Mr. Spaceman Read online

  I rise and I make my way down the corridor, a faint snoring or rustling of limbs coming from this cubicle and that. They all are sleeping, my guests, my children, and I believe that they are happy, for this moment at least. They are safe. But then I think of their dreams and I think of Citrus’s dream of the man named Jesus and of the nails hammered through his hands and feet and I grow afraid. Is this the role that Citrus would have me play? The stories this species tells itself over and over, through generations, all seem to have certain endings that are inevitable. My fingers grow stiff again in fear. The sounds to the left and to the right, coming from the darkness where these creatures sleep, suddenly drive me forward faster, faster, I am gliding fast, away from the sleepers lest they awaken and see me as Citrus does.

  But now there is a turning to the corridor and another and I am before our own living space—mine and my wife Edna Bradshaw’s—and I move through the yielding door and Edna is there. She is sitting on our genuine Early American Reproduction Couch with Comfy Built-In Recliner that we brought up from her trailer after our marriage. Eddie the yellow cat is purring loudly in her lap and she has characteristically left the recliner end for me to sit in. She has declared several times that she loves her one true man sitting in a recliner, especially a recliner that she picked out even before she met that man. It was Fate that brought us together. And the recliner is a sign of that.

  “Hello, darling, I am home,” I say.

  “Hello, darling, did you have a hard day?” Edna says.

  “I am still having my day,” I say, though I know this exchange is supposed to proceed less literally.

  “I’m still trying to adjust to that, Desi honey. Are we doing more breakfasts? It’s getting on into the afternoon, isn’t it? Though I never really know up here.”

  “Perhaps we will postpone breakfasts for a while,” I say.

  “Course, it’s always breakfast time for our guests, isn’t it? Seeing as they’re always just waking up after a long sleep?”

  “You are making a happy home for me and for our guests,” I say. “I rely on your judgment.”

  This pleases my wife Edna Bradshaw and she beams me a sweet smile and strokes the yellow cat Eddie with increased vigor and she nods her head toward the recliner and waits for me to sit down.

  I do. This is a difficult matter for me, but one that I am willing to take on for the sake of my wife Edna Bradshaw. The Comfy Adjustable Headrest thrusts my head forward with extreme Discomfy, from either of its two adjustable positions, and the Doctor Designed Lumbar Control buckles me outward in the middle, perhaps to give the anonymous doctor better access for abdominal surgery, and I pause in this process and Edna says, as she is always quick to do, “Go ahead. Stretch out and relax.” And I do what she is convinced—beyond the powers of her observation to contradict—gives me pleasure. And since she is my loving wife, my presumed pleasure clearly gives her pleasure, so I reach down and throw the handle and my torso flies back and my feet fly up and I am Reclining in Total Comfort, or so is the public assertion of those who make and sell and appreciate this machine. But I am far from that promised state. Far. Though I am now reclining, my head remains slung forward, running a hot flame down the back of my neck, and my midsection remains bulged, though now upward, inducing tendrils of pain to snake off my spine so that I find myself wishing for the doctor to get on with the surgery. And my vision is filled with my sixteen toes arrayed in rigid response to the severity of my discomfort.

  “There now,” Edna says. “Isn’t that nice?”

  I wish for that to be a true question instead of a joyful declaration. But it is not. She believes unquestioningly in the benefits of this place she has made for me. “Yes,” I say, understanding that I suffer this for her.

  And she falls silent. I turn my head to look at her as best I can from this position. She is sideways, in profile, partly blocked by the curve of the headrest. But still I can sense a movement of regret in her. I think of the knowing nod she gave me when I saw her last. “Something is on your mind,” I say.

  Edna replies at once. “For a moment there earlier, with that girl, with me cooking for her and you taking care of her like you do, it was almost like we were her mama and daddy. You know?”

  I look at my tentacle-like toes, fixed, from an increasingly complex discomfort, in the middle of the air. I think of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s toes.

  “Isn’t that a sweet thought?” she declares.

  Her toes are much shorter than my own.

  “You are an excellent mother figure,” I say. And there are noticeably fewer of them, her toes.

  “I’ve always wanted that,” she says, sitting with both feet flat on the floor, primly so, her feet hidden in her beflowered house slippers, and though her toes are not visible to me, I know that the hard tips of them are red, as red as certain giant stars, made so by her own hand.

  “Do I disappoint you?” I ask and this is a real question, for though I am charmed by her toes, they are dramatically different from my own. Not that toes are involved in reproduction on my planet. I am asking a direct question now of my wife but I am thinking in indirections. Her body and mine are different in regrettable ways. We certainly have fundamentally correct parts for each other, mechanically speaking. I am, happily, her spaceman lover as well as her husband. But there are deoxyribonucleic differences.

  “No, my dear darling spaceman, you have never disappointed me,” she says and I am glad that I hear this not as a further question but as a clear declaration. She even shifts in my direction to emphasize her words and she does this abruptly and single-mindedly enough that Eddie the yellow cat cries out his own sort of words, words that to my untutored ear sound like both unequivocal declaration and indignant question. “No,” Edna says again and I hope that she will not say it a third time and bring the doubt of too much protest into my mind, but she slides farther toward me, Eddie shooting off her lap, her hand fluttering in the space between us, and she says, “I didn’t mean that at all.”

  I say, “I wish for you to have everything in life that you desire.”

  “Desi honey, I’d given up on being a mama years ago, except maybe to Eddie. Where has he gone now, my little rascal?” She looks around distractedly. Her words notwithstanding, I feel a sadness in her that is unresolved.

  “See?” she says, lunging forward, entirely disappearing from my sight. I struggle to rise up a bit from the recliner, but the machine seems mysteriously to create its own gravitational field, for I make little progress in spite of significant effort.

  “No,” I say, “I do not see.”

  Edna’s voice floats up to me, muffled, from somewhere below, and I realize that she has her head under the couch, looking for Eddie in one of his favorite retreats. “I’m a neglectful mama anyway,” she says.

  “Not at all,” I say and I thrash furiously at the black-hole suck of the recliner and still I rise up only enough to free my back from the lump of the lumbar support and I grope now for the handle and throw it and the chair propels me violently forward and I fight the inertia that feels as if it will fling me across the room and my feet slam to the floor and I am a young spaceman cadet once again having just failed my landing test. I quiver for a moment and I turn to Edna. She is planted on the floor on her hands and knees, no longer looking under the couch. She is simply poised there, her head up, thoughtful, her mouth drawn down. “You are not neglectful,” I say. “You have even learned from him how to stand.”

  She considers this, observing her own quadrupedal stance. Then she looks at me and says a word that I cannot record. It is a word I am convinced I have heard Eddie the yellow cat speak. A word that is all vowels and understandable, surely, only in its complex inflection. When Edna says this word, I think that Eddie’s language might, in fact, be even closer to the basic expressiveness of my own species than Edna’s language. It is a kind of music. “My wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say. “You surprise me. Can you teach me to speak with Eddie the yellow cat?”
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  “Silly,” she says. “I just made that up. I am Edna the slightly flushed but basically white cat.”

  And at this she moves—with quite surprising grace, given her cat’s stance—to the foot of the recliner and she bites me on the ankle.

  9

  There are three things about this planet which are too wonderful for me. Make that four things. The way of dreams in the mind; the way of tears in the eyes; the way of words in the mouth; and the way of my wife Edna Bradshaw when she acts like a cat and love-nibbles me into her arms.

  Ah. Though this is but a quasi-word I feel it appropriate, and say it once more. Ah. Because there are more than four things, as a matter of fact. There are many things about this world that are too wonderful for me to comprehend, several of which Edna Bradshaw and I partook of after she had bitten me on the ankle and extracted me from the recliner. And enough said about that, as they end touchy conversations around the place where my wife Edna Bradshaw once worked, Mary Lou’s Southern Belle Beauty Nook, in Bovary, Alabama. Except to say that when I am reminded—even in a pleasurable way—of the mysteries of the planet they call Earth, floppy fingers can turn to flinty fingers in an instant. I have very little time left before I must reveal myself to this world. So little that I am afraid at this moment to calculate it precisely. And so I have left my wife Edna Bradshaw sleeping heavily in our bed, draped gently in the sheet by my own stiffening hands, and I have gone out of our private space, filled with dread. I am happy, however, that I did not show this feeling to my wife. Before she turned over and fell instantly and of her own accord asleep, she whispered, “Oh you spaceman,” and she made a sound like the purring of Eddie the cat.

  I sit now before the console and I think again of those who are dead. I met Herbert Jenkins in the air. It was during a period of great strife down below, in the year locally designated as 1968, but our selection algorithm found him on an uncharacteristically quiet night near the end of that year in a diner in the city of Chicago. I was not working our vessel alone at the time. But I was already a senior examiner and I did work the watch alone, observing the chosen subject for a while, remotely, engaging in the final, intuitive phase of the decision before acquisition. The diner was small and the hour was late. The man I saw on the screen was part of the primary species group superficially distinguished by a darker skin coloration, though I had already learned that in the minds of some in the world below, the distinction was not superficial, which was an attitude that greatly contributed to the strife of that time. He was alone. I close my eyes, trying to bring back these images that are no longer on record. Only his voice is in my machine. But I want to see him in his own world once more.

  He was alone, my old Herbert Jenkins. He had food before him. Yes. I thank my wife Edna Bradshaw for making possible the recall of that fact. More than simply food. He had breakfast before him. He had sausage and eggs and a biscuit and home fries. In my mind I pull back out the window of the diner and I see in neon: BREAKFAST SERVED 24 HOURS. It is cold out here, I realize. There is a frosty haze around a streetlamp. There is dirty snow mounded against the diner’s outer wall. A siren sounds in the distance and a dog barks. Herbert Jenkins comes out now. Time has lurched forward in my head. He has finished his breakfast. His coat is too thin. He pulls up his collar and he puffs a plume of his breath into the dark. On that night thirty-two years ago it was time to encounter this man, and I moved my hand to the panel to bring him up to the spaceship, and now I move my hand to hear his voice again, and I find my fingers stiff before me. Lately this has been happening with alarming frequency, these spasms of fear. In my memory I have also paused. And both of me watch Herbert Jenkins hunch his shoulders against the cold and turn to walk away. And this is why I am afraid: I am Herbert Jenkins. Yessir, I did too have a suit just like yours. Lord have mercy. I feel like a fool thinking back on it. Not that you should. I don’t mean it like that. You look fine for a space alien. But I was the oldest zoot-suiter on the South Side of Chicago in and about 1942. Fit me just pretty much like it fits you there. But when I was togged to the bricks in bluff cuffs, I could jump with my angel cake till it was brightin’. And that’s the Bible.

  Now listen to me there. I haven’t thought of those words for twenty some-odd years. Not to mention let them pass out of my mouth. Not even sure I could tell you what they all mean right now, exactly. But my zoot suit was the color of a singing canary and I was big inside that thing, real big, and all those words I said was like singing. I was forty-four years old at that time. My one child, my daughter Carolyn, was living with her husband by then in Milwaukee and my wife, Sadie, bless her heart, which was big as all of Lake Michigan, she went along with my second adolescence just fine. I miss her bad now, I can tell you. I was hoping when you took me up that I just had died and I was about to see her again.

  Some people think the zoots was a Mexican thing. But our man Cab Calloway was the first to billboard himself like that, make his shoulders wide and his drape long and you could see that he was master of something, bigger than anybody would expect him to be. Not that I’m saying the Mexicans couldn’t be like that, too. They went through the troubles like we did, I expect. And they paid for their threads with blood out in Los Angeles. In ’43, I think it was. There was an actual zoot suit riot, with the police and the soldiers and the sailors out there hunting down the cats with the reet pleats and beating them to death for being who they are.

  Doesn’t take much, does it, for the bad guys to go putting a world of hurt on you. These things going on in Chicago today and Detroit and all around. In my own street. People forget it’s happened before in this town. I come here with my daddy and my mammy from Mississippi before the first war and I was just a kid. Missed that war, too. I was too young. Like I was too old for the second one. Not that it was so easy to be able to fight for your country if you was a Negro, but I would’ve tried. Still, let’s see, what was I? I was nineteen when President Wilson finally had to start sending us over. I guess I could’ve died in France or somewhere at nineteen. But like I say, it was a known fact that they didn’t want Negro kids in the Army. We wasn’t worthy of dying for a country.

  What we could die for was a water fountain or a seat on a bus or some damn miserable little thing like that. Or a place to swim. See, there was a riot—just like this one—back right after the first war. It was a real hot summer, July or August, and it must have been about 1919. A Negro boy was out swimming in the lake and somehow he got in a current or something or he got turned around. But anyways he show up just off the shore at the Twenty-ninth Street beach and that was forbidden. People think it was just the South that have a white this and a colored that, but we couldn’t go nowhere near the Twenty-ninth Street beach at that time. That was before the whole South Side from Twenty-sixth to Fifty-first and from the lake to the Rock Island tracks had gone and turn into Bronzeville. We was already living pretty thick over near the railroad but there was still a bunch of German Jews and Irish Catholics living in the area, especially along Douglas and Grand Boulevard and they let us clean their houses but we couldn’t mess up the water off their shores. So some of those boys saw this Negro swimming out there and they threw stones against him till he went down and drowned. Just for being in the water.

  Lookit. There’s this thing that happens right here in the center of my chest when I say that. Right now. That’s interesting to me. I get to thrashing around in there. It’s enough that I might could do something real angry if I was a young man still, or even a forty-four-year-old man, and if I let myself dwell on what they did to Reverend King and what they did to Muhammad Ali and what they doing to all our Negro boys in this war in Vietnam. It’s only too easy now for a Negro to die in a war. And nobody kids himself it’s to save our country or save the world or nothing like that. So let the Negroes die in Vietnam, they be thinking. Do us all some good.

  I don’t know why I didn’t go and get into fights and burn some things down when I was twenty-one years old and we had a week or
more of fighting in the streets over that boy being stoned to death in Lake Michigan. Guess it was ’cause I only just did started out at the Stockyards and I was glad to have a job, even for fifteen dollars a week, and even if it was just as a driver at that time, wading around ankle-deep in pig shit herding those animals from train car to holding pen and from holding pen to killing room.

  Even going to work, though, I had my chances to do something about how I felt. There was plenty of Irish living west of the Rock Island tracks, in between us and the Yards, in a place they called Canaryville. I think May or Daley lives there right now. And I remember we had to go through there to get to work, through that Irish neighborhood, and it was real rough, especially during that week or two in 1919. We took some tough words and we took some spit and all like that. But I just turned the other cheek, so to speak. No matter how angry I was inside.

  I guess I feel a little ashamed of that now. I had plenty of cause to act on this thrash-around feeling in the center of me back then. I was a young man. I could’ve picked up a rock and throwed it. Or done something. And I can be thinking about white folks like they think about us. Whitey this. Whitey that. Ain’t no good Whitey but a dead Whitey. But lookit here. I figure that’d be a way for those white people who be racists, all the dumb shits with the bed sheets on or the spit flying out of their filthy mouths, it’d be a way for them to get the Negro real good once and for all. You know how that is? By turning us into them, that’s how. Make us think like they do. Make us see a color, no matter what it is, even if it’s white, and we think we know that person because of it. If we do the Whitey this and the Whitey that, then we’re being just like them boys in the sheets. That’d give them a good laugh, wouldn’t it. See, I got to go back now and say that in the time they killed that Negro boy who was just swimming out in the lake, it was only some particular Irish Catholics and German Jews who done it. I know there be plenty of good folks among them, just like we want them to know that we got plenty of good folks among us.