Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

“It’s Presbyterian Punch,” she says. “You’re not Presbyterian, are you? Of course not. Silly me. You just look a little funny, all the sudden, and I don’t want to cause any offense, though the Presbyterians I know don’t take offense at much of anything.”

Edna’s lovely, multilayered, self-dialoging effusion of words has its usual calming effect on me and I raise my hands before me, rippling the last hot spots out of them.

“I love it when you do that,” Edna says of this process. Then she adds, “Which reminds me, I want to apologize that all we have for these folks is finger food.”

My hands go instantly rigid. Before me I have sixteen oaken trunks in terrified uprightness waiting for a strike of lightning: I put it thus to embrace the metaphorical impulses of this planet and, as is the great benefit of our ability to take on the perspectives of those we are near, I suddenly understand one more figurative turn of speech.

Edna says, “I forgot to have you beam me up some plastic utensils.”

“Of course,” I say, dropping my hands out of sight. “So these visitors must use their fingers to eat the food you have prepared.”

“We can do a sit-down dinner later,” Edna says, and then her words veer off sharply, something I have learned to be prepared for. “Hi, honey,” she cries. “Welcome. It’s all right.”

I am determined to keep up with her. “Hi, honey,” I reply in a similarly excited voice. “Certainly a sit-down dinner will be all right.” But I realize that her gaze is no longer directed at me. She is looking over my shoulder, and I turn to see what it is.

The bus waits in the light. The windows are dark-tinted but near the front is a face pressed hard against the glass, gaping, eyes wide in terror, taking in all of this. The face presses harder, the eyes widen even further, and I understand that I am myself the source for this surge of distress. My face is different in many respects from the faces on this planet. My wife Edna Bradshaw has always spoken lovingly of my quite large eyes that resemble in shape Eddie the cat’s eyes and my total lack of hair or fur of any kind and my mouth that is thin and sinuous — I have a very nice mouth by my home planet’s standards, but it has nothing like the outfold of lips that I must say I find enchanting in Edna. I understand how the sudden turning of this man in the large suit — that is, me — and his having a face like mine would cause the fear I see in the bus window. It is hard to look directly upon me. All of our visitors over the years have had to come to terms with our faces, one way or another. But in these first moments I am usually wearing my wide-brimmed felt hat to soften the effect.

The face vanishes from the window and Edna brisks past me. “Come on, Desi. These folks need some food.”

And so it has come to pass that the twelve sojourners on the bus that carries LUCK upon its face have disembarked into the Reception Hall of my vessel and have each been given a name tag by my wife Edna Bradshaw, though she struggled at times, her Magic Marker in hand, to make them understand what she wished from them, for they were groggy from the deep sleep induced by our acquisition beam, and names are fragile things, after all. And these visitors are groggy still, though one of them has just now approached the delicious and welcoming food prepared by my wife. This is a good sign, even though most of them continue to drift uncertainly about the hall.

Normally in this process, before Edna Bradshaw was my wife, I would take these visitors straight from the bus to the warm and comforting darkness of the rooms prepared for them on our vessel. Then I would soon begin to interview them, bringing forth their voices and listening to and recording them in the vast and sparkling energy fields of our memory machines from where we can draw these voices back, again and again, and become one with them. This is our process. But tonight I am content to let the good times roll. This group has been specially chosen. These twelve are destined to help me in this time of my greatest challenge. It will soon be a very great challenge for their whole planet, as well. And so, for tonight, I stand beside the table of food. They drift to me — are herded to me, actually, by the charm and energy of my wife Edna Bradshaw — and I say, “Have a cheese straw. Have a sausage ball. Have a cup of cold Presbyterian Punch to quench your thirst.”

I have been saying things like this for many minutes and I have been met only with glazed stares or startled leaps. I have just begun to fear that I have made a mistake; they should be in their dark spaces, sleeping, resting, adjusting. But a few moments ago, a young man perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four years old stopped before the table and looked at the food and he shook his head violently and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and then he dropped his hands and opened his eyes again, wide, trying to come to terms with what was before him.

His tag says, Hi, my name is JARED. So I say, “Please, Mr. Jared, take that silver knife and cut a chunk off the outer moon of my home planet.” This is a little joke, based on my previous thoughts about the pecan ball, though I instantly realize that he has no frame of reference to allow him to see the humor.

My dear Edna appears at his elbow. “Go on ahead. It’s a real pecan ball. I don’t understand that moon stuff either.” She gives me a wink, to let me know that her implicit criticism of me is itself a little joke, and then she begins to cut the pecan ball for this young man. She continues, “My husband thinks everybody would just automatically know about his home planet. Like my daddy’d sometimes say something he clearly expected me to understand about Mobile and I didn’t have a clue. See, I’m from Bovary, Alabama, and that’s a far thing from Mobile, let me tell you, and I’m not talking about miles. I only went to Mobile once and I didn’t like it, though I’ve been some places even farther than that with my husband the spaceman and I liked them a lot. That’s him there, Jared, looking at you with those big old eyes. He’s a good man, I can tell you. A sweet and kind man and so you can just eat your pecan ball with a peaceful mind.”

Jared blinks at me and looks at the chunk of pecan ball on the paper plate in his hand and then he makes a tiny snapping movement with his head — I have seen this gesture many times over the years — and I know he is fully present at last. This has always been a difficult moment for visitors, the first understanding that this is not a dream, but Jared surprises me. He lifts his paper plate slightly toward Edna and speaks as if we have long been engaged in a casual conversation. “So’d you make this yourself?”

“What a sweet boy,” my wife says. “Yes, I did.”

“Cool,” Jared says to Edna. “You’re human, right? From Earth?”

“From Alabama.”

“Where’d you two meet?”

Edna is already cutting another piece of the pecan ball for Jared, though he has not yet begun to eat what he has. She says, “In the parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bovary. He’d been listening to me with his machines.” She deposits more of the pecan ball on the young man’s plate.

“We can hear all your words,” I try to explain, “but through the machines they are very confusing. And so, What is a Guy to Do? That is why we need to be Oh So Much Closer and then we can Get to Know You Better.”

And from across the Reception Hall a woman’s voice cries out “Oh my god!”

“Oh dear,” Edna says.

With a look of suddenly remembering a thing forgotten, Jared says, “Where’s Citrus?”

“Arthur!” the woman’s voice cries.