Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  Elizabeth had lately begun to think it was useful for business development to backtrack in our journey. If the condemned property was large enough to warrant a demolition party, she wanted to be there. So we were going to fly to Phoenix, see the final moments of the Sun Resort, meet people, and make a quick turnaround to Atlanta by tomorrow morning. That was my life.

  We were x-rayed and scanned at the airport, Elizabeth making sure the blue-gloved TSA agents handled her violin properly. Each time I went through security I had to think about my cousin Durbourg who called the world beyond security “the Airport Zone,” a place he claimed was the safest place in the world.

  Elizabeth and I took the tram to our concourse and rose on the escalator into the chaos of the intersection, walked together past the retail stores and the food court. When you’ve been up all night, the new day seems like a blurry extension of the last one.

  At our gate, I plopped down in a seat and tried not to sigh and tried to look energetic. Elizabeth sat two seats down from me, piled her bag and violin in the seat between us. She knew I had stayed out all night and waited for any sign of weariness so she could pounce.

  She put on reading glasses and pulled out her book. Karen Carpenter’s face on the cover, that bewildered look.

  “Are you enjoying Karen Carpenter’s life?” I asked.

  “It’s a good book. Her brother was a music prodigy. She was a very hard worker.”

  “She died from anorexia?”

  “Yes. She started dieting at sixteen and that was the beginning of her decline. She started a diet called ‘The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet.’ This was under doctor’s supervision. Isn’t that amazing? One of the main parts of the diet was drinking eight glasses of water a day. Can you imagine that? This is what doctors believed back then. What are we doing these days, under doctor’s orders, that people in the future will think insane?”

  I knew this was a mini lecture, but I relaxed just being in an airport with my mother. Honestly, I loved waiting in airports. We could do nothing but waste time. There was no business, no duties to perform, no people to meet. Whatever she was reading, when we were in the Airport Zone, it seemed interesting. I opened my eyes to listen to her.

  As she talked I watched her. She was dressed in a nice pants suit, only her glasses were disturbingly cheap with gaudy, fake stones on the front, dried glue beneath the plastic gems. She didn’t believe in the return value of expensive eyeglasses.

  Leaning an elbow on my bag, I began re-inspecting the back of my eyelids as she told me snippets of Karen Carpenter’s life, me trying not to think about Franni, the phone call, someone playing Elvis to harass me, Van Raye telling me we aren’t alone in the universe—everything like a dream. I had gone through all my secure websites and changed the password I’d had forever (“bettafish14”) to a new password, “geneva1000x.” After you change your old password, you feel like you’ve left an old life behind.

  I interrupted Elizabeth, “Where’s Randolph been?”

  She searched her mind, and I saw her memory catch but she cracked no emotion and played dumb. Did her face really blush? “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  When I was a kid, she would turn into “Randolph” when we got bored waiting in airports or waiting for meetings when no one else was around. When this possession took over her body, she changed her voice to this kind of fay Transylvanian accent and claimed he, this person Randolph, had possessed her, checking our world out. It was so unlike her to do Randolph; I couldn’t even imagine her doing it back then, certainly couldn’t imagine her doing it now, but I wanted some acknowledgment that this had been part of our lives. It was Elizabeth’s magic.

  Randolph always acted surprised to find himself in Elizabeth’s body, announcing, “Randolph is here! Randolph, never Randy!” coming to her when we were on the concourse level of terminal 4 at JFK. He would say, “This is one of those ports for aircraft! Which one is this?” It was a good performance. I could barely see hints of Elizabeth’s personality coming through, the dry analysis of things around her, filtered through the mind of someone supposedly not from this world. After quizzing me about Earth, about America and this world, never a word about hotels, Randolph would announce his departure, “Until next time, Number 1.” (He called me, for no known reason, “Number 1.”) When he left, Elizabeth’s face would change back to normal, staring at the familiar airport, and I would say, “Elizabeth?” and she would always respond in her own voice restored, “What? What’s the matter with you?”

  There had been a period of time when I’d begged Elizabeth to fess up that she was Randolph, but she never broke or gave the act up, Randolph coming into her body when I least expected. When she was bored with driving the rental car through the desert, she would suddenly announce in the accent, “What is this I’m doing?” staring at the steering wheel. “What is this machine called?” I remember her being startled once when I asked, “If you die, would Randolph die too?” She simply said, “I’m not going to die.”

  I don’t remember when she stopped doing Randolph, but it was a part of my childhood that had been helpful, used, and then put down.

  “Come on,” I said to her now in DFW, “Randolph one more time. You know, I want to hear the voice.”

  “You’re almost thirty years old,” she said. I could tell she was mulling it over. Randolph never made requested appearances. Had Elizabeth become even more serious over the years, lost the ability to be Randolph?

  “Aren’t you over that?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Anyway, I certainly don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

  I could see a hint of a smile, but she kept reading without that index finger scanning each line in Karen Carpenter’s life.

  Finally the counter agent called over the speaker, “Passengers Sandeep and Elizabeth Sanghavi please see an airline representative,” probably thinking we were some married couple. People either thought it was weird or noble that I’d traveled my whole life with my mother. To me, it was just us.

  “Marvelous,” Elizabeth said, standing at the announcement. She marched up to the counter, still wearing her cheap glasses, and got our upgrades.

  She came back and gave both boarding passes to me. “This isn’t an overindulgence,” she said. I had heard the upgrade lecture before because she was on constant watch for overindulgence, which, according to her, this country was full of.

  “It’s not free, we earned it,” she said. “The service in business class is the same as coach was twenty years ago. Now, let’s walk to some retail stores.”

  I sighed. “Can’t we just wait here?”

  “No,” she said, “walking around will keep you awake.”

  “Why do I have to stay awake?”

  “It’s daytime,” she said.

  I knew she was going to go into Hammell Brothers Clothiers to take pictures of the inventory like she always did, exclaiming how many choices there were and how full the inventories were. “What kind of country is this?” she would declare.

  I told her no, I was staying right here. I couldn’t take another speech on the economy and trends, and us looking like we were just off the plane and had never seen Hammell Brothers before.

  She took her digital camera out and left her bag and violin with me, and she walked toward the intersection of our concourse.

  I leaned my elbow on my bag, closed my eyes, and began concentrating on listening to the sounds of an airport, making my body, mostly my hands and mind, be still. A man’s voice raised to cellphone level said, “I got no friendly face, I got no yuck-yuck-yuck,” and then the Doppler shift of his voice as he went away, and his conversation merged into other spoken words and sentences until all conversations blended into babble that sounds the same no matter where you are in the world—a hotel in Chicago, the lobby of a busy theatre in Paris. This reminded me of what Van Raye had said—“It’s like a bunch of patterns of communications unintentionally radiating into space.”
He’d called it “the Big Murmur.”

  I opened my eyes. A pilot stood in front of me with one of those black bags pilots roll along like obedient dogs, the kind with the stickers of all the aircraft they’d flown.

  Maybe I had fallen asleep, but now I let my eyes make the roam of the vigilant traveler, a subconscious inventory of things: our two bags, boarding passes, and a mental alarm went off. Where was Elizabeth’s violin case? I looked behind my seat and saw only an ugly magazine subscription card on the floor. The nearest person was a woman feeding her baby. I walked toward her, looking under seats as I went. I carried our shoulder bags, glanced behind a trash can.

  The mother tore bread apart and fed the little girl who sat with her hands wide on the seat handles.

  “Pardon me,” I said, “but I had a violin, in a case,” I pointed to where I had been sitting. “It’s missing.”

  “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I can’t help you.”

  Obviously she thought I was a crazy person or running some kind of scam, although people are usually slightly less suspicious of each other in the Airport Zone.

  “It is a violin, my mother’s,” I said to the woman feeding her girl, choosing the right word—mother—to suggest I was okay. “You didn’t see anyone walking away with it?”

  “Oh boy, no,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t really paying attention.” The little girl held her mouth open. Her mom turned her head to see the people walking by.

  “Shit,” I whispered and then saw Elizabeth coming down the concourse. Had she taken the violin to teach me a lesson? It was amazing to watch people steer out of her way as if she were a ship. I looked at her hands. There was nothing but her camera looped to her wrist.

  I took steps to meet her, held up my arms.

  “What’s the matter?” she said, glancing at the bags hanging from my shoulder. “Where is my violin?”

  “I can’t find it.”

  “What?”

  “It was right here. I was sitting right there.” I pointed to the seats beneath a you-are-here map.

  “Please don’t tell me this.”

  “It’s got to be here somewhere,” I said.

  We walked around. She leaned over and looked between the rows of seats.

  “You fell asleep?” she asked me.

  “No! I closed my eyes for a second.”

  I followed her as she searched the gate area.

  “You were supposed to look after my things,” she said. “That was all you had to do. Now what has happened?”

  People in the gate area began to eye us suspiciously and slowly their legs and hands began guarding their own bags as if to say, see, this is how you do it, and the small U handles on their suitcases seemed to be mocking smiles.

  I stopped. “We are going to have to report this,” I said. We searched the next gate area until they announced the boarding of our flight.

  We reported it to the counter person, Elizabeth demanding to speak with the head of security as if this were a hotel. A regular airport police officer came and took the report, telling us that they rarely had problems with theft inside the airport.

  Elizabeth said, “That doesn’t help us.”

  She and I were the last to board, Elizabeth holding the yellow police report in her hand.

  When we found our seats in the middle of the business cabin, there was already a briefcase in the overhead and a jacket folded on top. To a man reading his Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth said, pointing to his bag and jacket, “Is this yours?”

  When he saw her, he got up and took his bag and coat down and tried to smile at her, placed his things under the seat in front of him.

  Elizabeth snapped the “Missing or Stolen Property Report” for me to take.

  On regular days, she always sat in the aisle seat. Today she slid in and faced the window and didn’t speak the whole way to Phoenix, the bright new sunlight slowly moving around the cabin in the exact shape of the portholes as the plane banked. I kept going over the contact numbers in fine print on the bottom of the report and her scrawled signature, the description of the missing item, “violin and case, Master Stefen.” The estimated value of the violin was an astounding $45,000 and next to ITEM INSURED there was a big check by NO. Under the column PURCHASE DATE, she had written a date that I calculated was when she was ten years old, four years after she’d come to the US, back when her family owned hotels, fifteen years before her father died of a heart attack, followed only six months later by her mother’s death.

  CHAPTER 7

  In Phoenix, the elevator let us out on the rooftop party of the New Sun Hotel. The day was at midmorning, a morning filled with Arizona sunlight, mimosas and the babble of voices, and the crinkling police report in my jacket pocket. I was going to have to pretend that this was business as usual, but I couldn’t even smile, kept checking my phone as if that would be the source of good news from Dallas about the violin.

  Everyone at the party wore sunglasses, a few women in hats, sipping drinks and rolling foamy yellow earplugs between fingers as they chatted and waited for the main event. The hotel world wasn’t that large, and so there were some of the usual people, and it was only strange to see them one week in Miami and then the next week in Phoenix. I noticed an attractive shape blanched by sunshine and inappropriately dressed in blue polyester-blend pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. It looked like my cousin, and only when she picked her phone up and aimed it at me did I realize it was Ursula. Ursula? Her empty epaulets hunched like inchworms on her shoulder as she aimed the phone at me, her smile crooked. I hadn’t seen her in a month, was trying to comprehend why she was here, and also why she suddenly struck me as an Ann-Margret look-alike even down to the nose. I had Ann-Margret on the brain. My legs wouldn’t move toward her as she smiled and snapped pictures of my expression.

  “You can’t inform me that she would be here?” Elizabeth said from behind me.

  “I didn’t know she was here,” I said.

  “She has developed a bad habit . . . ” Elizabeth was saying, but I found I could move.

  “That was a classic face,” Ursula said, showing me the picture on her phone. I hugged her, feeling the crush of the aviator sunglasses hanging on her shirt’s pocket. She swallowed awkwardly against my ear but didn’t lift her arms to hug me back. “Jesus, don’t crush me.”

  When I let go, she caught the sunglasses before they fell. “The look on your face when you saw me . . . ” she said, shaking her head, and she wobbled.

  I said, “You okay?”

  Her dark red hair was pulled back. Her necktie was in the airline’s required ugly double-Windsor knot. A pin held the black tie down, the tie’s tip flapping, and I tugged the end. “Stop,” she said, batting my hand away, repositioning the black zeppelin tiepin.

  She blinked at me, then inspected the liquid in the bottom of her plastic cup. “I came to see you, dumbass. It’s about time y’all got here.”

  “Good to see you, darling,” Elizabeth said behind me.

  “Yes, you seemed overwhelmed with joy,” Ursula said. She leaned to return Elizabeth’s kiss on the cheek.

  “I am. You know that I always am. But surprises are awkward.” Elizabeth touched her own elbows, but said, “You look tired. You must have been flying.”

  Ursula stuck her glasses on her nose. I saw by the way her head bobbed that she was tipsy.

  Elizabeth made a big obvious sigh, but Hal Beauvais from Resort Life in Charlotte came over to speak to her.

  “How do you know we were going to be here?” I asked Ursula.

  “Educated guess. And Dubourg told me.” She indicated the party, the sky toward the old Sun Resort building in the distance that was gutted and hollow, no windows, the whole place ready to be destroyed.

  The copper-colored hairs on her arms changed blond when sunlight found them. Her rubber watch dangled loosely on her wrist.

  “I’m on standby,” she shrugged, “and I kind of wandered over here.” She let her head roll t
o port, and I could tell even behind her glasses that her eyes were shut as if she’d fallen asleep, and suddenly I had this image of her and the other cousins hopping around on one foot, heads tilted to get water out of their ears after swimming in the springs back home in Wakulla County. She opened her eyes behind the glasses. “I’ve always wanted to see one of these things.” She pointed her cup to the tops of buildings around us.

  Some young guy stepped to her, his hair too long to be anything but an intern, collar too big for his neck, and he apologized and held a pen out to her with a New Sun Hotel napkin and said something to her. She handed me her cup and indicated for me to spin around. She put the napkin on my back, and I felt her swishing her signature as I watched half the party watching Ursula Dunbar using my back as a desk, Elizabeth eyeing me with disappointment. I’d heard Elizabeth’s diatribe about the unreality of reality shows, but she’d always ended it with a whistle of appreciation at the amount of money she thought Ursula must have made from Flight 000. I happened to know it wasn’t much money.

  I saw at the bottom of Ursula’s cup dregs of brown liquor.

  Ursula finished letting the guy’s friend take a picture of them together.

  I took Ursula by the arm to a corner of the roof. “Tell me you aren’t on standby. What are you drinking?”

  “Did I say I was on standby? I’m not. Eight hours from bottle to throttle. Always. Sacred. I keep up with it down to the second.”

  “You’re drinking in uniform.”

  “I’m not in uniform, asshole. These are my personal clothes. Do you see any insignia?”

  She looked over the roof’s edge and studied the gutted hotel building at the end of the long, deserted street beyond the barricades where official vehicles were parked with yellow flashing lights. The old hotel building faced us like an empty beehive, and by a trick of the eye, appeared to be already listing.

  “It’s a plain red cup,” she said.

  “People recognize you, Ur. They know you’re a pilot, that pilot, any pilot.”

  She tried to look at herself. “This is all the clothes I have, thank you. Some people don’t have a wardrobe. This is comfortable.”