Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

We watched the movie, the movie, at least once every summer, The Creature from Outer Space . My heart started pounding when the narrator began, “Since time began, man has looked toward the heavens with wonder. . wonder and fear.” This was the B movie filmed in Color-vision! and in which my grandmother was perpetually trapped, perpetually eighteen, and always the first victim.

When the movie was made at the springs, two years before Van Raye was born, Katherine Raye worked as a lifeguard. Young, beautiful, athletic, she was hired to do stunt diving but earned a speaking part in the opening teenage party scene and eventually became Victim 1. She had one line of dialogue. My cousins had Catholic prayers they recited, but we also recited “Meet you on the other side,” with my eighteen-year-old grandmother every summer before she dove into the river on the television, where she would be drug down by the Creature yet again.

She had Van Raye when she was only twenty and died of bone cancer when Van Raye was twelve, but every summer I saw the Creature’s claw wrapping around her ankle and her struggle to swim, trailing a line of death bubbles, the young Katherine Raye, preserved for twenty seconds on film and dying over and over. She was credited as “Teenage Victim 1.”

Of course when we were all kids, we believed the spaceship had really landed in our swamp, and the Creature still came out at night looking for humans. We believed he put his ear to the side of the house every night to listen to how many people were breathing inside. We believed if there were enough of us in the house — our collective number being our strength — he wouldn’t dare come in and try to take someone.

When I had been there enough summers to overcome most of my fears, I could lie comfortably on a grave during flashlight tag and feel the coolness of the stone and listen to my cousins’ voices in the dark. They got angry if I pointed the flashlight at the sky because stray lights in the swamp, they said, attracted UFOs and creatures, but I couldn’t help but tempt fate when it was my turn with the flashlight, watching how the beam disappeared just beneath the stars.

Ursula woke me in the hotel room in Phoenix. She had already put her not-uniform back on and we walked out into the hallway where a group of middle-aged women saw us, and I knew we looked like lovers emerging from a hotel room in the middle of the day, maybe husband and wife, a feeling I liked, and I smiled and nodded at them as we passed.

Walking out of the new hotel with Ursula I felt halfway decent until I saw a disappointed Elizabeth coming out of the conference room. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, “I haven’t been myself.”

She only said, “Always try to prevent sorries.”

When your mother is angry with you, you feel like your clothes are drenched and you can’t even walk.

Ursula drove us to the airport in her tiny Shenandoah Airlines car, Elizabeth not speaking. I was clean and rested, but even with Ursula right there in the front seat (I was in the back) I was already missing her, and she hugged me at departures, told me that she was going to see how long she could stay in the air. “Between work and my lifetime pass, I hardly have to touch the ground.”

I thought she was joking.

When our red-eye flight got to altitude, the flight attendants turned out the cabin lights and Elizabeth’s silence beside me grew bigger in the darkness. I was back in my normal window seat, head against the wall in the dark of the aircraft cabin, trying to ignore her silence. Ursula would be on another flight to somewhere else in the world at this very moment.

“I’ll find your violin,” I whispered, not even sure that she heard me.

“I don’t want to become one of those families.” Her voice was near my ear, her face in the darkness.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have to work hard,” she said. “We don’t want to be one of those families that only bad stuff happens to.”

“You’ve read too much about the Kennedys,” I said.

Her fingers found my arm and squeezed. “No. This has happened to people I know. One or two bad things happen, and then suddenly it starts piling up.”

“That won’t happen,” I said. “I’ll get your violin back.”

“It’s not just that. Lately things have been getting out of our control. Maintain control starting with the details, even very small things. I’ve given you everything I could,” she said in a hushed voice. “Something could happen to me — natural causes — and you could carry on.”

“Please,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. We don’t have to work so hard. We’re fine.”

“Work is the answer.”

“I know. I’ll be better,” I said.

I asked her there in the dark, “Elizabeth, are you okay? Tell me.”

“Of course I’m fine. There’s no need to worry about me. Promise me something, right now.” I said okay and she said, “Keep tapering. Do you really want to be on it for the rest of your life?”

“No.” I tried not to think of where the violin might be, a stranger’s hands.

“Let’s see what this next place is like,” I said.

“Don’t let that control you, you should control it. Sandeep?”

“I’m here, Elizabeth.”

She sighed, which caused her not to say whatever had just crossed her mind. All of this had happened in the dark. She said, “You need to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

“It is tomorrow,” I said.

I closed my eyes and put my head against my hand, knuckles against the cold side of the plane.

I fell asleep on that flight and dreamed that I stood before the lavatory door on this plane. The little window said UNOCCUPIED. When I opened it, the tempest of pressure loss sucked a maelstrom past me, but I stood there, immune to the wind, and below me I saw the darkness of Middle America — fly-over towns twinkling in a flat boring landscape. People in the plane yelled for me to shut the door ! During the maelstrom of depressurization, the mother from the concourse today calmly fed pieces of bread to her little girl who still had her hands out on the armrests. The dream me shut the door and walked back to my seat and there was no Elizabeth. A female flight attendant touched my shoulder. “I’m very sorry about your mother, Mr. Sanghavi,” she said. “You shouldn’t have opened the door.” In my dream, tears began welling, but I realized I must maintain my composure for the duration of the flight in front of everyone, all these clients, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how humiliated Elizabeth must have been when she’d been sucked down the aisles on the floor, the way she must have slid by the other passengers, her nails dragging down the carpet, suffering the indignity of being pulled toward the void and finally into the dark airspace over America. In my dream, the dream me remained composed, sat down in our row of seats, and he flipped the armrest up when it was completely dark. He stretched his legs across where his mother should have been sitting, more comfortable without her, something the real me would never be.

In the morning, rain in Atlanta beat my already dead mood. The hotel van’s tires hissed on the interstate, and heat from the transmission rose through the floor, filled the shuttle’s interior. The other three passengers avoided eye contact as travelers on buses always do, the cadence of the wipers counted down our fate. Elizabeth sat beside me and appeared impossibly fresh and rested, her suit immaculate.