Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

And his wife and his daughter do not move. Not even to glance in his direction. They are as implacable as the Santa Claus standing next to me, shining his cold red light into the darkness. And I know I have misjudged them all.

I back away, out of their yard. This is what I need. I have come here with my own agenda, but I must look at this world the way it is, so that I will know what to do when I soon return.

I hear the distant cry of a train whistle.

This is a sound that my wife Edna Bradshaw has referred to with great wistfulness, a sound that gave her pleasure to hear when she was alone with her yellow cat Eddie in the middle of the night in her trailer at the trailer park out the state highway that connected Bovary, Alabama, with the rest of what she knew to be the world. This was before she and I had met in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. And she was made happy by the thought that there were all those other lives going on in places far away — suggested to her by the sound of a train going somewhere in the night — but she was right there in a place she knew so well. I think that is the reason she turned me down the first time I asked her to fly away with me. She was content.

I straighten and quake with this thought. I plucked Edna Bradshaw from the very sort of life I went seeking on this night.

But no. She was not content. We met, I asked her for a date, I took her out, we fell in love, I was to be transferred, I asked her to marry me, she said no, I went away. But then she was suddenly very unhappy. Bovary, Alabama, no longer gave her pleasure. She heard this sound of a train whistle — and there it is again, coming nearer, but slowly — she heard this sound after I left, and it only made her sad. Made her yearn to follow it. She wanted to fly from what she had always known, a life that no longer satisfied her.

I look toward Kroger and I find that I, too, am yearning.

The bright lights are calling me. I am afraid that the life without yearning, which I sought, does not exist on this world. Perhaps it does not exist at all, anywhere in the universe, so long as creatures have minds and hearts and must move from one moment to the next. For example, I should go now to my undetected shuttle craft and return to my place in the middle of the air. But, in fact, I yearn to understand Kroger, which, I realize, is to yearn to know more about what is to come, for me. It is one thing for me to sneak around in the dark, unobserved, and smugly believe I understand these creatures. It is another thing to walk into that great swath of fluorescent light, which is full of beer and laundry soap and breakfast cereal and conditioning rinse and the ardent seekers of these things, and to say, Look here, you all, you are not the only beings in the universe.

I step across the steel rail and I move into the parking lot and I am full of hope. I know this place teems with the objects that breed in the physical space between these creatures, the objects that beckon and gather and beget words, words that have shaped my understanding of things in so many ways. And though I have collected and preserved a number of these objects in a certain dedicated space on my ship, and though they even clutter together there in some profusion, there is an inevitable air of artificiality about my collection, like a case full of insects stuck with pins. I need to be inside Kroger, no matter what the risk. I squeak on quickly across the asphalt, the bright white glow calling me, a cheery WELCOME and a vast yellow Smiley Face over the double automatic doors.

I am suddenly struck by this face, which I have seen through my observation machines in many places. But until this moment I have not seen it for what it truly is, the face of a spaceman. No ears. No hair. Large eyes. No lips but a wide, sweet smile. I am a friendly guy, after all. Perhaps this face has prepared a way for me. This word of welcome is for me, Desi the Friendly Spaceman, making a special appearance at the Family Center, Have a nice millennium. I rush toward KROGER.

A figure is standing there, a large figure in a tan uniform, a security guard, I realize, given the lateness of the hour. And I also realize that I am ready to present myself directly to him: Hi, my name is Desi; I’m the spaceman you have been waiting for, whose image floats cheerily over your head even as we speak. And as soon as I think of saying these words, all that I have imagined for myself crumbles at once. I pull my hat down low and then stuff my hands in my pockets and I turn my face aside. I am not a fool. The more rational part of me does not really expect this world to understand the iconography of their ubiquitous Mr. Smiley Face. I am drawing nearer, trying to navigate with peripheral vision, my face still turned sharply aside, focusing on the metal newspaper box to the right of the doors, allowing the guard a benign interpretation of my refusal to look at him. “Evening,” I say and then, cleverly, I refer to the newspaper headline which I want him to believe has entranced me. “‘Fear and Hope at the End of the Millennium.’ How often those two things go together, do they not?”

He makes no reply but neither does he try to stop me. I have already stepped onto the rubber pad and the doors swing open with a sound like the one that admits me to the life-giving atmosphere of my home craft from the vacuum of space. I cross the threshold, I am inside one of Earth’s cathedrals of consumerism and the lights dazzle me and I glance quickly about and see no creatures and I duck my head and put on my Groovy Glasses with the dark lenses, affixing my Snappy Sports Strap at the back to hold them on me in the absence of anything quite like earth creatures’ ears on my head. I thrust my hands back into my pockets and head off into an empty space to my right, away from the presence of store clerks and any of my fellow shoppers. But even as I avoid them, I am thrilled with the idea of them: my fellow shoppers.

Music plays from above. I’m Bluer Than Blue. How ironic. I am whatever is the opposite of that sentiment. I am redder than red. But now there is a metallic clash of shopping carts nearby and I am yellower than yellow, dashing forward, away from the sound, past a great silver case radiating heat, full of whole rotisserie chickens, and past tables Where it Costs Less to Get More, tables spilling over with French bread and cream cakes and angel-food cakes and cinnamon cakes and Special Sale Half Price fruit cakes and past bins of Big Savings on tubes of Christmas wrapping paper and bags of bows, and the sound that frightened me has ceased. It was the late-night work of some bag boy rounding up the evening’s stray carts, I am sure. And now I am in the vast and deserted pharmacy space and I slow down and I am alone and I am happy and I stop and I am standing before rows of mouthwash and they are full of motif and reprise: blue mint and cool mint and peppermint and soft mint and freshmint and my head is spinning with a strange delight and I stagger a bit farther and now there are many ways to hold your false teeth in your head, a matter about which this world is as deeply sympathetic and attentive as the most wonderful and loving father or mother. One can cling, in one’s prosthetic vulnerability, to Dentrol and Sea Bond and Fixodent and Poli-Grip and Dentu-Grip and ORAfix and effergrip and Rigident and Cushion Grip and Klutch. I am quaking now with an irrational hope. For what I do not know.

I take off my sunglasses to see all these things in their natural light. My eyes throb for a moment with the brightness, but I adjust. I adjust. I am happy to be here. I am awash in a sense of the possibility of things. Another few steps and there are so many ways to clean one’s teeth, one of them Age-Defying. That is all I need from this section. I turn a corner. To stand against the dark stellar wind of mortality, a tube of toothpaste held valiantly before you: perhaps this is the powerful outer edge of yearning.