Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Do you have memories of floating through the air?” one asked.

Yes. I was communicating my answer telepathically.

“Have you ever been paralyzed for unexplained reasons?” said another. These were all classic abduction questions.

Yes.

“Had any unusual nose bleeds?”

Yes.

“Have you had long-time problems with insomnia, the cause of which is puzzling to you?”

Yes.

“Are you more comfortable being in crowds, more comfortable with sleeping among people?”

In hotels.

“We will be releasing you from this paralysis.”

You are doing this to me , I said without speaking, and I remember floating out in the hallway, just my body, floating down the hallway toward the elevator and back to my room.

The next morning I simply woke in my room, and the nursing staff and Elizabeth rolled my body and I began the fifteen seconds of suffocation that started every day as my diaper was changed. Everything was normal, but I felt wonderful. When Elizabeth asked me if I was okay, as she did every morning, I blinked yes, yes, yes, yes . This was the euphoria of understanding.

During those strange few days of believing, I gave up my obsessive search for Rose Epstein. I didn’t intentionally stop, I just knew that every woman I saw was Rose Epstein who wanted to go home, and every man was Rose Epstein, and I was Rose Epstein and Rose Epstein was me, and I was also James Leggett and his jokes, and I liked his jokes, even the simple stupid ones. The jokes were funny. Why hadn’t I known this before?

I’m glad I couldn’t speak during this stage of my life because I would have shouted to everyone who would listen, It’s real! The lunacy of a new convert. It might be lunacy, but I think anyone would want it. If you make fun of people who believe in UFOs or Jesus, then you just can’t remember how great it feels, how fucking great it feels, to believe in something fantastic.

When Ursula read at night, I wanted to talk to her— yes, I know! My God, what would have happened if I could have talked? I would have become the most obnoxious convert. I was saved or destroyed by paralysis, whichever way you want to look at it. I was forced into a cooling-off period, and I went through a cold reawakening to reality, the tiny voice of my father through the headphones when she wasn’t there.

Let me dispense with my experience in the strange room. It was a dream, my brain filled with Ursula’s reading and convoluted by boredom and depression. What the doctors administered me that night was a real test to measure the conductivity of your nerves — an EMG, an electromyogram.

If conversion is a lightning strike, coming to your senses takes a few days, and that was what happened to me, slowly coming back to reality.

One night I just simply watched Ursula’s face as she read out loud and felt the same skepticism I always had, but I would have done anything to get that feeling back of believing something fantastic was real. I would have gone through the electroshock again, been paralyzed longer, anything.

In those days when the euphoria faded, the movement came back into my body. Ursula read from Jung: “‘These people are lacking not only in criticism but in the most elemental knowledge of psychology; at bottom, they don’t want to be taught any better but merely to go on believing. . ’”

One of my promises was to kiss those lips. I would declare my love for her as soon as I could speak.

A few days later, very normal human nurses loaded me in my wheelchair and took me down several floors to an MRI machine, a small tunnel fed by a gurney.

The motors pulled me along rails into the machine’s throat, and over a tiny speaker inches away from my nose, the tech gave me the absurd command to “stay completely still.” There was music to relax me: flute and Tibetan bowl. Air blew down the tiny tunnel, and then the music went off and then the drum roll began and the bass beat—“Viva Las Vegas” cued. It seemed like music from another world, a signal from a friend, and a bit of the euphoria of believing came on me and a drop of my body’s own saline leaked from my eye and found its way down my cheek, trickling in my ear. There was one last fantastic thing left, I thought, or was this a dream too?

Van Raye’s California book tour was disappointing. After a reading at a legitimate bookstore in San Francisco, he went home with the bookstore’s manager who was painting her apartment. He slept with her that night and picked up a hangover and latex paint that dried on his body and itched on the flight to Palm Springs.

In Palm Springs he had been booked to read in a new-age bookstore, and he’d gone home with a woman who’d told him afterward, “This is the best book you’ve written.”

Later that evening in the tub with the new woman, she sat with her legs draped around his waist and picked the latex paint off his leg with her nail. She wasn’t the least curious how he’d gotten paint on strange parts of his body, a non-curiosity that Van Raye took as a sign of low intelligence.

“I have found something,” he whispered to her while leaning back in the tub, rubbing his pubic hair beneath the water, letting the tiny bubbles tickle up his hand like champagne. He would try his news on a stranger, and he was drinking wine in a bathtub with her. The nice thing about returning to drinking after a sabbatical was that everything — when drinking was added — seemed much more fun. Drinking in a bathtub, telling someone you have found something.

She sat against the other side of the tub, and she used the sides of the tub to haul herself close enough to stare into his eyes, oblivious to his statement.

“Do you understand?” he said. “There is life on another planet.”

“I’ve already seen them,” she whispered but continued pealing latex paint from his leg. The hair ripping out was excruciatingly pleasurable.

She told him that she was a sculptor specializing in statues of aliens. “Anyone who buys one has a visitation,” she said. The chips of latex paint floated in the water and collected around the shoreline of her body.

Van Raye was glad to return to Northern California and the rational world of Ruth Christmas, but he carried in his suitcase a green alien figurine.

He returned to comfortable exile on the second story of his Palo Alto house, staying awake nights with Ruth, tuning the Trans-Oceanic radio to listen to the sound of Chava Norma. Ruth found the ceramic alien statue in his suitcase and pulled it out and held it with both hands, the size of a green cantaloupe with a belly and large black eyes, sitting in lotus, an alien Buddha. “Someone you fucked?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, and she put it on the dresser under the lamp.

He woke in the morning and didn’t feel her heat next to him and half-consciously searched with his foot, then reached a hand and found nothing but empty bed. By the sloping of the sun, he determined it was past midday and the drapes flapped dots and dashes to wake him. “Where are you?” he said.

He saw her figure rummaging through her bags. She turned to him and said, “You’re taking my cigarettes.”

“Why would I take your cigarettes?” He remembered the exact way a pack of cigarettes wadded awkwardly, always forming a non-aerodynamic ball. He’d felt like a kleptomaniac, stealing and throwing them off the balcony into the Dumpster below. Why did he do that?

“I left a pack right here on purpose.” She pointed to the bedside table. “ You are doing this.”