Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

“There’s lime sherbert in the punch,” Edna says.

“My girlfriend,” Jared says. He looks around, “There she is.”

I follow his gaze even as the woman’s voice calls out “Arthur!” once more and Edna excuses herself and moves off.

Away from the others, standing with her face turned up, faintly smiling into the dark, her body clothed such that it is nearly indistinguishable from the shadows, is a young woman with a spiky spray of deep-space black hair and black lips and a dozen tiny glints of metal about her face — rings and studs that she has attached to her flesh as if her very image would fly apart without these connecting devices.

A body lurches near, cutting off the girl in black. I read, Hi, my name is TREY. This man, clearly still not fully present, mumbles, “Slots. Where are the goddamn slots. Seen the goddamn buffet four times already, but no slots.” And he is gone.

“Citrus, hey,” Jared calls, his mouth full of pecan log, bits of the nuts spewing mistily into the spot lighting around us. The young woman continues to smile toward the invisible ceiling.

“She is not quite awake,” I say.

Jared looks at me. He, too, has metal on his face, though only a bit, two rings in an ear. He waves what is left of his pecan ball in a vague, sweeping gesture, meaning, I believe, to draw my attention to the entire spaceship. He says, “I knew there was something like this going on in the universe. You know? It’s, like, the thing I really expected.”

“You are a prescient young man,” I say.

Edna arrives now with her arm intertwined with the arm of a small, elderly woman, VIOLA, according to her name tag. “This is my husband, Desi,” Edna says.

“Citrus!” Jared calls.

Viola is frozen, wide-eyed, gazing at me, and Edna looks toward Jared’s girlfriend, whose face has descended now, though is still uncomprehending. “Oh,” Edna says, “you mean Judith?”

Jared barks in laughter. “Judith? She’s not Judith anymore. She’s long past Judith.”

“Well, honey, that’s the name she gave me for her tag,” Edna says, and she turns her attention back to the woman on her arm. “Come on now, Viola, his eyes are real pretty, don’t you think?” She is referring to my eyes, trying to deal with Viola’s astonishment at the sight of me.

“Did she really tell you ‘Judith’ was her name, Mrs. Desi?”

“You’re such a sweet boy.”

“Arthur!” Viola cries, though in a less strident voice, a fully conscious voice.

“Her name is Citrus.” Jared, who seemed so quickly at ease with his new surroundings, now sounds Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World. He looks sadly down at his plate of pecan log.

A man’s angular face, dark from an African heritage, appears, floating behind Edna’s head with only blackness all around. His eyes fix on me and he brings forth a rich, mellifluous, and ringingly loud voice: “Your honor, why in the motherfuck is the jury out of its box? What’s all this milling about?”

“Whoa,” Jared says. “What’s his problem?”

Now the face floats to the side and a whole man emerges into the spot of light, which glares off his name tag: Hi, my name is HUDSON. He wears a dark suit tailored tightly to cling to him in the way I think Edna wishes for my suit to fit.

I try to relieve Jared’s mind. “Did you hear how this clearly educated man expressed himself, Mr. Jared? You are all emerging slowly from a state of suspension. You will all speak for a while using words from the unswept refuse of your minds. Your Citrus no doubt called herself Judith in that state.”

“If the jury won’t sit, then they must acquit!” Hudson cries.

“You see? He quotes perhaps from a poet he has long forgotten.”

“Arthur! Help!” Viola is looking desperately around.

“Come on, honey,” Edna says to her. “Let’s go find him.” The two women move off and Hudson draws nearer, squinting at my face.

“What kind of judge are you?” he says. “A Reagan appointee?”

I motion to my name tag and Hudson focuses instead on my hand, squinting harder.

Jared tries to explain. “He’s a spaceman. An alien. This is the start of the new millennium, see. We’re on his spaceship and we’re heading into some other galaxy to be studied as representatives of Earth, since all these older generations of ours have fucked up our planet so bad and these superior beings are scared to death of us. Right?”

I say, “You are in touch only with partial truths in this matter, Mr. Jared, though I appreciate your efforts to be of assistance.”

“I’m having trouble focusing my eyes,” Hudson says.

“Hi, my name is Desi.” I read this for him with what I hope is a bright and cheery voice, following the example of my wife, as the man named Trey drifts past again pumping his hand oddly in the air before him and saying a word over and over that I have not heard: “Ka-ching.”

Hudson draws up to full height, taller than me by a full head.

“Would you like some sausage balls?” I ask him. “They are Tennessee Pride.” But I realize he is about to snap fully awake.

“Citrus! Over here!” Jared lifts his plate of pecan ball as if to entice her and Hudson looks at the young man, trying hard to think clearly. Jared sighs loudly and puts his plate down and moves off toward his girlfriend. And two more visitors appear at the far end of the table, side by side, a young man and a young woman, perhaps a little older than Jared, showing an Asian heritage in their faces.

The young man says, “Have I forgotten that it’s Tet?”

“I don’t think so,” says the young woman. “This is food I don’t recognize.”

They both bend near the cheese straws, studying them carefully.

“What the fuck is this?” Hudson has begun a slow revolution and I can hear in his voice a fully restored clarity of mind. I missed the moment of his snap, and he clearly missed an initial glimpse of his host Desi the Spaceman. His back is to me. I reach to pull my stylish wide-brimmed black felt hat lower over my face, but it is not on my head. I am, instead, dressed for my wife Edna Bradshaw’s welcome party.

“I should have rented a goddamn car,” Hudson says aloud, though clearly addressing only himself, and he is coming back around, looking at the young Asian couple, who are motionless before the sausage balls, and then at the full spread of the table, and now his eyes fall on me and he draws back. Suddenly he is wading through deep and muddy waters.

“Hi,” I say. “My name is Desi. I am a friendly guy.”

“A friendly guy? A fucking friendly guy? You got nothing to do with ‘guys’ from what I can see.” Hudson suddenly staggers a little at the import of this. “Oh man.”

“I understand your concern, Mr. Hudson,” I say.

“You look like … I’m not going to say it. I will not say it. Is this an abduction? Is that what this is?”

“You are on a spacecraft,” I say. “But not to worry.”

“Of all the goddamn times, Wilhelmina. Of all the mother-fucking times for you to pack your bag and grab the Lexus. And I had to go off and shoot some craps, didn’t I. Like it’d turn my luck around. Even if it meant riding the fucking bus.” Hudson has first addressed a person named “Wilhelmina” and then has begun speaking to himself, though he is still in my presence and is mostly looking at me. I attribute this phenomenon — which I have observed often in years of interviews — to the properties of spoken words. The words yearn to reach out directly to this or that soul but in the process of coming into being, they take on the finite properties that make them what they are, a limitation they themselves recognize and then try to ignore by conjuring up the ears of others who cannot hear or inner parts of the self that are oblivious to reason.