Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“You listen to the same song over and over?”

“Kind of,” I said. “I just have this feeling everyone is happier than I am. I just want to feel like everyone else.”

“That’s exactly what everyone else says,” Dr. Ahuja said. He tapped the keyboard to go back over something. He nodded his head. “Okay, okay. . ” He tilted his chin at me. “Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”

Suicide? I thought.

Before I could answer, he held up his hand to stop me. “What was that in your mind?” He admonished me with his hand, “Stop! Free association only. The thing that popped in your mind. Close your eyes.”

I did. I backed my mind up and saw a cart full of cleaning supplies and I saw housekeeping women pushing the cart. I realized that it had always been the morning staff that found suicides.

I said to Dr. Ahuja, “Morning maids, hotel morning maids.”

His chair squeaked. “Interesting,” he said. “What are they mourning?”

“No, morning maids,” I said, “like housekeeping, like in hotels in the morning, cleaning. I don’t think that will make sense to you—”

“It makes sense to me,” he said.

“But morning maids is what I thought about. My mother and I live in an environment where everyone resents us.”

“Everyone resents you? Interesting. Okay, the question again, and I’ll let you answer it. Any thoughts of suicide?”

“No,” I said.

“Let me ask you this.” He touched his fingertips together beneath his nose. “Are you getting ready to go on a trip?”

“What?”

“A trip, travel ?” he repeated.

“Always,” I said.

“See, I knew it. I can tell.” He smiled, pleased at himself. “Travel is very stressful.”

He swiveled in his chair and picked up a brown box from the floor, set it on his desk, took sample boxes out, and slid them across the desk to me. “This is going to help you,” he said. He explained this was a “new common help” people took, and explained the dosages, and told me to taper off the Rozaline. “This is newer, more effective, fewer side effects. This is my preference,” he said.

He waited. It was called Elapam. When I didn’t say anything right away, he pushed three more sample boxes to me. I finally said, “Sometimes I have trouble sleeping too.”

“My choice for my patients is somatropin.”

I turned the box of Elapam over. On the back were words and complicated chemical contents and warnings. Shaking the box, it rattled with tinfoil pill sleeves, and on the front of the box was a formless figure dancing, sexless and twirling with arms overhead, and I realized that the swirling at the feet was the drug company logo on the frame of his digital photo frame.

Dr. Ahuja was working at the computer, the mouse clicking faster. It took him about ten seconds to send the prescriptions to every pharmacy in the world.

“That’s it! Godspeed!” he said. “Enjoy your travels!”

I checked out with the woman who had been the nurse who’d weighed me and took my initial blood pressure, now sliding the translucent glass open and taking my credit card. All the magazines in the waiting room were business magazines, and she handed me the receipt for my visit, rather expensive for what he’d just done. It reminded me of the warning Van Raye had written in an essay in My Year of Quantum Weirdness : “Every doctor thinks he can be a businessman, and every businessman thinks he can be a lawyer, and every lawyer thinks he can be a writer, and every writer thinks he’s right about everything.”

On Thursday, Elizabeth and I woke early for a trip to Chicago for her to attend the Host Resorts board meeting. Elizabeth’s standard procedure was to be through security two hours before our departure time. I wore a gray suit and a red tie, and when we sat down at our gate and I had just begun enjoying the Airport Zone, I glanced at our itinerary on my phone and was shocked to see that our flight had been rebooked through Birmingham. When had I done that?

I had some vague recollection of changing our flights, as if I had dreamed it, but yes, it was me, not the hacker. I’d changed our reservations after taking my sleeping pills, under the influence, and believed the violin could be in Birmingham, at this place called the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. Now I wasn’t so sure. We’d be wasting our time going.

On my phone, I found where the post-sleeping-pill me had searched for the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. There was strangely no website, only an address in Birmingham. Sitting in the gate area, I found a street view of the address and saw a standard-looking warehouse warped in the fish-eye perspective.

Elizabeth took out the CEO report and began rereading it using her speed-reading finger.

On my phone, I also discovered a text conversation with Dubourg, my cousin. I actually had typed these words:

There’s weird shit going on.

I was embarrassed and annoyed.

Something big has happened with Van Raye. Tell you tomorrow.

Tomorrow? I scrolled toward the end of the conversation. The conversation went on with Dubourg trying to figure out what I was trying to get at, trying to follow my explanation of ringing payphones, Elvis, and Elizabeth’s lost violin, and he’d said:

I can fly through ATL in AM.

Meet concourse C tomorrow.

The last balloon was time stamped this morning:

Im here.

I looked at my watch seeing that our rendezvous time was fifteen minutes ago, and quickly texted:

I’m here! On way!

“I’ve got to go walk some,” I said to Elizabeth, standing suddenly, lifting my attaché and putting the strap over my head. “Stretch my legs.”

Her eyes studied me over her cheap rhinestone glasses, and she knew I was up to something. But as she was forming a question, I turned away.

On the train to concourse C, I noticed people wearing identify-me lapel pins — Christian crosses, Rotary Club pins, and different-colored ribbons signifying some cause — and the tram let me out on C, and I took the escalator up and stopped in a bookstore, searched the “New Arrivals” display until I found The Universe Is a Pair of Pants on the lower shelf and bought a copy and a pack of Marlboros and stuck them in my bag.

Midway down the concourse to the smoking lounge, I started encountering the smoke smell and the red-eyed people with the general gray complexion of addicts. I’m sorry to have to report that smokers in general show poorer personal hygiene than other people.

Outside the smoking lounge, I leaned to see into the glass room, the fishbowl of cancer, where my cousin — really my half brother — sat on a bench with a cigarette. He wore his black jacket and priest’s collar, and that valise between his feet, and he uncomfortably listened to a middle-aged man in a goatee smiling and talking animatedly.

I hadn’t seen Dubourg in over a month, but he looked older to me, and more like Van Raye than he ever had, though these features were handsome on Dubourg, perhaps the right amount of DNA from his biological French mother. We looked nothing alike. On one of my first visits to Florida, two of the aunts had put Dubourg and me back to back, made us slowly turn as though we were in a police lineup, looking for a resemblance, but there was very little. Elizabeth always claimed the Indian genes stomped all others.

I’d gone to his ordination in New Orleans on the last official day of spring for that year, and in the heat of the cathedral he vowed poverty, celibacy, and obedience, and he had pissed off someone because ultimately he was not given the assignment of a parish priest, but he was made a courier for the church, having to tote around that black valise now protected between his knees, the contents of which he was not even privileged to.