Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

I noticed my roommate was awake, and when he and I were alone, he said from the darkness, “This guy rides into a Southern town and sees an old man on the porch. . He says to the old man, ‘This is a godforsaken place. What do y’all do around here?’” The old man says, ‘Fuck and hunt.’ ‘What do you hunt?’ the guy asks. The old man says, ‘Something to fuck.’”

He always waited for me to laugh at his jokes, and I mercifully heard the solenoid click in the machine by his bed, and the red on his monitor turned to a green when the morphine dose was released and he fell back to sleep.

You know it is really late in the hospital when you hear the bundle of keys go swishing down the linoleum hallway outside your door. These were the keys to the narcotics cabinet. Late at night, this is how nurses passed them around.

A hospital is an ugly hotel where you share your room with a complete stranger, a world that is never fully asleep or awake, and when you are paralyzed, head facing the unavoidable clock, nothing much changes except eyes open or eyes shut — dreams, reality, half dreams, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.

December 12 should have meant something to me but it didn’t.

In California, morning light and hammering woke Van Raye. He had once again spent another surprisingly comfortable night wedged against Ruth’s hot pregnant body. He lifted his head off the pillow and noticed the cold air coming through his bedroom window, flowing with a velocity that made him understand that the downstairs doors and windows were open, and the work crew had let themselves in for another day.

Ruth shifted in bed next to him, and from downstairs came the screeching of an impact hammer.

He stepped over Ruth’s clothes and toed her underwear on the floor, these unsexy men’s boxer briefs. What had started out as a one-night stand with an ex-wife had ended up as days of bedroom debauchery, days sequestered in the bedroom with the concert of construction noises playing downstairs, and then the nights in the silence when he and Ruth turned on the Trans-Oceanic radio and listened to the signal bouncing off the space station and down to terrestrial repeaters and broadcasted over Earth for them to catch. Or anyone else, he worried.

Her duffle bag on the dresser had slowly deflated and spewed its content of clothing and books over the room. She had, he worried, quickly made herself back at home here.

He went out on the balcony and looked over his front yard and pulled a metal pipe from his robe’s pocket, inspected it, and flicked the lighter and smoked. (In The Universe Is a Pair of Pants , in the chapter “Cursing in Sunday School,” he discussed the creative powers unleashed by cannabis.) In the distance, a flock of pigeons flew over the terracotta roofs of the university, first forming a boomerang and then an awkward O.

Down in his front yard he could see the bleached roof of his old Jaguar. When she had gone up to the space station, she’d obviously not stored it inside because now the black roof and hood had been baked for nearly two years in the sun and bore the symmetrical gray ovals of oxidation.

Trucks and vans were parked in his driveway and on his grass. Construction junk littered his property, technically the university’s property, and he looked down into the contents of the Dumpster and saw parts of his old house, what he still considered his house, though it had been “given” to him by the university when he was hired and was now being taken away. The guest bath’s old lime-green toilet was now in the Dumpster, so were the cabinets from over the bar. Van Raye was thinking that once he announced his discovery, the university would not only halt the conversion of his house to an alumni inn, but they would probably give it to him on a permanent basis. But he wasn’t ready to tell the world. Not quite yet.

When the computer had kicked out the anomaly, Van Raye had been alone in the control room of the Big Dish antenna, and he’d done something he always promised he wouldn’t do at that moment: He piped the actual sound through a headset and listened. The edges of the signal were empty, like an open line on a phone, like a calmer outside layer of a whirlpool, but then fine-tuning onto the planet produced the electronic sparks and pulses, washing of waves, and burps.

Eight hours later, he’d contacted Ruth aboard Infinity . She was shocked to hear his voice and see his face on the monitor. He was charming as always, calling her “honey” and “sweetheart” and explaining why he’d called.

Per his request, she’d turned the station’s little-used low-gain antenna to the coordinates he’d given her. Her exact words over the secure link to Earth — after the computer confirmed the chance of this “noise” being a random pattern was of the magnitude of 10 -23—her words were: “You got something extraterrestrial.”

Van Raye, leaning against the doorframe of his balcony now, smoked his pipe and watched the vehicles in his driveway and yard, observed yet another truck turning slowly into his driveway. Not just another construction truck but one with kennels on the back. Animals. Animal control? A gold seal reflected from the door when it opened, and a woman got out, a nice-looking young woman in a tank and a billowing skirt and black tights on her legs and practical tennis shoes, and he heard the dogs in the kennels yelping, lots of dogs.

She opened a kennel box, stuck her head inside, and Van Raye noticed her shapely calves beneath the black material, and the hounds inside the kennels bayed louder as his thoughts went to shapely calves and she lifted a gray-haired dog and gently put him on the ground. When she came toward his house, Van Raye instinctively hid behind the wall. Did one of those workers have a dog being delivered? It made no sense.

From the bed, Ruth blinked at him, wondering what he was doing flat against the wall.

The doorbell rang.

He put his finger to his lips.

It rang again.

“ Don’t answer it ,” he whispered, though she was only stretching beneath the sheets, giving the headboard an isometric push. “What’s happening?” she said.

“ Nothing .”

When the hammering and sawing on the first floor stopped, a worker’s voice yelled up the staircase, “Professor? Professor? Someone’s at the door.”

“Shit,” he said.

He went down and through the big living room where workers stared at him in his robe and bare feet, a few mumbling, “Morning, professor.”

He went to the front door, which was propped open with a five-gallon bucket of scrap, and there, on his stoop in the morning light, was the smiling, young attractive woman holding a leash in one hand and an electronic pad in the other. The old gray dog sat calmly on the stones of the stoop, hair shading its eyes.

The woman saw Van Raye and she simply exclaimed, “Wow,” and began shaking her head, “I can’t believe it’s you. . I can’t believe. . ”

Being recognized was a fine feeling, like Heineken bubbles popping in your mouth. The dog, he noticed, avoided looking at anyone, eyebrows twitching.

“Hi, darling, what can I do for you?”

The young woman said, “Okay, I look on my list, right, to see who’s my next client, right, and I see your name, right, and I’m thinking I won’t really see you, but it is you, right?”

Van Raye leaned against the doorframe.

“I can’t believe I’m standing on Van Raye’s steps. When I was a freshman, I went to your lecture on redshift galaxy formations.”