Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  Ruth sat sideways on the bed facing away from us, her belly, her Cal T-shirt visible in the gap of her robe. She worked her instruments beneath the light. I watched her profile, eyes downcast as if closed. She turned with the metal syringe in her hand, loaded with a clear vile of liquid. She felt up and down the dog’s front leg. She said the first shot will relax him, and he would feel good. What was feeling good to him? A memory of running in a field? A park? The voice of a person he loved, calling his name—Butch? Butch? Who had loved Butch?

  Ruth felt along his leg and put the needle into his fur, her other hand holding his paw. She took it away. Dubourg held Butch’s hair so we could see his eyes.

  I could only lean my knees against the bed, not knowing or thinking to look at the clock. I had no awareness to stop Ruth from reloading the syringe with the last solution, nor awareness that the time Randolph had told me was approaching. Maybe none of this happened, maybe Randolph didn’t tell me 12:38, but the needle was real and Butch is not here because Ruth reloaded the syringe and swung away from the light and back to Butch. There was a blue fluid in the vile. When she was done, out of habit, I’m sure, she rubbed the spot the needle had entered, and she said, “Shh, shh.” Butch’s eyes closed, not in a way that he was falling asleep. Butch opened his mouth twice as if to gulp air. There was nothing similar in these two things: sleep and dying. I didn’t understand why anyone ever calls this putting your animal “to sleep.”

  The room filled with the smell of urine. Ruth took a handheld scanner out of her gym bag and waved it over the dog.

  “Still there?” Van Raye mumbled from the chair.

  She looked at the scanner’s screen and switched it off without answering Van Raye, but I could tell that Randolph was still on the microchip inside.

  “Is he gone?” Ursula said, not taking her hand away from her eyes. I had the startle reflex as if I’d just fallen in a dream, and the bedside clock said 12:38, and the horror of having time blink by struck me completely unaware. Jesus, I thought, how many more of these leaps are there? But I knew that I had asked for it. Butch was on his side with his legs bent together like he was in mid-gallop.

  So what is the difference if Randolph had not given me the answer? Did I somehow cheat? Did I trade the feeling of time passage and gain anything? How many more of these questions had I made Randolph answer? How many of these time bombs are out there in my life? Could I just ask him when I would die? This would be a kind of suicide, but the others around me would not be robbed of my time with them. I shuddered at the thought and helped Dubourg change the sheet beneath Butch, then shroud him with a clean one, something I would think about weeks later when I swaddled a baby.

  CHAPTER 41

  We left the shrouded body of Butch on the other bed in my room, the place he slept every ordinary night in the Grand Aerodrome. When I asked Ruth if it would be okay to keep him here until the broadcast, she’d only smirked at my not knowing even these small details about life beyond hotels, life beyond life, and she went out with Charles who crutched along stoned on painkillers, his one leg beneath his robe, Dubourg close behind him, patiently watching his foot, ready to catch him if he fell, his other hand carrying the valise, Charles’s prosthesis beneath his arm.

  Dubourg turned to Ursula and me before shutting the door, “I’ll come back about five.”

  When they were gone, I went to the bathroom and took my afternoon dose of the antidepressant. I glanced at my watch to make sure I had enough time and decided to take a sleeping pill too.

  I had on only boxers, climbed in the bed and felt the heat of Ursula without her clothes on. She was on her side facing the wall. She rolled over and reached for me and began kissing my neck below my ear, then on my mouth. Her skin tasted like the saltiness of sorrow.

  “Can’t we lay off each other one night?” I said, struggling to slide my boxers down. When she didn’t answer, I added, “This isn’t a happy time. Why are we doing this?” I whispered, still taking her.

  She wrapped her legs around me and said, “Whoever said this only goes with happiness?”

  I said, “I just had a déjà vu. You’re about to tell me how it’s natural to have the drive to procreate after a tragedy.”

  “Now I don’t have to say it,” she said.

  “We’ve already talked about this?”

  But she didn’t answer. I pulled out of her, which she hated, and she bit her bottom lip, and I watched her face in the wavy light from the aquarium. The next thing, according to the déjà vu in my mind, was that she was going to tell me that she couldn’t procreate anyway. I began to be fearful of another time bomb about to explode, so I kissed her neck.

  She stopped me with her hand and said, “Let me ask you a question, an important question.” I waited and she said, “Do you think Charles is better off believing he can see his leg?”

  “He doesn’t really believe it’s his leg. He can’t.”

  “But if you were him, would you want to keep on believing the leg was there? Listen to me,” she said. “It’s important. Answer me: Do you think he’s better off believing that is his leg even if it’s not?”

  “I think he’s letting himself believe. Deep down he really knows it’s not there, the real him does. And the hydrocodone . . . you know . . . He’s not himself. He’ll eventually come around.”

  “But then he won’t have the relief of believing anymore?” she said.

  “Maybe he’s going to be so fucking famous he’s going to hire someone to be his leg forever. His leg man.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. “Just let me have this night, okay?”

  I didn’t like the way she said this, as if there would be no other nights.

  We worked slowly, and the feeling of déjà vu came on because it was the sadness of Butch being gone, but the betta fish poked around in the yellow plastic plant, and I quit watching him to extend this time with Ursula. Time flies when you’re having fun is the truest maxim in the world and must have been dreamed up by someone during orgasm, the quickest moments in a human being’s life never to be captured, like shortwave radio broadcasts. I tried to hold on to this moment with Ursula, being connected to her as the sleeping pill took over and I came, and we passed through the hypnopompic badlands of sleep together, each in our own dreams.

  CHAPTER 42

  I don’t remember my last thought about Butch’s body being wrapped in the sheet on the other bed. I don’t remember Ursula’s pressing the button on her watch as she always did when she drifted off to sleep, measuring her time away from reality. I don’t remember turning off the aquarium’s light when we were done, nor sleeping or dreaming, only of a gentle annoying sound of knocking on the adjoining room’s door that woke me.

  I got up, quietly pulling on my tracksuit, and returned three quiet knocks on the adjoining door before opening it. Elizabeth’s suite was dark. I quietly closed the door so as not to wake Ursula.

  In Elizabeth’s room, her lamp’s shade cast a perfect circle on the ceiling, and Elizabeth sat on her bed facing away from me, the thick ponytail down the back of her uniform.

  I shut the door quietly and heard her laces hiss through the eyes of her boots. The sheers filtered the blue light from the airport, and I wasn’t sure I didn’t smell Charles’s scent in here—old cars and his musk. She glanced over her shoulder. “You need a haircut,” she said.

  “Do you have to say that every night?” I asked.

  She felt the weight of the boot in her hand. She put it on the floor beside the other, adjusted them until they were perfect. She lay down on the bed, still in her green Gypsy uniform with the triangle of a white T-shirt showing at her neck, and her white socks glowing. She looked ten years younger. “Why are you still angry at the thing inside the dog?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is everyone mad at me?” she said.

  “No one blames you,” I said, and then I told her, “You have to be there in the morning for the launch.”

/>   “Why?”

  “It’s just important for you to be there. We’re going to send him on, you know.”

  “‘You know?’” she said. “And the word ‘just’ is for simpletons.” She unclipped pens from her pocket and put them on the bedside table. “I’m not going to take a night off. This is my job now.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Sandeep,” she said, “it’s wonderful. I’m extremely tired, but it is so worth it.”

  So? So worth it? She’d never talked like that.

  “Better than you could ever, ever imagine. I mean I’m working hard learning the system, but it is like I’ve always known their system. It’s the system I would have designed.”

  I could smell sweat from her uniform.

  “So why isn’t it for me?”

  She made her it’s-impossible shish and said, “This is for you. This is what you’ve been trained to do. You have a knowledge base that no one else in the world has, and you are young with your whole life ahead of you, and you come from good stock. You can have a big family, the family I never got to have. Is Ursula sleeping?”

  “She is.”

  Though I couldn’t see them I knew her eyes were closed, her arms crossed on her chest in the posture of being dead. “She still believes she is being abducted?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you sighing like it’s a horrible thing?” she asked me. I hadn’t realized I’d sighed. “You don’t know how wonderful it is to believe in something fantastic,” she said. She crossed her arm over her eyes.

  “You think people like that are fools,” I said.

  “No. If we remembered how good it felt to believe in the fantastical, like we were kids again,” she said, “we’d give up anything else to feel that way.”

  “I just don’t understand why you won’t be there for the launch. Don’t you care that this thing is happening?”

  She took a few minutes to think in the dark. “That was a different part of my old life. I can’t dwell on that. I’m very proud of you. But time flies by.”

  We sat in the blue silence of the room for a while, Elizabeth lying on the bed with her hands crossed on her chest until she spoke. “We might not get to talk like this often so I want to tell you one thing, okay?”

  I agreed.

  “There are times,” she said, “when you have to forgive someone you don’t think deserves it.”

  “You mean Charles?”

  “I’m telling you an important lesson. Are you listening?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “In order to carry forward in a productive manner, you have to learn to forgive completely. Give this forgiveness to someone who you might not feel deserves it. Say it out loud to them—‘I forgive you.’ It sounds simple, but it starts working from that point forward. I think Dubourg’s Jesus had this right, and also that thing about being a child to be enlightened. Anyway, you will not be very productive until you learn to forgive. Some things in life just happen, and sometimes there’s a person who caused the event, but we go through life causing events, don’t we? Forgiveness starts with saying it.”

  “Do you forgive Charles?”

  “I’m very tired now,” she said.

  “Do you think I should forgive you?” I asked her. “Is this what this is about? There’s nothing to forgive. I love you more than anything. There is nothing else in the world to me but you.”

  “You know,” she said, another non-Elizabeth prelude to a statement, “you have always wanted me the most when I was walking out of the room,” she said. “Did you know that? I could be sitting with you for hours and as soon as I got in the doorway, you’d go, ‘Mom . . .’”

  “I never called you ‘Mom.’”

  “I supposed that’s my fault.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “Why are you talking like this? I’m worried about you.”

  “You are worrying about me?” she said. “Don’t make me angry right before I fall asleep. It’ll only give me bad dreams. Good happy thoughts before you fall asleep . . .”

  I looked at her work boots beside her other shoes, and I left her there to sleep, closing the doors quietly behind me—her door, then my door—and I snuck back in bed beside Ursula and just as I was thinking I would never fall asleep, I heard gentle knocks on the main door and then the silent form of Dubourg letting himself in the room, putting his bags down, and getting on the floor with a blanket and falling asleep below us with his fists beneath his chin just like when he was a kid.

  CHAPTER 43

  I startled awake from a dream, found Ursula asleep beside me, and Dubourg on the floor between the beds. The world through the shears was not yet showing the dawn of the next day, but Ursula’s watch alarm was going off, the blue dial light blinking as she raised it to her face. She reached to find me in bed and only then did she let her breath go, and Dubourg from the floor said, “I’m already here.”

  I hobbled to the door to Elizabeth’s room. I put my ear to the solidness and listened, felt her presence on the other side. I raised my hand, thought I should give her one last chance to go with us, but then I didn’t knock.

  Dubourg sat on the end of the bed putting on his black shoes, his priest shoes, and he had his valise, of course, but he also had his carry-on duffle packed.

  “Are you leaving?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “We all have to after this.”

  Ursula’s eyes followed me as I walked across the room. “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. I got Butch’s leash off the counter expecting him to perk up when he heard the sound of the buckle sliding on the counter, and I looked around for his chariot in order to strap it on for his morning walk.

  “Oh God,” Ursula said.

  But I saw the bundle of white sheets sunken into the comforter, the dead Butch, and of course I remembered.

  “I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

  “I had a momentary lapse,” I whispered, “I remember last night, don’t worry,” and I threw the leash back on the counter where it hit flight-attendant Barbie sitting drunkenly and staring straight ahead. She always looked like she was focused into a world we couldn’t see, one filled with her tiny friends and family.

  “Why do you keep doing this?” Ursula said, grabbing both sides of her head. “I can’t go through it again.”

  “No. You won’t. I remember.”

  “Everything?” she said.

  Ruth and the needles seemed like a dream.

  Dubourg slid his hands under the bundle that was Butch and lifted. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

  The service elevator took us up to the attic. It opened into the heavy air of the big room, and Dubourg mumbled, “Welcome to the inferno.” We walked between the frames of foldaway beds, and in the center of the darkness were the oasis of the light and furniture. It was like a lit stage at a theatre, this stage a messy set: equipment, computers opened and gutted, CPUs running, soldering irons, notebooks spread open, tools, spools of wire, an empty gallon jug of water, stacks of unused hard drives, and of course the Trans-Oceanic radio among stacks of plates from the restaurant.

  Dubourg went over to the table beside Ruth and set the bundle of Butch down on a pad and draped another pad over his body, a heavy pad.

  Van Raye was lying in one of the pool’s lounge chairs with his prosthesis standing beside him, the leg wearing a black zip-up boot as if it were dressed and ready to go.

  “You goddamn people,” Van Raye said. “How many times do I have to be right before people start listening to me?”

  Ruth screwed the wire leads to metal eyes on the pad on Butch and went back to work in front of four screens.

  Dubourg looked down on Charles. “He knows?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said without taking her eyes off the screens, monitors shining on her face. “Cat’s out of the bag.” A rotating fan agitated strings of the frayed fabric of her cutoff sleeves.

  Ursula
went over to Van Raye and took away his crutches.

  “Stop that. Shit. Those are mine!”

  Dubourg sat in front of the Trans-Oceanic radio.

  “If you send it, go ahead and kill me,” Van Raye said, “Okay? Okay? I’ll have nothing.”

  Dubourg turned on the radio. It took a few seconds to warm up to a station playing organ music but he tuned past it and past a voice—“Four cats, three dogs, a bundle of sticks has been delivered . . .” and then the tapping of Morse code—until he found our sound, like a twin-engine plane warming up for takeoff, the sound having traveled three thousand years to get here. Every sound we were hearing was three thousand years old.

  “You’ll have the planet,” Ruth said to Van Raye. “You’ll have Chava Norma.”

  “Fuck that noise,” Van Raye said. “There’s an extraterrestrial here.” He pointed to the bundle lying on the banquet table between the two plastic pads, a corner of the shroud hanging off the table. On a metal shelving unit was the orange box, the spell of software supposedly cast upon it making it a magic box capable of sending the burst of data that was Randolph, or whatever his real name was, to Chava Norma.

  Ruth had her chin resting on her hand as she watched a graphic version of the Earth rotating. She rolled her chair over to the gain booster and toggled a switch and watched a bar on one screen begin: “10%” then skipping suddenly to “15%” and stopped in a dimming of lamps. “Don’t surge on me now,” Ruth said, and the lights on all the hard drives remained green and the noise from the radio was strong.

  On the other end of the table there was a hole—a hole, like a blind spot in my vision. It was like a bubble in an aquarium, but this sphere was purer than air. I made myself watch the clock go through 00:00:5:00.

  “Are you okay?” Ursula said. She sat in her regular spot in that wingback chair.