Cosmic Hotel

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In the beginning, maybe I should state some things I did believe in, things that had served me well. Dividends. Face-to-face meetings. I believed in the American business system and everything my mother taught me, and we were successful. I believed in the report she was giving that day, a slide-show presentation—“Final Report: Windmere Resort Properties.” I believed in the ten weeks of hard work we’d done at this hotel.

My mother, Elizabeth Sanghavi, stood in front of the room, holding the remote in the crook of her elbow. She stood with such perfect posture that her head touched the edge of the projector’s light, her hair aflame with negative cash-flow numbers. She was the best hotelier in the world and nobody was listening. I sat in the dark conference room watching the slides that justified this hotel’s closing, this very building’s eventual demolition. While she did this, the four men from the hotel’s parent corporation sat around the table staring into their personal devices, faces glowing with hockey scores or email jokes or whatever entertained them more than this, her work.

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