Cosmic Hotel

by Russ Franklin

  “Come with me,” I said.

  She let the earphone go and shook her head, eyes hidden behind the dark glasses, which is exactly the answer she gives when I ask her to marry me. “Fundamentally different philosophies,” she says, but I feel her caving. Those nights when we are sleeping together, finally, after all those years, I know she loves me and another baby is on its way.

  In the airplane, when she threw her thumb to tell me to get out, the screen of her wristwatch (still worn backward) sparkled and her belly peaked from beneath her pilot’s shirt. This baby is going to be so brown. She just doesn’t understand. Like Elizabeth said, the Indian genes will dominate.

  When I shut the door, and she locked it from inside and turned the plane, she hit me with a blast of prop wash. I caught a ride to the campground beside the racetrack to find Charles.

  There is a huge coliseum built in the middle of the hills of east Tennessee where humans race cars. That night I went looking for Charles, the day’s racing done, and the parties had started. There were miles of RVs in every direction, music intertwining with other music, laughter and shouts, the sound of beanbags slapping in a cornhole game. The dark air smelled of campfires and port-o-potties, and I searched for his row. A country music band jammed in a dilapidated house at the corner. I used the tracker on my phone to find his, the sewage truck passing me on the gravel road, kicking up dust. I took out my handkerchief, and put it to my nose until I saw a group of race fans beneath a string of cactus lights staring at me. They drank beers, watched me in my button-down and slacks, handkerchief covering my face.

  I saw Van Raye sitting in a reclining chair, hands behind his head. “Sandeep!” he yelled and the patio recliner tilted, but he remained seated. “It’s my son!” he shouted.

  “Hello, Sandeep,” one of the men said to me, Bill something, one of the race regulars with Charles.

  Charles didn’t get up, but I bent and took his hand and put my face against his face and kissed him.

  “Want a beer?” Bill said, already going into the cooler.

  I sat by a campfire built inside a metal ring and asked about the race today, and the one tomorrow night, drank beer and kept seeing flickering lights in the sky, not an airplane but yellow glowing orbs of floating lanterns rising from the massive campgrounds. Van Raye kept pulling out his phone to check race news, fingering it off. He’d always loved driving fast cars, but how did he end up here?

  Van Raye reached and touched my shoulder and whispered, “Sandeep?”

  “Yes.”

  “I got a pit pass. I was this close to Austin Harris. I’ve got pictures!” He turned his phone on and started showing me pictures.

  “The family is fine,” I said, ignoring the pictures.

  “I’m glad. Ursula and the baby? Okay?” He looked at the pictures himself.

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful.”

  The campground was one big party, people wandering up and down the gravel road, beers in hand, golf carts dragging effigies of different drivers through the dirt. A guy staggered up and asked if he could use someone’s bathroom, said that he was lost. When he was done, he came back out of the neighbor’s RV and sat in one of Van Raye’s folding chairs and simply declared, “I’m from Canada,” and waited to see what reaction he got about this news. There was none. Harold from Maryland gave him a beer.

  “Are you happy?” I asked Van Raye.

  “Of course! This is great, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why are you so interested in this?”

  “In what?”

  “Racing. NASCAR.”

  “I’ve always been,” he said.

  “No, you haven’t. Did you ever go to a race, I mean, before?”

  “I followed it.”

  “No, you didn’t. You drove fast cars, but I never saw you watching a race. You’ve got some kind of false memory. I never even saw you watch television.”

  “Watching sports is for imbeciles,” he said. “This is racing. I’ve always loved racing. I just didn’t have much time to do it before. Retirement is great.”

  The word “retirement” gave me a shot of pain for Elizabeth to have lived long enough for it.

  Across the road, people held open a paper lantern and someone lit a tiny block of wood at its base, filling it with light and hot air. They raised it and let it go on the breeze, which carried it over the campers and the campground, rising ever higher. At one point there were dozens of them in the sky. “Redneck UFOs,” a guy name Marty said.

  “You know what this reminds me of,” Van Raye said to me and pointing to the surrounding hills of this Tennessee valley. “All these campfires?” I waited. His hand dropped. “The night in Georgia, that night, all the campfires and the soldiers.”

  “I don’t want to remember it,” I said.

  “Of course not. You certainly don’t want to,” he said. “I’m sorry. What was I thinking?”

  When four silver empty cans of beer stood beside his chair, he rose using the pole of his awning. Charles pulled his pant leg up. Velcro ripped and he took his prosthetic leg out leaving the pant leg empty.

  “Oh Jesus, he’s taking his leg off,” Marty said.

  “Things are getting serious, the professor is legless,” Bill said.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I lost this leg in the pursuit of extraterrestrial life.” He pivoted and plopped back in the lounger, holding the leg across his body like a guitar.

  “Have you found intelligent life yet?” one of the men asked and the others laughed, one saying, “Not around here!”

  This is the first joke any fool would think of, but Van Raye didn’t blink and said, “I have! I really have. Sandeep will tell you. We did it, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said, “you did.”

  “Don’t start with the alien crap,” Bill said. Then to me, “You know he’s drunk when he takes his leg off and starts in about aliens.”

  “Hunting them used to be his job,” I said.

  “Well, he knows how to retire,” Bill said, raising his beer.

  “Hear, hear, to the professor,” someone said, “intelligent life in Thunder Valley!” Everyone raised beers, and I did too, though it felt faked. When the toast was over, the Canadian announced that he’d wet his pants. Everyone laughed and Van Raye said, “That’s my chair, asshole!” A four-wheeler came by hauling a trailer with a hot tub full of people in cowboy hats. Elizabeth would have asked, “What kind of country is this?”

  “Listen, Charles, I’m going to write everything down. A book.”

  “Why?” he said. “I’m going to write one.”

  We both knew he wasn’t going to do it. This was his old life.

  He thought about this a second, and his chest relaxed, and he said, “Well, don’t mention the dog, okay? Someone might misconstrue my handling of the dog.”

  “But how could I ever tell this story without the dog?”

  He didn’t answer. It made me realize that Van Raye’s books, the articles, they were all bullshit, not in the sense that he ever lied about anything, but in the sense that they were chosen, edited, and elaborated to serve the image that he had of himself, and more importantly, he’d lived his life thinking first about the essay he would write, done things simply because it would make a better story. Even science, physics, mathematics were just frames to stretch the canvas of himself on and show the world who he thought he was, leaving out the parts he considered boring, uninteresting—father, husband, shitter, pisser, bankrupt man. Now he was simply old.

  The next night I went to the race with him, and the roar of forty-four cars going around on a half-mile track was unbearably loud even though I had those foamy earplugs in. I looked over and Charles was filming the green-flag start with his phone, body tilted back so he could see everything in the tiny screen, his mouth formed into a holler though no one could hear him. Van Raye had obtained a rare pleasure in this life: he had let go.

  I had gone to the demolition of the Gran
d Aerodrome because I wanted to see if I felt the memory of all the old lives lived there, those that had crossed through that hotel finally disappearing in the great cloud of dust. Of course I couldn’t. The hotel is gone and there is no way ever to go back into the hotel room with the blue light and talk to Elizabeth.

  When I fly through Atlanta, I take a cab to that totally industrialized side of the airport, passing the Gypsy Sky Cargo compound that will be there until the end of times. I stand on the bare dirt in the place that was the Grand Aerodrome and watch the sky and the Gypsy compound, and there is a small part of me that watches for Elizabeth’s posture over there on the other side. I really can’t fathom that I’ll never see her again. I need her so badly every day. Sometimes I catch myself thinking, The next time I see Elizabeth I’ll tell her . . . Memories overlap between people, and as each person dies, certain memories disappear. Perhaps that instinct to believe I will one day see her, this is where the concept of heaven comes from, an archetypal image of the place we will reunite and began new memories and talk about the old ones. I’m pretty sure there’s no heaven; the world, the universe, simply doesn’t work like that. I’ve certainly seen no evidence of it other than an alien that knew a few things that seemed incredible, an alien that doesn’t exist to me now. Writing about it makes me close to the feeling one last time before I let it go forever. Writing about it is as real as it will ever get.

  Ursula swings. Dubourg carries Boy on the hunt for the mole in the backyard. The child Ursula is carrying is not a hybrid of Ursula and some alien, but I say nothing to her. When the new baby arrives, it will look Indian. There’ll be no denying it’s my child, but do the truly converted ever face facts?

  We’ll raise it just like we do Boy. Ursula will find reasons why his or her skin is dark like mine, and I’ll never say anything to convince her otherwise, and hopefully we will make more. The idea of her not believing in what she wants to believe scares me, just like it would if Dubourg wanted to know what was in his case, or if he stopped believing in God.

  Ursula flies in and lives with the boy and me in hotels across America. Dubourg comes when he can.

  There is never a time when I don’t walk into a new hotel room, weary from the road, and plop facedown on a bed. Boy stares at me. My body makes the crater in the comforter, and that’s when I think about Butch’s body on the bed and remember the gravity we all make and this is what being is: an existence, a created crater. We all just simply go away, and our gravity disappears.

  Boy travels with me just like I did with Elizabeth, me rolling our luggage with one hand, carrying the bag of water and the fish for him through the airports, finding kind TSA agents who will let a boy and a betta fish into the Airport Zone, the fish inside warping big, small, big, small.

  When we are alone, I change my voice and say, “I’m Randolph, never Randy. Hello, Number 2, what is this place we are in?” but either he’s too young to understand or he doesn’t buy it. But the boy loves the Desert Motor Court, and, by default, must not hate my periods of paralysis because that’s where we go together and slow down.

  Here in the desert the fantastic and mysterious mole lives, and Boy gets to go there, and Dubourg is there and his Earth mother, Ursula, and he can search for the mole, the mole always just outside of Boy’s beam of light.

  The ritual of the mole is this: When I am paralyzed, I lie in the reclining chair beneath the darkening sky, Leggett staring at this weird nuclear family from the glass cube of the Desert Motor Court’s lobby. Dubourg lifts Boy up in his arms and carries him horizontally, flashlight in Boy’s hand. Boy tries to shine the light in the sage and the bushes looking for the mole.

  Ursula asks Boy, “Who are you looking for?”

  “The mole,” Boy says, eyes wide, and the way he says “mole” makes it sound like the most incredible, unbelievable, wonderful, most mysterious creature in the universe—the mole.

  “When does the mole come out?” Ursula asks.

  “At night,” Boy responds.

  “Where does the mole live?”

  “Underground,” the boys says.

  I can see why someone outside of our group would think everything I’ve told you is unreal—headlights, a dog’s eyes, an alien—but to me the problem is it’s too real, and it’s all going by in such a hurry. How many time mines are out there waiting for me, those terrifying moments when your life leaps forward, and you’ll just find yourself at the end? We are always only one answer from the end.

  The flashlight beam bounces over the yard thanks to Dubourg’s purposefully shaky carrying, but there is a black shape that leaps from one bush to the other. “There!” the boy shouts. Dubourg plays along and chases, shaking the boy so that the beam can’t quite be still. The black shape scoots along the dirt, bouncing, and jerks into the next bush. “The mole!” the boy shouts, Dubourg carrying him after it. “The mole! The mole! The mole!” The game ends too quickly, Ursula reeling the last of the line in and hiding the black sock beneath her leg. “The mole,” Boy shouts, Dubourg out of breath, and the boy knows the mole can’t be found.

  “Where has the mole gone?” Dubourg asks.

  “Underground!” Boy shouts.

  I want very badly to believe in the mole.