Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Ruth, standing on the edge of the pool, undid her sash and let her robe fall, revealing that she had on nothing beneath her robe. She stood with a wide stance, her belly plump.

Ursula mumbled, “Great.”

Dubourg looked at Ruth with bored eyes as if he’d expected her to do this all along.

Elizabeth swam oblivious to the nakedness behind her.

“What are you trying to do, darling?” Charles said to Ruth.

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit,” Ruth said, not lifting her eyes from the back of Elizabeth’s head, waiting for her to turn around.

Elizabeth fanned her arms, slowly turning.

Ruth’s pubic hair was a bushy funnel that went from the wide stretch beneath the belly and twisted into a tiny tornado between her legs. Her toes flexed on the edge, a thigh muscle twitched.

Elizabeth saw her and continued to swim. “There’s nothing more pathetic than someone trying to shock you. I’m not a prude. How many weeks are you? I will not keep you here unless you stop the cigarettes and the drinking. I’ll have nothing to do with it.”

Ruth dove in, torpedoing past Elizabeth. Her hands cushioned her momentum on the far wall and she did a flip turn underwater.

Elizabeth took the opportunity of her being submerged to say to Van Raye, “She has lots of problems.”

Ruth came up and spit out water and drank from Van Raye’s remaining whiskey on the side of the pool. Asian techno music played on the old radio.

Ruth took Dubourg’s old place on the steps, her elbows on the step behind her so that her body floated outward. There was this archipelago of Ruth Christmas sticking above the water: shoulders, breasts, a palm-tree navel island, the sub islands of her kneecaps, and then her feet.

A text dinged in:

On the night of the 27th, tell Ruth to listen to Infinity. I will send her the software.

They won’t believe me. Let me show them this text.

I said out loud, “Is the software you are talking about, can you get it from the space station?”

“It’s there,” Ruth said, “but there’s no one to send it to us. We can retrieve it.”

“I think I can help.”

“How is that?” Van Raye said.

I put my phone against my chest. “I think the software you want will be sent down on the twenty-seventh. He’s talking to me now.”

Van Raye stood up in the water.

“Can you ‘listen’ to Infinity ?” I asked them.

“Why would I do that?” Ruth said. “There’s no one there.”

Randolph said,

Tell her you know about the Bright Nothing.

“I want to tell you this,” I said, “and I want you to believe me. This thing who is texting me, he’s not from here, he’s not from Earth. I’m pretty sure that’s real.”

I sent the message back:

Is the noise Raye hears, the noise we’re listening to, is it from the other planet?

Yes. And that is where I want to go

“Does the ‘Bright Nothing’ mean anything to you?” I said to Ruth.

“The what?” Van Raye said.

Ruth turned pale, but her face also relaxed slightly, a mask having fallen away, and again the word “beautiful” came to my mind, but trying to understand what beauty was is like trying to see individual fish in a large school of fish.

Van Raye and Ruth gathered their things to go, Ruth re-robed and, slightly frantic at my mention of the Bright Nothing, though she would not elaborate, only said, “It’s impossible for anyone to know that.”

Ruth carried both the laptop and the heavy radio with her, Van Raye following.

Elizabeth put on her robe and collected her book and asked Ursula if she could have another bit of whiskey to drink on the way to her room.

I stopped Elizabeth at the door and whispered, “Are you okay?” I felt her tighten beneath my touch. “I know you don’t like being asked that, but I’m worried about you.”

“Me?” she said. Then she took a breath, held it, and let it go as if that was how long it took her to make a decision. “I will have to get used to you asking me that, won’t I?” Her nostrils pinched as she inhaled and smiled. “Now I’m going to play my violin. Make sure housekeeping knows about the dinner tray. I don’t know how often they—” she cut herself off. “Never mind. You handle it now, can’t you?”

When she was gone, only the three cousins were left, Ursula going into the utility room to change out of her wet clothes, and I pulling Dubourg over. “What is happening?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Listen to me, Du, don’t get chummy with him. He’ll suck you into believing he’s forming some kind of attachment and then he’ll suddenly cut you loose.”

“Look, I’m sorry about discussing your problems, but we are all family.”

I snorted. “Come on, Du. We’re family, but he’s not, not really.”

“Are you and Ur okay?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“It’s not like everyone doesn’t see you are madly in love with her.”

“We both love her, don’t we?” I said.

He shook his head like I wasn’t getting it. “You two have always been in love. You just don’t know it.” He crunched an antacid that I didn’t know was in his mouth. “Ur is not in the best place.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose.

I held my phone out to him. “But what is going on?”

“I think I’m qualified to say it’s not God,” he said. “God doesn’t work like this.”

“But you believe it’s something, right?”

“I don’t think you can hallucinate something so specific, so perfect. It doesn’t make sense. I guess we’ll find out on the twenty-seventh,” he said.

When Ursula and I stepped onto the twelfth floor, Dubourg stayed inside the elevator and put out his arm to block the door, told us he was going to the attic to help Ruth and Van Raye.

Ursula and I were walking to our room to change, and I touched Ursula’s arm to stop her. Gentle music played through the Air of Liability and the sound of the chorus of voices rose from the lobby, the Big Murmur of snowed-in guests.

On our corridor, I noticed one of those clamshell light fixtures flickering between rooms. The bulb inside the translucent glass blinked a random pattern barely hanging onto life. I pulled Ursula by the sleeve of her robe and we went into the corner under the flickering light.

“What the hell?”

“It’s the feeling from the movie,” I said. “I feel it now.”

I felt her chest deflating against mine. I reached over her head, and as my face came close to hers, I tapped the clamshell lamp with my finger and the light went out.

I felt her arms come up around my back, and she turned her head and let me kiss her on the mouth. What I realized was this: I had tasted her my whole life, tasted her when I drank from the same glass she had, when I put my head on a pillow she’d laid on, when I got in a car she had been in, the smell of her bedroom at home. She suddenly stopped and pulled away and said, “Stop, okay. Dubourg’s somewhere.”

One kiss and we were breathing heavy like we’d been holding our breaths under the water.

“We need to stop,” she said. She pushed my arm up and ducked away.

I leaned in the corner for balance, watching her go away.

She turned down the corridor in the center of the hotel. I watched the empty glass elevator rise to her, watched her step into the gold box and it sank while she squeezed her ponytail to get the wetness out, not glancing at me there under the dead light.

I reached up and tapped the light’s dome, and it flickered on, tungsten buzzing, a connection I knew couldn’t last long, this whole hotel not far behind, and I wanted to freeze everything, to make sure this hotel was there if I ever wanted to come back and remember what was happening to me right now.