Mr. Spaceman Read online

  This particular moment of ignorance is falling away now. But I am clearly capable of such a failure. I am afraid to consider what other manifestations of that self-ignorance I have been prey to. But for now, for this instance, the part of me that I failed to recognize and that transformed itself into a condemnation of the Stackhouses’ species concerns an issue—I am conscious of the irony—that our two species share with more or less equal intensity. An issue that is, typically, hiding behind even these words I now shape.

  I speak of death. I speak of death. The ultimate wordlessness. I have not seen it as a whiteness until Arthur and I were one voice. I have always seen it as darkness, the way Arthur once did, though my frame of reference, not surprisingly, was the deep concentration of gravity in space that we have chosen, as a species, never physically to approach. I speak of the black holes. That was the metaphor resident in my head. That our life should cease, our music fall silent: we are terrified of this. Yes. But it has always been like that dreadful suck of darkness, those places where you dared not go. Or, in a different mood, death was the darkness between the stars, the thing we moved in all the time, a commonplace thing, a thing that we could put aside with the mere shifting of our eyes to the stars themselves. The darkness could not exist without the light and was therefore subordinate to it. Subject to it. And even filled with particles. Stellar winds. Whatever. Foolish elaborations of metaphor for the sake of self-delusion.

  But Arthur would have me see the stars themselves, the blinding whiteness, as death. And the clear realization of this flares through me and stiffens my fingers and my toes and I try to think of red stars and blue stars, but it does no good, for I understand Arthur, it has nothing to do with the bending of the light into these other hues, they are a deception, they are part of the same vanishing.

  I remember a voice. Arthur Stackhouse is sleeping, his head bowed low, his chin nearly touching his chest. I do not disturb him. I move my hand to the control panel and pass it there and I find a voice I myself gathered just a few years ago. Though Arthur Stackhouse sits before me, I am Jacob Klein. This is the thought I sometimes have. For years, I’ve had it already. It should have been Berlin, where they dropped the A-bomb. Let the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire appear again, like it did for Moses to lead us out of Egypt. It went before and showed the way and that’s what we needed at the end of the Second World War. A way to lead us past what happened. Let the fireball come and the cloud rise above Berlin and we would follow and say, Here is the wrath of God and the retribution of God, here is God’s declaration about all of the bodies of our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and children and sisters and brothers and friends and teachers and neighbors and strangers who all were linked to us not just by blood but also by the sharing of thousands of years of history, thousands of years of trying to follow the will of God, here is God’s declaration about all the brutalized and murdered bodies of all these people who are our own. Here, in this pillar of cloud and fire, these bodies are declared once and for all to be worthy of the visitation upon their abusers of the worst horror that man can make on this earth. Let Japan fall brick by brick and wound by wound, but let those who defiled this people whose nation was a shared love of God, let those monsters be vaporized in a vision that Moses himself might recognize. And this vision of fire and cloud would lead us again. It would lead us to a place where we might finally live a life free from a daily, bone-deep memory of these terrible things that happened to millions of us. I go down into the subway and I hear a cry of metal from the tunnel; I walk out of my apartment onto Tenth Street heading for a morning coffee and bagel and I see vapor rising from a manhole; I pass a brown-stone and it’s garbage day and a bag is torn open and I see bones, tiny bones scattered there; and I find myself living in the wilderness of history, and I want a way out, I want someone to lead me from this place to another place where the past is avenged and abandoned.

  I sound like a religious man. God forbid you should take me for that. My mother and father were both lefties from the old school. They had me late—Mama was past forty—and I was their only child. For my two grandmothers I was their little shayna boychik, but for my mother and father I was their right-thinking Marxist youth. My father’s father was a Bolshevik who thought Leon Trotsky was the model of what Jews would finally become in the twentieth century. The Überjuden. Not that he fared any better than his hero. He was clubbed to death by a policeman in 1937 at the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre, three years before Trotsky got an ax blade in the head in Mexico. My father was just seventeen, but he’d learned well from his father. My mother’s father was a leftist, too, a Jewish boy from Brooklyn Heights who died in Spain fighting Franco. So this was the Tradition in my family. We never lit a Shabbat candle, never went to temple, but we made a pilgrimage to Highgate Cemetery in London and laid a stone on Marx’s grave, and every summer my parents sent me to a leftist summer camp up in the Adirondacks.

  Maybe I should have learned from my father like he learned from his. He sorted the world out a different way. It’s not if you’re a Jew or not a Jew, it’s whether you’re a worker or an exploiter. The camp was full of the children of leftist Jews like my parents. But there were plenty of others there, too. Without a God, who of course was the big capitalist boss in the sky running the Corporation of Opiates for the Masses, if you overthrew him, then there was no people chosen by God. Jewish meant the same as Irish or Italian or German or English. And there were exploited working classes among all those peoples, and there were true believers in the dialectics of history, too. This was a chosen brotherhood.

  Which fit the times pretty well. It was the sixties when I went every summer to camp. And we’d do craft projects on exploited peoples of the world and skits on great moments in socialist history and at night we’d watch films like The Grapes of Wrath and The Battleship Potemkin and we’d sing, of course. There was plenty of singing. At lights out every night our prepubescent voices piped out into the darkness of the mountains: “So comrades, come rally and the last fight let us face, The Internationale unites the human race.”

  That’s what my father would have had me learn from him. He saw Hitler’s ovens as an expression of the capitalist spirit. Nazism and capitalism thrived together in Germany, they were locked in a passionate embrace, soulmates, which I guess was true enough. “Away with all your superstitions, servile masses arise, arise. We’ll change henceforth the old tradition.” I sang with a fervor at camp to make my parents proud, and I suppose they were. And there were a lot of songs, not just “The Internationale.” That’s the first one to come to mind, with me suddenly remembering all this, but we had a leftist hymnal published by the IWW, called the Little Red Song Book, and we sang all those songs, and now that I think of it, there was another song that stood out for me back then. In 1914 the capitalist bosses of the copper mines framed a man named Joe Hill for murder because he was like a working-class troubadour wandering from migrant worker camp to hobo jungle to city slum and singing about the truths of capitalist exploitation. He died a martyr before a firing squad. Many of the songs in the Wobblies’ songbook were written by Joe Hill, but one of them was written about him, after his death.

  I haven’t thought about all this in a very long time. That camp sat in the center of almost every year of my childhood, but there’s so much that’s just faded away. I grew up to disappoint my father, I suppose. I still visit him once a week in his apartment in Brooklyn and he sits at the kitchen table and spreads out the New York Times and he interprets the news for me in a steady stream of Marxist analysis and at the end he always shouts at me, “You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” and I say, “I’m listening, Papa. I’m listening,” and he says, “Listening and hearing are two different things,” and I say, “Saying and propagandizing are two different things,” and it goes like this every time. We have this ritual dialectic and when I say I have to go, he gives me a handshake, but he will not look me in the eyes.
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br />   What did I know of death when I was a child? Joe Hill was shot to death. It meant nothing to me, except as an idea. The Holocaust was the same. I’d heard the tales of those things, I’d heard the numbers of the dead, I’d heard the invocation of mother and father and sister and brother, lost, gassed and incinerated. But I was a child. I knew nothing of death, except as an idea, a child’s idea. I sang, “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.” I sang, “‘The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you, Joe,’ says I. ‘Takes more than guns to kill a man,’ says Joe. ‘I didn’t die.’ Says Joe, ‘I didn’t die.’” And maybe that’s why the song stuck with me. Joe said he wasn’t really dead. With what little I knew directly of the world, that seemed more real to me. And it took the edge off the tales of the Big Death, the millions. Joe wasn’t even Jewish. If he could do it, if he could overcome death, so could they.

  But then there was Tony Marcello.

  I don’t know what’s going on in my head right now. I’d put him out of me long ago.

  He was a kid from Philly, a first-timer at the camp, and he had some kind of grandfather situation, too, his father’s father, I think it was, being close with Palmiro Togliatti. It was another like-grandfather-like-father thing, though on his mother’s side everyone was still a practicing Catholic, praying to the saints and so forth. Tony bunked right beside me—he and I were both on the top of doubles—and I never could get to sleep too fast, even in the mountain air, and I remember every night listening to him breathe. He was louder than the crickets, though it wasn’t a snore he made, exactly, the air just seemed to move heavily inside him and I could hear it and I’d listen to him, even though I didn’t want to.

  And it was about four weeks into the summer that one day we all went swimming in the lake. Officially, this was, with the camp counselors and all—there were a few nonpolitical summer-camp-type things we did—and Tony was a good swimmer. So he heads out deep, and this all happened so quick and simple that it just made things hit me even harder. He swims out and one of the counselors calls to him to come back. I was clinging to a post on the little wooden pier because I wasn’t a good swimmer and I was scared of the water and I was just holding on there in the shadow of the pier and waiting for this to be over. But when the counselor calls out to Tony, I look and I see him maybe a hundred yards out and he stops and his head bobs up and then he goes down. I figure he’s just turning around or something, or swimming back a ways underwater, which I guess is what the counselor is thinking too. But after a few moments, Tony’s head comes up again and it’s in just the same spot and this time it’s quick, just up and back down, and the counselor jumps in and starts swimming out.

  I don’t know exactly how it went. Another counselor leaped in, too, and a third one took all the rest of us out of the water and brought us up to the mess hall, and this is where an atheist is at a disadvantage, I suppose. It was hard to apply the dialectic of history and the oppression of the working masses to what was happening in the lake. And to their credit they didn’t try. They just let us be. So I started inching my way back to what I somehow knew I had to witness. I went to the mess hall door and nobody stopped me. Then I went out into the sun and over to the edge of the slope that led to the lake and nobody stopped me. There were a few people on the pier and somebody near them in the lake and then there was some activity between them and I went down the slope. I lowered my eyes and watched the rutted path as I walked but I went down to the lake and I arrived just as they laid Tony’s body out on the pier. Once it was there, they sort of backed away a little, struck themselves, I guess, by the thingness of it.

  And I came up to them and pushed between them and I looked at Tony Marcello, or what used to be him, because that’s how I saw it, clearly. His body was laid out chest down and flat, his arms at his side, his palms up, his face turned away from me, and his death fell into my mind and then straight to the center of my own chest and into my own limbs, which suddenly were sharply aware of the tenuousness of their own animation. There was a terrible lumpenness about this body before me, a heaviness, an absence. Tony Marcello was gone. Gone and done with. And all of a sudden, from the body of this boy who was no Jew at all, far from it, from the body of this boy who was a Christian, at least by the prayers of his mama and his mama’s mama, from the body of this boy, I finally felt the thing that happened to all those Jews as real.

  So I guess I didn’t put Tony Marcello out of me at all. He turned into a cry in a subway tunnel, a puff of vapor from a manhole, a scattering of bones on a sidewalk. And I really did dream of Joe Hill. For weeks after that, every night, I’d wake in my bunk bed and there must have been the sounds of other boys sleeping all around me and the chirr of crickets outside but all I’d hear was this silence, this clear and deafening absence of Tony Marcello’s breath, and I’d be in a cold sweat and I knew I’d been dreaming of Joe Hill. He stood on a pier by a lake and they shot him dead and he fell in the water and disappeared without a trace, and I knew he was gone and I knew he was dead, no matter what he said, he was dead. And in my dream, he was a Jew.

  And Jacob Klein dreamed again. His words stopped and he dreamed and I was afraid of his dreams. I am afraid once more. Of Arthur’s dreams, of Viola’s dreams, of Judith Marie Nash’s dreams, of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s dreams, of the dreams of all those creatures there below. I am afraid. For them and for myself. They live so intensely with such difficult desiderata. And I Think I’m Going Out of My Head. It is not Jacob Klein before me. He has returned to his life down there, his memory of me gone forever, like Tony Marcello. This is one thing that has brought on this spasm of fear, I realize. I am Tony Marcello to hundreds on this planet. I am before them, I am even part of them, I share their voices, and then I am gone forever. Worse. Tony Marcello’s body was gone and yet Jacob Klein kept a memory of him. I am gone from these lives and nothing of me remains. Nothing. Except with Edna Bradshaw. And with Minnie Butterworth, whom I allowed to remember. Does she think of me still? But no. Now it is she who is dead. Almost certainly dead. But I am not. I am not. Though I am in no one’s dreams on this planet, I am still alive. How fuzzy in my thinking I have become. How self-absorbed. I turned to Jacob Klein’s voice seeking the third red white and blue eagle and the big jackpot of understanding, I would know this species at last, not in my own terms but in theirs, but I cannot put these three voices together, I am losing the meaning of even any one of them. I have only blanks before me.

  I look at Arthur sleeping. His fingers move slightly. He touches someone in his dream, perhaps. I am reminded of Eddie the yellow cat. When he sleeps, his paws sometimes move, faintly, as if he is running. His toes flare and his claws come out. He dreams. He chases other subspecies creatures in his dreams to grab them and kill them and eat them. Perhaps the place where dreams come from is impervious to my power to bring forgetfulness. Perhaps they have all dreamed of me, all these visitors from Earth. Who is to say? Perhaps they chase me and grab me and kill me in their dreams.

  I am growing quite hysterical, am I not? But, of course, I am very tired. Very tired. And this planet spins on, pulling the end of its millennium toward it. Only a few hours away, and I have no plan for what I must do. I think to wake Arthur now and return him to his sleeping place. I see myself doing this very thing, though I am aware that I have not moved at all from my chair. This is merely my intention for the next few minutes playing itself out in my mind. But no. I am actually doing this thing. Surely I am. I rise and touch Arthur on the arm and he snaps awake and looks up at me.

  “It is time,” I say.

  “Have you come to take me home?” Arthur asks.

  “Only to the place on my ship where you sleep,” I say.

  He reaches up and grasps my arm. “Am I in heaven?”

  “You are not dead.”

  “Aren’t you the Lord?”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. You’ve come to take me.”

  “How do you know?” I say.

  “We have been waiting for you
. Forever.”

  “Please,” I say. “Come now. Sleep.”

  And Arthur falls from the chair to his knees and bends low before me. “Lord,” he says. “I will rest in you.”

  “Only your voice will. I am sorry. I wish it were more.”

  And now the door to the interview room opens with a great whoosh of air and with a flood of light from the corridor and I turn and there are silhouettes there, one and then another and they are sliding into the room, another silhouette enters and another, and they are simply dark, sharply outlined shapes, and there are more coming in and they gather around me now and the lights catch them, there are so many of these creatures that all the lights of the room flare up at once and it is very bright, and they are the rest of my twelve, my Viola and my Lucky and my Mary and my Hank and my Trey and my Hudson and my Claudia and my Digger and my Misty and my Jared and now my Citrus, who breaks through all of them and she has wiped the blackness from her mouth and her lips are pale, the color of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s thighs, and the black spikes of Citrus’s hair have dissolved into long silken curls of russet which fall about her shoulders and the metal piercings are gone from her face and all of these voices cry out, “Lord, Lord what will you have us do?”

  And I cry, “I am.”

  And I wait. And I look at these twelve faces hovering before me and I feel these twelve minds waiting for more. And I think, Surely that is what this world needs to understand. It is the fundamental truth I have to speak. From that truth all things will follow for each of them. But they wait, they do not respond, the faces hover blankly.

  Then Hudson says, “You am what?”