Mr. Spaceman Read online

  Mr. Spaceman

  a novel

  ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

  Copyright © 2000 by Robert Olen Butler

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to

  Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway,

  New York, NY 10003.

  Portions of this book previously appeared in a slightly different form in Louisiana Literature, The Threepenny Review, and Literal Latte.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST PAPERBACK EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Butler, Robert Olen.

  Mr. Spaceman : a novel / Robert Olen Butler.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4621-3

  I. Title: Mister spaceman. II. Title.

  PS3552.U8278 M7 2000

  813′.54—dc21 99-046822

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  For Elizabeth Dewberry

  Mr. Spaceman

  1

  I am. The word on the face of the bus is LUCK. Bright bulbs of gold illuminate the letters so that even though the night is dark, this word goes before them, shining. I am far above, but I have moved over the land and the water of this place for some years now, and so I know how it is: the hum of their tires on their Tax Dollars at Work, the rice fields sliding invisibly past and smelling like Fabric-Safe Morning Rain, spots of light out toward the night horizon where others of them huddle in their bungalows or their mobile homes waiting for what these on the bus rush to seek for themselves along Interstate number Ten. The bus dashes fast in the passing lane, the windows black, showing nothing to the outside world, but I know there are souls within, yearning forth into the dark night, crossing from the Great State of Texas to the Sportsman’s Paradise of Louisiana, the Pelican State, the Bayou State, the place where they Let the Good Times Roll, and down the highway is the city of Lake Charles where strobe lights as green as the most dazzling toothbrush wave about high over the lake, restlessly sweeping an empty sky. As if they are looking for me. But from these lights, everyone passing in the night knows there are vessels here that can carry them over this water and provide games to play where they might find this thing that so many seek. This is how I understand it so far.

  But the central mysteries continue to dwell in darkness. I am still learning, even at this late hour, even as the moment of my arrival is established. Even now I am trying to learn what I need to know in order to do what I must. And so I turn my attention back to the bus, still twenty miles west, blowing past a great tandem tractor-trailer, quaking in the turbulence. I am far above. I wait. I have at my disposal the Wonders of Modern Technology. I can see everything. Hear everything. I am, as those on this planet who truly believe in a widely bespirited universe call me, a spaceman. Or, often, an alien. There is some very great fear in this name alien. So much is alien to those who live here. Even to those who can believe in something they have never seen.

  In fact, I see nothing. I hear nothing. And I think it is because of the mystery of these vanishing, fragile, powerful things that plague the dwellers in this world, things that rush from them and around them and into them and through them and out again, constantly, these words, these particles of language that they each must manufacture with their brain and body and with something else in them, too, with a soul—this is itself a word, I realize—I am putting all of this forth now in words, I realize, and so even beginning to try to get at the mysteries I must solve here in order to do what I must, I fall deeper into the darkness—yet I have no other word for the thing I mean but soul—and this is something even a spaceman knows to be a mystery, even in himself, but more so in those who dwell across the vast and strange landscape of this planet, and this is something that eludes even the wonders of the technology of my home world—and this soul is something that on this planet must try to find a way to manufacture words, must try to speak its insubstantial self in these tiny, hastily assembled fragments of sound, these invisible things that yet always threaten to clog my wondrously advanced machines and my wondrously advanced head, too—I speak now with self-deprecating irony, because even I am not immune to fragmentation and digression when I am forced to resort to words. The atmosphere of this planet brims with words; they blow past me and I quake in the turbulence.

  I crack my knuckles. It is a soothing thing I learned from a cowboy I once beamed up from Lubbock, Texas. I am a gol-durn lucky creature. I have eight fingers full of knuckles—count ’em, eight—to crack on each of my hands, and I do this, and I grow calm, and I wait. The bus just now leaves the reach of the tandem tractor-trailer’s headlight beams. There are a thousand yards of empty Interstate ahead. I wait for the bus to run farther into that dark gap. I sit before a great console, a vast screen that can flare with any of the countless images we’ve collected since our first visits here, long ago now, nearly a hundred revolutions of this planet around its star. Images from our machines, simply watching and listening, and images from the human voices, from the words shaping the moments from inside the brains and the souls of those who have visited us from below. All of those who came to us were dashing somewhere, all of them were seeking something. These are the images that I have to understand. Quickly now, before my appointed hour. But I am still mystified.

  Perhaps this bus will help. I look again. It is racing on. For a hundred of these years we have gathered images. I am not the first. But now I am alone. I am the only one of my kind on this vessel, the only one of us attending this planet now. I am deeply moved by this responsibility. Yippee I. Yippee yay. I crack my knuckles once again. He was not a real cowboy, in the sense he himself wished for. I touch my console. He was the first of these that I had ever met. I was very young and not alone then. I call him up from the memories of this ship. I put him inside me.

  I am Whiplash Willie Jones. Mr. Griffith, of course, was the hottest of shit if you figured these moving pictures would amount to anything. I never worked for Mr. Griffith, though I could’ve done that if I’d got the same chance that I myself would give even to a scorpion lurking in my boot some morning. I’d at least dump him out on the floor and let him have a chance to go ahead and run off and be what he is. Probably still hit him with the boot heel, though. Smash him where he stood before he could take a step. This maybe not the best way to put what I’m trying to say.

  Though look at me, son. I don’t have the face of Mix or Holt or my old pal Bronco Billy Anderson. I never liked white horses anyhow. What I’d’ve been, dumped out of a boot there on the floor, was what I ended up being. The guy who grabs the loot and tries to get away. The guy who’d as soon cheat you as look at you. The guy who’d meet a decent woman in an orange grove in Los Angeles and marry her and take her back to Lubbock and treat her like shit and not be able to stop himself.

  I didn’t choose any of that. That was the cards I drew even before I knew what game it was I was playing. Take the one thing I’m remembered for. It was in that little movie that Ed Porter made in 1903, The Great Train Robbery. Ten minutes long. I show up and he puts a hat on me and a goddamn polka-dot kerchief and he glues a handlebar mustache to my face. Then he starts the camera to watching me and he says go here
, do this, do that.

  That’s how it always is, ain’t it?

  So I’m the leader of the gang that robs the train in the first damn story-telling film ever, and what happens? There’s fourteen scenes in this little tale and I get killed in an ambush in scene number thirteen, shot dead, clear for everybody to see, and then there I am in scene fourteen, the last one, and it’s just me filling up the screen. There ain’t no forest or no horses or nothing. Just blackness all around me, but I’m alive. I been born again. It’s some kind of miracle. And what do I do? I turn and face the audience and I raise my gun and I wrinkle my brow and I shoot. I shoot the whole lot of them. I shoot the whole goddamn world. And it’s nothing I choose for myself. The guy behind the camera, like some voice that just comes into my head, like the goddamn voice you hear inside you all your life long, he says do this, and I do it. And in the theaters, women fainted and strong men wept.

  So how could I do any better by Gladys?

  Quiet now, Willie. Quiet for now. The console flickers and goes dark. It would do me no good at this moment to crack my knuckles. I have an Achy Breaky Heart, and it is best to let this voice slide back into the darkness.

  I straighten up sharply. I am afraid I have let my bus go too far.

  But no. I see. It is all right. The bus is rushing on alone down there. The time has come. I move my hands over the dark surface before me and I make a great light and it gathers beneath my ship and then descends like a pillar of fire and it seizes this bus and the wheels rush on, spinning wildly but touching nothing now save the air, and the bus rises quickly, so quickly that any creature there below would instantly doubt its eyes. And inside, the pilgrims seeking Luck have all fallen into a deep sleep.

  I rise. I step into the brushed-smooth metalloid corridor ringing with silence. I move along quickly. Gliding, my wife says, a thing that never ceases to amuse her.

  Yes. I am married. Yes, to someone from this planet. In spite of the censure of many on the planet where I come from. And there is a faint clicking now. Tiny feet dashing at me from behind. This is the approach of my wife’s subspecies companion, Eddie. He is a cat. Or, through my wife’s voice, my darling adorable cat or my sweet little yellow cat or my cute-enough-to-eat cat—and this latter name alarms me, I must admit, though she assures me she would never actually employ this means of admiration for Eddie—and, by extension—she has spoken, at my request, directly to this point—for me either.

  Eddie dashes ahead down the corridor, anxious to see our new arrivals, I think. It is hard for me to know about Eddie. I am not telepathic with any species other than my own, even primary species. And when it comes to the subspecies, it is, of course, even more difficult. Eddie’s vocabulary is severely limited. Though there is nuance to his few words. I can distinguish his put-food-before-me-instantly meow from his I-will-now-try-to-eat-a-piece-of-your-hand-and-it-is-not-because-you-are-cute meow. But there are things in his head, always, that I wish to know. He feels things very strongly, even his languor, even his serene arrogance. If there were only time, I would like to listen carefully enough to him so that I could hear. I would like to listen to every cat on this planet. To every sparrow. To every fish. But there is so little time now. I find myself moving faster along the corridor, just at the thought of this. The time is near for me. They have chosen a moment for themselves down there, the turning of a millennium. And so it shall be for me. As I hurry along this corridor I fervently hope there might be from this bus some voice, some few tracks of words, that will help me understand how to do what I soon must do with this planet.

  And then she is before me. My wife. My Edna Bradshaw. My darling adorable Edna. My cascade-of-unedited-words Edna. My cute-enough-to-eat Edna. I try this thought in my head now, by her example, and I must admit there is an oddly pleasurable stirring at it.

  “Greetings, my wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say as I approach her. And I am struck anew with a further paradox of words on this planet. In my private inner self I am able to shape these words much more fluently and expressively than when I attempt to offer them through my mouth. On my planet we still have mouths and mechanisms to make sounds, but we use them primarily in the effort to create music or direct expressions of feeling that bypass the lumpenness of rational, denotated thought. For a time I assumed that this discrepancy between what is inside me and what comes out through my uttered words was a function of my, shall I say, alienness. But I no longer think that. And this is one of the reasons I am still searching desperately for answers about the inhabitants of this planet. I believe it is the same for them.

  “I’m so excited,” Edna says and she does a thing with her body that still bypasses my rational thoughts quite effectively. Somehow she manages to make the tightly fitted, profusely ruffled, dramatically low-cut dress that she wears hold absolutely still while she wiggles—or I might say even undulates—within it. I am a skinny male creature, quite excessively skinny, as are all of those who inhabit my planet, the female creatures even more so. Edna is not. She is often critical of herself for this, though I think she is also quite proud of her knockers. “You have never seen a set of knockers like these, I bet.” This is, for me, a memorable observation from my cute-enough-to-eat Edna. She made her observation on the occasion of our first becoming lovers, when I had asked her for a date and took her far out of her galaxy and parked in a quadrant of quiet space.

  Edna’s hand flies out now and thumps me on the chest. I assume she is reading the images from my inner self at this moment. But of course she is not. She will, however, occasionally thump me from an excess of love. “Oh you spaceman,” she will say.

  But this time she is nodding again and again toward my chest where I am still smarting from this gesture of her love. I look. I am wearing a pinstripe suit which Edna says is much too big for me but which I cannot part with, having been warmly complimented on it by a fine old gentleman we took up from a late-night diner in Chicago about thirty years ago. I had put my suit on to greet him, a suit which I had inherited from a predecessor, and Herbert Jenkins was made to feel instantly at ease by it. He had once worn a zoot suit that looked very much like this one.

  “This will make everybody feel right at home,” Edna says, and I focus on the lapel of my suit and a square white tag is affixed there. It reads: Hi, my Name is DESI.

  She now has a similar tag in her hand and is waving it over her own chest. She says, “You know, this is a problem I simply didn’t anticipate. I am showing a good many of my assets, am I not. And my assets don’t like the idea of adhesives sticking to them. I once had a bee sting right there.” She places a fingertip on the steep slope where her knockers bunch together in the middle, and without a pause—my wife Edna Bradshaw seems sometimes never to draw a breath no matter how many words she speaks—without a pause, she continues, “And it got so red and full of puss—forgive me for talking like this about unpleasant matters, but it’s to the point, really. Which is, I put an adhesive bandage over that bee sting, and when I come to take it off, it felt like I was taking all my skin with it. So you see I don’t have a place right at the moment to put my name tag, and you have to have name tags with strangers. I want to be a good hostess, especially this being my first time, and I’m trying to figure all this out without a great deal of guidance—I don’t mean to be critical, my sweet spaceman lover—but I am struggling.”

  She falls silent for a moment and her hand with the tag hovers before her and then, in a burst of inspiration, quickly descends past her knockers and toward the ruffled expanse below and it thumps down there and Edna cries out in satisfaction, “That should do.”

  I take a step back—a necessary procedure to adjust the sight lines—and there, floating on a wave of ruffles in the center of her stomach, are the words: Hi, my name is EDNA. And I bend nearer because there is more, written in a small hand: (Mrs. Desi, your spaceman host. Nothing to worry about.)

  I am pretty fast on the uptake. Needless to say, we have no use on my planet for such tags as these.
But I perceive their function and I realize that Edna’s first impulse was the correct one, to put this declaration higher on the body, so that one’s eyes can take in the greeting with ease. I also understand how it is impossible—given her decision to join me in my first encounter with the new arrivals and to wear her special party dress for the occasion—for her to wear this tag in the appropriate area. I also understand, from many observations of the people of this planet, that this could cause her some social awkwardness and even embarrassment. So I gently peel the tag from my lapel and reattach it to my own middle-body area.

  “What’s that for, honey?” she asks.

  “We will tell them it is a custom of my home planet to wear our name tags in this manner.”

  Edna Bradshaw smiles at me for doing this, a gentle smile, with her eyes filling, as they easily do, with tears. I am now rendered, as I usually am, utterly floppy-fingered helpless when I see her tears, even tears of appreciation and thanks, which is the case in this moment. I am struck, too, at the pleasure I am taking at her careful, indeed delicate, handwriting that identifies her as “Mrs. Desi,” for she is Mrs. Desi in the fullest sense, since I am Desi and she is my wife. Desi is the name she gave me at our first meeting because none of the people here, no dweller on this planet, is capable of saying my name, my true and full name.

  My wife lunges forward and embraces me. I think of the bee sting on her precious knocker and I am sad at her ordeal and very happy to be pressing against her. Across her bare shoulders and back I let my sixteen fingertips deliver my heartbeat into her. Edna once likened my fingertips to the sucker pads on the feet of certain lizards on this planet, and this has caused me a curious torment ever since. I believe her comparison was meant in a purely superficial, visual way, but the very thought, even if untrue, of some gecko down there crouching in the grass this evening, smug in his tactile knowledge of Edna’s flesh—this makes me unhappy in a peculiarly intense way. I have vowed, however, never to ask my wife about this possibility. She continues her embrace, but I wish to remove these unpleasant thoughts from my mind, and I do have a bus full of sleeping and soon-to-be distressed subjects waiting for me.