“A new violin? Just like that? All of you think my life is so easy.”
“What’s not easy?”
“I’ve got to go to Atlanta and close a hotel down. The violin. And I got this other problem, something that happened. I bought this one song last night, ‘Viva Las Vegas,’ because we were watching the movie, in Dallas, you know, and I got called to the hotel’s public phones, and when I picked up the phone, guess what was playing.”
“‘Viva Las Vegas.’”
“Right.”
“You changed all your security settings?” she asked.
“Yeah. Nothing else was wrong, they just made me go to the public phone and listen to the song. It’s just weird.” I took a breath and closed my eyes. “I didn’t sleep much last night.” Then I told her about drinking cranberry martinis in the bar with Franni from Mount Unpleasant, how they were on their way to get their breasts enhanced. “Have you ever heard of an island you go to for plastic surgery?” I asked.
“No, but I don’t for a second think there’s not an island where people go to have plastic surgery. Are you a tit man?”
“No,” I said, taking a glance at her free chest beneath the stenciled 2 and 0 on her shirt.
“Surprising,” she said, “I could have added that to about a dozen other mother issues you have.”
I wiggled into my pillow to get comfortable. “I don’t even think I slept an hour.”
“Congratulations,” she said, “you got laid.”
“I didn’t say that.” I closed my eyes.
“At least one of us is getting laid,” she sighed.
“I thought you were dating that other pilot.”
“That little experiment didn’t work.”
“God, I thought you were going to tell me you were getting married.”
“Jesus, no. I should be a nun. You know I’ve always had the fantasy of seeing a nun undress, hearing that heavy cross hit the floor,” she said.
“You all blasphemy yet you are psychotic about Mass and the church. I don’t get it.”
“It was a joke. If I get to heaven and find out God doesn’t have a sense of humor, I’ll kill myself.” She immediately closed her eyes and began whispering, “Hail Mary, full of grace . . . ”
Ursula reached a finger into the leg of her boxers, and I heard the nail scratch through a stubble there and then the pop of an elastic band of her panties beneath the penguins.
“Don’t snap your panties at me,” I said. My face was fifteen inches from her shoulder.
She rested her tablet on her chest to see me. “I’m your cousin, and didn’t you just get laid?”
I smiled, heartbeat suddenly throbbing.
“Do you remember the time we kissed?” I asked.
“I think I would remember that if it had happened.”
“We were in the river, under the dock.”
“That? We were like twelve. Have you been pining away for me ever since?”
“I actually kissed Portia and Holly too.”
“God, you’re an oversexed menace.”
“Portia didn’t count because we were dared by someone at a church barbecue.”
“Trust me, mine didn’t count either,” she said. “I probably felt sorry for you. That’s why I kissed you.”
With my finger I reached and touched her forearm, the golden hair there. “We’re only second cousins,” I said. She’d already gone back to reading her tablet. “Do you know how distant that is?”
She made that this-can’t-be-crossing-your-mind huff and said, “You think this would be one of your uncomplicated trysts, and you’d move on to the next hotel and forget about me? No, you would fall so madly in love with me.” She looked at her watch hanging loosely upside down on her wrist. She wore it like that so that she could see it easier when she was flying.
“More like you wouldn’t be able to get over me,” I said.
“I’d be over you before I got to the lobby,” she said. “But you, you’d be driven insane by not being able to have me, your second cousin. You would be institutionalized. I’d come visit you, though, don’t worry. I’d observe you through a one-way mirror, you having not showered for days, greasy, rocking back and forth in a chair, chain smoking and mumbling, ‘Ursula, Ursula, Ursula.’ A staff member would ask me why I was there, and I would say you were my cousin driven insane by your unrequited love for me. Gothic fucking city,” she said.
I said, “Nobody ever believes it when we say we are cousins. They think it is a joke.”
“You’re a little browner than me,” she said.
“You don’t have brown knees anymore.” I pointed. “Did you know that?”
“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with my knees?”
“Nothing. It was just that when we were kids, the skin on all y’all’s knees was brown.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know, but the skin on your knees was always browner than mine, all of y’all. Y’all’s knees were like Rorschach tests. Sometimes I saw Che Guevara’s face, sometimes Jesus.”
She picked her leg up to see her knees. “It’s all the kneeling. That’s how we all got Jesus knees. I can’t explain Che.”
She took the skin over her patella and wiggled it back and forth. Her nails were unpainted and clear, practical and short. In my memory, I could see them plucking a tick from her ankle, pinching it surgically between her fingernails until it popped, her own blood purged from the tiny creature and leaking into her cuticle like a pipette, then Ursula flicking the carcass away.
“You had something to tell me,” I said.
She looked at her watch, yet again, as if to see if it were the right time to talk. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you?”
“Hearing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ on that phone.”
“Yeah, I get it, but I mean something you can’t explain. That was a hacker, one of your former lovers. But have you ever been thinking about a friend you haven’t seen in ten years, and suddenly you see them in a restaurant halfway around the world?”
“No.”
“All the hotels you’ve lived in and you’ve never thought you heard a voice, anything? Come on, what’s the most unexplainable phenomenon that has ever happened to you?”
“Charles called and told me something that blew my mind.”
“Charles?” she said. “No, not Charles. I’m talking the opposite of Charles. His whole job is explaining shit. I’m talking about something that astonished you and you have no explanation for.”
“I saw a guy levitate once.”
“Levitate? You mean you thought you saw a guy floating?”
“I saw it in Key West, a guy on Mallory Pier—”
“No, not magic bullshit,” she said. “Jesus, Sanghavi, can you follow the bouncing ball here? I’m talking about a fricking phenomenon.” She squeezed the bridge of her nose. The thermostat on the wall made a tiny click and then the air conditioning came on. I smelled the air-conditioned air, an odor that hadn’t been in my life in a few months.
“I don’t like the way this is going,” I said. “Did something happen to you?”
“I want to tell you something about the flight.”
“I know the flight was normal,” I said, “nothing happened. You can take it from there.”
“You’re so condescending when you’ve got everything figured out. I don’t give a shit about that. That’s not the important part of what happened to me.” She took a breath and let it go. “What if I told you that a couple of hours after we landed, I realized my watch was wrong?” She absently touched her black rubber timepiece hanging upside down on her wrist. “My watch was behind,” she said. “Two hours behind.”
“I would tell you you screwed your watch up.”
“You know I didn’t. Don’t think I’ve gone crazy, okay? I went to that fucking convention that time, and I sat there and made fun of people with you. So I’m saying I sh
ould be the most skeptical person in the world.” She patted the number 20 on her chest and said, “I’m you, Sandy, I mean I’m the same as you, I’m not crazy, but I’ve seen things that make me, I don’t know, ask questions.”
“I think you are jerking my chain.” I closed my eyes, felt the sleepiness coming on.
“What if I told you I was driving from a friend’s house in Sausalito Tuesday night? I did drive back. I got to the hotel just fine. When I looked at my watch, I had only four hours before my flight. I’d left my friend’s house with plenty of time.”
“How much to drink did you have at the friend’s house?”
“Shut up. Just listen. I wanted at least eight hours of rack time before flying, but when I looked at my watch, I had to go straight to the airport. It was horrifying. I flew this flight from San Francisco to Seattle, and I was in the left seat with everything routine, but I keep having these flashes of memory. I realize some things, you know. Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“I know that I floated over downtown Sausalito at night. I know I floated over the bay.”
“Flying dreams are very common, Ur.”
I felt her take hold of the sleeve of my T-shirt. “I’m trying to describe something real here. Don’t write it off as a dream.”
She continued slowly wadding the sleeve, balling the material in her fist, the collar stretched against my neck.
“Hey, stop, okay?” I said.
When she let go, she pretended to help smooth it back in place.
“What if I told you it’s not my only experience?”
“Ur, now you’re just freaking me out. This is right off the script of every abductee.”
“Abductee. It sounds like I’m a leper. What if they are right?”
“There’s so much going on that you don’t know about,” I said to her.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” she said, “if you would have an open mind.”
“This is different, but I can’t tell you now. But it’s important.” Sleep nibbled at my brain. “I’ve got to doze off. I’m about to pass out.” I shifted down and put my head on the pillow. “I think your mind just can’t handle that nothing actually happened on Triple Zero and it needs something to happen. Listen, whatever you do, don’t go blabbing about this. You’ll come to your senses eventually. A pilot can’t go blabbing about being abducted by aliens.”
“I work for Shenandoah,” she said, “I could announce over the intercom before every flight that I have been abducted by aliens and no one would walk off.”
I tried to let sleep come to me. “Is that really what you’re saying? You’ve been abducted by aliens?”
Her touch on my bare arm made my scalp tingle, and when I opened my eyes her head was on the other pillow, eyes open and looking at me here trying to sleep. “Why do I want you to understand so badly?” she asked.
“Because you love me,” I said.
“True. I didn’t ask for it to happen to me.”
“Ur, I got to fall asleep. You’re trying to keep me awake to brainwash me, I think.” I hated to lose sight of her with her head so perfect on the pillow, but I lost the battle with my eyes and the curtain began to come down. “Ur?” I said.
“What?”
I cracked my lids so her face was fuzzy. “When it happens to you, what you think happens to you, I mean, how does it feel?”
She touched her index finger between my eyes and stroked the skin there to make me blink, my eyes even heavier. “Terrifyingly fantastic,” she said.
“You believe with all your heart it’s real?”
“I think I do.”
“How does believing feel?”
“The world has opened up.”
I fell asleep thinking “terrifyingly fantastic.” My cousin beside me was more comfortable than I’d felt in a long time. Cousin, cousin, cousin mixed in my dreaming brain to become the word cushion, cushion, cushion.
Knowing all my cousins almost didn’t happen. When I was a nine, Lucy Dunbar, Dubourg’s adopted mother, Van Raye’s first cousin, tracked Elizabeth down and tried to convince her that I would be much healthier if I knew their side of the family, especially my brother Dubourg. They invited Elizabeth and me to come stay with them in Florida, but Elizabeth said she was too busy, and I heard her explaining that the arrangement with Charles was her total custody of me, and he wasn’t in the picture, nor did he have any legal right to be. Lucy Dunbar told Elizabeth that no one in the family had seen Charles in over twenty years, and my visit wasn’t about that.
Over the course of several phone calls, I began to hear Elizabeth soften, ask again about the number of kids and the number of adults, and when she finally said, “If he comes, you can’t let him get too much sun,” I knew I was going to Florida, which in my experience had been Tampa, Miami, Orlando. When she hung up, she told me they were hung up on a traditional nuclear family structure because they were Catholics. Being “Catholic” summed up a lot of things for Elizabeth.
I remember flying alone to Florida, being picked up by a clan of people just outside security. I remember riding in a Ford Expedition, this giant vehicle driving through a forest, sitting in the position of honor (second row, middle seat) where I could see that even the pavement in this part of Florida was different, a lighter gray, almost white, and the headlights were purplish against it, and leaping across the highway were desperate toads trying to get out of the high beams, and everyone talked as if the death of a few hundred toads beneath the wheels were nothing, and there was the constant thucking of insects hitting the windshield. That was when I realized my idea of Florida—and certainly Elizabeth’s image of Florida—was not this. I fought back tears and the desire to tell someone I wanted to go back, immediately.
For the first years I visited, I feared those Wakulla County summers, but every subsequent spring I got excited when Aunt Lucy called Elizabeth about “plans.” The more Elizabeth learned about the family’s homestead, what we did, the more I wanted to go, shocking Elizabeth with emailed pictures of kids hanging upside down from branches or swimming in an inferior river called the Sopchoppy, which made up for its small size by being crystal clear and populated by alligators. From still pools of water, the cousins scooped up tadpoles, put them in jars so we could watch them turn into frogs, and there were long days when nothing was planned. We simply woke up and fed ourselves cereal and went outside.
They were the kind of families with one ATV for every two grown children, always driven full bore and kicking up dust past single-story houses, each house with at least three satellite dish antennas pointing at the same part of the sky, and you could stop at any house at any time and drink from a garden hose.
We played after supper in a family graveyard, our bellies full of grilled cow liver and fried doves, lying on graves listening for pursuers with flashlights.
Elizabeth thought I was exaggerating these things, and every summer sent me off with the last admonishment, “Don’t get too much sun.”
In Sopchoppy, a dog whelped puppies and, to my horror, ate two of them, which Dubourg explained meant there was something wrong with the puppies anyway. Equally terrifying to me was the sight of half tadpoles/half frogs growing in the tanks of brown water, rising to take air into new lungs, growing legs that weren’t useful yet.
After supper, we played epic games of flashlight tag in the cemetery, and here I was fascinated by the small graves of children, kids dead from childhood diseases or “stillborn,” which was a word I was taught and told not to say in front of adults—stillborn, stillborn, stillborn, running through my mind.
We watched the movie, the movie, at least once every summer, The Creature from Outer Space. My heart started pounding when the narrator began, “Since time began, man has looked toward the heavens with wonder . . . wonder and fear.” This was the B movie filmed in Color-vision! and in which my grandmother was perpetually trapped, perpetually eighteen, and always the first victim.
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br /> When the movie was made at the springs, two years before Van Raye was born, Katherine Raye worked as a lifeguard. Young, beautiful, athletic, she was hired to do stunt diving but earned a speaking part in the opening teenage party scene and eventually became Victim 1. She had one line of dialogue. My cousins had Catholic prayers they recited, but we also recited “Meet you on the other side,” with my eighteen-year-old grandmother every summer before she dove into the river on the television, where she would be drug down by the Creature yet again.
She had Van Raye when she was only twenty and died of bone cancer when Van Raye was twelve, but every summer I saw the Creature’s claw wrapping around her ankle and her struggle to swim, trailing a line of death bubbles, the young Katherine Raye, preserved for twenty seconds on film and dying over and over. She was credited as “Teenage Victim 1.”
Of course when we were all kids, we believed the spaceship had really landed in our swamp, and the Creature still came out at night looking for humans. We believed he put his ear to the side of the house every night to listen to how many people were breathing inside. We believed if there were enough of us in the house—our collective number being our strength—he wouldn’t dare come in and try to take someone.
When I had been there enough summers to overcome most of my fears, I could lie comfortably on a grave during flashlight tag and feel the coolness of the stone and listen to my cousins’ voices in the dark. They got angry if I pointed the flashlight at the sky because stray lights in the swamp, they said, attracted UFOs and creatures, but I couldn’t help but tempt fate when it was my turn with the flashlight, watching how the beam disappeared just beneath the stars.
Ursula woke me in the hotel room in Phoenix. She had already put her not-uniform back on and we walked out into the hallway where a group of middle-aged women saw us, and I knew we looked like lovers emerging from a hotel room in the middle of the day, maybe husband and wife, a feeling I liked, and I smiled and nodded at them as we passed.
Walking out of the new hotel with Ursula I felt halfway decent until I saw a disappointed Elizabeth coming out of the conference room. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, “I haven’t been myself.”
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