Robert Butler - Mr. Spaceman

“I’ve been waiting a long time to speak with you,” she says. “Please.”

“I was just coming to get you,” I say, and that certainly could be true. I was in fact going to get someone and she is a legitimate choice.

At this, Claudia turns on her heel and moves off down the corridor. I follow. She goes straight to the interview room and the door opens for her and by the time I step in, she is sitting in the appropriate chair, a shaft of light illuminating her.

I sit before her. She closes her eyes and without my even having to wave my hand her voice starts and mine starts with hers and we speak and I am Claudia Lambert. I feel like I should give you a formal welcome. I worked for NASA for nearly a decade. But other things overtook me. I worked for NASA but now I work for myself with my name on the door and a payroll of a dozen and nobody above me who I can turn to for appreciation. I had a daughter but now I have a twenty-one-year-old friend, such a good friend that she can tell me only the truth when I’m being stupid or a fool. I had faith in the institutions of the city of Houston and the state of Texas but now I carry a pistol in my purse, since concealed weapons in Texas are suddenly legal and I’m afraid of accidentally cutting somebody off on the interstate and them taking out a gun and trying to shoot me. I’ll be able to shoot back at them. Road rage enrages me. I hate the instant and harsh criticism of drivers trying to feel self-righteous over petty little things and I feel self-righteous hating them. I had a husband but now my body is my own and I can’t find anybody I’d even want to hold hands with after an hour’s conversation much less choose to take to bed.

God I loved the space program. Especially the two Voyagers. I love the Voyagers even more now, I think. They’re carrying these electronic records of who we are, the people of Earth. They’ll carry them for millennia and millennia, out into the stars. Not that I ever bought the hodgepodge image they’ve got of us. But it’s something. Among the music selections, they’ve got the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth flying out there and right alongside is Chuck Berry doing “Johnny B. Goode.” There’s an image of a traffic jam in India next to a tree toad next to a demonstration of human sex organs. And there’s fifty-five different speakers in fifty-five languages giving greetings. Mostly, Hello from earth. Peace to you. That sort of thing. But each one’s a little different. The Zulu speaking Nguni calls the spacemen “great ones” and wishes them longevity. The Turk co-opts them right away, addressing them as “Turkish-speaking friends.” The Indonesian seems to be the host of a TV talk show. He says, “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Good-bye and see you next time.” And the young woman doing the Swedish refused to step out of the bounds of her own little life. She says, “Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth.” What are the spacemen going to think? Ithaca’s in Sweden, I guess. I don’t know why I should give a damn. I can’t send a verbal greeting that can be adequately comprehended across a lunch table in River Oaks to my own daughter once a week.

But I did know how to turn NASA technical stuff into ideas and images the press could understand. And I did that for a while. Even now when I think about my life, it’s all Voyager 2. I got married the day it took off. When it was between the Earth and the asteroid belt I was happy. Jenny was born two weeks from Jupiter. Between Jupiter and Saturn I got divorced. Flying by Saturn, I went to work for NASA, and between Saturn and Uranus I thought I was happy again, buried in my work. Between Uranus and Neptune I wanted to get the hell away from people, from bosses, and just take care of myself and my baby and it still took a while. It wasn’t until after Neptune. It wasn’t until Voyager 2 suddenly was looking ahead and all that was out there was forty thousand years to the nearest star, it wasn’t until then that I could walk away. But I had a marketable skill for high-tech companies in Houston and elsewhere. I was somebody who could explain things like heliopause, which is what the scientists expect Voyager will locate for them sometime around the turn of the millennium. It’s the outermost boundary of the solar wind, which is made up of charged atomic particles sheering off from the Sun as it drags us all through space. At the heliopause the solar wind gets hemmed in by all the charged particles floating around in interstellar space. It puts the whole solar system in a big magnetic bubble. And so I whipped on past NASA, getting a big acceleration from its gravity, like Voyager accelerating past Neptune, and I was out on my own, with a lot of empty space ahead.

But that’s been more than ten years and now my little girl sits across from me over her spinach salad with sprouts and she’s a young woman and she tells me, “Mama why are you so militant? Men aren’t so bad. So they’re, like, from their own planet. That’s okay. But I’m afraid you’ve left Venus and moved to Mars.” And I have no idea where she got the capacity to absorb shit ideas like that.

But I guess I’m still looking for something to put in the center of me, where all the shit ideas once were. I can sit in my office for hours, after everyone else has gone home, and my office is dark and the shades are open to the night sky. I can sit there and think about how it was supposed to go for a woman’s life on this planet, for centuries — you must subordinate yourself; you are your devotion to your man; you find your excellence in the role the world gives you — and of course I understand how all that separated women from a chance to find their personal destinies. But I keep coming around to this. At the end of the day, the things the men tried to keep for themselves — you are your work; you are born to conquer and dominate; you make your own fate, find your own excellence — these things leave the even bigger questions unanswered, too. Just as badly. The questions that your job, your children, your marriage, your ideas, your personal destiny on this lump of cosmic rock just won’t get at. Not with the downright infinity of things hovering over you in the dark every night. But then I think about our little Voyager out there and for a moment I’m okay. Someday soon, Voyager’s going to reach the heliopause. And then it’ll pop out of that bubble we’re all in and it’ll just keep on going. Free at last. With the big mysteries ahead of it and all the time in the universe to figure them out.

Claudia falls silent and I am instantly buoyed by her words. This thing I must do in a few hours: it will bring an answer to one of the big mysteries. Surely all those who yearn as Claudia does will welcome me. Surely the Swedish-speaking computer programmer in Ithaca would welcome me. And the Zulu, who wishes me longevity. And the Indonesian who hopes he will see me next time.

“Surely they will welcome me,” I say to Claudia.

But she shakes her head sadly. No. “They’re coming for you,” she says.

And suddenly the light on her face begins to thrash and her eyes shift to look over my shoulder and I turn and the doorway is crowded with large men in ragged clothes and they have wild eyes and they are carrying torches alive with fire and pitchforks and the only reason they have not already burst in and grabbed me is that there are so many of them trying to squeeze through at once and I leap up and the room is silent and I turn back to Claudia but there is only an empty bed. The bed where, until this moment, I must have been sleeping. How could I? I have heard Claudia Lambert’s voice so clearly.

I rush out of this space where my body seems to be. Perhaps this is the dream. Perhaps I have dozed off before Claudia. The dream began with the sad shake of her head. The men in the doorway: that is the stuff of my dream. I skim down the corridor and into the interview room.