  This is the voice of Desi, the hero of Robert Olen Butler's novel Mr. Spaceman, who has kept a quiet vigil above the Earth for decades while studying the confusing, fascinating, and frustrating primary species of our planet, occasionally venturing to the planet's surface to hear their thoughts and experience their memories using his empathic powers. Now, on December 31, 2000, he prepares for the final phase of his mysterious mission, which begins when he beams a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino aboard his ship. The twelve passengers will be the last humans whose lives he will experience before he positions his spaceship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth, and descend to the planet's surface to proclaim his presence to all of humanity at the turn of the millennium. Poignant, funny, and charming, Mr. Spaceman is filled with unexpected twists and turns, a tribute to the powers of love and understanding and the essence of what it means to be human. Chapter One
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.
So how could I do any better by Gladys?
Quiet now, Willie. Quiet for now. The console flickers and goes dark. It would do me no good
at this moment to crack my knuckles. I have an Achy Breaky Heart, and it is best to let this voice
slide back into the darkness.
I straighten up sharply. I am afraid I have let my bus go too far.
But no. I see. It is all right. The bus is rushing on alone down there. The time has come. I
move my hands over the dark surface before me and I make a great light and it gathers beneath
my ship and then descends like a pillar of fire and it seizes this bus and the wheels rush on,
spinning wildly but touching nothing now save the air, and the bus rises quickly, so quickly that
any creature there below would instantly doubt its eyes. And inside, the pilgrims seeking Luck
have all fallen into a deep sleep.
I rise. I step into the brushed-smooth metalloid corridor ringing with silence. I move along
quickly. Gliding, my wife says, a thing that never ceases to amuse her.
Yes. I am married. Yes, to someone from this planet. In spite of the censure of many on the
planet where I come from. And there is a faint clicking now. Tiny feet dashing at me from
behind. This is the approach of my wife's subspecies companion, Eddie. He is a cat. Or, through
my wife's voice, my darling adorable cat or my sweet little yellow cat or my cute-enough-to-eat
cat-and this latter name alarms me, I must admit, though she assures me she would never
actually employ this means of admiration for Eddie-and, by extension-she has spoken, at my
request, directly to this point-for me either.
Eddie dashes ahead down the corridor, anxious to see our new arrivals, I think. It is hard for
me to know about Eddie. I am not telepathic with any species other than my own, even primary
species. And when it comes to the subspecies, it is, of course, even more difficult. Eddie's
vocabulary is severely limited. Though there is nuance to his few words. I can distinguish his
put-food-before-me-instantly meow from his
I-will-now-try-to-eat-a-piece-of-your-hand-and-it-is-not-because-you-are-cute meow. But there are
things in his head, always, that I wish to know.
He feels things very strongly, even his languor, even his serene arrogance. If there were only
time, I would like to listen carefully enough to him so that I could hear. I would like to listen to
every cat on this planet. To every sparrow. To every fish. But there is so little time now. I find
myself moving faster along the corridor, just at the thought of this. The time is near for me. They
have chosen a moment for themselves down there, the turning of a millennium. And so it shall be
for me. As I hurry along this corridor I1fervently hope there might be from this bus some voice,
some few tracks of words, that will help me understand how to do what I soon must do with this
planet.
And then she is before me. My wife. My Edna Bradshaw. My darling adorable Edna. My
cascade-of-unedited-words Edna. My cute-enough-to-eat Edna. I try this thought in my head
now, by her example, and I must admit there is an oddly pleasurable stirring at it.
"Greetings, my wife Edna Bradshaw," I say as I approach her. And I am struck anew with a
further paradox of words on this planet. In my private inner self I am able to shape these words
much more fluently and expressively than when I attempt to offer them through my mouth. On
my planet we still have mouths and mechanisms to make sounds, but we use them primarily in
the effort to create music or direct expressions of feeling that bypass the lumpenness of rational,
denotated thought. For a time I assumed that this discrepancy between what is inside me and
what comes out through my uttered words was a function of my, shall I say, alienness. But I no
longer think that. And this is one of the reasons I am still searching desperately for answers about
the inhabitants of this planet. I believe it is the same for them.
"I'm so excited," Edna says and she does a thing with her body that still bypasses my rational
thoughts quite effectively. Somehow she manages to make the tightly fitted, profusely ruffled,
dramatically low-cut dress that she wears hold absolutely still while she wiggles-or I might say
even undulates-within it. I am a skinny male creature, quite excessively skinny, as are all of
those who inhabit my planet, the female creatures even more so. Edna is not. She is often critical
of herself for this, though I think she is also quite proud of her knockers. "You have never seen a
set of knockers like these, I bet." This is, for me, a memorable observation from my cute-enough-to-eat
Edna. She made her observation on the occasion of our first becoming lovers,
when I had asked her for a date and took her far out of her galaxy and parked in a quadrant of
quiet space.
Edna's hand flies out now and thumps me on the chest. I assume she is reading the images
from my inner self at this moment. But of course she is not. She will, however, occasionally
thump me from an excess of love. "Oh you spaceman," she will say.
But this time she is nodding again and again toward my chest where I am still smarting from
this gesture of her love. I look. I am wearing a pinstripe suit which Edna says is much too big for
me but which I cannot part with, having been warmly complimented on it by a fine old
gentleman we took up from a late-night diner in Chicago about thirty years ago. I had put my suit
on to greet him, a suit which I had inherited from a predecessor, and Herbert Jenkins was made
to feel instantly at ease by it. He had once worn a zoot suit that looked very much like this one.
"This will make everybody feel right at home," Edna says, and I focus on the lapel of my suit
and a square white tag is affixed there. It reads: Hi, my Name is DESI.
She now has a similar tag in her hand and is waving it over her own chest. She says, "You
know, this is a problem I simply didn't anticipate. I am showing a good many of my assets, am I
not. And my assets don't like the idea of adhesives sticking to them. I once had a bee sting right
there." She places a fingertip on the steep slope where her knockers bunch together in the
middle, and without a pause-my wife Edna Bradshaw seems sometimes never to draw a breath
no matter how many words she speaks-without a pause, she continues, "And it got so red and
full of puss-forgive me for talking like this about unpleasant matters, but it's to the point, really.
Which is, I put an adhesive bandage over that bee sting, and when I come to take it off, it felt like
I was taking all my skin with it. So you see I don't have a place right at the moment to put my
name tag, and you have to have name tags with strangers. I want to be a good hostess, especially
this being my first time, and I'm trying to figure all this out without a great deal of guidance-I
don't mean to be critical, my sweet spaceman lover-but I am struggling."
Continues...
Excerpted from Mr. Spaceman
by Robert Olen Butler
Copyright © 2000 by Robert Olen Butler.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Copyright © 2000
Robert Olen Butler
All right reserved.
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