Cosmic Hotel (26 page)

CHAPTER 38

Dubourg helped Ruth into the shuttle and sat beside her. She seemed so groggy, I wasn't sure she hadn't taken something. Elizabeth got the engine going. We glanced at each other as if expecting the other to tell us what was wrong with Ruth.

As Elizabeth drove, I looked in the long mirror above the windshield and saw the shapes of everyone in back. Van Raye sat beside Ruth in the side seat, and Dubourg and Ursula bounced in the very back seat.

Elizabeth's eyes concentrated to navigate the roads back home, shadows crossing her face, Braves hat on, no ball, and the way her eyes shifted from one thing to the other out the window, I could tell she was thinking, and as always was vigilant and keeping us safe.

“I don't know how to explain it,” I said. “You do believe this person is contacting me?”

“Yes,” she said.

We passed an oasis of lighted gas stations with no one in them and there was a feeling of emptiness like we were the last people on Earth, and we drove county roads through one-stoplight junctions, and finally spiraled up and onto the desolate interstate south again. Ursula's head was on Dubourg's shoulder. Van Raye watched the night out the window, happy to have his software, so he could send some goddamn message to the planet and write a book about it.

Near the airport, we exited down from the interstate and then took Airport Loop South to the Boulevard of Desolation. When lights moved across Ruth, I saw her eyes closed, and she had the blank stare of the overmedicated. Her baseball cap had been taken off and her stubbly hair looked terrible. I had this sinking feeling this baby wasn't going to make it, and that possibility seemed like the most horrible thing in the world.

The shuttle accelerated as if Elizabeth read my mind.

Dubourg glanced at Ruth and said, “We need to make sure that she's healthy, stays healthy from now on. She's working too hard. To hell with anything else. The baby is priority.”

“As soon as possible,” Van Raye said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. The engine hummed louder and the automatic transmission downshifted, but the shuttle refused to go faster. Only the lateral rocking quickened the tempo of one squeaky shock. I had that last-day-in-a-hotel feeling, a feeling there was no water in the fish tank, no fish, and tomorrow could be a different time, a different place, if we just left this behind.

We shot through the dead sprawl of the Boulevard of Desolation beneath out-of-order traffic lights shrouded in black body bags. The road was dirty with things piled against the curves and blinking barricades anchored by sandbags. A gust of wind rocked the shuttle. Up
ahead, a plastic bag lifted and moved along the road, the shuttle missing it by inches.

Van Raye said, “Everything is going to be okay. I can't stand this. Tomorrow we'll be back to work.”

“Did you hear the one,” Ursula said, taking her head off of Dubourg's shoulder, “about the human being who found a magic lamp on the beach and the genie came out?” Ursula's head wobbled with the swaying. “The genie said, ‘You can have two wishes.'”

I thought about all the jokes I had to listen to Leggett tell in the hospital. Ursula's only depressed me more.

“Two wishes!” Van Raye yelled from the backseat, trying to be jovial. “I know this joke.”

“Are you seriously telling a joke?” I asked.

“Just listen,” she said and continued. “And for his first wish, the human being says, ‘Give me one pill that will make me happy forever!'”

“Happy forever!” Van Raye shouted. Van Raye, the man who hated joke-telling. “I believe I know this one,” he yelled over the engine noise. “This is unbelievable.”

Elizabeth's eyes scanned the road, not paying any attention. The tires hissed.

And Ursula said, “So the guy takes the eternal pill of happiness and the genie asks him if he's happy, and he says, ‘Yes! So happy! I've never felt like this in my life!' And the genie says, ‘Congratulations, and you will feel like this forever,' and the genie says, ‘So you get one more wish, what do you want?' And the human being says . . . ”

Van Raye shouted, “‘
I want another pill just like that one!
'” delivering the punch line.

“
Right!
” Ursula shouted. “‘
I want another pill just like that one!
'”

Van Raye from the backseat shouted with his finger in the air, “
That's my joke! I made that joke up!
”

I remember turning back around, trying to think of what this meant. I put my hand on the dashboard. The joke meant something to me, Leggett on my mind. Out the big windshield the hotel loomed
at the very end of the boulevard. Another piece of trash blew in front of us toward our lane, a tumbleweed of a trash bag, but I clearly saw the bag stop and sit with two shiny eyes staring into the headlights, glowing like silver dimes. My mind had time to think,
God is in the headlights
,
God is in the headlights,
making no sense, and then the eyes were gone as if they'd never been there.
I am not God, you are God, I'm not God.
“Elizabeth,” I wanted to say, but all I could get out was “God.”

“God?” she mumbled but then I could tell she saw the dog, staring again at the oncoming shuttle's headlights. I heard her foot release the accelerator, and the world moved very slowly, and time stretched into a song in my head:

       
You are dog.

       
I am dog.

       
You are not a dog.

       
I am not a dog.

The only word I could say was the most important word in my life—“
Elizabeth
.”

It would be a long time before I remembered the details of the accident, like the way the seatbelt seemed to click angrily to lock me down. One tire screeched and the van spun. I saw the dog out my window, the shuttle continuing toward him standing stoically or blinded, and my side of the shuttle bowed. I heard Ruth shout as the forces began, “
Monsterrrrrrr
—” and Dubourg, “
Holy mother
. . .” The creature disappeared beneath the van, and I waited for the sickening thump. The shuttle seemed to stabilize but the forces were only in the apogee of changing directions before the flipping would begin.

I had seen the glowing eyes, the very thing that had made Dubourg believe in God when we were little, and there was the clear quietness of new flight. We were floating before the noises began, only the yanking tug-of-war between gravity and the seatbelt. Gravity was
a whirlpool and there was a boil of sparks vomiting through the van, which I could taste, and then the noises stopped, replaced by the long silence and the smell of steam and rubber. There was only this silence afterward and finally someone whistling for a dog, someone very far away me.

PART IV

CHAPTER 39

I am under water, and it is dark and I cannot breathe
, I thought. My senses rebooted one at a time, including my sense of surrounding, and it was this: Air coming to me, and I swam quickly, sensing the others looking at me as if I'd done a belly flop and they wanted to see if I was okay. There was nighttime humidity and the relative coolness of the water. I stood in the shallow end, not wanting them to know it had happened again.
It?
I thought.
It? It what? Forgetting? An “episode” . . .
And I held onto a constant in my life, my mumbled prayer of the Seven Ps: “
Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance. Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance.
”

Humid night air weighed on the pool deck, and instinctively I knew which way the pool steps were. This was the big outdoor pool. I found the metal rail and hauled myself out, and I understood that I had no clothes on. I turned around, standing as my undressed self in the darkness before Ursula sitting on the steps. Behind me was the calm movement of the tip of Dubourg's cigarette. I knew Charles was that form laid out in the lounge, and Ruth was swimming in the dark pool. Ruth scooped up my floating boxer shorts and threw them at me.

If anyone knew about my mind rebooting, they didn't move or say anything as I stepped into my shorts. I went over what I knew:
I am nude and dripping and looking down through the metal fence at the wide-open space of a great airport beneath the ever-blind windows of the Grand Aerodrome Hotel. We are alone and no one is looking out of those windows because the hotel is vacant
.

The wind changed direction and brought a whiff of dog shit, and the smell brought on a big happiness. In my mind this equation:
Happiness = the dog
. A light from an open stairwell cast a shard of orange on the ground and there the old dog stood with his hind legs in his chariot. The cart held his rear legs off the ground, and he hobbled with front legs forward, trailing a loose stool in the grass, the globs of shit glistening in the moonlight. I found the shovel against the wall where I knew I'd left it last night—it felt good to remember such details—and I took it and leaned on it to make a posture of calmness—
nothing is wrong with me
—so the others wouldn't know that I had an “episode.” An episode of what, I wasn't sure.

I searched for the happiness again, something about the dog. I began to reconstruct facts from feelings.
I feel good because the dog is taking a shit. I feel good that the dog is taking a shit because? Because the dog is alive!
But even happiness comes with dread because time moves on and nothing stays the same.

The reflection of lights on a jet taking to the sky wobbled unevenly through the dark glass panes of the dark hotel, the image disappearing for a split second in the vertical columns and then popping out through more panes, in fits and starts like my memory.

The gray shaggy dog rolled his chariot forward finishing his business, and glanced at me with those eyebrows.
Now it makes me sad because? He is old and dying.
He was a terrier mix, knee-high and with scraggily beard and wise eyebrows that moved as he thought, his back haunches strapped to the cross-frame of the chariot and his ankles strapped and held up. I kneeled and pushed the hair back to see the blackness of the eyes, and I had a clear memory of these eyes reflecting.
When was the accident?
In my mind that night before the accident was a marker, like a surveyor's stake on the edge of a cliff. Beyond the stake was a giant excavated pit of nothing in the middle of my life.

“What is your name, dog?” I whispered.
Rally? Rally? Something like Rally, or was “rally” a prayer Dubourg had muttered for the dog?

The vibrations of the pool pump tingled through the concrete and up into my legs, and I stomped it out like fire ants. The bag in Ursula hands crinkled. I remembered,
Ursula eats pretzels
. She
squeezed and the bag popped open. In my memory, I could see her bending and plugging in a vending machine in the empty hotel, feeding it coins.
Pretzels are always D7 in every vending machine left in the Grand Aerodrome.

I could feel the exhaustion of our group, palpable as humidity. A debate had been taking place. I remembered that. I had an elated emotion that Van Raye had been deposed. Were we not going to send his message?

Ruth swam through the dark pool with her head above water.
Ruth
, I thought,
Ruth swims at night
,
and she has no clothes on and the baby is still floating in her belly and it is okay.
My mind continued to reboot:
The dog is alive, but I hated the alien inside the dog, hated the whole ordeal of what Van Raye had brought on us. Hate?
I begin following the breadcrumb trail of emotion back to memory:
I hate the thing inside the dog because it's an alien. Randolph. Randolph is trapped on the microchip inside the dog. I strongly dislike Randolph because?

The dog's eyebrows fluttered beneath my touch and sent chills along the dome of my head.

From the pocket of my robe hanging on the back of a pool chair, I got my phone because I knew it was the center of our circumstances, had to do with Randolph, not
the
Randolph of my childhood, but an alien trying to make me feel comfortable and believe in him, so he could travel on to Chava Norma, continuing his journey through the universe. Everyone knew I was right about Randolph.

The clock on my phone said 10:55
PM
, almost eleven, which made me happy too, a secret happiness I knew to hold within me.
What happens at 11:00?

From the darkness came the familiar sound of the safety cap on a prescription bottle clicking and then the sound of Charles's mouth opening.
The mouth belongs to Charles and the pills are painkillers.
I heard him swallow liquid and then a wineglass base tinged against the concrete and then the roar of another jet coming to a halt after hurling itself from the sky.

Why is eleven a happy time? I glanced through the fence to the compound of Gypsy Sky Cargo to our west. That's why. Shift change at eleven. Elizabeth will be going on duty at Gypsy Sky Cargo. I texted Randolph:

I said to the others, sensing where to pick up the argument, “We don't even know how long he's been in the dog,” knowing somehow this was Charles's argument: to postpone the sending of Randolph to Chava Norma, basically, to keep him here. Everyone else wanted to send him on his journey. Ursula and Dubourg's agreement was that we had no right to keep him. Ruth wanted to send him for the simple reason that she'd changed this whole hotel into an antenna, molded the software, and she simply refused to not see if the thing worked.

“He's been on the microchip fourteen and a half years,” Dubourg said. “You know that. Are you okay?”

“Absolutely.”
Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance.

“We could just wait,” Van Raye said. “That's all I'm saying.”

Without being able to see him in the dark, his presence was a smacking of lips, slurped saliva, breathing through his mouth, searching for words.

Van Raye continued, “Take the dog . . . somewhere else . . . to a safe facility to download.”
What is wrong with him? There's something wrong with him that I can't remember.
“We have so much to learn,” he said. “We can't let
that
slip through our fingers.” He held his hands up as if testing his fingers in front of his face.

Ursula said, “It is a
he
. It annoys me when you call him ‘it.' You haven't humanized him yet.”

“Human? We don't even know it has a gender,” Van Raye said.

He
,
he
,
he
, I said to myself.

The text came in from Randolph asking me:

I knew to be angry at him, and my fingers typed it out:

I listened to the dog panting. I put my phone in my robe and shoveled the congealed shit patties and hefted the clumps over the fence where it floated and then clopped on the ground on the Gypsy Sky Cargo side. I gripped the fence's wire, gazing down the hill over a flat no-man's land to the Gypsy tarmac sparkling beneath the clusters of spotlights as if it were a world without nighttime. What wouldn't Elizabeth like about this place that prided itself on such efficiency and order? Aircraft were parked in perfect rows. The spotlight clusters reflected on the top of the fuselages like decorative saddles. Trains of cargo carts snaked around the giants. The compound was far away, but I knew I could recognize Elizabeth's height and posture anywhere.
I come out here to watch Elizabeth at Gypsy, and it is part of an old sorrow for her leaving me. I was on my own. I could do anything I wanted.

I also knew for some reason I didn't want the others to know I was watching Gypsy Sky. It was my secret.
Is everyone angry at her?

“What are you doing?” Dubourg asked me. I heard an antacid roll ripping open.

“Nothing,” I said, letting the fence go, turning away. The tip of his cigarette touched the concrete and went out, and some part of me worried about the black stain on the patio, but then I immediately stopped myself.
This hotel will never see another guest.
Not worrying was freedom.

I lifted my long hair off the back of my neck to feel the coolness.

“Where's Butch?” Ursula said.

BUTCH!
The word had come to me at the moment she'd said it. “He's right here,” I said, and I remembered what Ursula said when we'd scanned the microchip and gotten his name off the chip and a metric shit ton of data. “There's something wonderful about . . . ” she said, tears going down her cheeks, “ . . . about finally knowing a stray dog's name. When you say his name—
Butch, Butch
—it's like a secret password that lets him know that we are okay.”

Dubourg flicked one of those kitchen matches on the pool deck, and the flame leapt to life and he lit another cigarette, and I could momentarily see Butch's scraggily shape struggling to kneel while his haunches remained in the chariot. He yelped at sharp pain.

“Shit,” I said.

But when his head was on the ground he panted.

Yet another pretzel snapped in Ursula's teeth, and I felt the sound move through me, and I gripped my wet hair on both sides of my head and squeezed,
Stop, stop the snapping!
but I knew not to say this out loud. Instead I concentrated on the sound of Ruth moving through the water, and looked to the sky to see the dim star between the two brighter stars that I knew was our star.
We come out here every night to watch the path of the star get closer to the aim of the antenna on the roof.
I remembered waiting for time to pass and wondering what a future point would feel like when it would finally point at the star, but I also stopped myself from thinking about the future because I didn't want another answer about the future to come to me, setting off another time bomb from Randolph.

Watching in the distance for Elizabeth at Gypsy Sky Cargo, I tried to access the memory when Randolph had contacted me after the accident. Where had I been? I remembered the inside of the empty restaurant, Dubourg serving us string beans he'd scavenged from the pantry, putting them on buttered toast he'd made.

On the pool deck, I scrolled through the history of my texts, back to the very beginning, messages Randolph had allowed the others to see. The first one:

Ha! I'm not crazy!

He came to Earth on August 15, 1977, and had lived first among military computers, and then personal computers, inside the stock exchange's network, skipping to different data-storage sites—inside Disney World, a register at a Whole Foods in Los Angeles looking at barcodes twinkling in the red laser, in the system of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I found another memory: Ruth kneeling over the unbelievably alive dog on the carpet in the middle of all the computers, the shelves of computers that had recently begun to make the strained noise of hard computations, Butch lying flat, his back legs useless. Ruth waved a yellow wand over his body. Ursula was crying. Ruth knelt and waved the wand like a metal detector over the animal, then concentrated it on his shoulders. The computer beeped and then the screen began marching with 0s and 1s. Ruth whistled. “That's a lot of data.” And my phone had beeped:

Ruth had said, looking at the information from the chip, “By the way, he's a neutered male, up to date on shots, owner's name is . . . ‘Charles Van Raye,' and his name is Butch.” And that was when Ursula had told us about finding out a stray dog's name and she'd cried,
saying
Butch, Butch, Butch
, watching him raise his ears and happiness registered in his eyes, him thinking,
They are one of those people, those people who know my name
.

Randolph had explained to us how he went from one electronically alive planet to the next, a kind of cosmic tourist, but never getting involved, never leaving a footprint, but learning and traveling. He was older than 150,000 Earth years. Twelve years ago, he had been passing through the systems of a small veterinarian clinic in Santa Cruz, California, where the animals came and went, all the personalities—the happy, the sad, the scared, nervous, and the owners who loved them. He “watched” the pets, though didn't explain other than, “I see without seeing.” When a litter of strays were brought in, he said he forgot about moving himself. The microchip was physically picked off the data pad by a technician and inserted into the neck of six-week-old Butch before Randolph could move. Otherwise he would have gone to Chava Norma when someone discovered the new planet was a new neighbor three thousand light-years away—and nobody on Earth would have been the wiser, and he wouldn't have affected our lives.