Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

“I do not wish to forsake you,” I say, and I lift my hands, I will try to touch them, I will place the beating of my heart inside each of them. But as soon as my hands appear, they all recoil.

Hank the bus driver’s voice lifts sharply, “That’s how he makes us sleep!”

And others cry, “The hands!”

And Citrus emerges into the light, her whole body, clothed in the whiteness of a nuclear fireball, and she lifts her hands even as mine still rise from the momentum of my impulse to help these yearning souls and in each of her hands is a glint of light in each of her hands is a long tapering shape in each of her hands is a metal spike and I wish to cry out but there is nothing to say and Citrus’s hands rear back and her face is twisted in pain and I see the flash of spikes as they rush at my hands, spikes Sharp Enough to Cut Tin Cans Sharp Enough for All Your Kitchen Needs, and I cannot hide my hands, I cannot move my hands at all, and my palms suddenly burn as if the very atoms that make them up are flying apart and I am about to flare into nothingness.

And I leap up. I am aflame and I am stiff but I am standing alone in my interview room. I spin to face the door and it is in darkness, closed tight. I am alone.

No. Not alone. I sense another, and I turn, slowly, and look.

It is Arthur. He sleeps, still, in his chair.

I look again toward the door and then into the places where the others had been. There is no one. They have vanished.

Or they were never there.

And suddenly I realize that I have dreamed.

My species does not dream. I have only music inside me when I sleep. It is mere sleep. But now I have dreamed. I have died my daily death and instead of darkness and an ineffable movement of tone, I have voices and faces and the anguish of others, and my own anguish as well, a terrible burning. I look at my hands. They are unharmed. But that merely preserves them for further harm when next I fall asleep. I have died my daily death and descended into the hell of dreams.

I lie down beside my wife Edna Bradshaw, where she sleeps within the covers of our bed. I listen to the sound she makes, and though she is not snoring, the air seems to move heavily inside her and I can hear it clearly and she is louder than the crickets in the Adirondack Mountains. Though I have never personally heard the crickets in the Adirondack Mountains, I am sure that this is true about my wife’s breathing. And it frightens me, of course, for I fear that she will swim out too far and she will drown. An unreasonable fear. She is safe on my spaceship. She will never have occasion to swim in a lake in the Adirondacks. My fear abates. But now I am sad, for I myself will never hear the chirring of the crickets in the Adirondacks, or in any mountains. Or perhaps I will. Perhaps I will descend from my spaceship in less than twenty hours — I checked the time again after my dream — and the world will welcome the truth that I exist and they will embrace me and slap me on the back in gestures of acceptance and affection, I will be their pardner, and they will say: Go, see, listen, let it all hang out, do your thing, the world is your oyster, wash the dirt right down your drain, fish in our streams, hunt in our woods, swim in our lakes. And I grow frightened again.

I draw near to my wife. I am glad for the prominent sound of her breath. I bring my face next to hers, I let the exhalation of her breath touch my eyes. I reach up and take her face gently in my hands, touching her with my fingertips, exchanging heartbeats for breaths. And she says, softly, “Oh you spaceman.”

“I am sorry I awoke you,” I say, not moving my hands.

“Oh you go ahead and wake me like this any old time,” she says.

Regrettably I cannot shape the words this world demands of its creatures without ceasing the sharing of my heart, and so I take my hands away from her face.

She sighs.

I say, “May I ask you two questions?”

“Of course, honey,” she says.

“When you dream, do you dream of Desi your spaceman husband?”

She rises up now from beneath the covers, throwing them off as if she were emerging from deep water in a dazzling rebirth, for though, when I laid her down to sleep at the beginning of this long night, I had simply helped her — sleepy bunny that she was — into her pink fuzzy wuzzies, now she flares and sparkles in the light in her Glittery Gold Harem Dazzler. “You mean Desi my husband and my spaceman lover?” she says, adjusting herself within her Shaped Sequin Bra.

“Yes,” I say, though the word goes mushy, formed as it is by my suddenly floppy tongue. “I remain your spaceman lover as well.”

“Of course I dream of you.”

“Why of course?”

She smiles and giggles and moves her hand as if she will pinch my cheek. I cannot face this gesture of affection tonight and so I withdraw from her reach, trying to mask my retreat as an intention to sit up and square around to face her. I think of my own dream, how my visitors all recoiled at the lifting of my hands.

“Girls always dream about their beaus,” Edna says.

“I am in retreat in your dreams,” I say. “I start as your husband and then I am your lover — am I not correct in thinking that, strictly speaking, this role, though similar in activity, is subsumed in the role of husband? — and now I am your beau, which is your boyfriend before becoming your lover. Do I misunderstand these words?”

Edna stops and thinks about this for a long moment. “You know, I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re right. Now sometimes a girl will say beau when she means lover, if she’s in polite company or if she’s with her girlfriends at the hairdressers or somewhere and they can all have fun winking at each other and making little we-know-what-you’re-really-saying sounds, because it’s like a secret code between you. And, of course, it’s a sad thing but true that most husbands don’t keep doing the basic activity you pretty much always have with a lover. But still, you’re right. A beau transforms into a lover and then into a husband, like a worm turning by stages into a butterfly. Except most times it’s more like a butterfly of a beau transforming into a worm of husband. But you do listen real good, don’t you my honeybun. Now there’s something that husband, lover, and beau all three most often are real neglectful at. A girl does like to be listened to, especially if she loves to talk, which I do, though you probably already know that.”

And Edna stops talking abruptly. Her brow knits and then her face does a quick turn slightly to the left as if she has just seen the darting of some tiny animal on the floor, and then her face does a similar quick turn to the right. “Where was I?” she asks.

“Loving to talk,” I say.

“Before that.”

“Dreams,” I say.

“I think it’s true,” she says. “I think a girl dreams of her beau more than her lover and her lover more than her husband. Probably a lot more. You dream about the things you want.”

“And the dreams that frighten you?”

“You also dream about things that frighten you, it’s true. But it’s not so different. It’s still about wanting. You want to escape those things. You run in your dreams, you scream, you weep. You want it to end.”

“But aren’t there sweet dreams?”

“There’s some that are sweet enough while you’re in them, but you wake up and they’re gone. That loving handsome man’s not there in the bed beside you. You didn’t actually make a speech on the Fourth of July to all of Bovary and they cheered for you. You can’t really flap your arms and fly high along the Pigeon River. You’re left with a whole lot of wanting again.”