Cosmic Hotel (29 page)

CHAPTER 43

I startled awake from a dream, found Ursula asleep beside me, and Dubourg on the floor between the beds. The world through the shears was not yet showing the dawn of the next day, but Ursula's watch alarm was going off, the blue dial light blinking as she raised it to her face. She reached to find me in bed and only then did she let her breath go, and Dubourg from the floor said, “I'm already here.”

I hobbled to the door to Elizabeth's room. I put my ear to the solidness and listened, felt her presence on the other side. I raised my hand, thought I should give her one last chance to go with us, but then I didn't knock.

Dubourg sat on the end of the bed putting on his black shoes, his priest shoes, and he had his valise, of course, but he also had his carry-on duffle packed.

“Are you leaving?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “We all have to after this.”

Ursula's eyes followed me as I walked across the room. “What's the matter with you?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. I got Butch's leash off the counter expecting him to perk up when he heard the sound of the buckle sliding on the counter, and I looked around for his chariot in order to strap it on for his morning walk.

“Oh God,” Ursula said.

But I saw the bundle of white sheets sunken into the comforter, the dead Butch, and of course I remembered.

“I can't take it anymore,” she said.

“I had a momentary lapse,” I whispered, “I remember last night, don't worry,” and I threw the leash back on the counter where it hit flight-attendant Barbie sitting drunkenly and staring straight ahead. She always looked like she was focused into a world we couldn't see, one filled with her tiny friends and family.

“Why do you keep doing this?” Ursula said, grabbing both sides of her head. “I can't go through it again.”

“No. You won't. I remember.”

“Everything?” she said.

Ruth and the needles seemed like a dream.

Dubourg slid his hands under the bundle that was Butch and lifted. “We've got to go,” he said.

The service elevator took us up to the attic. It opened into the heavy air of the big room, and Dubourg mumbled, “Welcome to the
inferno.” We walked between the frames of foldaway beds, and in the center of the darkness were the oasis of the light and furniture. It was like a lit stage at a theatre, this stage a messy set: equipment, computers opened and gutted, CPUs running, soldering irons, notebooks spread open, tools, spools of wire, an empty gallon jug of water, stacks of unused hard drives, and of course the Trans-Oceanic radio among stacks of plates from the restaurant.

Dubourg went over to the table beside Ruth and set the bundle of Butch down on a pad and draped another pad over his body, a heavy pad.

Van Raye was lying in one of the pool's lounge chairs with his prosthesis standing beside him, the leg wearing a black zip-up boot as if it were dressed and ready to go.

“You goddamn people,” Van Raye said. “How many times do I have to be
right
before people start listening to me?”

Ruth screwed the wire leads to metal eyes on the pad on Butch and went back to work in front of four screens.

Dubourg looked down on Charles. “He knows?”

“Yes,” Ruth said without taking her eyes off the screens, monitors shining on her face. “Cat's out of the bag.” A rotating fan agitated strings of the frayed fabric of her cutoff sleeves.

Ursula went over to Van Raye and took away his crutches.

“Stop that. Shit. Those are mine!”

Dubourg sat in front of the Trans-Oceanic radio.

“If you send it, go ahead and kill me,” Van Raye said, “Okay?
Okay?
I'll have nothing.”

Dubourg turned on the radio. It took a few seconds to warm up to a station playing organ music but he tuned past it and past a voice—“Four cats, three dogs, a bundle of sticks has been delivered . . .” and then the tapping of Morse code—until he found our sound, like a twin-engine plane warming up for takeoff, the sound having traveled three thousand years to get here. Every sound we were hearing was three thousand years old.

“You'll have the planet,” Ruth said to Van Raye. “You'll have Chava Norma.”

“Fuck that noise,” Van Raye said. “There's an extraterrestrial
here
.” He pointed to the bundle lying on the banquet table between the two plastic pads, a corner of the shroud hanging off the table. On a metal shelving unit was the orange box, the spell of software supposedly cast upon it making it a magic box capable of sending the burst of data that was Randolph, or whatever his real name was, to Chava Norma.

Ruth had her chin resting on her hand as she watched a graphic version of the Earth rotating. She rolled her chair over to the gain booster and toggled a switch and watched a bar on one screen begin: “10%” then skipping suddenly to “15%” and stopped in a dimming of lamps. “Don't surge on me now,” Ruth said, and the lights on all the hard drives remained green and the noise from the radio was strong.

On the other end of the table there was a hole—a hole, like a blind spot in my vision. It was like a bubble in an aquarium, but this sphere was purer than air. I made myself watch the clock go through 00:00:5:00.

“Are you okay?” Ursula said. She sat in her regular spot in that wingback chair.

I nodded.

“What do you see?” she said.

“
What?
”

I could tell Ursula's eyes tracked to the hole on the end of the table.

I knew from past experience this thing on the end of the table was disturbing to look at. I closed my eyes. I heard Ursula get up. I put my feet on the couch and drank from a water bottle.
What was on the end of the table?
I forced my eyes to look at it—a bubble in the air, a crystal ball of cosmic clarity with nothing in it.

Van Raye was in a half stupor on his lounge, and Dubourg smoked and stared at the radio as if this hole in the universe wasn't right there at the end of the table beside him. I squinted to see it better and it changed to the green alien Buddha from Charles's car but alive
and opening its mouth, a grotesque black tongue licking as though it had just swallowed something, its blank black eyes watching all of us. I knew even as I was seeing it that it wasn't real. I understood I was hallucinating.

“We can ask him anything. What do we want to know?” Dubourg said, but he meant Randolph, not that Buddha.

“Go ahead. It's now or never,” Ruth said. “You wanna know what's in your case?”

I heard Dubourg say, “
No
.”

My phone dinged with a message from Randolph.

The small alien Buddha persisted, moving, licking, fingers flexing as if coming alive.

Ruth called out coordinates as if there were someone listening: “Right ascension, less than ninety seconds.”

“You don't understand!” Van Raye tried to push up on the chair. “Don't any of you have the least bit of desire for knowledge?
Where does it come from? How long does it live?
” The fan whirred in Ruth's face. “Damn all of you,” he said.

“Do his leg,” Ruth said to Dubourg.

Dubourg looked over at the radio as if just discovering Ruth there. He started to get up, but I stopped him. “I'll do it,” I said, making myself not look at the living Buddha.

I was able to squeeze beneath Charles's chair, took off my shoe, rolled up my track pants, and carefully put my darker right leg in the place of his right leg, positioning it through the plastic slats. I waited beneath him, the back of my father inches away from my face. I looked
out and saw Ursula resting her head sideways on the arm of her chair, her eyes red from crying and staring at me on the ground.

“Sandeep,” Van Raye whispered. His hand found my arm and squeezed it. “You understand me. Stop them. Stop them so all this isn't a useless endeavor. You are the only person in the world who understands me, always have been. You and Elizabeth.”

I wiggled my foot to get his attention, and turned my head to see the alien Buddha. The Buddha continued smacking his lips as though he were looking for a teat, eyes big and embryotic, pre-birth. The 3-D Earth on Ruth's computer spun slowly, dots of satellites like bees swarming it. Ursula's head sat sideways on the arm of the chair watching me.

My phone dinged, but I thumbed it to voice, the same generic voice of millions of phones, but it was Randolph:

I can't
, I thought,
I can't
. Ruth tested the connection of the heavy pads on top of Butch's body. The clock counted down.

“YOU ASSES, YOU FOOLS!” Van Raye shouted. I felt the prosthesis being snatched up from beside my head, and he threw it across the room. The leg clattered to the floor halfway to Ruth.

I heard Dubourg's whispered prayer, “
Jesus, Mary, I love you, save souls . . . Jesus, Mary, I love you, save souls
. . . ” and the radio played the planet's noise, slaloming in and out of high and low humming, as mesmerizing as a didgeridoo.

“
Ask it questions
,” Van Raye said, “someone. We're blowing an opportunity, the biggest in the history of the world.”

I closed my eyes and repeated my Elizabeth prayer:
Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance,
and opened them and saw that the Buddha was gone. Instead, on the end of the table, sat a simple white vase, and even the taste in my mouth changed. I knew what was in the vase.

Randolph spoke through my phone:

“I can see my leg,” Van Raye mumbled above me.

“I feel it,” Van Raye said, “it's right there. I can wiggle my toes.”

I wiggled my toes for him. Ursula watched me, her head sideways on the arm of the chair. She was worn out. “I'm sorry,” I said to her. How many times had she had to tell me my mother was dead?

“She's not here, is she?” I whispered.

Ursula closed her eyes and held them closed against the pain of having to tell me once again that Elizabeth was gone.

“But I see her at Gypsy.”

She almost imperceptibly shook her head.

“Those are my toes,” Charles said above me. I felt the vibrations of his chest as he spoke.

The vase on the table. It was Elizabeth's ashes. I had simply forgotten where I'd stored this information and the sadness came back on me again. I was living in a world without my mother.

Water from Ursula's eyes dripped onto the floor, the nice reliable pull of gravity, Butch's leash wrapped tightly around her hand, her fingers turning blue.

Dubourg was in a trance, bobbing before the radio and mumbling, “May the most bold, most sacred, most adorable, most mysterious and unutterable name of God . . .”

Ruth said, “What the fuck? What is this?” The tip of her finger bruised pixels on the screen. “It's asking for a password,
a goddamn password
,” and Dubourg prayed, “ . . . in heaven, on earth and under the earth . . . ” and Van Raye said, “I feel tingling in my leg.”

“You feel what?” I said to him.

“Tingling, it's tingling. It's terrible.”

“A
password
?” Ruth asked, typing frantically.

He can feel my leg? Could I feel tingling in my leg? Was I going to get sick again?

“If Randolph wasn't here,” I said to Ursula, “then Elizabeth would be alive.”

Ursula looked frozen to the chair.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said, not caring if he heard it or not.

I closed my eyes. “My mother loved Elvis movies.”

“Ask it about the other planets . . . other worlds,” Van Raye said above me.

I ignored him.

I wiggled my toes.

“Password?” Ruth muttered. “
What password?
” I heard her typing and pounding the “Return” key. “Fuck me. This isn't right. What fucking password?”

“Try ‘Geneva,'” I started.

Her chair squeaked as she leaned backward. “
Geneva?
”

“Stop, not yet!” Ursula sat up. Through tears, she said, “Will Ruth's baby be okay? Ask him! Ask him!”

My phone chimed and the message came:

“Do you want to know the answer?” I said to Ursula. “There are consequences.”

“Yes,” she said, crying.

The clock said six seconds.

I said to Ruth, “It's Geneva 1000x. Geneva 1000x.”

“Geneva 1000x? As in x-ray? Hold on,” Ruth said, “here goes.”

“We want to know the answer,” I said to Randolph, and then I whispered, “I forgive you.”

I clearly heard Ruth hitting the “Return” key, like a pretzel snapping, like a bone breaking, like someone's life going away forever. The second Ruth hit the key, the sound over the Trans-Oceanic stopped, and there was nothing but gentle static, and silence in the attic until my phone dinged, and I looked at the answer to Ursula's question—
will the baby be okay?

CHAPTER 44

The first time I become aware that the baby is okay, that he is truly safe, he is in Dubourg's arms, but he is not a baby anymore, and Dubourg is carrying him with his hand around the boy's chest and through his
legs, carrying the boy flat as if he is flying over the yard as Dubourg runs, and I have the sudden falling feeling that comes even through my paralysis, and I realize another time bomb has gone off in my life and I've leapt forward.

I am paralyzed in the reclining chair in the Desert Motor Court's yard. The desert sun has set beyond the faraway cobalt-blue mountains, and this is when the single specks of satellites move through the sky and lend perspective to how far away the stars are.

Feeling safe took a long time, and I remember the stages of the boy being a baby, especially the gelatin stage that was the most worrisome to me. The boy is twenty-two months now and healthy, though not much of a talker. As Dubourg carries him through the little stone yard behind the Desert Motor Court, the boy tries to aim a flashlight at bushes, but Dubourg pretends to almost drop him, purposefully bouncing him so the beam of the flashlight he holds can't focus on the thing they search for:
the mole
.

The mole is really just a black sock stuffed with other socks and tied to the end of thirty-pound test line, which has been pre-strung through the yard by Ursula. I am paralyzed in my reclining chair for the third time in two years, and I have begun to think of it as timeouts, the opposite of time bombs, when life stands still and I can observe it.

Ursula sits alone on the swinging chair diagonal from me. She has one leg folded beneath her. The toes of her other foot barely touch the ground and keep her chair moving, her belly swollen with a child inside her.

The mole (the sock) sticks on the bottom of a fairy-dust bush, but the boy doesn't know it, and Dubourg runs by and kicks it free. “
Where is it?
” Dubourg shouts. Ursula tugs the line and the mole starts moving across the yard again.

“Where does the mole live?” Dubourg asks the boy, allowing the beam to shine in the wrong direction, momentarily at his black valise safely on the ground by the water pipe.

The boy has a real name on his birth certificate, but we have never called him anything other than “Boy” or “the boy,” though Ursula and Dubourg sound more natural saying it than I do. What will we call our next baby if it's a boy? I don't know. Of course Ursula doesn't consider it “our” baby.

We are at the Desert Motor Court built in 1969, a space-age design with a marquee out front that has a series of concentric disks that reminds me of a laser shooting toward the sky, and this is where I go when the Disease With No Name takes over my body. Mr. Leggett, the former letter carrier from Atlanta, my old hospital roommate, is in charge of security here, a position I secured him through the ownership, friends of Elizabeth's, though managers complain that Leggett thinks he runs the place, and he has an endless stream of jokes, which he still tells me when I come here for my episodes.

The motor court is good, though the neighborhood in the valley below us is known for meth houses. The pool is spring fed and the restaurant at the end keeps its doors open, and other guests take note of our special gang, but read their paperbacks or sip their cocktails.

The ownership warns everyone that it's not a good idea to leave the grounds after dark because of the crime, but this only adds to the isolation and feeling of security when we are here together, though Ursula says that they—the Others—come freely to take her away at night here in the desert with her family around her. She still flies for Shenandoah, but she has written a book about her abduction experiences, and is often the keynote speaker at UFO conventions, but she has refrained from telling her audiences that the baby growing inside her is of alien stock, though she reminds me constantly that it is not my child.

At this stage of pregnancy, she is round and plump, a baby she thought she could never have, practically a miracle. One of those eggs harvested by the aliens when she was young, she says, fertilized and replanted inside her.

During the mole hunt, she stares at the blinking lights of airliners in the sky, and I know that being up in the air is what she
really loves, almost as much as she loves this boy, the boy whose mothers are from the sky.

Ursula transferred her Triple Zero lifetime pass on Shenandoah to Dubourg, so he didn't have to rely on the church, but can still spend the rest of his life keeping the valise safe, safe inside the Airport Zone, and he can talk to God.

The boy calls me “Dad” because I am legally his father, and he calls Ursula “Mama,” because Ruth told her that she wanted it that way. He calls Dubourg just “Du,” which sounds like “father” in a better language. We tell the boy about Ruth, his mother in the sky, traveling back in space, which is confusing to him, and we know that we will one day tell him about his biological father who died orbiting Earth, Cosmonaut X. They'll be abstract to him, and his mind will build myths around this, surely. Will he want to go to the sky?

Now I watch the boy and imagine putting my fingers through his hair when I'm well, something I promise myself I will do more often than I've done, show him love no matter what, breaking the cycle of bad fathers.

When we are all here together at the Desert Motor Court, when I retreat into my head, this is our sunset ritual: Dubourg grabs the boy, who at two is extraordinarily healthy and fine and light in Dubourg's strong arms, Dubourg holding him flat like he's surfing the air, flashlight in Boy's hand, bouncing him so that he never gets a good bead when the mole crosses open ground, jumping from rock to plant, the pregnant Ursula pulling the string from the swinging bench.

When I am not in an episode of paralysis, I tell Boy every night before bed about his biological mother Ruth who is a great star traveler, and we see a few stars coming out in that impossibly purple light as we stand on top of a hotel, him not understanding yet what it means to be traveling among the stars.

That's where Ruth is, or at least she's somewhere in the asteroid belt for the next two years, and I can't help but think that this isn't much different from Randolph traveling toward Chava Norma, but
Ruth is much slower and will never get to a destination. Her travel is not much different from death, except that we can send his mother messages via computer and wait a few days for her response. All the important women in his life come from the sky: Ur, who comes to see him; Ruth, sending him messages; Elizabeth, who I tell him fantastic stories about but whom he can never communicate with. I would do anything to have one more night to talk to her, to go back to that hotel room in the blue light and talk to her in her Gypsy Sky uniform. Even if it were a dream. Would she look around at us here and think it was all worth it? I don't care. I miss her so.

We were at the Grand Aerodrome's pool when the boy was born, the paralysis coming on me slowly at that time as if it were the actual grief of losing my mother. We were trying to unravel the mystery of why the sound from the planet had suddenly quit. It took three thousand years to get here and they couldn't have known we had sent Randolph at that exact moment. Ruth had scanned the body of Butch and found no data on the microchip, and I think we all, late at night, wonder if any of it was real. It's no more real than the past ever is.

We scattered Elizabeth's ashes from the top of the Grand Aerodrome. All five of us witnessed that and have that stored, shared memory. Elizabeth's ashes went with the wind toward the airport. So much of the past you have to take on faith.

I'm telling it like I remember it, though I have nothing to offer as proof other than four witnesses, one of whom isn't here on Earth, and Dubourg refuses to talk about it. Ursula believes aliens are still here. Charles Van Raye should be writing this book, not me.

Van Raye, who had nothing now, had nearly quit talking to any of us, even by that night of the boy's birth. He was in some state of shock, legless, without even his sound of a distant civilization to show the world.

Ruth, swimming normally in the pool that night of the birth, gave no indication anything was about to happen to her. She squatted in the shallow end and reached between her legs and lifted this thing out in
a brown swirl of water, lifted it by both legs, umbilical cord running along its prune face, hands over its head as if indicating a touchdown. Ruth said, “Boy.”

Ruth signed up for some crazy, privately funded mission that sent three astronauts straight into space, a so-called self-sufficient craft, or at least sufficient enough for the astronauts to survive their normal lifetimes if no disaster struck, all we can ever hope for. She simply couldn't stand not being in space. I reminded her that space was where she'd been terrified. “Maybe that's why I'm going,” she said.

Ursula jerks the string and makes the mole jump in the air, and Dubourg takes the boy bouncing off in the wrong direction, the air thick with dust kicked up by his priestly black shoes. Ursula sees me looking at her. “You still think you have something to do with this?” She touches her stomach.

I blink once—yes.

What happened to Charles?

Van Raye is easy to locate. When I need to see him, I check the race schedule.

Elizabeth, never really being able to separate from him, left in her will that he be provided for in order to maintain his “current lifestyle,” which is vague, and left to the trustee's discretion. That's me.

There are thirty-six races in a NASCAR season.

Last time I hunted him down in Bristol, Tennessee, Ursula flying me in a pressurized Beechcraft Baron. She flew us into a tiny airport packed with private jets, releasing the air seal around the door when we taxied to the terminal. She shut down the right engine so I could safely get out. I gestured for her to take the headphone away. She cracked one side to hear me.

“Come with me,” I said.

She let the earphone go and shook her head, eyes hidden behind the dark glasses, which is exactly the answer she gives when I ask her to
marry me. “Fundamentally different philosophies,” she says, but I feel her caving. Those nights when we are sleeping together, finally, after all those years, I know she loves me and another baby is on its way.

In the airplane, when she threw her thumb to tell me to get out, the screen of her wristwatch (still worn backward) sparkled and her belly peaked from beneath her pilot's shirt. This baby is going to be so brown. She just doesn't understand. Like Elizabeth said, the Indian genes will dominate.

When I shut the door, and she locked it from inside and turned the plane, she hit me with a blast of prop wash. I caught a ride to the campground beside the racetrack to find Charles.

There is a huge coliseum built in the middle of the hills of east Tennessee where humans race cars. That night I went looking for Charles, the day's racing done, and the parties had started. There were miles of RVs in every direction, music intertwining with other music, laughter and shouts, the sound of beanbags slapping in a cornhole game. The dark air smelled of campfires and port-o-potties, and I searched for his row. A country music band jammed in a dilapidated house at the corner. I used the tracker on my phone to find his, the sewage truck passing me on the gravel road, kicking up dust. I took out my handkerchief, and put it to my nose until I saw a group of race fans beneath a string of cactus lights staring at me. They drank beers, watched me in my button-down and slacks, handkerchief covering my face.

I saw Van Raye sitting in a reclining chair, hands behind his head. “Sandeep!” he yelled and the patio recliner tilted, but he remained seated. “It's my son!” he shouted.

“Hello, Sandeep,” one of the men said to me, Bill something, one of the race regulars with Charles.

Charles didn't get up, but I bent and took his hand and put my face against his face and kissed him.

“Want a beer?” Bill said, already going into the cooler.

I sat by a campfire built inside a metal ring and asked about the race today, and the one tomorrow night, drank beer and kept seeing
flickering lights in the sky, not an airplane but yellow glowing orbs of floating lanterns rising from the massive campgrounds. Van Raye kept pulling out his phone to check race news, fingering it off. He'd always loved driving fast cars, but how did he end up here?

Van Raye reached and touched my shoulder and whispered, “Sandeep?”

“Yes.”

“I got a pit pass. I was
this
close to Austin Harris. I've got pictures!” He turned his phone on and started showing me pictures.

“The family is fine,” I said, ignoring the pictures.

“I'm glad. Ursula and the baby? Okay?” He looked at the pictures himself.

“Yes.”

“Wonderful.”

The campground was one big party, people wandering up and down the gravel road, beers in hand, golf carts dragging effigies of different drivers through the dirt. A guy staggered up and asked if he could use someone's bathroom, said that he was lost. When he was done, he came back out of the neighbor's RV and sat in one of Van Raye's folding chairs and simply declared, “I'm from Canada,” and waited to see what reaction he got about this news. There was none. Harold from Maryland gave him a beer.