Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Something heavy dropped and Dubourg stepped past me to intercept Charles. Dubourg’s hand went toward Van Raye in slow motion and struck him on the right side of his face. My first reaction to Charles being punched for a second time that day, I’m sorry to say, was to laugh. Maybe it was seeing the physics of Van Raye’s twisting body again and the expression on his face change from the bullshit of his greeting to total candor and the shock of a Munch scream, and then there was the miraculous catch he made on his way to the ground of his eyeglasses in midflight.

He rolled to his elbows and shut his mouth and blinked up at us. There was the slow blossom of a laceration above his eye.

I said to Dubourg, “What was that for?”

Dubourg, hopping around opening and shutting his bare hand to stay the pain, yelled at me, “ Why did I do that? ”

Van Raye’s gloved hand, the one not holding his glasses, was on the ground beside my foot, and because it was an easy thing to do, I adjusted my weight and lifted my right foot and put it on his hand. The glove was thick, but I pressed through the cushion until I felt his hand inside. I tried to remember if Van Raye had wronged Dubourg lately or if this was just some kind of reaction. Their last meeting was a few years ago, back when Dubourg was in seminary, and the three of us met in Southern California on a day that couldn’t have been more different from this. That meal had been completely amicable, though afterward Dubourg had mentioned that the man talked down to him.

“My God,” Van Raye said now. “More violence? What was that for?”

Dubourg spun like a dizzy kid and tucked his hand between his leg. “Oh fuck, oh fuck. That was pent-up anger. Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I really have hated you all these years. But I’m sorry!” Dubourg’s breathing produced condensation, but the curses were cloudless Oh fuck s, and he began mumbling in the blizzard, “ Tadyatha diri tishta taskara . . ” his eyes closed, hands on his knees.

“ For what? ” Van Raye snapped. “Jesus, I’ve never done anything to you.”

Then there was laughter behind us and Dubourg’s chanting stopped. Through the falling snow, standing and in front of a satellite dish antenna, the “genius” had her jacket hood over her head and was laughing, trying to clap but she had a tool in her hand. A utility box on the pole of the satellite dish flapped.

When the genius saw Ursula and Dubourg staring at her she put a hand on top of her head to keep the hood on. Her face was in the shadow, and we could see only her breath and that unlit cigarette. In her other hand she worked a pair of pliers as if deciding whose teeth to pull first. She stilled the control panel’s flapping door without taking eyes off us. She still wore flip-flops. Her toes must have been frostbitten. Obviously she was crazy.

Van Raye shouted up at me from the ground. “ Sandeep! You’re on my hand!” Blood trickled from the bridge of his right eye.

“ Oh, sorry! ” I shouted. “ I don’t have normal sensation in my feet! ” A gust rocked me off balance.

He raised himself to his knees. Dubourg and I grabbed him under his arms and hauled him to his feet.

“ Don’t touch me! ” Van Raye yelled, shaking us away, touching his cheek and smearing the blood.

I pulled a moist towelette I happened to have in my coat pocket and handed it to him.

“What is the matter with you people?” Van Raye said. “That could give me brain damage! Then where would we be? You ass! I’d punch you back if I weren’t a pacifist.” He took off his gloves and with hands trembling tore open the towelette.

Dubourg had scooped his case back under his arm. “I couldn’t help it. It was like I was possessed.”

Holding the towelette to his eye, Van Raye shouted to the woman, “ Can you make one work? ”

She turned toward a field of dish antennas of different sizes across the roof and said, “What we have here is an anthropological display of the decades of technology.” She pointed to the group of bigger dishes, “The eighties, and the nineties,” she said and pointed to a smaller farm of gray dishes, “and the aughts. But here: C band, steel. Nine meters, but its azimuth is rusted over. I can see when the star will drift through the field of view. Maybe we can make small adjustments.” She tilted on her heels and looked at it, holding her hood on her head, then back to him, “Yes, we could do it if we had the software to make the amplifier work.”

“We’ll get the software!” Van Raye said. “Somehow.”

She shrugged her shoulders. She wiped her hands. I saw the woman’s tongue come out of her mouth and spit out the worthless cigarette, and it bounced along the roof and into the sky. “If we can get the software. .” she said. “Ifs and ifs and ifs!” Her hood finally fell. She had that punk, fuck-you haircut but there was something else. I’d been in a hospital for over a month and had seen people in their worst states — sick, underweight, broken bodies, heads shaved and scars across their craniums — but I recognized Ruth Christmas was beautiful. Unlike all the sick hospital patients, I didn’t have to reimagine her with hair, didn’t have to take away the dark circles from her eyes nor try to magic-erase twenty years or try to put her in healthier times to understand that simple fact: she was beautiful.

Elizabeth stood by herself in the wind, her arms wrapping her shoulders, those sunglasses on in this weather, and trying to look into the gray horizon.

The alcohol in the towelette had decreased the viscosity of Van Raye’s blood, and it ran down his chin. A bit had frozen on his collar. It wasn’t much of a cut, but it was just one of those places of the body that bleeds greedily, and I had time to notice the wind had let up some.

The genius suddenly spun and squatted with her hands on her knees. It was as though she’d discovered ants crawling around her ankles, but wrenches spilled out of the pockets of her jacket, and she made a horrible sound and projected a tan vomit that splattered between her feet.

Van Raye said, “Don’t worry, she’s just pregnant.” He put the useless towelette to his nose and tilted his head back, the bloody end of it lifting in the breeze, but he seemed to suddenly remember something and said, “Relax, it’s not mine, people .”

Ruth Christmas, squatting and spitting, stuck her hand up and hung Van Raye a bird without looking at him.

Elizabeth turned and went toward the door but stopped.

He pointed his bent glasses at Ursula, and said, “And your Ben’s daughter that Sandeep is always talking about, aren’t you?”

Clear snot hung from one of Ursula’s nostril and she touched it with the back of her glove.

“Are you going to hit me too?” he said to her.

She pulled a bottle of antacids out of the pocket of Dubourg’s coat she was wearing and looked at the label as if the answer was there. “I’ll wait until you can feel it!” she said and tossed the bottle through the wind to Ruth Christmas. Van Raye flinched as it passed in front of his face.

The genius caught the bottle and threw them back to Ursula. “I’ve got nausea, not heartburn.”

Van Raye squinted at Ursula, then burst out one laugh—“ Ha! ”

He smiled and turned toward everyone. “We’re all family here, so I might as well tell you.” He paused for effect. “You know what I was looking for, right? I’ve found another planet! With life!” He held his hands up in victory, glasses in one hand, bloody towelette in the other.

Elizabeth said from the doorframe behind us, “It hasn’t been confirmed yet.” She had pulled down her scarf to say it, and she turned and went inside, shutting the door behind her.