Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

Then it happened. I wasn’t prepared at all. You read about this bomb in the newspapers and it’s supposed to have killed all those people in a couple of Japanese towns and so forth, and you see a newsreel in the movies and you watch the mushroom cloud and you think, This is some kind of bomb. Something like that. But all you’re doing is just that, thinking. Like thinking about war if you’ve never been there. You just don’t know jack shit. All of a sudden there’s this crown of light out there. You know it’s sixty, seventy miles away, but all of a sudden it’s there, this spray of white light, but it doesn’t register as white as all, if you’re used to thinking of whiteness as a clean thing. This is white like you’ve been wrong all your life about what death is. It’s not like closing your eyes and everything is black and that’s the way it stays forever. Suddenly you know death is white, and here it is and it doesn’t feel far away at all. It’s right here in your face, touching your eyes, which don’t close when you die but they look straight into this ghastly whiteness.

And then it fades a little, it pulls back, but something else is there in its place. And damn, you can see it. Even from here. It’s tiny from this distance, if you step back and look around you, if you can drag your eyes away and look up at the night sky, but you can’t do that. You have to see what’s there, and it’s a thing rising up where that whiteness was just a moment ago. And more than the worst of battle, more than the smell of cordite or burnt flesh, more than the sound of men’s voices blabbering in pain, more than the sight of torn limbs and gaping chests, that instant of light and that distant plume of smoke and the mindless smattering of applause on a hotel rooftop and the taste of champagne and sherry told me there was nothing but pain and then nothingness waiting for me in my life. I was thirty years old and I’d been through a terrible war but it wasn’t until that evening I realized what the end of life was all about.

And my wife put her hand on my arm and maybe she knew something terrible was happening inside me and maybe she didn’t. But I never said a word about this to her. I kept my battle face on and I sipped my drink and she and I went downstairs and I think I broke our rule that night. I think I lost another hundred dollars or so that we didn’t budget, and I knew I’d lose it. There was no way I’d win a penny that night. But I went through the motions. And I guess that did me some good, in a way. I went on through the motions of my life and here I am. And I never did say a thing about this to Viola. She wouldn’t understand. Or she would. Either way, we’d lose.

What’s wrong with this species? Its individuals seem to be profoundly ignorant of those even closest to them. Damn it, Arthur, speak to Viola. Viola, speak to Arthur. Share the things that are inside you. You are inferior beings. This is all I can think with Arthur Stackhouse dozing exhausted before me. I let him sit like that in the interview chair for a while.

But I am ashamed at these thoughts. Perhaps it is my own weariness that has rendered me immobile and cranky. After all, I have myself repeatedly castigated the inadequacy of words in the conduct of life on this planet. The silence between Arthur and Viola is based on their own recognition of the same thing. Is that not sensible on their part?

And perhaps there is even more betokened by this irritability that has come upon me. How can I be critical of this species when a sterling example of my own species, namely myself, Desi the Spaceman, a creature who is not even limited biologically by words, is, in fact, ignorant of himself. Is that not a far greater fault than the one I am finding in others?

This particular moment of ignorance is falling away now. But I am clearly capable of such a failure. I am afraid to consider what other manifestations of that self-ignorance I have been prey to. But for now, for this instance, the part of me that I failed to recognize and that transformed itself into a condemnation of the Stackhouses’ species concerns an issue — I am conscious of the irony — that our two species share with more or less equal intensity. An issue that is, typically, hiding behind even these words I now shape.

I speak of death. I speak of death. The ultimate wordlessness. I have not seen it as a whiteness until Arthur and I were one voice. I have always seen it as darkness, the way Arthur once did, though my frame of reference, not surprisingly, was the deep concentration of gravity in space that we have chosen, as a species, never physically to approach. I speak of the black holes. That was the metaphor resident in my head. That our life should cease, our music fall silent: we are terrified of this. Yes. But it has always been like that dreadful suck of darkness, those places where you dared not go. Or, in a different mood, death was the darkness between the stars, the thing we moved in all the time, a commonplace thing, a thing that we could put aside with the mere shifting of our eyes to the stars themselves. The darkness could not exist without the light and was therefore subordinate to it. Subject to it. And even filled with particles. Stellar winds. Whatever. Foolish elaborations of metaphor for the sake of self-delusion.

But Arthur would have me see the stars themselves, the blinding whiteness, as death. And the clear realization of this flares through me and stiffens my fingers and my toes and I try to think of red stars and blue stars, but it does no good, for I understand Arthur, it has nothing to do with the bending of the light into these other hues, they are a deception, they are part of the same vanishing.

I remember a voice. Arthur Stackhouse is sleeping, his head bowed low, his chin nearly touching his chest. I do not disturb him. I move my hand to the control panel and pass it there and I find a voice I myself gathered just a few years ago. Though Arthur Stackhouse sits before me, I am Jacob Klein. This is the thought I sometimes have. For years, I’ve had it already. It should have been Berlin, where they dropped the A-bomb. Let the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire appear again, like it did for Moses to lead us out of Egypt. It went before and showed the way and that’s what we needed at the end of the Second World War. A way to lead us past what happened. Let the fireball come and the cloud rise above Berlin and we would follow and say, Here is the wrath of God and the retribution of God, here is God’s declaration about all of the bodies of our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and children and sisters and brothers and friends and teachers and neighbors and strangers who all were linked to us not just by blood but also by the sharing of thousands of years of history, thousands of years of trying to follow the will of God, here is God’s declaration about all the brutalized and murdered bodies of all these people who are our own. Here, in this pillar of cloud and fire, these bodies are declared once and for all to be worthy of the visitation upon their abusers of the worst horror that man can make on this earth. Let Japan fall brick by brick and wound by wound, but let those who defiled this people whose nation was a shared love of God, let those monsters be vaporized in a vision that Moses himself might recognize. And this vision of fire and cloud would lead us again. It would lead us to a place where we might finally live a life free from a daily, bone-deep memory of these terrible things that happened to millions of us. I go down into the subway and I hear a cry of metal from the tunnel; I walk out of my apartment onto Tenth Street heading for a morning coffee and bagel and I see vapor rising from a manhole; I pass a brown-stone and it’s garbage day and a bag is torn open and I see bones, tiny bones scattered there; and I find myself living in the wilderness of history, and I want a way out, I want someone to lead me from this place to another place where the past is avenged and abandoned.