Cosmic Hotel (3 page)

The gate went up and I made the Alfa go forward, him nudging the steering wheel when we needed to take a certain exit. He pulled a driving hat out from between the seats and wore it backward.

I was two years away from any legal driver's license and very uneven with the accelerator. Van Raye glanced behind us as we merged into the interstate, and he judged things just right. “You're doing fine! Aren't you having fun? Isn't this fun?”

Fourteen and gripping the wheel for the first time in my life, it was all I could do to concentrate and drive through the desert. Back then he worked at a university that had an eleven-mile loop of an underground particle accelerator with the highway built over it that Van Raye used as his personal racetrack. When I hazarded a look, he was rather obnoxiously posed with those green glasses, that hat, his cheeks sucked in so he could hold them between his molars to make dimples. Lining the highway were sterile office buildings crowned with thorny antenna arrays, and the brighter stars and planets came out in the purple sky. Under the ground below us, protons were smashing into protons, like fireworks, and the ends of his hair danced about his hat as if electrified.

Elizabeth's knocking on the glass of
CUBE
1 brought me out of the daydream, and I realized I was slouched in the chair, head titled back. Behind her, the meeting room was empty, the chairs sitting exactly where disgruntled former employees had abandoned them.

“I'm sorry,” I said through the glass.

“If it's true, he'll be going through one of those periods,” she said, her voice dulled by the glass. “He's very hard to manage in popular periods, and he is very unlikeable. Don't let him affect you.”

She was right, of course; during high points of his life he never needed Elizabeth or me.
If
what he said he'd done was true.

CHAPTER 3

I got the bellhops to take our twelve boxes to the shuttle and tipped the driver fifty dollars. These were our possessions that traveled the country ahead of us, including my plastic aquarium, five first editions of Van Raye's books, my childhood copy of
Eloise
, my clothes, and the photo album that contained my certificates from seminars. I
had completed an online degree in finance, but my real education had been in hotel seminars held by foresters, lathers, magicians, amateur radio operators, celestial navigators, and UFO believers. I was even a certified pruner according to the National Ornamental Fruit Growers Association, a seminar I attended out of boredom in Miami's Grand South Resort when I was a teenager. Elizabeth said only in America can people dream up so many certificates and qualifications.

Back up in our suite, I sat on the couch and barely got my breath before I heard Elizabeth's keycard in the door and the electronic lock spinning. She came in, removed her shoes and slid the multitudes of bracelets off her wrists as she walked toward her room, saying nothing to me.

I thumbed through the
UFO Mysteries
before tossing it on the table when my phone vibrated. It was a text from my cousin on Van Raye's side, Dubourg.

I texted back:

Before I could ask him what he meant by seeing cousin Ursula, Elizabeth came out of her room, sari snapping at her ankles, and went to the kitchenette and unscrewed the wine and poured herself a glass,
got a container of pasta and came and sat down at the dining room table, opened her laptop, put on her cheap reading glasses, and began tapping out what I knew would be the “Final Report to Shareholders.” Her black violin case sat out of reach at the other end of the table.

“You don't care what's happening? He's done it,” I said.

Her fingers continued tapping the report and she said, “Did he say if it has been confirmed?”

“He said not yet.” I went to the headlines page on my phone and saw only a budget battle in Congress and a color picture of a mass wedding in South Korea, not that I expected there to be headlines that life had been found on another planet. The only sign of Van Raye was an email in my box from an account
[email protected]
, which had his bank information.

While Elizabeth told me that nothing was true until it was confirmed, I thumbed through the email looking for and finding no thank you, no name, but the simple secret code word—“Geneva.” The man hated email and cell phones until he needed money. I logged in to my First America account.

“But,” she said, “if pressed for an opinion at this point, I believe he
thinks
he's done it. Charles is a lot of things, but he wouldn't lie about his work. Which doesn't mean he hasn't made a mistake.” She closed the laptop and there was a thin light sandwich for three seconds before the processor went dark.

She came to the sofa chair beside me with her book,
Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter
, and her wine, and I put my phone down.

She eyed it. “Did he ask you for money?”

“Elizabeth, he has made the greatest discovery in human history. Guess where he was calling from.”

She hated when I started a statement with “Guess . . .” Her finger continued dropping below each line as she read about Karen Carpenter, this finger moving a remnant of a depressing speed-reading seminar we attended together years ago in a hotel I couldn't remember, though she could surely remember even the weave of the carpet.

“India,” I said.

Her finger stopped on the page to think and she said, “Even India doesn't deserve him.”

She could talk about India as if it was no part of her, changing her citizenship as the moment and mood demanded, and could certainly make comments as if I weren't half him. She was a self-reliant only child whose hoteling father and her mother brought her to the US when she was five. She had no surviving family members in the states, and she had started telling me early in my life, “The traditional nuclear family is not a necessary unit for success.” When I was a kid, I thought “nuclear” meant something to do with Van Raye's work, and because of him we were a special “nuclear family.”

“He said it was the noise of an advanced planet.”

“They call it an
exoplanet
,” she said.

“You pretend like you don't read his books.”

“I've never said I don't read his books. I like the science if only he would stick to science.” She turned a page to see where the end of the current chapter in Karen Carpenter's life was.

“I don't know if we should go to Atlanta,” I said.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Shouldn't we wait to see what is going to happen? Everything is about to change.”

After she sipped her Chardonnay, the gold meniscus ring shimmered inside like a trapped halo. “What does life on another planet have to do with the price of American Telephone and Telegraph?”

“I hate it when you say that.” I was sure this was something her father said to her.

“Will it help us go through middle management in Atlanta? Does it help us determine margins, the
real
margins? Will it suddenly make the next property
and
the existing structure a wonderful investment for shareholders?”

“I don't know. If he's right . . .”

She said, “You are looking for any reason not to do your job.”

“God,” I said and put my hands over my eyes. “Why don't we buy our own property, huh? We could have had the Desert Palm Inn last year. We've got the capital. We could have financed only 80 percent, conservatively. We are a banker's dream.”

“And when the Desert Palm failed, then what?”

“Everything can fail.”

“Ha, you've never been there when your own property fails. It's so . . . it's so
public
. Everyone knows. It killed my father and my mother.”

She rose and went to the kitchenette. Over the bar I could see her refill her wineglass and pour me a glass.

She said, “You don't know how good it is to have a job to go to. We have no property, but we have this extensive knowledge nothing can happen to. Everyone in the business knows us and respects us.”

“I'm not sure it's exactly like you think.”

“We do a job that no one in the world can do better and we are paid well. That's how it looks to me.”

“We have all this capital, what are we supposed to do with it.”

“It'll be yours when I'm gone.”

“And what am I supposed to do with it?”

She looked at me as if I were unbelievable. “Give it to
your
children,” she said.

I turned my phone and looked at the
SUBMIT TRANSACTION
for $3,000 to Van Raye, which looked miserly now. Wouldn't $4,000 make more of an impression on him?

She came with my glass, sat down again, saw my phone and began, “He comes into our lives only when he needs something. You mistake this for a relationship. We're going to Phoenix for some business development and then to Atlanta, and we will do our jobs. Control life, don't let life control you.” She looked at me over the top of her glasses and said, “Have you tapered your medications?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to avoid the subject. “You and Van Raye and me, we had a decent time in Sacramento together.”

“
He
had a decent time. I paid all the bills, and he had a vacation.
He'd just published
Report from Earth
, which was an economic failure. Are you following the doctor's tapering guidelines?”

I hit the
SUBMIT
button for $5,000, and I stood up and tugged the waistband of my pants so that my cuffs sagged an inch and bunched at my socked feet. I got in her direct line of sight and turned so that my back was to her but she couldn't see my right foot. I held my hands out beside me like a high diver.

“What are you doing?”

I spoke over my shoulder. “I'm feeling a strange force in this room.”

“You know I don't like magic,” she said. Then she mumbled as though speaking to Karen Carpenter in the book, “He knows I don't like magic,” and then to me, “Do you realize you've been on that medication for over half your life?”

I faced the balcony doors. In the glass's reflection a mosaic of lights shimmered from our living room and mixed with the stronger airport lights out there in the world, and I tried to ignore her question, which was a statement. I wondered if my cousin Ursula was flying one of those planes right now. I could see my mother's reflection, formless on the couch behind me. I wiggled my toes to get ready to float right in front of her eyes.

“I'm not looking,” she said very calmly, but I could tell from her voice that she was, and I did it, I levitated off the ground. Or that was the way it appeared to her sitting behind me—my heels floating off the ground a couple of inches. It's a simple trick done by rotating onto the ball of one foot but keeping your heels together.

“
My God!
” she said.

I landed with a showy wobble and turned to see her face. She had her hand out as if she could block the trick.

I'd gone to my first magic convention in Las Vegas when I was nine, and I got more duping delight out of tricking Elizabeth than anyone else in the world because I could tell that one side of her wanted to believe I had floated off the ground. Tonight, for the first time in my life, she actually said, “How did you do that?”

“It's magic.”

She picked up Karen Carpenter. “My God, if you could apply the same passion to the business . . .” She snapped the book shut and picked up the TV remote. She turned to the financial channel. I plopped down on the couch perpendicular to her and took the remote from her and turned on the menu. “You don't need to watch the news.”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“No, you don't. It's too real. Did you watch the news when we shut down the Crowne Suites in Denver? No, we watched
Follow That Dream
. When we shut down Sun Resort in Phoenix? We watched
Clambake
and
Jailhouse Rock
back to back.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said, “but I'm only interested in Elvis's life, his biography, not the movies.”

“Bullshit.”

“Cursing is a sign of low intelligence,” she said, but then, “his movies
are
completely unrealistic, but they are interesting if you know what was going on in his real life when he was filming them.”

Under the category “Romantic/Feel Good,” I selected
Viva Las Vegas
. “Admit it,” I said, “you like to watch Elvis movies when you are feeling bad.”

“This isn't a bad night,” she said as her eyes actually read the FBI warning on the screen and she said, “Did you know when they were filming this, the tabloids obtained the stills from the wedding scene and published them and started the rumor that he and Ann-Margret really got married.”

I knew when Elizabeth was quiet for fifteen minutes (Elvis driving into Vegas with his race car on a trailer), movie flashing on her face, she wanted to enjoy this, and I thought it would make me happy too. All I could think about was Charles.

In this movie, Elvis, a singer/race car driver, is after swim instructor Ann-Margret. Every scene is an excuse to sing, the band always ready, but during the first interior shot of the Flamingo Hotel, Elizabeth said, “Look at that mezzanine. They don't make them
like that anymore. He was in love with Ann-Margret, but she was a Hollywood career woman. He wanted a mother figure.”

Elizabeth was a sucker for the American celebrity biography, the more sordid the downfall the better. Every biography proved to her how corrupting her adopted country and success could be. She took pleasure in the spoiling and the spoils and the downfalls of the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Karen Carpenter, and Elvis Presley, and I'm not sure that these stories didn't comfort her, showing the high times, just like her younger life with her father and mother, but then everyone had to suffer the downfall just like hers, a once great business of hotels.

In the movie, Elvis looks out his hotel window and sees Ann-Margret teaching a swimming class to kids. Her red hair reminded me of Ursula's, though Ursula's was deeper, nearly brown. Elvis grabs his guitar and heads down to woo her. She wears a red one-piece with buttons up the front and shuns him, though there is no reason for her to do so—he is handsome, charismatic, seems nice—but I think this was what girls were supposed to do back in 1964. Ann-Margret is beautiful, and she goes into a dressing room to change, and Elvis begins singing as he waits for her. She sings back from inside. Pretty soon they dance around the hotel pool, and everyone is watching them. Everything in a musical is perfect, and for a second I believed in Rusty and Lucky, and that perhaps things back in 1964 were really like this, but then Elizabeth's tragic voiceover began, “He started taking amphetamines in 1958 in the army.” She put her feet on the table.

“You are using
Viva Las Vegas
as a teaching moment?”

“Look at the people there.” She pointed to the background. “Look at those people around the pool and the number of staff serving them. There are too many people in the world today, and everyone has money. Service like that can't be provided to everyone. Everyone expected this treatment back then and we certainly gave it to them.” She clicked her tongue.

“Elizabeth,” I said, my voice lower, not lifting my head off the back of the couch, “how wealthy was your father?”

“He was trained as a banker in New Delhi before he came here. He worked extremely hard for everything he had.”