Mr. Spaceman Read online

  We went out to Overlook Hill next to the intersection of State 340 and Farm 2491 so we could watch that Branch Davidian cult in their compound after they’d barricaded themselves up and were holding off the FBI and all. Not really watch. It took binoculars to see anything from there and we just brought our Bibles and our “Forwarding Address: Hell” tracts. There was probably some closer place to go, but this was close enough for Daddy, and for a bunch of others, too, because there was all types on the hill. The place was crammed full of those making their righteousness clear to the world as a testament and those acting in sin from their unrighteousness, supporting this cult and its Satan-controlled leader. And there was a bunch of others in between, press people and picnickers and people selling T-shirts and gimme caps and hot dogs and stuff. I wandered away in between prayers and used my own little bit of money when I got hungry and had a Koresh Burger, which was cooked over charcoal by a guy wearing a “WACO—We Ain’t Coming Out” T-shirt, and it maybe was the best-tasting hamburger I’ve ever had in my life and I was loving it till my father saw me and he came and grabbed this meal conceived in unrighteousness out of my hand and gave me a stoning-by-the-elders look and he threw the Koresh Burger down on the ground and crushed it under his heel. There’s nothing in the Bible about littering, as far as I know, so this wasn’t either here or there in terms of his witnessing to the world, from my daddy’s point of view. But he was ready to do me in, as a true witness to God’s word, right there and then, if only this was the sort of times when that was possible, but lucky for me it’s the wicked End Times instead. So he grabbed me hard by the arm and dragged me back and put me on my knees next to my always-faithful brother and my daddy started to pray for the Triumph of Jesus over the wickedness of the world as was clearly represented by those people hiding and sinning in that cult compound right here in Waco. My daddy may even have started talking in tongues or something because I stopped hearing any sense in his words at all. He was saying things like hunga marunga adenoid hallelujah. Everyone we know at church and at a lot of churches in Waco would say these were inspired words my daddy was saying, he was filled with the Holy Spirit. But as far as I was concerned he was just fading farther and farther away from me, at that time.

  And then it was the next Monday about noon and I was eating maybe the worst-tasting hamburger I’ve ever had in my life, in our school cafeteria, and thinking about that hamburger on Overlook Hill, when there was a big stir and we all went out to the parking lot and off in the distance, out to the northeast of town in the direction of the Branch Davidians, there was a pillar of smoke as dark as the worst grime you’ve ever seen, like the color of those people’s souls, I thought, and as soon as I did, I knew that thought came from my daddy, how he saw the world.

  And that night at the dinner table my daddy prayed to God in praise of how He’d shown us all in this family the true path and saved us from hell where every last one of those folks who’d burned up today was going to feel the fiery wrath of God for all eternity.

  And I said, What about the children?

  And he said, They have been brought to perdition by their parents. Don’t you think there was children in Sodom when the fires came down from heaven and no one was saved except Lot and his two daughters and even his wife was turned into a pillar of salt?

  And will you pass me some? I said. Salt, that is.

  And my daddy did and I put it on my hamburger which my mama had made and which tasted pretty bad, it needed more salt than I could give it, but I shook the salt out and I thought of the body of Lot’s wife making things taste good long after she was dead.

  And I was wondering: If the fires ever were to come down in Waco, on everybody, not just the Branch Davidians, would God first send his angels to the house of this true and faithful servant of the Lord, my daddy, and say, Go, take your wife and your son and your daughter and go from this Waco, for it is full of iniquity and will be destroyed, even the women and the children? And I looked at my daddy then and if the answer was no, God wouldn’t do that for this man, then my daddy was full of shit all along about what was right and holy and what wasn’t. And if the answer was yes, if God was such that He’d pull the four of us out of here and burn up all the rest and send them to hell for eternity, then that wasn’t a God I should give a good fuck about. That’s what I realized right there and then.

  So I went off. I made my plan and Daddy never knew about it till I was gone, but the night before I was hitting the road, he came to my room and knocked real soft and I said, Come in, and he sat on the side of my bed and he said, Honey, I know we have our differences. I know I seem real hard on you sometimes. But I just want you to know that it’s because I love you. I care about your happiness, not just today and tomorrow but forever.

  My daddy says this real soft and he pats my hand and he goes out without trying to wring any promises or anything from me.

  But these were just words, really. Just words. Since then, I’ve thought about the words that weren’t there in what he said and could never be there.

  Like: I guess the children are okay, the ones that got burnt up.

  Or: Certain things just don’t make sense to me either about who God is or what He really wants.

  And I’ve thought about the words that weren’t there in what he said but you could hear them lurking outside my door in the hall ready to jump back in his mouth as soon as he left.

  Like: I may seem hard but this is the way the God of the Universe wants me to be, so too bad.

  Or: We may have our differences but I’m always right.

  Or: I love you, but I’d be ready in a second to offer your life up—or in these wimpy times at least just cast you out of the family—if I figure you’re lost to God’s Word as I see it.

  My daddy still had all that in him and on that night he didn’t say anything to contradict it, but in spite of my knowing all the shit things he simply wasn’t saying aloud, I lay there in the dark after he’d gone and I started weeping and quaking and wishing he meant those other things that could never be. I guess it was the pat on the hand or just the tone of his voice or something, and I knew those things were as empty as his words, they were gestures intended for himself, testifying to what a gentle and understanding father he was when in fact he wasn’t anything like that. But still I trembled and wept and then I got angry at myself about it because I knew the truth. I trembled like the tail of our tabby cat when he’s taking a shit, but I couldn’t quite get Daddy out of my system. Not till the next morning. That’s when I went out the door and only I knew what I was going to do and as soon as I hit the end of the driveway, I was fine and I’ve never looked back.

  And I started dreaming about Jesus, about the nails in His hands and His feet and how I felt about that, how close I felt to Him over those nails, even though part of me was ready to throw the baby Jesus out with my daddy’s bathwater. And I felt a man’s body-thing about Jesus at that, as terrible as that sounds. It’s like something I’ve learned later, in the places I’ve lived in and from the people I’ve been with. You put metal through your flesh and it’s a real intimate thing, is what I’ve learned. And it really feels like that to me. You say, My body will give way for this hard, sharp thing, you can push a metal thing right through me and there it sits, touching me inside my flesh all the time. You can look at it and you can touch it and you can think about it and you’re looking at and touching and thinking about the inside of my body, where I’m really living and where usually it’s impossible for any other person to get into. But with these rings and these studs and these nails and spikes, somebody else can flow right on inside me, he can be in here with me. And when I found my boyfriend Jared and he found me we just knew that these were things that we had to do with our bodies together. And I knew it was about Jesus, too, from my dreams, though I’ve never said that to Jared. Not my daddy’s Jesus. My own personal Jesus.

  Judith Marie Nash who calls herself Citrus falls silent and my own voice falls silent, too, for she was in
me and I was in her, as if her words and my voice were nail and flesh. And her eyes fill with tears, as often happens with my wife Edna Bradshaw, and with so many of the beings on this planet. Tears are unknown to my species. But I find them to be wonderful things, much more direct and honest than these endless words, and they taste of the vast oceans of this place, which I know from the offer of my wife to kiss her cheek which was wet with tears on our wedding night, tears she said were prompted by joy. But these tears in Citrus’s eyes are not from joy, I know, and I must acknowledge that even these fragments of the sea are filled with complexity and ambiguity on this planet. They spill over now, Citrus’s tears, and I am moved to Reach Out and Touch Someone. Earlier I had touched Citrus without giving her my heart. Now I lay my hands on hers and I let my heart go, I let it enter her with each beat, and she looks down at this in wonder.

  Then she lifts her face again to me and she says, “Are you Jesus come again?” She is perfectly clearheaded now.

  “No,” I say. “I am a spaceman.”

  And she says, “If the Word is not a literal thing but still a holy thing, then perhaps it was you who was prophesied to come.”

  This is an alarming idea. “I would know, wouldn’t I?”

  Citrus looks at our hands again. “Perhaps not.”

  I feel her longing now, very strongly, as if her heart is beating back into me in return. “I am …” I say only this and fall silent.

  “Yes,” she says, as if I have completed the thought.

  I struggle on with words. “I am no one,” I say.

  “I can feel your sacred heart,” she says, still staring at our hands.

  And at this moment there is a thump at the door and my wife Edna Bradshaw has flung it open with her foot. She is standing there, silhouetted by the light from the corridor, one foot up, both her hands holding a tray full of Citrus’s breakfast.

  “Are you done?” she asks.

  I gently disengage my hands from Citrus’s and she makes a soft sound of understanding and disappointment and yearning and sadness and hope and even more feelings than that, all of which are only diminished and distorted by the naming of them with these words, for they truly exist only in the beating of a heart and a calfskin book drooping in a hand and twin nipple rings and a grilled hamburger on a hilltop and a black slash of a mouth and a pillar of dark smoke and a planet three-quarters covered with tears.

  8

  Citrus has taken her breakfast from my wife without rising from the place where she spoke to me and she has eaten it with the tray on her lap. She has the most meticulous of manners about her eating, having cut her Spicy, Finger-Lickin’-Good sausage into tiny morsels, which she chewed carefully and separately from her eggs, which she kept separate from her grits, which she kept separate from her biscuit, a time for each thing and each thing in its own time, and each morsel was carefully attended to without a trace left on her mouth, which she gently dabbed with her paper napkin. And she never licked her fingers, and I was grateful for that, as anyone observing my species and the significance of our fingertips might easily understand. I sensed in Citrus’s table manners the influence of her father, though I think she herself was unaware of this connection, given her careful dissociation from him in her body and her words.

  My wife Edna Bradshaw stood nearby and watched Citrus eat, her own mouth occasionally opening and biting and chewing faintly as this young woman consumed her food, as if Edna, as well, were part of a species from a distant galaxy, and her mission—like mine in regards to the speaking of words—was to observe the inhabitants of this planet in the eating of food, so that their mastication and hers could become one, as a path to understanding.

  When Citrus was finished, Edna took up the tray from Citrus’s lap and she said, “Feeling better, honey?”

  Citrus nodded yes and I asked her to return with me to her place on the spaceship and she complied without my even having to wave my hand. Edna gave me a knowing nod, which I did not completely understand, as I guided Citrus out the door.

  And Edna’s nod lingered in my head as Citrus and I moved along the corridors, and now we enter her cubicle and Citrus asks, “Am I to sleep?”

  “It is best,” I say. “This process is full of stress for your species.”

  “Will I ever see Jared again?”

  “Why should you doubt that?” I ask, though I mean it not as a question but as a declaration of reassurance. I have learned this particular strangeness of Earth words over the years. Sometimes a question is meant as a statement. Sometimes a statement is meant as a question. For example, “I care about your happiness” can mean, “Will you ever learn to follow my plan for you?” Which, however, though a question, can mean, “I cannot imagine you ever turning out the way I want.” Which, though a statement, can mean, “Will you lead me to cast you away?” Which can mean, though a question, its own answer: “Yes.” These are the times when even my own Extra-Strength brain can grow confused.

  Waving her hand before her softly, widely, as if she were trying to send me off to sleep, Citrus says, “What if all this is the true meaning of Paul’s words in his first letter to the Thessalonians when he prophesies that those in God’s church will be caught up together with those who have died in Jesus—caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air?”

  She pauses, looking into my eyes intently, a rare thing for a being from this planet, for my eyes are not easy to accept, they are so large, they are so deep, by this planet’s standards, but she looks into them as if she is ready to see me for what I am without fear. And what am I in this place? I grow stiff-fingered at the thought of that question, which Citrus inevitably makes me address. And her question is not a question. I have caught her and others up in the clouds and she is meeting me in the air and she is convinced that she understands all of that in a way fraught with eschatological meaning.

  “Jared is here too,” I say.

  “Cool,” she says. “Oh that’s cool.”

  “But this is not …” I begin and then pause, for I do not know how to address her intense belief.

  “It says the dead in Christ have been taken up first. … You have the dead here, too, don’t you?” She is saying that she knows I do.

  And I am led to consider in what sense this might be true. I think of Minnie Butterworth and of Whiplash Willie Jones and of Herbert Jenkins who thought I was a hep cat in my zoot suit, and of many others, all dead and buried on their tiny fragment of cosmic rock but alive still in me, in my voice joined with theirs. Metaphorically, that is. For my species also dies. The individuals of all species everywhere in the known universe die. I know what this means. Or, more precisely, I know how little any being knows of what this means.

  But living here in the midst of the clouds in this world full of words and passions, I am moved to understand things in new ways. I feel that those individuals I have known here who have died are still alive in more than a metaphorical way, more than as a construct of words. They are real inside me, moving about. Speaking. I hear their voices, even without the aid of my machines. These individual beings are very much alive, in my head and in my place of song and in the very pulse of my fingertips.

  “You do, don’t you?” she says.

  “Do?”

  “The dead are taken up here. They are alive here in the clouds.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Hallelujah.”

  But I must be honest. I say, “In a sense.”

  She does not take up this qualification. She says, “I will sleep, Lord. Thy will, not mine, be done.” Citrus lies down on her bed, which is notched into the softly glowing walls in this space that I worry now is not sufficient for her, or for any of my visitors. But she seems not to mind. The feeling in me, however, remains. I want to make things good for her. I sit beside her on the edge of her bed. I pat her hand. I wish to use words that will reassure her, give her the hopefulness about the universe that she seeks. In short, I wish to lie. But she and I have our differences on this su
bject. What is true, if I speak it, will seem hard on her. Still, I find myself caring about Judith Marie Nash’s happiness. I pat her hand some more. I could say these things now that are true: her view of the world is still being directed by her father; I am simply a spaceman. But I remain silent for the moment. Happiness, on this planet, is fragile and fleeting. There are so many souls here, yearning, and I myself yearn to touch them all, to give them peace. But I am simply a spaceman. I am.

  There is the sound of a rapid, fleshy fluttering in the room. I look down. I am still patting her hand. At a drastically brisk pace, it seems. I am unaccustomed to the use of this gesture. Judith’s face is turned slightly toward the wall. She glows from the light emanating there. Her eyes are full of tears. And my hand—committed somewhat independently now to this attempt to redeem the gesture of her father on her last night in his house, to give the gesture the sincerity she so desires—my hand pats away furiously. I am desperate to stop her tears.

  “Can you help me to do your will? To sleep?” she asks.

  I bring my patting hand to a stop. She and I are both relieved. I lift my hand and her eyes are still lambent with tears and I pass my hand before her and her face disappears and my hand moves on and her face reappears and her eyes are closed and she is asleep until I call her forth again. I am content. She sleeps.