Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

In the rearview mirror, I watched the driver’s eyes scan traffic, his Afro asymmetric. He pushed the blinker and leaned to check the traffic beside him. The flyovers and freeways crisscrossing at this intersection reminded me of my image of Van Raye’s inhabited other planet, but here on Earth, in Georgia, this south end of the airport was dirty and abandoned, tarps draped over exit signs that signaled to nowhere, orange barrels blocking roadways, lifeless aluminum warehouses and traffic lights blinking only yellow or clothed in body bags.

We looped until the driver slowed to make a left, nothing but dead businesses on both sides, and when I leaned down to try to see the end of this blight, I saw the glowing red letters on top of a hotel: GRAND AERODROME. The structure had the dimensions of a cinder block and the material was just as gray, the kind of property that every room had a balcony. The whole effect was Soviet-era bunker. On top of the block was a dome, and I said to Elizabeth, “Tell me this place isn’t old enough to have a revolving restaurant.”

“Did you even read the preliminaries?” she asked me.

Only a high metal fence sequestered the hotel from the surrounding entropy. I counted twelve stories, something I should have known. A large American flag on the roof blew straight and bright against the overcast sky.

When the shuttle stopped, I stepped off under the porte cochere where guests milled about smoking and yelling into cell phones. Two maroon-suited bellhops dispersed to the rear of the van for bags, both older white men with long beards. Another came to the door and held his hand to take Elizabeth’s bag, handles of his bushy mustache twitching in the wind.

We went through the electronic doors into the building, and the air seemed to open above our heads. The design was an open atrium, each floor ringed with ornate railing. A businesswoman went past me with the deliberate speed of a traveler, luggage wheels humming on the orange carpet. There was a fake forest in the middle of the lobby, and I went to the railing in the center and leaned over. Below us was a large rectangle of concrete gurgling water from its top, the sides with a healthy growth of real green algae, and below that an array of tables with patrons having lunch.

The walls of the lobby had that dull lumpy look of over a hundred paint-overs. The light had bleached the mulch in the planters pale, and people sat on worn pleather couches working and talking. Across the lobby on the wall above the phone booths, the silver hands of a clock, unbelievably, displayed the correct time.

“Elizabeth,” I started, and how was I going to put this, “I can’t go through this again.”

“Yes, you can.”

“What are we supposed to do here?”

“These are our clients,” she said.

“This is a no-brainer. Are they going to reinvest some capital or are they leveraging?. . It doesn’t even matter, does it?”

“Keep your voice down,” Elizabeth said.

I felt in my pocket for my money clip and tipped the bellhop, and he thanked me and told me he was Richard, and I told him we would need a minute to check in, and when he was gone, Elizabeth said, “It does matter. We don’t know but there might be some renaissance planned for this section near the airport. How do we know a high-end remodeling won’t make this work? How do we know this isn’t at some perfect intersection between the airport and the city, the perfect distance of noise reduction and convenience? We study, we observe, we make our report.”

I rubbed my shoe on the carpet and several pieces of sand flickered like popcorn. Whatever is on the floor in the lobby will end up on the floors in every room. I’d heard that a hundred times.

“We can concentrate on the accounting,” she said, “but don’t leave out service and reputation, all the intangibles.”

I went to the edge of the fake rainforest. The night’s menu stood inside a lighted menu box. The revolving restaurant was called View of the World. I leaned over the railing to see the floor below and that fountain again. On this belowground level there was an open-air bar, and I saw the tops of people eating and drinking, an airport hotel bar being a convergent of time zones, a border town between where you are from and where you are going, the last place in the world where a three-martini lunch was acceptable.

The rain came down harder on the hotel, spraying against the giant windows on the back of the lobby that looked over the Atlanta airport. People looked at the rain and nearly everyone sprouted their phones to confirm with local radar that yes, indeed, it was precipitating, and in the column of air above the fake rainforest, I caught a glimpse of something falling. High above on one of the floors, a young girl leaned over the railing, arm out. The object was a doll, not a cloth doll, but one accelerating with the assurance of molded plastic.

I heard Elizabeth behind me—“My God”—and the thing disappeared on the other side of the forest. High above, the girl who’d dropped it stepped away from the railing, and I saw the white light of an open hotel door behind her and the girl being swallowed inside. Whether she ran in, was pulled in by a parent or sibling, or God knows what, I didn’t know. The hotel simply ate her, and I would never see the girl again.

Elizabeth went to the fall zone as fast as her gold shoes would carry her, and when I got there, there was nothing on the ground, and Elizabeth said to a passing bellhop with an armful of courtesy umbrellas, “ Stop .”

At first I thought he was the same bearded white man whom I just tipped, but he was young and plump, still big bearded and with wind-burned cheeks, his boney wrists coming out of the sleeves of his jacket as he cradled the umbrellas. Elizabeth opened and closed her fingers to indicate to him: give me an umbrella .

Elizabeth stood on her tiptoes and poked the tip of an umbrella into the branches of the fake rainforest tree. Rain from the umbrella beaded silver on the shoulders of her dry-cleaned jacket, and she flipped the doll out.

The bellhop and I stepped back to see it plop faceup on the carpet. She wore a blue flight attendant’s uniform with nonregulation high heels. It was a Barbie or one of those Barbie rip-offs you get in airport gift shops.

“My God,” I said, thinking about my dream of Elizabeth falling out of the sky.

“I know,” Elizabeth said, “it is a liability nightmare,” looking up through the center of the hotel. Several times I’d heard her say these words: “An air of liability,” expressing an atmosphere of dread about a property, but here I was literally looking into an air of liability.

“Nobody in her right mind would design a hotel like this today,” she said.

“Let’s just walk out,” I said. “Catch a flight to wherever.”

“Stop,” she said.

I picked the doll up and tilted my head back to look up through the hotel.

Elizabeth went toward the front desk and got the attention of a standing agent and introduced herself. Elizabeth believed in announcing herself immediately, the secret-guest approach, according to her, was a cheap tactic employed by nonserious consultants. I wanted to walk up and say, hello, we’re the angels of death .

After getting the keycards and our accommodations settled, Elizabeth met a Mr. Blaney, a man with a sloped belly and receding hair, glasses on the end of his nose, and she immediately turned on her charming face, introducing me to him, “This is Sandeep Sanghavi. He will be doing the bulk of the analysis, and as such, deserves full access.”

When I was supposed to be listening, I couldn’t help look at the spectacular view out of the back of the lobby and over a pool deck being drizzled on, and then to the great panoramic plains of the busy airport beyond, the grass in every direction bowed by the weather and another gray phalanx of harder rain marching from the west. Jets blinked in line for takeoff no more than a quarter mile from us, and I had the stupid thought that Ursula could be on one, or maybe Dubourg, and in the distance terminals looked like an isolated city, the spires and cathedrals of control towers. Out the window to the right, to our west, our neighbor was the Gypsy Sky Cargo shipping center with its tarmac full of perfectly aligned green jets with the logo of the Gypsy eye on the tail, actually the pattern found on the wings of the gypsy moth, but it looked like the purple and green eye of a seductive drag queen.