Cosmic Hotel (23 page)

“I'm just saying,” I said, a statement Elizabeth abhorred, “we can make something happen. This is important.”

“I'm not delaying the process of our business,” Elizabeth said to me as though no one else was in the room.

“Do you want him here?” I asked.

“Me? Don't worry about me. I can take care of myself.” She sank in the water up to her chin and began fanning her arms to swim, a strand of her hair trailing in the water.

My phone dinged in my hand.

All the sweat inside my tracksuit suddenly chilled. I concentrated hard on the words. What would it look like if I were hallucinating? I typed a message, concentrated on seeing my letters pop up, and I sent them:

“Something important is happening,” I said, “okay?” I tapped my cane on the ground to think of words that would convince, and that's when Ursula burst out crying. She sat forward and put her head in her hands.

“Ur?” Dubourg said.

She took her hands away from her face and shot her index finger at Dubourg. “Stop! I'm fine! Stay away.” Her face was mottled. “It just hit me, okay?” She looked to everyone else. “I know it's real. Why aren't
y'all
crying?” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “Why am I the one crying? I've known longer than he has.” She was in the chair beside me, so she hooked a finger in her pocket that was gaping open. She patted her chest and said, “I know you think I'm insane, but I know what happened to me.”

“What is she talking about?” Van Raye said.

“Ursula,” I said, “not now.”

“I know what you are going to say, but
I'm
an abductee.”

“You're a what?” Ruth said.

I tugged at Ursula's pocket to stop her.

“She's had abduction experiences,” I said.

“Oh God,” Charles mumbled, shaking his head.

Ursula slapped my finger away. “Don't make it sound like I'm a goddamn leper.”

Dubourg stepped around a lounge chair and Ursula pointed her finger at him again. “Don't you dare come over here! Just leave me alone. What sucks is that
he
, he's right.”

“This has nothing to do with what you think is happening to you
,
” Van Raye said.

“Shut up,” Ursula said. “
I know
what you've written about abductions.” She counted off on her fingers that were shaking, “I know what Jung has written,
and
Kelly
and
Mathieson.”

“Ruth,” Charles said, “Jesus, what's going on?”

Ruth peered over the radio as if we were all a distraction to her. “She's hysterical,” she said. “She's suffering from some type of stress-related shock. She's been given a reality her mind can't handle . . .”

“Bite me,” Ursula said. “I'm getting lectured to by a knocked-up astronaut?”

“You, I like,” Ruth said pointing at Ursula. “I have auditory hallucinations myself.”

Van Raye said quickly, “That's not important right now. You're not
delusional
.”

“What are hallucinations,” Ruth said, “besides personalized visions? It's like listening to your own music through headphones.” She pointed to her ears, once again oversimplifying. “You can hear it but no one else can. We only look crazy when we dance to our own music.”

“Oh God,” Van Raye said. “Everyone is getting distracted from reality.”

“But I have a hacker,” I said, “or whatever, who is telling me stuff that has to be real.” I had my phone against my chest. “I have more information.”

When everyone was quiet, Ruth pulled out a lighter and flicked the flint and lit her cigarette. She fanned the smoke to see me better. She kicked one leg up on the chair, her dirty black sole facing us.

“You think you are seeing a message now?” Van Raye asked.

“The person calls himself Randolph.” I looked at Elizabeth. “I know it's unbelievable, but it's real. I don't know how he knows things, but he does.”

The gas heater diffused the chlorine, the smell of a clean hotel pool, a healthy and good hotel smell I'd sought all my life that was real. Ruth's smoke drifting out of her corner, that was real. My phone was in my hand, and I looked at the message again. I texted:

“Most people believe what is most comfortable to believe,” Ruth said. She leaned up and turned the knob on the radio, leaving the broadcast. Then a voice clearly preaching said, “
God has given us a choice to believe
. . . ”

Ruth said, “No, no, really,
that's
the noise from the planet.” She tuned to a pattern of dots and dashes, clearly someone's Morse code. “Nope! Never mind! That's it!” Then she tuned until a woman's voice said, “
. . . at the tone, one hour, seven minutes, universal time
. . . ” “No, no, no,
this
is it.”

“Stop, Ruth,” Van Raye said.

Ruth said, “I still think you should just send the message ‘Hell is real!' I think everyone on another planet would want to know we all had this in common—‘Hell is real.' How much data would that be? Beep, blurp, bang, there goes your message.”

“Ruth, darling, stop.”

She ran the dial back and found the original sound.

“What's the difference in truly believing something and reality?” she said.

“It's not a good idea for you to be smoking, is it?” Dubourg said.

Ruth sat with one leg propped up and stared at him through her smoke as if he were a new kind of bug she'd found crawling on her arm.

“It's probably not a good idea for the baby, I mean,” Dubourg said, sipping his energy-drink-spiked coffee. “Obviously you got pregnant on
Infinity
,” he said.

“Well, look who is figuring things out,” she said. “Is it outrageous, Father, to think about astronauts fucking?”

“No,” he said calmly. “I took a vow of celibacy in order to take a different journey in life, but I'm not outraged by
fucking
or discussing it, or the importance it takes in so many lives,” he said. “I'm trying to imagine what you are going through. You lost friends. One of them was the father of this baby.”

“What would you say, Father, if I said I wasn't even going to have this baby?”

He got out of the pool and grabbed a towel and roughly dried his hair and wrapped it around his waist, went over and took a cigarette from her pack, and right in front of her turned his head and lit it. Dubourg said very calmly, “Hell is real. Maybe the music you are hearing from the womb is God telling you something.”

“You know all about me, so let me make sure I understand your story. You're a priest who carries a bag around?” she said. “You don't know what's in the bag? Yet you're prepared to dedicate your life to keeping it moving?”

Dubourg said, “That's what faith is. God has told me to do this.”

“Literally, you heard God talking?” she asked. She looked at Van Raye. “We are at an impasse. Very little of individual realities are overlapping here.”

“The baby might as well be smoking too,” Elizabeth said. “Mothers everywhere frown on you.”

“I'm not a mother,” Ruth said. “What would you do to protect him?”

Everyone looked at me.

“Anything,” Elizabeth said, “absolutely anything.”

“Right,” Ruth said, “I don't get it. I know your instinct is real, but I just don't have it. This is one fucked-up quixotic endeavor.” She slammed the laptop shut. She dumped the cigarette in her glass, and she got up.

Elizabeth gently swam toward the other end of the room.

Ruth, standing on the edge of the pool, undid her sash and let her robe fall, revealing that she had on nothing beneath her robe. She stood with a wide stance, her belly plump.

Ursula mumbled, “Great.”

Dubourg looked at Ruth with bored eyes as if he'd expected her to do this all along.

Elizabeth swam oblivious to the nakedness behind her.

“What are you trying to do, darling?” Charles said to Ruth.

“I didn't bring a bathing suit,” Ruth said, not lifting her eyes from the back of Elizabeth's head, waiting for her to turn around.

Elizabeth fanned her arms, slowly turning.

Ruth's pubic hair was a bushy funnel that went from the wide stretch beneath the belly and twisted into a tiny tornado between her legs. Her toes flexed on the edge, a thigh muscle twitched.

Elizabeth saw her and continued to swim. “There's nothing more pathetic than someone trying to shock you. I'm not a prude. How many weeks
are
you? I will not keep you here unless you stop the cigarettes and the drinking. I'll have nothing to do with it.”

Ruth dove in, torpedoing past Elizabeth. Her hands cushioned her momentum on the far wall and she did a flip turn underwater.

Elizabeth took the opportunity of her being submerged to say to Van Raye, “She has lots of problems.”

Ruth came up and spit out water and drank from Van Raye's remaining whiskey on the side of the pool. Asian techno music played on the old radio.

Ruth took Dubourg's old place on the steps, her elbows on the step behind her so that her body floated outward. There was this archipelago of Ruth Christmas sticking above the water: shoulders, breasts, a palm-tree navel island, the sub islands of her kneecaps, and then her feet.

A text dinged in:

I said out loud, “Is the software you are talking about, can you get it from the space station?”

“It's there,” Ruth said, “but there's no one to send it to us. We can retrieve it.”

“I think I can help.”

“How is that?” Van Raye said.

I put my phone against my chest. “I think the software you want will be sent down on the twenty-seventh. He's talking to me now.”

Van Raye stood up in the water.

“Can you ‘listen' to
Infinity
?” I asked them.

“Why would I do that?” Ruth said. “There's no one there.”

Randolph said,

“I want to tell you this,” I said, “and I want you to believe me. This thing who is texting me, he's not from here, he's not from Earth. I'm pretty sure that's real.”

I sent the message back:

“Does the ‘Bright Nothing' mean anything to you?” I said to Ruth.

“The what?” Van Raye said.

Ruth turned pale, but her face also relaxed slightly, a mask having fallen away, and again the word “beautiful” came to my mind, but trying to understand what beauty was is like trying to see individual fish in a large school of fish.

CHAPTER 33

Van Raye and Ruth gathered their things to go, Ruth re-robed and, slightly frantic at my mention of the Bright Nothing, though she would not elaborate, only said, “It's impossible for anyone to know that.”

Ruth carried both the laptop and the heavy radio with her, Van Raye following.

Elizabeth put on her robe and collected her book and asked Ursula if she could have another bit of whiskey to drink on the way to her room.

I stopped Elizabeth at the door and whispered, “Are you okay?” I felt her tighten beneath my touch. “I know you don't like being asked that, but I'm worried about you.”

“Me?” she said. Then she took a breath, held it, and let it go as if that was how long it took her to make a decision. “I will have to get used to you asking me that, won't I?” Her nostrils pinched as she inhaled and smiled. “Now I'm going to play my violin. Make sure housekeeping knows about the dinner tray. I don't know how often they—” she cut herself off. “Never mind. You handle it now, can't you?”

When she was gone, only the three cousins were left, Ursula going into the utility room to change out of her wet clothes, and I pulling Dubourg over. “What is happening?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“Listen to me, Du, don't get chummy with him. He'll suck you into believing he's forming some kind of attachment and then he'll suddenly cut you loose.”

“Look, I'm sorry about discussing your problems, but we are all family.”

I snorted. “Come on, Du. We're family, but he's not, not really.”

“Are you and Ur okay?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“It's not like everyone doesn't see you are madly in love with her.”

“We both love her, don't we?” I said.

He shook his head like I wasn't getting it. “You two have always been in love. You just don't know it.” He crunched an antacid that I didn't know was in his mouth. “Ur is not in the best place.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

I held my phone out to him. “But what is going on?”

“I think I'm qualified to say it's not God,” he said. “God doesn't work like this.”

“But you believe it's something, right?”

“I don't think you can hallucinate something so specific, so perfect. It doesn't make sense. I guess we'll find out on the twenty-seventh,” he said.

When Ursula and I stepped onto the twelfth floor, Dubourg stayed inside the elevator and put out his arm to block the door, told us he was going to the attic to help Ruth and Van Raye.

Ursula and I were walking to our room to change, and I touched Ursula's arm to stop her. Gentle music played through the Air of Liability and the sound of the chorus of voices rose from the lobby, the Big Murmur of snowed-in guests.

On our corridor, I noticed one of those clamshell light fixtures flickering between rooms. The bulb inside the translucent glass blinked a random pattern barely hanging onto life. I pulled Ursula by the sleeve of her robe and we went into the corner under the flickering light.

“What the hell?”

“It's the feeling from the movie,” I said. “I feel it now.”

I felt her chest deflating against mine. I reached over her head, and as my face came close to hers, I tapped the clamshell lamp with my finger and the light went out.

I felt her arms come up around my back, and she turned her head and let me kiss her on the mouth. What I realized was this: I had tasted her my whole life, tasted her when I drank from the same glass she had, when I put my head on a pillow she'd laid on, when I got in a car she had been in, the smell of her bedroom at home. She suddenly stopped and pulled away and said, “Stop, okay. Dubourg's somewhere.”

One kiss and we were breathing heavy like we'd been holding our breaths under the water.

“We need to stop,” she said. She pushed my arm up and ducked away.

I leaned in the corner for balance, watching her go away.

She turned down the corridor in the center of the hotel. I watched the empty glass elevator rise to her, watched her step into the gold box and it sank while she squeezed her ponytail to get the wetness out, not glancing at me there under the dead light.

I reached up and tapped the light's dome, and it flickered on, tungsten buzzing, a connection I knew couldn't last long, this whole hotel not far behind, and I wanted to freeze everything, to make sure this hotel was there if I ever wanted to come back and remember what was happening to me right now.