Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

I blink once — yes.

What happened to Charles?

Van Raye is easy to locate. When I need to see him, I check the race schedule.

Elizabeth, never really being able to separate from him, left in her will that he be provided for in order to maintain his “current lifestyle,” which is vague, and left to the trustee’s discretion. That’s me.

There are thirty-six races in a NASCAR season.

Last time I hunted him down in Bristol, Tennessee, Ursula flying me in a pressurized Beechcraft Baron. She flew us into a tiny airport packed with private jets, releasing the air seal around the door when we taxied to the terminal. She shut down the right engine so I could safely get out. I gestured for her to take the headphone away. She cracked one side to hear me.

“Come with me,” I said.

She let the earphone go and shook her head, eyes hidden behind the dark glasses, which is exactly the answer she gives when I ask her to marry me. “Fundamentally different philosophies,” she says, but I feel her caving. Those nights when we are sleeping together, finally, after all those years, I know she loves me and another baby is on its way.

In the airplane, when she threw her thumb to tell me to get out, the screen of her wristwatch (still worn backward) sparkled and her belly peaked from beneath her pilot’s shirt. This baby is going to be so brown. She just doesn’t understand. Like Elizabeth said, the Indian genes will dominate.

When I shut the door, and she locked it from inside and turned the plane, she hit me with a blast of prop wash. I caught a ride to the campground beside the racetrack to find Charles.

There is a huge coliseum built in the middle of the hills of east Tennessee where humans race cars. That night I went looking for Charles, the day’s racing done, and the parties had started. There were miles of RVs in every direction, music intertwining with other music, laughter and shouts, the sound of beanbags slapping in a cornhole game. The dark air smelled of campfires and port-o-potties, and I searched for his row. A country music band jammed in a dilapidated house at the corner. I used the tracker on my phone to find his, the sewage truck passing me on the gravel road, kicking up dust. I took out my handkerchief, and put it to my nose until I saw a group of race fans beneath a string of cactus lights staring at me. They drank beers, watched me in my button-down and slacks, handkerchief covering my face.

I saw Van Raye sitting in a reclining chair, hands behind his head. “Sandeep!” he yelled and the patio recliner tilted, but he remained seated. “It’s my son!” he shouted.

“Hello, Sandeep,” one of the men said to me, Bill something, one of the race regulars with Charles.

Charles didn’t get up, but I bent and took his hand and put my face against his face and kissed him.

“Want a beer?” Bill said, already going into the cooler.

I sat by a campfire built inside a metal ring and asked about the race today, and the one tomorrow night, drank beer and kept seeing flickering lights in the sky, not an airplane but yellow glowing orbs of floating lanterns rising from the massive campgrounds. Van Raye kept pulling out his phone to check race news, fingering it off. He’d always loved driving fast cars, but how did he end up here?

Van Raye reached and touched my shoulder and whispered, “Sandeep?”

“Yes.”

“I got a pit pass. I was this close to Austin Harris. I’ve got pictures!” He turned his phone on and started showing me pictures.

“The family is fine,” I said, ignoring the pictures.

“I’m glad. Ursula and the baby? Okay?” He looked at the pictures himself.

“Yes.”

“Wonderful.”

The campground was one big party, people wandering up and down the gravel road, beers in hand, golf carts dragging effigies of different drivers through the dirt. A guy staggered up and asked if he could use someone’s bathroom, said that he was lost. When he was done, he came back out of the neighbor’s RV and sat in one of Van Raye’s folding chairs and simply declared, “I’m from Canada,” and waited to see what reaction he got about this news. There was none. Harold from Maryland gave him a beer.

“Are you happy?” I asked Van Raye.

“Of course! This is great, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why are you so interested in this?”

“In what?”

“Racing. NASCAR.”

“I’ve always been,” he said.

“No, you haven’t. Did you ever go to a race, I mean, before?”

“I followed it.”

“No, you didn’t. You drove fast cars, but I never saw you watching a race. You’ve got some kind of false memory. I never even saw you watch television.”

“Watching sports is for imbeciles,” he said. “ This is racing . I’ve always loved racing. I just didn’t have much time to do it before. Retirement is great.”

The word “retirement” gave me a shot of pain for Elizabeth to have lived long enough for it.

Across the road, people held open a paper lantern and someone lit a tiny block of wood at its base, filling it with light and hot air. They raised it and let it go on the breeze, which carried it over the campers and the campground, rising ever higher. At one point there were dozens of them in the sky. “Redneck UFOs,” a guy name Marty said.

“You know what this reminds me of,” Van Raye said to me and pointing to the surrounding hills of this Tennessee valley. “All these campfires?” I waited. His hand dropped. “The night in Georgia, that night, all the campfires and the soldiers.”

“I don’t want to remember it,” I said.

“Of course not. You certainly don’t want to,” he said. “I’m sorry. What was I thinking?”

When four silver empty cans of beer stood beside his chair, he rose using the pole of his awning. Charles pulled his pant leg up. Velcro ripped and he took his prosthetic leg out leaving the pant leg empty.

“Oh Jesus, he’s taking his leg off,” Marty said.

“Things are getting serious, the professor is legless,” Bill said.

“Gentlemen,” he announced, “I lost this leg in the pursuit of extraterrestrial life.” He pivoted and plopped back in the lounger, holding the leg across his body like a guitar.

“Have you found intelligent life yet?” one of the men asked and the others laughed, one saying, “Not around here!”

This is the first joke any fool would think of, but Van Raye didn’t blink and said, “I have! I really have. Sandeep will tell you. We did it, didn’t we?”

“Yes,” I said, “you did.”

“Don’t start with the alien crap,” Bill said. Then to me, “You know he’s drunk when he takes his leg off and starts in about aliens.”

“Hunting them used to be his job,” I said.

“Well, he knows how to retire,” Bill said, raising his beer.

“Hear, hear, to the professor,” someone said, “intelligent life in Thunder Valley!” Everyone raised beers, and I did too, though it felt faked. When the toast was over, the Canadian announced that he’d wet his pants. Everyone laughed and Van Raye said, “That’s my chair, asshole!” A four-wheeler came by hauling a trailer with a hot tub full of people in cowboy hats. Elizabeth would have asked, “What kind of country is this?”

“Listen, Charles, I’m going to write everything down. A book.”

“Why?” he said. “I’m going to write one.”

We both knew he wasn’t going to do it. This was his old life.

He thought about this a second, and his chest relaxed, and he said, “Well, don’t mention the dog, okay? Someone might misconstrue my handling of the dog.”

“But how could I ever tell this story without the dog?”

He didn’t answer. It made me realize that Van Raye’s books, the articles, they were all bullshit, not in the sense that he ever lied about anything, but in the sense that they were chosen, edited, and elaborated to serve the image that he had of himself, and more importantly, he’d lived his life thinking first about the essay he would write, done things simply because it would make a better story. Even science, physics, mathematics were just frames to stretch the canvas of himself on and show the world who he thought he was, leaving out the parts he considered boring, uninteresting — father, husband, shitter, pisser, bankrupt man. Now he was simply old.