I nodded.
“What do you see?” she said.
“What?”
I could tell Ursula’s eyes tracked to the hole on the end of the table.
I knew from past experience this thing on the end of the table was disturbing to look at. I closed my eyes. I heard Ursula get up. I put my feet on the couch and drank from a water bottle. What was on the end of the table? I forced my eyes to look at it—a bubble in the air, a crystal ball of cosmic clarity with nothing in it.
Van Raye was in a half stupor on his lounge, and Dubourg smoked and stared at the radio as if this hole in the universe wasn’t right there at the end of the table beside him. I squinted to see it better and it changed to the green alien Buddha from Charles’s car but alive and opening its mouth, a grotesque black tongue licking as though it had just swallowed something, its blank black eyes watching all of us. I knew even as I was seeing it that it wasn’t real. I understood I was hallucinating.
“We can ask him anything. What do we want to know?” Dubourg said, but he meant Randolph, not that Buddha.
“Go ahead. It’s now or never,” Ruth said. “You wanna know what’s in your case?”
I heard Dubourg say, “No.”
My phone dinged with a message from Randolph.
Calm down. You are hallucinating.
The small alien Buddha persisted, moving, licking, fingers flexing as if coming alive.
Before I go, I want you to see through the hallucination. You must see what it is.
Ruth called out coordinates as if there were someone listening: “Right ascension, less than ninety seconds.”
“You don’t understand!” Van Raye tried to push up on the chair. “Don’t any of you have the least bit of desire for knowledge? Where does it come from? How long does it live?” The fan whirred in Ruth’s face. “Damn all of you,” he said.
“Do his leg,” Ruth said to Dubourg.
Dubourg looked over at the radio as if just discovering Ruth there. He started to get up, but I stopped him. “I’ll do it,” I said, making myself not look at the living Buddha.
I was able to squeeze beneath Charles’s chair, took off my shoe, rolled up my track pants, and carefully put my darker right leg in the place of his right leg, positioning it through the plastic slats. I waited beneath him, the back of my father inches away from my face. I looked out and saw Ursula resting her head sideways on the arm of her chair, her eyes red from crying and staring at me on the ground.
“Sandeep,” Van Raye whispered. His hand found my arm and squeezed it. “You understand me. Stop them. Stop them so all this isn’t a useless endeavor. You are the only person in the world who understands me, always have been. You and Elizabeth.”
I wiggled my foot to get his attention, and turned my head to see the alien Buddha. The Buddha continued smacking his lips as though he were looking for a teat, eyes big and embryotic, pre-birth. The 3-D Earth on Ruth’s computer spun slowly, dots of satellites like bees swarming it. Ursula’s head sat sideways on the arm of the chair watching me.
My phone dinged, but I thumbed it to voice, the same generic voice of millions of phones, but it was Randolph:
You have to see the object for what it is.
I can’t, I thought, I can’t. Ruth tested the connection of the heavy pads on top of Butch’s body. The clock counted down.
“YOU ASSES, YOU FOOLS!” Van Raye shouted. I felt the prosthesis being snatched up from beside my head, and he threw it across the room. The leg clattered to the floor halfway to Ruth.
I heard Dubourg’s whispered prayer, “Jesus, Mary, I love you, save souls . . . Jesus, Mary, I love you, save souls . . . ” and the radio played the planet’s noise, slaloming in and out of high and low humming, as mesmerizing as a didgeridoo.
“Ask it questions,” Van Raye said, “someone. We’re blowing an opportunity, the biggest in the history of the world.”
I closed my eyes and repeated my Elizabeth prayer: Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance, and opened them and saw that the Buddha was gone. Instead, on the end of the table, sat a simple white vase, and even the taste in my mouth changed. I knew what was in the vase.
Randolph spoke through my phone:
Are you ready?
Are you leaving?
“I can see my leg,” Van Raye mumbled above me.
Do you understand what you are seeing?
“I feel it,” Van Raye said, “it’s right there. I can wiggle my toes.”
I wiggled my toes for him. Ursula watched me, her head sideways on the arm of the chair. She was worn out. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. How many times had she had to tell me my mother was dead?
“She’s not here, is she?” I whispered.
Ursula closed her eyes and held them closed against the pain of having to tell me once again that Elizabeth was gone.
“But I see her at Gypsy.”
She almost imperceptibly shook her head.
“Those are my toes,” Charles said above me. I felt the vibrations of his chest as he spoke.
The vase on the table. It was Elizabeth’s ashes. I had simply forgotten where I’d stored this information and the sadness came back on me again. I was living in a world without my mother.
Water from Ursula’s eyes dripped onto the floor, the nice reliable pull of gravity, Butch’s leash wrapped tightly around her hand, her fingers turning blue.
Dubourg was in a trance, bobbing before the radio and mumbling, “May the most bold, most sacred, most adorable, most mysterious and unutterable name of God . . .”
It’s almost time. Please send me.
Would you like to listen to Elvis?
Ruth said, “What the fuck? What is this?” The tip of her finger bruised pixels on the screen. “It’s asking for a password, a goddamn password,” and Dubourg prayed, “ . . . in heaven, on earth and under the earth . . . ” and Van Raye said, “I feel tingling in my leg.”
“You feel what?” I said to him.
“Tingling, it’s tingling. It’s terrible.”
“A password?” Ruth asked, typing frantically.
He can feel my leg? Could I feel tingling in my leg? Was I going to get sick again?
“If Randolph wasn’t here,” I said to Ursula, “then Elizabeth would be alive.”
Ursula looked frozen to the chair.
Elvis makes you feel better?
“Go fuck yourself,” I said, not caring if he heard it or not.
Elvis always makes you feel better.
I closed my eyes. “My mother loved Elvis movies.”
“Ask it about the other planets . . . other worlds,” Van Raye said above me.
I ignored him.
My journey will be longer because I have your mother to think about and you. You are the only other being I’ve spoken to.
I’m sorry to have gotten involved.
This journey will be long. But send me.
I wiggled my toes.
“Password?” Ruth muttered. “What password?” I heard her typing and pounding the “Return” key. “Fuck me. This isn’t right. What fucking password?”
“Try ‘Geneva,’” I started.
Her chair squeaked as she leaned backward. “Geneva?”
“Stop, not yet!” Ursula sat up. Through tears, she said, “Will Ruth’s baby be okay? Ask him! Ask him!”
My phone chimed and the message came:
If I answer, you will only jump there in time.
“Do you want to know the answer?” I said to Ursula. “There are consequences.”
“Yes,” she said, crying.
The clock said six seconds.
I said to Ruth, “It’s Geneva 1000x. Geneva 1000x.”
“Geneva 1000x? As in x-ray? Hold on,” Ruth said, “here goes.”
“We want to know the answer,” I said to Randolph, and then I whispered, “I forgive you.”
I clearly heard Ruth hitting the “Return” key, like a pretzel snapping, like a bone breaking, l
ike someone’s life going away forever. The second Ruth hit the key, the sound over the Trans-Oceanic stopped, and there was nothing but gentle static, and silence in the attic until my phone dinged, and I looked at the answer to Ursula’s question—will the baby be okay?
CHAPTER 44
The first time I become aware that the baby is okay, that he is truly safe, he is in Dubourg’s arms, but he is not a baby anymore, and Dubourg is carrying him with his hand around the boy’s chest and through his legs, carrying the boy flat as if he is flying over the yard as Dubourg runs, and I have the sudden falling feeling that comes even through my paralysis, and I realize another time bomb has gone off in my life and I’ve leapt forward.
I am paralyzed in the reclining chair in the Desert Motor Court’s yard. The desert sun has set beyond the faraway cobalt-blue mountains, and this is when the single specks of satellites move through the sky and lend perspective to how far away the stars are.
Feeling safe took a long time, and I remember the stages of the boy being a baby, especially the gelatin stage that was the most worrisome to me. The boy is twenty-two months now and healthy, though not much of a talker. As Dubourg carries him through the little stone yard behind the Desert Motor Court, the boy tries to aim a flashlight at bushes, but Dubourg pretends to almost drop him, purposefully bouncing him so the beam of the flashlight he holds can’t focus on the thing they search for: the mole.
The mole is really just a black sock stuffed with other socks and tied to the end of thirty-pound test line, which has been pre-strung through the yard by Ursula. I am paralyzed in my reclining chair for the third time in two years, and I have begun to think of it as timeouts, the opposite of time bombs, when life stands still and I can observe it.
Ursula sits alone on the swinging chair diagonal from me. She has one leg folded beneath her. The toes of her other foot barely touch the ground and keep her chair moving, her belly swollen with a child inside her.
The mole (the sock) sticks on the bottom of a fairy-dust bush, but the boy doesn’t know it, and Dubourg runs by and kicks it free. “Where is it?” Dubourg shouts. Ursula tugs the line and the mole starts moving across the yard again.
“Where does the mole live?” Dubourg asks the boy, allowing the beam to shine in the wrong direction, momentarily at his black valise safely on the ground by the water pipe.
The boy has a real name on his birth certificate, but we have never called him anything other than “Boy” or “the boy,” though Ursula and Dubourg sound more natural saying it than I do. What will we call our next baby if it’s a boy? I don’t know. Of course Ursula doesn’t consider it “our” baby.
We are at the Desert Motor Court built in 1969, a space-age design with a marquee out front that has a series of concentric disks that reminds me of a laser shooting toward the sky, and this is where I go when the Disease With No Name takes over my body. Mr. Leggett, the former letter carrier from Atlanta, my old hospital roommate, is in charge of security here, a position I secured him through the ownership, friends of Elizabeth’s, though managers complain that Leggett thinks he runs the place, and he has an endless stream of jokes, which he still tells me when I come here for my episodes.
The motor court is good, though the neighborhood in the valley below us is known for meth houses. The pool is spring fed and the restaurant at the end keeps its doors open, and other guests take note of our special gang, but read their paperbacks or sip their cocktails.
The ownership warns everyone that it’s not a good idea to leave the grounds after dark because of the crime, but this only adds to the isolation and feeling of security when we are here together, though Ursula says that they—the Others—come freely to take her away at night here in the desert with her family around her. She still flies for Shenandoah, but she has written a book about her abduction experiences, and is often the keynote speaker at UFO conventions, but she has refrained from telling her audiences that the baby growing inside her is of alien stock, though she reminds me constantly that it is not my child.
At this stage of pregnancy, she is round and plump, a baby she thought she could never have, practically a miracle. One of those eggs harvested by the aliens when she was young, she says, fertilized and replanted inside her.
During the mole hunt, she stares at the blinking lights of airliners in the sky, and I know that being up in the air is what she really loves, almost as much as she loves this boy, the boy whose mothers are from the sky.
Ursula transferred her Triple Zero lifetime pass on Shenandoah to Dubourg, so he didn’t have to rely on the church, but can still spend the rest of his life keeping the valise safe, safe inside the Airport Zone, and he can talk to God.
The boy calls me “Dad” because I am legally his father, and he calls Ursula “Mama,” because Ruth told her that she wanted it that way. He calls Dubourg just “Du,” which sounds like “father” in a better language. We tell the boy about Ruth, his mother in the sky, traveling back in space, which is confusing to him, and we know that we will one day tell him about his biological father who died orbiting Earth, Cosmonaut X. They’ll be abstract to him, and his mind will build myths around this, surely. Will he want to go to the sky?
Now I watch the boy and imagine putting my fingers through his hair when I’m well, something I promise myself I will do more often than I’ve done, show him love no matter what, breaking the cycle of bad fathers.
When we are all here together at the Desert Motor Court, when I retreat into my head, this is our sunset ritual: Dubourg grabs the boy, who at two is extraordinarily healthy and fine and light in Dubourg’s strong arms, Dubourg holding him flat like he’s surfing the air, flashlight in Boy’s hand, bouncing him so that he never gets a good bead when the mole crosses open ground, jumping from rock to plant, the pregnant Ursula pulling the string from the swinging bench.
When I am not in an episode of paralysis, I tell Boy every night before bed about his biological mother Ruth who is a great star traveler, and we see a few stars coming out in that impossibly purple light as we stand on top of a hotel, him not understanding yet what it means to be traveling among the stars.
That’s where Ruth is, or at least she’s somewhere in the asteroid belt for the next two years, and I can’t help but think that this isn’t much different from Randolph traveling toward Chava Norma, but Ruth is much slower and will never get to a destination. Her travel is not much different from death, except that we can send his mother messages via computer and wait a few days for her response. All the important women in his life come from the sky: Ur, who comes to see him; Ruth, sending him messages; Elizabeth, who I tell him fantastic stories about but whom he can never communicate with. I would do anything to have one more night to talk to her, to go back to that hotel room in the blue light and talk to her in her Gypsy Sky uniform. Even if it were a dream. Would she look around at us here and think it was all worth it? I don’t care. I miss her so.
We were at the Grand Aerodrome’s pool when the boy was born, the paralysis coming on me slowly at that time as if it were the actual grief of losing my mother. We were trying to unravel the mystery of why the sound from the planet had suddenly quit. It took three thousand years to get here and they couldn’t have known we had sent Randolph at that exact moment. Ruth had scanned the body of Butch and found no data on the microchip, and I think we all, late at night, wonder if any of it was real. It’s no more real than the past ever is.
We scattered Elizabeth’s ashes from the top of the Grand Aerodrome. All five of us witnessed that and have that stored, shared memory. Elizabeth’s ashes went with the wind toward the airport. So much of the past you have to take on faith.
I’m telling it like I remember it, though I have nothing to offer as proof other than four witnesses, one of whom isn’t here on Earth, and Dubourg refuses to talk about it. Ursula believes aliens are still here. Charles Van Raye should be writing this book, not me.
Van Raye, who had nothing now, had nearly quit talking to any of us
, even by that night of the boy’s birth. He was in some state of shock, legless, without even his sound of a distant civilization to show the world.
Ruth, swimming normally in the pool that night of the birth, gave no indication anything was about to happen to her. She squatted in the shallow end and reached between her legs and lifted this thing out in a brown swirl of water, lifted it by both legs, umbilical cord running along its prune face, hands over its head as if indicating a touchdown. Ruth said, “Boy.”
Ruth signed up for some crazy, privately funded mission that sent three astronauts straight into space, a so-called self-sufficient craft, or at least sufficient enough for the astronauts to survive their normal lifetimes if no disaster struck, all we can ever hope for. She simply couldn’t stand not being in space. I reminded her that space was where she’d been terrified. “Maybe that’s why I’m going,” she said.
Ursula jerks the string and makes the mole jump in the air, and Dubourg takes the boy bouncing off in the wrong direction, the air thick with dust kicked up by his priestly black shoes. Ursula sees me looking at her. “You still think you have something to do with this?” She touches her stomach.
I blink once—yes.
What happened to Charles?
Van Raye is easy to locate. When I need to see him, I check the race schedule.
Elizabeth, never really being able to separate from him, left in her will that he be provided for in order to maintain his “current lifestyle,” which is vague, and left to the trustee’s discretion. That’s me.
There are thirty-six races in a NASCAR season.
Last time I hunted him down in Bristol, Tennessee, Ursula flying me in a pressurized Beechcraft Baron. She flew us into a tiny airport packed with private jets, releasing the air seal around the door when we taxied to the terminal. She shut down the right engine so I could safely get out. I gestured for her to take the headphone away. She cracked one side to hear me.
Cosmic Hotel Page 28
