Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Someone in the room above us dropped something on the tile floor of their bathroom, a sound that came into the temporary life of Franni and Sandeep and then went.

“But that’s bullshit,” Franni said. She pulled her knee up beneath the covers and slammed it back down. “You want me to believe it’s real magic ?” she asked.

“Just believe what you want.”

“Just tell me how you did it,” she said.

I remembered one part of her story, that she had been the last person in Charleston or Mount Pleasant to know her husband was having an affair. Everyone knew but her. I remembered a chapter in Van Raye’s My Year of Quantum Weirdness about the steps he’d gone through when he’d been let inside the secret Borealis Project for the Department of Energy. Step 1 was disbelief — this isn’t real. One of the other steps was that you felt like a fool for not knowing what had been going on all along, and what everyone else knew.

I began explaining the trick. “It’s really a variation of a famous card trick, ‘The Ambitious Card,’” I said. “Seemingly supercilious motions are usually the most important,” and I explained, and in doing so, even to me, it seemed simple and only depended on knowing how to double-card coasters.

After the explanation, there was silence in the room except for the humming of human occupancy around us, and as she was thinking about the trick, I said, “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and found out there was life on another planet?”

She began crying again. “ It would be horrible! ” she said. She picked up the sheet and wiped her face. “I remember being twenty-one. .” she said.

“I’m not twenty-one,” I said because I know I looked young.

She paid no attention to my comment and said, “And I remember thinking anything was possible. I always thought I would work in New York. When I was your age, I wondered, ‘What is Paris like?’ but then I had this feeling that one day I would go to Paris or even to the moon — shit, that wasn’t beyond the possibility — and I was happy. You know when you were little, someone mentions the moon, and you can say to yourself, ‘I’ll probably go to the moon one day’. .” She started to cry and her voice got higher, and she said, “I’m in Dallas! I’m certainly never going to the moon . Why is that so depressing?”

“You can still go to Paris,” I said.

“ I’ve been to Paris! ” she said. “That’s not the point. You just keep moving to a state of unhappiness. I mean it’s a scientific fact, I mean they’ve done studies, the older you get, when you take LSD, the more bad trips you have.” I tried to follow her. “Because your general outlook becomes bleaker,” she said. “When you’re young, you have more good trips because you still have time, and more time makes you more optimistic about everything .”

This was the worst conversation I had ever had, the walls absorbing our bad experience with forty-plus years of experiences, which dawned on me as a stupid theory, as if you could play the room back like a phonograph, the needle playing in the grooves left by the impressions of all the lives.

I looked at the dark lumps of my clothes on the floor. Tomorrow morning I would be in Phoenix in that jacket. Then I would be in Atlanta in that jacket, those shoes. I heard my phone vibrate as if my clothes knew I needed a reason to leave this room. I was getting a very panicky depression.

I got up and went through the orange light of the room and got my phone to see the text. It had originated as a *865, which meant someone from the front desk.

call on business center phone. Long distance. Can’t transfer. Do you want?

Van Raye was calling on the landline again. I began grabbing my pants. “Can you call Lisa?”

“Why? What are you doing?”

“I hate this, but I’ve got to go. I have an important phone call.”

“I think it’s better if you just go,” she said, angry with me for putting a bow on this bad experience.

“Well, can you call Lisa? I can’t leave you here like this.”

“I’m okay.”

I buttoned my shirt. The room smelled like our earthy alfalfa-sprout sex, and I also caught a whiff of her suitcase/home smell.

“Are you okay?” I said. I put my feet in my shoes, stuffed socks and tie into my pocket. “Look,” I said quickly, “you and Lisa are going to start a new life. Leave all the bad stuff here. Write it all down and stuff the note in the razor blade disposal in the back of the medicine cabinet. It’ll go into the wall. That’s what I do when I want to forget something. This hotel will be gone within a year, and all this will be gone. Call Lisa. You need Lisa.”

And I left the room.

I took the elevator down, trotted through the quarter-staffed lobby so I wouldn’t keep Van Raye waiting on the line. Why didn’t he, a genius, carry a fucking phone and call my cell phone? I went down the hallway of empty conference rooms. The phone was off the hook in CUBE 1, and I yanked it up and said, “ Hello! ” I cleared my throat. There was nothing. “ Charles? ” There was only the wash of long distance and then music began — an electric guitar and Elvis’s singing, “ Bright lights city . .”

I had time to think, Why is he playing this? But then I knew it wasn’t Charles. Who knew that Elizabeth and I had been watching that movie? My body went weak with confusion, and the dark business center and conference room suddenly felt threatening. Did anyone see me come in here? The conference room across the glass hallway was dark and empty. I took my phone out and scrolled to see the song “Viva Las Vegas” sitting dormant on my playlist, “Songs to Beat Depression.”

“Hello?” I said, switching ears.

“. . and I’m just the devil with love to spare . . ”

“Who is this?” I thumbed my phone to airplane mode to disconnect it from the world. Who had gotten my information? A disgruntled, newly released ex-employee of Windmere? A hacker?

I disconnected the landline by pressing the button, let it go and listened to the ancient sound of a dial tone, and put my finger on the button to disconnect, but something made me wait.

In two seconds the old phone rang beneath my finger, sending a shock through my arm, and I let it go and the line opened and the bongos and maracas and the electric guitar intro began again—“. . how I wish there was more than twenty-four hours in the day . . ”

I swear I thought I could feel someone listening on the other end. “Hello, who is this?”

I waited an excruciating time until the song ended, but then there were clicks and the line went dead and then an annoying BEEP-BEEP-BEEP . The piece of paper on the pad still told me “Geneva 1000x,” and I ripped it up, threw it in the wastebasket as if it were the cause of my problems.

I waited for the phone to ring again, but it didn’t as if the person on the other end knew I wasn’t going to answer it this time, and I went out into the lobby, eyed the single bellhop reading his newspaper on the podium, his hands braced on each side like a lecturer.

He straightened when he saw me coming, a night-shifter working alone whom I didn’t recognize.

I said, “Did you answer that phone?”

“Yes,” he said. “For Sanghavi.”

“Who was on the other end?”

“Operator for Sanghavi.”

I turned away from the bellhop, fingering my tie and socks balled in my jacket pockets.

I considered that Van Raye was playing some kind of joke on me, which meant he was thinking about me. That made no sense. He wouldn’t waste time on me.