Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Right!” she said.

“You and Dubourg sprinted up and down the hallways because you said that you could run faster inside than you could outside.”

“I still believe that, by the way,” she said.

I realized how good it feels to have a shared experience with someone and told her, “Isn’t family about having someone around to share experiences with?”

She said, “Then Elizabeth caught us and jumped all over our asses, and Du and I went back home, and the next thing we know you flew down with his pants.” She laughed. “You looked pathetic standing on the porch holding the bag.”

“All right,” I said.

“You stayed for weeks.”

“I know,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to be part of y’all.”

“Not that you couldn’t have just come down and stayed if you wanted, but we all thought it was a little weird.”

“I wish you would just forget that,” I said. “I was twelve or whatever.”

She handed me her glass to take a sip and crossed her arm over her eyes. “Can I tell you something? This is the best I’ve felt in a long time. Right here. I love you,” she said.

She took her arm down to see me.

I said, “You know I love you. . ”

“Like a sister?” she said.

“Of course.” The whole room was quiet.

She said, “Do you remember we used to believe that the Creature wouldn’t come after us if we were all together in the kids’ bunk room?”

“Of course,” I said.

“It was a great comfort being together, wasn’t it?”

After a few seconds of silence I thought she’d drifted off to sleep. Without opening her eyes or removing her hand, she said, “This is the same thing, isn’t it, except it’s only us, and it’s not the Creature from the movie. It’s something else that we are scared of.”

“And that we make ourselves want to believe in,” I said.

I got the remote and turned on the TV, the light filling the room. I searched the movie menu until I found The Creature from Outer Space , and when she saw, she said, “Seriously?”

“When was the last time we’ve watched it?” I asked.

We took turns sipping out of the same glass as the credits played and the music started, and she got under the covers against me.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Watching the movie that scared the hell out of me when I was little.”

We sat, the length of our bodies touching. I could feel her heat trapped beneath the blanket with mine, and I could smell her, and this feeling reminded me of once being alone with her in a pub in Dublin years before, and we’d started holding hands because we had realized that the patrons who’d befriended us in that pub thought we were traveling college students who were lovers. We simply held hands in the pub, her thumb rubbing my hand, and we drank our beers, and people went in and out of the door like life was normal, and a man at the end of the bar asked if he could sing us a song, and as he sang to us, we let go of each other’s hand because holding hands while he sang so beautifully would have been like stealing something that wasn’t ours.

“Even this music starts to freak me out,” she said as the movie began.

The voice-over narrator said, “ Since time began ,” and Ursula and I recited along with him, “ man has looked toward the heavens with wonder. . wonder and fear. The interstellar distances have kept us safe. . until now ,” and her voice and his voice made a tingling, a good tingling, spread from my back into the base of my skull.

“There’s something sexual about that fear,” Ursula said, “I’ve gotten that same feeling when I was about to have sex.”

“Are we about to have sex?” I said.

“You’ll only fall madly in love with me and be driven insane by your cousin-lover—”

“Ursula, quit. I’ve always been madly in love with you.” I stared at the movie. I felt her take my hand beneath the covers and pull it to her lap, the heat like a fever.

“I tremble, okay?” I said. “My muscles are weak, that’s all.”

“I’m trembling too,” she said. “It’ll never work, will it, we’ll never work?”

I was about to ask her why not when I felt myself getting hard, heard the Sanctus bells chiming in the pleasure center of my brain responding to the one person in the world who I most desired, but there was also an unfamiliar stretching pain as if the growing erection were caught on something.

“Eventually you’ll get tired of me,” she mumbled, unaware of my discomfort, which only made me harder, made more stinging and stretching. “Then where would we be?”

“I don’t think I ever would get tired of you,” I said, the pain not stopping. I closed my eyes to make it go away, but when I did, I suddenly knew what the date was, new what the time was.

“Hey,” she said, “you’re squeezing my hand.”

“Sorry.”

My heart palpitated, but before letting her hand go I lifted her arm so I could see that rubber watch she always wore, dangling on the bottom of her wrist. Its time and date confirmed what I already knew. Worried about my impotency, I had asked Randolph when I would get an erection, and he’d told me, and now here I was. Now here I was tumbling, falling forward in time again.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, putting my hand to my chest, my breath taken away.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” but I had felt my life leaping to that moment my penis was burning. I rolled to try to inconspicuously shift the erection.

I went quickly to the bathroom.

By the time I got the door shut, I heard her shout, “Are you okay?”

“Fine!”

I undid the drawstring and pushed the pants down, inspected everything, which, miraculously, didn’t have blood on it, and I pulled my pants up and made myself breathe. In the mirror I looked more hollow eyed than ever. It seemed only a second ago that I had been alone in my room and had forced Randolph, once again, to answer a question about the future. Now here I was. Jesus, would more of these moments just pop into my life, throw my life forward?

I went back and slid in bed beside her again.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. Glancing at the television, I said, “Good, I didn’t miss it.”

In the movie it was daylight on the river. A group of young people were having a party on a bluff, which was the scene with my grandmother, Harriet Raye, Victim 1. Dance music came from a transistor radio on a rock, and I could only think about how most of these actors were dead now, their lives gone in probably what seemed like a couple of blinks.

Ursula whispered, “I’ve seen this movie so many times. . I swear I’m getting that same feeling I used to get when we were kids. This shit freaked me out, okay? Now it’s an extremely corny movie to me, but I still get the same feeling. . ” She held her breath, then let it out. “Here it comes,” she tensed and relaxed, “and there it goes. It comes in waves. I want to hold onto it for a second but can’t completely do it.”

We both had our backs against the headboard, and at some point I realized she was watching me.

“What?” I said.

She stretched her knee until it touched me.

On the screen, Harriet Raye, my paternal grandmother, Ursula’s great-aunt, unbuttoned her shirt and revealed a black bathing suit.

“See you on the other side!” Harriet Raye says in the movie. The movie cut to a longer shot from across the river and she dove perfectly from the bluff. This was really my grandmother diving.

The Creature’s theme came up loud.

Right then, as our ancestor was becoming “Victim 1,” I felt the same fear and excitement The Creature from Outer Space had given me when I was a kid, but like Ursula said, it was there, then gone, and even though it was a kind of fear, you wanted it back, and when I looked to tell her this, she had turned away. While Harriet Raye was pulled down by the Creature, claw around her ankle, struggling through the crystal-clear water, Ursula’s watch beeped and then there was her gentle snoring.