I blinked once — yes.
She squinted and said, “Have you stopped masturbating yet, Sanghavi?” She waited until I blinked twice — no. “Got it,” she said and put the cup to my lips, and I tried to get only a taste, enough to spread on my tongue.
I wanted her badly to touch me again, to still the tingling anywhere.
She poured the remainder of my cup in her cup and poked at the Foley bag hanging on the end of my bed. “Let me see. I pour whiskey in this end of you and it comes out this end? Interesting.” She took another swig and looked over her shoulder at Leggett as if she didn’t trust his being asleep, and then put her hands on my railing and said, “And you don’t know why this keeps happening to you?”
I blinked twice, no. Through the wall, the old woman’s voice called out to be recognized—“I’m Rose Epstein!”—shouted like she was on a phone with a bad connection.
“They come and get you at night. Do you have recollection of this?”
I blinked emphatically no. I was not getting abducted.
“Jesus,” she said, and for the first time I saw a little fear. She looked out the window and felt around the seal to see that it couldn’t be opened.
She went to her bag and took out a thin book and two more tiny whiskey bottles. She pulled a goosenecked lamp over to a chair and clicked its rheostat switch and judged just the right amount of light. She poured both bottles into her cup and made herself comfortable in the chair under the light, propped her legs on my bed. The lamp’s light shined on her face. She held the book up to show me the cover: C. G. Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.
“Carl fucking Jung.” She wiggled to get comfortable and began. “Chapter 1, ‘UFOs as Rumors.’” She waited to see if the snoring would be interrupted, and I could hear the tiny sound of my father’s voice coming from the headphones still on the bed, like he was reduced by a mad scientist’s shrinking machine.
Ursula continued, “‘Since the things reported of UFOs not only sound incredible but seem to fly in the face of all our basic assumptions about the physical world, it is very natural that one’s first reaction would be the negative one of outright rejection. . ’”
I wanted to laugh. I could barely make the face of laughter, my right side particularly droopy. No sound came from me. Clicking my tongue hurt. I didn’t have enough breath to whistle. There was a paper calendar on the wall directly in front of my bed, a clock beside it that I had no choice but to watch.
While she read, I moved my eyes to watch her face and then back to the clock’s hands moving time forward. You would have thought with those big calendar numbers in front of me I would be thinking about December 12, but I wasn’t. It didn’t seem to be in my mind.
Ursula fell asleep curled in the chair. More than three hours passed on the clock until she stretched, put the book away, and stood over me.
Please touch me.
“I could stay here with you,” she whispered. “Do you feel vulnerable? Do you want me to stay through the night?” She looked at the sleeping roommate in the other bed.
Yes, climb in bed next to me, I thought, but I blinked no. I’d been there for fifteen days and, no, I wouldn’t let her think that for a second I believed aliens were coming to get me in a hospital.
She leaned over and finally did it — put her hand on my head, lips to my skin, stopping the tingling. She whispered good night and got her bags, jacket over her arm. As the tingling flooded back, she was out the door.
I noticed my roommate was awake, and when he and I were alone, he said from the darkness, “This guy rides into a Southern town and sees an old man on the porch. . He says to the old man, ‘This is a godforsaken place. What do y’all do around here?’” The old man says, ‘Fuck and hunt.’ ‘What do you hunt?’ the guy asks. The old man says, ‘Something to fuck.’”
He always waited for me to laugh at his jokes, and I mercifully heard the solenoid click in the machine by his bed, and the red 
on his monitor turned to a green 
when the morphine dose was released and he fell back to sleep.
You know it is really late in the hospital when you hear the bundle of keys go swishing down the linoleum hallway outside your door. These were the keys to the narcotics cabinet. Late at night, this is how nurses passed them around.
A hospital is an ugly hotel where you share your room with a complete stranger, a world that is never fully asleep or awake, and when you are paralyzed, head facing the unavoidable clock, nothing much changes except eyes open or eyes shut — dreams, reality, half dreams, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.
December 12 should have meant something to me but it didn’t.
CHAPTER 21
In California, morning light and hammering woke Van Raye. He had once again spent another surprisingly comfortable night wedged against Ruth’s hot pregnant body. He lifted his head off the pillow and noticed the cold air coming through his bedroom window, flowing with a velocity that made him understand that the downstairs doors and windows were open, and the work crew had let themselves in for another day.
Ruth shifted in bed next to him, and from downstairs came the screeching of an impact hammer.
He stepped over Ruth’s clothes and toed her underwear on the floor, these unsexy men’s boxer briefs. What had started out as a one-night stand with an ex-wife had ended up as days of bedroom debauchery, days sequestered in the bedroom with the concert of construction noises playing downstairs, and then the nights in the silence when he and Ruth turned on the Trans-Oceanic radio and listened to the signal bouncing off the space station and down to terrestrial repeaters and broadcasted over Earth for them to catch. Or anyone else, he worried.
Her duffle bag on the dresser had slowly deflated and spewed its content of clothing and books over the room. She had, he worried, quickly made herself back at home here.
He went out on the balcony and looked over his front yard and pulled a metal pipe from his robe’s pocket, inspected it, and flicked the lighter and smoked. (In The Universe Is a Pair of Pants, in the chapter “Cursing in Sunday School,” he discussed the creative powers unleashed by cannabis.) In the distance, a flock of pigeons flew over the terracotta roofs of the university, first forming a boomerang and then an awkward O.
Down in his front yard he could see the bleached roof of his old Jaguar. When she had gone up to the space station, she’d obviously not stored it inside because now the black roof and hood had been baked for nearly two years in the sun and bore the symmetrical gray ovals of oxidation.
Trucks and vans were parked in his driveway and on his grass. Construction junk littered his property, technically the university’s property, and he looked down into the contents of the Dumpster and saw parts of his old house, what he still considered his house, though it had been “given” to him by the university when he was hired and was now being taken away. The guest bath’s old lime-green toilet was now in the Dumpster, so were the cabinets from over the bar. Van Raye was thinking that once he announced his discovery, the university would not only halt the conversion of his house to an alumni inn, but they would probably give it to him on a permanent basis. But he wasn’t ready to tell the world. Not quite yet.
When the computer had kicked out the anomaly, Van Raye had been alone in the control room of the Big Dish antenna, and he’d done something he always promised he wouldn’t do at that moment: He piped the actual sound through a headset and listened. The edges of the signal were empty, like an open line on a phone, like a calmer outside layer of a whirlpool, but then fine-tuning onto the planet produced the electronic sparks and pulses, washing of waves, and burps.