Mr. Spaceman Read online

  “We must look in on our visitors now,” I say.

  Edna ends her embrace and steps back and shifts about briefly in her dress once more and pats at her hairdo, though it is stiffly inert from All the Body and Holding Power She Will Ever Need, a state attainable from certain spray cans that I periodically beam up to our vessel. Since I married Edna, it is quite remarkable, the wondrous variety of seemingly commonplace things that one of the finest fruits of my planet’s technology has been used to acquire. Not that I have any regrets. My own daily life, like the lives of my fellow countrymen, can be rather stark in design: brush-textured alloys and tightly focused spot lighting and great, high-ceiling shadows. For all her stuff, which she has begun to bring into my existence, I am grateful to Edna. Personally, of course, since she is my wife, but professionally, too. These things are part of what I must try to learn.

  I turn now to the great door into the Reception Hall and I move my hand and it opens. Edna and I have not discussed this moment in any detail. She asked me if she could be at my side when the next visitors arrived, and I thought this was a very good idea. There is always a period of anxiety at first, and Edna, being recognizable as one of their own, would put my visitors at ease. I said yes to her and she said she would handle everything and so I am not surprised at the name tags and the party dress. In the Reception Hall, however, there are some surprises.

  The bus sits, just as it should, in a great swath of light in the center of the hall, which recedes into soothing darkness in all directions. Except one. Just as my vessel’s intuitive light—as natural as a cloudless morning—immediately picks up Edna and me and moves with us as we move—so, too, has a wide column of light appeared in a space to my right, about twenty paces away from the bus. I look carefully in this direction because the things being illuminated are very strange to me. There is a large hovering drape there with red roses marching around the edges—masking a table, I realize now—and on its top is a profusion of things.

  “Come and see,” Edna says, taking my hand and pulling me toward the table. “This is going to be a lovely time for all. I’ve made everything here myself, nothing store-bought, except the ingredients, of course. That’s Southern Hospitality, and if you’re married to me, you’re married to Southern. Course you’re from the South in your own place, aren’t you?”

  She pauses for me to verify this. She has made this inquiry before. The distinction is uncommon where I am from and so I compute the answer again and, from what I understand, latitudinally, of her question, I am able to reassure her once more. “Yes, I am from the Southern part of my own place.”

  “See?” my wife Edna Bradshaw says, “this is just the touch you need. Now these are cheese straws and these are sausage balls—I had to make a choice between Jimmy Dean and Tennessee Pride, but I always tend to ‘Take Home a Package of Tennessee Pride.’ I like that, you know, thinking you can take home something that precious in a package, though my pride’d be Alabama pride, but never mind. At the end of the day, all you really have is just pride in your sausage, is all, and Tennessee is close enough for that.”

  My Edna Bradshaw pauses with this thought and an unmistakable sadness comes upon her. I will ask her about this feeling at a more appropriate moment, but already she is transforming her face into a perky, welcoming thing and she moves on down the table. She says, lifting her hand toward a great round, creviced globe remarkably similar in appearance to the outer moon of my home planet, “Now this is a pecan ball. Dried beef isn’t good enough for me when I make it. This baby has three pounds of real beef jerky. You remember when I had you beam up some things from that truck stop near where I used to live? A truck driver should know good jerky, it seems to me.”

  I work hard at understanding what Edna is explaining to me, but the best I can do is record her observations in my memory and hope that I will one day fit all of this together. Food. Hospitality. I do know these to be crucial concepts in this world, and Edna’s self-assurance in these complex matters makes me happy to have her good counsel, and—I am not reluctant to speak this, for on my planet we greatly revere learning and expertise—Edna’s understanding of these concepts makes me love her even more. She moves along the table and says, “Here’s the low-fat neighborhood at our little spread. Carrot curls and rosettes of radishes. We Earth-lings are fragile creatures, for all of that. You can put that down in the book you’re keeping on us, or whatever it is.”

  “My records are increasingly full of your wisdom,” I say, though she resists the clear sexual invitation of my words. Which, I realize, is an act of the very wisdom I have spoken of, given our more pressing task at hand.

  “And to top it all off,” she says, “we have a little indulgence for those of our guests with a sweet tooth. A tray full of Mississippi Mud.”

  I quickly sort through all that I’ve learned about eating customs on this planet and I am at a loss to find a precedent for this taste in the primary species. Or even a subspecies, for that matter. Edna laughs at the apparent display of my confusion.

  “Not real mud, you silly spaceman. It’s just a name. These are my best brownies with melted marshmallows, melted chocolate chips, and finely chopped pecans on top. You can see how versatile the pecan is, right here. I’ve used it in both a dessert and a main dish.” She motions back to our deeply creviced outer moon, and then gently tugs me to the end of the table and a large bowl full of a pale green fluid. It is precisely the color of the life substance flowing in my very veins, even foaming into more substantial eddies, just as in my body. Surely this is as deceptively figurative as the Mississippi mud, this bowl of my blood, but I am suddenly intensely conscious of my hands, which is where we feel fear in our bodies on my planet. My hands grow quickly hot and threaten to stiffen.

  “It’s Presbyterian Punch,” she says. “You’re not Presbyterian, are you? Of course not. Silly me. You just look a little funny, all the sudden, and I don’t want to cause any offense, though the Presbyterians I know don’t take offense at much of anything.”

  Edna’s lovely, multilayered, self-dialoging effusion of words has its usual calming effect on me and I raise my hands before me, rippling the last hot spots out of them.

  “I love it when you do that,” Edna says of this process. Then she adds, “Which reminds me, I want to apologize that all we have for these folks is finger food.”

  My hands go instantly rigid. Before me I have sixteen oaken trunks in terrified uprightness waiting for a strike of lightning: I put it thus to embrace the metaphorical impulses of this planet and, as is the great benefit of our ability to take on the perspectives of those we are near, I suddenly understand one more figurative turn of speech.

  Edna says, “I forgot to have you beam me up some plastic utensils.”

  “Of course,” I say, dropping my hands out of sight. “So these visitors must use their fingers to eat the food you have prepared.”

  “We can do a sit-down dinner later,” Edna says, and then her words veer off sharply, something I have learned to be prepared for. “Hi, honey,” she cries. “Welcome. It’s all right.”

  I am determined to keep up with her. “Hi, honey,” I reply in a similarly excited voice. “Certainly a sit-down dinner will be all right.” But I realize that her gaze is no longer directed at me. She is looking over my shoulder, and I turn to see what it is.

  The bus waits in the light. The windows are dark-tinted but near the front is a face pressed hard against the glass, gaping, eyes wide in terror, taking in all of this. The face presses harder, the eyes widen even further, and I understand that I am myself the source for this surge of distress. My face is different in many respects from the faces on this planet. My wife Edna Bradshaw has always spoken lovingly of my quite large eyes that resemble in shape Eddie the cat’s eyes and my total lack of hair or fur of any kind and my mouth that is thin and sinuous—I have a very nice mouth by my home planet’s standards, but it has nothing like the outfold of lips that I must say I find enchanting in Edna. I und
erstand how the sudden turning of this man in the large suit—that is, me—and his having a face like mine would cause the fear I see in the bus window. It is hard to look directly upon me. All of our visitors over the years have had to come to terms with our faces, one way or another. But in these first moments I am usually wearing my wide-brimmed felt hat to soften the effect.

  The face vanishes from the window and Edna brisks past me. “Come on, Desi. These folks need some food.”

  2

  And so it has come to pass that the twelve sojourners on the bus that carries LUCK upon its face have disembarked into the Reception Hall of my vessel and have each been given a name tag by my wife Edna Bradshaw, though she struggled at times, her Magic Marker in hand, to make them understand what she wished from them, for they were groggy from the deep sleep induced by our acquisition beam, and names are fragile things, after all. And these visitors are groggy still, though one of them has just now approached the delicious and welcoming food prepared by my wife. This is a good sign, even though most of them continue to drift uncertainly about the hall.

  Normally in this process, before Edna Bradshaw was my wife, I would take these visitors straight from the bus to the warm and comforting darkness of the rooms prepared for them on our vessel. Then I would soon begin to interview them, bringing forth their voices and listening to and recording them in the vast and sparkling energy fields of our memory machines from where we can draw these voices back, again and again, and become one with them. This is our process. But tonight I am content to let the good times roll. This group has been specially chosen. These twelve are destined to help me in this time of my greatest challenge. It will soon be a very great challenge for their whole planet, as well. And so, for tonight, I stand beside the table of food. They drift to me—are herded to me, actually, by the charm and energy of my wife Edna Bradshaw—and I say, “Have a cheese straw. Have a sausage ball. Have a cup of cold Presbyterian Punch to quench your thirst.”

  I have been saying things like this for many minutes and I have been met only with glazed stares or startled leaps. I have just begun to fear that I have made a mistake; they should be in their dark spaces, sleeping, resting, adjusting. But a few moments ago, a young man perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four years old stopped before the table and looked at the food and he shook his head violently and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and then he dropped his hands and opened his eyes again, wide, trying to come to terms with what was before him.

  His tag says, Hi, my name is JARED. So I say, “Please, Mr. Jared, take that silver knife and cut a chunk off the outer moon of my home planet.” This is a little joke, based on my previous thoughts about the pecan ball, though I instantly realize that he has no frame of reference to allow him to see the humor.

  My dear Edna appears at his elbow. “Go on ahead. It’s a real pecan ball. I don’t understand that moon stuff either.” She gives me a wink, to let me know that her implicit criticism of me is itself a little joke, and then she begins to cut the pecan ball for this young man. She continues, “My husband thinks everybody would just automatically know about his home planet. Like my daddy’d sometimes say something he clearly expected me to understand about Mobile and I didn’t have a clue. See, I’m from Bovary, Alabama, and that’s a far thing from Mobile, let me tell you, and I’m not talking about miles. I only went to Mobile once and I didn’t like it, though I’ve been some places even farther than that with my husband the spaceman and I liked them a lot. That’s him there, Jared, looking at you with those big old eyes. He’s a good man, I can tell you. A sweet and kind man and so you can just eat your pecan ball with a peaceful mind.”

  Jared blinks at me and looks at the chunk of pecan ball on the paper plate in his hand and then he makes a tiny snapping movement with his head—I have seen this gesture many times over the years—and I know he is fully present at last. This has always been a difficult moment for visitors, the first understanding that this is not a dream, but Jared surprises me. He lifts his paper plate slightly toward Edna and speaks as if we have long been engaged in a casual conversation. “So’d you make this yourself?”

  “What a sweet boy,” my wife says. “Yes, I did.”

  “Cool,” Jared says to Edna. “You’re human, right? From Earth?”

  “From Alabama.”

  “Where’d you two meet?”

  Edna is already cutting another piece of the pecan ball for Jared, though he has not yet begun to eat what he has. She says, “In the parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bovary. He’d been listening to me with his machines.” She deposits more of the pecan ball on the young man’s plate.

  “We can hear all your words,” I try to explain, “but through the machines they are very confusing. And so, What is a Guy to Do? That is why we need to be Oh So Much Closer and then we can Get to Know You Better.”

  And from across the Reception Hall a woman’s voice cries out “Oh my god!”

  “Oh dear,” Edna says.

  With a look of suddenly remembering a thing forgotten, Jared says, “Where’s Citrus?”

  “Arthur!” the woman’s voice cries.

  “There’s lime sherbert in the punch,” Edna says.

  “My girlfriend,” Jared says. He looks around, “There she is.”

  I follow his gaze even as the woman’s voice calls out “Arthur!” once more and Edna excuses herself and moves off.

  Away from the others, standing with her face turned up, faintly smiling into the dark, her body clothed such that it is nearly indistinguishable from the shadows, is a young woman with a spiky spray of deep-space black hair and black lips and a dozen tiny glints of metal about her face—rings and studs that she has attached to her flesh as if her very image would fly apart without these connecting devices.

  A body lurches near, cutting off the girl in black. I read, Hi, my name is TREY. This man, clearly still not fully present, mumbles, “Slots. Where are the goddamn slots. Seen the goddamn buffet four times already, but no slots.” And he is gone.

  “Citrus, hey,” Jared calls, his mouth full of pecan log, bits of the nuts spewing mistily into the spot lighting around us. The young woman continues to smile toward the invisible ceiling.

  “She is not quite awake,” I say.

  Jared looks at me. He, too, has metal on his face, though only a bit, two rings in an ear. He waves what is left of his pecan ball in a vague, sweeping gesture, meaning, I believe, to draw my attention to the entire spaceship. He says, “I knew there was something like this going on in the universe. You know? It’s, like, the thing I really expected.”

  “You are a prescient young man,” I say.

  Edna arrives now with her arm intertwined with the arm of a small, elderly woman, VIOLA, according to her name tag. “This is my husband, Desi,” Edna says.

  “Citrus!” Jared calls.

  Viola is frozen, wide-eyed, gazing at me, and Edna looks toward Jared’s girlfriend, whose face has descended now, though is still uncomprehending. “Oh,” Edna says, “you mean Judith?”

  Jared barks in laughter. “Judith? She’s not Judith anymore. She’s long past Judith.”

  “Well, honey, that’s the name she gave me for her tag,” Edna says, and she turns her attention back to the woman on her arm. “Come on now, Viola, his eyes are real pretty, don’t you think?” She is referring to my eyes, trying to deal with Viola’s astonishment at the sight of me.

  “Did she really tell you ‘Judith’ was her name, Mrs. Desi?”

  “You’re such a sweet boy.”

  “Arthur!” Viola cries, though in a less strident voice, a fully conscious voice.

  “Her name is Citrus.” Jared, who seemed so quickly at ease with his new surroundings, now sounds Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World. He looks sadly down at his plate of pecan log.

  A man’s angular face, dark from an African heritage, appears, floating behind Edna’s head with only blackness all around. His eyes fix on me and he brings forth a rich
, mellifluous, and ringingly loud voice: “Your honor, why in the motherfuck is the jury out of its box? What’s all this milling about?”

  “Whoa,” Jared says. “What’s his problem?”

  Now the face floats to the side and a whole man emerges into the spot of light, which glares off his name tag: Hi, my name is HUDSON. He wears a dark suit tailored tightly to cling to him in the way I think Edna wishes for my suit to fit.

  I try to relieve Jared’s mind. “Did you hear how this clearly educated man expressed himself, Mr. Jared? You are all emerging slowly from a state of suspension. You will all speak for a while using words from the unswept refuse of your minds. Your Citrus no doubt called herself Judith in that state.”

  “If the jury won’t sit, then they must acquit!” Hudson cries.

  “You see? He quotes perhaps from a poet he has long forgotten.”

  “Arthur! Help!” Viola is looking desperately around.

  “Come on, honey,” Edna says to her. “Let’s go find him.” The two women move off and Hudson draws nearer, squinting at my face.

  “What kind of judge are you?” he says. “A Reagan appointee?”

  I motion to my name tag and Hudson focuses instead on my hand, squinting harder.

  Jared tries to explain. “He’s a spaceman. An alien. This is the start of the new millennium, see. We’re on his spaceship and we’re heading into some other galaxy to be studied as representatives of Earth, since all these older generations of ours have fucked up our planet so bad and these superior beings are scared to death of us. Right?”