Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Don’t be petty. My son is sick, and we are going to visit him for a few days and see what progress we can make on finding an antenna to send my message.”

Smoke filled the car.

On one of the trees she drove past, there was a small white sign, and Ruth had time to read it as they flashed by. It said HELL IS REAL, and Ruth said, “Hell is real. Why not send that?”

“Quit,” he said.

“That is succinct and it’s very helpful.”

He didn’t say anything and then softly, “Poor baby.”

“What did you say?” she said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

When Van Raye fell asleep against his door, he dreamed he was in the woods trying to re-catch the dog. The dog stood still long enough for Van Raye to see a medical porthole in the side of the dog. He looked inside, expecting intestines like in the cow in the pasture, but instead there was clean blackness of space and one bright shiny point of light. It was, Van Raye knew, the star with Chava Norma orbiting around it, a whole other world inside the dog. In his dream, he tried to get closer, but the dog ran away.

I got the adjoining room to Elizabeth’s suite, room 1212, and didn’t have the energy or the initiative to go out in public. My waking hours were spent texting Ursula and then Dubourg, pressing redial for the only number I had for Van Raye and getting a recording for the university’s bed and breakfast. My companions in my room were the betta fish and flight-attendant Barbie sitting unladylike on the dresser, legs spread, and out my sliding glass doors was the wide-open dome of sky over the Atlanta airport. I ran a search for “World record” + “living in a hotel room,” and got directed to Howard Hughes biographies.

Elizabeth would come and speak through the adjoining door to me, “This is very unhealthy.”

I sometimes gathered myself into one of my new tracksuits and went to dinner. In the revolving restaurant, she updated me on the Grand Aerodrome’s wrap-up. I sat slouched in the chair. She told me that I looked like a gangster. I told her that my wardrobe was comfortable.

“If you ever have to defend what you are wearing with ‘it’s comfortable,’” she said, “you’ve made the wrong choice.”

She explained that I had to get back to work, to write this report myself. My phone sat beside my dinner plate, the last conversation with Randolph clearly visible in green and purple text balloons.

“I’m preparing you to run the firm alone,” she said.

“And what are you going to do?” I touched the screen to make the light come back on and slid it again in her direction. Just look at my phone, see this conversation!

“I will not travel with you,” she said, “if that’s what you are asking. I think you would be healthier without me. You’re completely capable of doing it when you get back to 100 percent.”

“No, I don’t think I can. Are you looking around?” I used my eyes to point to my phone. All she had to do was glance down at the conversation.

“What? What is wrong with you?” She picked up the phone. She tilted her head back. “What am I supposed to be looking at? I don’t have my glasses on.”

“Jesus!” I took it, but the screen was blank white, conversation gone. “Dammit!”

The restaurant revolved, slowly turned on its axis. After dessert, we drank coffee. If she retired, if she never said a word about business, would our whole lives be like it was when we were waiting on a flight — no worries, no business, only the moment? Her eyes kept looking to the west, and Gypsy Sky Cargo inched its way into view. The jets were being unloaded and loaded under the lights, cargo doors wide open, and containers going up on accordion lifts. They had floodlights mounted in clusters on high poles making every worker on the ground have multiple shadows emanating from his or her feet like a Swiss Army knife of selves.

Back alone in my room with the doors shut and locked, I took Dr. Ahuja’s sleeping pills when I felt like I needed a break — they were like pushing a button — and I would wake into new light, my phone on my chest.

I turned my head on the pillow and watched the betta fish and wondered if he was somehow changing colors. Now he looked a plasmotronic blue as if he’d changed color for a different segment of life, and he went up and down in the corner of his tank, fighting his reflection. A jet’s thrust reversers rattled the balcony doors, the sounds of the womb to me, and another gray day trying to leak through the shears, and I thought, Is the day ending or beginning? I’d become jetlagged inside a hotel room.

I was thinking “ jetlag ” when something on the other bed moved, a lump of a human beneath the covers, and somehow my mind already knew it was Ursula. She was on her side facing the wall, the shimmering light from the aquarium undulating on the comforter over her body, and I had some vague recollection of the happiness of seeing her last night. Ursula is here .

On the bedside table were a martini glass with two dead cranberries and my bottle of sleeping pills.

I whispered, “Ursula?” and wondered why I was whispering if I wanted to wake her. “ Ur! ”

She rolled, squinted at me, and immediately squeezed the button on her watch to stop it. “What?” she said, eyes swollen from sleep.

“What are you doing here?”

“Sleeping, dumbass.” She rolled back toward the wall, and I heard the watch beep again.

“Are you really here?”

“Are you really here?” She didn’t turn over to see me, only took a deep breath, and her voice reflected off the wall. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

Her watch beeped again, and she rolled over to see me, then checked the time.

“A little bit.”

“I found you downstairs,” she said.

“You’re lying.”

“You were at the bar. I’m extremely pissed at you, by the way.”

“At the bar?” I pulled up memories that were like dreams. “Elizabeth doesn’t know about this, does she?” I asked. “Did she see me?”

“No, but you were quite the hit there in your pajamas. It’s freezing in here.” She pulled the cover tighter over her head. “Why did you invite me here?” she said. “Do you even want me here?”

“Yes, of course I want you here.” I had a dull alcohol headache.

She rolled her eyes and pulled the covers over her mouth; she was only eyes and a nose. The empty martini glass sat on the bedside table, sugar around the rim reminding me of the night with Franni from Mount Unpleasant.

“There’s a front coming, an ugly storm,” she said, words veiled, her lips beneath the fabric. She reached a hand out and picked the brown pill bottle and shook. “Look, don’t take this shit.”

“I know,” I said. “I just—”

“No, you don’t know,” she said. “I mean, it knocks you out, and, you know, erases your memory. You don’t want to be that deep asleep. Ever.”

She got out of the covers, slammed the bottle down and it bounced on the floor. She said, “Too many people take these. You don’t want to be that out.”

“Aliens aren’t coming to take me.”

She had on that worn-out fake jersey with the peeling “20.” She put her feet on the floor so she was facing me, had on gray cutoff sweatpants. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “You believe what you believe. In a weird way, I can completely understand why you do this. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

“Feel good? To live in constant fear it’s going to happen tonight?” she said. She got back under the comforter.