Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“‘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 should 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.”