Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“That would be great,” he said. “This is greatly appreciated. I’ve got the new book coming out.”

“Why don’t I make it a little more,” I said like it was nothing, and I know it was degrading for him to be strung along like this. What amount would the man say no to? “Why not make it a dollar for every light-year away? How far away is this thing?”

There was a pause. “Three thousand,” he said.

“Are you rounding up?”

“Sandeep, three thousand is wonderful! This book is going to be big.” He said this like he would pay me back.

“I’ll make it four. Is the new book about this , I mean what you’ve found?” I said.

“No, no. But I’m going to give you the bank’s routing number, a Bangalore bank’s account number, and my account number. . ”

“Charles,” I said, “this — what you are telling me — it’s true to the best of your knowledge? You aren’t trying to just get money from me? All you have to do is ask.”

“I’m deeply insulted. Have I ever lied to you before?”

I thought about it and the answer was actually no. Stretched the truth, exaggerated facts, maybe, but never out and out lied.

“Can’t you just email me the bank information?” I said. “I’ll send you your cash.”

“Absolutely. Give me your email address.”

I had to spell my email out for him though it had been the same since I was eight, and I glanced at Elizabeth, who’d taught me everything I knew about hotels, and I felt a sense of dread, and realized that for the last few minutes, talking to my father, I had forgotten about the business.

“Geneva 1000x,” someone had written on the pad beside the old phone like we were a thousand times happier in Geneva than we are now.

“Charles, use the code word Geneva in the email so I will know that’s you and everything is okay.”

“What a great idea. ‘Geneva.’”

“Yes, Geneva,” I said.

There was silence. From thousands of miles away, I could feel his attention waning.

I turned UFO Mysteries facedown as if from thousands of miles he could see what I was looking at.

Over the phone, Charles said, “Sandeep, I’ve got to go, someone is waiting on me. I’ll be going on a book tour in the states. Remember, no worries! And I’ll send you an advance copy. How does that sound?”

“When are you going to release your findings?” I shouted, but it was too late, the line clicked off.

Still in the conference room listening to the complaining managers, Elizabeth pivoted slowly in her chair to lock eyes on me.

I replaced the landline on its receiver. She had to understand the magnitude of this, if it were true, far outweighed any business meeting we could ever have, especially the final meeting with managers who we would likely never see again. We should leave this hotel and put the business on hold for a little while, connect with Charles, but how does one connect with Charles?

I thumbed backward through UFO Mysteries , and then I was trying to comprehend what it would mean if he had found something, and how famous he would be, and I began thinking about his early successful books, and who he was during these periods when he was a guest on talk shows. He was an ass. I remembered the red Alfa Romeo he had the year San Francisco Public Television had produced the six-episode TV series hosted by. . Van Raye!

I had just turned fourteen, and, after not seeing or hearing from him in over a year, I forced him to let me come visit California. He met me at the airport, him wearing green sunglasses like a movie star. I came down the long airport hallway into the real world and saw the green lenses were attached to the front of his prescription glasses, and that unruly white hair was a garland around the dome of his head. For someone raised in Florida, he had pale skin that blushed easily, always seemed a shade of splotchy red, especially the bumpy supraorbital ridge down the center of his bald head that looked like the relief map of the Himalayas.

He put his hand on my shoulder. He squinched his nose and said, “Jesus, look at you,” pulling me along, forcing a smile as he studied me, as if I were not the person he’d expected to get off the plane.

I thought something was wrong with me, and the first chance I got I excused myself to the airport bathroom to ostensibly wash my face but really to check myself in the mirror to make sure nothing had happened to me on the flight. Why had he given me that look? In the mirror, I appeared normal, dare I say not a bad-looking guy. Look at the pictures of Van Raye — bushy eyebrows, the ugly head, thin lips, stooped posture that so many tall people get — I could not think of his physical appearance without thinking of the word “bones.”

After checking my face in the bathroom mirror that day, I dried it and went out and continued with his escort, him telling me of his plans, stealing glances at me. It had been over a year since he’d seen me. Elizabeth had been against this trip. “Why do you want to spend time with him?” she had asked. I think Elizabeth believed she’d conceived me by herself, like some plant.

In the parking garage that day, Charles and I stood over a bright red convertible, top down, a sports car, a man’s car, a cliché that had been illegally parked on the yellow stripes, and he threw a set of keys to me. “You drive!” he said.

I told him that I was only fourteen and he seemed surprised, but that didn’t stop his plan.

Van Raye and I spent an hour sputtering and stalling the Alfa Romeo on the top parking deck, him showing me how to give it some gas and let the clutch out, and after a lapse, he asked me if I was ready and pointed to the exit ramp.

I never told him, but I wasn’t exactly ready. I stalled in front of the woman taking our money for parking. The woman in the booth looked at him as I re-cranked, and she said, “Aren’t you an actor?”

“No,” he said, “an astronomer.”

She said, “Oh,” and asked if we needed a receipt. The price was ten dollars to let us out into the world together.

The gate went up and I made the Alfa go forward, him nudging the steering wheel when we needed to take a certain exit. He pulled a driving hat out from between the seats and wore it backward.

I was two years away from any legal driver’s license and very uneven with the accelerator. Van Raye glanced behind us as we merged into the interstate, and he judged things just right. “You’re doing fine! Aren’t you having fun? Isn’t this fun?”

Fourteen and gripping the wheel for the first time in my life, it was all I could do to concentrate and drive through the desert. Back then he worked at a university that had an eleven-mile loop of an underground particle accelerator with the highway built over it that Van Raye used as his personal racetrack. When I hazarded a look, he was rather obnoxiously posed with those green glasses, that hat, his cheeks sucked in so he could hold them between his molars to make dimples. Lining the highway were sterile office buildings crowned with thorny antenna arrays, and the brighter stars and planets came out in the purple sky. Under the ground below us, protons were smashing into protons, like fireworks, and the ends of his hair danced about his hat as if electrified.

Elizabeth’s knocking on the glass of CUBE 1 brought me out of the daydream, and I realized I was slouched in the chair, head titled back. Behind her, the meeting room was empty, the chairs sitting exactly where disgruntled former employees had abandoned them.

“I’m sorry,” I said through the glass.

“If it’s true, he’ll be going through one of those periods,” she said, her voice dulled by the glass. “He’s very hard to manage in popular periods, and he is very unlikeable. Don’t let him affect you.”