Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

I never did actually enter Wal-Mart that night in Bovary, Alabama. Our machines have given us views, of course, inside all of the various edifices on this planet, but there is something that cannot be reproduced through any technology. On this planet, one has to stand in a place, in one’s own body, to understand its influence on the lives here. That is one reason why I am taking these risks right now. There is an ethos to every spot. I look around. I have moved perhaps fifty paces from my craft, which, I am happy to observe, is invisible in the Roller Rink space. But things are quite different, even just over here. For instance, I can no longer smell burning wood. Instead, there is a smell of trees. Fir trees. They are piled off the street curb to my right. A dozen small, scrawny trees, intended, I know — how spotty and minute is my understanding of this place — intended to be placed in the home at this time of the year and decorated with lights to celebrate the birth of the man for whom Citrus mistook me on the spaceship earlier, a celebration whose primary day has recently passed. I hesitate here with the dead trees, which were apparently too thin to have been worth purchasing — I presume in a sales operation across the street at this Kroger Family Center, in spite of its avowal simply to provide DRUGS and FOOD, or perhaps in the space of this departed Roller Rink — whichever, the trees would be trucked in and piled up and sold and then the excess dumped, as with this dozen trees — I am conscious of the ways of commerce on this planet and you do what you can to make a buck and if you can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, you go for it — though why that phrase should leap into me in this context, I have no idea, because though it does have to do with commerce, its application is misplaced in this circumstance, for Kroger’s customers would have more use for a holiday tree than an Eskimo would have for ice — but standing here, I sense myself drifting erratically on a thin smoke of nervous words, sounding once again like my wife Edna Bradshaw, and I wish I was with her now, lying beside her on our bed as she sleeps her image-laden sleep.

However, I am not. I am here. And the thought from which I started to drift is this: The place where I stand at this moment is new to me. Perhaps that thought wasn’t the exact starting point, but it is close to it. And this is true of the planet Earth: fifty paces away, things are different. Drastically so, if you are alert. And fifty paces more, five paces even, the world will change once again. There is no dog barking now. I hear the mechanical click of the traffic light as the tint on my hands changes from green to amber and then another click as it changes from amber to red. In short, though I can acquire clear images of Kroger from my machines, I do not truly know Kroger, do not know its essence, and so I wish to enter into that place, squeaking across its floor in my Chuck Taylor sneakers. But I am held back by recognizing the inherent risks in doing this, perhaps manageable risks at this hour but perhaps not. The traffic light clicks again and I look up and the large red eye closes and the large green eye opens, and I realize how far from the inherent characteristics of mind of a member of my own species I have been borne. I would say “borne by words” but I can hear how I am sounding on that matter, as well. I have become a whiner. Kvetch. Kvetch. That is all I hear out of me. And surely I am not out of my normal mind simply because of words. Perhaps I should go with the flow. My wife Edna Bradshaw frequently shows evidence of this same syndrome of rambling free association and she is clearly not alarmed by it, indeed seems almost to enjoy it, rolling words out of her head that follow one tiny bright object until it passes another one and then veers off following that one and so on and so on. I look down at my sneakers. Their yellowness, like a singing canary, like Herbert Jenkins’s zoot suit — though I never actually saw his zoot suit — the yellowness of my Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers has paled and darkened here on the street at night. But now, Click. The yellow sharpens a bit. From the streetlight again. I look at the light, straight into its amber eye. “Oh shut up your incessant clicking,” I say aloud. And it clicks again. This is not your planet, it says. And it opens its red eye and glares hotly at me. It is the air, causing this wandering. As much as words. It is the smell of smoke, which I am picking up again. And the smell of dead trees. And the dog barking again. No, a different dog, in some other, distant place. I am rushing, inside. It is not the words that are carrying me. The words and I are companions. We are being carried together on this deeper current inside me, which itself comes from the smoke and the trees and the dogs and a thousand other nuances of the night. The click of the street light. The orange glow of the western sky. The rasp of grit beneath my sneakers at the tiniest movement of my feet. The smooth-contoured inertness of the cars in the Kroger lot. And perhaps the words, after all, as well. On my own planet, the primary focus of our lives, moment to moment, is inside our minds, and to touch each other, we leap cleanly across the sensual particularities of our outer world, hardly noticing them at all. But on a planet built with words, which are valenced with the same charge as streetlight clicks and dog barks and sneaker rasps, I must deal directly with all these things of the senses lying between my inner world and the inner world of anyone else. I have no choice. And they run deep in me, these sensual things. In ways that both demand and defy the words. Suddenly I find my hands floppy with desire. I think of dear Edna Bradshaw. Edna, come quick. It’s alive!

I am unsteady now on my feet. I must not think. I step off the curb. I move through the Kroger parking lot, circling to the back, fighting off the impulse to take a chance. I cross the train track. I enter a quiet street, leading directly away from Kroger. It is a street named for a class of bryophytic plants which have a small, leafy, often tufted stem which bears its sex organs at the tip. Do not ask me why it was named after such a thing. Perhaps the place was once covered with moss. Perhaps the builder of this street first lay down in a vast blanket of moss, right here, and dreamed of the thing he would build. I move on this street of Moss. Intently now. Trying to hold back the words for a bit, so that I don’t stop in any one square of this sidewalk and spend the rest of the night rendering my words around its unique vantage point on the night. I move on, my sneakers scraping and popping, and I press my attention back to my original intent.

I look in the passing windows, ready to go closer, ready to approach an isolated someone, wave my hand before his face, loosen his words, hear him speak of his contentment — in taking out the trash, in thinking about his father, in facing his work, in living his life on this planet. He would speak in a voice I have not yet heard.

A tree lies on its side by the curb, silver threads of tinsel clinging to it, and I look to the house, a porch swing, a shutter sagging slightly away from a broken hinge, the windows dark, no one there. But now there is a movement, even in the dimness of the unlit front room. I slow my step, only vaguely discerning the figure there, a man, I think, moving for a moment in the darkness and then stopping, standing there. The next house drifts into my view and it is bright but I am wondering about the man I have just seen. Only briefly: his tree thrown hastily from the house, him sitting awake in a dark room only to stand and go nowhere. My machines are full of voices no different from his.

I focus, instead, on this bright house before me, the front window outlined in amber bulbs, the tree still standing inside, ablaze with white lights. I see through the front room and through an arch to a table in the dining room and people are there. I stop. A happy family. Contented with their lives. I take a step toward them, onto their lawn, and another step. I am not alone. Something has told me that all along. Perhaps it is the nose, shining as brightly as the streetlight near Kroger. It is Santa Claus, who stands, inanimate, of course, but life-size, beside an azalea bush. What a sense of holiday whimsy resides in this place. How could there be angst and striving and conflict and disconnection in such a family as this? And there they sit, beneath a chandelier — a cheap chandelier, I realize, its bare bulbs poking out of cloudy glass flower blossoms. Good. There is no pretense here. Only harmony and contentment. At least complacent drabness. A woman is in a chair with her back to me, a young woman, I think, given what I know of hairstyles from my wife Edna Bradshaw. Her hair is long and draped straight behind her. She is very thin. Her skin, which I can see on her arm, is pale. I angle a little to the side as I take more steps toward this house. I can hear the murmur of voices. A window is open somewhere, I think. The night, though in the first stages of the winter season on this part of the planet, is very mild. It is the state of Louisiana, after all, Where Winter Comes to Party. Opposite the young woman at the table is another woman, the wife and mother, her hair short and permed, her face haggard, her mouth drawn down. Perhaps given this appearance by the bared bulb light coming from above. She has been preparing this wonderful meal all day long and she is pleasantly weary and the light shows this on her face. She is looking across at her daughter. Next to both of them at the head of the table is a man, the husband and father. He is leaning forward as if listening, but not to these two women. There are others out of my sight, at the opposite end of the table. The murmur I hear is another male voice, the words rushing and tumbling. And then suddenly the husband and father laughs. He leans back in his chair and throws his head back and laughs.