Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

On the pool deck, I scrolled through the history of my texts, back to the very beginning, messages Randolph had allowed the others to see. The first one:

I am Randolph.

Ha! I’m not crazy!

I am trapped inside the dog.

He came to Earth on August 15, 1977, and had lived first among military computers, and then personal computers, inside the stock exchange’s network, skipping to different data-storage sites — inside Disney World, a register at a Whole Foods in Los Angeles looking at barcodes twinkling in the red laser, in the system of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

I found another memory: Ruth kneeling over the unbelievably alive dog on the carpet in the middle of all the computers, the shelves of computers that had recently begun to make the strained noise of hard computations, Butch lying flat, his back legs useless. Ruth waved a yellow wand over his body. Ursula was crying. Ruth knelt and waved the wand like a metal detector over the animal, then concentrated it on his shoulders. The computer beeped and then the screen began marching with 0s and 1s. Ruth whistled. “That’s a lot of data.” And my phone had beeped:

I am this data. Don’t remove me.

I would like to be sent to Chava Norma but no transfer. Storage can corrupt

Please.

Ruth had said, looking at the information from the chip, “By the way, he’s a neutered male, up to date on shots, owner’s name is. . ‘Charles Van Raye,’ and his name is Butch.” And that was when Ursula had told us about finding out a stray dog’s name and she’d cried, saying Butch, Butch, Butch , watching him raise his ears and happiness registered in his eyes, him thinking, They are one of those people, those people who know my name .

Randolph had explained to us how he went from one electronically alive planet to the next, a kind of cosmic tourist, but never getting involved, never leaving a footprint, but learning and traveling. He was older than 150,000 Earth years. Twelve years ago, he had been passing through the systems of a small veterinarian clinic in Santa Cruz, California, where the animals came and went, all the personalities — the happy, the sad, the scared, nervous, and the owners who loved them. He “watched” the pets, though didn’t explain other than, “I see without seeing.” When a litter of strays were brought in, he said he forgot about moving himself. The microchip was physically picked off the data pad by a technician and inserted into the neck of six-week-old Butch before Randolph could move. Otherwise he would have gone to Chava Norma when someone discovered the new planet was a new neighbor three thousand light-years away — and nobody on Earth would have been the wiser, and he wouldn’t have affected our lives.

This is the hatred I feel , I thought while standing on the pool deck. I dislike him so because he affected our lives.

I leaned on the shovel, looking at the hollowness of a shadow by the blooming azalea bush, the shadow that was this Butch who’d gone through nearly his whole life with Randolph inside him.

My phone vibrated, and a text from Dubourg was bright in my face:

You remember the plan?

Don’t wig out *now* please

I thumbed it off. Yes, I remembered the plan. We were sending Randolph to Chava Norma. I looked at the faint star in the sky and remembered the plan hatched to keep Van Raye calm; a plan us four coconspirators had forged in what seemed like a dream.

The dark, flat shape of Van Raye was sunk in the lounge chair and he didn’t know how close the star really was to moving into the field of view.

Ursula snapped another pretzel stick and I cringed. I was on the verge of yelling at her, STOP! I hate the fucking snapping , and then Dubourg’s teeth broke an antacid.

Ursula came to the fence to see my face. “Why are you standing here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I like the view to the west there. I’m just saying. . ” I’m just saying was a statement that Elizabeth loathed. “Empty talk,” she would tell me, and I felt sadness coming on.

I said to Ursula, just because I could, “I’m just saying! Why don’t we get married?”

“Don’t start on this again,” she whispered.

“He’s lapsing,” Dubourg said.

“I’m not,” I said.

From the pool, Ruth said, “Short-term memory is a strange beast. It has to take its natural course.”

Van Raye’s snoring stopped. I know how he felt when he woke among the others, felt us watching him.

“I’m not a goddamn patient,” I said to Ruth. “I’m right here.”

“And you’re displaying unusual anger,” Ruth said. “Very common with head trauma.”

“It was a concussion ,” I said, “days ago.”

“Weeks ago,” Dubourg said.

“That’s what I meant.”

That was when I heard another clicking, felt it rise through my legs, making me cringe because it was another snapping, but this was the pool light’s timer, the underwater light spreading down the length of the pool, Ruth’s body dark and surrounded by sparkling, floating microparticles, her belly flashing white like a keel beneath her.

Ursula was on the steps, hair slicked back over her head, freckles on her shoulders, one bra cup gapping so that I could see the crescent of her burgundy nipple. Happiness, sit. Happiness, stay. But her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, and her face lax with worry and unable to break the trance of staring into the palm trees where the light from the pool wiggled. Dubourg was reclined in the deck chair, his legs astraddle and his valise beside him.

Charles’s new eyeglasses mirrored the light, dull stipples going across his body. He was pale, his boxer shorts dry, left foot hanging over the side, and his right leg only a stump with a rubber swim cap on the end. He has a stump! It was true: his leg was gone. These forgotten facts of my past rebounded into place. His temporary prosthesis stood upright on the ground beside his lounge chair.

“Charles lost his leg,” I mumbled, and I couldn’t help myself, I smiled. That was all— Charles lost a leg , which seemed much less than the lurking sadness that had been in my brain. I said “ AAK, AAK, AAK ,” and everyone looked at me.

“Not this again,” Dubourg said.

“Why am I thinking AAK? Laughing?” I asked.

“‘ A mputation a bove the k nee,’” Dubourg said.

That is why I am angry. If it weren’t for Randolph, Van Raye would have his leg!

“Are you okay?” Ursula asked me.

“Sure.”

Charles put his hand on his bare thigh. His remaining foot was bare, toes flexing, and the stump had a white rubber swim cap on its end, a child’s swim cap with black rubber flowers on it. I remembered he’d found it in the pool box. His crutches were on the ground beside him. I also now remembered he wanted to take Randolph out and present him to the world and be really famous. Frankenstein and his creature. I remembered a scene from yesterday, or maybe it was the day before. Butch went missing, and I had found him in the empty underground parking garage standing obediently in his chariot beside Charles’s Jaguar. His leash coiled beneath the seam of the car’s back door, and there Charles sat in the backseat. Charles didn’t move even when I peered through the window, him frozen in a painkiller haze, desiring to steal the dog. I looked in the car and saw the other end of the leash still looped to his hand. I got in on the other side, moved his crutches to sit, and he’d explained to me that he was running away with the dog but couldn’t manage to lift him into the Jaguar. On the dashboard of his car was this ugly statue of the alien Buddha. This was the first time I’d ever seen the thing, the long eyes of a classic Gray but plump and fat as Buddha. I remembered the way the statue seemed to be staring and smiling at how ridiculous we were in the backseat of the car as if waiting for a chauffeur who would never show.