Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

When Elizabeth finished the song and was putting the magic violin in its case, Dubourg set the old Trans-Oceanic radio on a table, stretched out the wire, and clipped the alligator clip to a pipe in the ceiling and began searching the bands.

Ruth swiveled in her chair as if discovering us behind her. Solder smoke hung in the lamp’s light. Her hair had grown longer and was spikey, and her eyes were sleepy. She carefully lowered herself from her chair to the floor, eyes closed before she was totally supine. She grabbed the corner of the old area rug and rolled inside like an enchilada. She only slept two hours at a time. If we didn’t bring meals for her, I don’t think she would have stopped to eat.

I wondered about Ruth’s life, about how we were supposed to take a break and go watch the space station fly over on the twenty-seventh and hope to get the software so Van Raye could send his damn message to the planet.

Only the top of Ruth’s head stuck out of the rolled carpet. Did the baby sleep when she slept? On nights when we forced her to eat and go to the pool, she stripped off her robe as usual and dove in. What sensation did a baby conceived in zero gravity have when its mother dove into the pool, a momentary weightlessness during her dive?

Dubourg tuned to a strong music station, a female singer, and turned the volume down.

Sitting in the chair beside Ursula’s, I tried to understand why listening to a faraway broadcast was any better than finding music on the Internet, but it was, something about how these signals broadcasted for someone to listen to at that exact moment. There was this idea in my mind that this song making me so happy would simply evaporate.

I watched Ursula’s leg bounce to the sultry sound of some woman singing in French and the guitar being passionately plucked and then strummed. I leaned and held my phone to the speaker so the app could identify the title, so I would know this song, put it on my “Songs to Beat Depression” playlist, and remember Ursula’s bouncing leg. The French voice was incredible, and I felt myself getting hard without pain. My phone chimed with the song title, but I didn’t look.

I never found out the name of the French singer or the name of the song, and I’ve never heard it again, and I reached out with my hand and put it on Ursula’s thigh until she parted her legs enough for it to slide between them. It was halfway between her knees and all the rest of her. Everyone else was paying attention to what they were doing.

“I want you,” I whispered.

“They came and got me last night,” she whispered back. “You don’t remember anything?”

What I remembered was only that Dubourg and I had ended up falling asleep on the same queen bed, Ursula on the other bed.

“They can get me while I’m here,” she said. She was on the verge of crying.

“Please don’t,” I said.

She slid her hand to mine between her thighs, and I felt the familiar heat of her, and this was a gesture of lovers, people who’d slept together, and as stupid as this sounded, I had to think about if we had slept together, had sex together. Of course not. It seemed the only thing left that we hadn’t done.

At night when Ursula, Dubourg, and I went to our room for the night, we fell asleep like we were kids again, back in the house in Sopchoppy with all the cousins, sleeping wherever we ended up, but combinations and permutations burned my mind in the Grand Aerodrome: three people and two queen beds. There could be three people in one bed and zero people in the other bed, which would be represented DSU+0, or two people in one bed and one in the other (DS+U or DU+S or US+D). When it was DU+S, Ursula and I watched each other across the gap, the undulating reflections of the aquarium’s light on her face, the betta fish fighting his own reflection. When it was US+D, both of us in bed together, Ursula and I touched each other through the night and slept at times with my erection against her. Dubourg in the other bed started the deep breathing that indicated sleep. What did he dream of, his case on the ground beside his bed? He had his hands under his chin, exactly the same way he slept when he was a kid.

In bed without kissing, nothing else, I placed my hand flat on Ursula’s chest, felt her heart beneath her shirt. She took my hand away and guided it beneath the shirt, letting me feel the sound her whole body made, hearing it through my hand.

Her watch always beeped within a minute of her falling asleep, her pressing the button, some last-ditch effort before falling in the wormhole of sleep, and on some nights I woke to the limpness of her paralyzed body next to me, completely consumed by sleep. I whispered her name but I didn’t want to wake her, only comfort her in whatever dream she was having.

With Mr. Blaney, the general manager, we closed the hotel from top to bottom. It took six days. When even Mr. Blaney was gone, Dubourg went with me to lock the front doors. I started to kneel, using my cane for a brace, to put the thick brass key into the lock at the bottom of the revolving doors, but Dubourg took the key and did it.

It would be weeks before auction people came and cleaned the hotel out. I glanced around the dark lobby. Did it really already smell stale? A 1,439-bed hotel for six people? We could let it fall apart around us for the next few days if we wanted to, if Elizabeth could let a hotel decay around her and still keep her sanity.

This empty hotel changed my life. It was devoid of human beings. I took Ursula to the tenth floor, took my plain white master keycard, and I showed her how I could open a room in the middle of the day and how the rooms were still perfect with perfectly made beds. I always threw the metal safety latch across the door as if we needed extra protection from the outside world, and when I was supposed to be arranging for venders to start collecting the contents of the hotel, Ursula and I began discovering the clandestine light that exists in hotel rooms in the middle of the day when you are in bed together. Our clothes littered the floor, Ursula always keeping her black rubber watch on. We tumbled into exotic positions, but always found ourselves quickly back to positions in which we could wrap our arms around each other, that watch of hers pressing into my back. Words were brief because our own voices reminded us of who we were.

Only once did she say, “This isn’t going to last forever.”

I felt her hold her breath. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“We aren’t going to be here much longer. What are we going to do then?”

“We can meet anywhere,” I said, “nothing will change.”

“Something important is happening to me,” she said. “I’m not going to just get over it.”

“Let’s see what happens,” I said.

For a few seconds we watched the steady green light on the fire alarm above the bed. “Do you believe,” I said, “that you reach some point in your life, some peak happiness, a point you’ll never be as happy as you are now?”

“You think this is it?” she asked.

“It can’t be,” I agreed, but just like starting the Movie, listening to the narration and badly hoping that your grandmother doesn’t die again, you still know something has to go wrong or it wouldn’t be a movie. The hotel business teaches you something is always going wrong. Now this hotel was decaying around me, and I was only delaying emptying it out.

The night of the twenty-seventh, the six of us wore our Braves caps and the elevator took us down through the hotel, me looking out of the elevator’s glass and being spooked by the emptiness, the lack of travelers, the darkness broken by only the lowest-wattage security lighting and glowing exit signs as we sunk into the basement.