Mr. Spaceman by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler [Butler, Robert Olen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Science Fiction, Literary, Millennium (Eschatology)
ISBN: 9780802137821
Google: n1tR6xiyh4UC
Amazon: 0802137822
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2000-12-07T07:00:00+00:00

But, of course, there may be no need to erase the memories of any of my present visitors, since I will myself follow them back to this planet's surface and will reveal the secret to everyone. In only a matter of hours now. Let them all remember.

And I do lead Lucky back to the deep shadows of his sleeping space and then I stand in the corridor and I listen to the breathing of all of my visitors as they sleep and wait. I need to push on to the next voice. There may yet be some sudden revelation. But I do not know how to choose and so I begin to pace up and down the corridor outside these doorways and I sing to myself. I need to do this anyway. I sing a wordless song inside me—and I mean by using this word sing something other than the thing meant by music on the planet below me, for this song is not translated into elements— words, perceivable sounds—that can exist in the shared physical space outside one's internal landscape—these are primal tones ris-ing and spinning inside me like the crepuscular spirals of dust and cloud and moisture on my home planet, a process that nightly comes with the setting of our beautiful blue star, the very elements of our world rising up to bid our star farewell, rising up in their yearning—yes, I now readily attribute this condition even to the inanimate substances of my own planet—they yearn to go with that star as it seems about to leave us all alone. This is the sensual theme of the song I sing, a song created in my own head, even as I sing it, existing only there in its true form, like no one else's song, and I, too, yearn, I yearn to place this music into the head of a being other than myself, directly, untranslated, but my own wife Edna Bradshaw, whom I love with a great spiral of feeling inside me, my own wife cannot hear this kind of music, I cannot share it with her, and I know this is true of all the beings on this planet, it is how they live: If there is some deep sense of an essential thing inside them, an ontological music, beyond words, beyond sounds, it is impossible for them truly to share it with anyone else.

I have let my thoughts grow intrusive now. The music stops. I stop. I am before a sleeping space and so I choose this one. And soon we are in the speaking place. Sitting before me is the tiny, elderly form of Viola Stackhouse. And though she cannot place the things that are inside her directly inside me, we do speak as one, we shape these words as one. My husband Arthur buys Buicks. He always has. He says the Buick LeSabre was the one American car they never forgot how to build, even in the bad days of the late

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