Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Marvelous,” Elizabeth said, standing at the announcement. She marched up to the counter, still wearing her cheap glasses, and got our upgrades.

She came back and gave both boarding passes to me. “This isn’t an overindulgence,” she said. I had heard the upgrade lecture before because she was on constant watch for overindulgence, which, according to her, this country was full of.

“It’s not free, we earned it,” she said. “The service in business class is the same as coach was twenty years ago. Now, let’s walk to some retail stores.”

I sighed. “Can’t we just wait here?”

“No,” she said, “walking around will keep you awake.”

“Why do I have to stay awake?”

“It’s daytime,” she said.

I knew she was going to go into Hammell Brothers Clothiers to take pictures of the inventory like she always did, exclaiming how many choices there were and how full the inventories were. “What kind of country is this?” she would declare.

I told her no, I was staying right here. I couldn’t take another speech on the economy and trends, and us looking like we were just off the plane and had never seen Hammell Brothers before.

She took her digital camera out and left her bag and violin with me, and she walked toward the intersection of our concourse.

I leaned my elbow on my bag, closed my eyes, and began concentrating on listening to the sounds of an airport, making my body, mostly my hands and mind, be still. A man’s voice raised to cellphone level said, “I got no friendly face, I got no yuck-yuck-yuck,” and then the Doppler shift of his voice as he went away, and his conversation merged into other spoken words and sentences until all conversations blended into babble that sounds the same no matter where you are in the world — a hotel in Chicago, the lobby of a busy theatre in Paris. This reminded me of what Van Raye had said—“It’s like a bunch of patterns of communications unintentionally radiating into space.” He’d called it “the Big Murmur.”

I opened my eyes. A pilot stood in front of me with one of those black bags pilots roll along like obedient dogs, the kind with the stickers of all the aircraft they’d flown.

Maybe I had fallen asleep, but now I let my eyes make the roam of the vigilant traveler, a subconscious inventory of things: our two bags, boarding passes, and a mental alarm went off. Where was Elizabeth’s violin case? I looked behind my seat and saw only an ugly magazine subscription card on the floor. The nearest person was a woman feeding her baby. I walked toward her, looking under seats as I went. I carried our shoulder bags, glanced behind a trash can.

The mother tore bread apart and fed the little girl who sat with her hands wide on the seat handles.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but I had a violin, in a case,” I pointed to where I had been sitting. “It’s missing.”

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head, “I can’t help you.”

Obviously she thought I was a crazy person or running some kind of scam, although people are usually slightly less suspicious of each other in the Airport Zone.

“It is a violin, my mother’s,” I said to the woman feeding her girl, choosing the right word— mother —to suggest I was okay. “You didn’t see anyone walking away with it?”

“Oh boy, no,” she said. “Sorry. I wasn’t really paying attention.” The little girl held her mouth open. Her mom turned her head to see the people walking by.

“Shit,” I whispered and then saw Elizabeth coming down the concourse. Had she taken the violin to teach me a lesson? It was amazing to watch people steer out of her way as if she were a ship. I looked at her hands. There was nothing but her camera looped to her wrist.

I took steps to meet her, held up my arms.

“What’s the matter?” she said, glancing at the bags hanging from my shoulder. “Where is my violin?”

“I can’t find it.”

“What?”

“It was right here. I was sitting right there.” I pointed to the seats beneath a you-are-here map.

“Please don’t tell me this.”

“It’s got to be here somewhere,” I said.

We walked around. She leaned over and looked between the rows of seats.

“You fell asleep?” she asked me.

“No! I closed my eyes for a second.”

I followed her as she searched the gate area.

“You were supposed to look after my things,” she said. “That was all you had to do. Now what has happened?”

People in the gate area began to eye us suspiciously and slowly their legs and hands began guarding their own bags as if to say, see, this is how you do it , and the small U handles on their suitcases seemed to be mocking smiles.

I stopped. “We are going to have to report this,” I said. We searched the next gate area until they announced the boarding of our flight.

We reported it to the counter person, Elizabeth demanding to speak with the head of security as if this were a hotel. A regular airport police officer came and took the report, telling us that they rarely had problems with theft inside the airport.

Elizabeth said, “That doesn’t help us.”

She and I were the last to board, Elizabeth holding the yellow police report in her hand.

When we found our seats in the middle of the business cabin, there was already a briefcase in the overhead and a jacket folded on top. To a man reading his Wall Street Journal , Elizabeth said, pointing to his bag and jacket, “Is this yours?”

When he saw her, he got up and took his bag and coat down and tried to smile at her, placed his things under the seat in front of him.

Elizabeth snapped the “Missing or Stolen Property Report” for me to take.

On regular days, she always sat in the aisle seat. Today she slid in and faced the window and didn’t speak the whole way to Phoenix, the bright new sunlight slowly moving around the cabin in the exact shape of the portholes as the plane banked. I kept going over the contact numbers in fine print on the bottom of the report and her scrawled signature, the description of the missing item, “violin and case, Master Stefen.” The estimated value of the violin was an astounding $45,000 and next to ITEM INSURED there was a big check by NO. Under the column PURCHASE DATE, she had written a date that I calculated was when she was ten years old, four years after she’d come to the US, back when her family owned hotels, fifteen years before her father died of a heart attack, followed only six months later by her mother’s death.

In Phoenix, the elevator let us out on the rooftop party of the New Sun Hotel. The day was at midmorning, a morning filled with Arizona sunlight, mimosas and the babble of voices, and the crinkling police report in my jacket pocket. I was going to have to pretend that this was business as usual, but I couldn’t even smile, kept checking my phone as if that would be the source of good news from Dallas about the violin.

Everyone at the party wore sunglasses, a few women in hats, sipping drinks and rolling foamy yellow earplugs between fingers as they chatted and waited for the main event. The hotel world wasn’t that large, and so there were some of the usual people, and it was only strange to see them one week in Miami and then the next week in Phoenix. I noticed an attractive shape blanched by sunshine and inappropriately dressed in blue polyester-blend pants and a white short-sleeved shirt. It looked like my cousin, and only when she picked her phone up and aimed it at me did I realize it was Ursula. Ursula? Her empty epaulets hunched like inchworms on her shoulder as she aimed the phone at me, her smile crooked. I hadn’t seen her in a month, was trying to comprehend why she was here, and also why she suddenly struck me as an Ann-Margret look-alike even down to the nose. I had Ann-Margret on the brain. My legs wouldn’t move toward her as she smiled and snapped pictures of my expression.