Cosmic Hotel (21 page)

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Watching the movie that scared the hell out of me when I was little.”

We sat, the length of our bodies touching. I could feel her heat trapped beneath the blanket with mine, and I could smell her, and this feeling reminded me of once being alone with her in a pub in Dublin years before, and we'd started holding hands because we had realized that the patrons who'd befriended us in that pub thought we were traveling college students who were lovers. We simply held hands in the pub, her thumb rubbing my hand, and we drank our beers, and people went in and out of the door like life was normal, and a man at the end of the bar asked if he could sing us a song, and as he sang to us, we let go of each other's hand because holding hands while he sang so beautifully would have been like stealing something that wasn't ours.

“Even this music starts to freak me out,” she said as the movie began.

The voice-over narrator said, “
Since time began
,” and Ursula and I recited along with him, “
man has looked toward the heavens with wonder . . . wonder and fear. The interstellar distances have kept us safe . . . until now
,” and her voice and his voice made a tingling, a good tingling, spread from my back into the base of my skull.

“There's something sexual about that fear,” Ursula said, “I've gotten that same feeling when I was about to have sex.”

“Are we about to have sex?” I said.

“You'll only fall madly in love with me and be driven insane by your cousin-lover—”

“Ursula, quit. I've always been madly in love with you.” I stared at the movie. I felt her take my hand beneath the covers and pull it to her lap, the heat like a fever.

“I tremble, okay?” I said. “My muscles are weak, that's all.”

“I'm trembling too,” she said. “It'll never work, will it, we'll never work?”

I was about to ask her why not when I felt myself getting hard, heard the Sanctus bells chiming in the pleasure center of my brain responding to the one person in the world who I most desired, but there was also an unfamiliar stretching pain as if the growing erection were caught on something.

“Eventually you'll get tired of me,” she mumbled, unaware of my discomfort, which only made me harder, made more stinging and stretching. “Then where would we be?”

“I don't think I ever would get tired of you,” I said, the pain not stopping. I closed my eyes to make it go away, but when I did, I suddenly knew what the date was, new what the time was.

“Hey,” she said, “you're squeezing my hand.”

“Sorry.”

My heart palpitated, but before letting her hand go I lifted her arm so I could see that rubber watch she always wore, dangling on the bottom of her wrist. Its time and date confirmed what I already knew. Worried about my impotency, I had asked Randolph when I would get an erection, and he'd told me, and now here I was. Now here I was tumbling, falling forward in time again.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, putting my hand to my chest, my breath taken away.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” but I had felt my life leaping to that moment my penis was burning. I rolled to try to inconspicuously shift the erection.

I went quickly to the bathroom.

By the time I got the door shut, I heard her shout, “Are you okay?”

“Fine!”

I undid the drawstring and pushed the pants down, inspected everything, which, miraculously, didn't have blood on it, and I pulled my pants up and made myself breathe. In the mirror I looked more
hollow eyed than ever. It seemed only a second ago that I had been alone in my room and had forced Randolph, once again, to answer a question about the future. Now here I was. Jesus, would more of these moments just pop into my life, throw my life forward?

I went back and slid in bed beside her again.

“What's the matter with you?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. Glancing at the television, I said, “Good, I didn't miss it.”

In the movie it was daylight on the river. A group of young people were having a party on a bluff, which was the scene with my grandmother, Harriet Raye, Victim 1. Dance music came from a transistor radio on a rock, and I could only think about how most of these actors were dead now, their lives gone in probably what seemed like a couple of blinks.

Ursula whispered, “I've seen this movie so many times . . . I swear I'm getting that same feeling I used to get when we were kids. This shit freaked me out, okay? Now it's an extremely corny movie to me, but I still get the same feeling . . . ” She held her breath, then let it out. “Here it comes,” she tensed and relaxed, “and there it goes. It comes in waves. I want to hold onto it for a second but can't completely do it.”

We both had our backs against the headboard, and at some point I realized she was watching me.

“What?” I said.

She stretched her knee until it touched me.

On the screen, Harriet Raye, my paternal grandmother, Ursula's great-aunt, unbuttoned her shirt and revealed a black bathing suit.

“See you on the other side!” Harriet Raye says in the movie. The movie cut to a longer shot from across the river and she dove perfectly from the bluff. This was really my grandmother diving.

The Creature's theme came up loud.

Right then, as our ancestor was becoming “Victim 1,” I felt the same fear and excitement
The Creature from Outer Space
had given me when I was a kid, but like Ursula said, it was there, then gone, and even
though it was a kind of fear, you wanted it back, and when I looked to tell her this, she had turned away. While Harriet Raye was pulled down by the Creature, claw around her ankle, struggling through the crystal-clear water, Ursula's watch beeped and then there was her gentle snoring.

CHAPTER 29

Ursula slept. The Creature was eventually killed by spear guns.

I slowly lifted her hand to see the numbers twirling on her stopwatch as she slept. She was trying to somehow quantify real sleep time versus lost time if the aliens came to take her away.

I turned the television off and put my back against her back and tried to sleep, but the bed covers were loose and frustrating.

I had no choice but to get up, but I didn't get in the other bed. I put on my red tracksuit and went down to the empty nighttime lobby. I shut myself in the phone booth on the end and waited. The sign on the phone said:

                       
1) STOP!

                       
2) Listen for tone.

                       
3) Deposit coins.

When it rang, like I knew it would, I snapped it up without speaking. It was the old favorite “Viva Las Vegas,” and it did seem like the best song ever—“
. . .and I'm just the devil with love to spare . . . Viva Las Vegas . . .
”

I glanced outside to the lobby but saw nothing out of the ordinary, just the lobby at low staff, and I closed my eyes to relax. The tight confines of the phone booth was wonderful, slouched with knees braced against the metal wall, but then my leg tingled—tingling, tingling?—but I realized that my phone was vibrating in my tracksuit pocket. The message was from “UNKNOWN,” which meant Randolph:

The dog? I looked at the world outside the phone booth as if I would see a dog among the late-night check-ins. On the concierge's desk, a small sign apologized for the inconvenience of her not being there.

I fell asleep in the comfort of the booth, one of those deep, paralyzing sleeps from childhood, and dreamed of being back in the hospital bed beside Mr. Leggett. I happily waited for Rose Epstein to call her name and tell everyone she wanted to go home. I wanted Mr. Leggett to tell one of his stupid jokes even though I had always agreed with my father about jokes being the shallowest form of human conversation.

In chapter 9 of
The Universe Is a Pair of Pants
, “Mediocre Men,” Van Raye ranked them:

       
3) Talking about sports.

       
2) Talking about television shows.

       
1) Telling jokes—“Did you hear the one about . . . ?”

“It is slightly interesting to wonder where these jokes come from,” he wrote. “The ‘farmer's daughters' jokes, ‘a guy walks into a bar' jokes? Nobody knows who creates dirty jokes, nor why such categories evolve and remain. How do the jokes survive in the world? How do they become popular enough to be repeated? Why do these appeal to people, appeal to them enough that they are memorized and stored? They spread like the most proficient virus. Why?”

In the chapter, he tells of an experiment. He made up a joke, told it to a friend when they were on a hiking trip on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula (picture a woman in a tent). “I told my English-speaking friend the joke on top of a volcano,” he wrote. “It was funny, if I say so
myself. I told no one else the joke, and I will not write it here. This is about what spreads among human beings by shear desire to have this superficial contact with other human beings. I hope to one day hear my joke repeated to me somewhere far away from Kronotsky.”

I woke in the phone booth the next morning, sat blinking my eyes to a new, dull-gray day dawning through the hotel, and I was surprised to see Elizabeth get out of the elevator at that moment, fully dressed in a navy business suit. I started to fold the door open but Elizabeth's speed of walking made me stop to see what the hell was going on. She was looking at someone. He was in the direction of the bank of courtesy phones on the opposite wall, and as soon as I saw the rounded Bob Cratchit posture I knew it was Charles.

CHAPTER 30

Charles wore a big blue arctic parka and a knit cap. He still had on sunglasses like he was a movie star, and the heavy coat couldn't hide that stooping posture. They went toward each other like a bad movie, Van Raye with his arms open, Elizabeth moving too fast, not even caring if anyone saw her. She hit him with an embrace that knocked him slightly off balance, then took his cheeks between her hands and stretched her neck forward to kiss him on the lips.

He appeared mildly shocked.

I rose awkwardly out of the booth, stood with the help of my cane and the doorframe.

I walked to them and said, “Elizabeth?”

She let go of him and kept his elbow in her grip and simply said, “Charles is here!”

“Look who's here!” he said, eyes behind the glasses. “
Me!
”

“Charles,” I said. He came and hugged me, pinning my arms so that I could only touch his elbows. “It's really you,” I said. “Thank God. Charles, let me go. You're squeezing me.”

He did and said, “We're all here!” He took in the sight of Elizabeth, down to her gold shoes. “I've never had a greeting like that! Darling, look at you, you look fantastic! I look horrible. It really took too long to get here. It wasn't supposed to be this long. And the storm.” His parka squeaked as he moved. He had on black pants and boots with zippers.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “You're here.”

The waterfall ran in the fake rainforest. The Air of Liability was clear. Guests pulled their luggage by us. Everything was quite normal except the girlish look of delight on Elizabeth's face.

“I've got a lot to tell you,” I said. “I don't know where to start.”

“Well, we have plenty of time.” He clapped his hands. “You look fine,” he said to me. “I love the getup,” he pointed to my red tracksuit. “Very urban.” He took Elizabeth's arm, me with the other, moving us along as if we were guests in his hotel.

“My God. This is just like you to call when you are already
here
,” Elizabeth said. “I wasn't even dressed. I could have used some warning.”

“We had to beat the storm.”

“Have you had breakfast?” she said. “Do you want a room? Of course you want a room. There's an extra room, Sandeep's old room. I could see what else is available. I'll book you something.”

“Elizabeth, slow down,” he said. “I've got some things.” He pointed toward a gold luggage cart where a homeless woman sat on a pile of cheap bags that included two garbage bags and a drawstring laundry bag. The woman's hair had recently been sheared off. She wore sandals, her legs spread so that hairy shins were revealed.

He herded us to the cart and said, “This is Ruth Christmas.”

The woman didn't attempt to get off the cart. She had an unlit cigarette in her fingers and she had the expression of careful, objective observing.

“This is Elizabeth Sanghavi, and this is Sandeep.”

She only nodded and reached up and hooked her hand around the top bar of the cart and let it hang there as she took an imaginary drag of the unlit cigarette in the other. She was clearly deranged. My thought was,
Where had he picked her up?

“This is . . . ” Elizabeth said, “this is your luggage? I mean, this is it?” Elizabeth was staring at the woman, but then tried to occupy her eyes with scanning the bags. “I thought you were bringing your horn.”

“My horn?” he said.

“I don't see your horn.” Her voice had changed.

“Elizabeth, I haven't played my horn in years. Ruth did most of the driving. I'm starving.”

“You don't have your
horn
?” Elizabeth said again, and I wanted her to stop repeating herself. She'd told me a thousand times that only dullards repeated things in order to give the dullard time to think about what was going on.

“I haven't played a horn in years. You know that.” He smiled.

“You mentioned starting back,” she said.

The bellhops in their maroon uniforms wore
ushankas
that made them look like ice fishermen in band uniforms.

“Ruth and I were wondering,” Van Raye said, “if we might see the hotel's roof.”

“The roof?” I said, being the dullard now.

“We're searching for a certain type of dish antenna—”

My phone chimed and Charles looked at it as though it were a turd.

A message from Ursula said:

“
What?
” I mumbled.

Van Raye maneuvered Elizabeth and me by the arm again as if to talk to us in private.

Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder. “She's with you?”

“Now, sweetheart, before assumptions are made . . .” He turned slightly back at the other woman—“Ruth is . . . ”—who still sat on the bags on the cart and out of earshot. She put the cigarette in her mouth and drug on it as if it were lit; she even squinted through nonexistent smoke.

I saw Elizabeth's focus in the distance, and her eyes became sleepy the way she did when she was playing a particular difficult piece of music. She refocused on Charles talking about driving, and she slowly lifted her hand and tucked her fingers, and I saw the meaty paler part of her palm rise, and I had a flash memory to the executive self-defense course we'd taken in Trenton, New Jersey, years ago, and that meaty part of her hand traveled on a path toward Van Raye. He could only flinch before it struck him on his cheek, half slap and half fist.

He stepped backward, mouth open. “My God!” He still had those horrible sunglasses on.

Travelers stopped walking, stopped talking on their phones to see this spectacle.

The woman sitting on the luggage began to laugh.

Elizabeth covered her mouth. “Dear God, are you okay?”

“Violence?” he said. “Seriously?”

“He's okay,” I said. “You're okay, aren't you?”

“NO!” He leaned away from me.

Elizabeth recovered and dropped her hands. “Go find another hotel! Get out!”

“Elizabeth, darling . . . ”

“Elizabeth,” I said, “wait a minute, okay?”

I saw the front desk staff dispersing, one woman quickly coming out of the door.

Van Raye said to Elizabeth, “Please don't. I have nothing.” He finally took his glasses off and folded them and put them in his parka's pocket, withdrawing a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses. “I don't have anywhere else to go,” he said. “I don't have
nothing
exactly. I do have one thing. Sandeep knows. I've had a bit of success. For what I was searching for.”

Someone had summoned potbellied Mr. Blaney, and Albert from security followed.

“What has happened here?” Mr. Blaney said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Was someone struck?” Albert in his brown nylon jacket and tie wanted to know, his aftershave arriving with him.

“I'm handling everything,” Elizabeth said. “This is a family matter, and I apologize.”

“I'll go get an incident report,” Albert said.

“I don't need an
incident
report,” Elizabeth said. “Please leave us.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Blaney said and motioned for Albert to disperse, and Blaney left without a glance back.

Van Raye unzipped the jacket and said, “Seriously, Elizabeth? It takes a lot to admit this to you, but I am broke.”

“Broke you should be familiar with,” she said. “And we are always here to bail you out, aren't we?”

“It's not like that. That's not true.” In a lower voice, he said, “You know what I've found.”

“Yes,” she said. “That has nothing to do with us.”

He let out a breath. “It has everything to do with everyone. Look, I need a place to stay. Ruth is here to help me work. She's the only person who can help. She's a genius.”

When we turned to see Ruth Christmas sitting on the luggage, she shrugged.

I reached out to Elizabeth, but she turned and stormed toward the elevator.

I hobbled on my cane to catch up to her. She pushed the button and waited for the elevator. I turned to Van Raye and held up a finger for him to stay away.

Elizabeth tried to control her breathing as she watched the numbers above the elevator. “The man will never change. I don't want him here.”

“Yes, you do. Who was that back there that I just saw?”

“You mean the
genius
?”

“No, I mean you.”

“Me?” she said.

“Yes. You were someone else, asking about his horn. And then you hit him.”

She closed her eyes and made a visible shudder. “Sandeep, look at me, I'm shaking. Yes, I struck someone.”

I leaned on my cane. “We can let him stay.”

“He's using us.”

“What does that hurt? He's going to do this anyway. We can let him work here. Just don't get too close.”

Elizabeth considered the chandelier in the ceiling, then casually glanced at the woman across the lobby dressed in a green flight suit and with no hair.

“A
genius
?” Elizabeth said sarcastically.

I quickly typed Ursula a message that I was coming to the room.

Elizabeth said, “‘Genius' is a term tossed around too much, don't you think?
You're
a genius, Sandeep.”

I stopped typing and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“See, you can label anyone,” she said.

She took in a deep breath.

“Holy shit,” I said, “for a second there, you scared me.” Elizabeth and I watched the other woman put her feet up on the bags.

“His discovery won't make this elevator any faster, will it?” she said.

“Dubourg and Ursula are here.”

She turned to me. “We're supposed to be getting back on task here. I'm ready to put this hotel behind us.” She looked back at the two geniuses. “Book only one room for the geniuses. What do I care? Put them away together. We'll pay for everything, of course.”