Cosmic Hotel (20 page)

PART III

CHAPTER 27

I got the adjoining room to Elizabeth's suite, room 1212, and didn't have the energy or the initiative to go out in public. My waking hours were spent texting Ursula and then Dubourg, pressing redial for the only number I had for Van Raye and getting a recording for the university's bed and breakfast. My companions in my room were the betta fish and flight-attendant Barbie sitting unladylike on the dresser, legs spread, and out my sliding glass doors was the wide-open dome of sky over the Atlanta airport. I ran a search for “World record” + “living in a hotel room,” and got directed to Howard Hughes biographies.

Elizabeth would come and speak through the adjoining door to me, “This is very unhealthy.”

I sometimes gathered myself into one of my new tracksuits and went to dinner. In the revolving restaurant, she updated me on the Grand Aerodrome's wrap-up. I sat slouched in the chair. She told me that I looked like a gangster. I told her that my wardrobe was comfortable.

“If you ever have to defend what you are wearing with ‘it's comfortable,'” she said, “you've made the wrong choice.”

She explained that I had to get back to work, to write this report myself. My phone sat beside my dinner plate, the last conversation with Randolph clearly visible in green and purple text balloons.

“I'm preparing you to run the firm alone,” she said.

“And what are you going to do?” I touched the screen to make the light come back on and slid it again in her direction.
Just look at my phone, see this conversation!

“I will not travel with you,” she said, “if that's what you are asking. I think you would be healthier without me. You're completely capable of doing it when you get back to 100 percent.”

“No, I don't think I can. Are you looking around?” I used my eyes to point to my phone. All she had to do was glance down at the conversation.

“What? What is wrong with you?” She picked up the phone. She tilted her head back. “What am I supposed to be looking at? I don't have my glasses on.”

“Jesus!” I took it, but the screen was blank white, conversation gone. “Dammit!”

The restaurant revolved, slowly turned on its axis. After dessert, we drank coffee. If she retired, if she never said a word about business, would our whole lives be like it was when we were waiting on a flight—no worries, no business, only the moment? Her eyes kept looking to the west, and Gypsy Sky Cargo inched its way into view. The jets were being unloaded and loaded under the lights, cargo doors wide open, and containers going up on accordion lifts. They had floodlights mounted in clusters on high poles making every worker on the ground have multiple shadows emanating from his or her feet like a Swiss Army knife of selves.

CHAPTER 28

Back alone in my room with the doors shut and locked, I took Dr. Ahuja's sleeping pills when I felt like I needed a break—they were like pushing a button—and I would wake into new light, my phone on my chest.

I turned my head on the pillow and watched the betta fish and wondered if he was somehow changing colors. Now he looked a plasmotronic blue as if he'd changed color for a different segment of life, and he went up and down in the corner of his tank, fighting his reflection. A jet's thrust reversers rattled the balcony doors, the sounds of the womb to me, and another gray day trying to leak through the shears, and I thought,
Is the day ending or beginning?
I'd become jetlagged inside a hotel room.

I was thinking “
jetlag
” when something on the other bed moved, a lump of a human beneath the covers, and somehow my mind already knew it was Ursula. She was on her side facing the wall, the shimmering light from the aquarium undulating on the comforter over her body, and I had some vague recollection of the happiness of seeing her last night.
Ursula is here
.

On the bedside table were a martini glass with two dead cranberries and my bottle of sleeping pills.

I whispered, “Ursula?” and wondered why I was whispering if I wanted to wake her. “
Ur!
”

She rolled, squinted at me, and immediately squeezed the button on her watch to stop it. “What?” she said, eyes swollen from sleep.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sleeping, dumbass.” She rolled back toward the wall, and I heard the watch beep again.

“Are you really here?”

“Are
you
really here?” She didn't turn over to see me, only took a deep breath, and her voice reflected off the wall. “You don't remember anything, do you?”

Her watch beeped again, and she rolled over to see me, then checked the time.

“A little bit.”

“I found you downstairs,” she said.

“You're lying.”

“You were at the bar. I'm extremely pissed at you, by the way.”

“At the bar?” I pulled up memories that were like dreams. “Elizabeth doesn't know about this, does she?” I asked. “Did she see me?”

“No, but you were quite the hit there in your pajamas. It's freezing in here.” She pulled the cover tighter over her head. “Why did you invite me here?” she said. “Do you even want me here?”

“Yes, of course I want you here.” I had a dull alcohol headache.

She rolled her eyes and pulled the covers over her mouth; she was only eyes and a nose. The empty martini glass sat on the bedside
table, sugar around the rim reminding me of the night with Franni from Mount Unpleasant.

“There's a front coming, an ugly storm,” she said, words veiled, her lips beneath the fabric. She reached a hand out and picked the brown pill bottle and shook. “Look, don't take this shit.”

“I know,” I said. “I just—”

“No, you don't know,” she said. “I mean, it knocks you out, and, you know, erases your memory. You don't want to be that deep asleep. Ever.”

She got out of the covers, slammed the bottle down and it bounced on the floor. She said, “Too many people take these. You don't want to be that out.”

“Aliens aren't coming to take me.”

She had on that worn-out fake jersey with the peeling “20.” She put her feet on the floor so she was facing me, had on gray cutoff sweatpants. “You think I'm crazy, don't you?”

“No,” I said. “You believe what you believe. In a weird way, I can completely understand why you do this. It makes you feel good, doesn't it?”

“Feel good? To live in constant fear it's going to happen tonight?” she said. She got back under the comforter.

“If someone could snap their fingers,” I said, “and make it never happen to you again, would you do it?”

She thought about it. “No.”

“But you're scared all the time.”

“Like a cat on a windy day,” she said.

“Ur, just don't get hypnotized. Okay?” Almost all the abductees she read about got hypnosis to supposedly regain memories. They only engrained false memories. She had read this too, but I still wanted to make sure.

“Did I say I was fucking getting hypnotized?”

“Stop cussing so much. It just means you don't know how to express yourself.”

“Jesus, I'm freezing,” she said.

Her fingers were holding the covers beneath her chin as she ceiling-stared, and she said, “I wish you would just open your mind for once. I have several floating experiences I remember, I mean when I was a kid. I remember flying over the woods, seeing the highway. I literally have seen the V wake of snakes swimming in the river at night, moonlight reflecting on the water. They aren't dreams.”

“Ur, we literally grew up thinking there was a spaceship crashed in the swamp, or wanting to believe it. We were kids. I think we liked to believe. We liked to watch the movie and believe an alien was in the swamp. I think you're just doing that now.”

“The
Creature
,” she corrected me.

She waited until everything was completely quiet and still in the room and she said, “They took my eggs.”

“Stop it.”

“They did.”

“No, Ur, you're just trying to find a reason for why you are the way you are, you know . . . ”

“
Barren
, you mean?” she said.

“That was because of the cyst, or related to it,” I said and watched her shift beneath the covers. “I'm speaking honestly, okay. We all remember when you had that problem.” Ursula, since she was fourteen and had the cyst removed and the doctor told her that she'd probably never have children, always openly declared herself
barren.
She had always said it as if she just wanted to get over it.

“But why did I have a cyst?” she asked.

“Look, forget that for a second. I really think Triple Zero affected you. I know nothing happened on that flight, and when
nothing happened
, that triggered something in your mind. You wanted something to happen.”

She got up and went over and grabbed a new Adidas jacket from the chair and put it on. The tag stuck out of the collar, and she walked around and sat on the bed across from me. Her eyes moved back and forth from my right eye to my left, inspecting me, and there was a part
of me that wanted to put my hands on the side of her face and pull her and kiss her. I had promised myself to do this.

“Are you lucid?” she asked. This close, I could smell her, and I had a flash of the house in Sopchoppy, the taste of fresh river water and then the salt of the gulf.

“You think I'm crazy?” she said. “You're the one who thinks God is sending you text messages.”

“
What?
”

She nodded.

“What else did I tell you?”

“You said it was a hacker too and it's all related to Charles's discovery.”

“I told you about Charles?”

“Yes,” she said. She paced and pulled the elastic band out of her hair and casually said, “And conveniently can't you show me this conversation?”

“Whoever it is makes the texts disappear.”

“What a fine predicament,” she said. “You think I'm crazy, and I think you're crazy for believing anything Van Raye says. He's got that Southern mouth of a liar, you know.” She spread her mouth thin with her fingers. “You know, Southern liars all got a thinness, a shape.”

“I don't think he's lying about this.”

She held the elastic hair band in her mouth as she collected her ponytail again. I watched, jealous of the dexterity of her hands looping the band in her hair. Then she went and put her feet into a pair of my Nike high-tops and pulled a fifth of Jack Daniel's from her duffle, held it up so I could see it and said, “I'm not keeping this very sophisticated.” She got two glasses from the bathroom, shook the protective covers off, and let them fall to the floor as she plodded back. She pushed the martini glass out of the way and put the glasses down too hard.

“What's the matter with you?” I said.

When she poured, the brown liquid washed up one side of the glass, left an oily after-wave that slowly retreated.

“You got your head so far up your daddy's ass. You and Du.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Do you understand the magnitude of what is happening to me? People like me have been chosen. I don't know why. Something comes to me and takes me away. I
fly
. It has happened when I'm in my apartment, and once recently when I was staying at this motel in Twentynine Palms, okay. It happened once when I was driving through the Muir Woods in a goddamn rental car. This was last month! Whenever I'm alone. Do you understand? They take me. I fly, I mean, just my body. Van Raye might hear something but he's about five hundred years behind. There are dozens, hundreds, whatever, of civilizations out there. So what? Something is
here
,” she said.

We waited in the relative silence of the airport hotel room. She took her feet out of the shoes and sat on the other bed. She said, “I'm here with you because I don't want to be alone.”

“Stay with me as long as you want,” I whispered.

“Don't get weird on me, okay?” she said.

We took a sip of our drinks.

She lifted her glass. “To life somewhere else in the universe . . . besides here. To aliens.”

“Don't ever let Charles hear you use that term. I think he's coming here.”

She turned and put her legs up on her bed and crossed her arms. “I've never met the man,” she said. “When you're not around, Dubourg tells me what an ass he is, but Dubourg is totally in love with him. Dubourg put his own name on Van Raye's Wiki page. He put himself under ‘children.'”

“Why?” I asked. “He's a pathetic excuse for anything resembling a father. Dubourg's got Uncle Louis. I can't think of anyone but Uncle Louis as Dubourg's father.”

“Would you trade Van Raye for Louis?”

“Louis is great,” I said.

“No, that's not an answer. Think about it. Van Raye's a son of a bitch but he's bigger than life.”

We sat still. I listened to the hotel room, felt the humanity around us, the rooms full of lives.

She got up and went to the bottle on the dresser and poured us both more whiskey. I watched her calves flex when she adjusted the thermostat, and the Sanctus bells stirred in the nether lobes of my brain. I hadn't had an erection in weeks, not even the healthy morning kind, and I'd begun to wonder if it was the depression.

I glanced at my phone and saw a whole conversation from last night that I had no recollection of, Randolph asking me:

Ursula came back with the glass and got on the bed beside me, pushing the comforter tight over my body. I turned the phone quickly to her and she studied it, and then shook her head, said, “Nothing. Yes, you are crazy.” She put legs straight out on the covers.

“Sandy, do you remember that you once flew down to Sopchoppy because Dubourg left a pair of pants in Baltimore?”

I twirled my whiskey in the glass before gulping some. “Yes. I was like twelve.” But there was the memory emerging from the background. “It was actually a pair of swim trunks,” I said. “And it was in Washington. That was after you stayed with us at the Marriott. I remember it because y'all wanted to run up and down the hallways.”

“Right!” she said.

“You and Dubourg sprinted up and down the hallways because you said that you could run faster inside than you could outside.”

“I still believe that, by the way,” she said.

I realized how good it feels to have a shared experience with someone and told her, “Isn't family about having someone around to share experiences with?”

She said, “Then Elizabeth caught us and jumped all over our asses, and Du and I went back home, and the next thing we know you flew down with his pants.” She laughed. “You looked pathetic standing on the porch holding the bag.”

“All right,” I said.

“You stayed for weeks.”

“I know,” I said, “I've always wanted to be part of y'all.”

“Not that you couldn't have just come down and stayed if you wanted, but we all thought it was a little weird.”

“I wish you would just forget that,” I said. “I was twelve or whatever.”

She handed me her glass to take a sip and crossed her arm over her eyes. “Can I tell you something? This is the best I've felt in a long time. Right here. I love you,” she said.

She took her arm down to see me.

I said, “You know I love you . . . ”

“Like a sister?” she said.

“Of course.” The whole room was quiet.

She said, “Do you remember we used to believe that the Creature wouldn't come after us if we were all together in the kids' bunk room?”

“Of course,” I said.

“It was a great comfort being together, wasn't it?”

After a few seconds of silence I thought she'd drifted off to sleep. Without opening her eyes or removing her hand, she said, “This is the same thing, isn't it, except it's only us, and it's not the Creature from the movie. It's something else that we are scared of.”

“And that we make ourselves want to believe in,” I said.

I got the remote and turned on the TV, the light filling the room. I searched the movie menu until I found
The Creature from Outer Space
, and when she saw, she said, “Seriously?”

“When was the last time we've watched it?” I asked.

We took turns sipping out of the same glass as the credits played and the music started, and she got under the covers against me.