Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

But I know that first I will do something rash. I have little hope of encountering, among the travelers on the bus, the sort of life I presently wish to study. It is time to spend a few hours on the planet surface. When the night returns to the place beneath my ship, I will go down, personally, in my very body. I will go with great caution, disguised in the trench coat and wide-brimmed felt hat I wore when I first met Edna Bradshaw in the nearly deserted parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bovary, Alabama. My five-hour mission will be to seek out a kind of life new to my studies, a life full of bland contentedness. A life without yearning.

And though I should gather another voice or two from my present visitors before I go, instead, I return to find my wife Edna Bradshaw still sleeping on our bed. And I lie down beside her and I seek out my own sleep, where dreams never intrude and the Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music, except there are no hills, either, not even the ups and downs of a landscape. Just music.

And I wake. I sense it is time for my mission. Edna, I am happy to see, is still beside me, though she stirs now. I move my hand across her and she grows quiet once more. I do not wish for her to wake while I am gone and be alarmed at my absence. I lean to her and touch my fingertips to her face and I hope that she can see me in her dreams, that she can hear my heartbeat there.

I slip away quietly to my preparation room and I open the storage space and I resolve to take extra precautions. I will have layers of disguise: Before the trench coat and felt hat, I become togged to the bricks in bluff cuffs, and I choose the tie that I wore on my first date with my angel cake Edna Bradshaw, a red one with dozens of Tabasco bottles floating on it. She seemed to love that tie. I even put on my size-twenty Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers. Encapsulating footwear is unknown on my planet, and I am still not used to the concept, but I will take no chances on this night. I don my trench coat and cinch the belt, though not too revealingly tight because of what Edna refers to as my Scarlett O’Hara waist — which I understand to refer to its minimal girth — my waist was the first clue to give me away as a spaceman on the night I met her — and I put on my hat and pull the wide brim down low.

It is night. I am ready. I squeak down the corridor in my Chuck Taylors, which are the color, I am pleased to note, of Herbert Jenkins’s bluff cuffs, that is to say, the color of a singing canary. My zoot suit, however, is conservative in color, gray with pinstripes. My trench coat is black, as is my hat. I am a Dude.

And the Dude is behind the wheel of his honker. So to speak. I have no wheel and I have no horn, but I sit in my shuttle ship and I am ready to spin off into the world below and I flex at my fingers, which are turning me into a coward. But to be honest, it is the coward in me that is producing this frequent stiffening in my fingers, not the other way around. In all the Earth years I have been watching this planet, I have actually and personally been to its surface perhaps six or eight times and I have never been in peril. The last time I even came to carry away the woman who fell in love with me the time before. But the time after this one will be so momentous that I am full of anxiety now. And there are always risks, of course. Outside of my spaceship I still have the power to induce sleep and forgetfulness, but only within a very limited physical area. There are many circumstances, in an alien terrain, over which I would have no control whatsoever.

But I put these thoughts from my mind and I launch forth and I rush toward the lights below, veering now to the dark edges of the city, mindful of the searching green strobes from the casino boats. I am being excessively cautious. Though my craft is shrouded, pilot errors can, of course, occur, especially in the transition between modes of propulsion, thus giving an observer below a glimpse of what they call a UFO. But this is a rare phenomenon and I am alert tonight. So I let myself move over the thickenings of trees with streets between and dwellings set side by side by side by side. If the placid lives I seek exist, surely they will be along these quiet streets. I move quickly back and forth and I look for a place to land my craft. Open, preferably dim, with no one apt to walk unsuspecting into an invisible thing. I grow bold. I move over a great ship taking on rice in the orange wash of sodium vapor lamps and I rush along the edge of the lake. The houses here are large and full of the fruits of capitalism and yet I feel a great striving emanating from them and I cut inland and ahead I see what I think for a moment is a Wal-Mart and I grow nostalgic, thinking of the night in Bovary, Alabama, when Edna called out to me as I stood alone and separate, very late into the time of daily darkness, and there were only four scattered vehicles about and no living creatures at all, not until my future wife came out of her shopper’s paradise and spotted me from afar and then called out in sympathetic concern over what, I later realized, she presumed was my misplaced vehicle. “Are you lost?” she said. I am.

And now I see that the place before me is not a Wal-Mart after all. I swoop around it, and the place proclaims itself KROGER FAMILY CENTER OPEN 24 HOURS DRUGS FOOD and next to it, across a street, is a vast open space of fissured concrete, not ideally dim, but clearly abandoned, the structure that was once there reduced to a faint outline of its foundation. I swoop and return. There are railroad tracks running along a street past the front of Kroger, past this open space, and then at an angle across that same street and down a median and heading into the night in the direction of the ship at the lake. I swoop, slowing, and there is a sign at the edge of the open space, dark and fractured: ROLLER RINK.

I land. I wait. It is late. It is dim here in the center of Roller Rink. I wonder what Roller Rink was. I wonder why such a thing has escaped my notice over the years. Perhaps for the same reason that it has now been reduced to an empty swath of concrete and a crumbling sign. Something went terribly wrong. Once Roller Rink was as proud an edifice of the planet Earth as Kroger or Wal-Mart, but those of this world turned against it and it crumbled into emptiness.

My mind is overheating. I even imagine the people of Lake Charles, Louisiana, storming Roller Rink with pitchforks and burning torches crying for its death, tearing it apart with their hands. But I know how words always strive to be something other than they are, to gather around the thing they have their eyes on and run at it from the shadows, from unexpected directions, I know this about the words on this planet and so I know, in fact, I am not pondering the past fate of Roller Rink but the imminent fate— very imminent, I am afraid — of the spaceman known as DESI who has been ordered to expose his actual physical self in a grand and irrefutable and unambiguous way to all the people of this world and to share a fundamental truth of the universe. Come Quick. It’s Alive!

Lookit, I say to myself. I could have sat and dreaded the future back on the home spacecraft without the unpleasantness of wearing sneakers. If I am going to make this visit, I should Just Do It. The street beyond the train track is empty. The street between Roller Rink and Kroger is empty. The Kroger parking lot has only a scattered few cars and no creature is visible. So I step from my craft.

The air is quite mild and it smells faintly of wood fire. A dog barks in the distance. The sky to the west is tinted orange from oil refineries, and there, cutting above the distant rim of trees and then sliding silently off, is the thread of green light from the casinos. But my way lies into the quiet streets of the neighborhood. I move through the vanished Roller Rink, resolving to ask my wife Edna Bradshaw about this place, and I stop at the street and look over at the Kroger parking lot.