Cosmic Hotel (9 page)

I heard the sound of a phone ringing in one of the phone booths behind me. The old-fashioned sound of a ringing bell was so strange that I saw people looking at the source and smiling, but no one stopped to answer it. I turned back in my seat.

This person texting me was the same person who'd called me in Dallas and played Elvis. Now he knew I was here, and that ringing continued in the booth behind me and I tried to ignore it.
It has nothing to do with me
, I told myself, but I eventually took a breath, got Barbie and our bags, and went around to the booth, put my shoulder against the wooden bifold door. Hand on the receiver, I hated myself doing this. I picked it up, heard the hollowness of an open line.
What is the name of this hotel?
“Grand Aerodrome,” I said.

There was a click, then an angry squeal—high pitched, then low—then a saddened long dull whining, a sound I'd heard before, the sound of an old modem trying to make a connection, a horrible sound. The metal phone cord yanked my arm when I tried to look around the lobby. I sat in the booth and that rolling drumbeat started and then a guitar and then Elvis's unmistakable singing. It wasn't “Viva Las Vegas,” but “ . . .
come on baby I'm tired of talking, grab your coat and let's start walking.
. . .” It was “A Little Less Conversation.”

Jesus, hell
. I put my finger down on the silver tongue to disconnect and make it stop. I needed to remain calm. I texted on my phone:

There was no number to block on my phone, just the prefix code. After sitting in the booth—no more ringing—and watching people go by in the lobby, I grabbed my bags and made a dash for the elevators. What scared me most wasn't this hacker. What scared me most was I was going to have to tell Elizabeth Sanghavi that our personal items were not here.

CHAPTER 11

On the way up to the room, I felt the forty-eight-hour recommended limit for my fish running down. I tried to call the only number I had for Van Raye in California to get some answer from him for what might be going on, but I got a recording: “The alumni house will begin taking reservations in March . . .”

I called the physics department and explained to three different people I was trying to get in touch with Charles Van Raye and each person transferred me to someone else.

Holding the phone to my ear, I got out of the elevator and found 1201, our suite for at least the next six weeks, the orange doorbell glowing beside the door welcoming me. When I got inside, I leaned back against the door, and listened to a kind-sounding person named Mary, the “program coordinator” for the physics department, who said Van Raye was “indisposed for an indefinite period of time.”

I told Mary, “This is Sandeep Sanghavi. I'm Van Raye's son.”

There was a pause and she finally said, “Would you like to leave a voicemail?”

His outgoing message wasn't even his voice but a mailbox number.
Why is he so fucking low-tech?
I tried to gather myself so my voice wouldn't shake, left a message telling him to call me. “This is Sandeep,” I added and then said, “Something strange is going on. Call me,” and on second thought, I said, “Does anyone call you just ‘Raye'?” and terminated the call, intuiting that he would never get this message.

For the first time, I allowed myself to look around the suite, and I would have given it two stars at most. It was large and smelled like an antique shop—slightly homey but “cancer causing” crossed my mind. There were high ceilings. One wall was missing a strip of chair railing. I unlocked the balcony door and pushed against wind pressure to step outside, the vast airport spread before me, wind smelling of diesel and jet fuel, and the patio was a dirty concrete, solid wall on each side for privacy, but twelve stories below me was the hotel's rain-slick pool
deck. Beyond the pool deck was a high perimeter security fence separating this property from Atlanta Hartsfield and the Airport Zone.

I went back inside and sat in a sofa chair and waited in the dimness for Elizabeth. One of my great skills was waiting. I'd done it all my life. A trance overtook me, and it was sunset by the time Elizabeth let herself in.

She flipped on a light and glanced at me without making eye contact, slipped her shoes off by the door.

“Where have you been?” she said.

“There have been some complications, I'm afraid.” I began with the facts. “Our shipment can't be located . . . ”

“Our shipment?”

She always hated when
other
people repeated what you said in order to give them a chance to think.

I told her that the website still listed them as “in flight,” though I was waiting on word from Gypsy about their exact whereabouts.

The inner tips of her eyebrows sought each other as I explained, and her movements slowed, her hand stopping at her earlobe when the earring snapped off.

“Sky Cargo could have them here at any moment,” I said.

She snapped the other earring off. Then she started to say something and let the gold earrings clatter to the table against her laptop like dice. She suddenly went to her new bedroom and shut the door with authority.

Her earrings lying on the table were supposed to be a gold-braided figure-eight knot, a knot I learned at the Ocean Navigator seminar I took at Bay Front Plaza Hotel in Tampa long ago.

She came out wearing a hotel robe, went into the kitchen, and found the chardonnay she'd ordered in the refrigerator. I hated the silent treatment.

She sat at the dining room table and opened her laptop, and I broke: “You don't think this is my fault, do you?”

Her reading glasses reflected the computer screen.

“I want to know right now,” she said, “are you planning on contributing to this analysis, or are you going to make me do it all by myself? You should be taking over. I should actually be doing less.”

“Yes, I am, of course, I'm going to do my part, but I'm going to locate, you know, our stuff. That's my first priority. The fish is in our stuff.” I put my hands behind my head.

I got up and checked our door to make sure it was secure, glanced out the peephole to the warped image of the Air of Liability beyond the railing, and then I checked that the door to the adjoining suite, which wasn't ours, was locked.

“You have to will yourself to be in control,” she said. “When you do that, then good things—not bad things—will happen to you. Bad luck is beginning to follow you around.”

I pressed my head against the window and saw Gypsy Sky Cargo to our west, the facility bathed in so much light that it was practically daylight for the workers. Giant coils snaked along the ground and connected into aircraft. Tiny people in yellow rain slickers worked around the ankles of these giants. Nobody stood still. Gypsy Sky Cargo had always been Elizabeth's ideal of efficiency.

“I'll get our stuff,” I said.

I went and sat at the table beside her. I put my head in my hands.

“It's a bad sign that
all
our boxes are missing,” she said. “Not one box showed up?”

She knew the answer.

I picked up her earrings.

She grabbed my hand to stop me from fiddling. “Listen to me, and listen to me good. The violin, the shipment . . . Now stop and listen to me. I'm not saying this was directly your fault, but you have to stop this trend. You let bad things happen and pretty soon, we're just one of those families that bad things happen to all the time. Trust me, I know families like this. I can't stand them.” She seemed to consider what she had just said. “I don't mean to be so harsh, but there is something despicable about how they let bad things happen to them, their inattention
to details of life. The Epps, remember them?” I nodded. Susan Epps was Elizabeth's college roommate and she had died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago. “They owned a farm in Virginia. Old money, from canning, of all things. The farm had an airfield for the family plane. The family drove the father in a jeep to the plane, then watched the plane crash on takeoff. A terrible tragedy. The family watched it happen—their father, husband, exploding into the trees with two children aboard. Was it his fault? Ronald was third-generation money, wasn't much of a businessperson. Things were in decline because they were lazy and then he crashed.

“After that, her brother died in a bicycle accident in Spain. There were strange stories about how every time they traveled something tragic happened—family members lost for a month, someone caught a skin disease in Greece, another hit by a taxi in London. She, Susan, well you know that story. Her other brother works at a grocery store in North Carolina now. This is a phenomenon, it's real. I will not be one of these families. It's just you and me, we are a family who has to be vigilant, so you will have opportunities and have the big family.”

I picked the earrings back up and felt their weight.

“One of my regrets is that I could not have a large family,” she said.

“You never wanted a large family,” I said.

“Who doesn't want a large family? But it wasn't right for my generation. For economics, it needed to be only you and me.”

“I'm twenty-eight,” I said, “I'm not sure I am large-family material.”

“Find a younger woman. Find someone you are physically attracted to, a beautiful woman whom you can be attracted to for the
rest
of your life, and this woman should be a woman who wants to take care of you for the rest of
your
life and who will love you because you are successful.”

“Seriously? This is Elizabeth Sanghavi's formula for marriage?”

Elizabeth had her suitors, and she'd married two of them—Van Raye first, then an attorney, William (Will) Henry Elrod IV from Savannah, Georgia. Constantly being on the road wasn't suited for marriage.

I said, “Do you want to find someone and arrange this business deal?”

“Stop it! I hate arranged marriages, but Americans want to pretend like marriage isn't business. An individual's success depends on the family; the spouse comes first and foremost.”

“Jesus,” I said, “will you listen to yourself?”

“A large family is a sign of success.”

I thought about all the cousins running around in Florida on hot days, all of us dirty, pulling things out of the refrigerator to eat, tried to picture Elizabeth overseeing such chaos.

I pushed my hair back. “Goddamn it,” I said and then very calmly, “This hotel is going to be a pile of concrete in a couple of months. Why should we even care?”

She slammed her fist on the table. “That's what I'm talking about! Stop it!
You
are in control . . . make yourself feel better! Misfortune breeds misfortune, families become cursed! That is not
us!
” She got up and went to her bedroom.

Her door shut harder, and I went out onto the private balcony off of my room and looked at the airport, felt the cold wind sting. I thought I heard something on Elizabeth's balcony but the wall blocked me from seeing if she was there. A mile away there were the pearly floodlights crowning the terminals where people were traveling, constantly traveling.

CHAPTER 12

I dreamed a doorbell was ringing. I woke but didn't move because I didn't want to loosen the bed covers. I looked around searching for a sign to indicate what hotel I was in, what city. The ice in the courtesy bucket collapsed, and then there was clearly a knock on the outer door.

I got out of bed and met Elizabeth going to the door, tying her robe's sash. “Nothing good could be happening at this hour,” she said.

I looked through the peephole and saw two figures, the image of their bodies concave like parentheses around a golden luggage cart full of boxes.

When I opened, a Gypsy Sky Cargo delivery person said, “I apologize for the hour, but this was a hot priority per your request. You are Sandeep Sanghavi?”

One of those bearded bellhops shifted his balance to try to see into the suite. He had two luggage carts stacked with our boxes.

“They found them. Good,” Elizabeth said.

I quickly signed the DIAD pad and found the important box on top of all the others, a box with an orange sticker: “FRAGILE: Live Fish.”

“Again, Gypsy Sky apologizes for the inconvenience of the hour,” the delivery woman said, “but I mean with this priority . . . ”

“They came from Dallas?” I asked her, carefully taking the box to the kitchen and using the tip of a steak knife to slice through the tape.

She said, “Came to us in Fort Worth, and I'm afraid due to a processing glitch they were never offloaded in Fort Collins. Someone threw a hot-location search on them. Look at this priority.” She pointed to the electronic pad.

“I don't understand what that is,” I said, glancing as I removed the Styrofoam cooler's top and saw the clear plastic bag. I immediately lifted it and before my eyes was my purple betta fish swimming, his image slightly distorted by the plastic, but alive and well.

“Just what it looks like,” she said. “That's a priority five, and I've never seen anything above a three, and I've been doing this for seventeen years.”

I lifted the bag in front of my face and watched the fish.

“Priority three is something like you would see for essential industrial or even medical, you know,” the woman said. “Didn't know there was a five.” While the bellhop unloaded boxes, she looked me up and down as if to determine who I was, and then into the apartment to see Elizabeth.

“Gypsy Sky Cargo apologizes for any inconvenience this might have caused,” she said.

“Who did the search?” I asked her.

Elizabeth came and looked at the fish and took it from my hand and carried it to my room.

“Who did the hot locate?” The woman made a sigh but consulted her pad. “There's no ID.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I showed her the door, which had been propped open by the bellhop's rubber stopper.

My phone dinged with a message.

I typed quickly as I went to get a tip for the bellhop.

When I handed a tip to the bellhop to get him out of the apartment, I noticed his eyes above the wild growth of brown beard focused past me to the door. I turned. There was a woman in her pajamas standing inside our suite. She held an ice bucket.

I whispered, “Who are you?”

The bellhop had to skim the wall to get around her, but she stood her ground. He grabbed his rubber stopper but held the door open. “Anything else, Mr. Sanghavi?”

I put up my finger to stop him. “Who are you?” I asked the woman again.

“Sandra. I was looking for the ice and vending room.”

“Why are you in here?”
Was this person somehow responsible for all this?

She stepped into the light of the living room, her white fuzzed bedroom slippers snapping. She hugged a bucket of ice. “Look at the size of your suite.”

Hearing the voice, Elizabeth came out of my room drying her hands on a towel. “Excuse me. May I help you?”

The woman glanced at her and then down at a can of soda stuck in her bucket of ice. “I was thirsty. I've always loved pop. Is the gift shop open?”

“It's the middle of the night,” Elizabeth said.

“I'm looking for the . . . ” she contemplated, “ . . . the thing. You know.”

Elizabeth flipped the towel over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips. “And what kind of sleeping pills did you take tonight?”

The woman thought about this and said, “I'm not drunk.”

“Aren't you?” Elizabeth asked.

The woman said lowly, “I'm completely okay.”

Elizabeth said, “Then may we help you back to your room?”

We found most sleepwalkers because someone called the front desk to complain that a stranger was knocking on their door. Sleepwalkers in hotels often locked themselves out of their own rooms, and several times had shown up in their underwear at front desks asking for admittance to their room. Quite common.

The bellhop kept the door open with his foot.

“I just came here to find . . . ” But she didn't finish.

“I know,
the thing
,” Elizabeth said. “Do you understand? You are sleepwalking?”

“No I'm not.”

“Let's get you back, okay?” Elizabeth said.

“Yes. I forgot why I'm here?” She turned toward the door. “I'm disturbing a private property.”

Elizabeth showed her the way out.

The woman mumbled, “This is really strange. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. I'm Sandra Whitehouse, you know.”

We followed the bellhop to the elevators.

Elizabeth said, “Do you remember where your room is?”

“Certainly. It was nice to meet both of you. I'll see you in the morning. Are you going to Frank's lecture?”

“We most certainly will not be,” Elizabeth said.

The woman looked confused but walked away without glancing back, hugging her ice bucket until she got to a door. Elizabeth and I both held our breaths until she found her keycard, swiped successfully, and disappeared inside her room.

When the clicking of the door latch finished echoing off floors on the other side of the atrium, I said, “I really hate this hotel.”

“The sleepwalkers in the Grand Aerodrome aren't hidden down lonely hallways, are they? This is open and quite dangerous.” She pointed out into the Air of Liability and all the rooms we could see. “She won't remember any of it in the morning,” Elizabeth said. Her eyebrows of consternation never slept.

The atmosphere of the open-atrium hotel was dreamlike. Tiny room number lights sat beside each door where guests were sleeping or fucking or everything people do inside a layover, airport hotel.

“The problem is that everyone in this country is filthy rich and they don't even know it,” Elizabeth said. “We are all filthy rich and everyone takes prescription medications. We have quite literally turned into a country of Elvis Presleys.”

My phone dinged.

“Who could be messaging you in the middle of the night?”

“Dubourg,” I lied and looked at the message.

“We got our stuff,” I said to her, and left her looking into the Air of Liability and contemplating a country full of Elvis Presleys. I typed and sent: