Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“You are worrying about me ?” she said. “Don’t make me angry right before I fall asleep. It’ll only give me bad dreams. Good happy thoughts before you fall asleep. .”

I looked at her work boots beside her other shoes, and I left her there to sleep, closing the doors quietly behind me — her door, then my door — and I snuck back in bed beside Ursula and just as I was thinking I would never fall asleep, I heard gentle knocks on the main door and then the silent form of Dubourg letting himself in the room, putting his bags down, and getting on the floor with a blanket and falling asleep below us with his fists beneath his chin just like when he was a kid.

I startled awake from a dream, found Ursula asleep beside me, and Dubourg on the floor between the beds. The world through the shears was not yet showing the dawn of the next day, but Ursula’s watch alarm was going off, the blue dial light blinking as she raised it to her face. She reached to find me in bed and only then did she let her breath go, and Dubourg from the floor said, “I’m already here.”

I hobbled to the door to Elizabeth’s room. I put my ear to the solidness and listened, felt her presence on the other side. I raised my hand, thought I should give her one last chance to go with us, but then I didn’t knock.

Dubourg sat on the end of the bed putting on his black shoes, his priest shoes, and he had his valise, of course, but he also had his carry-on duffle packed.

“Are you leaving?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “We all have to after this.”

Ursula’s eyes followed me as I walked across the room. “What’s the matter with you?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. I got Butch’s leash off the counter expecting him to perk up when he heard the sound of the buckle sliding on the counter, and I looked around for his chariot in order to strap it on for his morning walk.

“Oh God,” Ursula said.

But I saw the bundle of white sheets sunken into the comforter, the dead Butch, and of course I remembered.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she said.

“I had a momentary lapse,” I whispered, “I remember last night, don’t worry,” and I threw the leash back on the counter where it hit flight-attendant Barbie sitting drunkenly and staring straight ahead. She always looked like she was focused into a world we couldn’t see, one filled with her tiny friends and family.

“Why do you keep doing this?” Ursula said, grabbing both sides of her head. “I can’t go through it again.”

“No. You won’t. I remember.”

“Everything?” she said.

Ruth and the needles seemed like a dream.

Dubourg slid his hands under the bundle that was Butch and lifted. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

The service elevator took us up to the attic. It opened into the heavy air of the big room, and Dubourg mumbled, “Welcome to the inferno.” We walked between the frames of foldaway beds, and in the center of the darkness were the oasis of the light and furniture. It was like a lit stage at a theatre, this stage a messy set: equipment, computers opened and gutted, CPUs running, soldering irons, notebooks spread open, tools, spools of wire, an empty gallon jug of water, stacks of unused hard drives, and of course the Trans-Oceanic radio among stacks of plates from the restaurant.

Dubourg went over to the table beside Ruth and set the bundle of Butch down on a pad and draped another pad over his body, a heavy pad.

Van Raye was lying in one of the pool’s lounge chairs with his prosthesis standing beside him, the leg wearing a black zip-up boot as if it were dressed and ready to go.

“You goddamn people,” Van Raye said. “How many times do I have to be right before people start listening to me?”

Ruth screwed the wire leads to metal eyes on the pad on Butch and went back to work in front of four screens.

Dubourg looked down on Charles. “He knows?”

“Yes,” Ruth said without taking her eyes off the screens, monitors shining on her face. “Cat’s out of the bag.” A rotating fan agitated strings of the frayed fabric of her cutoff sleeves.

Ursula went over to Van Raye and took away his crutches.

“Stop that. Shit. Those are mine!”

Dubourg sat in front of the Trans-Oceanic radio.

“If you send it, go ahead and kill me,” Van Raye said, “Okay? Okay? I’ll have nothing.”

Dubourg turned on the radio. It took a few seconds to warm up to a station playing organ music but he tuned past it and past a voice—“Four cats, three dogs, a bundle of sticks has been delivered. .” and then the tapping of Morse code — until he found our sound, like a twin-engine plane warming up for takeoff, the sound having traveled three thousand years to get here. Every sound we were hearing was three thousand years old.

“You’ll have the planet,” Ruth said to Van Raye. “You’ll have Chava Norma.”

“Fuck that noise,” Van Raye said. “There’s an extraterrestrial here .” He pointed to the bundle lying on the banquet table between the two plastic pads, a corner of the shroud hanging off the table. On a metal shelving unit was the orange box, the spell of software supposedly cast upon it making it a magic box capable of sending the burst of data that was Randolph, or whatever his real name was, to Chava Norma.

Ruth had her chin resting on her hand as she watched a graphic version of the Earth rotating. She rolled her chair over to the gain booster and toggled a switch and watched a bar on one screen begin: “10 %” then skipping suddenly to “15 %” and stopped in a dimming of lamps. “Don’t surge on me now,” Ruth said, and the lights on all the hard drives remained green and the noise from the radio was strong.

On the other end of the table there was a hole — a hole, like a blind spot in my vision. It was like a bubble in an aquarium, but this sphere was purer than air. I made myself watch the clock go through 00:00:5:00.

“Are you okay?” Ursula said. She sat in her regular spot in that wingback chair.

I nodded.

“What do you see?” she said.

“ What? ”

I could tell Ursula’s eyes tracked to the hole on the end of the table.

I knew from past experience this thing on the end of the table was disturbing to look at. I closed my eyes. I heard Ursula get up. I put my feet on the couch and drank from a water bottle. What was on the end of the table? I forced my eyes to look at it — a bubble in the air, a crystal ball of cosmic clarity with nothing in it.

Van Raye was in a half stupor on his lounge, and Dubourg smoked and stared at the radio as if this hole in the universe wasn’t right there at the end of the table beside him. I squinted to see it better and it changed to the green alien Buddha from Charles’s car but alive and opening its mouth, a grotesque black tongue licking as though it had just swallowed something, its blank black eyes watching all of us. I knew even as I was seeing it that it wasn’t real. I understood I was hallucinating.

“We can ask him anything. What do we want to know?” Dubourg said, but he meant Randolph, not that Buddha.

“Go ahead. It’s now or never,” Ruth said. “You wanna know what’s in your case?”

I heard Dubourg say, “ No .”

My phone dinged with a message from Randolph.

Calm down. You are hallucinating.

The small alien Buddha persisted, moving, licking, fingers flexing as if coming alive.

Before I go, I want you to see through the hallucination. You must see what it is.

Ruth called out coordinates as if there were someone listening: “Right ascension, less than ninety seconds.”

“You don’t understand!” Van Raye tried to push up on the chair. “Don’t any of you have the least bit of desire for knowledge? Where does it come from? How long does it live? ” The fan whirred in Ruth’s face. “Damn all of you,” he said.