Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

He turned with his lantern and whispered to two soldiers. I heard my name—“Sanghavi. . ”—and then he looked back at us and fanned his hand as if to make the smell go away, and his men came and indicated which way to march. There was the sound of metal on metal as they put their bayonets on their rifles but Charles led the way, veering off toward a hill to the north and the escorts said nothing.

Charles led us up a trail to the plateau of an empty parking lot with historic markers too dark to read. Our small band encamped above the battlefield in a picnic area. Below was the waiting battlefield with hundreds of tiny red specks of campfires warming reenactors who were too far away to see. Ruth and Ursula opened the box of the satellite dish, me holding the flashlight on my phone. They adjusted the three flat legs until the bubble level was centered, holding their breaths whenever fine adjustments were called for. When it was ready and aimed at the eastern sky, Van Raye, Dubourg, Ursula, and I sat on a crosstie fence watching the valley bellow, hearing Ruth clicking on a laptop as she sat in lotus, stomach beneath her coat. Elizabeth sat on a picnic table, the two reenactors beside her as if we needed guarding.

Van Raye lit a joint, puffed it alive and gave it to Dubourg. He smoked and handed to me, and I smoked, not liking the light on my face, handed it to Ursula who took it, kept it going. She had clipped her ping-pong ball to the collar of her coat. Without hesitation, she handed the joint to Elizabeth who took it and handed it to the former bellhops, no reenactors, sitting beside her. “Thank you, Ms. Sanghavi.”

Van Raye got off his seat and went to the reenactors and said, “Give me that; that’s certainly not historically accurate.”

The guy took quick puffs before giving it to him.

“What time is it now?” Van Raye said. He twirled the joint in the lighter’s flame.

“Quit asking that,” Ruth said. “We’re here. We’re set up.” She touched the screen to start different applications.

“I can’t feel my toes,” Van Raye said.

“This isn’t all about you,” Ursula said.

“I never said I wanted to come here to do this,” Ruth said.

“Working so hard can’t be good for the baby,” Elizabeth said. “We are taking a break.”

The fires of the union encampment below were single dots of amber. Over that scene, jets winked against the stars, and occasionally there was the high-to-low-pitch banshee whine of jet engines decelerating out of high-altitude holding patterns and headed down to the airport. I wondered about Albert’s mindset. Ursula lay back on the table with her hands behind her head staring at the blinking jets and the stars.

There was a yell from the troops in the distance.

“Who are they shouting at?” Dubourg asked.

“Rebel taunts,” a reenactor said.

“They’re shouting ‘ Chickamauga ,’” the other said. “They beat us up pretty bad in Chickamauga, but we’ll get them tomorrow.”

“You’ll get them? ” Van Raye said. “How absurd. Do you not find it disturbing to recreate the scene of horror where men shot and killed each other in mass? My God, we are on a field of hell, and you are celebrating this? It’s disgusting.”

“Shut up,” Ruth said. Tracking motors whined beneath the dish, a short test, and stopped. “Everything is so fucking academic to you. I’m sick of it. I’m doing all the work of this project. Without the instrumentation, you wouldn’t be shit. Oh, the horror, the horror ,” she mocked. “What do you know about horror? There’s only one thing that really scares us,” she said.

“And what is that, darling?”

“Don’t be so quick to want to know,” she said.

Van Raye took out a metal pipe and his baggie. I heard him tapping it on the fence and then the relative silence of him stuffing it. “I want to know,” he said. “I want to know what happened to you up there.”

I smelled the natural rot of decay on the wind from a nearby trash can.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this,” Elizabeth said. “We are out here to get the software, and the space station. . we will see it pass over. Have you seen it, I mean, watched it since you’ve been back?”

“No,” Ruth said. “Why would I?” She touched the screen in the lower left and all the light went away, and we could see the stars better and the campfires below. “We had a slight problem up there,” Ruth said. “Did anyone know that? EVA-ing? That’s spacewalking. We became a little unhinged by it. Kind of an epidemic we couldn’t explain. At first, I diagnosed panic attacks, but nothing like this had ever happened to anyone. It started happening to a few of us as soon as the doors opened. Like agoraphobia but on a grander scale — hyperventilating, increased heart rates, adrenaline spikes, and the screaming. Yes, they screamed. I’m talking hysterics. But it wasn’t that simple. Nothing is. Even safely back in the station, people continued to scream. I tried to calm them.

“Some of the crew were parents, you know.” She sniffed in the cold air. “And they were the ones to compare what was happening to the night terrors their kids experienced. Nothing can calm kids in this state and nothing worked on us either. I mean besides a good cocktail of Ativan and Haldol.”

Ruth stared across the valley of the battle, legs crossed beneath her. “Kids having night terrors, they have their eyes open, appear lucid, but they can’t communicate and there’s no amount of reasoning or reassurance that can bring them out of that state. Children in all cultures experience night terrors. What was happening to the crew, I guess, it was similar in a way, and it would start the second the airlock opened — sudden-onset hysterics.

“I volunteered to be forcefully EVA-ed on the BEAR arm. You know, the BEAR. .” Ruth extracted her arm, fist balled. She pointed to her fist to show she was on the arm. “Supposed to haul twenty-ton satellites, but it’s me on the end. I told them stick me out there and don’t stop, no matter what. I’ve got to see what this is, right, to see what’s making us like this? I’m the chief of biomedical problems, right? So I’m strapped to the cherry picker and it moves me out there, and I’m screaming but I force myself to shut up and take it. I can’t see Earth. It’s behind me, so all I’m seeing is empty space. I’m in the station’s shadow, right? There’s darkness all around. Darkness only happens when you are in the shadow of something, like we are now, the only way the stars come out at night is we’re in the shadow.” When she moved, the material of her jacket squeaked. “From a shadow of the space station, you can see stars,” she said. “Stars to focus on. So I’m on the end of the BEAR arm, and I’m under some modicum of control with stars as reference, but I’m still panicking and I’m moving out of the shadow into the light, the thing comes back on me, this dread that there’s nothing waiting, and the arm extends me into the sunlight, and that was when it hit me the hardest: everything is black, but it’s a bright black. That’s the terrifying part: there’s nothing there, and it’s painfully bright, but I also feel the presence of nothing. I started screaming so loud that I overloaded the audio.”

Everyone but Van Raye had turned around on the fence to see her. Ruth pulled a cigarette out of her jacket pocket and lit it, looking like she was asleep with her eyes down into the lighter for a brief second.

Dubourg hopped down and took the cigarette from her. She didn’t argue. He sat on the other table and smoked it.

“The strange thing about this experience,” Ruth continued, “was that I realized this thing, this bright nothing, I’d always known about it, but something had made me forget it. When I was a kid, I knew it was there. It had been every dark shape caught in the corner of my eye, every sinister shadow. We don’t understand how horrified children are, but at least the adults are there, you know. Can you imagine, these other beings in your world telling you with good authority that everything is okay , that things are fine? At some point you start to believe it. You have to believe it or go insane. Adults have blocked out the knowledge of nothing. Adults provide meaning for kids as they live through childhood and tell them what’s real and what isn’t. In American culture, we get them fucked up on Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, but then they figure out that’s bullshit, right? Then we get them fucked up on God, and God is just Santa Claus for grownups. Pretty soon, you subconsciously start believing in this order of the world or else you just go insane. Don’t you remember feeling when you were a kid that anything could be just around the corner, anything?