Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

And I came up to them and pushed between them and I looked at Tony Marcello, or what used to be him, because that’s how I saw it, clearly. His body was laid out chest down and flat, his arms at his side, his palms up, his face turned away from me, and his death fell into my mind and then straight to the center of my own chest and into my own limbs, which suddenly were sharply aware of the tenuousness of their own animation. There was a terrible lumpenness about this body before me, a heaviness, an absence. Tony Marcello was gone. Gone and done with. And all of a sudden, from the body of this boy who was no Jew at all, far from it, from the body of this boy who was a Christian, at least by the prayers of his mama and his mama’s mama, from the body of this boy, I finally felt the thing that happened to all those Jews as real.

So I guess I didn’t put Tony Marcello out of me at all. He turned into a cry in a subway tunnel, a puff of vapor from a manhole, a scattering of bones on a sidewalk. And I really did dream of Joe Hill. For weeks after that, every night, I’d wake in my bunk bed and there must have been the sounds of other boys sleeping all around me and the chirr of crickets outside but all I’d hear was this silence, this clear and deafening absence of Tony Marcello’s breath, and I’d be in a cold sweat and I knew I’d been dreaming of Joe Hill. He stood on a pier by a lake and they shot him dead and he fell in the water and disappeared without a trace, and I knew he was gone and I knew he was dead, no matter what he said, he was dead. And in my dream, he was a Jew.

And Jacob Klein dreamed again. His words stopped and he dreamed and I was afraid of his dreams. I am afraid once more. Of Arthur’s dreams, of Viola’s dreams, of Judith Marie Nash’s dreams, of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s dreams, of the dreams of all those creatures there below. I am afraid. For them and for myself. They live so intensely with such difficult desiderata. And I Think I’m Going Out of My Head. It is not Jacob Klein before me. He has returned to his life down there, his memory of me gone forever, like Tony Marcello. This is one thing that has brought on this spasm of fear, I realize. I am Tony Marcello to hundreds on this planet. I am before them, I am even part of them, I share their voices, and then I am gone forever. Worse. Tony Marcello’s body was gone and yet Jacob Klein kept a memory of him. I am gone from these lives and nothing of me remains. Nothing. Except with Edna Bradshaw. And with Minnie Butterworth, whom I allowed to remember. Does she think of me still? But no. Now it is she who is dead. Almost certainly dead. But I am not. I am not. Though I am in no one’s dreams on this planet, I am still alive. How fuzzy in my thinking I have become. How self-absorbed. I turned to Jacob Klein’s voice seeking the third red white and blue eagle and the big jackpot of understanding, I would know this species at last, not in my own terms but in theirs, but I cannot put these three voices together, I am losing the meaning of even any one of them. I have only blanks before me.

I look at Arthur sleeping. His fingers move slightly. He touches someone in his dream, perhaps. I am reminded of Eddie the yellow cat. When he sleeps, his paws sometimes move, faintly, as if he is running. His toes flare and his claws come out. He dreams. He chases other subspecies creatures in his dreams to grab them and kill them and eat them. Perhaps the place where dreams come from is impervious to my power to bring forgetfulness. Perhaps they have all dreamed of me, all these visitors from Earth. Who is to say? Perhaps they chase me and grab me and kill me in their dreams.

I am growing quite hysterical, am I not? But, of course, I am very tired. Very tired. And this planet spins on, pulling the end of its millennium toward it. Only a few hours away, and I have no plan for what I must do. I think to wake Arthur now and return him to his sleeping place. I see myself doing this very thing, though I am aware that I have not moved at all from my chair. This is merely my intention for the next few minutes playing itself out in my mind. But no. I am actually doing this thing. Surely I am. I rise and touch Arthur on the arm and he snaps awake and looks up at me.

“It is time,” I say.

“Have you come to take me home?” Arthur asks.

“Only to the place on my ship where you sleep,” I say.

He reaches up and grasps my arm. “Am I in heaven?”

“You are not dead.”

“Aren’t you the Lord?”

“Am I?”

“Yes. You’ve come to take me.”

“How do you know?” I say.

“We have been waiting for you. Forever.”

“Please,” I say. “Come now. Sleep.”

And Arthur falls from the chair to his knees and bends low before me. “Lord,” he says. “I will rest in you.”

“Only your voice will. I am sorry. I wish it were more.”

And now the door to the interview room opens with a great whoosh of air and with a flood of light from the corridor and I turn and there are silhouettes there, one and then another and they are sliding into the room, another silhouette enters and another, and they are simply dark, sharply outlined shapes, and there are more coming in and they gather around me now and the lights catch them, there are so many of these creatures that all the lights of the room flare up at once and it is very bright, and they are the rest of my twelve, my Viola and my Lucky and my Mary and my Hank and my Trey and my Hudson and my Claudia and my Digger and my Misty and my Jared and now my Citrus, who breaks through all of them and she has wiped the blackness from her mouth and her lips are pale, the color of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s thighs, and the black spikes of Citrus’s hair have dissolved into long silken curls of russet which fall about her shoulders and the metal piercings are gone from her face and all of these voices cry out, “Lord, Lord what will you have us do?”

And I cry, “I am.”

And I wait. And I look at these twelve faces hovering before me and I feel these twelve minds waiting for more. And I think, Surely that is what this world needs to understand. It is the fundamental truth I have to speak. From that truth all things will follow for each of them. But they wait, they do not respond, the faces hover blankly.

Then Hudson says, “You am what?”

And they all say, “You am what?”

And I say, “I am that I am.”

And Hudson says, “What the fuck does that mean?”

And they all say, “What the fuck does that mean?”

And I try to shape some further revelation. I am thinking to say, I am a spaceman. I am a sharer of your voices. I am one who yearns and grieves with you.

But before I can speak, Citrus says, “He am God!”

“God!” they all cry and their faces fall, clustering together now low to the floor at the edge of the light, and from them, Citrus’s voice rises.

She says, “He has spoken the words of God to Moses at Horeb. He is God!”

“I am not!” I say, though my voice sounds faint to me.

“Do not forsake us!” Citrus cries.

And they all cry, “Do not forsake us!”

And I say, “Go to sleep.”

And Claudia says, “Sleep! He wants us to die!”

Claudia’s voice is full of fear and I am afraid she will draw her pistol again. I cry out loud and sharp, “Sleep! Merely sleep!”

And Arthur’s voice rises now, “He says there’s nothing after death!”

And Hudson cries. “Merely sleep! We’re in deep!”

A great wave of moans sweeps across all of them.

Citrus’s face rises from the gathering near the floor. Her eyes are full of tears. “Are those the words you haven’t been saying to me?”

“No.” I cannot make my voice rise above a whisper.

The tears are rushing down Citrus’s face now and down the faces of the others, too, for they are all weeping copiously, and Citrus says, “Why are you forsaking us?”