Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

She was right, of course; during high points of his life he never needed Elizabeth or me. If what he said he’d done was true.

I got the bellhops to take our twelve boxes to the shuttle and tipped the driver fifty dollars. These were our possessions that traveled the country ahead of us, including my plastic aquarium, five first editions of Van Raye’s books, my childhood copy of Eloise , my clothes, and the photo album that contained my certificates from seminars. I had completed an online degree in finance, but my real education had been in hotel seminars held by foresters, lathers, magicians, amateur radio operators, celestial navigators, and UFO believers. I was even a certified pruner according to the National Ornamental Fruit Growers Association, a seminar I attended out of boredom in Miami’s Grand South Resort when I was a teenager. Elizabeth said only in America can people dream up so many certificates and qualifications.

Back up in our suite, I sat on the couch and barely got my breath before I heard Elizabeth’s keycard in the door and the electronic lock spinning. She came in, removed her shoes and slid the multitudes of bracelets off her wrists as she walked toward her room, saying nothing to me.

I thumbed through the UFO Mysteries before tossing it on the table when my phone vibrated. It was a text from my cousin on Van Raye’s side, Dubourg.

Where r u? CVG 230–430 tomorow?

I texted back:

Dallas. Cant do. I have a meeting in PHX, direct flight.

Ursula is flyin. Tell her that I miss her when you see her in PHX

Will not see her. There quick and to Atlanta

You’ll see her

Before I could ask him what he meant by seeing cousin Ursula, Elizabeth came out of her room, sari snapping at her ankles, and went to the kitchenette and unscrewed the wine and poured herself a glass, got a container of pasta and came and sat down at the dining room table, opened her laptop, put on her cheap reading glasses, and began tapping out what I knew would be the “Final Report to Shareholders.” Her black violin case sat out of reach at the other end of the table.

“You don’t care what’s happening? He’s done it,” I said.

Her fingers continued tapping the report and she said, “Did he say if it has been confirmed?”

“He said not yet.” I went to the headlines page on my phone and saw only a budget battle in Congress and a color picture of a mass wedding in South Korea, not that I expected there to be headlines that life had been found on another planet. The only sign of Van Raye was an email in my box from an account penjin863@cip.in, which had his bank information.

While Elizabeth told me that nothing was true until it was confirmed, I thumbed through the email looking for and finding no thank you, no name, but the simple secret code word—“Geneva.” The man hated email and cell phones until he needed money. I logged in to my First America account.

“But,” she said, “if pressed for an opinion at this point, I believe he thinks he’s done it. Charles is a lot of things, but he wouldn’t lie about his work. Which doesn’t mean he hasn’t made a mistake.” She closed the laptop and there was a thin light sandwich for three seconds before the processor went dark.

She came to the sofa chair beside me with her book, Little Girl Blue: The Life of Karen Carpenter , and her wine, and I put my phone down.

She eyed it. “Did he ask you for money?”

“Elizabeth, he has made the greatest discovery in human history. Guess where he was calling from.”

She hated when I started a statement with “Guess. .” Her finger continued dropping below each line as she read about Karen Carpenter, this finger moving a remnant of a depressing speed-reading seminar we attended together years ago in a hotel I couldn’t remember, though she could surely remember even the weave of the carpet.

“India,” I said.

Her finger stopped on the page to think and she said, “Even India doesn’t deserve him.”

She could talk about India as if it was no part of her, changing her citizenship as the moment and mood demanded, and could certainly make comments as if I weren’t half him. She was a self-reliant only child whose hoteling father and her mother brought her to the US when she was five. She had no surviving family members in the states, and she had started telling me early in my life, “The traditional nuclear family is not a necessary unit for success.” When I was a kid, I thought “nuclear” meant something to do with Van Raye’s work, and because of him we were a special “nuclear family.”

“He said it was the noise of an advanced planet.”

“They call it an exoplanet ,” she said.

“You pretend like you don’t read his books.”

“I’ve never said I don’t read his books. I like the science if only he would stick to science.” She turned a page to see where the end of the current chapter in Karen Carpenter’s life was.

“I don’t know if we should go to Atlanta,” I said.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“Shouldn’t we wait to see what is going to happen? Everything is about to change.”

After she sipped her Chardonnay, the gold meniscus ring shimmered inside like a trapped halo. “What does life on another planet have to do with the price of American Telephone and Telegraph?”

“I hate it when you say that.” I was sure this was something her father said to her.

“Will it help us go through middle management in Atlanta? Does it help us determine margins, the real margins? Will it suddenly make the next property and the existing structure a wonderful investment for shareholders?”

“I don’t know. If he’s right. .”

She said, “You are looking for any reason not to do your job.”

“God,” I said and put my hands over my eyes. “Why don’t we buy our own property, huh? We could have had the Desert Palm Inn last year. We’ve got the capital. We could have financed only 80 percent, conservatively. We are a banker’s dream.”

“And when the Desert Palm failed, then what?”

“Everything can fail.”

“Ha, you’ve never been there when your own property fails. It’s so. . it’s so public . Everyone knows. It killed my father and my mother.”

She rose and went to the kitchenette. Over the bar I could see her refill her wineglass and pour me a glass.

She said, “You don’t know how good it is to have a job to go to. We have no property, but we have this extensive knowledge nothing can happen to. Everyone in the business knows us and respects us.”

“I’m not sure it’s exactly like you think.”

“We do a job that no one in the world can do better and we are paid well. That’s how it looks to me.”

“We have all this capital, what are we supposed to do with it.”

“It’ll be yours when I’m gone.”

“And what am I supposed to do with it?”

She looked at me as if I were unbelievable. “Give it to your children,” she said.

I turned my phone and looked at the SUBMIT TRANSACTION for $3,000 to Van Raye, which looked miserly now. Wouldn’t $4,000 make more of an impression on him?

She came with my glass, sat down again, saw my phone and began, “He comes into our lives only when he needs something. You mistake this for a relationship. We’re going to Phoenix for some business development and then to Atlanta, and we will do our jobs. Control life, don’t let life control you.” She looked at me over the top of her glasses and said, “Have you tapered your medications?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to avoid the subject. “You and Van Raye and me, we had a decent time in Sacramento together.”