Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

She fanned the smoke away from her face to see him better and said, “Every expectant mother has her cravings.” She rolled her neck to loosen it, then quickly switched the radio off, shut the radio, pushed the antenna down.

He thought: Her problem is not my problem , and he grabbed her and kissed her on the bridge over the dry lakebed. She enjoyed the kiss, but opened her eyes to look at the sky while she did it.

While the Van Raye/Ruth reunion went on in California, I was paralyzed in a hospital bed, living through nights while my roommate incessantly snored and the old woman in the next room shouted her name: “This. . is. . Rose. . Epstein. I want to go home!”

Wouldn’t I have focused on that date the hacker, “Randolph,” gave me for my release: December 12? I don’t remember remembering. It’s a classic paradox.

Nurses came into my room all night long, green phosphorescent ID glowing as they took our vital signs in the near darkness. I’d gotten to a point where I barely woke when they slid the pressure cuff on my arm, pressed the thermometer to my ear, or stuck a small gauge needle into my abdomen, though I felt the cold shot of heparin spreading beneath the layers of my dead nerves, medicine that kept my blood thin so I wouldn’t get clots.

The 11:00 PM shift was good at reading my face, and one of them would get out the tablet Elizabeth had loaded with The Universe Is a Pair of Pants . The nurse put the headphones over my ears and moved in my line of sight to see if the volume was okay. I blinked once to signal yes, my father’s voice announcing, “Chapter 19, ‘Elements from the Tiger’s Tail,’” and began the essay about the most dangerous elements on the periodic table. I had no choice but to drift off while he spoke, my ears sweaty in the headphones.

When I woke, still the middle of the night, there was a reprise of light but the hydraulic door was closing, and I had enough time to see Ursula standing in the darkness. There is always an awkward moment when people step into your darkness because you see them better than they see you: her uniform was sloppy, her captain’s hat crooked on her head.

She let her eyes adjust to see me and then let her bag plop on the floor. My roommate’s snoring continued.

Ursula took off her cap and stepped to my bed, patted the cap twice against her leg as she looked down at me. She’d never seen me like this, only heard stories about the episodes when I was younger.

She tossed her hat in a chair and then removed my headphones and listened to them for a second and said, “Seriously? You’ll get brainwashed.” Then she leaned over the rail and kissed my forehead, not at all scared I was contagious.

She smelled like a cockpit — sweat and electronics and a showerless winter day. At the spot her lips touched my skin, the chaos of tingling nerves stilled as if they tried to decipher the touch. When she took them away, the tingling swarmed back in like a hive of bees.

“Do you think your mama calls me and tells me what’s going on?” She stood in silhouette against the window and tried to smooth strands of her hair that had escaped from the barrette and floated away from her head. “Hell no. I couldn’t get you, and so I finally called her.” She walked around inspecting things in the dark, the network of the hexagons in the safety-glass window cast a shadowy net over her body. She went to my sleeping roommate, his mouth wide open. I had no idea what was wrong with him, though his name on his computer monitor was JAMES LEGGETT and had a green cartoon heart beating just like mine. The room was filled with his breath and the bitter metabolized morphine stench of it.

“I can’t find Dubourg,” she said. “He’s probably going through one of those times he keeps his phone off.” She wiggled out of her uniform jacket, carefully folded it on the chair, and then rummaged through her duffle and came out with tiny bottles of Jack Daniel’s. She lined them up on the tray table, got two cups from the wall dispenser.

“Want some?”

I heard the seal break, and I blinked deliberately when she looked at me. She turned her head sideways, eyes scanning my face. She swigged from the tiny bottle and said, “That’s it, then? Blinking?”

I blinked once — yes.

She squinted and said, “Have you stopped masturbating yet, Sanghavi?” She waited until I blinked twice — no. “Got it,” she said and put the cup to my lips, and I tried to get only a taste, enough to spread on my tongue.

I wanted her badly to touch me again, to still the tingling anywhere.

She poured the remainder of my cup in her cup and poked at the Foley bag hanging on the end of my bed. “Let me see. I pour whiskey in this end of you and it comes out this end? Interesting.” She took another swig and looked over her shoulder at Leggett as if she didn’t trust his being asleep, and then put her hands on my railing and said, “And you don’t know why this keeps happening to you?”

I blinked twice, no. Through the wall, the old woman’s voice called out to be recognized—“I’m Rose Epstein!”—shouted like she was on a phone with a bad connection.

“They come and get you at night. Do you have recollection of this?”

I blinked emphatically no. I was not getting abducted.

“Jesus,” she said, and for the first time I saw a little fear. She looked out the window and felt around the seal to see that it couldn’t be opened.

She went to her bag and took out a thin book and two more tiny whiskey bottles. She pulled a goosenecked lamp over to a chair and clicked its rheostat switch and judged just the right amount of light. She poured both bottles into her cup and made herself comfortable in the chair under the light, propped her legs on my bed. The lamp’s light shined on her face. She held the book up to show me the cover: C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies .

“Carl fucking Jung.” She wiggled to get comfortable and began. “Chapter 1, ‘UFOs as Rumors.’” She waited to see if the snoring would be interrupted, and I could hear the tiny sound of my father’s voice coming from the headphones still on the bed, like he was reduced by a mad scientist’s shrinking machine.

Ursula continued, “‘Since the things reported of UFOs not only sound incredible but seem to fly in the face of all our basic assumptions about the physical world, it is very natural that one’s first reaction would be the negative one of outright rejection. . ’”

I wanted to laugh. I could barely make the face of laughter, my right side particularly droopy. No sound came from me. Clicking my tongue hurt. I didn’t have enough breath to whistle. There was a paper calendar on the wall directly in front of my bed, a clock beside it that I had no choice but to watch.

While she read, I moved my eyes to watch her face and then back to the clock’s hands moving time forward. You would have thought with those big calendar numbers in front of me I would be thinking about December 12, but I wasn’t. It didn’t seem to be in my mind.

Ursula fell asleep curled in the chair. More than three hours passed on the clock until she stretched, put the book away, and stood over me.

Please touch me.

“I could stay here with you,” she whispered. “Do you feel vulnerable? Do you want me to stay through the night?” She looked at the sleeping roommate in the other bed.

Yes, climb in bed next to me , I thought, but I blinked no. I’d been there for fifteen days and, no, I wouldn’t let her think that for a second I believed aliens were coming to get me in a hospital.

She leaned over and finally did it — put her hand on my head, lips to my skin, stopping the tingling. She whispered good night and got her bags, jacket over her arm. As the tingling flooded back, she was out the door.