Cosmic Hotel (12 page)

He said, “I know you're not a believer, but He's here. Sometimes I go days without talking to anyone. I mean I'm right here among all the people, but I'm silent for days. To be silent among everyone is wonderful.”

His ordination ceremony in the cathedral that hot spring was three hours long. When I showed up, a Knights of Columbus in his commodore hat and sword seated me in the back until Aunt Lucy, Dubourg's mother, saw me and moved me forward, a big, deep-voiced, strong woman whom I loved for finding me and bringing me to them when I was nine years old.

Aunt Lucy cried during the ceremony; lots of people cried like it was a wedding. I leaned forward and saw Ursula dry eyed with her brother Cecil and Aunt Myra and Uncle Ben.

In the airport smoking lounge with Dubourg, I pulled the copy of
The Universe Is a Pair of Pants
out of the satchel, and the pack of Marlboros, and gave it to him.

“His latest book,” I said.

He leaned away from the book as if to see it better before touching it. “Maybe that's not what I need at this exact moment.”

“What do you mean? He can't have fucked up your life that much. You've barely known him.”

“But all the science. Maybe I don't need his rich thicket of reality at the moment.”

“Maybe you do,” I said.

He saw my puzzled face. He took the cigarettes but left me the book. “But thanks for the smokes.”

In the ordination ceremony, Dubourg had to lay facedown on the altar while a woman in the balcony sang out for the blessing of every saint upon him. I remember seeing the soles of his shoes up there on the altar, which were unscuffed and a symbol so blatant it was laughable. The ceiling's mural depicted Christ showing his scarred hands to his disciples, and I noticed that the woman singing in the balcony was standing near the railing, and through the gap in the marble railing, I, the only one in the cathedral whose head wasn't bowed, looked up into the shadow of her short skirt. I sat in the ceremony realizing that if all this were true, then I was going to hell, but I began to hear the wind chimes in my brain that proceed an erection, the exact sound, I realized, as the church's Sanctus bells rang,
those
bells that signify a supernatural occurrence, and I thought about how happy Dubourg seemed when I went to see him in college, before he ever mentioned wanting to be a priest. He had boyfriends in college, and I have this image of him when he was joking around with a guy, grabbing him by the wrist to pull him out of a car. I can still see Dubourg's hand around the other guy's wrist, playfully pulling. I can still see him asleep on the train when we went to New York, boyfriend's head on Dubourg's shoulder, Dubourg watching out the window.

I was surely going to hell, but I wondered how Dubourg gave up the happiness of tugging his boyfriend by the wrist, the way they were laughing together, or giving up ever having someone to sleep with you,
to protect you at night from the Creature listening through the wall. On the altar he repeated, “I vow poverty, chastity, and obedience to my superior in the Society of Jesus . . .”

“Father Dunbar?” someone said in the lounge. “Is that you?”

“Yes? Oh, hello,” he said to the man.

The man had a suit on, a red tie he rearranged with a flick. “We would love to have you come worship with us today. Would you?” His nametag said:

Deacon Donald K. Cook

Airport Interfaith Services

(Baptist)

The man squinted his eyes, not used to being in the smoking lounge. He tried to smile at me and resisted the urge to fan the air in front of his face. “You too, my friend,” he said to me.

“Oh, right,” Dubourg said, rising. “May I have a minute?”

The man nodded, and we watched him walk out the door. Through the glass we could see him smiling at passersby.

“Are you in trouble?”

“No,” he said. “Interfaith people,” he rolled his eyes. “The hazard of spending too much time in airports is they start to recognize you.” He faked a smile to the man.

“Can I pray before we leave?” Dubourg asked me, and he didn't give me a chance to answer, only put one hand on my shoulder and bowed his head. “God, this is Dubourg Dunbar in the Atlanta airport. I say a prayer of safety and tranquility for my cousin, if it's Your will. Look after him on his journey. You are all powerful and loving God, and it is in Your son's name, Jesus Christ, we pray, amen.” He patted my shoulder.

“Well, thanks,” I said, picking up my bag.

He frowned. “Sandy, do you need a sign as literal as the dog's eyes to believe something?”

Dubourg and I stood inside the fishbowl of cancer, being watched by the interfaith man through the glass, and I searched my memory for the meaning of “the dog's eyes.”

“I remember the dog's eyes,” I said. “Was that when you had the experience? I thought it was that camping trip.”

“These feelings of understanding God's love happen a lot,” he said. “It's ongoing and magical. One aspect that William James observed with conversions is that the experience can't be explained. The feeling I got when I saw the dog's eyes couldn't be explained.”

This was before we were teenagers. We were playing in the graveyard at night. Someone dropped the flashlight and ran. This was my memory: A dog barked and cousins ran in different directions, and there was stifled yelling and laughter. Dubourg picked the flashlight up. One of the dogs stood in the beam of light. The dog's eyes were floating gold orbs, disks, reflectors, and Dubourg saw me behind a grave marker, but he didn't turn the light on me. He shook the light at the dog's eyes and said, “That's proof God exists 'cause they protect him from getting run over by cars at night.” He turned the flashlight up at the sky as if to search for God. “He made dogs with reflecting eyes!” Dubourg had yelled and claimed he was overcome with comfort, a feeling of ease in the universe. It scared the shit out of me. What is an anxiety attack and what is a religious experience?

I said to him on concourse C, “Come stay with us. Please, Du.”

“I will when I can.” He opened his arms and we hugged again, me taking a good whiff of his body odor to remember him. Elizabeth and I were going to Chicago, and at some point I was going to have to tell her we were going to Alabama too because I had this feeling I would find something there, maybe not the violin, but it was important to go.

I said, “Have you ever lost your luggage?”

He let go and held me at arm's length, his legs straddling the valise. “Are you shitting me? I can't lose contact with this.”

“You don't have any idea what's in the case?”

“Nope.”

“And yet you carry it around because
the church
told you to?”

“Faith,” he said, “sacrifice.”

“You must have pissed off the wrong person to get this assignment,” I said.

“I can't imagine it being any other way now.”

“Hey, have you ever heard of this place in Birmingham with the lost luggage?”

For an answer, he pushed his glasses up with a knuckle, exactly the same way Van Raye did and shrugged his shoulders. He waved. “Thanks for the cigarettes,” he said. “I've got to go.”

He turned and began walking fast with the big case beneath his arm, duffle hanging on the other side of him, and I saw that his white shirttail was untucked and hanging below his jacket. His shirttails never stayed tucked.

CHAPTER 16

In Chicago, while Elizabeth attended the board meetings, I sat in an empty waiting room and read the
Universe Is a Pair of Pants
, a chapter titled “Musings in a Quake Zone.” He wrote, “Twenty-five years ago I had a wonderful little theory. This was before planetary science distracted me. I arrived at it while in San Francisco where I met a wonderful violinist.” He described the violinist as “sophisticated and worldly.” He wrote, “We went back and forth in my tiny apartment above Beulah Street, each playing separately—my French horn, her violin—then together, working ourselves into a frenzy, and not a single neighbor complained. It was a perfect night.” Van Raye wrote that they had a “continuous concert” together, and the chapter was really about cosmology and his “wonderful theory.” “When we were done and almost asleep,” he wrote, “a mist fell through the open window on my face, and I heard a junkie puking on the street below,
some guy who'd wandered off of Haight, retching right beneath the window, and I thought—
Exactly!
And that was when I began to formulate the shape of the universe in my mind, which could be both infinite and
bounded
. . .”

I read through eight pages of cosmology but then I kept rereading the beginning.

When Elizabeth came out of the meeting, I told her that we were going to fly through Birmingham. “I have to show you something in Charles's new book.”

“Birmingham?” she said. “Why?”

“There's a store I want to go to,” I said.

“What store? Another magic store?”

“Did you hear me? There's something in Charles's book I want you to read.”

In the gate area, waiting for our plane, I watched her eyes beneath the cheap rhinestone readers go over the words about the violinist in San Francisco.

“You can stop when you get to the cosmology part,” I said.

She finished and shut the book.

“That's about you, isn't it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “who else?”

“It's the only time he's ever mentioned you in a book!”

She handed the book back to me. “He mentions everyone in his books.”

“Not you and me.”

“Is that what you want, Sandeep? To be a couple of paragraphs of an excuse for him to talk about what he wants to talk about?”

“I just don't think I've done anything interesting enough for him to write about.”

“Self-pity isn't productive,” she said.

I leaned back. “Well, we're going through Birmingham.”

“I don't mind spontaneity,” she said, “but don't spring it on me.”

It was late afternoon by the time our Airbus glided out of the overcast and touched down in Birmingham.

We got a green minivan cab, and I gave the driver the address. I asked him if he'd heard of the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. He'd simply replied, “No,” and put the address into his GPS and sighed because he saw the fare would barely earn him over his minimum.

“What is it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Just somewhere I wanted to go.”

He drove us through the same indistinct buildings and warehouses you'll find at the southern end of any airport. The driver turned off the main boulevard and went down a narrow street, then across a small bridge, and I had this sinking feeling that there wouldn't be any kind of store here, not even a pawn shop.

Big drops of rain spotted the windshield, and the wipers smeared the pollen. A simple green utility sign beside the road announced
WAREHOUSE 122-A
and had an arrow pointing to the next street.

A single piece of hard-cased Samsonite luggage was wrapped to an oak tree with yellow crime-scene tape. A single word,
LUGGAGE
, had been spray-painted on a board against the fence.

Up the drive, through woods, we left the rain shower. The cab pulled up to the indistinct warehouse I had seen on Google Street View—blue aluminum, no windows, no sign of people other than a few cars in the lot. A big Dumpster in the parking lot was filled with construction scrap, but on second look I saw it was full of dead suitcases, ones that had been unzipped or cut open and discarded.

I told the driver to wait.

“Why are we
here
?” Elizabeth asked, getting out and looking over the top of the car at me. I could hear the rain advancing through the trees and waved her to take my arm and run. We got under the shelter and I said, “I just heard about this place. It's supposedly where all lost and unclaimed luggage ends up. I thought it would be interesting.”

She wiped the water off her shoulder. “Used to, when the airlines lost your luggage, they found it and delivered to your front door. Now they give you a voucher for the value. Everything is expendable.”

When we stepped through the door and saw the expanse of the place, saw the rows and rows of merchandise, I felt around inside my bag, dug her camera out, the one she used to take pictures of the merchandise in the retail stores in the airports, and gave it to her without a word.

The warehouse was a giant thrift store filled with smells of used clothing, old plastic, warm electronics. I saw no other shoppers. Only a mannequin guarding the entrance dressed completely in scuba gear and holding a spear gun, guarding the wall-to-wall forgotten merchandise, a graveyard of lost things.

“Welcome to Mishandled Luggage!” a man shouted over the full rain on the metal roof. He was behind a sales counter working on the interior of something electronic. His cash register read a green “00000.”

I caught up to Elizabeth at the glass jewelry case. Inside, mannequin hands reached out of the lake of a mirror, plastic fingers garishly adorned with rings—lost wedding bands, cheap green stones, ugly turquoise jewelry, white price tags dangling.

“Look at this, Sandeep!” She took the camera and aimed into the display case, trying to get a picture through the glass. We went to the next case where watches hung from horizontally placed golf clubs, hundreds of watches.

Somehow I knew which direction to walk. Maybe it was the increase of electronic noise from the back, but I saw guitars on the back wall, old ones and shiny new ones, a few without strings. Guitars? Who lost guitars? And each one represented someone's broken heart, like Elizabeth with her violin or the girl who'd dropped Barbie into the Air of Liability.

There was so much stuff here I didn't even notice the young woman until she moved, lifted her head to see us. She sat on a stool behind a counter, and her chin dropped to continue reading an old paperback held open on her knees.

On the wall were beat-up trumpets, shiny flutes, and empty instrument cases with plush red-velvet interiors. Beneath the pounding of the rain was my heartbeat because I saw high on the wall a violin in its open case sitting on pegboard hooks. I could see the Master Stefen label liner, the gold script on black cloth, one that I had seen all my life. It is a popular maker of violins, but I felt the remnants of raindrops reach my scalp and tingle. “Elizabeth” was all I could say, but she had seen it.

“That,” she said to the girl reading on the stool. “Get that down.”

That's it,
I thought,
that can't be it.
The coolness of the raindrops made me dizzy.
This can't be happening.

The girl pulled an aluminum ladder over, legs clattering. Elizabeth put her hands on her ears to block the racket, and the girl stopped and climbed.

Elizabeth pivoted to me and said, “That
is
my violin. Sandeep,
how did you know?
”

For the first time that trip, I noticed her earrings (clip-ons)—were gold frogs sleeping on her ears.

“I don't know how to tell you,” I said.

The girl took the Master Stefen by the neck, no strings.

“Be careful,” Elizabeth said, “and the case too. It is all delicate.”

The girl put the violin under her arm and grabbed the case.

When a pegboard hook fell, clanging through the ladder, Elizabeth put her hand to her mouth, but the girl made it to the ground and came forth and put the violin on the counter. An orange tag had $800 written on it.

“This is my violin,” Elizabeth said to me. It lay before her, but she seemed unable to reach out to touch it. Her right hand came out slowly and for some reason the violin reminded me—this thing without strings—of something dead in a tiny coffin, the children's graves I had seen when we played flashlight tag in the cemetery in Florida, and she lifted it.

“Is it okay?” I asked her.

“This is my violin,” she said to the girl.

The girl said, “It's eight hundred dollars.”

Elizabeth twisted around, eyes wide in disbelief. “I should not have to pay for my own violin!” She looked at me, tears streaking. I couldn't bear to look at her. “
Should I have to pay for my own violin?
” she said.

I took my money clip out, hands shaking.

The girl said, “You don't pay me.”

We had to go to the man up front. He scanned a barcode on a sticker and the register went from 00000 to 00800. Maybe I should have explained that the price was badly wrong, but I was shaking and stunned, only wanted to get out of there.

I gave him the money to get us back out in the world with her violin, which rode in its case on her lap in the cab. Classic music played on the cab's satellite radio as the driver retraced the path back to the airport, Mozart's Symphony No. 15. Elizabeth wiped tears away as soon as they came, trying not to sniff, both of us wondering what had just happened.

Her tears cleared up and she asked me, “How did you know it was there?”

“Are you absolutely sure this is yours?”

“Without a doubt. How did you know?”

My hands squeezed my knees, and I said, “Magic.”

“Dammit,” the driver said and touched a finger to the radio to change stations until the screen said “Sports Talk 250” and the music was gone.

My phone vibrated. I pulled it out and saw a new conversation had begun:

I texted:

Somebody out there could obviously sort through data and track a violin down. The explanation would be complicated but it would be a rational one. I kept reminding myself of this. It wasn't really magic. Nothing was but I had this wonderful feeling of being confused by what I saw.

I quickly turned my phone for Elizabeth to see. “Do you see this conversation?” I said to her.

She cleared her eyes and tilted her head back even though she didn't have her reading glasses on. “What?”

I looked at the phone and there was nothing but the phone's menu, the conversation gone.

Everything could be explained, maybe explained with a long-shot scenario, like the fact that all information exists on the web and a hacker could get information and track down a violin. I think we all have this sense that a shadow exists in this other space—each name, place, thought, theorem, video—entire lives could be constructed from the information. I had once noticed how my fingers were more blunt than Elizabeth's, and the thought crossed my mind to search “Sanghavi Aardarsh's fingers” to see what my grandfather's fingers looked like before I realized the absurdity.

The satellite radio on the dash changed from sports talk back to Symphony No. 15 without the driver touching it. Everything was becoming a message to me, or I was going insane.

For a second I thought my phone was vibrating in my hand, but realized my fingers were tingling.
Not the tingling. What is happening?
I shook the hand to increase circulation.

I wanted Charles to help me figure everything out, but on that flight back to Atlanta that small tingle became numbness and progressed inward. If this thing, this paralyzing thing was happening again, I wouldn't be able to talk to anyone.
This isn't happening
,
this isn't happening again
. I had allowed myself to get stressed out, that was all. I was too scared to mention it to Elizabeth sitting right beside me.