Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“If someone could snap their fingers,” I said, “and make it never happen to you again, would you do it?”

She thought about it. “No.”

“But you’re scared all the time.”

“Like a cat on a windy day,” she said.

“Ur, just don’t get hypnotized. Okay?” Almost all the abductees she read about got hypnosis to supposedly regain memories. They only engrained false memories. She had read this too, but I still wanted to make sure.

“Did I say I was fucking getting hypnotized?”

“Stop cussing so much. It just means you don’t know how to express yourself.”

“Jesus, I’m freezing,” she said.

Her fingers were holding the covers beneath her chin as she ceiling-stared, and she said, “I wish you would just open your mind for once. I have several floating experiences I remember, I mean when I was a kid. I remember flying over the woods, seeing the highway. I literally have seen the V wake of snakes swimming in the river at night, moonlight reflecting on the water. They aren’t dreams.”

“Ur, we literally grew up thinking there was a spaceship crashed in the swamp, or wanting to believe it. We were kids. I think we liked to believe. We liked to watch the movie and believe an alien was in the swamp. I think you’re just doing that now.”

“The Creature ,” she corrected me.

She waited until everything was completely quiet and still in the room and she said, “They took my eggs.”

“Stop it.”

“They did.”

“No, Ur, you’re just trying to find a reason for why you are the way you are, you know. . ”

“ Barren , you mean?” she said.

“That was because of the cyst, or related to it,” I said and watched her shift beneath the covers. “I’m speaking honestly, okay. We all remember when you had that problem.” Ursula, since she was fourteen and had the cyst removed and the doctor told her that she’d probably never have children, always openly declared herself barren. She had always said it as if she just wanted to get over it.

“But why did I have a cyst?” she asked.

“Look, forget that for a second. I really think Triple Zero affected you. I know nothing happened on that flight, and when nothing happened , that triggered something in your mind. You wanted something to happen.”

She got up and went over and grabbed a new Adidas jacket from the chair and put it on. The tag stuck out of the collar, and she walked around and sat on the bed across from me. Her eyes moved back and forth from my right eye to my left, inspecting me, and there was a part of me that wanted to put my hands on the side of her face and pull her and kiss her. I had promised myself to do this.

“Are you lucid?” she asked. This close, I could smell her, and I had a flash of the house in Sopchoppy, the taste of fresh river water and then the salt of the gulf.

“You think I’m crazy?” she said. “You’re the one who thinks God is sending you text messages.”

“ What? ”

She nodded.

“What else did I tell you?”

“You said it was a hacker too and it’s all related to Charles’s discovery.”

“I told you about Charles?”

“Yes,” she said. She paced and pulled the elastic band out of her hair and casually said, “And conveniently can’t you show me this conversation?”

“Whoever it is makes the texts disappear.”

“What a fine predicament,” she said. “You think I’m crazy, and I think you’re crazy for believing anything Van Raye says. He’s got that Southern mouth of a liar, you know.” She spread her mouth thin with her fingers. “You know, Southern liars all got a thinness, a shape.”

“I don’t think he’s lying about this.”

She held the elastic hair band in her mouth as she collected her ponytail again. I watched, jealous of the dexterity of her hands looping the band in her hair. Then she went and put her feet into a pair of my Nike high-tops and pulled a fifth of Jack Daniel’s from her duffle, held it up so I could see it and said, “I’m not keeping this very sophisticated.” She got two glasses from the bathroom, shook the protective covers off, and let them fall to the floor as she plodded back. She pushed the martini glass out of the way and put the glasses down too hard.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said.

When she poured, the brown liquid washed up one side of the glass, left an oily after-wave that slowly retreated.

“You got your head so far up your daddy’s ass. You and Du.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Do you understand the magnitude of what is happening to me? People like me have been chosen. I don’t know why. Something comes to me and takes me away. I fly . It has happened when I’m in my apartment, and once recently when I was staying at this motel in Twentynine Palms, okay. It happened once when I was driving through the Muir Woods in a goddamn rental car. This was last month! Whenever I’m alone. Do you understand? They take me. I fly, I mean, just my body. Van Raye might hear something but he’s about five hundred years behind. There are dozens, hundreds, whatever, of civilizations out there. So what? Something is here ,” she said.

We waited in the relative silence of the airport hotel room. She took her feet out of the shoes and sat on the other bed. She said, “I’m here with you because I don’t want to be alone.”

“Stay with me as long as you want,” I whispered.

“Don’t get weird on me, okay?” she said.

We took a sip of our drinks.

She lifted her glass. “To life somewhere else in the universe. . besides here. To aliens.”

“Don’t ever let Charles hear you use that term. I think he’s coming here.”

She turned and put her legs up on her bed and crossed her arms. “I’ve never met the man,” she said. “When you’re not around, Dubourg tells me what an ass he is, but Dubourg is totally in love with him. Dubourg put his own name on Van Raye’s Wiki page. He put himself under ‘children.’”

“Why?” I asked. “He’s a pathetic excuse for anything resembling a father. Dubourg’s got Uncle Louis. I can’t think of anyone but Uncle Louis as Dubourg’s father.”

“Would you trade Van Raye for Louis?”

“Louis is great,” I said.

“No, that’s not an answer. Think about it. Van Raye’s a son of a bitch but he’s bigger than life.”

We sat still. I listened to the hotel room, felt the humanity around us, the rooms full of lives.

She got up and went to the bottle on the dresser and poured us both more whiskey. I watched her calves flex when she adjusted the thermostat, and the Sanctus bells stirred in the nether lobes of my brain. I hadn’t had an erection in weeks, not even the healthy morning kind, and I’d begun to wonder if it was the depression.

I glanced at my phone and saw a whole conversation from last night that I had no recollection of, Randolph asking me:

Any sign of Raye?

You are not God

I am not God

You are God

I am God

What is your favorite Elvis movie?

I prefer Martin and Lewis movies. Jerry Lewis:)

Ursula came back with the glass and got on the bed beside me, pushing the comforter tight over my body. I turned the phone quickly to her and she studied it, and then shook her head, said, “Nothing. Yes, you are crazy.” She put legs straight out on the covers.

“Sandy, do you remember that you once flew down to Sopchoppy because Dubourg left a pair of pants in Baltimore?”

I twirled my whiskey in the glass before gulping some. “Yes. I was like twelve.” But there was the memory emerging from the background. “It was actually a pair of swim trunks,” I said. “And it was in Washington. That was after you stayed with us at the Marriott. I remember it because y’all wanted to run up and down the hallways.”