Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Dear Sandeep, my son,

I’ve just arrived back home. Here is my new book, the best one yet if I’m allowed to say so.

I have to mention to you the subject we briefly talked about on the phone. I will remind you that this information was given to you in the strictest confidence. (Save this letter for posterity sake.)

What many others have searched for, I alone have found. It was a matter of knowing how to narrow the search. I will say this again because it has proven fruitful: It was only a matter of looking for places that reminded me of home.

For people who will wonder about such things, I used an old Craig-48 calculator and performed the loop transformations (like everything else) by hand. This took about three months, between March of last year until June of the same. All my work was done in my house at 211 Gildeer Street, which I should point out has been my personal residence for almost fifteen years, but I, however, first heard the sound when I was alone at the Big Dish antenna above campus.

Enjoy the book.

Your loving father,

Van Raye

This copy of his book — unsigned — and the letter, had cost me $5,000. There was no mention of the money, and I had no idea what a Craig-48 was. I turned the book over and looked at the author photo. The camera had caught Van Raye, eyes right, and he was in the process of smiling, a smile that you could tell was the beginning of laughter. Of course he displayed no hand in the author photo. Van Raye had written in a previous book that a hand in an author photo was a sign of a bad book. An author with his hand to his chin, or an arm draped on an arm, or, God forbid, holding a pair of glasses, was a sign the writer was dull as shit.

He was full of shit. I ripped his letter in half before I realized an old man and woman had gotten into the elevator, now staring at me, both with hands on rolling suitcases, ready to start their travel day. I stuffed the pieces of letter in my robe’s pocket and forced a smile.

They got out at the lobby, and I rose in the glass elevator again, seeing Albert in the lobby below, standing with his hands in front of him, staring at me going up, and I felt my eye twitching.

That Wednesday, I went to see a doctor in a strip mall.

By luck of the draw, I got an Indian doctor. He thumped my chest and instructed me to take deep breaths, which took me to the point of dizziness.

Dr. Ahuja was in his fifties, hair parted in the middle, stringy bangs and eyes so small they appeared closed and suspicious of everything. He probably had an Indian mother somewhere out there who was either very proud of him for being a doctor, or who thought being only an internist in a strip mall was a big failure.

When I told him my eye had been twitching, he squinted even harder but said, “No, they aren’t twitching.”

Redressed and sitting in his office, I stared at the changing pictures in the digital photo frame on his desk. The frame had the swirling logo of the drug company’s name on its bottom. A picture brightened in the screen: a pair of bare feet propped on a table framing the Eiffel Tower. Then the picture changed to bare feet framing Big Ben. I was pretty sure these were Dr. Ahuja’s feet.

“I think I might be getting depressed again,” I said. There was a superficial scuff on the side of my loafer. “I can’t seem to relax. I don’t think the Rozaline is working. Could I be building up a tolerance?”

“No,” he said, looking at my records on his computer from dozens of other doctors in my past. I almost expected him to tell me that America was full of overmedicated crybabies, but I’d listened and heard no accent. I’m guessing, like me, he had been born here.

The digital frame on his desk changed to a picture of his bare feet framing the pyramids, and I tried to control myself from rubbing the mark off my shoe. Scuffed shoes? No appreciation for the value of things.

“Can you describe in greater detail how you are feeling?” he asked.

I crossed my leg to bring the shoe closer. “I have this twitching in my eye, like I said—”

“Stop. It says here you are refusing an influenza shot? I want you to tell me why.”

“I never get the flu,” I said.

He made a distrustful sound in his throat and a small laugh, and I used the moment to lick my thumb and wipe the scratch off my shoe.

The picture frame on his desk changed to his legs propped on a backpack, his bare feet framing sharp snowcapped mountains.

He asked, “You were how old during this period here. . when you were last paralyzed?”

“Last time? Fourteen,” I said, “but I had milder cases at six and eight.”

“Ventilator?”

He’d just examined me and seen no scar on my throat, and this mistake made me picture a disappointed Indian mother frowning at him. “No,” I said.

That episode of paralysis happened after I had visited Van Raye with the Alfa Romeo in the desert. I’d flown back to Elizabeth who was living at a hotel in Baltimore. Tingling began in my extremities. In a matter of hours I had even been unable to talk.

Dr. Ahuja asked me, “Did anyone ever give a firm diagnosis?”

“No. It just went away.”

I remembered how doctors had examined the fourteen-year-old me, trying diagnoses on me like shoes—“He has Guillain-Barré syndrome,” ruling each one out — West Nile virus, MS, mercury poisoning. There seemed some comfort in Elizabeth telling them that it had happened before when I was six, once when I was eight, and it simply had gone away both times.

Dr. Ahuja’s brow wrinkled, and for the first time I could see his brown eyes, but then he squinted again as the picture changed to his bare feet framing an alpine chateau.

“I was stressed then too, like I am now. That’s what I’m worried about,” I said. “I haven’t been sick at all since. I mean not even the sniffles. I don’t need a flu shot. I just don’t want to get emotionally unbalanced or I’m worried about the paralysis happening again. The flu shot is unnecessary. My mother says I have an Indian immune system.”

He said, “That’s absurd.”

“My biological father is from rural Florida. I’ve got a weird combination of third-world immune systems.”

He said, “May I see your medical degree?” Idiotically, I touched the pocket of my jacket, but he said, “No, you don’t have one. I do. What you are saying has no scientific facts.” He looked down at his computer and began rapidly typing. “What happened to you has a medical reason, it just hasn’t been found yet. Stay away from superstitions. I would suggest that you let good medical professionals collect the facts and let them give you answers. Calcutta and Miami immune systems have nothing to do with each other.”

“I didn’t say Miami, I said Florida . There’s a difference.”

“I know the difference,” he said. “And I would also strongly suggest you take a flu shot.” He asked me, “And you think you are depressed? Describe how you feel.” He squinted into the fluorescent lighting, prepared to analyze my answer.

How could I explain? I thought about my playlist, “Songs to Beat Depression.”

“You know how when you are listening to music?” I said. “Okay, on the shuffle function, it gives you random songs supposedly designed for you by your previous choices, right?”

“Of course. I know this.”

“And some days every song the computer sends me makes me feel great, like the best song I’ve ever felt. On other days, it shuffles songs. .” I shrugged my shoulders. “You know, every song makes you feel terrible, they’re all bummers. Then I realize it’s not the music, it’s me. I only listen to one song, basically. Only one song makes me feel good.”