Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Now I don’t have to say it,” she said.

“We’ve already talked about this?”

But she didn’t answer. I pulled out of her, which she hated, and she bit her bottom lip, and I watched her face in the wavy light from the aquarium. The next thing, according to the déjà vu in my mind, was that she was going to tell me that she couldn’t procreate anyway. I began to be fearful of another time bomb about to explode, so I kissed her neck.

She stopped me with her hand and said, “Let me ask you a question, an important question.” I waited and she said, “Do you think Charles is better off believing he can see his leg?”

“He doesn’t really believe it’s his leg. He can’t.”

“But if you were him, would you want to keep on believing the leg was there? Listen to me,” she said. “It’s important. Answer me: Do you think he’s better off believing that is his leg even if it’s not?”

“I think he’s letting himself believe. Deep down he really knows it’s not there, the real him does. And the hydrocodone. . you know. . He’s not himself. He’ll eventually come around.”

“But then he won’t have the relief of believing anymore?” she said.

“Maybe he’s going to be so fucking famous he’s going to hire someone to be his leg forever. His leg man.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she said. “Just let me have this night, okay?”

I didn’t like the way she said this, as if there would be no other nights.

We worked slowly, and the feeling of déjà vu came on because it was the sadness of Butch being gone, but the betta fish poked around in the yellow plastic plant, and I quit watching him to extend this time with Ursula. Time flies when you’re having fun is the truest maxim in the world and must have been dreamed up by someone during orgasm, the quickest moments in a human being’s life never to be captured, like shortwave radio broadcasts. I tried to hold on to this moment with Ursula, being connected to her as the sleeping pill took over and I came, and we passed through the hypnopompic badlands of sleep together, each in our own dreams.

I don’t remember my last thought about Butch’s body being wrapped in the sheet on the other bed. I don’t remember Ursula’s pressing the button on her watch as she always did when she drifted off to sleep, measuring her time away from reality. I don’t remember turning off the aquarium’s light when we were done, nor sleeping or dreaming, only of a gentle annoying sound of knocking on the adjoining room’s door that woke me.

I got up, quietly pulling on my tracksuit, and returned three quiet knocks on the adjoining door before opening it. Elizabeth’s suite was dark. I quietly closed the door so as not to wake Ursula.

In Elizabeth’s room, her lamp’s shade cast a perfect circle on the ceiling, and Elizabeth sat on her bed facing away from me, the thick ponytail down the back of her uniform.

I shut the door quietly and heard her laces hiss through the eyes of her boots. The sheers filtered the blue light from the airport, and I wasn’t sure I didn’t smell Charles’s scent in here — old cars and his musk. She glanced over her shoulder. “You need a haircut,” she said.

“Do you have to say that every night?” I asked.

She felt the weight of the boot in her hand. She put it on the floor beside the other, adjusted them until they were perfect. She lay down on the bed, still in her green Gypsy uniform with the triangle of a white T-shirt showing at her neck, and her white socks glowing. She looked ten years younger. “Why are you still angry at the thing inside the dog?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is everyone mad at me?” she said.

“No one blames you,” I said, and then I told her, “You have to be there in the morning for the launch.”

“Why?”

“It’s just important for you to be there. We’re going to send him on, you know.”

“‘ You know? ’” she said. “And the word ‘just’ is for simpletons.” She unclipped pens from her pocket and put them on the bedside table. “I’m not going to take a night off. This is my job now.”

“What’s it like?”

“Sandeep,” she said, “it’s wonderful. I’m extremely tired, but it is so worth it.”

So? So worth it? She’d never talked like that.

“Better than you could ever, ever imagine. I mean I’m working hard learning the system, but it is like I’ve always known their system. It’s the system I would have designed.”

I could smell sweat from her uniform.

“So why isn’t it for me?”

She made her it’s-impossible shish and said, “This is for you. This is what you’ve been trained to do. You have a knowledge base that no one else in the world has, and you are young with your whole life ahead of you, and you come from good stock. You can have a big family, the family I never got to have. Is Ursula sleeping?”

“She is.”

Though I couldn’t see them I knew her eyes were closed, her arms crossed on her chest in the posture of being dead. “She still believes she is being abducted?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why are you sighing like it’s a horrible thing?” she asked me. I hadn’t realized I’d sighed. “You don’t know how wonderful it is to believe in something fantastic,” she said. She crossed her arm over her eyes.

“You think people like that are fools,” I said.

“No. If we remembered how good it felt to believe in the fantastical, like we were kids again,” she said, “we’d give up anything else to feel that way.”

“I just don’t understand why you won’t be there for the launch. Don’t you care that this thing is happening?”

She took a few minutes to think in the dark. “That was a different part of my old life. I can’t dwell on that. I’m very proud of you. But time flies by.”

We sat in the blue silence of the room for a while, Elizabeth lying on the bed with her hands crossed on her chest until she spoke. “We might not get to talk like this often so I want to tell you one thing, okay?”

I agreed.

“There are times,” she said, “when you have to forgive someone you don’t think deserves it.”

“You mean Charles?”

“I’m telling you an important lesson. Are you listening?”

“Of course I am.”

“In order to carry forward in a productive manner, you have to learn to forgive completely. Give this forgiveness to someone who you might not feel deserves it. Say it out loud to them—‘I forgive you.’ It sounds simple, but it starts working from that point forward. I think Dubourg’s Jesus had this right, and also that thing about being a child to be enlightened. Anyway, you will not be very productive until you learn to forgive. Some things in life just happen, and sometimes there’s a person who caused the event, but we go through life causing events, don’t we? Forgiveness starts with saying it.”

“Do you forgive Charles?”

“I’m very tired now,” she said.

“Do you think I should forgive you ?” I asked her. “Is this what this is about? There’s nothing to forgive. I love you more than anything. There is nothing else in the world to me but you.”

“You know,” she said, another non-Elizabeth prelude to a statement, “you have always wanted me the most when I was walking out of the room,” she said. “Did you know that? I could be sitting with you for hours and as soon as I got in the doorway, you’d go, ‘Mom. .’”

“I never called you ‘Mom.’”

“I supposed that’s my fault.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “Why are you talking like this? I’m worried about you.”