Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“My horn?” he said.

“I don’t see your horn.” Her voice had changed.

“Elizabeth, I haven’t played my horn in years. Ruth did most of the driving. I’m starving.”

“You don’t have your horn ?” Elizabeth said again, and I wanted her to stop repeating herself. She’d told me a thousand times that only dullards repeated things in order to give the dullard time to think about what was going on.

“I haven’t played a horn in years. You know that.” He smiled.

“You mentioned starting back,” she said.

The bellhops in their maroon uniforms wore ushankas that made them look like ice fishermen in band uniforms.

“Ruth and I were wondering,” Van Raye said, “if we might see the hotel’s roof.”

“The roof?” I said, being the dullard now.

“We’re searching for a certain type of dish antenna—”

My phone chimed and Charles looked at it as though it were a turd.

A message from Ursula said:

Dubourg is here

“ What? ” I mumbled.

Van Raye maneuvered Elizabeth and me by the arm again as if to talk to us in private.

Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder. “She’s with you?”

“Now, sweetheart, before assumptions are made. .” He turned slightly back at the other woman—“Ruth is. . ”—who still sat on the bags on the cart and out of earshot. She put the cigarette in her mouth and drug on it as if it were lit; she even squinted through nonexistent smoke.

I saw Elizabeth’s focus in the distance, and her eyes became sleepy the way she did when she was playing a particular difficult piece of music. She refocused on Charles talking about driving, and she slowly lifted her hand and tucked her fingers, and I saw the meaty paler part of her palm rise, and I had a flash memory to the executive self-defense course we’d taken in Trenton, New Jersey, years ago, and that meaty part of her hand traveled on a path toward Van Raye. He could only flinch before it struck him on his cheek, half slap and half fist.

He stepped backward, mouth open. “My God!” He still had those horrible sunglasses on.

Travelers stopped walking, stopped talking on their phones to see this spectacle.

The woman sitting on the luggage began to laugh.

Elizabeth covered her mouth. “Dear God, are you okay?”

“Violence?” he said. “Seriously?”

“He’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”

“NO!” He leaned away from me.

Elizabeth recovered and dropped her hands. “Go find another hotel! Get out!”

“Elizabeth, darling. . ”

“Elizabeth,” I said, “wait a minute, okay?”

I saw the front desk staff dispersing, one woman quickly coming out of the door.

Van Raye said to Elizabeth, “Please don’t. I have nothing.” He finally took his glasses off and folded them and put them in his parka’s pocket, withdrawing a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said. “I don’t have nothing exactly. I do have one thing. Sandeep knows. I’ve had a bit of success. For what I was searching for.”

Someone had summoned potbellied Mr. Blaney, and Albert from security followed.

“What has happened here?” Mr. Blaney said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Was someone struck?” Albert in his brown nylon jacket and tie wanted to know, his aftershave arriving with him.

“I’m handling everything,” Elizabeth said. “This is a family matter, and I apologize.”

“I’ll go get an incident report,” Albert said.

“I don’t need an incident report,” Elizabeth said. “Please leave us.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Blaney said and motioned for Albert to disperse, and Blaney left without a glance back.

Van Raye unzipped the jacket and said, “Seriously, Elizabeth? It takes a lot to admit this to you, but I am broke.”

“Broke you should be familiar with,” she said. “And we are always here to bail you out, aren’t we?”

“It’s not like that. That’s not true.” In a lower voice, he said, “You know what I’ve found.”

“Yes,” she said. “That has nothing to do with us.”

He let out a breath. “It has everything to do with everyone. Look, I need a place to stay. Ruth is here to help me work. She’s the only person who can help. She’s a genius.”

When we turned to see Ruth Christmas sitting on the luggage, she shrugged.

I reached out to Elizabeth, but she turned and stormed toward the elevator.

I hobbled on my cane to catch up to her. She pushed the button and waited for the elevator. I turned to Van Raye and held up a finger for him to stay away.

Elizabeth tried to control her breathing as she watched the numbers above the elevator. “The man will never change. I don’t want him here.”

“Yes, you do. Who was that back there that I just saw?”

“You mean the genius ?”

“No, I mean you.”

“Me?” she said.

“Yes. You were someone else, asking about his horn. And then you hit him.”

She closed her eyes and made a visible shudder. “Sandeep, look at me, I’m shaking. Yes, I struck someone.”

I leaned on my cane. “We can let him stay.”

“He’s using us.”

“What does that hurt? He’s going to do this anyway. We can let him work here. Just don’t get too close.”

Elizabeth considered the chandelier in the ceiling, then casually glanced at the woman across the lobby dressed in a green flight suit and with no hair.

“A genius ?” Elizabeth said sarcastically.

I quickly typed Ursula a message that I was coming to the room.

Elizabeth said, “‘Genius’ is a term tossed around too much, don’t you think? You’re a genius, Sandeep.”

I stopped typing and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“See, you can label anyone,” she said.

She took in a deep breath.

“Holy shit,” I said, “for a second there, you scared me.” Elizabeth and I watched the other woman put her feet up on the bags.

“His discovery won’t make this elevator any faster, will it?” she said.

“Dubourg and Ursula are here.”

She turned to me. “We’re supposed to be getting back on task here. I’m ready to put this hotel behind us.” She looked back at the two geniuses. “Book only one room for the geniuses. What do I care? Put them away together. We’ll pay for everything, of course.”

I went to my room to collect my cousins. We hugged and then divvied up my ski gear because I told them Van Raye was going to the roof to check out some antenna. Ursula cursed me for leaving her alone in the room and ended up putting on Dubourg’s wool pea coat, and Dubourg put on my hooded ski jacket. We took the service elevator to the attic storage room, and Dubourg and Ursula followed me through aisles of fold-up bed frames from some forgotten era, me following the path of ceiling lights Elizabeth had flipped on only minutes before, purplish and buzzing as they warmed inside wire cages. A set of steel stairs on the far wall went up to a landing and a single metal door. Halfway up, I had to catch my breath and my phone dinged:

Raye is with you.

I turned the phone to them. “Can you see this?” I said.

“No,” Dubourg said, patiently waiting behind me for my legs to rest.

Wind shook the door at the top of the landing and drew our attention, and I kept trudging upward. Ursula reached the door first and pushed its handle and the wind threw it open. Dubourg and I covered our eyes, blinking into the snow. This was the top of the hotel, literally in the sky, swirling with cold that immediately bit at my ears.

Elizabeth stood calmly in the wind shadow of a giant metal utility box, only the triangle of her wool overcoat lifting, her cheap sunglasses on. She pulled her scarf down to say something I couldn’t hear, and pointed. The flagpole’s halyard dinged a rhythm. Ducts leaked clouds of steam that tumbleweeded and thinned and disappeared before it got to an old satellite dish, and there was Van Raye marching toward us with arms raised, a giant smile on his face. “ There is more here! ” he shouted. “ Look at the people! ” The ends of his white hair were damp, snow collected on his cap.