Cosmic Hotel (13 page)

CHAPTER 17

By the time we got back to the Grand Aerodrome, it was almost a comfort to see the ugly orange carpet. I only wanted to get in the bed, give my body rest. The numbness would go away.

When I walked by the payphones, the one on the end began ringing. I motioned for Elizabeth to go ahead, and when I picked it up, I didn't even say hello, just waited for the music, that drum roll and beat and the bass pick up—“
A little less conversation, a little more action, all this aggravation ain't satisfaction in me
. . .”

My phone dinged and the text appeared:

I glanced around the lobby before taking a breath and typing with numb fingers:

It took a few seconds as though he were thinking or searching.

How could he know about the paralysis? My medical records? I opened and closed my left hand, shook it.

I rode the glass elevator up, went to our suite. My throat tingled.
Would I stop breathing?

The paralysis hadn't happened in fourteen years. I remembered weeks of lying in a bed and being so incredibly thirsty, waiting for someone to hold a cup of water to my lips.
Was the thirst only in my mind? Is the paralysis somehow up to me?

Alone in my room now, I took off my clothes and slid into the tight covers of my bed. The aquarium water had cleared and the betta swam inside, gills flared, him fighting his own reflection.

Through the wall came the first tuning of Elizabeth's strings.

The rising tide of tingling had reached my knees. I didn't want to have to go and tell her.

The music she played seemed brand new, like nothing I'd ever heard before, though I'd heard Sarasate's “Carmen Fantasy” a thousand times. Maybe it was the new strings, but I also realized that Elizabeth, like every musician in the world, was a bundle of organic compounds and neurochemical reactions with feelings and experiences that converted the chaos of the universe into the best order she could make.

I was going to have to tell her it was happening again, but first I got up and got
The Universe Is a Pair of Pants
and went to the bathroom, poured a glass of water, shut the toilet lid and sat backward on the toilet with the book on the back of the tank, and I began where I'd left off, and I drank glass after glass of water as if I could fill up my body for this long journey. Elizabeth finished “Carmen Fantasy,” started and finished all of “Moonlight Sonata.”

I pissed and drank one last full glass of water.

In my room, Barbie sat stiff limbed on the dresser, back against the wall. I had to find Van Raye. I texted the hacker, thumbs feeling like nubs.

I opened the door to the suite where Elizabeth played in the low-wattage light of the fake living room. Her arm stopped when she saw me against the doorframe.

“Sandeep, what is it?”

“Elizabeth . . . ” It seemed like the hardest thing in the world to tell her what was happening. I felt like I was failing her. I waited for a jet to finish landing, the thrust reversers shutting off. She stepped toward the lamp and the few strands of frayed string floated away from her bow like spider webs. I said, “I want to go to India.”

She puzzled over my statement but said, “Look,” holding the violin up. “This is wonderful. How did you do this?”

“You've never taken me to India,” I said.

She held her breath then carefully put the violin in the case. She walked to me and put her hand on my forehead. Elizabeth had always told doctors, “My son never has a fever.” This gesture tonight of putting her hand on my forehead was just what mothers had done for a thousand years when they were worried.

“I've never been to India,” I repeated.

“Stop it,” she said. “You're delirious. You've had a long day. Look,” she pointed to the violin, “it's here.”

“In India,” I said, “I can let my body have its way with all the diseases its supposed to have. Right?”

“Why are you thinking about this now?” she said and stepped back to see me. “You don't want to go to India,” she said. “In India, I've seen Americans get sunburned through their hats and die.”

I held onto the doorframe. “Can I have a glass of water?”

She went into the bathroom, leaving me leaning against the doorframe. When my phone dinged, I fumbled it out of my pajama pocket. It said:

I started to put the phone away, but another text came in.

I read the word again, “Randolph.” This was impossible. I was losing my mind. A hacker couldn't know about a childhood game that Elizabeth had played on me, one in which an alien took over her body.

Dog? This was bullshit.

Elizabeth came out of the bathroom with a glass of water.

“Tell me now,” I said. “You did Randolph, didn't you? Randolph is you.”

“This again? Sandeep, please.”

I could see my hand gripping the glass of water but not feel it. The coolness of the glass felt a long way from my head. Elizabeth watched me gulp. “Why are you drinking water?”

“I won't be able to drink when it's done.”

“
Stop that talk
.”

“You know that's the worse part,” I said. “I get so thirsty.”

“It's not happening again. Tell yourself no. Please, Sandeep. It's not true.”

“It's not my fault,” I said, and tried to adjust my hands and the glass fell, almost hit Elizabeth's feet.

“Sandeep!”

The water splashed on the floor, the floor an impossible distance from my head.

“It's the tingling,” I said to her, the horrible, magic word we never spoke.

“Oh no,” she said, her eyes big, “you're wrong!”

“Tell me! You are Randolph. You did Randolph.”

“Of course I did,” she said. “Why is that even important? Stop, you are frightening me.”

I leaned against the door, her eyeing me suspiciously, and I texted.

And he, Randolph or whatever he was, gave me the answer to the question—What day would I be out of the hospital?—though I still have the experience of the EMT shining a light in my eyes that night I was driven to the hospital, the ambulance leaning into a turn and all that was to follow, but as it was happening I did not think about the date, worry about the date, the date never crossed my mind but now seems to have been there all along, waiting for me to remember it. Every experience from that episode is in my memory, but here I am typing this, knowing that I knew the date of my release all those weeks, the date Randolph had given me of my body's reprieve.

Riding in the ambulance, I thought about my phone sitting on my dresser in the hotel room—“Viva Las Vegas” stuck on my “Songs to Beat Depression” playlist—and also that I hadn't sent Dubourg and
Ursula a message about what was going on. My body was shutting me inside. I hoped like all the other times it would only be temporary. I was becoming just a brain.

I remember the EMT, a woman, putting the plastic oxygen mask over my face and remember how clean the air was and Elizabeth sitting on a jump seat, arms wrapped around her body, rocking as if praying, which scared me the most.

PART II

CHAPTER 18

A couple of thousand miles away from me, a woman sat on a campus bench that afforded her a view of both entrances of the physics building. She sucked an unlit cigarette for a cheap tobacco buzz, her first “cigarette” in over a year. She wore a dirty insulated jacket, though the air temperature in Stanford, California, (I've checked archives for that day) was 65°F. Students probably thought Ruth Christmas sitting and listening to an old radio in her lap was a homeless woman who'd wondered over from town. It didn't help that her hair had been chopped off so she looked crazy.

(When she was telling me this story, filling in the few gaps left by Van Raye's journals, she told me she didn't consider what she was doing as “stalking,” but then she laughed and told me, “That's what every stalker says.”)

If anything showed her state of mind that day, it was that she sat nearly six hours listening to big band music on that radio, no eating, drinking, or relieving her bladder or lighting the cigarette. (She told me, “I have the perfect bladder for an astronaut.”)

When Van Raye finally emerged at 17:25 from the north entrance, he was wearing the same button-up sweater he'd been wearing when she'd followed him to work that morning.

A minor heart palpitation took Ruth's breath.
Jesus,
she thought,
why do I want him now?

Remembering that people walk 1.3 meters per second, she counted to thirty-three before she pushed the radio's antenna down, shut the front cover, and began trailing him. She noted the way his body swayed back and forth as if it contained more lazy muscles than enterprising
muscles, leaning to his left to counterbalance carrying the single book in the other hand, and Ruth suddenly realized she was out of breath, needed to lean against something. She'd forgotten gravity was a bitch.

From Van Raye's perspective, he had no idea Ruth Christmas was back on Earth.

Two weeks ago, she'd left the space station via emergency pod, the pod coming to Earth dangling from four parachutes and landing not so gently in Mongolia. There, she traveled via horseback, then bus, then a Roscosmos flight to Star City where she was given a physical, which included peeing on a stick, her condition confirmed, and then she'd hopped a MAC flight to California without telling anyone where she was going.

From Moffett Field, California, she'd taken a cab to the storage lot in Redwood City and liberated Van Raye's Jaguar, technically
her
Jaguar because she'd gotten it in the divorce settlement two years ago, though she hated the car, hated driving. She had stopped at the first 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Marlboros and a three-pack of lighters, and then went to Empire Vintage Electronic in Palo Alto. She settled for the solid heaviness of a Trans-Oceanic model 600, bought a new IL6 capacitor, and replaced the old one just to cover her bases. She drove to campus, left the Jaguar in the overflow parking lot, took the Trans-Oceanic, and now she was hiding behind bronze statues of weeping people and watching Van Raye climb the stairs of the auditorium.

She sat on a marble wall to catch her breath, opened the panel on the back of the radio, and checked the tubes, the battery leads. Then she stared at the sculpture garden around her: Rodin's giant “Gates of Hell,” a twenty-foot bronze, spectacular with the inlaid suffering people, screaming and melting into the surface of the door.

Hell, hell, hell
, Ruth thought.

She noted in particular the bronze babies cast along the left column.

The babies made her quit the “Gates of Hell” and take the radio and work up the courage to go inside the auditorium. Why did she want him? He would be a comfort, but she also knew he was the least qualified man in the world to discuss family.

Van Raye looked out at the scant audience in the auditorium, not yet recognizing Ruth sitting in the back. This was depressing, he thought. He used to pack this auditorium, used to pack the lecture room even for a simple Physics 211 lecture.

In the middle seats, he saw the three old string theorists—ruined men who now spent their time attending any lectures. One of them, Gabriel Zepler, was doing something on his phone. Besides them, the audience was older book-club types, no candidates to take home to sleep with tonight. He'd been having an on-again-off-again relationship with a married system administrator from Sunnyvale who had become less and less available, and there was the woman across the aisle on the flight from Seattle to San Francisco yesterday who had recognized him. As soon as she said, “I saw the
Report from Earth
when I was a teenager . . . ” he knew that he would sleep with her that night, and he did.

The auditorium's giant coffee maker gurgled while a woman from the university bookstore gave an introduction and he went to the podium, thanked her, and read the chapter in
The Universe Is a Pair of Pants
about the time he drove the Pacific Coast Highway with an “actress.” He referred to her in the essay as “Jessica,” and they stopped at an alfresco Mexican restaurant, were eating at a picnic table above the beach when she said that a friend had told her that you could unlock your car from anywhere in the world by simply broadcasting the signal of your electronic keyless device through your cell phone.

(I kept up with all of Van Raye's writings. This essay that he read was “There Are Neutrinos in My Hair,” and it first appeared in
Playboy
, which I had bought several years before, and I will always associate the “actress” with that Playmate of the Month who appeared to enjoy being alone and naked in the desert and eating plums.)

He read about how he told Jessica that even if he weren't the world's foremost expert on electromagnetism, if he knew nothing about electronics, he would know that broadcasting her door lock over
her cell phone was impossible simply because he could feel how badly she
wanted
to believe it.

Jessica said, “My friend told me she's done it. It works.”

“Don't you feel it?” he said to her.

“Feel what?” she said sitting at the table in her bikini top and a gold hunting horn dangling from a necklace. (He, a French horn player, wrote these details.)

“Don't you feel this thing inside you,” he said. “This is emotion-driven logic, this feeling of how you
want
something to be true? How wonderful would the universe be if we could discover this one little thing that tied everything together—phones and door locks? We could unlock our car doors from
anywhere
! Wouldn't that be wonderful? When it feels that kind of wonderful, it's never true.”

To prove it, he used his charm to borrow a server's cell phone, and left Jessica at the table and went alone to the gravel parking lot and held the phone to Jessica's Porsche. Behind the restaurant Jessica held the remote keyless fob to her phone (open line to Van Raye) and tried to broadcast its signal over the airwaves. Nothing happened.

“Nope,” Van Raye said on his end of the phone.

Her voice came from the hollowness of cell phone reception: “Are you holding it to the car?”

“Yes, darling.” He blandly turned the phone to the Porsche and smiled at the waitress who looked out the open window of the taco shack to see what he was doing with her phone. Lifting it back to his ear, he said, “Nothing, dear. Sorry.”

He writes that Jessica was angry: “As if it were my fault that she'd believed this thing.”

He hated the term “skeptic,” but he wrote in “There Are Neutrinos in My Hair” that the more we want to believe in something, the unlikelier it is to be true.

Back eating tacos behind the restaurant, Van Raye took Jessica's keys off the table and said, “But watch this.” He held it up in the air, pushed the button. He showed her that it was still out of range, her car silent.

“Now,” he said, “put it under your chin like this.” He put the fob beneath his chin in the V of his jawbone and pushed the button. When the wind rested, when the waves were in lull, Van Raye and Jessica could hear a beep coming from her car in the parking lot each time he pushed the button. She wanted to try, pushed it into the tender spot beneath her jaw. Her Porsche beeped and then beeped again.

“Your body is an antennae,” he said to her.

She was underwhelmed, he wrote.

“What's the difference,” she asked, “in believing this will work, and my idea . . . besides the fact one of them was
my
idea and one was yours?”

“My idea isn't very grand. It's not something I felt I wanted to
believe
in, the way a part of us wants to believe in the supernatural or horoscopes. I could feel how much you
wanted
to believe that the universe is built like that. Always be suspicious of what you feel yourself wanting to believe. Couldn't you feel your imagination being played with? I actually felt myself wanting to believe in the idea too.

“Professor Marcello Truzzi said it best: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.' My idea just uses your whole body as an antenna,” he said. “Of course, some bodies are better than others.”

If you watch the archived video of him reading this essay that night in the auditorium, you'll be able to distinguish the exact moment when he saw Ruth Christmas.

He noted this person in the audience, a woman in an oversized puffy coat, and he did think she was a homeless person who'd wandered in to eat the free food.

He was wrapping up the reading, “The universe itself is a wonder but often completely unfascinating to ordinary people, and therefore they want to believe in little green men, monsters, or God . . .”

Here, in the video, he does a double take, adjusts his glasses with his knuckle.

He said she mouthed words at him, holding an unlit cigarette beside her head and he recognized Ruth Christmas. Her gorgeous dark hair was gone.

Van Raye stopped the reading midsentence and tried to hear what she was saying. Here was his most recent ex-wife.

“I'm sorry, darling?” he asked.

Annoyed, she spoke louder from the thin audience, “I have something for you.” There was percolating from the coffee boiler in back, and the shifting of the few people in the audience to see who was interrupting.

Van Raye cleared his throat. “Wonderful,” he mumbled.

He found the place in the book and wrapped up, “Why do human beings find such outrageous beliefs comforting? Can they not find satisfaction in reality? Has reality not served them well? Why isn't the neutrino, which can pass through matter, not as exciting as a ghost?”