Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

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.

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.