Cosmic Hotel (8 page)

Knowing all my cousins almost didn't happen. When I was a nine, Lucy Dunbar, Dubourg's adopted mother, Van Raye's first cousin, tracked Elizabeth down and tried to convince her that I would be much healthier if I knew their side of the family, especially my brother Dubourg. They invited Elizabeth and me to come stay with them in Florida, but Elizabeth said she was too busy, and I heard her explaining that the arrangement with Charles was her total custody of me, and he wasn't in the picture, nor did he have any legal right to be. Lucy Dunbar told Elizabeth that no one in the family had seen Charles in over twenty years, and my visit wasn't about that.

Over the course of several phone calls, I began to hear Elizabeth soften, ask again about the number of kids and the number of adults, and when she finally said, “If he comes, you can't let him get too much sun,” I knew I was going to Florida, which in my experience had been Tampa, Miami, Orlando. When she hung up, she told me they were hung up on a traditional nuclear family structure because they were Catholics. Being “Catholic” summed up a lot of things for Elizabeth.

I remember flying alone to Florida, being picked up by a clan of people just outside security. I remember riding in a Ford Expedition, this giant vehicle driving through a forest, sitting in the position of
honor (second row, middle seat) where I could see that even the pavement in this part of Florida was different, a lighter gray, almost white, and the headlights were purplish against it, and leaping across the highway were desperate toads trying to get out of the high beams, and everyone talked as if the death of a few hundred toads beneath the wheels were nothing, and there was the constant
thucking
of insects hitting the windshield. That was when I realized my idea of Florida—and certainly Elizabeth's image of Florida—was not this. I fought back tears and the desire to tell someone I wanted to go back,
immediately
.

For the first years I visited, I feared those Wakulla County summers, but every subsequent spring I got excited when Aunt Lucy called Elizabeth about “plans.” The more Elizabeth learned about the family's homestead, what we did, the more I wanted to go, shocking Elizabeth with emailed pictures of kids hanging upside down from branches or swimming in an inferior river called the Sopchoppy, which made up for its small size by being crystal clear and populated by alligators. From still pools of water, the cousins scooped up tadpoles, put them in jars so we could watch them turn into frogs, and there were long days when nothing was planned. We simply woke up and fed ourselves cereal and went outside.

They were the kind of families with one ATV for every two grown children, always driven full bore and kicking up dust past single-story houses, each house with at least three satellite dish antennas pointing at the same part of the sky, and you could stop at any house at any time and drink from a garden hose.

We played after supper in a family graveyard, our bellies full of grilled cow liver and fried doves, lying on graves listening for pursuers with flashlights.

Elizabeth thought I was exaggerating these things, and every summer sent me off with the last admonishment, “Don't get too much sun.”

In Sopchoppy, a dog whelped puppies and, to my horror, ate two of them, which Dubourg explained meant there was something wrong
with the puppies anyway. Equally terrifying to me was the sight of half tadpoles/half frogs growing in the tanks of brown water, rising to take air into new lungs, growing legs that weren't useful yet.

After supper, we played epic games of flashlight tag in the cemetery, and here I was fascinated by the small graves of children, kids dead from childhood diseases or “stillborn,” which was a word I was taught and told not to say in front of adults—
stillborn, stillborn, stillborn
, running through my mind.

We watched the movie,
the
movie, at least once every summer,
The Creature from Outer Space
. My heart started pounding when the narrator began, “Since time began, man has looked toward the heavens with wonder . . . wonder and fear.” This was the B movie filmed in
Color-vision!
and in which my grandmother was perpetually trapped, perpetually eighteen, and always the first victim.

When the movie was made at the springs, two years before Van Raye was born, Katherine Raye worked as a lifeguard. Young, beautiful, athletic, she was hired to do stunt diving but earned a speaking part in the opening teenage party scene and eventually became Victim 1. She had one line of dialogue. My cousins had Catholic prayers they recited, but we also recited “Meet you on the other side,” with my eighteen-year-old grandmother every summer before she dove into the river on the television, where she would be drug down by the Creature yet again.

She had Van Raye when she was only twenty and died of bone cancer when Van Raye was twelve, but every summer I saw the Creature's claw wrapping around her ankle and her struggle to swim, trailing a line of death bubbles, the young Katherine Raye, preserved for twenty seconds on film and dying over and over. She was credited as “Teenage Victim 1.”

Of course when we were all kids, we believed the spaceship had really landed in our swamp, and the Creature still came out at night looking for humans. We believed he put his ear to the side of the house every night to listen to how many people were breathing inside.
We believed if there were enough of us in the house—our collective number being our strength—he wouldn't dare come in and try to take someone.

When I had been there enough summers to overcome most of my fears, I could lie comfortably on a grave during flashlight tag and feel the coolness of the stone and listen to my cousins' voices in the dark. They got angry if I pointed the flashlight at the sky because stray lights in the swamp, they said, attracted UFOs and creatures, but I couldn't help but tempt fate when it was my turn with the flashlight, watching how the beam disappeared just beneath the stars.

Ursula woke me in the hotel room in Phoenix. She had already put her not-uniform back on and we walked out into the hallway where a group of middle-aged women saw us, and I knew we looked like lovers emerging from a hotel room in the middle of the day, maybe husband and wife, a feeling I liked, and I smiled and nodded at them as we passed.

Walking out of the new hotel with Ursula I felt halfway decent until I saw a disappointed Elizabeth coming out of the conference room. “I'm sorry,” I said to her, “I haven't been myself.”

She only said, “Always try to prevent sorries.”

When your mother is angry with you, you feel like your clothes are drenched and you can't even walk.

Ursula drove us to the airport in her tiny Shenandoah Airlines car, Elizabeth not speaking. I was clean and rested, but even with Ursula right there in the front seat (I was in the back) I was already missing her, and she hugged me at departures, told me that she was going to see how long she could stay in the air. “Between work and my lifetime pass, I hardly have to touch the ground.”

I thought she was joking.

CHAPTER 9

When our red-eye flight got to altitude, the flight attendants turned out the cabin lights and Elizabeth's silence beside me grew bigger in the darkness. I was back in my normal window seat, head against the wall in the dark of the aircraft cabin, trying to ignore her silence. Ursula would be on another flight to somewhere else in the world at this very moment.

“I'll find your violin,” I whispered, not even sure that she heard me.

“I don't want to become one of
those
families.” Her voice was near my ear, her face in the darkness.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You have to work hard,” she said. “We don't want to be one of those families that only bad stuff happens to.”

“You've read too much about the Kennedys,” I said.

Her fingers found my arm and squeezed. “No. This has happened to people I know. One or two bad things happen, and then suddenly it starts piling up.”

“That won't happen,” I said. “I'll get your violin back.”

“It's not just that. Lately things have been getting out of our control. Maintain control starting with the details, even very small things. I've given you everything I could,” she said in a hushed voice. “Something could happen to me—natural causes—and you could carry on.”

“Please,” I said. “Don't talk like that. We don't have to work so hard. We're fine.”

“Work is the answer.”

“I know. I'll be better,” I said.

I asked her there in the dark, “Elizabeth, are you okay? Tell me.”

“Of course I'm fine. There's no need to worry about me. Promise me something, right now.” I said okay and she said, “Keep tapering. Do you really want to be on it for the rest of your life?”

“No.” I tried not to think of where the violin might be, a stranger's hands.

“Let's see what this next place is like,” I said.

“Don't let
that
control you, you should control it. Sandeep?”

“I'm here, Elizabeth.”

She sighed, which caused her not to say whatever had just crossed her mind. All of this had happened in the dark. She said, “You need to get some sleep. Tomorrow's a big day.”

“It is tomorrow,” I said.

I closed my eyes and put my head against my hand, knuckles against the cold side of the plane.

I fell asleep on that flight and dreamed that I stood before the lavatory door on this plane. The little window said
UNOCCUPIED
. When I opened it, the tempest of pressure loss sucked a maelstrom past me, but I stood there, immune to the wind, and below me I saw the darkness of Middle America—fly-over towns twinkling in a flat boring landscape. People in the plane yelled for me to
shut the door
! During the maelstrom of depressurization, the mother from the concourse today calmly fed pieces of bread to her little girl who still had her hands out on the armrests. The dream me shut the door and walked back to my seat and there was no Elizabeth. A female flight attendant touched my shoulder. “I'm very sorry about your mother, Mr. Sanghavi,” she said. “You shouldn't have opened the door.” In my dream, tears began welling, but I realized I must maintain my composure for the duration of the flight in front of everyone, all these clients, but I couldn't stop thinking about how humiliated Elizabeth must have been when she'd been sucked down the aisles on the floor, the way she must have slid by the other passengers, her nails dragging down the carpet, suffering the indignity of being pulled toward the void and finally into the dark airspace over America. In my dream, the dream me remained composed, sat down in our row of seats, and he flipped the armrest up when it was completely dark. He stretched his legs across where his mother should have been sitting, more comfortable without her, something the real me would never be.

CHAPTER 10

In the morning, rain in Atlanta beat my already dead mood. The hotel van's tires hissed on the interstate, and heat from the transmission rose through the floor, filled the shuttle's interior. The other three passengers avoided eye contact as travelers on buses always do, the cadence of the wipers counted down our fate. Elizabeth sat beside me and appeared impossibly fresh and rested, her suit immaculate.

In the rearview mirror, I watched the driver's eyes scan traffic, his Afro asymmetric. He pushed the blinker and leaned to check the traffic beside him. The flyovers and freeways crisscrossing at this intersection reminded me of my image of Van Raye's inhabited other planet, but here on Earth, in Georgia, this south end of the airport was dirty and abandoned, tarps draped over exit signs that signaled to nowhere, orange barrels blocking roadways, lifeless aluminum warehouses and traffic lights blinking only yellow or clothed in body bags.

We looped until the driver slowed to make a left, nothing but dead businesses on both sides, and when I leaned down to try to see the end of this blight, I saw the glowing red letters on top of a hotel:
GRAND AERODROME
. The structure had the dimensions of a cinder block and the material was just as gray, the kind of property that every room had a balcony. The whole effect was Soviet-era bunker. On top of the block was a dome, and I said to Elizabeth, “Tell me this place isn't old enough to have a revolving restaurant.”

“Did you even read the preliminaries?” she asked me.

Only a high metal fence sequestered the hotel from the surrounding entropy. I counted twelve stories, something I should have known. A large American flag on the roof blew straight and bright against the overcast sky.

When the shuttle stopped, I stepped off under the porte cochere where guests milled about smoking and yelling into cell phones. Two maroon-suited bellhops dispersed to the rear of the van for bags, both older white men with long beards. Another came to the door
and held his hand to take Elizabeth's bag, handles of his bushy mustache twitching in the wind.

We went through the electronic doors into the building, and the air seemed to open above our heads. The design was an open atrium, each floor ringed with ornate railing. A businesswoman went past me with the deliberate speed of a traveler, luggage wheels humming on the orange carpet. There was a fake forest in the middle of the lobby, and I went to the railing in the center and leaned over. Below us was a large rectangle of concrete gurgling water from its top, the sides with a healthy growth of real green algae, and below that an array of tables with patrons having lunch.

The walls of the lobby had that dull lumpy look of over a hundred paint-overs. The light had bleached the mulch in the planters pale, and people sat on worn pleather couches working and talking. Across the lobby on the wall above the phone booths, the silver hands of a clock, unbelievably, displayed the correct time.

“Elizabeth,” I started, and how was I going to put this, “I can't go through this again.”

“Yes, you can.”

“What are we supposed to do here?”

“These are our clients,” she said.

“This is a no-brainer. Are they going to reinvest some capital or are they leveraging? . . . It doesn't even matter, does it?”

“Keep your voice down,” Elizabeth said.

I felt in my pocket for my money clip and tipped the bellhop, and he thanked me and told me he was Richard, and I told him we would need a minute to check in, and when he was gone, Elizabeth said, “It
does
matter. We don't know but there might be some renaissance planned for this section near the airport. How do we know a high-end remodeling won't make this work? How do we know this isn't at some perfect intersection between the airport and the city, the perfect distance of noise reduction and convenience? We study, we observe, we make our report.”

I rubbed my shoe on the carpet and several pieces of sand flickered like popcorn. Whatever is on the floor in the lobby will end up on the floors in every room. I'd heard that a hundred times.

“We can concentrate on the accounting,” she said, “but don't leave out service and reputation, all the intangibles.”

I went to the edge of the fake rainforest. The night's menu stood inside a lighted menu box. The revolving restaurant was called View of the World. I leaned over the railing to see the floor below and that fountain again. On this belowground level there was an open-air bar, and I saw the tops of people eating and drinking, an airport hotel bar being a convergent of time zones, a border town between where you are from and where you are going, the last place in the world where a three-martini lunch was acceptable.

The rain came down harder on the hotel, spraying against the giant windows on the back of the lobby that looked over the Atlanta airport. People looked at the rain and nearly everyone sprouted their phones to confirm with local radar that yes, indeed, it was precipitating, and in the column of air above the fake rainforest, I caught a glimpse of something falling. High above on one of the floors, a young girl leaned over the railing, arm out. The object was a doll, not a cloth doll, but one accelerating with the assurance of molded plastic.

I heard Elizabeth behind me—“My God”—and the thing disappeared on the other side of the forest. High above, the girl who'd dropped it stepped away from the railing, and I saw the white light of an open hotel door behind her and the girl being swallowed inside. Whether she ran in, was pulled in by a parent or sibling, or God knows what, I didn't know. The hotel simply ate her, and I would never see the girl again.

Elizabeth went to the fall zone as fast as her gold shoes would carry her, and when I got there, there was nothing on the ground, and Elizabeth said to a passing bellhop with an armful of courtesy umbrellas, “
Stop
.”

At first I thought he was the same bearded white man whom I just tipped, but he was young and plump, still big bearded and with
wind-burned cheeks, his boney wrists coming out of the sleeves of his jacket as he cradled the umbrellas. Elizabeth opened and closed her fingers to indicate to him:
give me an umbrella
.

Elizabeth stood on her tiptoes and poked the tip of an umbrella into the branches of the fake rainforest tree. Rain from the umbrella beaded silver on the shoulders of her dry-cleaned jacket, and she flipped the doll out.

The bellhop and I stepped back to see it plop faceup on the carpet. She wore a blue flight attendant's uniform with nonregulation high heels. It was a Barbie or one of those Barbie rip-offs you get in airport gift shops.

“My God,” I said, thinking about my dream of Elizabeth falling out of the sky.

“I know,” Elizabeth said, “it is a liability nightmare,” looking up through the center of the hotel. Several times I'd heard her say these words: “An air of liability,” expressing an atmosphere of dread about a property, but here I was literally looking into an air of liability.

“Nobody in her right mind would design a hotel like this today,” she said.

“Let's just walk out,” I said. “Catch a flight to wherever.”

“Stop,” she said.

I picked the doll up and tilted my head back to look up through the hotel.

Elizabeth went toward the front desk and got the attention of a standing agent and introduced herself. Elizabeth believed in announcing herself immediately, the secret-guest approach, according to her, was a cheap tactic employed by nonserious consultants. I wanted to walk up and say,
hello, we're the angels of death
.

After getting the keycards and our accommodations settled, Elizabeth met a Mr. Blaney, a man with a sloped belly and receding hair, glasses on the end of his nose, and she immediately turned on her charming face, introducing me to him, “This is Sandeep Sanghavi. He will be doing the bulk of the analysis, and as such, deserves full access.”

When I was supposed to be listening, I couldn't help look at the spectacular view out of the back of the lobby and over a pool deck being drizzled on, and then to the great panoramic plains of the busy airport beyond, the grass in every direction bowed by the weather and another gray phalanx of harder rain marching from the west. Jets blinked in line for takeoff no more than a quarter mile from us, and I had the stupid thought that Ursula could be on one, or maybe Dubourg, and in the distance terminals looked like an isolated city, the spires and cathedrals of control towers. Out the window to the right, to our west, our neighbor was the Gypsy Sky Cargo shipping center with its tarmac full of perfectly aligned green jets with the logo of the Gypsy eye on the tail, actually the pattern found on the wings of the gypsy moth, but it looked like the purple and green eye of a seductive drag queen.

When Elizabeth turned to go with Mr. Blaney to the hotel's “house”—the parts no guest ever sees—I said, “I'll catch up with you. I'm going to get our things moved to our room.”

I went and waited for a guest to vacate the concierge, a pretty dark-skinned woman. Concierges are the loners of the lobby, and by trade, snobs. “I am Sandeep Sanghavi, I believe there are packages waiting for us.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Boxes shipped to the hotel. They arrived this morning. Last name: Sanghavi.”

“There's been no deliveries, sir,” she said. “Have you checked with the front desk?”

Before I panicked, I took a fifty from my clip and handed it to her. She gave the tip a glance before putting it away.

“I will be staying here for an extended amount of time, Darlene. Please let me know when packages arrive for me.” I handed her a business card and went to the front desk, feeling time clicking down. The betta fish was in that shipment.

I asked the agent if they had received packages for “Sanghavi.” I had shipped them for a guaranteed 9:00
AM
delivery and told her there
was a live fish at stake, and she looked at me like I was unstable, and I remembered I was holding Barbie, right there in my hand propped on the agent's desk. The agent excused herself to check with the shift manager, and I remembered the dream I'd had on the plane, Elizabeth sliding down the aisle and out the door, and now this doll flight attendant had fallen out of the sky. The agent came back and said, “Sorry, no.”

Then I panicked.

I put Barbie in my blazer's pocket and went into a cavernous men's room and splashed water on my face. There was a man using a urinal staring at the ceiling as if it were the stars. I dug out the bottle of Rozaline from the side pocket of my bag and tapped out four tablet halves. I often wondered where I would be if we couldn't afford good insurance. I bent and put my head beneath the automatic faucet to drink. The water ran in the corner of my mouth as the faucet's tiny red sensor light stared into my lowered eye as if it were my conscience staring back at me.

I went back out and to the sofa, dug the shipping receipt out of my shoulder bag, and searched the Gypsy Sky Cargo website—that damned Gypsy eye greeting me—and I entered my account number and found that the packages had been logged in two days ago in Dallas. On the page
ABOUT LOST OR DAMAGED PACKAGES
, I hit
REQUEST LIVE CHAT FROM PERSONAL SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE
, and I waited.

Had the drivers in Dallas tampered with the paperwork? I don't think it was possible without getting on our account. Should I walk next door to the Gypsy Sky Cargo compound and see if I could find someone to help me?

I had very little to take care of in life. I had never had the responsibilities of cleaning my room or cooking or homework. I had attended formal schools only until ninth grade, which was when Elizabeth discovered that half the freshmen had been “held back” during their kindergarten year, a decision of their parents to make them more competitive, and Elizabeth was furious that ninth grade was populated by should-be tenth graders.

My phone vibrated. The message was from a BLOCKED number and contained some generic text introduction.

I quickly typed my request.

There was a ding and I saw the message from who I thought was Gypsy Sky Cargo:

You never knew when you were getting a human being or a computer programmed to respond.
I hate this,
I thought,
this pathetic excuse for not talking to a human being who I could explain things to.
Then the next message came in:

Raye? It took me a second to figure out what the name meant. No one called him “Raye.” I typed in:

I am that I am?

Elvis? Looking up from my phone, there was a man in the lobby rereading the back of his paperback as if he weren't sure what book he had started. There was a woman on the couch wearing running shoes, bouncing one foot as she read from a blue file. Everyone appeared to be normal, then again, what was I looking for? There was a ding and the text said:

I took a breath, typed.

The world was going on around me like normal—the elevator dinging, people squeezing through the doors before they were even fully opened. I glanced behind me at the faceless clock on the wall. I looked at the texts. Who used so many emoticons? A kid or an old person?