Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

I was going to have to tell her it was happening again, but first I got up and got The Universe Is a Pair of Pants and went to the bathroom, poured a glass of water, shut the toilet lid and sat backward on the toilet with the book on the back of the tank, and I began where I’d left off, and I drank glass after glass of water as if I could fill up my body for this long journey. Elizabeth finished “Carmen Fantasy,” started and finished all of “Moonlight Sonata.”

I pissed and drank one last full glass of water.

In my room, Barbie sat stiff limbed on the dresser, back against the wall. I had to find Van Raye. I texted the hacker, thumbs feeling like nubs.

I am getting sick again. This sometimes takes awhile

I am very sorry this is happening.

I have gotten used to talking to someone.

I will miss talking to you but I’ll be here when you are well

I opened the door to the suite where Elizabeth played in the low-wattage light of the fake living room. Her arm stopped when she saw me against the doorframe.

“Sandeep, what is it?”

“Elizabeth. . ” It seemed like the hardest thing in the world to tell her what was happening. I felt like I was failing her. I waited for a jet to finish landing, the thrust reversers shutting off. She stepped toward the lamp and the few strands of frayed string floated away from her bow like spider webs. I said, “I want to go to India.”

She puzzled over my statement but said, “Look,” holding the violin up. “This is wonderful. How did you do this?”

“You’ve never taken me to India,” I said.

She held her breath then carefully put the violin in the case. She walked to me and put her hand on my forehead. Elizabeth had always told doctors, “My son never has a fever.” This gesture tonight of putting her hand on my forehead was just what mothers had done for a thousand years when they were worried.

“I’ve never been to India,” I repeated.

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re delirious. You’ve had a long day. Look,” she pointed to the violin, “it’s here.”

“In India,” I said, “I can let my body have its way with all the diseases its supposed to have. Right?”

“Why are you thinking about this now?” she said and stepped back to see me. “You don’t want to go to India,” she said. “In India, I’ve seen Americans get sunburned through their hats and die.”

I held onto the doorframe. “Can I have a glass of water?”

She went into the bathroom, leaving me leaning against the doorframe. When my phone dinged, I fumbled it out of my pajama pocket. It said:

I can’t believe you are going away.

Can you stop it? I’ll do anything. I can’t get Raye if I’m paralyzed

No. I can’t stop a disease.

I started to put the phone away, but another text came in.

But I can give you a method.

It will help time go by quickly. Take it.

Ask me a question about the near future.

I don’t understand.

Do you want to know the date you will get out of the hospital?

?

Providing the answer will make you jump there in time. You will still have the experiences.

But for the moment it will feel like you’ve leapt forward in time.

Do you want to know how?

Who are you?

I’m not from this planet, so call me Randolph.:)

I read the word again, “Randolph.” This was impossible. I was losing my mind. A hacker couldn’t know about a childhood game that Elizabeth had played on me, one in which an alien took over her body.

When Raye contacts you, he’ll have a dog. Take care of the dog.

Dog? This was bullshit.

Do you want to know when you will be out of the hospital?

Telling you the future will make you leap there in time.

Elizabeth came out of the bathroom with a glass of water.

“Tell me now,” I said. “You did Randolph, didn’t you? Randolph is you.”

“This again? Sandeep, please.”

I could see my hand gripping the glass of water but not feel it. The coolness of the glass felt a long way from my head. Elizabeth watched me gulp. “Why are you drinking water?”

“I won’t be able to drink when it’s done.”

“ Stop that talk .”

“You know that’s the worse part,” I said. “I get so thirsty.”

“It’s not happening again. Tell yourself no. Please, Sandeep. It’s not true.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said, and tried to adjust my hands and the glass fell, almost hit Elizabeth’s feet.

“Sandeep!”

The water splashed on the floor, the floor an impossible distance from my head.

“It’s the tingling,” I said to her, the horrible, magic word we never spoke.

“Oh no,” she said, her eyes big, “you’re wrong!”

“Tell me! You are Randolph. You did Randolph.”

“Of course I did,” she said. “Why is that even important? Stop, you are frightening me.”

I leaned against the door, her eyeing me suspiciously, and I texted.

ok. Tell me

And he, Randolph or whatever he was, gave me the answer to the question — What day would I be out of the hospital? — though I still have the experience of the EMT shining a light in my eyes that night I was driven to the hospital, the ambulance leaning into a turn and all that was to follow, but as it was happening I did not think about the date, worry about the date, the date never crossed my mind but now seems to have been there all along, waiting for me to remember it. Every experience from that episode is in my memory, but here I am typing this, knowing that I knew the date of my release all those weeks, the date Randolph had given me of my body’s reprieve.

Riding in the ambulance, I thought about my phone sitting on my dresser in the hotel room—“Viva Las Vegas” stuck on my “Songs to Beat Depression” playlist — and also that I hadn’t sent Dubourg and Ursula a message about what was going on. My body was shutting me inside. I hoped like all the other times it would only be temporary. I was becoming just a brain.

I remember the EMT, a woman, putting the plastic oxygen mask over my face and remember how clean the air was and Elizabeth sitting on a jump seat, arms wrapped around her body, rocking as if praying, which scared me the most.

A couple of thousand miles away from me, a woman sat on a campus bench that afforded her a view of both entrances of the physics building. She sucked an unlit cigarette for a cheap tobacco buzz, her first “cigarette” in over a year. She wore a dirty insulated jacket, though the air temperature in Stanford, California, (I’ve checked archives for that day) was 65°F. Students probably thought Ruth Christmas sitting and listening to an old radio in her lap was a homeless woman who’d wondered over from town. It didn’t help that her hair had been chopped off so she looked crazy.

(When she was telling me this story, filling in the few gaps left by Van Raye’s journals, she told me she didn’t consider what she was doing as “stalking,” but then she laughed and told me, “That’s what every stalker says.”)

If anything showed her state of mind that day, it was that she sat nearly six hours listening to big band music on that radio, no eating, drinking, or relieving her bladder or lighting the cigarette. (She told me, “I have the perfect bladder for an astronaut.”)

When Van Raye finally emerged at 17:25 from the north entrance, he was wearing the same button-up sweater he’d been wearing when she’d followed him to work that morning.

A minor heart palpitation took Ruth’s breath. Jesus, she thought, why do I want him now?

Remembering that people walk 1.3 meters per second, she counted to thirty-three before she pushed the radio’s antenna down, shut the front cover, and began trailing him. She noted the way his body swayed back and forth as if it contained more lazy muscles than enterprising muscles, leaning to his left to counterbalance carrying the single book in the other hand, and Ruth suddenly realized she was out of breath, needed to lean against something. She’d forgotten gravity was a bitch.