Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

Ursula sits alone on the swinging chair diagonal from me. She has one leg folded beneath her. The toes of her other foot barely touch the ground and keep her chair moving, her belly swollen with a child inside her.

The mole (the sock) sticks on the bottom of a fairy-dust bush, but the boy doesn’t know it, and Dubourg runs by and kicks it free. “ Where is it? ” Dubourg shouts. Ursula tugs the line and the mole starts moving across the yard again.

“Where does the mole live?” Dubourg asks the boy, allowing the beam to shine in the wrong direction, momentarily at his black valise safely on the ground by the water pipe.

The boy has a real name on his birth certificate, but we have never called him anything other than “Boy” or “the boy,” though Ursula and Dubourg sound more natural saying it than I do. What will we call our next baby if it’s a boy? I don’t know. Of course Ursula doesn’t consider it “our” baby.

We are at the Desert Motor Court built in 1969, a space-age design with a marquee out front that has a series of concentric disks that reminds me of a laser shooting toward the sky, and this is where I go when the Disease With No Name takes over my body. Mr. Leggett, the former letter carrier from Atlanta, my old hospital roommate, is in charge of security here, a position I secured him through the ownership, friends of Elizabeth’s, though managers complain that Leggett thinks he runs the place, and he has an endless stream of jokes, which he still tells me when I come here for my episodes.

The motor court is good, though the neighborhood in the valley below us is known for meth houses. The pool is spring fed and the restaurant at the end keeps its doors open, and other guests take note of our special gang, but read their paperbacks or sip their cocktails.

The ownership warns everyone that it’s not a good idea to leave the grounds after dark because of the crime, but this only adds to the isolation and feeling of security when we are here together, though Ursula says that they — the Others — come freely to take her away at night here in the desert with her family around her. She still flies for Shenandoah, but she has written a book about her abduction experiences, and is often the keynote speaker at UFO conventions, but she has refrained from telling her audiences that the baby growing inside her is of alien stock, though she reminds me constantly that it is not my child.

At this stage of pregnancy, she is round and plump, a baby she thought she could never have, practically a miracle. One of those eggs harvested by the aliens when she was young, she says, fertilized and replanted inside her.

During the mole hunt, she stares at the blinking lights of airliners in the sky, and I know that being up in the air is what she really loves, almost as much as she loves this boy, the boy whose mothers are from the sky.

Ursula transferred her Triple Zero lifetime pass on Shenandoah to Dubourg, so he didn’t have to rely on the church, but can still spend the rest of his life keeping the valise safe, safe inside the Airport Zone, and he can talk to God.

The boy calls me “Dad” because I am legally his father, and he calls Ursula “Mama,” because Ruth told her that she wanted it that way. He calls Dubourg just “Du,” which sounds like “father” in a better language. We tell the boy about Ruth, his mother in the sky, traveling back in space, which is confusing to him, and we know that we will one day tell him about his biological father who died orbiting Earth, Cosmonaut X. They’ll be abstract to him, and his mind will build myths around this, surely. Will he want to go to the sky?

Now I watch the boy and imagine putting my fingers through his hair when I’m well, something I promise myself I will do more often than I’ve done, show him love no matter what, breaking the cycle of bad fathers.

When we are all here together at the Desert Motor Court, when I retreat into my head, this is our sunset ritual: Dubourg grabs the boy, who at two is extraordinarily healthy and fine and light in Dubourg’s strong arms, Dubourg holding him flat like he’s surfing the air, flashlight in Boy’s hand, bouncing him so that he never gets a good bead when the mole crosses open ground, jumping from rock to plant, the pregnant Ursula pulling the string from the swinging bench.

When I am not in an episode of paralysis, I tell Boy every night before bed about his biological mother Ruth who is a great star traveler, and we see a few stars coming out in that impossibly purple light as we stand on top of a hotel, him not understanding yet what it means to be traveling among the stars.

That’s where Ruth is, or at least she’s somewhere in the asteroid belt for the next two years, and I can’t help but think that this isn’t much different from Randolph traveling toward Chava Norma, but Ruth is much slower and will never get to a destination. Her travel is not much different from death, except that we can send his mother messages via computer and wait a few days for her response. All the important women in his life come from the sky: Ur, who comes to see him; Ruth, sending him messages; Elizabeth, who I tell him fantastic stories about but whom he can never communicate with. I would do anything to have one more night to talk to her, to go back to that hotel room in the blue light and talk to her in her Gypsy Sky uniform. Even if it were a dream. Would she look around at us here and think it was all worth it? I don’t care. I miss her so.

We were at the Grand Aerodrome’s pool when the boy was born, the paralysis coming on me slowly at that time as if it were the actual grief of losing my mother. We were trying to unravel the mystery of why the sound from the planet had suddenly quit. It took three thousand years to get here and they couldn’t have known we had sent Randolph at that exact moment. Ruth had scanned the body of Butch and found no data on the microchip, and I think we all, late at night, wonder if any of it was real. It’s no more real than the past ever is.

We scattered Elizabeth’s ashes from the top of the Grand Aerodrome. All five of us witnessed that and have that stored, shared memory. Elizabeth’s ashes went with the wind toward the airport. So much of the past you have to take on faith.

I’m telling it like I remember it, though I have nothing to offer as proof other than four witnesses, one of whom isn’t here on Earth, and Dubourg refuses to talk about it. Ursula believes aliens are still here. Charles Van Raye should be writing this book, not me.

Van Raye, who had nothing now, had nearly quit talking to any of us, even by that night of the boy’s birth. He was in some state of shock, legless, without even his sound of a distant civilization to show the world.

Ruth, swimming normally in the pool that night of the birth, gave no indication anything was about to happen to her. She squatted in the shallow end and reached between her legs and lifted this thing out in a brown swirl of water, lifted it by both legs, umbilical cord running along its prune face, hands over its head as if indicating a touchdown. Ruth said, “Boy.”

Ruth signed up for some crazy, privately funded mission that sent three astronauts straight into space, a so-called self-sufficient craft, or at least sufficient enough for the astronauts to survive their normal lifetimes if no disaster struck, all we can ever hope for. She simply couldn’t stand not being in space. I reminded her that space was where she’d been terrified. “Maybe that’s why I’m going,” she said.

Ursula jerks the string and makes the mole jump in the air, and Dubourg takes the boy bouncing off in the wrong direction, the air thick with dust kicked up by his priestly black shoes. Ursula sees me looking at her. “You still think you have something to do with this?” She touches her stomach.