Mr. Spaceman Read online

  And so, without letting go to further sleep myself, I gently disengage from my wife’s arms and I rise and enter into the corridor and as I move toward the place where they are all waiting I let myself try to calculate exactly how much time I have before I must descend from my machine in plain sight.

  It is not an easy calculation to do in one’s head.

  My time is not their time.

  And I am surely wrong in doing a thing like this without my machines.

  And I stagger to a stop.

  I have gotten close to a bottom line but I have averted my eyes at the last moment, professing ignorance, feigning ignorance, hoping for ignorance, and I move off now to our control room and I am before my machines and I am a simple movement of my hand away from having the precise answer and I am Hot as a Firecracker and Ready to Explode. I am also having trouble drawing a breath. The hand I finally move is a slab of rock, a layer hacked from a desert excavation full of the fossils of life on this planet long ago dead.

  And my eyes try to see the numbers that appear before me as if they are hieroglyphs from an extinct language. Unreadable. But this cannot last for long. My mind peeks. And the heat in me swells and roils. I knew it was not long, the time left to me. But the numbers before me are a terrible surprise.

  I have twenty-two hours and eleven minutes.

  I envy the roaches of the planet Earth. I am ready to check in, quite willingly, to a place where I cannot check out.

  But I am who I am.

  And this is my life.

  And there are so many voices to hear before I offer myself up.

  And so I go out of the control room and I move again in the corridors of my spaceship, move quickly, and I am among my visitors—I realize now that I may not have a chance to hear them all—and so I choose the visitor whose very name derives from what all of these sojourners were seeking on their bus when I caught them up in the clouds, a thing that I, too, seek for myself. I awaken, to a state of dreamspeak, the young man named Lucky.

  He sits before me now and I am—I hear how words create their own states of being and this one I wish were true—I am Lucky. I am an all-American guy, through and through red white and blue, and that is the fact. I don’t even remember Vietnam. Not even a little bit. My mother and father, they talk about it all the time while I am growing up. You should have seen the clouds in the sky at twilight. You should have seen the teakwood furniture in our house. You should have seen the Emperor of Jade pagoda. And I say, Right. You should see the Astros play the Cardinals. Maybe you can get lucky and see Mark McGwire hit a home run. I go to one game this past season and he hits a ball about ten rows into the upper deck. I root for the Astros but I like to see big home runs and this one was about as big as they get.

  See, even my name is Lucky. I could call myself Joe or Ed or Bill or anything I want since I am an American and since my parents gave me a Vietnamese name. I don’t blame them, understand, I was born in Vietnam and all, but things went bad over there, as everybody knows, and my parents and my sister and me ended up running away. And you can’t carry your teakwood furniture on a sampan stuffed full of refugees in the South China Sea. So we came to the USA with basically the clothes on our backs—realize, I don’t have a single memory of any of this—and then at some point it became clear that the communist government wasn’t just going to up and topple over and we were pretty much stuck here—stuck is how my parents saw it—and they realized it was time for me to have a name that my fellow Americans would understand. So they let me choose. It was when I was twelve years old.

  Knowing how they feel about what they lost, that must have been a bad day for them. We all of us sat around our kitchen table in our little condo out in the Bellaire part of Houston and we had a stack of name-your-baby books and we all chose new names. Our family name was Nguyn. For sure, nobody American could say that. But when people tried and just chose to duck that Ng sound at the start, they often ended up saying something that sounded like an American name: Wynn. So my father made the family name first order of business and that’s what he said it was going to be. Wynn. Which was fine by me. I was already a baseball fan and I knew about my Astros even back to when they were the Colt 45s, before I was born, and one of the early Astros greats was Jimmy Wynn, who hit ninety-six home runs in the three seasons from ’67 to ’69. He was a little guy and they called him the Toy Cannon. I like to think of him all through those bad years of the war out there in the air-conditioned comfort of the Astrodome, this little man, getting just his pitch, guessing just right on the fastball or the curve ball and he’d swing and be right on the money, right on the sweet spot on his bat, not a millimeter off—there is some guesswork to good hitting, you see; it takes some luck to hit the long ball—I like to think of him hitting big home runs in 1967 and 1968 and 1969 and him jogging around the bases, not having to rush because everything was already decided in his favor. It was like he was preparing a place for me. I’m sorry for my parents and what they lost and its never being okay for them, but Jimmy Wynn was laying down this track for a guy who looked to be Vietnamese but ended up an American, cheering his Astros and free to chase his own luck. Me.

  So my sister goes first on that day and she doesn’t even look in the books. She’s fifteen and it’s clear she’s been thinking about this for a long time, probably been wanting to ask my parents for this very thing but she’s too good and obedient and old-fashioned a daughter to open her mouth. She even claims to remember the furniture and the sunsets some, back in Vietnam. Nancy, she says.

  Nancy? I say. From Nancy Reagan?

  This is after almost four years of Ronald in the White House, 1986, the year the Astros finished ten games ahead in the Western Division and then lost to the Mets in the playoffs. Real bad luck. And the Mets go on and win the World Series that year only because a guy lets a slow, good-hop ground ball go through his legs, a ball he’s going to catch nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand. And because of that, the Red Sox don’t win the World Series, which they hadn’t for seventy years and they still haven’t, to this day. One chance in a thousand they lose in 1986 and that’s their luck.

  So my sister says, Yes, I admire her.

  I also, says my father, who wants this to go smoothly. That is a good choice, he says.

  Then my dad says, Fred.

  Is that you? I say.

  That is me, he says.

  Is that from Fred Flintstone? I say. Which is this cartoon character caveman.

  And my father gets angry. You do not take this in the right spirit, he says to me. It is plenty hard already, all these things that happen to us. You are spoiled child. You are not Vietnamese at all.

  He says this last thing like it’s going to hurt my feelings, like I’m going to get upset about it. But of course I’m not Vietnamese. I don’t want to be. I’m on another team now. The ball went through my father’s legs and that was that. Bad luck.

  My mother is flipping through the name books and she can’t stand it, my father and me fighting, so she starts calling out names for herself, though she’s not being too choosy, which tells me she’s just trying to stop the two of us.

  How about Hildegarde, she says.

  My father’s head snaps in her direction at this.

  But she’s going on before he can say anything. Maybe Hyacinth, she says.

  It should go with Fred, my father says, but his voice is suddenly tiny like he just realized he missed the ball. It’s dribbling into right field and he’s blown it for everybody.

  My mother looks up from the book and straight into his eyes. She thinks a moment and turns Fred over silently in her mouth, you can see her shaping it. It’s just a word, after all. Just a stupid word. It’s not going to change who either of them is. And then she says, Ethel.

  And she’s serious.

  I’d watched some episodes of that old TV show with the screwy whiney wife of the good-natured dodo of a Cuban band leader. Lucy and Desi. And they had these friends, an old mi
ser and a sort of screwy whiney wife assistant. Fred and Ethel. Fred was a geezer. He looked to be about thirty years older than Ethel. They didn’t have any kids, and the only thing interesting to me about them was thinking he married her when he was probably forty-five and she was about fifteen and she’s been waiting decades for him to come through for her some night, but he never does. With that situation running unspoken under the surface, it made everything else really kind of interesting. But there I sit looking from my mother to my father and back again. From Ethel to Fred to Ethel. And I just keep my mouth shut about it.

  But it turns out later that my father chose Fred from some big boss he’d never even spoken a word to at Pennzoil. My father is a computer expert there. He hates computers. And my mother chose Ethel from hearing somewhere that Fred and Ethel were some kind of couple, but she didn’t know anything else about them. So when my mother says, Ethel, my father goes, Good. My sister goes, Good, and she’s not even trying to keep from laughing or anything, though she knows the TV show as well as I do. It sounds like she really does believe those names are good, which is a pretty scary thing about my sister, if you stop and consider it.

  And now they’re all three looking at me.

  Not that I haven’t also given this a lot of thought already. So I say, Lucky.

  My father says, Lucky? What kind of name is that, Lucky?

  I’m ready for him. I say, It’s the English translation of my Vietnamese name.

  And what I said was true. My Vietnamese given name was Vn. Of course, right away my mother and father know I’ve got them.

  I say, I want to keep this connection to my beginnings in Vietnam. And I look over at my sister, Nancy Reagan Wynn, who’s supposed to be the one that appreciates our family’s roots, and she knows I got her, too.

  That is very good, my mother says. I give you lucky name myself.

  My father can’t quite make himself say the words, but he’s got no choice except to nod his approval, in spite of his suspicions about me.

  My sister says, You sure it’s not from Lucky Luciano? Wasn’t he a gangster who got whacked in a barber chair?

  I’m surprised at you, Nancy, I say, making my voice sound hurt. I even think she’s got that wrong. Lucky Luciano died of old age.

  Or maybe Lucky Strikes, my sister says.

  I’ve really gotten to her.

  They’ll give you cancer, she says.

  I even force a faint sob into my voice. I say to her, I thought you’d be the first to understand how I miss my real home.

  Yes, my mother says to my sister, watch how you talk.

  So I get what I want. I get my luck, right there in my name. And it’s even at the expense of the one perfect Vietnamese child in the family.

  And I am lucky. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m making ninety grand a year in computers. I love computers. I’ve got a great girl, Mary Wynn—no relation, fortunately—and her original name was Hin, which means generous, and she is that, she’s a generous girl who loves me. And I get to go to the casino boats and do what I love the most, next to watching the Astros. Well, maybe even more than watching the Astros, because this is more like playing the game, not just watching it.

  I play the slots. A lot of Vietnamese go to gamble. They even have a Vietnamese night once a month at one of the boats, with some Vietnamese singer or other whining out sorrowful tunes for a room full of exiles. They’re not so different from me, really. Except they’re most of them looking to get something back. They got unlucky once, in a big way. Drew one too many cards and lost a country. And it gave them a big dose of gambler’s logic: you lose that big and things have got to turn your way just as big, the great cosmic odds tables have got to work themselves out. Even better if it’s in a different currency. Lose a country, win a million bucks. But you got to be on the spot when the time for that adjustment comes or you just end up a big loser forever and you’ve done it to yourself.

  I understand where they’re coming from. And they all love the card tables. Blackjack and baccarat and Pai Gow poker, which is pretty funny if you think about it, Vietnamese gamblers trying to win back their pasts playing a Chinese game. But like I say, it’s the slots for me. The megabucks dollar slots.

  One on one, pitcher and batter, facing that next moment of your life. That’s what it is for me. I’m not trying to make up for anything. I don’t figure the universe is ready to even my score. It’s just me and the moment. And I always use the handle on the machine. No punching buttons. You punch a button, it’s like you’re entirely passive. You’re just saying, I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got. That’s okay as far as it goes. But with the handle, you’ve got a chance to play the moment. You know? You palm that black ball at the end and you curl your fingers around it and you wait. You can feel the time slipping along and you’re going to do this thing and you’re either going to lose or you’re going to win. But there’s a way to make it your own. I’m sure of it. Like thinking, Okay, he’s shown me his curveball low and outside twice, now he’s going to try to bust a fastball inside. I’m guessing fastball and I’m ready for it. There’s four clicks on the handle. You can hear them, and if there’s too much noise—that loud, steady, Saturday-night casino roar—then you can feel them in the palm of your hand. One click. Two. You’re doing this slow and counting them. Three. Four. And you pause, maybe. Or you don’t. However it is you’re feeling this thing at the moment. There’s this flow of time and if you jump in at one particular second you win and if you jump in at another second you lose. That’s the way things are. So you feel click number four, and you hold one beat, two—and the progressive is quietly counting away over your head, five million and something dollars and something cents, and it’s running up fast, busy storing up a fortune for you, and you wait for that third beat, and that’s it, you realize, a little waltz here, three-four time, and you take your swing.

  And what you’re waiting for is three little eagles. That’s all. In the window of the slot machine. Forget the minor scores, the singles and doubles and triples, the cherries and the bars and the sevens. You’re going for the upper deck. You wait for three little red white and blue eagles to land side by side for you. Look where you are, they’ll say to me. It’s America.

  Lucky Wynn and I stop speaking. He is suspended now, waiting, I think, for the eagles to line up in the window of a slot machine in his head. And I am, too. I keep pulling the handle and I am waiting for some of these voices to line up side by side—perhaps it will only take three of them—and they will say, Look where you are. And I will know. But inevitably, there is only one voice before me and a blank on either side.

  This I do understand. Lucky knows as little as I do. He says he is American, but I think there are feelings in him that he is not recognizing. He is still waiting—yearning—to be this thing he thinks he already is, to learn these things he thinks he already knows.

  A lost home. A vessel that carries you away to another place. A new name. Others around you whose voices you hear but that you do not truly understand. Nor do they truly understand you. I share this diaspora with Lucky Wynn. But even knowing this, I can think of nothing to do or to say to him, except lead him back to his place so that he can return to sleep. And, eventually, to return him to his life, the memory of all this erased, and his yearning will go on.

  But, of course, there may be no need to erase the memories of any of my present visitors, since I will myself follow them back to this planet’s surface and will reveal the secret to everyone. In only a matter of hours now. Let them all remember.

  And I do lead Lucky back to the deep shadows of his sleeping space and then I stand in the corridor and I listen to the breathing of all of my visitors as they sleep and wait. I need to push on to the next voice. There may yet be some sudden revelation. But I do not know how to choose and so I begin to pace up and down the corridor outside these doorways and I sing to myself. I need to do this anyway. I sing a wordless song inside me—and I mean by using this word sing someth
ing other than the thing meant by music on the planet below me, for this song is not translated into elements—words, perceivable sounds—that can exist in the shared physical space outside one’s internal landscape—these are primal tones rising and spinning inside me like the crepuscular spirals of dust and cloud and moisture on my home planet, a process that nightly comes with the setting of our beautiful blue star, the very elements of our world rising up to bid our star farewell, rising up in their yearning—yes, I now readily attribute this condition even to the inanimate substances of my own planet—they yearn to go with that star as it seems about to leave us all alone. This is the sensual theme of the song I sing, a song created in my own head, even as I sing it, existing only there in its true form, like no one else’s song, and I, too, yearn, I yearn to place this music into the head of a being other than myself, directly, untranslated, but my own wife Edna Bradshaw, whom I love with a great spiral of feeling inside me, my own wife cannot hear this kind of music, I cannot share it with her, and I know this is true of all the beings on this planet, it is how they live: If there is some deep sense of an essential thing inside them, an ontological music, beyond words, beyond sounds, it is impossible for them truly to share it with anyone else.

  I have let my thoughts grow intrusive now. The music stops. I stop. I am before a sleeping space and so I choose this one. And soon we are in the speaking place. Sitting before me is the tiny, elderly form of Viola Stackhouse. And though she cannot place the things that are inside her directly inside me, we do speak as one, we shape these words as one. My husband Arthur buys Buicks. He always has. He says the Buick LeSabre was the one American car they never forgot how to build, even in the bad days of the late seventies and into the eighties, when the Japanese came and took over our car market because so many of the US makers seemed to forget how to do it right.