Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

The low-pressure system dumped its snow and twirled over the Atlantic to fizzle and be forgotten. I attended meetings in the hotel and watched committees that lacked enthusiasm because they were shutting this hotel down, and when I left meetings, I put myself into a phone booth in the lobby not caring if I looked crazy sitting there staring at the world going by.

I mumbled, “Call me, dammit,” because I needed proof that Randolph had happened to me, but he wasn’t responding — no ringing, no Elvis songs, the last conversation having disappeared.

Out the big windows on the back of the hotel lobby was the sky over the airport. The storm had left in its wake harsh sunshine that lasted for days as though the great factory of weather was spent of raw material, and there was little proof that there was ever a storm except for tiny patches of snow around telephone poles or in the northern shadows of buildings. That’s the crazy part about the present: there is rarely satisfying proof that anything really happened in the past.

I wanted everyone to believe that Randolph was someone not from this planet who was a great finder of lost things, but no one would come out and say they trusted me, not even Dubourg or Ursula.

What Ruth was doing should have made me feel like she believed in me. She and Elizabeth purchased a small military satellite dish for the twenty-seventh, but instead of feeling good about this my stomach was constantly churning. The setup had cost $5,125. What if this Randolph was some mad professor in some snowbound laboratory who hated Van Raye, some guy with a T3 connection and a ham radio wanting to make Van Raye look like an idiot? The number “27” loomed in my mind.

Sitting in the booth, I caught the eye of the middle-aged bellhop with a beard like Moses. I waved. He didn’t wave back. Honestly, these employees were taking the closing better than any group we’d ever cut loose. Maybe this was because — though I was one of the Sanghavis — I was also Van Raye’s, “the professor’s,” son.

Over the days, Charles’s eye had turned from black to purple, and if he were working on a secret plan, he was anything but incognito in the Grand Aerodrome. He greeted maids in Spanish, talking and laughing with them. He knew every employee’s first name, from engineering to front-desk agents.

While Ruth spent most of her time crawling through access passages, dragging cable or bowed over her computers in the attic, Van Raye barhopped the three hotel bars, his favorite being the Outer Marker on the convention level where he always sat at the corner stool and shouted, “Ron, my favorite mixologist!” Ron would place a handwritten RESERVED sign at Van Raye’s place when he wasn’t there, and Ron would quickly mix a gin and tonic every afternoon while Van Raye scribbled in his black-and-white notebook, the kind he always used, the notebooks mottled like dairy cows. He didn’t look like a man recording history, but rather a man on vacation as hotel employees, people he knew by name, disappeared into unemployment, and eventually Ron the bartender was gone and all the liquor in the Outer Marker inventoried and taken away. Only one bar on the lobby level remained open.

I came out of the phone booth to intercept a Gypsy Sky Cargo man strolling across the lobby with a package under his arm. Of course it was addressed to me, and I signed and took it, expecting it to be the usual heavy hardware, but it was surprisingly light, though lightness, I had learned, didn’t mean inexpensive.

I rode the glass elevator with the light package under my arm, wondering where the concrete of these walls of this hotel would be in a year’s time. Where would the pump to the fake rainforest fountain be? Would it ever be used again, or would it sit out decades in storage or be sent to a landfill? Would birds and dragonflies one day fly through the air that had once been this great hotel, sensing for a second the thousands of old lives that had lived in this space? Would Van Raye be not just science famous, but famous famous?

On the twelfth, I went through the laundry room, which was still perfectly stacked with white towels and linens that might never reach a guest’s hands again. Where would they go? On the far wall, I punched the service elevator’s button and noticed words scratched on the metal plate. Some employee had etched “heaven” over the elevator’s up button, and on the DOWN button scratched “Atlanta.”

The elevator took me to the attic, and the doors opened onto the big, open room, the full size of the hotel’s floor plan and interspersed with load-bearing columns. The old furniture from past years was stored there, and there was my whole family in an oasis of light in the center, five players in The Musical Based on My Life: Elizabeth playing her violin; Ursula sitting sideways in a King Henry chair; Dubourg at a table and gluing what looked like ping-pong balls to clothespins. Van Raye was lying on the couch and reading from his milk-cow notebook held awkwardly above his head. Ruth was at a table burdened with five CPUs stripped of their casings. Sitting in the center of the rug was the $5,125 portable receiver and dish, deployed like a metal daisy.

Dubourg saw the box under my arm, put his glue gun down, and took it from me.

“What is it?” I asked.

He judged the box’s weight and said, “Charles, I think it’s the hats.”

“Hats?” I said. It pissed me off to be in the dark about expenditures.

Elizabeth stood with her violin, and she wore the same clothes she’d had on the day before, her eyes closed as she played Bach.

Charles put his notebook on his chest, put his arm across his eyes. I asked him, like I did every day, “Isn’t there someone else to call, some way to check on the dog?” He was trying to doze now, his lips slightly parted. The days were marked by the metamorphosis of his eye, and I realized looking at the new avocado color, nearly healed, that it reminded me of the Gypsy Cargo logo of the Luna moth’s eye.

“I wouldn’t even know what to ask them,” he said.

The back of Ursula’s King Henry chair was at least five feet high, and she was sideways in the chair reading Flying magazine.

Dubourg, straddling his valise, slit the new package open with his pocketknife and pulled out a stack of baseball hats, white A s on the front.

“Atlanta Braves hats?” I said. “I’m not paying for those. Who ordered hats ?”

“They are important, actually,” Van Raye said. “It’ll help us in the dark.”

“What dark?” I asked.

“We’re going hiking on the twenty-seventh. At night,” Van Raye said.

“What? Jesus, I’m funding this project, and I demand that I approve everything and be told. Why the hell do we need hats and why are we going hiking ?”

Elizabeth played softer and said, “I decided we should go away from the city lights on the twenty-seventh.”

“Why?” I said, “That’s not necessary. This thing can receive from anywhere there’s a clear view of the sky.”

“To see the space station,” Elizabeth said. “It’s for her.” She indicated Ruth. Ruth’s back was to us. She was lost in her four computer monitors.

Dubourg put his baseball cap on, the bill straight, and said, “We all think it might be good for her.”

“Great,” I said, plopping down on the other couch in this living area under the dome of floor lamps and table lamps. “I don’t think we need to make it a big production. We don’t know what will happen. If anything will.”

I held my breath and stared at Ursula’s profile until she told me, “Stop.”