Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

There was so much stuff here I didn’t even notice the young woman until she moved, lifted her head to see us. She sat on a stool behind a counter, and her chin dropped to continue reading an old paperback held open on her knees.

On the wall were beat-up trumpets, shiny flutes, and empty instrument cases with plush red-velvet interiors. Beneath the pounding of the rain was my heartbeat because I saw high on the wall a violin in its open case sitting on pegboard hooks. I could see the Master Stefen label liner, the gold script on black cloth, one that I had seen all my life. It is a popular maker of violins, but I felt the remnants of raindrops reach my scalp and tingle. “Elizabeth” was all I could say, but she had seen it.

“That,” she said to the girl reading on the stool. “Get that down.”

That’s it, I thought, that can’t be it. The coolness of the raindrops made me dizzy. This can’t be happening.

The girl pulled an aluminum ladder over, legs clattering. Elizabeth put her hands on her ears to block the racket, and the girl stopped and climbed.

Elizabeth pivoted to me and said, “That is my violin. Sandeep, how did you know? ”

For the first time that trip, I noticed her earrings (clip-ons) — were gold frogs sleeping on her ears.

“I don’t know how to tell you,” I said.

The girl took the Master Stefen by the neck, no strings.

“Be careful,” Elizabeth said, “and the case too. It is all delicate.”

The girl put the violin under her arm and grabbed the case.

When a pegboard hook fell, clanging through the ladder, Elizabeth put her hand to her mouth, but the girl made it to the ground and came forth and put the violin on the counter. An orange tag had $800 written on it.

“This is my violin,” Elizabeth said to me. It lay before her, but she seemed unable to reach out to touch it. Her right hand came out slowly and for some reason the violin reminded me — this thing without strings — of something dead in a tiny coffin, the children’s graves I had seen when we played flashlight tag in the cemetery in Florida, and she lifted it.

“Is it okay?” I asked her.

“This is my violin,” she said to the girl.

The girl said, “It’s eight hundred dollars.”

Elizabeth twisted around, eyes wide in disbelief. “I should not have to pay for my own violin!” She looked at me, tears streaking. I couldn’t bear to look at her. “ Should I have to pay for my own violin? ” she said.

I took my money clip out, hands shaking.

The girl said, “You don’t pay me.”

We had to go to the man up front. He scanned a barcode on a sticker and the register went from 00000 to 00800. Maybe I should have explained that the price was badly wrong, but I was shaking and stunned, only wanted to get out of there.

I gave him the money to get us back out in the world with her violin, which rode in its case on her lap in the cab. Classic music played on the cab’s satellite radio as the driver retraced the path back to the airport, Mozart’s Symphony No. 15. Elizabeth wiped tears away as soon as they came, trying not to sniff, both of us wondering what had just happened.

Her tears cleared up and she asked me, “How did you know it was there?”

“Are you absolutely sure this is yours?”

“Without a doubt. How did you know?”

My hands squeezed my knees, and I said, “Magic.”

“Dammit,” the driver said and touched a finger to the radio to change stations until the screen said “Sports Talk 250” and the music was gone.

My phone vibrated. I pulled it out and saw a new conversation had begun:

Some people call them “miracles.”

I texted:

Thank you for the lost luggage tip. How did you know?

Now Raye?

Somebody out there could obviously sort through data and track a violin down. The explanation would be complicated but it would be a rational one. I kept reminding myself of this. It wasn’t really magic. Nothing was but I had this wonderful feeling of being confused by what I saw.

I quickly turned my phone for Elizabeth to see. “Do you see this conversation?” I said to her.

She cleared her eyes and tilted her head back even though she didn’t have her reading glasses on. “What?”

I looked at the phone and there was nothing but the phone’s menu, the conversation gone.

Everything could be explained, maybe explained with a long-shot scenario, like the fact that all information exists on the web and a hacker could get information and track down a violin. I think we all have this sense that a shadow exists in this other space — each name, place, thought, theorem, video — entire lives could be constructed from the information. I had once noticed how my fingers were more blunt than Elizabeth’s, and the thought crossed my mind to search “Sanghavi Aardarsh’s fingers” to see what my grandfather’s fingers looked like before I realized the absurdity.

The satellite radio on the dash changed from sports talk back to Symphony No. 15 without the driver touching it. Everything was becoming a message to me, or I was going insane.

For a second I thought my phone was vibrating in my hand, but realized my fingers were tingling. Not the tingling. What is happening? I shook the hand to increase circulation.

I wanted Charles to help me figure everything out, but on that flight back to Atlanta that small tingle became numbness and progressed inward. If this thing, this paralyzing thing was happening again, I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening again . I had allowed myself to get stressed out, that was all. I was too scared to mention it to Elizabeth sitting right beside me.

By the time we got back to the Grand Aerodrome, it was almost a comfort to see the ugly orange carpet. I only wanted to get in the bed, give my body rest. The numbness would go away.

When I walked by the payphones, the one on the end began ringing. I motioned for Elizabeth to go ahead, and when I picked it up, I didn’t even say hello, just waited for the music, that drum roll and beat and the bass pick up—“ A little less conversation, a little more action, all this aggravation ain’t satisfaction in me . .”

My phone dinged and the text appeared:

LOL! I still love doing that to you!

Life can be so wonderful, Sandeep!

I glanced around the lobby before taking a breath and typing with numb fingers:

Where are you?

I am everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a clump of data like you. I need Raye in order to travel on.

I think I’m getting sick.

It took a few seconds as though he were thinking or searching.

The paralysis?

How could he know about the paralysis? My medical records? I opened and closed my left hand, shook it.

You know what is happening to me?

Yes.

I rode the glass elevator up, went to our suite. My throat tingled. Would I stop breathing?

The paralysis hadn’t happened in fourteen years. I remembered weeks of lying in a bed and being so incredibly thirsty, waiting for someone to hold a cup of water to my lips. Was the thirst only in my mind? Is the paralysis somehow up to me?

Alone in my room now, I took off my clothes and slid into the tight covers of my bed. The aquarium water had cleared and the betta swam inside, gills flared, him fighting his own reflection.

Through the wall came the first tuning of Elizabeth’s strings.

The rising tide of tingling had reached my knees. I didn’t want to have to go and tell her.

The music she played seemed brand new, like nothing I’d ever heard before, though I’d heard Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy” a thousand times. Maybe it was the new strings, but I also realized that Elizabeth, like every musician in the world, was a bundle of organic compounds and neurochemical reactions with feelings and experiences that converted the chaos of the universe into the best order she could make.