Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

The sun slid down into the frame of our hospital window and the parallelogram of yellow moved across the tile floor as my roommate watched a news show about a man who’d killed his wife on their Jamaican honeymoon. Luckily our door had been propped open, and I could cut my eyes to study people walking past, the parallelogram of window light stalking me, finally climbing onto the side of my bed like it did every afternoon. I watched every old woman going by our door — walkers, wheelchairs, shuffling in bedroom slippers — to see if I could determine who Rose Epstein was, the woman’s voice that called through the wall. I was a little obsessed with finding out who she was.

Elizabeth came in the door carrying a new paper sack with a change of clothes, and Leggett watched her go over and take my cup from the table and fill it with water. She put it to my lips, and a pewter charm dangling from her neck caught the sunlight — the elephant head of Ganesha. I didn’t even know she had this charm, this remover of obstacles.

She saw me looking at it and leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, stilling the nerves for a second.

She opened the paper bag to get my new pair of pajamas and the nurse came in and rolled me on my side to change my diaper. When they did this, they had no idea the dead weight of my high arm crushed my chest, and for these fifteen seconds I couldn’t breathe. They folded the dirty diaper beneath me. The nurse inspected the Foley catheter going into the tip of my penis, ran the tube and the bag through the leg of my pajamas, hung the bag on the end of the bed, and pulled the pants up. She gave me the cold shot of heparin in the gut and went away.

“Are you okay?” Elizabeth asked me, watching me swallow one more cup of water.

I blinked once, yes.

Leggett’s news program was interviewing the husband in his orange prison jumpsuit.

Elizabeth stepped on a pedal beneath the bed, and the motor hummed and the whole bed rose until she could put her hands on the railing, bracelets pushing up, and she bent to whisper, “Sandeep, think about how happy we are going to be when all this is over.”

She straightened herself. She went and got the paper bag, stuffed the old pajamas inside, and put her purse on her shoulder. She straightened her posture. “I’m going to run away and work for Sky Cargo.” When she stopped to look at herself in the mirror above the sink, putting her hair back in place, she looked like a stranger. She turned and smiled at me. “I’m joking, of course, but I look at Gypsy every day, the people working, loading and unloading. Everyone seems happier than we do.” Inside the bracelets was her watch, and she noted the time. “She’s coming to see you tonight, right?”

I didn’t blink because I didn’t know. Some nights Ursula did, some nights she had to fly.

“I know she comes here. I smell whiskey on your breath every morning.” She kissed my cheek. She sighed. “I’m glad you have each other. You know that, right?”

I blinked yes.

On her way out, she ignored Leggett in the other bed as usual. She left my bed a good four feet in the air.

When she was gone, Leggett stared at the shut door and said, “What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vender?” I hated him. “‘Make me one with everything,’” he said.

At night, after the last chimes had played over the PA to signal visiting hours were over, Ursula came in trailing the light from the hallway, put her things down, poured one cup of whiskey, which she gave me a sip from, and pulled up a chair, propped her feet on the railing of my bed, and began reading Strieber’s classic, Communion , “‘This is the story of one man’s attempt to deal with a shattering assault from the unknown.’”

During her late-night visits I had to lay and listen to how abductees supposedly recovered lost memories through hypnosis, though I knew that hypnosis had been scientifically proven to create false memories. Leggett, when he was awake, seemed to listen to her, making no comment, mostly looking at her as she read the words of some third-rate journalists and hokey scientists with titles like “Harvard educated . .”

When she finished for the night, her steps were often too deliberately careful, and she always came and touched me one last time for the night, kissing my cheek and then left.

When the darkness took back over the room, and Leggett fidgeted in pain, grunting, the night belonged to Rose Epstein who came alive shouting her name through the wall.

Leggett grimaced and said in the darkness, “Did you hear about the deaf gynecologist?” He gripped the railing with one hand, his gold Masonic ring glinting. His other hand raised the morphine clicker like he was a contestant on a game show of pain, and he finally said, “ He reads lips! ” and pressed the button, and there was the snap of the solenoid, and on his monitor above his rising heart beat, the green appeared.

I began dreading his passing into sleep each night, the dose of morphine taking him away because then I heard the narcotics cabinet keys go swishing past our door, and I waited what seemed forever for Rose Epstein. “ I’m Rose Epstein . . ”

It was hard to tell the difference between sleep and just living through the night, stranded inside my head, but this made me vulnerable to an experience that I have to write about if I’m going to tell the truth about everything.

A teaching hospital such as this is a surreal place where people often came into the darkened room — doctors and interns administering tests just outside the dome of light surrounding my bed, asking each questions about my condition, trying on diagnoses. I was often taken to different exam rooms in the middle of the night, once waking to a woman outside the light surrounding my bed, asking, “Babinski reflex?” I wanted to answer no I wasn’t Babinski Reflex, but someone uncovered my feet, which seemed a million miles from my head, like looking backward through binoculars. The man rubbed a tongue depressor along my sole, something I didn’t feel, and when my toes curled, everyone seemed to be impressed and said, “Babinski reflex,” and took notes on their phones.

I once woke in a strange room where doctors spoke Spanish and inserted needles below my skin delivering shocks that convulsed dormant muscles and produced peaks and waves on a computer next to my bed. The only English was “This will be a little uncomfortable,” though I wasn’t sure who spoke it. The needle pricked into my leg, and the electric stimulus was delivered to my thigh, then my calves, and when the needle and the wires were taken away, doctors in the dark began asking me questions.

“Do you have any thoughts of suicide?”

Thoughts of suicide?

“Are you generally happy about the world?”

No.

“Have you had unexplainable missing or lost time?”

No.

“Do you have any unusual scars or marks on your body you can’t explain?”

Just outside the dome of light, I saw the reflections on the surfaces of blank eyes, saw their slender bodies and the large heads of the classic Greys. It is happening to me , I thought, even though I write this with the confidence that it was a dream. In the dim light I saw the four-jointed fingers I’d read about, and a great wave of relief washed over my body, not because the pain had stopped but because there were aliens around my bed. I tried to catch my breath and at the time I only felt terrified and wonderful, thinking that at last something fantastic was real.