Mr. Spaceman Page 10

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  And I wake. I sense it is time for my mission. Edna, I am happy to see, is still beside me, though she stirs now. I move my hand across her and she grows quiet once more. I do not wish for her to wake while I am gone and be alarmed at my absence. I lean to her and touch my fingertips to her face and I hope that she can see me in her dreams, that she can hear my heartbeat there.

  I slip away quietly to my preparation room and I open the storage space and I resolve to take extra precautions. I will have layers of disguise: Before the trench coat and felt hat, I become togged to the bricks in bluff cuffs, and I choose the tie that I wore on my first date with my angel cake Edna Bradshaw, a red one with dozens of Tabasco bottles floating on it. She seemed to love that tie. I even put on my size-twenty Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers. Encapsulating footwear is unknown on my planet, and I am still not used to the concept, but I will take no chances on this night. I don my trench coat and cinch the belt, though not too revealingly tight because of what Edna refers to as my Scarlett O’Hara waist—which I understand to refer to its minimal girth—my waist was the first clue to give me away as a spaceman on the night I met her—and I put on my hat and pull the wide brim down low.

  It is night. I am ready. I squeak down the corridor in my Chuck Taylors, which are the color, I am pleased to note, of Herbert Jenkins’s bluff cuffs, that is to say, the color of a singing canary. My zoot suit, however, is conservative in color, gray with pinstripes. My trench coat is black, as is my hat. I am a Dude.

  And the Dude is behind the wheel of his honker. So to speak. I have no wheel and I have no horn, but I sit in my shuttle ship and I am ready to spin off into the world below and I flex at my fingers, which are turning me into a coward. But to be honest, it is the coward in me that is producing this frequent stiffening in my fingers, not the other way around. In all the Earth years I have been watching this planet, I have actually and personally been to its surface perhaps six or eight times and I have never been in peril. The last time I even came to carry away the woman who fell in love with me the time before. But the time after this one will be so momentous that I am full of anxiety now. And there are always risks, of course. Outside of my spaceship I still have the power to induce sleep and forgetfulness, but only within a very limited physical area. There are many circumstances, in an alien terrain, over which I would have no control whatsoever.

  But I put these thoughts from my mind and I launch forth and I rush toward the lights below, veering now to the dark edges of the city, mindful of the searching green strobes from the casino boats. I am being excessively cautious. Though my craft is shrouded, pilot errors can, of course, occur, especially in the transition between modes of propulsion, thus giving an observer below a glimpse of what they call a UFO. But this is a rare phenomenon and I am alert tonight. So I let myself move over the thickenings of trees with streets between and dwellings set side by side by side by side. If the placid lives I seek exist, surely they will be along these quiet streets. I move quickly back and forth and I look for a place to land my craft. Open, preferably dim, with no one apt to walk unsuspecting into an invisible thing. I grow bold. I move over a great ship taking on rice in the orange wash of sodium vapor lamps and I rush along the edge of the lake. The houses here are large and full of the fruits of capitalism and yet I feel a great striving emanating from them and I cut inland and ahead I see what I think for a moment is a Wal-Mart and I grow nostalgic, thinking of the night in Bovary, Alabama, when Edna called out to me as I stood alone and separate, very late into the time of daily darkness, and there were only four scattered vehicles about and no living creatures at all, not until my future wife came out of her shopper’s paradise and spotted me from afar and then called out in sympathetic concern over what, I later realized, she presumed was my misplaced vehicle. “Are you lost?” she said. I am.

  And now I see that the place before me is not a Wal-Mart after all. I swoop around it, and the place proclaims itself KROGER FAMILY CENTER OPEN 24 HOURS DRUGS FOOD and next to it, across a street, is a vast open space of fissured concrete, not ideally dim, but clearly abandoned, the structure that was once there reduced to a faint outline of its foundation. I swoop and return. There are railroad tracks running along a street past the front of Kroger, past this open space, and then at an angle across that same street and down a median and heading into the night in the direction of the ship at the lake. I swoop, slowing, and there is a sign at the edge of the open space, dark and fractured: ROLLER RINK.

  I land. I wait. It is late. It is dim here in the center of Roller Rink. I wonder what Roller Rink was. I wonder why such a thing has escaped my notice over the years. Perhaps for the same reason that it has now been reduced to an empty swath of concrete and a crumbling sign. Something went terribly wrong. Once Roller Rink was as proud an edifice of the planet Earth as Kroger or Wal-Mart, but those of this world turned against it and it crumbled into emptiness.

  My mind is overheating. I even imagine the people of Lake Charles, Louisiana, storming Roller Rink with pitchforks and burning torches crying for its death, tearing it apart with their hands. But I know how words always strive to be something other than they are, to gather around the thing they have their eyes on and run at it from the shadows, from unexpected directions, I know this about the words on this planet and so I know, in fact, I am not pondering the past fate of Roller Rink but the imminent fate—very imminent, I am afraid—of the spaceman known as DESI who has been ordered to expose his actual physical self in a grand and irrefutable and unambiguous way to all the people of this world and to share a fundamental truth of the universe. Come Quick. It’s Alive!

  Lookit, I say to myself. I could have sat and dreaded the future back on the home spacecraft without the unpleasantness of wearing sneakers. If I am going to make this visit, I should Just Do It. The street beyond the train track is empty. The street between Roller Rink and Kroger is empty. The Kroger parking lot has only a scattered few cars and no creature is visible. So I step from my craft.

  The air is quite mild and it smells faintly of wood fire. A dog barks in the distance. The sky to the west is tinted orange from oil refineries, and there, cutting above the distant rim of trees and then sliding silently off, is the thread of green light from the casinos. But my way lies into the quiet streets of the neighborhood. I move through the vanished Roller Rink, resolving to ask my wife Edna Bradshaw about this place, and I stop at the street and look over at the Kroger parking lot.

  I never did actually enter Wal-Mart that night in Bovary, Alabama. Our machines have given us views, of course, inside all of the various edifices on this planet, but there is something that cannot be reproduced through any technology. On this planet, one has to stand in a place, in one’s own body, to understand its influence on the lives here. That is one reason why I am taking these risks right now. There is an ethos to every spot. I look around. I have moved perhaps fifty paces from my craft, which, I am happy to observe, is invisible in the Roller Rink space. But things are quite different, even just over here. For instance, I can no longer smell burning wood. Instead, there is a smell of trees. Fir trees. They are piled off the street curb to my right. A dozen small, scrawny trees, intended, I know—how spotty and minute is my understanding of this place—intended to be placed in the home at this time of the year and decorated with lights to celebrate the birth of the man for whom Citrus mistook me on the spaceship earlier, a celebration whose primary day has recently passed. I hesitate here with the dead trees, which were apparently too thin to have been worth purchasing—I presume in a sales operation across the street at this Kroger Family Center, in spite of its avowal simply to provide DRUGS and FOOD, or perhaps in the space of this departed Roller Rink—whichever, the trees would be trucked in and piled up and sold and then the excess dumped, as with this dozen trees—I am conscious of the ways of commerce on this planet and you do what you can to make a buck and if you can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, you go for it—though why that phrase should
leap into me in this context, I have no idea, because though it does have to do with commerce, its application is misplaced in this circumstance, for Kroger’s customers would have more use for a holiday tree than an Eskimo would have for ice—but standing here, I sense myself drifting erratically on a thin smoke of nervous words, sounding once again like my wife Edna Bradshaw, and I wish I was with her now, lying beside her on our bed as she sleeps her image-laden sleep.

  However, I am not. I am here. And the thought from which I started to drift is this: The place where I stand at this moment is new to me. Perhaps that thought wasn’t the exact starting point, but it is close to it. And this is true of the planet Earth: fifty paces away, things are different. Drastically so, if you are alert. And fifty paces more, five paces even, the world will change once again. There is no dog barking now. I hear the mechanical click of the traffic light as the tint on my hands changes from green to amber and then another click as it changes from amber to red. In short, though I can acquire clear images of Kroger from my machines, I do not truly know Kroger, do not know its essence, and so I wish to enter into that place, squeaking across its floor in my Chuck Taylor sneakers. But I am held back by recognizing the inherent risks in doing this, perhaps manageable risks at this hour but perhaps not. The traffic light clicks again and I look up and the large red eye closes and the large green eye opens, and I realize how far from the inherent characteristics of mind of a member of my own species I have been borne. I would say “borne by words” but I can hear how I am sounding on that matter, as well. I have become a whiner. Kvetch. Kvetch. That is all I hear out of me. And surely I am not out of my normal mind simply because of words. Perhaps I should go with the flow. My wife Edna Bradshaw frequently shows evidence of this same syndrome of rambling free association and she is clearly not alarmed by it, indeed seems almost to enjoy it, rolling words out of her head that follow one tiny bright object until it passes another one and then veers off following that one and so on and so on. I look down at my sneakers. Their yellowness, like a singing canary, like Herbert Jenkins’s zoot suit—though I never actually saw his zoot suit—the yellowness of my Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers has paled and darkened here on the street at night. But now, Click. The yellow sharpens a bit. From the streetlight again. I look at the light, straight into its amber eye. “Oh shut up your incessant clicking,” I say aloud. And it clicks again. This is not your planet, it says. And it opens its red eye and glares hotly at me. It is the air, causing this wandering. As much as words. It is the smell of smoke, which I am picking up again. And the smell of dead trees. And the dog barking again. No, a different dog, in some other, distant place. I am rushing, inside. It is not the words that are carrying me. The words and I are companions. We are being carried together on this deeper current inside me, which itself comes from the smoke and the trees and the dogs and a thousand other nuances of the night. The click of the street light. The orange glow of the western sky. The rasp of grit beneath my sneakers at the tiniest movement of my feet. The smooth-contoured inertness of the cars in the Kroger lot. And perhaps the words, after all, as well. On my own planet, the primary focus of our lives, moment to moment, is inside our minds, and to touch each other, we leap cleanly across the sensual particularities of our outer world, hardly noticing them at all. But on a planet built with words, which are valenced with the same charge as streetlight clicks and dog barks and sneaker rasps, I must deal directly with all these things of the senses lying between my inner world and the inner world of anyone else. I have no choice. And they run deep in me, these sensual things. In ways that both demand and defy the words. Suddenly I find my hands floppy with desire. I think of dear Edna Bradshaw. Edna, come quick. It’s alive!

  I am unsteady now on my feet. I must not think. I step off the curb. I move through the Kroger parking lot, circling to the back, fighting off the impulse to take a chance. I cross the train track. I enter a quiet street, leading directly away from Kroger. It is a street named for a class of bryophytic plants which have a small, leafy, often tufted stem which bears its sex organs at the tip. Do not ask me why it was named after such a thing. Perhaps the place was once covered with moss. Perhaps the builder of this street first lay down in a vast blanket of moss, right here, and dreamed of the thing he would build. I move on this street of Moss. Intently now. Trying to hold back the words for a bit, so that I don’t stop in any one square of this sidewalk and spend the rest of the night rendering my words around its unique vantage point on the night. I move on, my sneakers scraping and popping, and I press my attention back to my original intent.

  I look in the passing windows, ready to go closer, ready to approach an isolated someone, wave my hand before his face, loosen his words, hear him speak of his contentment—in taking out the trash, in thinking about his father, in facing his work, in living his life on this planet. He would speak in a voice I have not yet heard.

  A tree lies on its side by the curb, silver threads of tinsel clinging to it, and I look to the house, a porch swing, a shutter sagging slightly away from a broken hinge, the windows dark, no one there. But now there is a movement, even in the dimness of the unlit front room. I slow my step, only vaguely discerning the figure there, a man, I think, moving for a moment in the darkness and then stopping, standing there. The next house drifts into my view and it is bright but I am wondering about the man I have just seen. Only briefly: his tree thrown hastily from the house, him sitting awake in a dark room only to stand and go nowhere. My machines are full of voices no different from his.

  I focus, instead, on this bright house before me, the front window outlined in amber bulbs, the tree still standing inside, ablaze with white lights. I see through the front room and through an arch to a table in the dining room and people are there. I stop. A happy family. Contented with their lives. I take a step toward them, onto their lawn, and another step. I am not alone. Something has told me that all along. Perhaps it is the nose, shining as brightly as the streetlight near Kroger. It is Santa Claus, who stands, inanimate, of course, but life-size, beside an azalea bush. What a sense of holiday whimsy resides in this place. How could there be angst and striving and conflict and disconnection in such a family as this? And there they sit, beneath a chandelier—a cheap chandelier, I realize, its bare bulbs poking out of cloudy glass flower blossoms. Good. There is no pretense here. Only harmony and contentment. At least complacent drabness. A woman is in a chair with her back to me, a young woman, I think, given what I know of hairstyles from my wife Edna Bradshaw. Her hair is long and draped straight behind her. She is very thin. Her skin, which I can see on her arm, is pale. I angle a little to the side as I take more steps toward this house. I can hear the murmur of voices. A window is open somewhere, I think. The night, though in the first stages of the winter season on this part of the planet, is very mild. It is the state of Louisiana, after all, Where Winter Comes to Party. Opposite the young woman at the table is another woman, the wife and mother, her hair short and permed, her face haggard, her mouth drawn down. Perhaps given this appearance by the bared bulb light coming from above. She has been preparing this wonderful meal all day long and she is pleasantly weary and the light shows this on her face. She is looking across at her daughter. Next to both of them at the head of the table is a man, the husband and father. He is leaning forward as if listening, but not to these two women. There are others out of my sight, at the opposite end of the table. The murmur I hear is another male voice, the words rushing and tumbling. And then suddenly the husband and father laughs. He leans back in his chair and throws his head back and laughs.

  And his wife and his daughter do not move. Not even to glance in his direction. They are as implacable as the Santa Claus standing next to me, shining his cold red light into the darkness. And I know I have misjudged them all.

  I back away, out of their yard. This is what I need. I have come here with my own agenda, but I must look at this world the way it is, so that I will know what to do when I soon return.

&n
bsp; I hear the distant cry of a train whistle.

  This is a sound that my wife Edna Bradshaw has referred to with great wistfulness, a sound that gave her pleasure to hear when she was alone with her yellow cat Eddie in the middle of the night in her trailer at the trailer park out the state highway that connected Bovary, Alabama, with the rest of what she knew to be the world. This was before she and I had met in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. And she was made happy by the thought that there were all those other lives going on in places far away—suggested to her by the sound of a train going somewhere in the night—but she was right there in a place she knew so well. I think that is the reason she turned me down the first time I asked her to fly away with me. She was content.

  I straighten and quake with this thought. I plucked Edna Bradshaw from the very sort of life I went seeking on this night.

  But no. She was not content. We met, I asked her for a date, I took her out, we fell in love, I was to be transferred, I asked her to marry me, she said no, I went away. But then she was suddenly very unhappy. Bovary, Alabama, no longer gave her pleasure. She heard this sound of a train whistle—and there it is again, coming nearer, but slowly—she heard this sound after I left, and it only made her sad. Made her yearn to follow it. She wanted to fly from what she had always known, a life that no longer satisfied her.

  I look toward Kroger and I find that I, too, am yearning.

  The bright lights are calling me. I am afraid that the life without yearning, which I sought, does not exist on this world. Perhaps it does not exist at all, anywhere in the universe, so long as creatures have minds and hearts and must move from one moment to the next. For example, I should go now to my undetected shuttle craft and return to my place in the middle of the air. But, in fact, I yearn to understand Kroger, which, I realize, is to yearn to know more about what is to come, for me. It is one thing for me to sneak around in the dark, unobserved, and smugly believe I understand these creatures. It is another thing to walk into that great swath of fluorescent light, which is full of beer and laundry soap and breakfast cereal and conditioning rinse and the ardent seekers of these things, and to say, Look here, you all, you are not the only beings in the universe.