Cosmic Hotel (28 page)

And Randolph told me the answer.

CHAPTER 40

As with everything I've told you, I have told you the truth. I have a memory of the time from when Randolph told me that answer to when Ursula asked, “Is he gone?” This is what I remember about Butch
dying: I see Ursula lying across the bed in our hotel room, arms over her eyes—“Is he gone?” I remember the way her legs hang off the end of the bed. The time was 12:38
AM
, the exact time Randolph had told me, but it only seemed like the snap of a pretzel since he gave me the answer. I have all the experiences: I felt Butch's weight in my arms as we rode the elevator up to that room, the way I had tried to synch my breathing to his breathing to feel who he was. I have the images in my mind: The white paper sack in Ruth's hands. Dubourg placed a hotel sheet on the bed where I put the still-breathing Butch, the place he always slept, making sure his back legs were not folded uncomfortable beneath him. All of us stood around the bed. Only Butch's eyes moved, wondering, without lifting his head, what we were doing. From my vantage point at the foot, I wondered this thought: What must we look like to him, the five us wearing our white bathrobes, smelling of pool chlorine and speaking a language he only understands one word of: Butch, Butch, Butch. Did he know there was something alive inside of him?

He was sunken into the middle of the comforter. Only a bedside light illuminated the room. I had my knees against the bed. Dubourg sat beside the dog, rubbing from his eyebrows down his head. Ursula fell backward into the disarray of covers on the other bed, putting her hand across her eyes, that image burning into my brain. Van Raye slouched in an armchair, shoulders hunched, letting his crutches fall to the floor. Ruth sat near the dog's head, working what she needed out of the white bag beneath the lamp. The betta fish in his tank swam against the glass.

I pushed Dubourg's valise slightly aside so I could lean over Butch and touch his chest. I felt the rising and falling of breath that was this creature who occupied space, his body forming the crater in the comforter. He was created by his parents, came into this world, created space and stored memories for thirteen years, that's all there was to us: created space and memories.

Ruth sat sideways on the bed facing away from us, her belly, her Cal T-shirt visible in the gap of her robe. She worked her instruments
beneath the light. I watched her profile, eyes downcast as if closed. She turned with the metal syringe in her hand, loaded with a clear vile of liquid. She felt up and down the dog's front leg. She said the first shot will relax him, and he would feel good. What was feeling good to him? A memory of running in a field? A park? The voice of a person he loved, calling his name—Butch? Butch? Who had loved Butch?

Ruth felt along his leg and put the needle into his fur, her other hand holding his paw. She took it away. Dubourg held Butch's hair so we could see his eyes.

I could only lean my knees against the bed, not knowing or thinking to look at the clock. I had no awareness to stop Ruth from reloading the syringe with the last solution, nor awareness that the time Randolph had told me was approaching. Maybe none of this happened, maybe Randolph didn't tell me 12:38, but the needle was real and Butch is not here because Ruth reloaded the syringe and swung away from the light and back to Butch. There was a blue fluid in the vile. When she was done, out of habit, I'm sure, she rubbed the spot the needle had entered, and she said, “Shh, shh.” Butch's eyes closed, not in a way that he was falling asleep. Butch opened his mouth twice as if to gulp air. There was nothing similar in these two things: sleep and dying. I didn't understand why anyone ever calls this putting your animal “to sleep.”

The room filled with the smell of urine. Ruth took a handheld scanner out of her gym bag and waved it over the dog.

“Still there?” Van Raye mumbled from the chair.

She looked at the scanner's screen and switched it off without answering Van Raye, but I could tell that Randolph was still on the microchip inside.

“Is he gone?” Ursula said, not taking her hand away from her eyes. I had the startle reflex as if I'd just fallen in a dream, and the bedside clock said 12:38, and the horror of having time blink by struck me completely unaware.
Jesus
, I thought,
how many more of these leaps are
there?
But I knew that I had asked for it. Butch was on his side with his legs bent together like he was in mid-gallop.

So what is the difference if Randolph had not given me the answer? Did I somehow cheat? Did I trade the feeling of time passage and gain anything? How many more of these questions had I made Randolph answer? How many of these time bombs are out there in my life? Could I just ask him when I would die? This would be a kind of suicide, but the others around me would not be robbed of my time with them. I shuddered at the thought and helped Dubourg change the sheet beneath Butch, then shroud him with a clean one, something I would think about weeks later when I swaddled a baby.

CHAPTER 41

We left the shrouded body of Butch on the other bed in my room, the place he slept every ordinary night in the Grand Aerodrome. When I asked Ruth if it would be okay to keep him here until the broadcast, she'd only smirked at my not knowing even these small details about life beyond hotels, life beyond life, and she went out with Charles who crutched along stoned on painkillers, his one leg beneath his robe, Dubourg close behind him, patiently watching his foot, ready to catch him if he fell, his other hand carrying the valise, Charles's prosthesis beneath his arm.

Dubourg turned to Ursula and me before shutting the door, “I'll come back about five.”

When they were gone, I went to the bathroom and took my afternoon dose of the antidepressant. I glanced at my watch to make sure I had enough time and decided to take a sleeping pill too.

I had on only boxers, climbed in the bed and felt the heat of Ursula without her clothes on. She was on her side facing the wall. She rolled over and reached for me and began kissing my neck below my ear, then on my mouth. Her skin tasted like the saltiness of sorrow.

“Can't we lay off each other one night?” I said, struggling to slide my boxers down. When she didn't answer, I added, “This isn't a happy time. Why are we doing this?” I whispered, still taking her.

She wrapped her legs around me and said, “Whoever said this only goes with happiness?”

I said, “I just had a déjà vu. You're about to tell me how it's natural to have the drive to procreate after a tragedy.”

“Now I don't have to say it,” she said.

“We've already talked about this?”

But she didn't answer. I pulled out of her, which she hated, and she bit her bottom lip, and I watched her face in the wavy light from the aquarium. The next thing, according to the déjà vu in my mind, was that she was going to tell me that she couldn't procreate anyway. I began to be fearful of another time bomb about to explode, so I kissed her neck.

She stopped me with her hand and said, “Let me ask you a question, an important question.” I waited and she said, “Do you think Charles is better off believing he can see his leg?”

“He doesn't really believe it's his leg. He can't.”

“But if you were him, would you want to keep on believing the leg was there? Listen to me,” she said. “It's important. Answer me: Do you think he's better off believing that
is
his leg even if it's not?”

“I think he's letting himself believe. Deep down he really knows it's not there, the real him does. And the hydrocodone . . . you know . . . He's not himself. He'll eventually come around.”

“But then he won't have the relief of believing anymore?” she said.

“Maybe he's going to be so fucking famous he's going to hire someone to be his leg forever. His leg man.”

“Don't be sarcastic,” she said. “Just let me have this night, okay?”

I didn't like the way she said this, as if there would be no other nights.

We worked slowly, and the feeling of déjà vu came on because it was the sadness of Butch being gone, but the betta fish poked around
in the yellow plastic plant, and I quit watching him to extend this time with Ursula. Time flies when you're having fun is the truest maxim in the world and must have been dreamed up by someone during orgasm, the quickest moments in a human being's life never to be captured, like shortwave radio broadcasts. I tried to hold on to this moment with Ursula, being connected to her as the sleeping pill took over and I came, and we passed through the hypnopompic badlands of sleep together, each in our own dreams.

CHAPTER 42

I don't remember my last thought about Butch's body being wrapped in the sheet on the other bed. I don't remember Ursula's pressing the button on her watch as she always did when she drifted off to sleep, measuring her time away from reality. I don't remember turning off the aquarium's light when we were done, nor sleeping or dreaming, only of a gentle annoying sound of knocking on the adjoining room's door that woke me.

I got up, quietly pulling on my tracksuit, and returned three quiet knocks on the adjoining door before opening it. Elizabeth's suite was dark. I quietly closed the door so as not to wake Ursula.

In Elizabeth's room, her lamp's shade cast a perfect circle on the ceiling, and Elizabeth sat on her bed facing away from me, the thick ponytail down the back of her uniform.

I shut the door quietly and heard her laces hiss through the eyes of her boots. The sheers filtered the blue light from the airport, and I wasn't sure I didn't smell Charles's scent in here—old cars and his musk. She glanced over her shoulder. “You need a haircut,” she said.

“Do you have to say that every night?” I asked.

She felt the weight of the boot in her hand. She put it on the floor beside the other, adjusted them until they were perfect. She lay down
on the bed, still in her green Gypsy uniform with the triangle of a white T-shirt showing at her neck, and her white socks glowing. She looked ten years younger. “Why are you still angry at the thing inside the dog?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“Is everyone mad at me?” she said.

“No one blames you,” I said, and then I told her, “You have to be there in the morning for the launch.”

“Why?”

“It's just important for you to be there. We're going to send him on, you know.”

“‘
You know?
'” she said. “And the word ‘just' is for simpletons.” She unclipped pens from her pocket and put them on the bedside table. “I'm not going to take a night off. This is my job now.”

“What's it like?”

“Sandeep,” she said, “it's wonderful. I'm extremely tired, but it is
so
worth it.”

So? So worth it?
She'd never talked like that.

“Better than you could ever, ever imagine. I mean I'm working hard learning the system, but it is like I've always known their system. It's the system I would have designed.”

I could smell sweat from her uniform.

“So why isn't it for me?”

She made her it's-impossible
shish
and said, “This is for you. This is what you've been trained to do. You have a knowledge base that no one else in the world has, and you are young with your whole life ahead of you, and you come from good stock. You can have a big family, the family I never got to have. Is Ursula sleeping?”

“She is.”

Though I couldn't see them I knew her eyes were closed, her arms crossed on her chest in the posture of being dead. “She still believes she is being abducted?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you sighing like it's a horrible thing?” she asked me. I hadn't realized I'd sighed. “You don't know how wonderful it is to believe in something fantastic,” she said. She crossed her arm over her eyes.

“You think people like that are fools,” I said.

“No. If we remembered how good it felt to believe in the fantastical, like we were kids again,” she said, “we'd give up anything else to feel that way.”

“I just don't understand why you won't be there for the launch. Don't you care that this thing is happening?”

She took a few minutes to think in the dark. “That was a different part of my old life. I can't dwell on that. I'm very proud of you. But time flies by.”

We sat in the blue silence of the room for a while, Elizabeth lying on the bed with her hands crossed on her chest until she spoke. “We might not get to talk like this often so I want to tell you one thing, okay?”

I agreed.

“There are times,” she said, “when you have to forgive someone you don't think deserves it.”

“You mean Charles?”

“I'm telling you an important lesson. Are you listening?”

“Of course I am.”

“In order to carry forward in a productive manner, you have to learn to forgive completely. Give this forgiveness to someone who you might not feel deserves it. Say it out loud to them—‘I forgive you.' It sounds simple, but it starts working from that point forward. I think Dubourg's Jesus had this right, and also that thing about being a child to be enlightened. Anyway, you will not be very productive until you learn to forgive. Some things in life just happen, and sometimes there's a person who caused the event, but we go through life causing events, don't we? Forgiveness starts with saying it.”

“Do you forgive Charles?”

“I'm very tired now,” she said.

“Do you think I should forgive
you
?” I asked her. “Is this what this is about? There's nothing to forgive. I love you more than anything. There is nothing else in the world to me but you.”

“You know,” she said, another non-Elizabeth prelude to a statement, “you have always wanted me the most when I was walking out of the room,” she said. “Did you know that? I could be sitting with you for hours and as soon as I got in the doorway, you'd go, ‘Mom . . .'”

“I never called you ‘Mom.'”

“I supposed that's my fault.”

“No, it's not,” I said. “Why are you talking like this? I'm worried about you.”

“You are worrying about
me
?” she said. “Don't make me angry right before I fall asleep. It'll only give me bad dreams. Good happy thoughts before you fall asleep . . .”

I looked at her work boots beside her other shoes, and I left her there to sleep, closing the doors quietly behind me—her door, then my door—and I snuck back in bed beside Ursula and just as I was thinking I would never fall asleep, I heard gentle knocks on the main door and then the silent form of Dubourg letting himself in the room, putting his bags down, and getting on the floor with a blanket and falling asleep below us with his fists beneath his chin just like when he was a kid.