Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

In the time it took my chair’s cushion to re-suck air into its interior, the words “found something” registered as the impossible.

“Yes, I have found something very, very big.” He let that soak in. “Do you understand?”

“Okay,” I said. I realized I hated the word “okay,” but “I have found something” in the context of his life wouldn’t be attached to something as mundane as “keys,” “myself,” or “good sushi.” If the economy hadn’t been bad, if we weren’t delivering bad news all the time, I’m not sure I would have been in the state of mind to listen to him. If we were always extremely comfortable, would we ever really be ready for a change?

If our world of hotels was mundane and normally happy, my father’s life could be referred to as exciting and, well, a bit tumultuous. He had written popular science books, was the physicist who people would recognize as the tall, strange-looking man from the PBS series, the one who believed he could find an extraterrestrial sound by listening only to planets that he said, “Remind me of home.” I had lived with The Search all my life. The Search was like an imaginary person my father was madly in love with but who posed no real threat because the person didn’t exist. One of the personal items that roamed from hotel to hotel with me was the fifteen-year-old edition of the Sunday Magazine with Van Raye on the cover. He was young enough in that picture to have only thinning hair, and he had his arms folded as he stared down at the camera, his bell-bottom jeans surrounded by a sea of yellow flowers. In the background was the large dish antenna pointed at the sky — the wispy, impossibly blue California sky. The caption read “Searching Alone.”

If I ever thought he would really find something, I certainly stopped believing long ago, but here he was saying words over the long-distance connection, words I’d heard all my life but meaning had abandoned them—“inhabited,” “exoplanet”—while I watched the scene inside the conference room where Sinclair stood with his knuckles on the table, his envelope crumpled. Elizabeth nodded and listened to their complaints without me.

“Are you absolutely sure?” I said to Charles. “You’ve found a signal?”

“Not a signal, but it’s the noise of a planet, jumbled noises of a technically advanced planet.”

“Sure,” I said and whispered, “ Alien . .” in such a way I didn’t think the phone would pick it up, but he said, “Okay, I don’t like that term.”

“I know,” I said.

I tried to wrap my mind around “inhabited,” could only imagine a sparkling city with elevated roadways and flying cars.

Across the hall, Elizabeth calmly listened to the department heads. This scene was too familiar to me. About now, each person would be listing to Elizabeth his or her job description, naming things they thought no one else could do while the hotel was being staged down, but Elizabeth was reiterating “immediate,” and that the hotel would be operating for a short length of time on a reduced staff before the complete closure.

I texted Elizabeth on my phone:

He says he found something

I saw her take a deep breath and push her phone away so her farsightedness could read it, and she spoke reassuringly to Harrison as she read my message. Then she swiveled in her conference chair and stared at me through the glass walls. I nodded, started a smile, still holding the landline between cheek and shoulder, but then she held up her hands as if to say, “ So? ” and she turned around to face the managers.

Van Raye had written the popular science books Perfect Randomness, Renaming the Sky, My Year of Quantum Weirdness , and The Report from Earth . They were popular enough that I occasionally saw a person reading one in the airport, found a tattered copy of The Report from Earth in a beach condo one year. He used to occasionally pop up on a congressional hearing, wearing all black, his white hair styled into disarray to look the part of the mad scientist. His most recent article had been a twenty-five-thousand-word treatise in World magazine about strip clubs. He was an interesting character and people wanted to know what he thought of everything, but he was a gangly man who loved women, had dated a few famous women, been married five times, and he had a difficult reputation among his academic peers, made worse when he dressed shabbily and showed up at parties with attractive, younger women. He lived in a big house on the campus of an important university, had made a fortune three times and gone broke four, lost half of Elizabeth’s net worth before I was the age of five. He was a great storyteller, a brilliant mathematician, but he still drove a late-model sports car to the liquor store to buy Powerball lotto tickets hoping to defy the odds, and he’d been married five times declaring himself in an essay “a habitual monogamist.”

He said over the phone, “Sandeep, I just need a splash of cash.”

“Why? Can’t you get money now?” I said.

“Good God. You’re too sheltered. How do you think the world works? I can’t tell anyone at this point. Do you understand that? I’m trusting you. Did I tell you I was between funding?”

“Charles, wait, why haven’t you told anyone?” I switched the phone to my other ear. “This is what you’ve been waiting on. . working on, all these years.” I squeezed the magazine so I could get it out of the wrapper.

“I’m in immediate need for some short-term funds. Just to get me through.”

“Sure,” I said. “Charles, I am going to tell the truth. This sounds suspicious. No one at the university knows? There is a protocol. Even I know that.”

“ Suspicious? Jesus, I’m giving you my word here. If you can’t help me I can find someone who can.”

“No, no. I just said I would send you funds. I’m simply asking if you’re sure it’s not a false positive?”

“I’m 100 percent sure of its extraterrestrial origin. I’ve already tested the chance of randomness.”

I tried to see in the conference room if anyone had opened envelopes. I felt horrible for Elizabeth having to do this by herself.

I pinched the phone on my shoulder and pulled the magazine out, glancing around as if Charles might be watching me, then I straightened it out and saw the cover of this month’s UFO Mysteries magazine showing a formation of World War II bombers and a computer-generated circle around a speck in the old photograph, some bullshit the publishers wanted you to believe was a flying saucer. The caption read “The Real History of the Foo Fighters.”

I tried to rub the magazine flat on the table. These UFO publications were for crazy people, but I was alone in CUBE 1, trying to listen to my father complaining about how the world has no cash value for knowledge anymore. Van Raye had dispensed with the UFO phenomenon in his essay “The Modern Religion.” I had only started getting the monthly UFO Mysteries magazine because I’d attended a conference at a hotel we were working in just to laugh at the people.

“Okay,” I said, stopping Van Raye. He’d begged enough. “How much do you need, Charles?”

“Fifteen hundred should do.”

“That’s all?” I said. “That’s not a problem.” This would have been a good time to point out to him that Elizabeth and I weren’t made of money, but especially today I wanted him to need us.

I said to Van Raye, “Why don’t we make it a round two thousand?”

In the conference room across the hall, Elizabeth scribbled on her pad, something she never did.