Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Do you have only wants, my wife Edna Bradshaw?”

  “I try.”

  “But then is it not true that you yearn not to yearn?”

  My wife flutters her hands and she looks here and there about the room. Clunkheadedly, I have made her uncomfortable. “I am sorry,” I say. “It is just a word. I have always scorned these bits of sound on this planet and here I am, pursuing my wife to a state of discomfy with a word. A word I think far too much about. Perhaps I am not in the real world now. Though I have never heard the word in question in the heightened discourse that has so interested me in the unreal world. Oh oh, I yearn for Spaghettios! I yearn for a Twinkie! I yearn for TwoAllBeefPattiesSpecial-SauceLettuceCheesePicklesOnionsOnA SesameSeedBun! I yearn for the Breakfast of Champions! No! These are ‘wants.’ And yes, you are right, my wife Edna Bradshaw. I can have any one of them. So can you. So can anyone. It is simple! It is economical! It is America! I want! I want! I am my wants. I can have my wants. I can be me! I gotta be me!”

  I find myself standing on the bed, straight and proud, my wife Edna Bradshaw’s face turned up to me in wonder. We consider each other for a long moment.

  Then my wife says, “Desi? Are you all right, honey? What do you want right now?”

  “I want what I cannot have. More time. I want to listen to our guests.”

  “I can fix that, honeybun. Please. Sit down.”

  And I do. I sit before my wife, my mate, my spouse, my old lady, my better half, my helpmeet. Though my mind is careening on. I sit.

  Edna Bradshaw says, “We should have a nice fancy sit-down supper for everybody. You can talk with them all and you can see how they are together.”

  I grow floppy with appreciation at my wife. “This is a very good idea,” I say. “But there is so little time.”

  “Have you forgotten who you’re married to, Mr. Spaceman? I’ll have things ready in plenty of time. It’s only right, anyway. You wouldn’t want our guests to sleep through this special New Year’s Eve.” And the wife I clearly remember marrying, Edna Louise Bradshaw, bounces off the bed. “If the dinner’s a big success maybe you won’t have to go down there after all.”

  I do not have the heart to argue this point with her. Perhaps her want has turned into a yearning. Not that creatures on this planet—or any planet in the universe—can get even all their wants, either. But I want to obey the powers that sent me to this world, even if I do not want to do the thing they ask of me. And I must obey. But I do not speak these thoughts to my wife, and at this moment I am grateful for the barrier between our minds.

  “My mind is on the job already,” she says. “Don’t ask. Don’t ask. It’ll be a surprise. You’re in the hands of an expert at this, if I do say so myself—and I just did—though I hope you won’t think I’m being too prideful. But you do have a choice to make. It must be chicken. Without knowing anything else about this mixed group we have here, you can go wrong with all other main dishes except chicken. Chicken is safe. That’s not the choice I refer to. I just want you to consider two things right now, however, Desi. Chicken Lickin’. Or Chicken Wiggle.”

  She pauses as if the salient qualities of these two things are already apparent to me. Since her earlier observations about my physiology, I find myself inordinately conscious of my mouth. It has drawn tight, I think. Edna observes this.

  “Silly me,” she says. “Chicken Wiggle. We’re talking boiled chicken cut into chunks. Onions, canned English peas, Worcestershire sauce, pimento, mushroom soup, chopped bell peppers, a dash of Tabasco. All mixed with egg noodles. And then with Chicken Lickin’ it’s baked whole chicken dipped in milk and creamy peanut butter with paprika and Accent and … wait a minute.” Edna slaps her own forehead. “Stop right there. We don’t know if anybody has a peanut allergy. That can kill you dead.”

  She looks at me. I am still stuck on boiled and cut and baked chickens. Perfectly innocent birds, it seems to me. Perhaps with their own feelings and their own language rivaling Eddie the yellow cat’s in complexity. My wife would never consider boiling, cutting, and baking Eddie.

  “So it’s Chicken Wiggle,” Edna says. “That settles it. I may have to get you to beam me up some Worcestershire sauce, but I think I’ve stocked up on everything else.”

  And she disappears into the bathroom to dress. I can hear her whistling.

  “That is a happy tune,” I say.

  “It’s ‘Dixie,’” she calls from the bathroom. “Happy and sad, really.”

  “Happy and sad,” I repeat, but low, only for myself. There is a sound of water running now. I wish there were a chicken before me, to apologize to. But that is not the true issue, I realize. The sad things are complex, too complex for me to deal with at this moment. And yet, I am happy at the wonderful plan that my wife Edna Bradshaw has presented to me. We will have a nice big supper before I descend to the planet Earth. If it is a success, I will know what to do, what to say when I go down there. I will ask all my guests to put their heads together to help me.

  I feel bloated with weariness. I am so weary I cannot even hear the music of sleep beginning to shape in me. I am that weary. And it is all right now, to sleep. Edna will wake me for the supper and until then I can sleep. Still, something in me wants to hear another voice. It is not so easy to abandon the pattern of my professional life, no matter how weary I am. And I am weary. I should sleep. I should sleep but I rise up from the bed and I go to the door that leads into the corridor and before I move to open it I can feel that there is someone on the other side. I know this as surely as if a member of my own species were standing there, waiting, placing his presence in my head, placing his consciousness there. Her presence. I realize there is a female on the other side of the door. I imagine that it might indeed be a member of my own species. A supervisor come to give me last-minute instructions or to fortify my courage.

  I move my hand.

  The door opens.

  And it is Claudia.

  I look instantly to her hands, though I know I have her weapon in my Hall of Objects. But I also had her in her sleeping space, unconscious. Anything is possible. But she simply opens her empty hands before me.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time to speak with you,” she says. “Please.”

  “I was just coming to get you,” I say, and that certainly could be true. I was in fact going to get someone and she is a legitimate choice.

  At this, Claudia turns on her heel and moves off down the corridor. I follow. She goes straight to the interview room and the door opens for her and by the time I step in, she is sitting in the appropriate chair, a shaft of light illuminating her.

  I sit before her. She closes her eyes and without my even having to wave my hand her voice starts and mine starts with hers and we speak and I am Claudia Lambert. I feel like I should give you a formal welcome. I worked for NASA for nearly a decade. But other things overtook me. I worked for NASA but now I work for myself with my name on the door and a payroll of a dozen and nobody above me who I can turn to for appreciation. I had a daughter but now I have a twenty-one-year-old friend, such a good friend that she can tell me only the truth when I’m being stupid or a fool. I had faith in the institutions of the city of Houston and the state of Texas but now I carry a pistol in my purse, since concealed weapons in Texas are suddenly legal and I’m afraid of accidentally cutting somebody off on the interstate and them taking out a gun and trying to shoot me. I’ll be able to shoot back at them. Road rage enrages me. I hate the instant and harsh criticism of drivers trying to feel self-righteous over petty little things and I feel self-righteous hating them. I had a husband but now my body is my own and I can’t find anybody I’d even want to hold hands with after an hour’s conversation much less choose to take to bed.

  God I loved the space program. Especially the two Voyagers. I love the Voyagers even more now, I think. They’re carrying these electronic records of who we are, the people of Earth. They’ll carry them for millennia and millennia, out into the stars. Not t
hat I ever bought the hodgepodge image they’ve got of us. But it’s something. Among the music selections, they’ve got the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth flying out there and right alongside is Chuck Berry doing “Johnny B. Goode.” There’s an image of a traffic jam in India next to a tree toad next to a demonstration of human sex organs. And there’s fifty-five different speakers in fifty-five languages giving greetings. Mostly, Hello from earth. Peace to you. That sort of thing. But each one’s a little different. The Zulu speaking Nguni calls the spacemen “great ones” and wishes them longevity. The Turk co-opts them right away, addressing them as “Turkish-speaking friends.” The Indonesian seems to be the host of a TV talk show. He says, “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Good-bye and see you next time.” And the young woman doing the Swedish refused to step out of the bounds of her own little life. She says, “Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth.” What are the spacemen going to think? Ithaca’s in Sweden, I guess. I don’t know why I should give a damn. I can’t send a verbal greeting that can be adequately comprehended across a lunch table in River Oaks to my own daughter once a week.

  But I did know how to turn NASA technical stuff into ideas and images the press could understand. And I did that for a while. Even now when I think about my life, it’s all Voyager 2. I got married the day it took off. When it was between the Earth and the asteroid belt I was happy. Jenny was born two weeks from Jupiter. Between Jupiter and Saturn I got divorced. Flying by Saturn, I went to work for NASA, and between Saturn and Uranus I thought I was happy again, buried in my work. Between Uranus and Neptune I wanted to get the hell away from people, from bosses, and just take care of myself and my baby and it still took a while. It wasn’t until after Neptune. It wasn’t until Voyager 2 suddenly was looking ahead and all that was out there was forty thousand years to the nearest star, it wasn’t until then that I could walk away. But I had a marketable skill for high-tech companies in Houston and elsewhere. I was somebody who could explain things like heliopause, which is what the scientists expect Voyager will locate for them sometime around the turn of the millennium. It’s the outermost boundary of the solar wind, which is made up of charged atomic particles sheering off from the Sun as it drags us all through space. At the heliopause the solar wind gets hemmed in by all the charged particles floating around in interstellar space. It puts the whole solar system in a big magnetic bubble. And so I whipped on past NASA, getting a big acceleration from its gravity, like Voyager accelerating past Neptune, and I was out on my own, with a lot of empty space ahead.

  But that’s been more than ten years and now my little girl sits across from me over her spinach salad with sprouts and she’s a young woman and she tells me, “Mama why are you so militant? Men aren’t so bad. So they’re, like, from their own planet. That’s okay. But I’m afraid you’ve left Venus and moved to Mars.” And I have no idea where she got the capacity to absorb shit ideas like that.

  But I guess I’m still looking for something to put in the center of me, where all the shit ideas once were. I can sit in my office for hours, after everyone else has gone home, and my office is dark and the shades are open to the night sky. I can sit there and think about how it was supposed to go for a woman’s life on this planet, for centuries—you must subordinate yourself; you are your devotion to your man; you find your excellence in the role the world gives you—and of course I understand how all that separated women from a chance to find their personal destinies. But I keep coming around to this. At the end of the day, the things the men tried to keep for themselves—you are your work; you are born to conquer and dominate; you make your own fate, find your own excellence—these things leave the even bigger questions unanswered, too. Just as badly. The questions that your job, your children, your marriage, your ideas, your personal destiny on this lump of cosmic rock just won’t get at. Not with the downright infinity of things hovering over you in the dark every night. But then I think about our little Voyager out there and for a moment I’m okay. Someday soon, Voyager’s going to reach the heliopause. And then it’ll pop out of that bubble we’re all in and it’ll just keep on going. Free at last. With the big mysteries ahead of it and all the time in the universe to figure them out.

  Claudia falls silent and I am instantly buoyed by her words. This thing I must do in a few hours: it will bring an answer to one of the big mysteries. Surely all those who yearn as Claudia does will welcome me. Surely the Swedish-speaking computer programmer in Ithaca would welcome me. And the Zulu, who wishes me longevity. And the Indonesian who hopes he will see me next time.

  “Surely they will welcome me,” I say to Claudia.

  But she shakes her head sadly. No. “They’re coming for you,” she says.

  And suddenly the light on her face begins to thrash and her eyes shift to look over my shoulder and I turn and the doorway is crowded with large men in ragged clothes and they have wild eyes and they are carrying torches alive with fire and pitchforks and the only reason they have not already burst in and grabbed me is that there are so many of them trying to squeeze through at once and I leap up and the room is silent and I turn back to Claudia but there is only an empty bed. The bed where, until this moment, I must have been sleeping. How could I? I have heard Claudia Lambert’s voice so clearly.

  I rush out of this space where my body seems to be. Perhaps this is the dream. Perhaps I have dozed off before Claudia. The dream began with the sad shake of her head. The men in the doorway: that is the stuff of my dream. I skim down the corridor and into the interview room.

  It is empty. But it would be, if this is the dream. Still, I glide to the machine. I move my hand. I seek the voice of Claudia Lambert recorded on Earthtime December 31, 2000. She is not here. There is no record. But she wouldn’t be. There is no reason for the dream machine’s records to correspond with the real machine’s. But why am I not waking? I stomp about the room now, moving my feet and legs like the Earthlings. I stomp and my feet flare with pain and my jaw vibrates from the blows.

  I am already awake. In the empty interview room. I turn to my machine. I try once more to retrieve Claudia’s voice. It is not there. She was a dream.

  My next move is clear. I go out into the corridor and down to the place where my visitors are sleeping. I go in to Claudia’s room and I find her there. I bend near her. I move my hand. She opens her eyes and turns her face to me.

  She says, very softly, “Have you come for me?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Do I vaguely remember shooting my pistol?”

  “Yes. But you did not hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t know what came over me. I’m sorry.” She sits up now and wobbles a bit. I touch her shoulder to steady her.

  “You will be fine in a moment,” I say.

  “Really. The irony is that I’m happy to be here,” she says. “In spite of the impression I gave. Now that I know …”

  “Yes. Yes,” I say, and I find that I am beginning to flush hot inside and I do not know why, exactly.

  And we go, Claudia and I, down the corridor, and she is very gracious and curious and friendly and I grow more and more agitated.

  And now she is sitting before me in the interview room and she says, “What should I do?”

  “Just relax,” I say, and I move my hand.

  In the brief moment before we begin to speak together I realize the source of my agitation. I am afraid of the power of my dreams. And I am Claudia Lambert. And I say, I feel like I should give you a formal welcome. …

  14

  And so together, swept along by the solar wind of Claudia’s life, we spoke the words I had dreamed, precisely, she and I together, the very same words. She gave her Earth-voice to the yearning for answers to the big mysteries and now she falls silent, and I should not be afraid of my prophecy, I should perhaps try to understand it as a reading of Claudia’s mind, not unlike the exchange of thoughts between members of my own species, effected here only in
this state of dreams. But I am, nevertheless, afraid. This was a different thing. I have become a different being. Different from my own species. But different, too, from the primary species of Earth. And I am afraid the prophecy may continue to be fulfilled. Are there men with torches and pitchforks just outside the door waiting for me to speak my hope for a welcome on Earth, as I had in my dream? I keep my mouth shut. In spite of the fifty-five greetings carried on Voyager, I cannot expect a cheery hello tonight.

  Claudia is looking at me, intently. “Looking into your eyes, I feel like I’m dreaming,” she says.

  “Did you not believe …?”

  “In you? That you existed? Yes.”

  “This is not a dream,” I say, and Claudia looks over my shoulder, but I think I suddenly recognize the heliopause, that boundary between my spaceman’s life and this other state, and I have just popped out of the bubble and I am heading into the vast interstellar darkness of dreams. I try to stop. I press my eyes open wide. I move my hand before my own face.

  “You look tired,” Claudia says. She is focused only on me. I am awake once more.

  “I am very tired,” I say.

  “Can we speak again?” she asks.

  “There will be a supper tonight, as the moment of the millennium approaches. My wife Edna Bradshaw is cooking even now. We can speak then.”

  Claudia leans forward, her hand coming out to me. Yes, Claudia Lambert, you may have the beating of my heart. You have sought it and you shall have it. I take her hands in mine.

  She watches this entwining, conscious, I am sure, of the thing I am giving her. I say, “I am glad that after our hour of conversation you want to hold hands.”

  She looks at me. “Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

  And I escort her back to her space and she accepts my suggestion of rest. I pass my hand over her and I am unsteady on my feet and I glide away, into the corridor and back to my bed, and I am full of trepidation. I must sleep. This will be my first formal seeking of the state since I have begun to dream. I wonder if the formality of this will alter the dreams.