“You’re hearing the music from downstairs.”
“No,” she said. “It’s different music. It’s comes from inside me. I feel it too, like vibrations. Like music-box music.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, matching her quiet tone, “you have been through a lot.”
There was only the light coming through the curtains flapping in the breeze.
“You are hallucinating because your mind, well,” he said, “you’re overloaded. You’re struggling, and you have conflicting instincts. Your mind is looking for some way for there to be something that will make you feel better about having feelings for this . . .” He waved his hand over her belly.
“Fetus?” she said.
The room was silent. The curtains still.
“Are you hearing it now?” he said.
“Maybe. I shouldn’t have told you.”
He said, “I can assure you that in reality, there is no music.” His ear was against her chest. “There’s no music.”
“How do you know? You’re on the outside.”
When Ruth had been aboard the spacecraft Infinity, and she’d found out she was pregnant—this was after she’d listened to the broadcast for Van Raye—she’d started packing to come back to Earth, stuffing personal items in her bag, and then grabbed the gain amplifier just in time because Cosmonaut X stuck his head in her quarters and asked what she was doing.
No one knew her condition, especially not him.
“Leaving,” she said, fanning away a group of monarchs fluttering about her cabin. Her sleeping bag was hung on the wall like a giant chrysalis itself, butterflies decorating its outside, hundreds of pulsing wings. It was nearly impossible not to occasionally smash a butterfly, and the crew was constantly vacuuming up carcasses, an experiment on growth and flight that had gotten out of control.
Ruth floated her duffle down the trans-tube, then followed it, and then Cosmonaut X followed her to the bay where orange monarchs were disturbed into confetti fluttering up, down, and sideways. She braced her feet on each side of the escape pod’s hatch and strained to open it.
Cosmonaut X went to the intercom and said, “We have a crew member loading her things into the emergency capsule.”
In seconds the other five crewmembers were watching her entering information on the computer.
“It’s been rough on everyone,” Jane said.
“I can’t do it again right now,” Ruth said, “I just can’t.”
The station began emerging from Earth’s shadow and the sunlight hit the station’s skin and began creaking.
Cosmonaut X floated in the high corner, arms folded. Ruth stuck her head in the escape capsule and scanned to make sure there were no butterflies there. What would butterflies born in zero gravity think of gravity?
“You volunteered for that walk,” Jane said. “You don’t have to go out anymore, okay? Don’t do this.”
Ruth’s hair floated like the Bride of Frankenstein. “It’s not that,” she said. “I’ve got other reasons.”
There was a loud pop as the sunlight intensity peaked on the space station’s exterior.
Ruth quickly gripped the handle and went into the capsule feet-first, stuck her head back out like an angry gopher. “There’s shit going on that none of you can imagine. I’m getting the hell out of here. There are two more seats on this thing, anyone else want out?”
No one spoke.
“Then start the sequence.” She reached to pull the hatch closed but the leverage was awkward.
“That is a big mass,” Cosmonaut X said, not uncrossing his arms, as if the hatch would stop her.
“You don’t know where you’ll come down,” Jane said. “Give us twenty to come up with trajectories.”
“And then I’ll have to wait for a window and have time to think about this? No.” She struggled with the heavy hatch but no one helped until finally Cosmonaut X pushed himself off the wall in a flutter of butterflies and grabbed the hatch. He touched her hand first. “Because of me?” he said.
“Jesus, don’t flatter yourself.” His flight suit was smeared with more black protoplasm than the others. “A port in a storm,” she whispered, looking around to see if anyone else heard or understood this slight of intimacy.
When the hatch was shut, through the round window she saw everyone exiting the airlock. In six minutes, after she was buckled in and the pressure had fallen inside the airlock, she watched through the porthole as the butterflies froze into unrecognizable specks, and when the pod separated from the station and the tiny boosters hissed, stabilizing her into a decaying orbit Earthward. The computers came up with an emergency-landing target, and she heard Uree over the com say, “How’s your Mongolian?” and the signal faded as Infinity continued over Earth’s horizon and Ruth’s pod fell behind like a dropped buoy and her porthole began to glow in the fire that separated space and Earth, and she felt the first g grab her in her center of mass where it always started, in her gut near where this thing lived inside her, and the pod began shaking, and Ruth began grunting, contracting the muscles in her stomach and legs. She had always grunted “monster” when reentering. Everyone had his or her own g-load word to grunt. She grunted “monster” to dam the blood flow in her head—“Mmmmmmm-onster . . .” taking a quick breath and repeating, straining, “Mmm-onstersss.” She flinched when something fell out of the instrument panel, and she watched the cosmopolitan butterfly beat dying in the crook of her arm as she began to pass out.
CHAPTER 22
When his house was quiet for the night, Van Raye and Ruth made love, and she fell asleep, but his eyes were wide, trying to listen for signs the dog was downstairs, but there was only the hiss of distant interstate traffic coming through the open balcony doors. He tried to shut his eyes. No more dog. Problem solved, but then he was thinking about the freeway and the possibility of the dog wandering into traffic. He bolted upright.
He got dressed, left Ruth sleeping, and as he slid on his bedroom shoes he noticed a pack of cigarettes on the dresser. He thought he’d secretly taken them all. What is she doing? He grabbed the pack and wadded it into his pocket and went quietly down the back steps to the first floor and through the grand dining room. He held his breath for a few minutes, listening and watching the tiny lights of power tools recharging, and he looked around for the animal. Dog, be safe, he begged, and then: Why do I care? A black shape on the kitchen floor raised its head. Van Raye fumbled around to find the leash on the counter.
In the middle of the night, he took the bus to the animal shelter, the dog riding obediently in the aisle. At the front of the shelter—a strikingly modern building—he peeked through the glass doors into the dim waiting area inside and saw one luckless night watchman at the desk. Van Raye took a circuitous route to the rear, the dog walking slowly on his leash. A single tube flickered over a loading dock and cast purplish light on the wall of empty cages and the words NO QUESTIONS DROP-OFF.
Van Raye pulled his lighter out to see the list of instructions by the cage. They were too long to bother reading. He wasn’t stupid. It was simple. He opened the mesh-steel doors and kneed the dog to get inside the cage. He pushed its neck to keep him inside, the dog swallowing against his hand. He tried to think about all the work he had to do, his upcoming book tour, finding an easy way to get rid of Ruth before the pregnancy or another decision became an issue, deciding what message he would send to Chava Norma, and reminding himself that this wasn’t his dog. You couldn’t abandon what didn’t belong to you.
He got the door shut and secured the latch, smelling the dog’s sour panting.
He went down the dock stairs and through a gate at the back of the complex and into an open-space park, a long expanse of grass sparkling dewy in the moonlight. He headed toward the electric whine of a bus in the distance and the warm glow of campus beyond. He saw a clump of something he’d thought were bushes but were actually resting cows. A beast disturbed, stood. A glint of stray urban light shown off the cow’s side and Van Raye sto
oped forward to see. He’d been waiting for the dog to bark in the cage behind him but nothing happened, and he found his lighter and flicked it on so he could see what was on this cow’s side. The cow—a good research cow from one of the dark pharmaceutical companies surrounding the field—was patient and still, let Van Raye get closer with the lighter. There was only the sound of grass being ripped from the ground and the crunching of cud in molars. The thing on the side of the cow was a porthole, a medical porthole into the gut of the animal. Van Raye saw gummy pink intestines smashed against the glass. Van Raye let the lighter’s flame go at the exact moment the cow startled and began to trot, Van Raye high-stepping in the other direction, stopping only when he was out of breath and realized his right shoe seemed heavier than his left.
CHAPTER 23
The sun slid down into the frame of our hospital window and the parallelogram of yellow moved across the tile floor as my roommate watched a news show about a man who’d killed his wife on their Jamaican honeymoon. Luckily our door had been propped open, and I could cut my eyes to study people walking past, the parallelogram of window light stalking me, finally climbing onto the side of my bed like it did every afternoon. I watched every old woman going by our door—walkers, wheelchairs, shuffling in bedroom slippers—to see if I could determine who Rose Epstein was, the woman’s voice that called through the wall. I was a little obsessed with finding out who she was.
Elizabeth came in the door carrying a new paper sack with a change of clothes, and Leggett watched her go over and take my cup from the table and fill it with water. She put it to my lips, and a pewter charm dangling from her neck caught the sunlight—the elephant head of Ganesha. I didn’t even know she had this charm, this remover of obstacles.
She saw me looking at it and leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, stilling the nerves for a second.
She opened the paper bag to get my new pair of pajamas and the nurse came in and rolled me on my side to change my diaper. When they did this, they had no idea the dead weight of my high arm crushed my chest, and for these fifteen seconds I couldn’t breathe. They folded the dirty diaper beneath me. The nurse inspected the Foley catheter going into the tip of my penis, ran the tube and the bag through the leg of my pajamas, hung the bag on the end of the bed, and pulled the pants up. She gave me the cold shot of heparin in the gut and went away.
“Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked me, watching me swallow one more cup of water.
I blinked once, yes.
Leggett’s news program was interviewing the husband in his orange prison jumpsuit.
Elizabeth stepped on a pedal beneath the bed, and the motor hummed and the whole bed rose until she could put her hands on the railing, bracelets pushing up, and she bent to whisper, “Sandeep, think about how happy we are going to be when all this is over.”
She straightened herself. She went and got the paper bag, stuffed the old pajamas inside, and put her purse on her shoulder. She straightened her posture. “I’m going to run away and work for Sky Cargo.” When she stopped to look at herself in the mirror above the sink, putting her hair back in place, she looked like a stranger. She turned and smiled at me. “I’m joking, of course, but I look at Gypsy every day, the people working, loading and unloading. Everyone seems happier than we do.” Inside the bracelets was her watch, and she noted the time. “She’s coming to see you tonight, right?”
I didn’t blink because I didn’t know. Some nights Ursula did, some nights she had to fly.
“I know she comes here. I smell whiskey on your breath every morning.” She kissed my cheek. She sighed. “I’m glad you have each other. You know that, right?”
I blinked yes.
On her way out, she ignored Leggett in the other bed as usual. She left my bed a good four feet in the air.
When she was gone, Leggett stared at the shut door and said, “What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vender?” I hated him. “‘Make me one with everything,’” he said.
At night, after the last chimes had played over the PA to signal visiting hours were over, Ursula came in trailing the light from the hallway, put her things down, poured one cup of whiskey, which she gave me a sip from, and pulled up a chair, propped her feet on the railing of my bed, and began reading Strieber’s classic, Communion, “‘This is the story of one man’s attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown.’”
During her late-night visits I had to lay and listen to how abductees supposedly recovered lost memories through hypnosis, though I knew that hypnosis had been scientifically proven to create false memories. Leggett, when he was awake, seemed to listen to her, making no comment, mostly looking at her as she read the words of some third-rate journalists and hokey scientists with titles like “Harvard educated . . .”
When she finished for the night, her steps were often too deliberately careful, and she always came and touched me one last time for the night, kissing my cheek and then left.
When the darkness took back over the room, and Leggett fidgeted in pain, grunting, the night belonged to Rose Epstein who came alive shouting her name through the wall.
Leggett grimaced and said in the darkness, “Did you hear about the deaf gynecologist?” He gripped the railing with one hand, his gold Masonic ring glinting. His other hand raised the morphine clicker like he was a contestant on a game show of pain, and he finally said, “He reads lips!” and pressed the button, and there was the snap of the solenoid, and on his monitor above his rising heart beat, the green appeared.
I began dreading his passing into sleep each night, the dose of morphine taking him away because then I heard the narcotics cabinet keys go swishing past our door, and I waited what seemed forever for Rose Epstein. “I’m Rose Epstein . . . ”
It was hard to tell the difference between sleep and just living through the night, stranded inside my head, but this made me vulnerable to an experience that I have to write about if I’m going to tell the truth about everything.
A teaching hospital such as this is a surreal place where people often came into the darkened room—doctors and interns administering tests just outside the dome of light surrounding my bed, asking each questions about my condition, trying on diagnoses. I was often taken to different exam rooms in the middle of the night, once waking to a woman outside the light surrounding my bed, asking, “Babinski reflex?” I wanted to answer no I wasn’t Babinski Reflex, but someone uncovered my feet, which seemed a million miles from my head, like looking backward through binoculars. The man rubbed a tongue depressor along my sole, something I didn’t feel, and when my toes curled, everyone seemed to be impressed and said, “Babinski reflex,” and took notes on their phones.
I once woke in a strange room where doctors spoke Spanish and inserted needles below my skin delivering shocks that convulsed dormant muscles and produced peaks and waves on a computer next to my bed. The only English was “This will be a little uncomfortable,” though I wasn’t sure who spoke it. The needle pricked into my leg, and the electric stimulus was delivered to my thigh, then my calves, and when the needle and the wires were taken away, doctors in the dark began asking me questions.
“Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”
Thoughts of suicide?
“Are you generally happy about the world?”
No.
“Have you had unexplainable missing or lost time?”
No.
“Do you have any unusual scars or marks on your body you can’t explain?”
Just outside the dome of light, I saw the reflections on the surfaces of blank eyes, saw their slender bodies and the large heads of the classic Greys. It is happening to me, I thought, even though I write this with the confidence that it was a dream. In the dim light I saw the four-jointed fingers I’d read about, and a great wave of relief washed over my body, not because the pain had stopped but because there were aliens around my bed. I tried to catch my breath and at the time I only felt terrified and wonderful, thinking that at last something fant
astic was real.
“Do you have memories of floating through the air?” one asked.
Yes. I was communicating my answer telepathically.
“Have you ever been paralyzed for unexplained reasons?” said another. These were all classic abduction questions.
Yes.
“Had any unusual nose bleeds?”
Yes.
“Have you had long-time problems with insomnia, the cause of which is puzzling to you?”
Yes.
“Are you more comfortable being in crowds, more comfortable with sleeping among people?”
In hotels.
“We will be releasing you from this paralysis.”
You are doing this to me, I said without speaking, and I remember floating out in the hallway, just my body, floating down the hallway toward the elevator and back to my room.
The next morning I simply woke in my room, and the nursing staff and Elizabeth rolled my body and I began the fifteen seconds of suffocation that started every day as my diaper was changed. Everything was normal, but I felt wonderful. When Elizabeth asked me if I was okay, as she did every morning, I blinked yes, yes, yes, yes. This was the euphoria of understanding.
During those strange few days of believing, I gave up my obsessive search for Rose Epstein. I didn’t intentionally stop, I just knew that every woman I saw was Rose Epstein who wanted to go home, and every man was Rose Epstein, and I was Rose Epstein and Rose Epstein was me, and I was also James Leggett and his jokes, and I liked his jokes, even the simple stupid ones. The jokes were funny. Why hadn’t I known this before?
I’m glad I couldn’t speak during this stage of my life because I would have shouted to everyone who would listen, It’s real! The lunacy of a new convert. It might be lunacy, but I think anyone would want it. If you make fun of people who believe in UFOs or Jesus, then you just can’t remember how great it feels, how fucking great it feels, to believe in something fantastic.
Cosmic Hotel Page 16
