Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

I say, “I am not surprised at what you say. I have made a mistake to link the thing I wish for to dreams. What I wish for is to be in your memory. It can be in memories of your waking state, as well. I wish to be always inside you.”

Edna Bradshaw leans forward and puts her hand on mine. Her bazongas — I can only think of them as that, held, as they are, by these besequined cups of gold — her bazongas surge and pucker at their place of cleavage. Sweet dreams are made of these. And she says, “You’re always inside me, you spaceman lover you. You’re the proof that dreams come true.”

In spite of the billowing of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s bazongas, and though I have had only one dream in my life, I am struck with fear at this notion.

I wish to stop speaking now. I need to sleep. But the fear that sprung from dreams and again from the thought of dreams fulfilled now leaps back into me at the prospect of falling asleep. I am a member of my own species but I have taken on the nature of this species. I am as vulnerable as they.

“Didn’t you say you had two questions?”

I look at my wife Edna Bradshaw, who has just spoken to me. I struggle to comprehend the words. She seems to understand my difficulty.

“Two questions,” she says. “You said you had two.”

“Yes,” I say. “What is a roller rink?”

“You do have such an interesting mind, Desi honey. Going from one thing to another. Well, a roller rink — and we do have one in Bovary, Alabama, though I never mention it when I say to people what there is to do in town, I always just say the Rebel Roll Bowling Alley and Sam’s Skeet Shoot and, of course, people like to hang out at the Dairy Freeze, and that’s all I say, even though the Dixie-Do Roller Rink sits not a quarter of a mile from the Wal-Mart where you and I met — a roller rink, on the one hand, is a place with a big hardwood floor and flashing colored lights where people strap wheels on their feet and roll around to fast music, but on the other hand, it’s a place where you choose to go if you’re a girl who wants to humiliate herself before the whole world in numerous ways, like having to call out your shoe size in front of everybody when you’ve got a size-ten foot and you even are fool enough to ask for double-E width and they laugh and give you about a size-six set of roller skates and say to squeeze into these honey and then you go on to try to follow every little activity the DJ, who’s the guy running the music, gives you, from Presto Chango, where you have to suddenly change direction, to Backwards Time, where everybody has to skate backwards, to the Hokey Pokey, where you gather around and you extend various parts of your body into the circle and shake them all about, all of which activities are designed to make you fall down, which I always did with a great flopping and trembling of my then too ample flesh, if you know what I mean. That’s a roller rink. Hell on wheels.”

“I am sorry,” I say.

“What in heaven’s name for?”

“I made you remember the place that humiliated you.”

“The Dixie-Do Roller Rink? Oh don’t you be worrying your sweet spaceman head. That old life is dead and gone. But people can be pretty cruel sometimes. … Where are you going?”

I have jumped up from the bed, full of anxiety. It is the capacity for cruelty in these creatures that I fear. I say, “There is so little time left.”

“For what?”

This is a question I do not feel prepared to answer. Though I should. By tomorrow all the planet will know. And this is my wife before me. There is nothing in my directive that would prohibit letting my wife know my mission, especially this near to the hour and in the safe confines of our spaceship. But I am not yet prepared to shape these words of explanation. I am frightened.

“Desi honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong, my dear wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say.

“I thought we’d pretty much cured you of addressing me in that formal spaceman way. Something is bothering you.”

“I have a task.” I find I can say no more.

Edna waits a few moments and then tries to fill in the blank I have left. “You’re a hardworking man, I know that.”

“I am a hardworking man. This is true. I am an okay Joe. I am a friendly guy. There is nothing to be afraid of. I come in peace, Earthlings.”

“What are you going on about?”

“You have nothing to fear,” I say.

“Then why does your saying that scare me?”

“Why does your being scared of me scare me?” I cry. All of this is going very badly.

And my wife cries in return, “I don’t know why me being scared of you saying not to be scared scares you, but that scares me even more.”

This answer is clear to me. “Because if I scare you by asking you not to be scared — you who are my wife Edna Bradshaw who loves me — then how scared will all the creatures on this planet be when I obey my orders to descend from my spaceship and reveal the existence of spacemen to the whole world?”

And now it has been spoken between us.

Edna lowers herself to the bed. She sits and she is, for the moment, uncharacteristically, speechless.

I begin to hum. But at the first sound of this, Edna’s face turns to me and she is wide-eyed with fear and I stop.

“I am sorry,” I say. “Whenever I Feel Afraid, I Whistle a Happy Tune.”

“That was no whistle,” Edna says, softly.

“A spaceman whistle,” I say.

“They’ll tear you apart down there,” she says.

“What Do Doctors Do To Relieve Tense Nervous Headaches?” I say.

“This is no time for that kind of talk, Desi honey. Turn off that TV in your head.”

Unexpectedly, I find that her words Make My Brown Eyes Blue. I sit down beside her.

“I’ve gone and hurt your feelings,” she says.

“Did you read my mind?” I cry, full of hope.

“I read your face, honeybun. When your feelings are hurt, that wide sweet mouth of yours wrinkles up like a Mary-Lou’s-Southern-Belle-Beauty-Nook marcel wave. Like now.”

“What is wrong with the TV in my head?”

“There’s a lot of good things on TV. I’m not saying there’s not. You’re full of tasty tidbits from your listening in and all. But this is the real world you’re about to face.”

My wife Edna Bradshaw is confirming my worst fears now. There is the world I have learned about all these years and then there is a real world that has eluded me all along. I know nothing.

Her eyes widen. “Now I’ve never seen your mouth do that , honey. Like it was a lie-detecting machine and I just told the biggest whopper ever. I don’t mean to keep on hurting your feelings. But the truth is I’m scared for you.”

I say, “I am scared too.”

“I don’t ever interfere with my man’s work. That’s not what’s done where I come from. But please, Desi, can’t we just go off to some other world now? Let’s try a new place. Listen in on Mars or somewhere.”

“There are only rocks on Mars.”

Edna bends near to me. She places her hand on mine. “Anywhere,” she says. “Please.”

“I am,” I say, “who I am.”

My wife Edna Bradshaw thinks about this for a moment and then she says in a voice that is very soft and with her eyes filling with the tears that still seem so alien to me. “Yes you are,” she says. “And I would not want that any other way.”

I say, “Time has run out for me, Edna Bradshaw my honey-bun. I go down to your planet tonight at midnight. But I am very tired. I must rest. And yet I must talk with more of our guests. Are they not from the real world you speak of? Perhaps I can still learn.”

“Has it done you any good so far, all your interviewing?” she asks.