Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  And they all say, “You am what?”

  And I say, “I am that I am.”

  And Hudson says, “What the fuck does that mean?”

  And they all say, “What the fuck does that mean?”

  And I try to shape some further revelation. I am thinking to say, I am a spaceman. I am a sharer of your voices. I am one who yearns and grieves with you.

  But before I can speak, Citrus says, “He am God!”

  “God!” they all cry and their faces fall, clustering together now low to the floor at the edge of the light, and from them, Citrus’s voice rises.

  She says, “He has spoken the words of God to Moses at Horeb. He is God!”

  “I am not!” I say, though my voice sounds faint to me.

  “Do not forsake us!” Citrus cries.

  And they all cry, “Do not forsake us!”

  And I say, “Go to sleep.”

  And Claudia says, “Sleep! He wants us to die!”

  Claudia’s voice is full of fear and I am afraid she will draw her pistol again. I cry out loud and sharp, “Sleep! Merely sleep!”

  And Arthur’s voice rises now, “He says there’s nothing after death!”

  And Hudson cries. “Merely sleep! We’re in deep!”

  A great wave of moans sweeps across all of them.

  Citrus’s face rises from the gathering near the floor. Her eyes are full of tears. “Are those the words you haven’t been saying to me?”

  “No.” I cannot make my voice rise above a whisper.

  The tears are rushing down Citrus’s face now and down the faces of the others, too, for they are all weeping copiously, and Citrus says, “Why are you forsaking us?”

  “I do not wish to forsake you,” I say, and I lift my hands, I will try to touch them, I will place the beating of my heart inside each of them. But as soon as my hands appear, they all recoil.

  Hank the bus driver’s voice lifts sharply, “That’s how he makes us sleep!”

  And others cry, “The hands!”

  And Citrus emerges into the light, her whole body, clothed in the whiteness of a nuclear fireball, and she lifts her hands even as mine still rise from the momentum of my impulse to help these yearning souls and in each of her hands is a glint of light in each of her hands is a long tapering shape in each of her hands is a metal spike and I wish to cry out but there is nothing to say and Citrus’s hands rear back and her face is twisted in pain and I see the flash of spikes as they rush at my hands, spikes Sharp Enough to Cut Tin Cans Sharp Enough for All Your Kitchen Needs, and I cannot hide my hands, I cannot move my hands at all, and my palms suddenly burn as if the very atoms that make them up are flying apart and I am about to flare into nothingness.

  And I leap up. I am aflame and I am stiff but I am standing alone in my interview room. I spin to face the door and it is in darkness, closed tight. I am alone.

  No. Not alone. I sense another, and I turn, slowly, and look.

  It is Arthur. He sleeps, still, in his chair.

  I look again toward the door and then into the places where the others had been. There is no one. They have vanished.

  Or they were never there.

  And suddenly I realize that I have dreamed.

  My species does not dream. I have only music inside me when I sleep. It is mere sleep. But now I have dreamed. I have died my daily death and instead of darkness and an ineffable movement of tone, I have voices and faces and the anguish of others, and my own anguish as well, a terrible burning. I look at my hands. They are unharmed. But that merely preserves them for further harm when next I fall asleep. I have died my daily death and descended into the hell of dreams.

  13

  I lie down beside my wife Edna Bradshaw, where she sleeps within the covers of our bed. I listen to the sound she makes, and though she is not snoring, the air seems to move heavily inside her and I can hear it clearly and she is louder than the crickets in the Adirondack Mountains. Though I have never personally heard the crickets in the Adirondack Mountains, I am sure that this is true about my wife’s breathing. And it frightens me, of course, for I fear that she will swim out too far and she will drown. An unreasonable fear. She is safe on my spaceship. She will never have occasion to swim in a lake in the Adirondacks. My fear abates. But now I am sad, for I myself will never hear the chirring of the crickets in the Adirondacks, or in any mountains. Or perhaps I will. Perhaps I will descend from my spaceship in less than twenty hours—I checked the time again after my dream—and the world will welcome the truth that I exist and they will embrace me and slap me on the back in gestures of acceptance and affection, I will be their pardner, and they will say: Go, see, listen, let it all hang out, do your thing, the world is your oyster, wash the dirt right down your drain, fish in our streams, hunt in our woods, swim in our lakes. And I grow frightened again.

  I draw near to my wife. I am glad for the prominent sound of her breath. I bring my face next to hers, I let the exhalation of her breath touch my eyes. I reach up and take her face gently in my hands, touching her with my fingertips, exchanging heartbeats for breaths. And she says, softly, “Oh you spaceman.”

  “I am sorry I awoke you,” I say, not moving my hands.

  “Oh you go ahead and wake me like this any old time,” she says.

  Regrettably I cannot shape the words this world demands of its creatures without ceasing the sharing of my heart, and so I take my hands away from her face.

  She sighs.

  I say, “May I ask you two questions?”

  “Of course, honey,” she says.

  “When you dream, do you dream of Desi your spaceman husband?”

  She rises up now from beneath the covers, throwing them off as if she were emerging from deep water in a dazzling rebirth, for though, when I laid her down to sleep at the beginning of this long night, I had simply helped her—sleepy bunny that she was—into her pink fuzzy wuzzies, now she flares and sparkles in the light in her Glittery Gold Harem Dazzler. “You mean Desi my husband and my spaceman lover?” she says, adjusting herself within her Shaped Sequin Bra.

  “Yes,” I say, though the word goes mushy, formed as it is by my suddenly floppy tongue. “I remain your spaceman lover as well.”

  “Of course I dream of you.”

  “Why of course?”

  She smiles and giggles and moves her hand as if she will pinch my cheek. I cannot face this gesture of affection tonight and so I withdraw from her reach, trying to mask my retreat as an intention to sit up and square around to face her. I think of my own dream, how my visitors all recoiled at the lifting of my hands.

  “Girls always dream about their beaus,” Edna says.

  “I am in retreat in your dreams,” I say. “I start as your husband and then I am your lover—am I not correct in thinking that, strictly speaking, this role, though similar in activity, is subsumed in the role of husband?—and now I am your beau, which is your boyfriend before becoming your lover. Do I misunderstand these words?”

  Edna stops and thinks about this for a long moment. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right. Now sometimes a girl will say beau when she means lover, if she’s in polite company or if she’s with her girlfriends at the hairdressers or somewhere and they can all have fun winking at each other and making little we-know-what-you’re-really-saying sounds, because it’s like a secret code between you. And, of course, it’s a sad thing but true that most husbands don’t keep doing the basic activity you pretty much always have with a lover. But still, you’re right. A beau transforms into a lover and then into a husband, like a worm turning by stages into a butterfly. Except most times it’s more like a butterfly of a beau transforming into a worm of husband. But you do listen real good, don’t you my honeybun. Now there’s something that husband, lover, and beau all three most often are real neglectful at. A girl does like to be listened to, especially if she loves to talk, which I do, though you probably already know that.”

  And Edna stops talking abruptl
y. Her brow knits and then her face does a quick turn slightly to the left as if she has just seen the darting of some tiny animal on the floor, and then her face does a similar quick turn to the right. “Where was I?” she asks.

  “Loving to talk,” I say.

  “Before that.”

  “Dreams,” I say.

  “I think it’s true,” she says. “I think a girl dreams of her beau more than her lover and her lover more than her husband. Probably a lot more. You dream about the things you want.”

  “And the dreams that frighten you?”

  “You also dream about things that frighten you, it’s true. But it’s not so different. It’s still about wanting. You want to escape those things. You run in your dreams, you scream, you weep. You want it to end.”

  “But aren’t there sweet dreams?”

  “There’s some that are sweet enough while you’re in them, but you wake up and they’re gone. That loving handsome man’s not there in the bed beside you. You didn’t actually make a speech on the Fourth of July to all of Bovary and they cheered for you. You can’t really flap your arms and fly high along the Pigeon River. You’re left with a whole lot of wanting again.”

  I say, “I am not surprised at what you say. I have made a mistake to link the thing I wish for to dreams. What I wish for is to be in your memory. It can be in memories of your waking state, as well. I wish to be always inside you.”

  Edna Bradshaw leans forward and puts her hand on mine. Her bazongas—I can only think of them as that, held, as they are, by these besequined cups of gold—her bazongas surge and pucker at their place of cleavage. Sweet dreams are made of these. And she says, “You’re always inside me, you spaceman lover you. You’re the proof that dreams come true.”

  In spite of the billowing of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s bazongas, and though I have had only one dream in my life, I am struck with fear at this notion.

  I wish to stop speaking now. I need to sleep. But the fear that sprung from dreams and again from the thought of dreams fulfilled now leaps back into me at the prospect of falling asleep. I am a member of my own species but I have taken on the nature of this species. I am as vulnerable as they.

  “Didn’t you say you had two questions?”

  I look at my wife Edna Bradshaw, who has just spoken to me. I struggle to comprehend the words. She seems to understand my difficulty.

  “Two questions,” she says. “You said you had two.”

  “Yes,” I say. “What is a roller rink?”

  “You do have such an interesting mind, Desi honey. Going from one thing to another. Well, a roller rink—and we do have one in Bovary, Alabama, though I never mention it when I say to people what there is to do in town, I always just say the Rebel Roll Bowling Alley and Sam’s Skeet Shoot and, of course, people like to hang out at the Dairy Freeze, and that’s all I say, even though the Dixie-Do Roller Rink sits not a quarter of a mile from the Wal-Mart where you and I met—a roller rink, on the one hand, is a place with a big hardwood floor and flashing colored lights where people strap wheels on their feet and roll around to fast music, but on the other hand, it’s a place where you choose to go if you’re a girl who wants to humiliate herself before the whole world in numerous ways, like having to call out your shoe size in front of everybody when you’ve got a size-ten foot and you even are fool enough to ask for double-E width and they laugh and give you about a size-six set of roller skates and say to squeeze into these honey and then you go on to try to follow every little activity the DJ, who’s the guy running the music, gives you, from Presto Chango, where you have to suddenly change direction, to Backwards Time, where everybody has to skate backwards, to the Hokey Pokey, where you gather around and you extend various parts of your body into the circle and shake them all about, all of which activities are designed to make you fall down, which I always did with a great flopping and trembling of my then too ample flesh, if you know what I mean. That’s a roller rink. Hell on wheels.”

  “I am sorry,” I say.

  “What in heaven’s name for?”

  “I made you remember the place that humiliated you.”

  “The Dixie-Do Roller Rink? Oh don’t you be worrying your sweet spaceman head. That old life is dead and gone. But people can be pretty cruel sometimes. … Where are you going?”

  I have jumped up from the bed, full of anxiety. It is the capacity for cruelty in these creatures that I fear. I say, “There is so little time left.”

  “For what?”

  This is a question I do not feel prepared to answer. Though I should. By tomorrow all the planet will know. And this is my wife before me. There is nothing in my directive that would prohibit letting my wife know my mission, especially this near to the hour and in the safe confines of our spaceship. But I am not yet prepared to shape these words of explanation. I am frightened.

  “Desi honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong, my dear wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say.

  “I thought we’d pretty much cured you of addressing me in that formal spaceman way. Something is bothering you.”

  “I have a task.” I find I can say no more.

  Edna waits a few moments and then tries to fill in the blank I have left. “You’re a hardworking man, I know that.”

  “I am a hardworking man. This is true. I am an okay Joe. I am a friendly guy. There is nothing to be afraid of. I come in peace, Earthlings.”

  “What are you going on about?”

  “You have nothing to fear,” I say.

  “Then why does your saying that scare me?”

  “Why does your being scared of me scare me?” I cry. All of this is going very badly.

  And my wife cries in return, “I don’t know why me being scared of you saying not to be scared scares you, but that scares me even more.”

  This answer is clear to me. “Because if I scare you by asking you not to be scared—you who are my wife Edna Bradshaw who loves me—then how scared will all the creatures on this planet be when I obey my orders to descend from my spaceship and reveal the existence of spacemen to the whole world?”

  And now it has been spoken between us.

  Edna lowers herself to the bed. She sits and she is, for the moment, uncharacteristically, speechless.

  I begin to hum. But at the first sound of this, Edna’s face turns to me and she is wide-eyed with fear and I stop.

  “I am sorry,” I say. “Whenever I Feel Afraid, I Whistle a Happy Tune.”

  “That was no whistle,” Edna says, softly.

  “A spaceman whistle,” I say.

  “They’ll tear you apart down there,” she says.

  “What Do Doctors Do To Relieve Tense Nervous Headaches?” I say.

  “This is no time for that kind of talk, Desi honey. Turn off that TV in your head.”

  Unexpectedly, I find that her words Make My Brown Eyes Blue. I sit down beside her.

  “I’ve gone and hurt your feelings,” she says.

  “Did you read my mind?” I cry, full of hope.

  “I read your face, honeybun. When your feelings are hurt, that wide sweet mouth of yours wrinkles up like a Mary-Lou’s-Southern-Belle-Beauty-Nook marcel wave. Like now.”

  “What is wrong with the TV in my head?”

  “There’s a lot of good things on TV. I’m not saying there’s not. You’re full of tasty tidbits from your listening in and all. But this is the real world you’re about to face.”

  My wife Edna Bradshaw is confirming my worst fears now. There is the world I have learned about all these years and then there is a real world that has eluded me all along. I know nothing.

  Her eyes widen. “Now I’ve never seen your mouth do that, honey. Like it was a lie-detecting machine and I just told the biggest whopper ever. I don’t mean to keep on hurting your feelings. But the truth is I’m scared for you.”

  I say, “I am scared too.”

  “I don’t ever interfere with my man’s work. That’s not what’s done where I c
ome from. But please, Desi, can’t we just go off to some other world now? Let’s try a new place. Listen in on Mars or somewhere.”

  “There are only rocks on Mars.”

  Edna bends near to me. She places her hand on mine. “Anywhere,” she says. “Please.”

  “I am,” I say, “who I am.”

  My wife Edna Bradshaw thinks about this for a moment and then she says in a voice that is very soft and with her eyes filling with the tears that still seem so alien to me. “Yes you are,” she says. “And I would not want that any other way.”

  I say, “Time has run out for me, Edna Bradshaw my honey-bun. I go down to your planet tonight at midnight. But I am very tired. I must rest. And yet I must talk with more of our guests. Are they not from the real world you speak of? Perhaps I can still learn.”

  “Has it done you any good so far, all your interviewing?” she asks.

  “I thought yes, for a long while, yes, at least to some extent, but now I am not so sure. Still, I must try. I must listen. I must learn. I … yearn for these things, my wife Edna Bradshaw. That is the word for what I do. Like all of you. I yearn. To seek. To know.”

  “Do you also yearn to go down there and tell all those folks who are so full of themselves and have so many ways to hurt one another that they ain’t such big fish in the universe after all? Ida Mae Pickett, my best friend in the world for many years, she yearned once, too, she even said that word one day in the beauty parlor and I didn’t trust it in her mouth, not for one second. She yearned to go off to Montgomery, she said, and make a name for herself doing the hair of capital hostesses and lady lawyers and people like that and maybe even the hair of the wife of the governor of the great state of Alabama someday. And Ida Mae was back in Bovary in no time and she wasn’t talking about Montgomery—rather not say a thing, thank you very much for not asking—and it was plain to see she’d been yearning for the wrong things and found nothing but grief for herself. Don’t talk to me about yearning. Better you should just want a few things. You might can get something you want. But nobody ever gets a yearning, I bet. That just goes on and on.”