Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  I say, “They will each of them sleep for as long as it is convenient for us.”

  “That’s okay,” Edna says. “I’ll be ready for them—let’s see, there’s twelve plus you and me—just give me an hour.”

  “But I wish for most of them to continue to sleep. I must do my work now, speaking to them one at a time.”

  A sadness passes over Edna’s face. I do not understand. And now even a welling of tears. “What is it, my wife Edna Bradshaw? Have I been a clunkhead?”

  She smiles at me, though the tears do not seem to cease. “No,” she says. “Not at all, Desi. Where’d you even get that word? It’s okay. I don’t mean to interfere with your work.”

  “You spoke to me last night of the sadness of making breakfast.”

  “I did?”

  I lift my hand and she remembers. She casts her eyes downward. I think she is embarrassed. “Please,” I say. “This was a very interesting thing you told me. But as a consequence, I do not understand why it would disappoint you so, not to do this thing for all these people.”

  “They need to eat.”

  “We have always had adequate ways to feed our visitors.”

  Edna is not looking at me now. Still another mood has come over her. She pulls a tissue from a box beside our bed, and another, and three more quickly, and a sixth and seventh, and then even more, so that I lose count, she is snatching at them as if they are in a place they should not be. Finally she contemplates her hand stuffed full of tissues. She addresses the hand. “I know about how you feed your visitors. I was a visitor once upon a time, don’t forget.”

  I say, “It is a Liquid Diet Rich in Protein and Food Value. You need not worry for them.”

  Edna pats at her eyes with her handful of tissues. “I do wish we’d begun this conversation before I put my makeup on. This is a real test for my No-Smear Revlon.”

  “This is a surprising subject suddenly to find in your words,” I say.

  “Well, you spacemen aren’t near as smart as you think you are,” my wife Edna Bradshaw says, sharply.

  I am having trouble following her associative connections. The disparity I have noted, between the words inside me and the words I speak, has a corollary. It is this. I can begin to hear the latent music in the words of this world when I can place the voice inside me. But when these words must pass from the voice of a visitor across a physical space and then enter my mind as external things, things that must then be transformed back into spirit, into music, into deep feeling, into the cries of a soul, at these times I think I understand very little. In this sense, certainly, my wife is correct, though I would rephrase her assertion. I am not acting near as smart as I feel I am capable of being. She is watching me now, even as this analysis is passing through me, delaying my audible voice to her. And now I am struck by the sudden realization that I thought of her, implicitly, as a “visitor” moments ago. I was reluctant last night even to characterize her as a woman and now she is a visitor, which is even farther from my feelings for her. And still nothing presents itself for me to speak. There seem to be no words to send back across this physical space. Will she remember me from this moment as she remembers her father, with regret and anger? Am I failing her in some terrible way even in the very process of wondering if I am failing her in some terrible way? This is a real test for my No-Smear superior intelligence. I am not as smart as I think I am.

  And I say, unexpectedly for both of us, “Clunkhead.”

  Her hand lunges forward and grabs a sizable part of my cheek and squeezes and jiggles it. This physical attack is very distressing to me, especially given the sudden lightheartedness of her demeanor as she does it. This is a side to Edna that shocks me, and the violence goes on. I am bearing it the best I can and now Edna even says, “Oh you spaceman,” in that cheery, loving voice that I have grown to recognize in spite of the neutrality of the words themselves. I am very confused and her attack on my cheek ceases and her hand drops and I think I have missed something. I think she has meant this gesture as a friendly thing. After all, she does not have suckers on her fingers. Without recognizing the drastic difference of effect, given the limitations of her species’ body, she could be trying to replicate the basic act of physical attachment that I offer her.

  “My wife Edna Bradshaw, may I ask if you are feeling angry at your husband in a physically actionable way?”

  She pauses briefly with an inward concentration, as if she is translating what I have said. But quite quickly she replies, “I’m not angry, Desi. You clunkhead sweetheart spaceman. I love you.” And her hand rushes at my cheek again and grabs that very same handful of flesh and my analysis is, thankfully, confirmed. I bear the pain with patience, for she does not know what it is that she is doing.

  Finally she releases me a second time and I turn my fingertips to the task of restoring life to my cheek. She says, “Can I make them breakfast one at a time then, as you choose to wake them up?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I only wished to protect you from your sadness.”

  I realize that this declaration has touched Edna and I quickly cover both my cheeks with my hands. But she has already spun around and she disappears into the corridor.

  I myself am left not only with an Achy Breaky cheek but the lingering mystery of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s willingness, even eagerness, to return to the activity that has been a source of abiding pain in her life. But I ain’t stupid, pardner. In spite of its ability to baffle me again and again, this is a pattern I recognize. I have encountered it often before, in many others from this world.

  There is a sound in the corridor and I think Edna has returned. I move to the door, eager to see her again, and I open it.

  A figure of shadow drops to its knees before me. The face turns up with black lips and a dark, spiky penumbra. It is the young woman named Citrus. Her eyes fix on me and she clasps her hands before her. She cries, “Art thou He that should come? Or look we for another?”

  I do not understand her question. I also wonder at her being awake, though from her words she obviously is only partially so. She lifts her clasped hands higher. “Please,” she says.

  I say, “I know these things are difficult to believe.”

  And she says, “Art thou the Christ? Tell us.”

  I pass my hand before her and her eyes close and her body sags and I take her up in my arms and I carry her along the corridor to her dark space and I place her on her bed, on her back, her legs straight, her arms folded on her chest. She will rest now. When it is her time, I will call her forth and she will speak.

  6

  I am. That is all I know from the beginning of things. I am. That, at least, is a matter of clarity, though the answers to all the questions that follow are not clear at all. Those are matters of philosophy. Of music. Of the Great Mysteries. And yet I must try to divine answers to many of those abiding questions, at least about this complex and alien world, so that I can do what I must and in doing so not create such confusion as to cast a whole world down. Many will look upon me and be sore afraid.

  And I am alone in this task. It is reasoned that one spaceman—I would add, a clunkhead spaceman, at that—may not seem to be so great a threat. I hover above a vast place with billions of individual sentiences speaking trillions of words every day in an attempt to move beyond the one matter of ontological clarity. The I am. Though, incidentally, there are some on my home planet who would challenge even that first principle as a settled matter. But if they were sincere in their skepticism, they would find it both meaningless and impossible even to express the challenge. Who would they think they are sending their thoughts to? Or, even, who would they think are the entities having those thoughts? If there were but one imperiously great and brutally wise sentience in a meaningless universe, it would never let on for a moment.

  I am. A clunkhead. Drugged by words. Hooked on them. Infected by them, as a visitor to a foreign place is infected by a virus for which he has no defenses. Shaken by them. Unbalanced by th
em. Made delirious by them. Enrapt by them. Transformed by them. Filled full of false and, it seems, endlessly renewable hopes for them. I sit with a new voice waiting in the panel before me. The speaker—the man who drove the bus—has returned to his sleep, though with a delicious and nutritious country breakfast in his stomach. Edna brought it in when the interview was finished and he ate it before both of us, gratefully, at ease with us, even when my wife Edna Bradshaw said to him, “If you really want a pony-tail, I wish you’d let me sit you down and do something a little cuter with it.” I held this voice once, as it first found words, but that is hardly sufficient. I move my hand to put the voice inside me once more, put it inside me in solitude. I am Henry Gillette. Call me Hank. I’m not afraid of that, though I’m always meeting guys who’d much rather me be Henry. But I’ve never been a Nelly, even for an evening, even for just the sport of it, even when I was going through that early teenage thing when it was clear I wasn’t going to fit the profile of a real man in America. That was at the end of the bad old fifties. It wasn’t easy.

  But my mother’s clothes, for instance, never did have an allure for me, though I’ve always appreciated it in my lovers, those who had that sweet soft edge to them. Me being inclined to walk without rolling my shoulders and wiggling my butt—I think it just made me love all the more those guys who were natural like that. Some of my friends, when I say things like this, they think I’m overcompensating. Gay men don’t have to be one thing or another, they’d say. There’s plenty of us in leather and studs and also in tailored suits or football pads or Arrow shirts and chinos and they never vamp at all. Never. The Lady—meaning me—doth protest too much, making this point so strongly.

  Maybe they’re right. Maybe there’s part of me I’m just trying to make be still. But I don’t think so. I am what I am. When I realized I was gay, it was just a matter of how I wanted to express the feeling of love. When I loved somebody, loved the way the person spoke or thought or looked, then the part of their body that was hidden became like a secret, it took on a kind of magic, it became more than itself, it became a way to touch not only their body but everything else they were. But when I started feeling love like that, the male parts could take on the magic for me and the female parts couldn’t. It was as simple as that. All pussies looked alike, and every cock was wonderfully, specially different, as different as a voice or a personality.

  My Adam—that’s what we used to call our first male sexual partner—didn’t come along for a few years. I kept my feelings to myself. Being who I am, nobody ever guessed. So I went off to Northwestern University in the fall of 1963, and this was a good school, I was pretty smart, and my parents lived in Chicago and I was just an El ride away from them. But I did stay in a dorm, way up on the north edge of the campus. My roommate was from Pittsburgh. His name was George. We slept in the same room, an arm’s length away from each other across the narrow floor, and we never knew about each other. Not for nearly three months. That’s how scared everybody was back then, or naive. When we went down to the shower at the end of the hall, we both hid in our terry-cloth robes, from each other and especially from all the others on the floor, and we didn’t dare let our eyes wander, for fear of being found out.

  Then the thing nobody ever dreamed of suddenly happened and I was in a lecture hall when it did, watching slides of nebulae and spiral galaxies and dying stars. Our professor was named Hynek and he had a pointed gray goatee and thick glasses and he’d won me over right away. I was going to major in astronomy. He was also an adviser to the Air Force about UFOs, and I liked that, too. There was a whole other kind of creature in the universe, there was a distant world where things were drastically different from what everybody thought was right and normal. Needless to say, I liked the idea of that.

  I was sitting up near the top of the hall. A great spiraling splash of stars was on the screen and we were understanding how birth and death were going on all the time on an unimaginably vast scale and then it was time to go and Professor Hynek stacked his notes, which was our sign, though it was hard to say, set against the issues we’d just considered, how such an unimaginably small gesture should have any effect on anything. But there was that end-of-a-class shuffling sound all over the place and we were back on the planet Earth and then a voice was at the door behind us and it said, “The President’s been shot.”

  I didn’t go to the dorm for a long while. I knew he was going to die, though it wasn’t quite official yet. I went down to the little beach at the south end of campus, where Sheridan Road takes a jog toward the lake. Nobody was there. I hunched up against the iron jetty and squeezed my eyes shut and filled myself with the smells of rust and dead alewives and there was thunder out to the east, out at the razor cut of the horizon, and there was another smell, the ozone off the lake, which was a thing you knew was big, just from the smell of it, as big as a galaxy. And for a moment I thought to open my eyes and face that horizon and walk out into the lake and just keep walking until it overwhelmed me.

  I didn’t expect this. I never thought I was suicidal. But things were suddenly clarified. You look through the eye of a telescope or the glory hole of a john wall and it all comes down to the same thing. You’re a gathering of atoms swirling around some kind of center and you never chose any of it, neither the swirl nor the center, and when you focus your eye you might find a similar body to yours here and there, but there’s light years in between. I loved Jack Kennedy. I didn’t even know that till his beautiful shaggy head was blown apart. I still had never even touched a man, and now I felt a passionate love rush on me hand in hand with death. I was being prepared for the last two decades of the century and the great plague, I suppose. But at the time, without the solace of a single remembered embrace, I could only open my eyes and step to the shore and look out at the lake and very seriously consider putting all this behind me.

  Then George was suddenly by my side. “I wondered if it was you,” he said.

  I wasn’t surprised at all that he was here. I said, “I want to be holding him in my arms, right now, cradling his head and telling him good-bye.”

  And George said, “That smarmy Bouvier girl in the pillbox hat doesn’t have a clue what he needs.”

  We didn’t speak another word. You’d think there would’ve had to be a clearer declaration between us, since we’d missed signs that were surely even more obvious about each other all along. But we’d made our way to the moment that most gays do, and sometimes it comes on you in an instant. You go from seeing only darkness to having a very subtle perception of light.

  George and I walked back up to the dorm, and with the other men of Elder Hall we watched Walter Cronkite weep and Lyndon Johnson—the cow—take over the country, and then, without a further word, we went back to our room and fully became what we had always been.

  I sit with these words for a time. I try always to set aside the ways of my own world, the issues of my own life. My task, of necessity, is to submerge myself in this planet Earth. But I do reflect for a moment on the often rigorous and heavily sanctioned taboos of physical affection in this place. The mores are different on my home planet. Even there, however, I, Desi the Spaceman, am clearly a Manly Man, Fresh as an Irish Spring with a Lot to Like—Filter, Flavor, and a Flip-top Box—and I am a Hero of the Beach whose body will bring me Fame Instead of Shame and whose Lust is for Life. These things are true of me in light of this planet Earth’s public declarations of value that I have found in my collected records of printed matter and in my scanning tapes of the endless transmissions filling the air. Though it is also true that my man’s body is a very skinny one to the Earthman’s eye. But I am certainly not a ninety-seven-pound weakling. I am a seventy-eight-pound Powerhouse of Strength and Vigor. And though the female counterparts on my home planet are exceedingly skinny, too, I am sufficiently in tune, in some instinctive way, with Red-blooded American Male Values so as to have acquired a sincere and intense appreciation for knockers.

  But listen to me. I have set a
side the values of my species so effectively, given my mission here, that the Lady (meaning me, in this context, Desi the Spaceman) Doth Protest Too Much. On my home planet I would never dream of spending all these words on establishing my masculinity—not that we have words there—though we can be subject to a similar psychological syndrome with our transmitted thoughts—not that I am really guilty of that either, given the relevance of the premise of my masculinity to the larger point I wish to make—a point, by the way, which still remains unmade—and listen to me again, I am beginning to sound like my wife Edna Bradshaw now, digressing into clarification after clarification—even in that clarification, as a matter of fact—though it wasn’t clarifying anything exactly, more like amplifying or even digressing—which is a trait of hers, as well, and one that just as inexorably carries her away from her main point—just as I continue to do now, as these words—quite alarmingly—come unbidden, as they seem veritably to choose themselves.

  I leap up from where I sit and I sing a thin, clear note of frustration at full voice. Our New and Improved Tracking Lights cannot even follow me quickly enough and my face is shrouded in darkness for a moment. This reminds me of sleep. My own sleep. I am fortunate that all my studies of this planet have not affected my sleep. I still dream only in music. There is a place where the words cannot follow me. This is a comfort.