Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  “I know,” I said. “I just—”

  “No, you don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it knocks you out, and, you know, erases your memory. You don’t want to be that deep asleep. Ever.”

  She got out of the covers, slammed the bottle down and it bounced on the floor. She said, “Too many people take these. You don’t want to be that out.”

  “Aliens aren’t coming to take me.”

  She had on that worn-out fake jersey with the peeling “20.” She put her feet on the floor so she was facing me, had on gray cutoff sweatpants. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “You believe what you believe. In a weird way, I can completely understand why you do this. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

  “Feel good? To live in constant fear it’s going to happen tonight?” she said. She got back under the comforter.

  “If someone could snap their fingers,” I said, “and make it never happen to you again, would you do it?”

  She thought about it. “No.”

  “But you’re scared all the time.”

  “Like a cat on a windy day,” she said.

  “Ur, just don’t get hypnotized. Okay?” Almost all the abductees she read about got hypnosis to supposedly regain memories. They only engrained false memories. She had read this too, but I still wanted to make sure.

  “Did I say I was fucking getting hypnotized?”

  “Stop cussing so much. It just means you don’t know how to express yourself.”

  “Jesus, I’m freezing,” she said.

  Her fingers were holding the covers beneath her chin as she ceiling-stared, and she said, “I wish you would just open your mind for once. I have several floating experiences I remember, I mean when I was a kid. I remember flying over the woods, seeing the highway. I literally have seen the V wake of snakes swimming in the river at night, moonlight reflecting on the water. They aren’t dreams.”

  “Ur, we literally grew up thinking there was a spaceship crashed in the swamp, or wanting to believe it. We were kids. I think we liked to believe. We liked to watch the movie and believe an alien was in the swamp. I think you’re just doing that now.”

  “The Creature,” she corrected me.

  She waited until everything was completely quiet and still in the room and she said, “They took my eggs.”

  “Stop it.”

  “They did.”

  “No, Ur, you’re just trying to find a reason for why you are the way you are, you know . . . ”

  “Barren, you mean?” she said.

  “That was because of the cyst, or related to it,” I said and watched her shift beneath the covers. “I’m speaking honestly, okay. We all remember when you had that problem.” Ursula, since she was fourteen and had the cyst removed and the doctor told her that she’d probably never have children, always openly declared herself barren. She had always said it as if she just wanted to get over it.

  “But why did I have a cyst?” she asked.

  “Look, forget that for a second. I really think Triple Zero affected you. I know nothing happened on that flight, and when nothing happened, that triggered something in your mind. You wanted something to happen.”

  She got up and went over and grabbed a new Adidas jacket from the chair and put it on. The tag stuck out of the collar, and she walked around and sat on the bed across from me. Her eyes moved back and forth from my right eye to my left, inspecting me, and there was a part of me that wanted to put my hands on the side of her face and pull her and kiss her. I had promised myself to do this.

  “Are you lucid?” she asked. This close, I could smell her, and I had a flash of the house in Sopchoppy, the taste of fresh river water and then the salt of the gulf.

  “You think I’m crazy?” she said. “You’re the one who thinks God is sending you text messages.”

  “What?”

  She nodded.

  “What else did I tell you?”

  “You said it was a hacker too and it’s all related to Charles’s discovery.”

  “I told you about Charles?”

  “Yes,” she said. She paced and pulled the elastic band out of her hair and casually said, “And conveniently can’t you show me this conversation?”

  “Whoever it is makes the texts disappear.”

  “What a fine predicament,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, and I think you’re crazy for believing anything Van Raye says. He’s got that Southern mouth of a liar, you know.” She spread her mouth thin with her fingers. “You know, Southern liars all got a thinness, a shape.”

  “I don’t think he’s lying about this.”

  She held the elastic hair band in her mouth as she collected her ponytail again. I watched, jealous of the dexterity of her hands looping the band in her hair. Then she went and put her feet into a pair of my Nike high-tops and pulled a fifth of Jack Daniel’s from her duffle, held it up so I could see it and said, “I’m not keeping this very sophisticated.” She got two glasses from the bathroom, shook the protective covers off, and let them fall to the floor as she plodded back. She pushed the martini glass out of the way and put the glasses down too hard.

  “What’s the matter with you?” I said.

  When she poured, the brown liquid washed up one side of the glass, left an oily after-wave that slowly retreated.

  “You got your head so far up your daddy’s ass. You and Du.”

  “Why are you angry?”

  “Do you understand the magnitude of what is happening to me? People like me have been chosen. I don’t know why. Something comes to me and takes me away. I fly. It has happened when I’m in my apartment, and once recently when I was staying at this motel in Twentynine Palms, okay. It happened once when I was driving through the Muir Woods in a goddamn rental car. This was last month! Whenever I’m alone. Do you understand? They take me. I fly, I mean, just my body. Van Raye might hear something but he’s about five hundred years behind. There are dozens, hundreds, whatever, of civilizations out there. So what? Something is here,” she said.

  We waited in the relative silence of the airport hotel room. She took her feet out of the shoes and sat on the other bed. She said, “I’m here with you because I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Stay with me as long as you want,” I whispered.

  “Don’t get weird on me, okay?” she said.

  We took a sip of our drinks.

  She lifted her glass. “To life somewhere else in the universe . . . besides here. To aliens.”

  “Don’t ever let Charles hear you use that term. I think he’s coming here.”

  She turned and put her legs up on her bed and crossed her arms. “I’ve never met the man,” she said. “When you’re not around, Dubourg tells me what an ass he is, but Dubourg is totally in love with him. Dubourg put his own name on Van Raye’s Wiki page. He put himself under ‘children.’”

  “Why?” I asked. “He’s a pathetic excuse for anything resembling a father. Dubourg’s got Uncle Louis. I can’t think of anyone but Uncle Louis as Dubourg’s father.”

  “Would you trade Van Raye for Louis?”

  “Louis is great,” I said.

  “No, that’s not an answer. Think about it. Van Raye’s a son of a bitch but he’s bigger than life.”

  We sat still. I listened to the hotel room, felt the humanity around us, the rooms full of lives.

  She got up and went to the bottle on the dresser and poured us both more whiskey. I watched her calves flex when she adjusted the thermostat, and the Sanctus bells stirred in the nether lobes of my brain. I hadn’t had an erection in weeks, not even the healthy morning kind, and I’d begun to wonder if it was the depression.

  I glanced at my phone and saw a whole conversation from last night that I had no recollection of, Randolph asking me:

  Any sign of Raye?

  You are not God

  I am not God

  You are God

  I am God

  What is your favorite Elvis movie
?

  I prefer Martin and Lewis movies. Jerry Lewis :)

  Ursula came back with the glass and got on the bed beside me, pushing the comforter tight over my body. I turned the phone quickly to her and she studied it, and then shook her head, said, “Nothing. Yes, you are crazy.” She put legs straight out on the covers.

  “Sandy, do you remember that you once flew down to Sopchoppy because Dubourg left a pair of pants in Baltimore?”

  I twirled my whiskey in the glass before gulping some. “Yes. I was like twelve.” But there was the memory emerging from the background. “It was actually a pair of swim trunks,” I said. “And it was in Washington. That was after you stayed with us at the Marriott. I remember it because y’all wanted to run up and down the hallways.”

  “Right!” she said.

  “You and Dubourg sprinted up and down the hallways because you said that you could run faster inside than you could outside.”

  “I still believe that, by the way,” she said.

  I realized how good it feels to have a shared experience with someone and told her, “Isn’t family about having someone around to share experiences with?”

  She said, “Then Elizabeth caught us and jumped all over our asses, and Du and I went back home, and the next thing we know you flew down with his pants.” She laughed. “You looked pathetic standing on the porch holding the bag.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You stayed for weeks.”

  “I know,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to be part of y’all.”

  “Not that you couldn’t have just come down and stayed if you wanted, but we all thought it was a little weird.”

  “I wish you would just forget that,” I said. “I was twelve or whatever.”

  She handed me her glass to take a sip and crossed her arm over her eyes. “Can I tell you something? This is the best I’ve felt in a long time. Right here. I love you,” she said.

  She took her arm down to see me.

  I said, “You know I love you . . . ”

  “Like a sister?” she said.

  “Of course.” The whole room was quiet.

  She said, “Do you remember we used to believe that the Creature wouldn’t come after us if we were all together in the kids’ bunk room?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It was a great comfort being together, wasn’t it?”

  After a few seconds of silence I thought she’d drifted off to sleep. Without opening her eyes or removing her hand, she said, “This is the same thing, isn’t it, except it’s only us, and it’s not the Creature from the movie. It’s something else that we are scared of.”

  “And that we make ourselves want to believe in,” I said.

  I got the remote and turned on the TV, the light filling the room. I searched the movie menu until I found The Creature from Outer Space, and when she saw, she said, “Seriously?”

  “When was the last time we’ve watched it?” I asked.

  We took turns sipping out of the same glass as the credits played and the music started, and she got under the covers against me.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Watching the movie that scared the hell out of me when I was little.”

  We sat, the length of our bodies touching. I could feel her heat trapped beneath the blanket with mine, and I could smell her, and this feeling reminded me of once being alone with her in a pub in Dublin years before, and we’d started holding hands because we had realized that the patrons who’d befriended us in that pub thought we were traveling college students who were lovers. We simply held hands in the pub, her thumb rubbing my hand, and we drank our beers, and people went in and out of the door like life was normal, and a man at the end of the bar asked if he could sing us a song, and as he sang to us, we let go of each other’s hand because holding hands while he sang so beautifully would have been like stealing something that wasn’t ours.

  “Even this music starts to freak me out,” she said as the movie began.

  The voice-over narrator said, “Since time began,” and Ursula and I recited along with him, “man has looked toward the heavens with wonder . . . wonder and fear. The interstellar distances have kept us safe . . . until now,” and her voice and his voice made a tingling, a good tingling, spread from my back into the base of my skull.

  “There’s something sexual about that fear,” Ursula said, “I’ve gotten that same feeling when I was about to have sex.”

  “Are we about to have sex?” I said.

  “You’ll only fall madly in love with me and be driven insane by your cousin-lover—”

  “Ursula, quit. I’ve always been madly in love with you.” I stared at the movie. I felt her take my hand beneath the covers and pull it to her lap, the heat like a fever.

  “I tremble, okay?” I said. “My muscles are weak, that’s all.”

  “I’m trembling too,” she said. “It’ll never work, will it, we’ll never work?”

  I was about to ask her why not when I felt myself getting hard, heard the Sanctus bells chiming in the pleasure center of my brain responding to the one person in the world who I most desired, but there was also an unfamiliar stretching pain as if the growing erection were caught on something.

  “Eventually you’ll get tired of me,” she mumbled, unaware of my discomfort, which only made me harder, made more stinging and stretching. “Then where would we be?”

  “I don’t think I ever would get tired of you,” I said, the pain not stopping. I closed my eyes to make it go away, but when I did, I suddenly knew what the date was, new what the time was.

  “Hey,” she said, “you’re squeezing my hand.”

  “Sorry.”

  My heart palpitated, but before letting her hand go I lifted her arm so I could see that rubber watch she always wore, dangling on the bottom of her wrist. Its time and date confirmed what I already knew. Worried about my impotency, I had asked Randolph when I would get an erection, and he’d told me, and now here I was. Now here I was tumbling, falling forward in time again.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, putting my hand to my chest, my breath taken away.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” but I had felt my life leaping to that moment my penis was burning. I rolled to try to inconspicuously shift the erection.

  I went quickly to the bathroom.

  By the time I got the door shut, I heard her shout, “Are you okay?”

  “Fine!”

  I undid the drawstring and pushed the pants down, inspected everything, which, miraculously, didn’t have blood on it, and I pulled my pants up and made myself breathe. In the mirror I looked more hollow eyed than ever. It seemed only a second ago that I had been alone in my room and had forced Randolph, once again, to answer a question about the future. Now here I was. Jesus, would more of these moments just pop into my life, throw my life forward?

  I went back and slid in bed beside her again.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. Glancing at the television, I said, “Good, I didn’t miss it.”

  In the movie it was daylight on the river. A group of young people were having a party on a bluff, which was the scene with my grandmother, Harriet Raye, Victim 1. Dance music came from a transistor radio on a rock, and I could only think about how most of these actors were dead now, their lives gone in probably what seemed like a couple of blinks.

  Ursula whispered, “I’ve seen this movie so many times . . . I swear I’m getting that same feeling I used to get when we were kids. This shit freaked me out, okay? Now it’s an extremely corny movie to me, but I still get the same feeling . . . ” She held her breath, then let it out. “Here it comes,” she tensed and relaxed, “and there it goes. It comes in waves. I want to hold onto it for a second but can’t completely do it.”

  We both had our backs against the headboard, and at some point I realized she was watching me.

  “What?” I said.

>   She stretched her knee until it touched me.

  On the screen, Harriet Raye, my paternal grandmother, Ursula’s great-aunt, unbuttoned her shirt and revealed a black bathing suit.

  “See you on the other side!” Harriet Raye says in the movie. The movie cut to a longer shot from across the river and she dove perfectly from the bluff. This was really my grandmother diving.

  The Creature’s theme came up loud.

  Right then, as our ancestor was becoming “Victim 1,” I felt the same fear and excitement The Creature from Outer Space had given me when I was a kid, but like Ursula said, it was there, then gone, and even though it was a kind of fear, you wanted it back, and when I looked to tell her this, she had turned away. While Harriet Raye was pulled down by the Creature, claw around her ankle, struggling through the crystal-clear water, Ursula’s watch beeped and then there was her gentle snoring.

  CHAPTER 29

  Ursula slept. The Creature was eventually killed by spear guns.

  I slowly lifted her hand to see the numbers twirling on her stopwatch as she slept. She was trying to somehow quantify real sleep time versus lost time if the aliens came to take her away.

  I turned the television off and put my back against her back and tried to sleep, but the bed covers were loose and frustrating.

  I had no choice but to get up, but I didn’t get in the other bed. I put on my red tracksuit and went down to the empty nighttime lobby. I shut myself in the phone booth on the end and waited. The sign on the phone said:

  1) STOP!

  2) Listen for tone.

  3) Deposit coins.

  When it rang, like I knew it would, I snapped it up without speaking. It was the old favorite “Viva Las Vegas,” and it did seem like the best song ever—“. . .and I’m just the devil with love to spare . . . Viva Las Vegas . . .”

  I glanced outside to the lobby but saw nothing out of the ordinary, just the lobby at low staff, and I closed my eyes to relax. The tight confines of the phone booth was wonderful, slouched with knees braced against the metal wall, but then my leg tingled—tingling, tingling?—but I realized that my phone was vibrating in my tracksuit pocket. The message was from “UNKNOWN,” which meant Randolph: