Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

I said to him on concourse C, “Come stay with us. Please, Du.”

“I will when I can.” He opened his arms and we hugged again, me taking a good whiff of his body odor to remember him. Elizabeth and I were going to Chicago, and at some point I was going to have to tell her we were going to Alabama too because I had this feeling I would find something there, maybe not the violin, but it was important to go.

I said, “Have you ever lost your luggage?”

He let go and held me at arm’s length, his legs straddling the valise. “Are you shitting me? I can’t lose contact with this.”

“You don’t have any idea what’s in the case?”

“Nope.”

“And yet you carry it around because the church told you to?”

“Faith,” he said, “sacrifice.”

“You must have pissed off the wrong person to get this assignment,” I said.

“I can’t imagine it being any other way now.”

“Hey, have you ever heard of this place in Birmingham with the lost luggage?”

For an answer, he pushed his glasses up with a knuckle, exactly the same way Van Raye did and shrugged his shoulders. He waved. “Thanks for the cigarettes,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

He turned and began walking fast with the big case beneath his arm, duffle hanging on the other side of him, and I saw that his white shirttail was untucked and hanging below his jacket. His shirttails never stayed tucked.

In Chicago, while Elizabeth attended the board meetings, I sat in an empty waiting room and read the Universe Is a Pair of Pants , a chapter titled “Musings in a Quake Zone.” He wrote, “Twenty-five years ago I had a wonderful little theory. This was before planetary science distracted me. I arrived at it while in San Francisco where I met a wonderful violinist.” He described the violinist as “sophisticated and worldly.” He wrote, “We went back and forth in my tiny apartment above Beulah Street, each playing separately — my French horn, her violin — then together, working ourselves into a frenzy, and not a single neighbor complained. It was a perfect night.” Van Raye wrote that they had a “continuous concert” together, and the chapter was really about cosmology and his “wonderful theory.” “When we were done and almost asleep,” he wrote, “a mist fell through the open window on my face, and I heard a junkie puking on the street below, some guy who’d wandered off of Haight, retching right beneath the window, and I thought— Exactly! And that was when I began to formulate the shape of the universe in my mind, which could be both infinite and bounded . .”

I read through eight pages of cosmology but then I kept rereading the beginning.

When Elizabeth came out of the meeting, I told her that we were going to fly through Birmingham. “I have to show you something in Charles’s new book.”

“Birmingham?” she said. “Why?”

“There’s a store I want to go to,” I said.

“What store? Another magic store?”

“Did you hear me? There’s something in Charles’s book I want you to read.”

In the gate area, waiting for our plane, I watched her eyes beneath the cheap rhinestone readers go over the words about the violinist in San Francisco.

“You can stop when you get to the cosmology part,” I said.

She finished and shut the book.

“That’s about you, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “who else?”

“It’s the only time he’s ever mentioned you in a book!”

She handed the book back to me. “He mentions everyone in his books.”

“Not you and me.”

“Is that what you want, Sandeep? To be a couple of paragraphs of an excuse for him to talk about what he wants to talk about?”

“I just don’t think I’ve done anything interesting enough for him to write about.”

“Self-pity isn’t productive,” she said.

I leaned back. “Well, we’re going through Birmingham.”

“I don’t mind spontaneity,” she said, “but don’t spring it on me.”

It was late afternoon by the time our Airbus glided out of the overcast and touched down in Birmingham.

We got a green minivan cab, and I gave the driver the address. I asked him if he’d heard of the Warehouse of Mishandled Luggage. He’d simply replied, “No,” and put the address into his GPS and sighed because he saw the fare would barely earn him over his minimum.

“What is it?” Elizabeth asked.

“Just somewhere I wanted to go.”

He drove us through the same indistinct buildings and warehouses you’ll find at the southern end of any airport. The driver turned off the main boulevard and went down a narrow street, then across a small bridge, and I had this sinking feeling that there wouldn’t be any kind of store here, not even a pawn shop.

Big drops of rain spotted the windshield, and the wipers smeared the pollen. A simple green utility sign beside the road announced WAREHOUSE 122-A and had an arrow pointing to the next street.

A single piece of hard-cased Samsonite luggage was wrapped to an oak tree with yellow crime-scene tape. A single word, LUGGAGE, had been spray-painted on a board against the fence.

Up the drive, through woods, we left the rain shower. The cab pulled up to the indistinct warehouse I had seen on Google Street View — blue aluminum, no windows, no sign of people other than a few cars in the lot. A big Dumpster in the parking lot was filled with construction scrap, but on second look I saw it was full of dead suitcases, ones that had been unzipped or cut open and discarded.

I told the driver to wait.

“Why are we here ?” Elizabeth asked, getting out and looking over the top of the car at me. I could hear the rain advancing through the trees and waved her to take my arm and run. We got under the shelter and I said, “I just heard about this place. It’s supposedly where all lost and unclaimed luggage ends up. I thought it would be interesting.”

She wiped the water off her shoulder. “Used to, when the airlines lost your luggage, they found it and delivered to your front door. Now they give you a voucher for the value. Everything is expendable.”

When we stepped through the door and saw the expanse of the place, saw the rows and rows of merchandise, I felt around inside my bag, dug her camera out, the one she used to take pictures of the merchandise in the retail stores in the airports, and gave it to her without a word.

The warehouse was a giant thrift store filled with smells of used clothing, old plastic, warm electronics. I saw no other shoppers. Only a mannequin guarding the entrance dressed completely in scuba gear and holding a spear gun, guarding the wall-to-wall forgotten merchandise, a graveyard of lost things.

“Welcome to Mishandled Luggage!” a man shouted over the full rain on the metal roof. He was behind a sales counter working on the interior of something electronic. His cash register read a green “00000.”

I caught up to Elizabeth at the glass jewelry case. Inside, mannequin hands reached out of the lake of a mirror, plastic fingers garishly adorned with rings — lost wedding bands, cheap green stones, ugly turquoise jewelry, white price tags dangling.

“Look at this, Sandeep!” She took the camera and aimed into the display case, trying to get a picture through the glass. We went to the next case where watches hung from horizontally placed golf clubs, hundreds of watches.

Somehow I knew which direction to walk. Maybe it was the increase of electronic noise from the back, but I saw guitars on the back wall, old ones and shiny new ones, a few without strings. Guitars? Who lost guitars? And each one represented someone’s broken heart, like Elizabeth with her violin or the girl who’d dropped Barbie into the Air of Liability.