Cosmic Hotel (25 page)

CHAPTER 36

The night of the twenty-seventh, the six of us wore our Braves caps and the elevator took us down through the hotel, me looking out of the elevator's glass and being spooked by the emptiness, the lack of travelers, the darkness broken by only the lowest-wattage security lighting and glowing exit signs as we sunk into the basement.

We looked like a gang in some heist movie all wearing identical hats, Dubourg walking in the parking garage with his black valise in his hand, Ruth with the black laptop case, and Van Raye carrying the nylon bag with the satellite receiver inside. We were on a grand mission to get software to send a message to a distant civilization, but as I walked through the parking deck, I was thinking,
What kind of car is Charles driving?
Then I saw the old Jaguar.

“A Jaguar?” I asked. “
That's your car?
”

He'd always said that a Jaguar was a shitty automobile that people bought only because they were expensive. I think he was actually applying it as a metaphor to a Baltimore private school Elizabeth had enrolled me in at the time.

“We'll not be comfortable in that,” Elizabeth said and turned on her boot heels to see the plum-colored shuttle van parked along the far wall, its windows stained by time.

Dubourg mapped the Civil War campground on his phone, as Elizabeth drove, the heater in the shuttle on full blast.

“When was the last time I saw you driving?” I said to her, smiling.

The bill of her cap was straight, her hair falling out the back. She kept her eyes on the dark road ahead, hands at eleven and one. “Are you asking me a question? You don't expect me to remember, do you? It was probably in Nashville.” Even in her insulated coat, she looked small in the seat with the seatbelt rising above her and going into the wall.

“Listen,” I said so only she could hear me, “if nothing happens, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm hallucinating. I don't have a history of hallucinating.” The others in back watched out the windows, the light from the streets crossing their faces. Ursula had curved the bill of her hat so severely that it shadowed her eyes.

When we left the lights of the city behind, went miles on a single lane and turned off the country highway, we parked at the entrance of a Civil War park, the iron gate flanked by two stone columns.

We abandoned the shuttle at the entrance, stepped over the gate. Van Raye and Ruth stopped, and I realized they were clipping their ping-pong balls to the bills of their caps, the ping-pong balls that Dubourg had glued to the clothespins.

Van Raye said, “Place the ball over your eyes like this. We won't need lights. No phones please. Think about your night vision.”

“What is this?” I said to Dubourg. He shrugged.

We did as told and began following a trail. It was awkward having the white orb hanging on the bill of my cap. Even with my cane, the terrain twisted at my ankles. It was too dark to see our breaths, but in a minute, the woods and the dirt below the ball became clearer. I saw
individual roots and stones, stepped on the wooden erosion steps perpendicular across the trail. The ping-pong ball seemed to emit some kind of glow, but that wasn't it. The ball kept your focus; out of the sides of my eyes everything was bright. Focus on the ball and everything in your peripheral vision was clear and bright.

“This is amazing, Charles,” Dubourg said.

We went up until the woods gave way to the open space of a field, the stars a brilliant bowl, the Milky Way bisecting it.

“It's a beautiful night,” Dubourg said. “I thank God for this.”

“Do it in a hurry,” Ruth said. “The station will rise from east-southeast. That direction. We've got to set up.”

A meadow was bathed in starlight, scattered with brush. Some kind of primitive fencing zigzagged toward a mountain that blocked out a quarter of the sky, and I smelled a campfire and cooking grease.

“Here are tables,” Ursula said. Dubourg clicked on his cell phone. Van Raye said, “You're killing my vision!”

Dubourg's light caught the table and showed a shocking scene of a mini disaster of a recent meal—plates with chicken bones on them, and a pot of congealed liquid, and that was when a voice yelled out of the darkness, “Hark, who goes there!”

“Sentry!” someone from the other direction called, and there was movement at my feet and voices.

“
Sentry, sir!
A-LARM!”

“Good God,” Van Raye said.

Dark shapes rose from the ground around us. The one nearest hauled his blanket shawl-like over shoulders.

“I am Dubourg Dunbar. Who is there?”

“Christ, shut up, old ass, it's cold,” mumbled what I thought was a log at my feet. “Get down!” the voice said.

The six of us stood among acres of sleeping humans, maybe some encampment of desperate people, down on their luck, but then I saw one with a rifle. Someone let out a fart and there was no laughing.

Dubourg aimed his fading phone to reveal a shocking scene of
scraggily faces and beards at our feet, men trying to remain under blankets, their eyes squinting at the light. “Who's there with a lantern?” one said.

The yelling voice said, “Eighteenth corps, third division. Dodge's regulars. Identify yourself!”

“Oh hell,” a standing man said, “a civilian is here.” He cupped his hands around his mouth to yell, “Lieutenant, let the lines know there are Beauregarders.”

The lieutenant with a Civil War cavalry hat shouted over the field, “BEAU-RE-GARD! BEAUREGARD!” He turned in another direction. “
For God's sake, BEAUREGARD!
”

Someone down the line picked up the alarm and repeated it, “BEAUREGARD!” Shapes grumbled under blankets. More voices in the dark: “
Oh, for shit's sake
. What is happening?”

The interior of a tent lit and shadows moved on the canvas.

“They're reenactors,” Ursula said.

“‘Living historians,'” a voice from the ground said and added, “ma'am.”

A man came out of the tent holding up a lantern; I saw blue military pants and a nightshirt and a sleeping cap. He stepped over his men and came at us with an entourage following, hands on the swords at their belts, very cold Civil War actors in unbuttoned tunics.

“Jesus Christ, what are you civilians doing here?” the man in charge said.

“We were searching for dark skies,” Van Raye said.

The man held the lantern up. I recognized him, had that flash that he was someone I didn't like. He was the muttonchopped security man, Albert, from the hotel, but he said, squinting, “I'm Major General Joseph P. Rosenblach of the Army of the Potomac. Who are you?” He held the lantern closer, and when he saw me, he seemed to snap out of it. “
Sanghavi?
What the hell? Professor Van Raye?”

Elizabeth had her head turned slightly so she could see him around the ping-pong ball, her muffler pulled over her mouth, unrecognizable.

The general looked back at his men, then said to me, “The park closes at sundown. Douse that light! This is a battleground.”

The two men in his escort wore blue uniforms with gold buttons, and I recognized them as former employees of the hotel too—bellhops.

“We apologize, General Rosenblach,” Dubourg said. “We're out here looking for satellites.”

“Satellites?” He turned from Dubourg to Van Raye and said, “You do understand that this is a mindset, don't you? Do you know how rare it is to have an actual new
goddamn
moon on the night before the battle? You do understand—a
mindset
? What we are doing is important.”

“I'm sure it is,” Van Raye said.

“Yes, it is. If we are as accurate as possible . . . it's real, you understand? I mean I can smell you all. You smell like the twenty-first century. My God. What is on your hat?”

All six of us had the ping-pong balls on our bills.

Albert straightened, became this General Rosenblach again, and a command voice came from the back of his throat, “My men are tired, hungry, and cold. There is a confederate encampment beyond that branch. Douse all the lights. I'll have you escorted to safety immediately.”

He turned with his lantern and whispered to two soldiers. I heard my name—“Sanghavi . . . ”—and then he looked back at us and fanned his hand as if to make the smell go away, and his men came and indicated which way to march. There was the sound of metal on metal as they put their bayonets on their rifles but Charles led the way, veering off toward a hill to the north and the escorts said nothing.

CHAPTER 37

Charles led us up a trail to the plateau of an empty parking lot with historic markers too dark to read. Our small band encamped above the battlefield in a picnic area. Below was the waiting battlefield with
hundreds of tiny red specks of campfires warming reenactors who were too far away to see. Ruth and Ursula opened the box of the satellite dish, me holding the flashlight on my phone. They adjusted the three flat legs until the bubble level was centered, holding their breaths whenever fine adjustments were called for. When it was ready and aimed at the eastern sky, Van Raye, Dubourg, Ursula, and I sat on a crosstie fence watching the valley bellow, hearing Ruth clicking on a laptop as she sat in lotus, stomach beneath her coat. Elizabeth sat on a picnic table, the two reenactors beside her as if we needed guarding.

Van Raye lit a joint, puffed it alive and gave it to Dubourg. He smoked and handed to me, and I smoked, not liking the light on my face, handed it to Ursula who took it, kept it going. She had clipped her ping-pong ball to the collar of her coat. Without hesitation, she handed the joint to Elizabeth who took it and handed it to the former bellhops, no reenactors, sitting beside her. “Thank you, Ms. Sanghavi.”

Van Raye got off his seat and went to the reenactors and said, “Give me that; that's certainly not historically accurate.”

The guy took quick puffs before giving it to him.

“What time is it now?” Van Raye said. He twirled the joint in the lighter's flame.

“Quit asking that,” Ruth said. “We're here. We're set up.” She touched the screen to start different applications.

“I can't feel my toes,” Van Raye said.

“This isn't all about you,” Ursula said.

“I never said I wanted to come here to do this,” Ruth said.

“Working so hard can't be good for the baby,” Elizabeth said. “We are taking a break.”

The fires of the union encampment below were single dots of amber. Over that scene, jets winked against the stars, and occasionally there was the high-to-low-pitch banshee whine of jet engines decelerating out of high-altitude holding patterns and headed down to the airport. I wondered about Albert's mindset. Ursula lay back on the table with her hands behind her head staring at the blinking jets and the stars.

There was a yell from the troops in the distance.

“Who are they shouting at?” Dubourg asked.

“Rebel taunts,” a reenactor said.

“They're shouting ‘
Chickamauga
,'” the other said. “They beat us up pretty bad in Chickamauga, but we'll get them tomorrow.”

“You'll
get them?
” Van Raye said. “How absurd. Do you not find it disturbing to recreate the scene of horror where men shot and killed each other in mass? My God, we are on a field of hell, and you are celebrating this? It's disgusting.”

“Shut up,” Ruth said. Tracking motors whined beneath the dish, a short test, and stopped. “Everything is so fucking academic to you. I'm sick of it. I'm doing all the work of this project. Without the instrumentation, you wouldn't be shit.
Oh, the horror
,
the horror
,” she mocked. “What do you know about horror? There's only one thing that really scares us,” she said.

“And what is that, darling?”

“Don't be so quick to want to know,” she said.

Van Raye took out a metal pipe and his baggie. I heard him tapping it on the fence and then the relative silence of him stuffing it. “I want to know,” he said. “I want to know what happened to you up there.”

I smelled the natural rot of decay on the wind from a nearby trash can.

“Maybe we shouldn't talk about this,” Elizabeth said. “We are out here to get the software, and the space station . . . we will see it pass over. Have you seen it, I mean, watched it since you've been back?”

“No,” Ruth said. “Why would I?” She touched the screen in the lower left and all the light went away, and we could see the stars better and the campfires below. “We had a slight problem up there,” Ruth said. “Did anyone know that? EVA-ing? That's spacewalking. We became a little unhinged by it. Kind of an epidemic we couldn't explain. At first, I diagnosed panic attacks, but nothing like this had ever happened to anyone. It started happening to a few of us as soon as the doors opened. Like agoraphobia but on a grander scale—hyperventilating, increased
heart rates, adrenaline spikes, and the screaming. Yes, they screamed. I'm talking hysterics. But it wasn't that simple. Nothing is. Even safely back in the station, people continued to scream. I tried to calm them.

“Some of the crew were parents, you know.” She sniffed in the cold air. “And they were the ones to compare what was happening to the night terrors their kids experienced. Nothing can calm kids in this state and nothing worked on us either. I mean besides a good cocktail of Ativan and Haldol.”

Ruth stared across the valley of the battle, legs crossed beneath her. “Kids having night terrors, they have their eyes open, appear lucid, but they can't communicate and there's no amount of reasoning or reassurance that can bring them out of that state. Children in all cultures experience night terrors. What was happening to the crew, I guess, it was similar in a way, and it would start the second the airlock opened—sudden-onset hysterics.

“I volunteered to be forcefully EVA-ed on the BEAR arm. You know, the BEAR . . .” Ruth extracted her arm, fist balled. She pointed to her fist to show she was on the arm. “Supposed to haul twenty-ton satellites, but it's me on the end. I told them stick me out there and don't stop, no matter what. I've got to see what this is, right, to see what's making us like this? I'm the chief of biomedical problems, right? So I'm strapped to the cherry picker and it moves me out there, and I'm screaming but I force myself to shut up and take it. I can't see Earth. It's behind me, so all I'm seeing is empty space. I'm in the station's shadow, right? There's darkness all around. Darkness only happens when you are in the shadow of something, like we are now, the only way the stars come out at night is we're in the shadow.” When she moved, the material of her jacket squeaked. “From a shadow of the space station, you can see stars,” she said. “Stars to focus on. So I'm on the end of the BEAR arm, and I'm under some modicum of control with stars as reference, but I'm still panicking and I'm moving out of the shadow into the light, the thing comes back on me, this dread that there's nothing waiting, and the arm extends me into the sunlight, and that was when
it hit me the hardest: everything is black, but it's a
bright
black. That's the terrifying part: there's nothing there, and it's painfully bright, but I also feel the presence of nothing. I started screaming so loud that I overloaded the audio.”

Everyone but Van Raye had turned around on the fence to see her. Ruth pulled a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it, looking like she was asleep with her eyes down into the lighter for a brief second.

Dubourg hopped down and took the cigarette from her. She didn't argue. He sat on the other table and smoked it.

“The strange thing about this experience,” Ruth continued, “was that I realized this thing, this bright nothing, I'd always known about it, but something had made me forget it. When I was a kid, I knew it was there. It had been every dark shape caught in the corner of my eye, every sinister shadow. We don't understand how horrified children are, but at least the adults are there, you know. Can you imagine, these other beings in your world telling you with good authority that everything is
okay
, that things are fine? At some point you start to believe it. You have to believe it or go insane. Adults have blocked out the knowledge of nothing. Adults provide meaning for kids as they live through childhood and tell them what's real and what isn't. In American culture, we get them fucked up on Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, but then they figure out that's bullshit, right? Then we get them fucked up on God, and God is just Santa Claus for grownups. Pretty soon, you subconsciously start believing in this order of the world or else you just go insane. Don't you remember feeling when you were a kid that anything could be just around the corner, anything?

“Here's the irony,” she said and leaned back, the nylon of her jacket rubbing together, and she tried to wiggle her belly. “See this? This is what happens when you seek comfort by fucking a cosmonaut, which is what I did first thing after I came out of the terrors. Safety makes you want to procreate. That's cruel because safety never lasts long.”

The two Union guards seemed to be frozen, sitting and leaning into their rifles.

Dubourg stubbed the cigarette on the crosstie.

“It doesn't make sense that I had the instinct to procreate after what I'd experienced. I'm only producing something that will suffer and that will probably cause me more suffering, though, I'm sure, some pleasure too, right?”

She clapped her gloved hands so hard everyone jumped, then pointed over the battlefield. “Well, look who's here.”

A tiny point of light rose over the mountains. The receiver on the ground beeped, servomotors on the dish began high-speed clicks, and Ruth squatted over the equipment, like the squat she'd done that very first day I saw her, vomiting onto the roof of the Grand Aerodrome.

In the sky a moving star grew brighter as it came away from the horizon.

“Right on time,” Van Raye said, hopping down to see the screen.

Ruth, arms over her knees, typed and hit “Enter.” Two sets of numbers on the screen rolled as the antenna whirred to track. “I don't see how this is going to work,” Ruth said. “There's no one to answer us up there.”

The point of light moved swifter than a terrestrial airliner, was clearly made up of a different kind of light from the stars, reflecting sunlight from the coming tomorrow.

Ruth said, “We're tracking a dead space station, people. Nothing's happening.”

Dubourg whispered, “Ruth? I'm sorry you had that experience.”

“Yeah, that really helps me,” she said.

The dish's purring sounded warm, keeping pace with the station that hadn't reached it zenith. I took off my glove to hold my phone, waiting for something to happen.

The station rose higher, luminosity making silver spikes.

“Ever wake up hungover in zero g?” Ruth said. “Realize what's sticking in your hair is semen? Wake looking out the porthole at nothing? Then you'll know what a fucking wasteland the universe is. What are the odds of getting pregnant anywhere? I was so skinny I missed like three periods. What are the fucking odds?”

We were all huddled around her now, staring at the screen. She kept touching the command “check run,” “check run,” but nothing happened. The star transited the zenith, us craning our necks as if to see little parachutes falling out of the sky or a beam of light, anything. Elizabeth's face was lit by the screen, expression blank, the tops of her ears tucked into her Braves cap. “Wait,” Ruth said. “There's incoming.”

READY SOURCE A

Ruth said, “Someone is asking us to open the line. There's no way.”

She hit return and saw
CONNECTED
, and even she glanced at the sky. “Hey, everybody back up, away from the dish. Don't jiggle it, okay?” The screen popped full of code and began scrolling. The light around her changed to yellow. “Oh shit, holy shit,” Ruth said, “
Capture
,
capture
. . . please.” There was a tiny sound as the light of the monitor flashed with more data.

“That's it?” Van Raye said.

“Yeah, that's it,” she said. “Yeah, that's it. Okay, okay, it's downloading. Un-fucking believable, okay?” Ruth put the keyboard down and then got up off the ground, Dubourg helping her up.

“Sandeep was right,” Elizabeth said.

I held up my dark phone.

Ruth had her head bent back to follow the track of the station, the moving star that was the space station now falling toward the other horizon. “There's no way,” Ruth said. “My God, someone is sending that to us. Is someone really still alive?”

“No,” I said. “I'm afraid there's no one up there. It's whoever . . .” I held up my phone, “. . .whoever's on the other end of this.”

Van Raye said, “Ruth, darling, there's no one there. You really know that.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

Dubourg put his valise down on the picnic table and put his arm around Ruth. The station got dimmer as it went back toward the
horizon, turned a deeper yellow, but the data was still scrolling on the screen. Ruth pushed Dubourg away. “I know there's no one left, people. It means we have other problems we haven't figure out yet. Is it finished downloading? Let's hope we get all of it.” She watched the station changing to deep amber.

A window popped up on the computer screen. “There you go. Done.” Ruth touched the screen, checking the files, then shutting things down quickly and mechanically. “Somehow we got the software, and if someone asked me how we got it, honestly, I wouldn't know what to tell them.” She looked around with her laptop under her arm. “You goddamn people, you have no idea what just happened, do you?”

The troops in the valley began their normal taunts and wild animal yells across the lines in the predawn light, ready for the reenacted horrors coming in the next day, oblivious to anything that happened in the skies, or dismayed by such witchcraft of it.

But this dark section can't be over yet.