Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

And now they’re all three looking at me.

Not that I haven’t also given this a lot of thought already. So I say, Lucky.

My father says, Lucky? What kind of name is that, Lucky?

I’m ready for him. I say, It’s the English translation of my Vietnamese name.

And what I said was true. My Vietnamese given name was V n. Of course, right away my mother and father know I’ve got them.

I say, I want to keep this connection to my beginnings in Vietnam. And I look over at my sister, Nancy Reagan Wynn, who’s supposed to be the one that appreciates our family’s roots, and she knows I got her, too.

That is very good, my mother says. I give you lucky name myself.

My father can’t quite make himself say the words, but he’s got no choice except to nod his approval, in spite of his suspicions about me.

My sister says, You sure it’s not from Lucky Luciano? Wasn’t he a gangster who got whacked in a barber chair?

I’m surprised at you, Nancy, I say, making my voice sound hurt. I even think she’s got that wrong. Lucky Luciano died of old age.

Or maybe Lucky Strikes, my sister says.

I’ve really gotten to her.

They’ll give you cancer, she says.

I even force a faint sob into my voice. I say to her, I thought you’d be the first to understand how I miss my real home.

Yes, my mother says to my sister, watch how you talk.

So I get what I want. I get my luck, right there in my name. And it’s even at the expense of the one perfect Vietnamese child in the family.

And I am lucky. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m making ninety grand a year in computers. I love computers. I’ve got a great girl, Mary Wynn — no relation, fortunately — and her original name was Hi n, which means generous, and she is that, she’s a generous girl who loves me. And I get to go to the casino boats and do what I love the most, next to watching the Astros. Well, maybe even more than watching the Astros, because this is more like playing the game, not just watching it.

I play the slots. A lot of Vietnamese go to gamble. They even have a Vietnamese night once a month at one of the boats, with some Vietnamese singer or other whining out sorrowful tunes for a room full of exiles. They’re not so different from me, really. Except they’re most of them looking to get something back. They got unlucky once, in a big way. Drew one too many cards and lost a country. And it gave them a big dose of gambler’s logic: you lose that big and things have got to turn your way just as big, the great cosmic odds tables have got to work themselves out. Even better if it’s in a different currency. Lose a country, win a million bucks. But you got to be on the spot when the time for that adjustment comes or you just end up a big loser forever and you’ve done it to yourself.

I understand where they’re coming from. And they all love the card tables. Blackjack and baccarat and Pai Gow poker, which is pretty funny if you think about it, Vietnamese gamblers trying to win back their pasts playing a Chinese game. But like I say, it’s the slots for me. The megabucks dollar slots.

One on one, pitcher and batter, facing that next moment of your life. That’s what it is for me. I’m not trying to make up for anything. I don’t figure the universe is ready to even my score. It’s just me and the moment. And I always use the handle on the machine. No punching buttons. You punch a button, it’s like you’re entirely passive. You’re just saying, I’m ready. Show me what you’ve got. That’s okay as far as it goes. But with the handle, you’ve got a chance to play the moment. You know? You palm that black ball at the end and you curl your fingers around it and you wait. You can feel the time slipping along and you’re going to do this thing and you’re either going to lose or you’re going to win. But there’s a way to make it your own. I’m sure of it. Like thinking, Okay, he’s shown me his curveball low and outside twice, now he’s going to try to bust a fastball inside. I’m guessing fastball and I’m ready for it. There’s four clicks on the handle. You can hear them, and if there’s too much noise — that loud, steady, Saturday-night casino roar — then you can feel them in the palm of your hand. One click. Two. You’re doing this slow and counting them. Three. Four. And you pause, maybe. Or you don’t. However it is you’re feeling this thing at the moment. There’s this flow of time and if you jump in at one particular second you win and if you jump in at another second you lose. That’s the way things are. So you feel click number four, and you hold one beat, two — and the progressive is quietly counting away over your head, five million and something dollars and something cents, and it’s running up fast, busy storing up a fortune for you, and you wait for that third beat, and that’s it, you realize, a little waltz here, three-four time, and you take your swing.

And what you’re waiting for is three little eagles. That’s all. In the window of the slot machine. Forget the minor scores, the singles and doubles and triples, the cherries and the bars and the sevens. You’re going for the upper deck. You wait for three little red white and blue eagles to land side by side for you. Look where you are, they’ll say to me. It’s America.

Lucky Wynn and I stop speaking. He is suspended now, waiting, I think, for the eagles to line up in the window of a slot machine in his head. And I am, too. I keep pulling the handle and I am waiting for some of these voices to line up side by side — perhaps it will only take three of them — and they will say, Look where you are. And I will know. But inevitably, there is only one voice before me and a blank on either side.

This I do understand. Lucky knows as little as I do. He says he is American, but I think there are feelings in him that he is not recognizing. He is still waiting — yearning — to be this thing he thinks he already is, to learn these things he thinks he already knows.

A lost home. A vessel that carries you away to another place. A new name. Others around you whose voices you hear but that you do not truly understand. Nor do they truly understand you. I share this diaspora with Lucky Wynn. But even knowing this, I can think of nothing to do or to say to him, except lead him back to his place so that he can return to sleep. And, eventually, to return him to his life, the memory of all this erased, and his yearning will go on.

But, of course, there may be no need to erase the memories of any of my present visitors, since I will myself follow them back to this planet’s surface and will reveal the secret to everyone. In only a matter of hours now. Let them all remember.

And I do lead Lucky back to the deep shadows of his sleeping space and then I stand in the corridor and I listen to the breathing of all of my visitors as they sleep and wait. I need to push on to the next voice. There may yet be some sudden revelation. But I do not know how to choose and so I begin to pace up and down the corridor outside these doorways and I sing to myself. I need to do this anyway. I sing a wordless song inside me — and I mean by using this word sing something other than the thing meant by music on the planet below me, for this song is not translated into elements — words, perceivable sounds — that can exist in the shared physical space outside one’s internal landscape — these are primal tones rising and spinning inside me like the crepuscular spirals of dust and cloud and moisture on my home planet, a process that nightly comes with the setting of our beautiful blue star, the very elements of our world rising up to bid our star farewell, rising up in their yearning — yes, I now readily attribute this condition even to the inanimate substances of my own planet — they yearn to go with that star as it seems about to leave us all alone. This is the sensual theme of the song I sing, a song created in my own head, even as I sing it, existing only there in its true form, like no one else’s song, and I, too, yearn, I yearn to place this music into the head of a being other than myself, directly, untranslated, but my own wife Edna Bradshaw, whom I love with a great spiral of feeling inside me, my own wife cannot hear this kind of music, I cannot share it with her, and I know this is true of all the beings on this planet, it is how they live: If there is some deep sense of an essential thing inside them, an ontological music, beyond words, beyond sounds, it is impossible for them truly to share it with anyone else.