Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Junctions?”

“Conjunctions or something, what word am I looking for?”

Dubourg and Ursula lived across from each other their whole lives on the misnamed Harms Road in Wakulla County, Florida, along with all my tanned, brown-kneed cousins: Holly, Marissa, Jenna, Good John, and Bad John, their houses scattered not more than a short ATV ride away. If someone had asked them, Ursula and Dubourg would say they were first cousins, which was true if Dubourg’s adoption to the Dunbar side of the family trumped the fact that he was Charles’s biological son by another woman who gave him up for adoption to Van Raye’s first cousin, Louis and his wife Lucy. It’s complicated, but if you do the math — divide by pi, carry the remainder, multiply by an estranged father — Dubourg and I know we are half brothers and sons of Van Raye but call each other cousin, and the skin on my knees was pale and the skin on his knees was brown, a peculiar trait of my Sopchoppy cousins I silently studied but could not explain as simple wrinkles or old scars or just the shadow of predominate patella bones. No one seemed wise to their brown knees but me.

Ursula glanced across the party to Elizabeth talking to Susanne Lund who was the banker who worked at least half the properties we dealt with. They saw me, and Susanne waved.

“Are you glad to see me or not?” Ursula said.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Ann-Margret?”

She wrinkled her nose like something stank and her sunglasses returned to her nose, and she became more interested in the wind and the gutted hotel in the distance. “I used to get it in college some. Stop looking at me. You’ve seen me all your life.”

I said, “We just watched Viva Las Vegas last night. Ann-Margret is on my mind.”

She pushed the glasses up on her nose with a knuckle. “Lay off it, okay? I don’t like it.”

Around our rooftop party, white tulips drooped over their vases, and I forced myself out of the cousin bubble, and it felt horrible outside it. I felt invulnerable when I was around my cousins.

“I’m really very glad to see you, but I’m on the job.”

“ Job , please.” She crushed the cup with one hand, but it was one of those brittle plastic cups whose sides split but popped back into a destroyed shape of itself, and she considered its defiance. “I need to tell you something,” she said, “but not here, okay?”

Please God , I thought, don’t tell me you are getting married . I wanted badly to tell her what Van Raye had claimed. “I got something I want to tell you too,” I said. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Did I just fucking say not here ?” she said.

“Okay, okay. Give me a second, okay?” I stepped away and found the number to DFW’s lost and found and called, and they passed me off through several numerical choices.

I watched a middle-aged woman in a beautiful blue dress approach Ursula with a pen and a pad ready. Please, I didn’t want to go to a wedding. She had been dating a guy from Charlotte but that hadn’t been that long, had it? Why wouldn’t I want her to get married? Probably the same reason I didn’t want Dubourg go be a priest. I would lose them.

Ursula didn’t have the normal light complexion of a redhead. I guess it was all those years in the Wakulla sun, but she looked like an airline pilot, straight, true, and smart. She had wanted to be a pilot since she was a little girl, nothing else. I think those looks and earnestness were why the network and the airline had chosen her for the reality show about the crazy cross-country flight, Flight 000 .

Regular people auditioned to be passengers aboard Flight 000 from Los Angeles to New York, and the airline cooperating with the network was the unknown Shenandoah Airlines. It was promoted as a “test flight” with four crewmembers (pilot, copilot, two flight attendants) and twenty passengers. When the network and the airline chose the “volunteers,” they signed a waiver and a confidential agreement that the company could do basically anything to the aircraft and the occupants during the flight. This was the catch: The passengers and crew could never tell anyone what had happened on Flight 000.

The only known flight plan was that the plane would be out of contact with the ground except for normal flight communications, but there were to be no cell phones, no cameras, no recording devices. When the flight was completed, by agreement, the passengers and crew would be given physical exams, would be debriefed and released, and no one could reveal what had happened during the trip. In return, the passengers and the four flight crewmembers, including Ursula (pilot in command), were given guaranteed lifetime gate passes to fly. Any of the Flight 000-ers could walk up to Shenandoah or one of its affiliated airlines, show her ID, and the airline would immediately issue a first-class ticket, bump a passenger if necessary. It was a deal that even airline employees didn’t enjoy, guaranteed flight, no reservation, no pre-notification. The only catch was that if one person broke the confidentiality agreement, then everyone — passengers and the four crewmembers — lost their lifetime passes.

When Ursula called and told me that she was one of the chosen cast members, the pilot in command, Elizabeth and I had to watch. Twenty ordinary Americans had been chosen, the passengers interviewed on morning talk shows before the flight. “What possibility most frightens you?” “What is more important, the fame or the lifetime pass?” “What is your worst fear?” “Do you get motion sickness easily?”

One news personality pointed out that Flight 000 might do aerobatics, and then an aviation expert was brought on-air and the aerobatic possibilities of the 737 were plotted along with possible airframe stresses (barrel roll was the most realistic). What about depressurization, a nosedive and pulling up at the last second?

A passenger, an elementary school teacher from Duluth, Georgia, said that she had nightmares that they were going to pipe “strong odors” through the ventilation just to see how passengers would react to five hours of torture. Others speculated on a simulated hijacking. Torture was a big part of the forecasts. What was the airline testing?

Shenandoah said that the captain and copilot would have the same information as the passengers. Ursula was selected because of her experience in the 737 and because you looked at Ursula in her uniform and immediately wanted to know everything about her, including if she was married. At first she told me she was doing it for the small bundle of money the network was paying the flight crew as well as the lifetime pass, but then on a late-night phone call before Flight 000, she told me that the real reason she was doing it was that she would die if she didn’t know what had happened on the flight. “I have to know, Sandy. I couldn’t stand around and see these people who knew and I didn’t. I have to know what happened. I have dreams at night that the flight takes off without me and I’ll never know.”

“But you’ll tell me, right?”

“Fuck off.”

Elizabeth watched a few episodes of Flight 000 , and she told me that this program proved that the world was so big they could find crazy people to do anything. Her opinion of the publicity for the airlines was right on: “The strange thing is that you wouldn’t think people want mystery and quirkiness with an airline, but there’s something about it that will work. Trust me. The world goes through periods of reverse in logic. The world is crazy.”

Ursula didn’t sleep for days before the flight, going over every emergency procedure, stealing time on the ground school’s 737 simulator (she called it “the stimulator”).