Cosmic Hotel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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?”
    â€œYes,” I said, trying to avoid the subject. “You and Van Raye and me, we had a decent time in Sacramento together.”
    â€œ He had a decent time. I paid all the bills, and he had a vacation.He’d just published Report from Earth , which was an economic failure. Are you following the doctor’s tapering guidelines?”
    I hit the SUBMIT button for $5,000, and I stood up and tugged the waistband of my pants so that my cuffs sagged an inch and bunched at my socked feet. I got in her direct line of sight and turned so that my back was to her but she couldn’t see my right foot. I held my hands out beside me like a high diver.
    â€œWhat are you doing?”
    I spoke over my shoulder. “I’m feeling a strange force in this room.”
    â€œYou know I don’t like magic,” she said. Then she mumbled as though speaking to Karen Carpenter in the book, “He knows I don’t like magic,” and then to me, “Do you realize you’ve been on that medication for over half your life?”
    I faced the balcony doors. In the glass’s reflection a mosaic of lights shimmered from our living room and mixed with the stronger airport lights out there in the world, and I tried to ignore her question, which was a statement. I wondered if my cousin Ursula was flying one of those planes right now. I could see my mother’s reflection, formless on the couch behind me. I wiggled my toes to get ready to float right in front of her eyes.
    â€œI’m not looking,” she said very calmly, but I could tell from her voice that she was, and I did it, I levitated off the ground. Or that was the way it appeared to her sitting behind me—my heels floating off the ground a couple of inches. It’s a simple trick done by rotating onto the ball of one foot but keeping your heels together.
    â€œ My God! ” she said.
    I landed with a showy wobble and turned to see her face. She had her hand out as if she could block the trick.
    I’d gone to my first magic convention in Las Vegas when I was nine, and I got more duping delight out of tricking Elizabeth than anyone else in the world because I could tell that one side of her wanted to believe I had floated off the ground. Tonight, for the first time in my life, she actually said, “How did you do that?”
    â€œIt’s magic.”
    She picked up Karen Carpenter. “My God, if you could apply the same passion to the business . . .” She snapped the book shut and picked up the TV remote. She turned to the financial channel. I plopped down on the couch perpendicular to her and took the remote from her and turned on the menu. “You don’t need to watch the news.”
    â€œYes, I do,” she said.
    â€œNo, you don’t. It’s too real. Did you watch the news when we shut down the Crowne Suites in Denver? No, we watched Follow That Dream . When we shut down Sun Resort in Phoenix? We watched Clambake and Jailhouse Rock back to back.”
    â€œYes, I remember,” she said, “but I’m only interested in Elvis’s life, his biography, not the movies.”
    â€œBullshit.”
    â€œCursing is a sign of low intelligence,” she said, but then, “his movies are completely unrealistic, but they are interesting if you know what was going on in his real life when he was filming them.”
    Under the category “Romantic/Feel Good,” I selected Viva Las Vegas . “Admit it,” I said, “you like to watch Elvis movies when you are feeling bad.”
    â€œThis isn’t a bad night,” she said as her eyes actually read the FBI warning on the screen and she said, “Did you know when they were filming this, the tabloids obtained the stills from the wedding scene and published them