Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Dubourg tried to help the puking genius up, but she shrugged him away.

I touched Charles’s elbow and yelled, “ Do you have a dog? ”

He leaned back to see me better. “ A dog? ”

“ Yes! Dog! ”

He held out his hand as if to stop me from advancing, and he shut the bad eye to focus. “ You did the dog to me, didn’t you? ” He stabbed a finger at me. “ YOU DID THE DOG TO ME! ”

“ What? ”

The woman snapped the hood back over her head and stepped over to a pipe to try to let steam warm her bare feet.

“ Let’s get out of this! ” Ursula said.

As Ruth Christmas walked by him, she pointed a finger at Charles to emphasize when she said, “We don’t have the software.”

He ignored her, holding the towelette to his eye. “What kind of swimming facility does this place have?”

“I want to talk about the dog,” I said.

“You can come swim and talk.”

My cousins walked by me.

“Why do I have to follow you?” I said. “This is my hotel.”

Van Raye ignored me, seemed to notice the bent glasses in his hand. “Watch this,” he said, “it never ends well.” He tried to bend the glasses back, but of course they snapped. “Fantastic,” he said, “just fantastic.”

The snow drifts went by us, obscuring the roof-scape, and when I turned, Van Raye was going toward the door, a piece of his eyeglasses in each hand, the bloody towelette tumbleweeding past me and in two leaps going over the edge of the roof. Just before I pulled the door shut, I glanced at the black dish antenna they wanted to use for something, frozen like a net cast against the sky.

No matter what hotel we were staying in, Charles had to go swimming. Most of my childhood talks with him took place sitting side by side in lounges as he dripped dry, his dark glasses on, fresh drink in hand, me sneaking glimpses of the Möbius strip tattoo on his right shoulder blade.

That day of the snowstorm was no exception. Everyone but Elizabeth went down to the small indoor lap pool because that was where he said he’d be. He immediately turned the gas heater on high. Even when I was hanging the CLOSED sign on the door, I admired Elizabeth for being able to stay away from him. Here the rest of us were already doing anything Charles wanted, ready to see what he said next.

Ursula and Dubourg sat and ate cheeseburgers, while Charles unbuttoned his shirt, immodestly dropping his pants to reveal plain, vertical gray-striped boxer shorts. I caught a glimpse of the Möbius strip tattoo on his shoulder and remembered the noise of the tattoo gun tattering as he stoically explained the characteristics of this geometric shape, which went right into an essay I read months later about how painkillers block the opioid receptors in the brain to prevent pain. He didn’t mention his son attended the tattooing.

That memory must have been fifteen years old, but Charles swimming in the pool was in exactly the same shape — pale, boney, skinny. He hopped into the shallow end of the pool, his eyeglasses repaired with a bundle of white surgical tape. When he got used to the water, he began catching us up on his story, including the drive with Ruth across the country.

Ruth worked on a laptop beside a giant leather radio, an antique thing that played a salsa station. Without taking her eyes off the laptop, she turned her head sideways to take large bites of her burger, and Charles told us about first hearing the sound on the Big Dish antenna.

Ursula went into the utility room and changed into a black sports bra and red tennis shorts and got into the water. Van Raye reached the pool’s edge, took a sip of his whiskey, pushed his mended glasses on top of his head, and gingerly placed the baggie of ice to his darkening eye. The Möbius strip tattoo on his shoulder had certainly faded over the years, and when a cold drop of condensation hit my hand, I realized maybe I hadn’t actually been with Charles when the tattooing was done. Had I only read his essay, “My Non-Orientable Surface,” and internalized it?

“Are you going to write about what is happening now?” I interrupted him.

“This is the most important discovery ever made.”

I tried to study the details of the room as he might — the way the ceramic tile in the old gas heater glowed orange. Condensation dimpled on the ceiling like contact lenses about to turn into rain, and as Dubourg walked down the steps into the water, his green cargo shorts filled with air then burped. I was the underweight guy in the red tracksuit.

I said to Charles, “Why did you say I did the dog to you? What does that mean?”

“There’s no dog,” Van Raye said, and I could tell that he and Ruth glanced at each other. “We had a problem in our neighborhood with a stray. I made a bad association.”

“What kind of dog was it?”

“Just a stray and the humane society took care of it.”

“Can you call the humane society?” I asked him. “Just to make sure this dog is there?”

“Why would I do that? I have no way of telling them what I’m looking for.”

“The person, the hacker, contacted me, said to look after a dog.”

Charles stopped in the pool below me, crossed his arms over each other on the side, stared up at me with that bluing eye. “Don’t you find it rather convenient that these supposed conversations you are having disappear before you can show them to anyone?”

“How do you know that?”

Dubourg sat on the top step, his hair slicked back, glasses off, making him look younger, and he stared into the cup of coffee on his knee. “We only want to help you,” Dubourg mumbled to me.

“Seriously, you’ve been here four hours, you slug him, and now you get together and talk about me?”

The only thing Dubourg did was straighten out his leg and take a tiny bottle of energy drink from his shorts pocket.

Charles said, “There is a reason you think God is contacting you.”

The seal on Dubourg’s energy bottle cracked.

“Dammit, I never really said it was God, but it did say it wasn’t from, you know, here.”

Dubourg poured the energy drink into his cold coffee and swirled it with his finger.

“Somehow you’ve internalized what I have discovered and processed it,” Charles said, “now it is manifesting itself into this thing you believe you see on your phone. We can help. Ruth is a doctor.”

“I don’t need a doctor.”

One of Charles’s loose white hairs had gotten stuck in the hornet’s nest of white tape that mended his glasses, and that single hair swirled from his head like a thought that couldn’t break free.

The door shook in its frame and we all turned to see the silhouette of Elizabeth through the translucent glass inserting her keycard. The tumblers spun in the lock and the door opened. She was dressed in a hotel robe and slippers, book under her arm as if she were going to the beach.

“Elizabeth! Welcome to the grotto!” Van Raye said as if he owned the place.

“What, have you got the heater on?” Elizabeth said.

Ruth glanced at Elizabeth — from her slippers up to her hair, Elizabeth dressed exactly like Ruth was, in the hotel robe with GA on it.

Elizabeth made her way toward the table. She picked up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, studied it, and then considered everyone in the room and pointedly asked to Ursula, “May I?”

Ursula nodded.

Elizabeth poured two fingers’ worth, and I got up using my cane and got her covered plate from the room-service tray for her.

“I was just discussing some work I need to do,” Van Raye said.

Elizabeth sat in the lounge beside mine, straightened the sash, kicked the slippers off, and crossed her ankles as I set her plate on the table beside her. She thanked me with a glance. She rested her book on her chest, a local library copy of Get Happy , a Judy Garland biography.