Robert Butler: Mr. Spaceman

I am. The word on the face of the bus is LUCK. Bright bulbs of gold illuminate the letters so that even though the night is dark, this word goes before them, shining. I am far above, but I have moved over the land and the water of this place for some years now, and so I know how it is: the hum of their tires on their Tax Dollars at Work, the rice fields sliding invisibly past and smelling like Fabric-Safe Morning Rain, spots of light out toward the night horizon where others of them huddle in their bungalows or their mobile homes waiting for what these on the bus rush to seek for themselves along Interstate number Ten. The bus dashes fast in the passing lane, the windows black, showing nothing to the outside world, but I know there are souls within, yearning forth into the dark night, crossing from the Great State of Texas to the Sportsman’s Paradise of Louisiana, the Pelican State, the Bayou State, the place where they Let the Good Times Roll, and down the highway is the city of Lake Charles where strobe lights as green as the most dazzling toothbrush wave about high over the lake, restlessly sweeping an empty sky. As if they are looking for me. But from these lights, everyone passing in the night knows there are vessels here that can carry them over this water and provide games to play where they might find this thing that so many seek. This is how I understand it so far.

But the central mysteries continue to dwell in darkness. I am still learning, even at this late hour, even as the moment of my arrival is established. Even now I am trying to learn what I need to know in order to do what I must. And so I turn my attention back to the bus, still twenty miles west, blowing past a great tandem tractor-trailer, quaking in the turbulence. I am far above. I wait. I have at my disposal the Wonders of Modern Technology. I can see everything. Hear everything. I am, as those on this planet who truly believe in a widely bespirited universe call me, a spaceman. Or, often, an alien. There is some very great fear in this name alien. So much is alien to those who live here. Even to those who can believe in something they have never seen.

In fact, I see nothing. I hear nothing. And I think it is because of the mystery of these vanishing, fragile, powerful things that plague the dwellers in this world, things that rush from them and around them and into them and through them and out again, constantly, these words, these particles of language that they each must manufacture with their brain and body and with something else in them, too, with a soul —this is itself a word, I realize — I am putting all of this forth now in words, I realize, and so even beginning to try to get at the mysteries I must solve here in order to do what I must, I fall deeper into the darkness — yet I have no other word for the thing I mean but soul —and this is something even a spaceman knows to be a mystery, even in himself, but more so in those who dwell across the vast and strange landscape of this planet, and this is something that eludes even the wonders of the technology of my home world — and this soul is something that on this planet must try to find a way to manufacture words, must try to speak its insubstantial self in these tiny, hastily assembled fragments of sound, these invisible things that yet always threaten to clog my wondrously advanced machines and my wondrously advanced head, too — I speak now with self-deprecating irony, because even I am not immune to fragmentation and digression when I am forced to resort to words. The atmosphere of this planet brims with words; they blow past me and I quake in the turbulence.

I crack my knuckles. It is a soothing thing I learned from a cowboy I once beamed up from Lubbock, Texas. I am a gol-durn lucky creature. I have eight fingers full of knuckles — count ’em, eight — to crack on each of my hands, and I do this, and I grow calm, and I wait. The bus just now leaves the reach of the tandem tractor-trailer’s headlight beams. There are a thousand yards of empty Interstate ahead. I wait for the bus to run farther into that dark gap. I sit before a great console, a vast screen that can flare with any of the countless images we’ve collected since our first visits here, long ago now, nearly a hundred revolutions of this planet around its star. Images from our machines, simply watching and listening, and images from the human voices, from the words shaping the moments from inside the brains and the souls of those who have visited us from below. All of those who came to us were dashing somewhere, all of them were seeking something. These are the images that I have to understand. Quickly now, before my appointed hour. But I am still mystified.

Perhaps this bus will help. I look again. It is racing on. For a hundred of these years we have gathered images. I am not the first. But now I am alone. I am the only one of my kind on this vessel, the only one of us attending this planet now. I am deeply moved by this responsibility. Yippee I. Yippee yay. I crack my knuckles once again. He was not a real cowboy, in the sense he himself wished for. I touch my console. He was the first of these that I had ever met. I was very young and not alone then. I call him up from the memories of this ship. I put him inside me.

I am Whiplash Willie Jones. Mr. Griffith, of course, was the hottest of shit if you figured these moving pictures would amount to anything. I never worked for Mr. Griffith, though I could’ve done that if I’d got the same chance that I myself would give even to a scorpion lurking in my boot some morning. I’d at least dump him out on the floor and let him have a chance to go ahead and run off and be what he is. Probably still hit him with the boot heel, though. Smash him where he stood before he could take a step. This maybe not the best way to put what I’m trying to say.

Though look at me, son. I don’t have the face of Mix or Holt or my old pal Bronco Billy Anderson. I never liked white horses anyhow. What I’d’ve been, dumped out of a boot there on the floor, was what I ended up being. The guy who grabs the loot and tries to get away. The guy who’d as soon cheat you as look at you. The guy who’d meet a decent woman in an orange grove in Los Angeles and marry her and take her back to Lubbock and treat her like shit and not be able to stop himself.

I didn’t choose any of that. That was the cards I drew even before I knew what game it was I was playing. Take the one thing I’m remembered for. It was in that little movie that Ed Porter made in 1903, The Great Train Robbery. Ten minutes long. I show up and he puts a hat on me and a goddamn polka-dot kerchief and he glues a handlebar mustache to my face. Then he starts the camera to watching me and he says go here, do this, do that.

That’s how it always is, ain’t it?

So I’m the leader of the gang that robs the train in the first damn story-telling film ever, and what happens? There’s fourteen scenes in this little tale and I get killed in an ambush in scene number thirteen, shot dead, clear for everybody to see, and then there I am in scene fourteen, the last one, and it’s just me filling up the screen. There ain’t no forest or no horses or nothing. Just blackness all around me, but I’m alive. I been born again. It’s some kind of miracle. And what do I do? I turn and face the audience and I raise my gun and I wrinkle my brow and I shoot. I shoot the whole lot of them. I shoot the whole goddamn world. And it’s nothing I choose for myself. The guy behind the camera, like some voice that just comes into my head, like the goddamn voice you hear inside you all your life long, he says do this, and I do it. And in the theaters, women fainted and strong men wept.