Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

Van Raye stopped the reading midsentence and tried to hear what she was saying. Here was his most recent ex-wife.

  “I’m sorry, darling?” he asked.

  Annoyed, she spoke louder from the thin audience, “I have something for you.” There was percolating from the coffee boiler in back, and the shifting of the few people in the audience to see who was interrupting.

  Van Raye cleared his throat. “Wonderful,” he mumbled.

  He found the place in the book and wrapped up, “Why do human beings find such outrageous beliefs comforting? Can they not find satisfaction in reality? Has reality not served them well? Why isn’t the neutrino, which can pass through matter, not as exciting as a ghost?”

  CHAPTER 19

  To write this book, I have researched websites and personal blogs of people who attended some of the public events of his book tour, and I have noticed that quite a few of the women posing with him have their hands on his stomach.

  The reception at his university that night Ruth showed up was in a room adorned with portraits of dead university presidents. He signed all twelve books presented to him in the same way:

  On the night

  of the noisy coffee maker.

  Van Raye

  Ruth, who sat at a table by herself, watched people posing with him, and she said she felt at ease for the first time since she’d returned to Earth, watching him with his arm curled around the book, trying to pay attention to the people he was signing for, but his eyes kept finding her, her fake smoking an unlit cigarette.

  When the caterers were clearing away the one table of food, he went to her and stood without speaking.

  She said, “Not a big crowd, huh? It’s a sad thing when people no longer find you interesting. If only they knew what you’ve found.”

  “Let’s keep quiet, shall we? When did you get back?” He straightened his posture and asked the bartender for a beer, got it and guided her away. He swigged from his Heineken and smiled at a couple with their coats over their arms, wanting to talk to the author before they left, but he turned his back to them.

  “This is my home,” Ruth said. She touched her head as though she could fix the stubble of hair. “What? You don’t want to see me?”

  “I didn’t say that.” A server came and put a new Heineken on the table and took the empty bottle from Van Raye.

  “Should you be doing that?” she asked, pointing to the beer.

  “You knew all along I didn’t have a problem.”

  Three years ago he’d shown up to a department meeting with ice cubes in a glass of Guinness beer. When asked by the chairman what he was drinking, Van Raye had told him it was iced coffee. The department had formed an intervention (not including Ruth who was training in Houston) and gave him the ultimatum that it was AA or face serious reprimands. AA seemed like such a commitment that Van Raye had quit drinking, and in the last several years he’d gotten into the habit of not drinking, and he’d kept on not drinking until now.

  Now he tried to look at Ruth, put the Heineken bottle to his lips. He’d forgotten the perfect click a Heineken bottle makes when it touches your incisors. No other beer bottle is made so perfect, he thought. Also the hissing foam in the mouth. That sounded like a large audience applauding. He took swigs just to hear applause.

  He felt electricity when he touched the sleeve of Ruth’s insulated parka as he swallowed and thought about her body beneath it. He remembered her strong legs and her daringness in bed, the way she would hop around. Now she stank a little.

  “Would you like to go back to my place?” he asked.

  “I was surprised to find that it was still your place.”

  “It’s still my house,” he said. “Barely. Is that yours?” He pointed at the radio in the chair beside her.

  “Yes,” she said without taking her eyes off him. “I have to tell you something: I’m pregnant.”

  There was the sound of bottles being placed on the serving cart, the last caterer walking across the room.

  “Oh,” he said, thinking. “How long have you been back?”

  She pulled the sleeve of the parka to see her watch. “Ten days. I think. I lost track.”

  “That was fast,” he said.

  She narrowed her eyes and waited for him to think.

  “Oh,” he said. “Up there?”

  She nodded.

  “Is that why you came back down?”

  “It played a part in my decision, yes.”

  They left the auditorium, walking through the sculpture garden, “The Gates of Hell” illuminated by spotlights.

  They walked through the dry lakebed toward home, Van Raye with two beers in his sweater’s pockets stretching the fabric, bottles tapping against his thighs. Above the trees was a dome of light pollution cast from the university golf course’s arc lights.

  “Let’s see,” Ruth said counting the brighter stars with her finger. “Now where is it?”

  “Don’t point,” he said.

  “There are the twins. There’s Capella,” she said, her hand held straight out, “so I’d follow it east. It would be about . . . there, third star down. There’s a planet there full of life. Chava Norma!”

  “Don’t say it out loud, please,” he said.

  They were on a small pedestrian bridge. Van Raye glanced to see only a student walking through the grass using her open laptop like a flashlight, illuminating the ground before her.

  “Please don’t be flippant about this,” he said. “I’m not ready for anyone to know.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Soon,” he said. “But I have things to do first.”

  Moonlight highlighted the lakebed’s grass. He took a breath. “Sometimes I don’t believe it’s real,” he said. “What if I made it all up in my mind?”

  “You’re forgetting I heard it too,” she said. “I’m not crazy.”

  She stopped and put the radio on the railing of the bridge. She unhooked the gold latch on the front of the radio and lifted the front cover to reveal the old radio dial. She extended the antenna and turned it on, illuminating the eight bands on the dial.

  “You don’t think you can . . .” he started. “That’s not possible.”

  Big band music played until she pushed the button for the dial labeled NIGHTS & EVENINGS and then there was the whining of white noise. She dialed through voices, Spanish and more Spanish, an Australian calling out numbers, then more music, and she fine-tuned to a silence among the chaos and then a humming interlaced with a pattern of clicks like a needle stuck at the end of a record.

  “My God,” he said sitting back on the railing. “How?”

  “The space station’s high gain is still trained on it. When I fell to Earth, I made sure it would keep tracking. It’s broadcasting down to old Cold War repeaters, which in turn broadcasts it over Earth.”

  “We shouldn’t do that,” he said.

  “Why? It’s hidden in plain sight. Do you think anyone knows what this is? The telemetry of your signal isn’t there, only the sound. Does it sound a little like a didgeridoo to you?”

  “No,” he said.

  She took out a plastic lighter, lit the cigarette.

  “Should you be doing that?” he asked, pointing to the cigarette. “If you are pregnant.”

  She fanned the smoke away from her face to see him better and said, “Every expectant mother has her cravings.” She rolled her neck to loosen it, then quickly switched the radio off, shut the radio, pushed the antenna down.

  He thought: Her problem is not my problem, and he grabbed her and kissed her on the bridge over the dry lakebed. She enjoyed the kiss, but opened her eyes to look at the sky while she did it.

  CHAPTER 20

  While the Van Raye/Ruth reunion went on in California, I was paralyzed in a hospital bed, living through nights while my roommate incessantly snored and the old woman in the next room shouted her name: “This . . . is . . . Rose . . . Epstein. I want to go home!”

  Wouldn’t I have focused on tha
t date the hacker, “Randolph,” gave me for my release: December 12? I don’t remember remembering. It’s a classic paradox.

  Nurses came into my room all night long, green phosphorescent ID glowing as they took our vital signs in the near darkness. I’d gotten to a point where I barely woke when they slid the pressure cuff on my arm, pressed the thermometer to my ear, or stuck a small gauge needle into my abdomen, though I felt the cold shot of heparin spreading beneath the layers of my dead nerves, medicine that kept my blood thin so I wouldn’t get clots.

  The 11:00 PM shift was good at reading my face, and one of them would get out the tablet Elizabeth had loaded with The Universe Is a Pair of Pants. The nurse put the headphones over my ears and moved in my line of sight to see if the volume was okay. I blinked once to signal yes, my father’s voice announcing, “Chapter 19, ‘Elements from the Tiger’s Tail,’” and began the essay about the most dangerous elements on the periodic table. I had no choice but to drift off while he spoke, my ears sweaty in the headphones.

  When I woke, still the middle of the night, there was a reprise of light but the hydraulic door was closing, and I had enough time to see Ursula standing in the darkness. There is always an awkward moment when people step into your darkness because you see them better than they see you: her uniform was sloppy, her captain’s hat crooked on her head.

  She let her eyes adjust to see me and then let her bag plop on the floor. My roommate’s snoring continued.

  Ursula took off her cap and stepped to my bed, patted the cap twice against her leg as she looked down at me. She’d never seen me like this, only heard stories about the episodes when I was younger.

  She tossed her hat in a chair and then removed my headphones and listened to them for a second and said, “Seriously? You’ll get brainwashed.” Then she leaned over the rail and kissed my forehead, not at all scared I was contagious.

  She smelled like a cockpit—sweat and electronics and a showerless winter day. At the spot her lips touched my skin, the chaos of tingling nerves stilled as if they tried to decipher the touch. When she took them away, the tingling swarmed back in like a hive of bees.

  “Do you think your mama calls me and tells me what’s going on?” She stood in silhouette against the window and tried to smooth strands of her hair that had escaped from the barrette and floated away from her head. “Hell no. I couldn’t get you, and so I finally called her.” She walked around inspecting things in the dark, the network of the hexagons in the safety-glass window cast a shadowy net over her body. She went to my sleeping roommate, his mouth wide open. I had no idea what was wrong with him, though his name on his computer monitor was JAMES LEGGETT and had a green cartoon heart beating just like mine. The room was filled with his breath and the bitter metabolized morphine stench of it.

  “I can’t find Dubourg,” she said. “He’s probably going through one of those times he keeps his phone off.” She wiggled out of her uniform jacket, carefully folded it on the chair, and then rummaged through her duffle and came out with tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s. She lined them up on the tray table, got two cups from the wall dispenser.

  “Want some?”

  I heard the seal break, and I blinked deliberately when she looked at me. She turned her head sideways, eyes scanning my face. She swigged from the tiny bottle and said, “That’s it, then? Blinking?”

  I blinked once—yes.

  She squinted and said, “Have you stopped masturbating yet, Sanghavi?” She waited until I blinked twice—no. “Got it,” she said and put the cup to my lips, and I tried to get only a taste, enough to spread on my tongue.

  I wanted her badly to touch me again, to still the tingling anywhere.

  She poured the remainder of my cup in her cup and poked at the Foley bag hanging on the end of my bed. “Let me see. I pour whiskey in this end of you and it comes out this end? Interesting.” She took another swig and looked over her shoulder at Leggett as if she didn’t trust his being asleep, and then put her hands on my railing and said, “And you don’t know why this keeps happening to you?”

  I blinked twice, no. Through the wall, the old woman’s voice called out to be recognized—“I’m Rose Epstein!”—shouted like she was on a phone with a bad connection.

  “They come and get you at night. Do you have recollection of this?”

  I blinked emphatically no. I was not getting abducted.

  “Jesus,” she said, and for the first time I saw a little fear. She looked out the window and felt around the seal to see that it couldn’t be opened.

  She went to her bag and took out a thin book and two more tiny whiskey bottles. She pulled a goosenecked lamp over to a chair and clicked its rheostat switch and judged just the right amount of light. She poured both bottles into her cup and made herself comfortable in the chair under the light, propped her legs on my bed. The lamp’s light shined on her face. She held the book up to show me the cover: C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

  “Carl fucking Jung.” She wiggled to get comfortable and began. “Chapter 1, ‘UFOs as Rumors.’” She waited to see if the snoring would be interrupted, and I could hear the tiny sound of my father’s voice coming from the headphones still on the bed, like he was reduced by a mad scientist’s shrinking machine.

  Ursula continued, “‘Since the things reported of UFOs not only sound incredible but seem to fly in the face of all our basic assumptions about the physical world, it is very natural that one’s first reaction would be the negative one of outright rejection. . . .’”

  I wanted to laugh. I could barely make the face of laughter, my right side particularly droopy. No sound came from me. Clicking my tongue hurt. I didn’t have enough breath to whistle. There was a paper calendar on the wall directly in front of my bed, a clock beside it that I had no choice but to watch.

  While she read, I moved my eyes to watch her face and then back to the clock’s hands moving time forward. You would have thought with those big calendar numbers in front of me I would be thinking about December 12, but I wasn’t. It didn’t seem to be in my mind.

  Ursula fell asleep curled in the chair. More than three hours passed on the clock until she stretched, put the book away, and stood over me.

  Please touch me.

  “I could stay here with you,” she whispered. “Do you feel vulnerable? Do you want me to stay through the night?” She looked at the sleeping roommate in the other bed.

  Yes, climb in bed next to me, I thought, but I blinked no. I’d been there for fifteen days and, no, I wouldn’t let her think that for a second I believed aliens were coming to get me in a hospital.

  She leaned over and finally did it—put her hand on my head, lips to my skin, stopping the tingling. She whispered good night and got her bags, jacket over her arm. As the tingling flooded back, she was out the door.

  I noticed my roommate was awake, and when he and I were alone, he said from the darkness, “This guy rides into a Southern town and sees an old man on the porch . . . He says to the old man, ‘This is a godforsaken place. What do y’all do around here?’” The old man says, ‘Fuck and hunt.’ ‘What do you hunt?’ the guy asks. The old man says, ‘Something to fuck.’”

  He always waited for me to laugh at his jokes, and I mercifully heard the solenoid click in the machine by his bed, and the red on his monitor turned to a green when the morphine dose was released and he fell back to sleep.

  You know it is really late in the hospital when you hear the bundle of keys go swishing down the linoleum hallway outside your door. These were the keys to the narcotics cabinet. Late at night, this is how nurses passed them around.

  A hospital is an ugly hotel where you share your room with a complete stranger, a world that is never fully asleep or awake, and when you are paralyzed, head facing the unavoidable clock, nothing much changes except eyes open or eyes shut—dreams, reality, half dreams, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.

  December 12 should have meant something to me but
it didn’t.

  CHAPTER 21

  In California, morning light and hammering woke Van Raye. He had once again spent another surprisingly comfortable night wedged against Ruth’s hot pregnant body. He lifted his head off the pillow and noticed the cold air coming through his bedroom window, flowing with a velocity that made him understand that the downstairs doors and windows were open, and the work crew had let themselves in for another day.

  Ruth shifted in bed next to him, and from downstairs came the screeching of an impact hammer.

  He stepped over Ruth’s clothes and toed her underwear on the floor, these unsexy men’s boxer briefs. What had started out as a one-night stand with an ex-wife had ended up as days of bedroom debauchery, days sequestered in the bedroom with the concert of construction noises playing downstairs, and then the nights in the silence when he and Ruth turned on the Trans-Oceanic radio and listened to the signal bouncing off the space station and down to terrestrial repeaters and broadcasted over Earth for them to catch. Or anyone else, he worried.

  Her duffle bag on the dresser had slowly deflated and spewed its content of clothing and books over the room. She had, he worried, quickly made herself back at home here.

  He went out on the balcony and looked over his front yard and pulled a metal pipe from his robe’s pocket, inspected it, and flicked the lighter and smoked. (In The Universe Is a Pair of Pants, in the chapter “Cursing in Sunday School,” he discussed the creative powers unleashed by cannabis.) In the distance, a flock of pigeons flew over the terracotta roofs of the university, first forming a boomerang and then an awkward O.

  Down in his front yard he could see the bleached roof of his old Jaguar. When she had gone up to the space station, she’d obviously not stored it inside because now the black roof and hood had been baked for nearly two years in the sun and bore the symmetrical gray ovals of oxidation.

  Trucks and vans were parked in his driveway and on his grass. Construction junk littered his property, technically the university’s property, and he looked down into the contents of the Dumpster and saw parts of his old house, what he still considered his house, though it had been “given” to him by the university when he was hired and was now being taken away. The guest bath’s old lime-green toilet was now in the Dumpster, so were the cabinets from over the bar. Van Raye was thinking that once he announced his discovery, the university would not only halt the conversion of his house to an alumni inn, but they would probably give it to him on a permanent basis. But he wasn’t ready to tell the world. Not quite yet.