Cosmic Hotel by Russ Franklin Page A

What is this machine called? ” I remember her being startled once when I asked, “If you die, would Randolph die too?” She simply said, “I’m not going to die.”
    I don’t remember when she stopped doing Randolph, but it was a part of my childhood that had been helpful, used, and then put down.
    â€œCome on,” I said to her now in DFW, “Randolph one more time. You know, I want to hear the voice.”
    â€œYou’re almost thirty years old,” she said. I could tell she was mulling it over. Randolph never made requested appearances. Had Elizabeth become even more serious over the years, lost the ability to be Randolph?
    â€œAren’t you over that?” she said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnyway, I certainly don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.
    I could see a hint of a smile, but she kept reading without that index finger scanning each line in Karen Carpenter’s life.
    Finally the counter agent called over the speaker, “Passengers Sandeep and Elizabeth Sanghavi please see an airline representative,” probably thinking we were some married couple. People either thought it was weird or noble that I’d traveled my whole life with my mother. To me, it was just us.
    â€œMarvelous,” Elizabeth said, standing at the announcement. She marched up to the counter, still wearing her cheap glasses, and got our upgrades.
    She came back and gave both boarding passes to me. “This isn’t an overindulgence,” she said. I had heard the upgrade lecture before because she was on constant watch for overindulgence, which, according to her, this country was full of.
    â€œIt’s not free, we earned it,” she said. “The service in business class is the same as coach was twenty years ago. Now, let’s walk to some retail stores.”
    I sighed. “Can’t we just wait here?”
    â€œNo,” she said, “walking around will keep you awake.”
    â€œWhy do I have to stay awake?”
    â€œIt’s daytime,” she said.
    I knew she was going to go into Hammell Brothers Clothiers to take pictures of the inventory like she always did, exclaiming how many choices there were and how full the inventories were. “What kind of country is this?” she would declare.
    I told her no, I was staying right here. I couldn’t take another speech on the economy and trends, and us looking like we were just off the plane and had never seen Hammell Brothers before.
    She took her digital camera out and left her bag and violin with me, and she walked toward the intersection of our concourse.
    I leaned my elbow on my bag, closed my eyes, and began concentrating on listening to the sounds of an airport, making my body, mostly my hands and mind, be still. A man’s voice raised to cellphone level said, “I got no friendly face, I got no yuck-yuck-yuck,” and then the Doppler shift of his voice as he went away, and his conversation merged into other spoken words and sentences until all conversations blended into babble that sounds the same no matter where you are in the world—a hotel in Chicago, the lobby of a busy theatre in Paris. This reminded me of what Van Raye had said—“It’s like a bunch of patterns of communications unintentionally radiating into space.” He’d called it “the Big Murmur.”
    I opened my eyes. A pilot stood in front of me with one of those black bags pilots roll along like obedient dogs, the kind with the stickers of all the aircraft they’d flown.
    Maybe I had fallen asleep, but now I let my eyes make the roam of the vigilant traveler, a subconscious inventory of things: our two bags, boarding passes, and a mental alarm went off. Where was Elizabeth’s violin case? I looked behind my seat and saw only an ugly magazine subscription card on the floor. The nearest person was a woman feeding her baby. I walked toward her, looking under seats as