Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

We shot through the dead sprawl of the Boulevard of Desolation beneath out-of-order traffic lights shrouded in black body bags. The road was dirty with things piled against the curves and blinking barricades anchored by sandbags. A gust of wind rocked the shuttle. Up ahead, a plastic bag lifted and moved along the road, the shuttle missing it by inches.

Van Raye said, “Everything is going to be okay. I can’t stand this. Tomorrow we’ll be back to work.”

“Did you hear the one,” Ursula said, taking her head off of Dubourg’s shoulder, “about the human being who found a magic lamp on the beach and the genie came out?” Ursula’s head wobbled with the swaying. “The genie said, ‘You can have two wishes.’”

I thought about all the jokes I had to listen to Leggett tell in the hospital. Ursula’s only depressed me more.

“Two wishes!” Van Raye yelled from the backseat, trying to be jovial. “I know this joke.”

“Are you seriously telling a joke?” I asked.

“Just listen,” she said and continued. “And for his first wish, the human being says, ‘Give me one pill that will make me happy forever!’”

“Happy forever!” Van Raye shouted. Van Raye, the man who hated joke-telling. “I believe I know this one,” he yelled over the engine noise. “This is unbelievable.”

Elizabeth’s eyes scanned the road, not paying any attention. The tires hissed.

And Ursula said, “So the guy takes the eternal pill of happiness and the genie asks him if he’s happy, and he says, ‘Yes! So happy! I’ve never felt like this in my life!’ And the genie says, ‘Congratulations, and you will feel like this forever,’ and the genie says, ‘So you get one more wish, what do you want?’ And the human being says. . ”

Van Raye shouted, “‘ I want another pill just like that one! ’” delivering the punch line.

“ Right! ” Ursula shouted. “‘ I want another pill just like that one! ’”

Van Raye from the backseat shouted with his finger in the air, “ That’s my joke! I made that joke up! ”

I remember turning back around, trying to think of what this meant. I put my hand on the dashboard. The joke meant something to me, Leggett on my mind. Out the big windshield the hotel loomed at the very end of the boulevard. Another piece of trash blew in front of us toward our lane, a tumbleweed of a trash bag, but I clearly saw the bag stop and sit with two shiny eyes staring into the headlights, glowing like silver dimes. My mind had time to think, God is in the headlights, God is in the headlights, making no sense, and then the eyes were gone as if they’d never been there. I am not God, you are God, I’m not God. “Elizabeth,” I wanted to say, but all I could get out was “God.”

“God?” she mumbled but then I could tell she saw the dog, staring again at the oncoming shuttle’s headlights. I heard her foot release the accelerator, and the world moved very slowly, and time stretched into a song in my head:

You are dog.

I am dog.

You are not a dog.

I am not a dog.

The only word I could say was the most important word in my life—“ Elizabeth .”

It would be a long time before I remembered the details of the accident, like the way the seatbelt seemed to click angrily to lock me down. One tire screeched and the van spun. I saw the dog out my window, the shuttle continuing toward him standing stoically or blinded, and my side of the shuttle bowed. I heard Ruth shout as the forces began, “ Monsterrrrrrr —” and Dubourg, “ Holy mother . .” The creature disappeared beneath the van, and I waited for the sickening thump. The shuttle seemed to stabilize but the forces were only in the apogee of changing directions before the flipping would begin.

I had seen the glowing eyes, the very thing that had made Dubourg believe in God when we were little, and there was the clear quietness of new flight. We were floating before the noises began, only the yanking tug-of-war between gravity and the seatbelt. Gravity was a whirlpool and there was a boil of sparks vomiting through the van, which I could taste, and then the noises stopped, replaced by the long silence and the smell of steam and rubber. There was only this silence afterward and finally someone whistling for a dog, someone very far away me.

I am under water, and it is dark and I cannot breathe , I thought. My senses rebooted one at a time, including my sense of surrounding, and it was this: Air coming to me, and I swam quickly, sensing the others looking at me as if I’d done a belly flop and they wanted to see if I was okay. There was nighttime humidity and the relative coolness of the water. I stood in the shallow end, not wanting them to know it had happened again. It? I thought. It? It what? Forgetting? An “episode”. . And I held onto a constant in my life, my mumbled prayer of the Seven Ps: “ Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance. Proper planning and practice prevent piss-poor performance. ”

Humid night air weighed on the pool deck, and instinctively I knew which way the pool steps were. This was the big outdoor pool. I found the metal rail and hauled myself out, and I understood that I had no clothes on. I turned around, standing as my undressed self in the darkness before Ursula sitting on the steps. Behind me was the calm movement of the tip of Dubourg’s cigarette. I knew Charles was that form laid out in the lounge, and Ruth was swimming in the dark pool. Ruth scooped up my floating boxer shorts and threw them at me.

If anyone knew about my mind rebooting, they didn’t move or say anything as I stepped into my shorts. I went over what I knew: I am nude and dripping and looking down through the metal fence at the wide-open space of a great airport beneath the ever-blind windows of the Grand Aerodrome Hotel. We are alone and no one is looking out of those windows because the hotel is vacant .

The wind changed direction and brought a whiff of dog shit, and the smell brought on a big happiness. In my mind this equation: Happiness = the dog . A light from an open stairwell cast a shard of orange on the ground and there the old dog stood with his hind legs in his chariot. The cart held his rear legs off the ground, and he hobbled with front legs forward, trailing a loose stool in the grass, the globs of shit glistening in the moonlight. I found the shovel against the wall where I knew I’d left it last night — it felt good to remember such details — and I took it and leaned on it to make a posture of calmness— nothing is wrong with me —so the others wouldn’t know that I had an “episode.” An episode of what, I wasn’t sure.

I searched for the happiness again, something about the dog. I began to reconstruct facts from feelings. I feel good because the dog is taking a shit. I feel good that the dog is taking a shit because? Because the dog is alive! But even happiness comes with dread because time moves on and nothing stays the same.

The reflection of lights on a jet taking to the sky wobbled unevenly through the dark glass panes of the dark hotel, the image disappearing for a split second in the vertical columns and then popping out through more panes, in fits and starts like my memory.

The gray shaggy dog rolled his chariot forward finishing his business, and glanced at me with those eyebrows. Now it makes me sad because? He is old and dying. He was a terrier mix, knee-high and with scraggily beard and wise eyebrows that moved as he thought, his back haunches strapped to the cross-frame of the chariot and his ankles strapped and held up. I kneeled and pushed the hair back to see the blackness of the eyes, and I had a clear memory of these eyes reflecting. When was the accident? In my mind that night before the accident was a marker, like a surveyor’s stake on the edge of a cliff. Beyond the stake was a giant excavated pit of nothing in the middle of my life.