Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“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.