Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

I hear the crackle of a two-way radio. This must be the guard. And he is calling for help from the local authorities. “This is Nate,” he says. “We got ourselves a problem. Over.”

I rise up and peek over the top of the dog food. It is indeed the man in the tan uniform. He is looking down at the two sleepers and he takes a step toward them. I lift my hand and he says into his radio, “I’m not sure …” and then he sees me and adds — not exactly into his radio but generally, for Ken and Roger and Barry Manilow, who is singing overhead about trying to get some unnamed feeling again—“Oh fuck me.” And I realize that my Groovy Glasses are in my hand again and I do not even remember taking them off. Nate is surely about to say more, even though his face seems frozen in its contemplation of mine, but I do not give him the chance. I wave my hand and the radio clatters to the floor, spitting out static and broken cries for someone to come back. But Nate himself is settling down to sleep, ignoring the upthrust of Ken’s backside, drooping down against the delicate balance of the assistant manager so that he topples sideways and I am left with a stack of three loudly snoring members of this planet’s primary species at my feet. I look quickly around and I see no more gliding heads, hear no more rushing feet. But the radio is crackling in the center of the aisle and I must assume that a police car is on its way.

I wave my hand over each of the three sleepers to ensure they will have no memory of me and I rush off as fast as my sneakers will carry me, back in the direction of the door, the profusion of goods flowing past me on each side in an indistinguishable blur. I think of Ken and Roger and Nate and wonder what they will conclude when they wake and find themselves intertwined on the floor with no memory of how they arrived there. Perhaps love will inadvertently bloom. I wish for that as I rush past the woman who began all this and her voice carries me toward the automatic door: “Swim little fishies, swim if you can …”

I am released, thankfully, from the fluorescence and into the darkness and already I hear a siren, and I turn toward the open space of ROLLER RINK, which seems to me a very great distance away. I take a step and another and another and I lean forward, into the night, trying to glide the best I can, but as much as I admire my Chuck Taylors, they are not made to facilitate the movement of a member of my species and I press forward, across the asphalt, under the glare of a light and into darkness again and the siren is drawing nearer and I am moving with agonizing slowness and I realize what an obviously suspicious figure I make in my hat and my trench coat and my size-twenty yellow sneakers and I realize I have to remove them, the sneakers, I am no longer concerned about a part of my body giving away my true identity, I am concerned only with running fast from the coppers, who are drawing ever nearer. So I begin pulling at one of my sneakers even as I try to keep my forward momentum and the Chuck Taylor clings to me and I am hopping on one foot with the other in my hands and I hop and wrench at my sneaker and hop and wrench and hop and I am a Bad Boy and I am wondering what I am going to do because the authorities are unquestionably coming for me and I am not sure if I can control the situation.

And over my shoulder I hear the train whistle once more, quite loud, as if it, too, is in pursuit of me, and there is another sound, a clackity-clack and I look and the train is passing in front of Kroger, slowly, approaching the crossing and there are red lights flashing there and I can see the blue and white flashing of police lights racing this way from the street along the tracks and the engine reaches the crossing and enters it and its cars are following and beneath them I can see the flare of blue and white approach and slow and turn to come to get me. But the police vehicle is blocked there by the train. And I hop on along, still clinging to one determinedly sneakered foot. I hop across the street and through the ghost-space of Roller Rink and I bounce along to my invisible craft and I am at last passing inside and I release my foot and I move to the controls and I sit before them, and I pause. I look toward Kroger and I am filled with regret for causing upset in a Family Center. But there is far more upset to come, I fear. Far more. And I move my hand and I rise above Lake Charles, Louisiana, quickly, and I fly toward the huggies of my wife.

Edna Bradshaw was still sleeping when I returned. Everyone on the ship was sleeping. But when I lay down beside my wife, she stirred without opening her eyes and her arms came around me as if she knew in her very dreams what it was that I needed at that moment. I was grateful.

I am frightened. Even lying here now with my wife Edna Bradshaw’s arms about me, even with a fetching scent of something coming from her, a good scent that seems to come straight from her knockers, which tower above me in her embrace and which are so unlike anything among my species, even with all of that, I can think only of my imminent public appearance on this planet, how it will be fraught with danger and needs a careful plan, and how even the vague first glimmerings of such a plan are still far from my mind. I continue to believe that whatever I am to do, whatever I am to say, has to be shaped by all the voices of creatures, alive and dead, floating in the vast energy fields of my memory machines and, more to the present point, all the voices now sleeping on my ship and ready to speak. These latter voices are surely as close as I can get to the exact tenor of this particular era, the fin de siècle state of consciousness of the creatures I will face in vast numbers in a very short time.

And so, without letting go to further sleep myself, I gently disengage from my wife’s arms and I rise and enter into the corridor and as I move toward the place where they are all waiting I let myself try to calculate exactly how much time I have before I must descend from my machine in plain sight.

It is not an easy calculation to do in one’s head.

My time is not their time.

And I am surely wrong in doing a thing like this without my machines.

And I stagger to a stop.

I have gotten close to a bottom line but I have averted my eyes at the last moment, professing ignorance, feigning ignorance, hoping for ignorance, and I move off now to our control room and I am before my machines and I am a simple movement of my hand away from having the precise answer and I am Hot as a Firecracker and Ready to Explode. I am also having trouble drawing a breath. The hand I finally move is a slab of rock, a layer hacked from a desert excavation full of the fossils of life on this planet long ago dead.

And my eyes try to see the numbers that appear before me as if they are hieroglyphs from an extinct language. Unreadable. But this cannot last for long. My mind peeks. And the heat in me swells and roils. I knew it was not long, the time left to me. But the numbers before me are a terrible surprise.

I have twenty-two hours and eleven minutes.

I envy the roaches of the planet Earth. I am ready to check in, quite willingly, to a place where I cannot check out.

But I am who I am.

And this is my life.

And there are so many voices to hear before I offer myself up.

And so I go out of the control room and I move again in the corridors of my spaceship, move quickly, and I am among my visitors — I realize now that I may not have a chance to hear them all — and so I choose the visitor whose very name derives from what all of these sojourners were seeking on their bus when I caught them up in the clouds, a thing that I, too, seek for myself. I awaken, to a state of dreamspeak, the young man named Lucky.