Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

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?”

“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.

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.