“My wife Edna Bradshaw, may I ask if you are feeling angry at your husband in a physically actionable way?”
She pauses briefly with an inward concentration, as if she is translating what I have said. But quite quickly she replies, “I’m not angry, Desi. You clunkhead sweetheart spaceman. I love you.” And her hand rushes at my cheek again and grabs that very same handful of flesh and my analysis is, thankfully, confirmed. I bear the pain with patience, for she does not know what it is that she is doing.
Finally she releases me a second time and I turn my fingertips to the task of restoring life to my cheek. She says, “Can I make them breakfast one at a time then, as you choose to wake them up?”
“Of course,” I say. “I only wished to protect you from your sadness.”
I realize that this declaration has touched Edna and I quickly cover both my cheeks with my hands. But she has already spun around and she disappears into the corridor.
I myself am left not only with an Achy Breaky cheek but the lingering mystery of my wife Edna Bradshaw’s willingness, even eagerness, to return to the activity that has been a source of abiding pain in her life. But I ain’t stupid, pardner. In spite of its ability to baffle me again and again, this is a pattern I recognize. I have encountered it often before, in many others from this world.
There is a sound in the corridor and I think Edna has returned. I move to the door, eager to see her again, and I open it.
A figure of shadow drops to its knees before me. The face turns up with black lips and a dark, spiky penumbra. It is the young woman named Citrus. Her eyes fix on me and she clasps her hands before her. She cries, “Art thou He that should come? Or look we for another?”
I do not understand her question. I also wonder at her being awake, though from her words she obviously is only partially so. She lifts her clasped hands higher. “Please,” she says.
I say, “I know these things are difficult to believe.”
And she says, “Art thou the Christ? Tell us.”
I pass my hand before her and her eyes close and her body sags and I take her up in my arms and I carry her along the corridor to her dark space and I place her on her bed, on her back, her legs straight, her arms folded on her chest. She will rest now. When it is her time, I will call her forth and she will speak.
6
I am. That is all I know from the beginning of things. I am. That, at least, is a matter of clarity, though the answers to all the questions that follow are not clear at all. Those are matters of philosophy. Of music. Of the Great Mysteries. And yet I must try to divine answers to many of those abiding questions, at least about this complex and alien world, so that I can do what I must and in doing so not create such confusion as to cast a whole world down. Many will look upon me and be sore afraid.
And I am alone in this task. It is reasoned that one spaceman — I would add, a clunkhead spaceman, at that — may not seem to be so great a threat. I hover above a vast place with billions of individual sentiences speaking trillions of words every day in an attempt to move beyond the one matter of ontological clarity. The I am. Though, incidentally, there are some on my home planet who would challenge even that first principle as a settled matter. But if they were sincere in their skepticism, they would find it both meaningless and impossible even to express the challenge. Who would they think they are sending their thoughts to? Or, even, who would they think are the entities having those thoughts? If there were but one imperiously great and brutally wise sentience in a meaningless universe, it would never let on for a moment.
I am. A clunkhead. Drugged by words. Hooked on them. Infected by them, as a visitor to a foreign place is infected by a virus for which he has no defenses. Shaken by them. Unbalanced by them. Made delirious by them. Enrapt by them. Transformed by them. Filled full of false and, it seems, endlessly renewable hopes for them. I sit with a new voice waiting in the panel before me. The speaker — the man who drove the bus — has returned to his sleep, though with a delicious and nutritious country breakfast in his stomach. Edna brought it in when the interview was finished and he ate it before both of us, gratefully, at ease with us, even when my wife Edna Bradshaw said to him, “If you really want a pony-tail, I wish you’d let me sit you down and do something a little cuter with it.” I held this voice once, as it first found words, but that is hardly sufficient. I move my hand to put the voice inside me once more, put it inside me in solitude. I am Henry Gillette. Call me Hank. I’m not afraid of that, though I’m always meeting guys who’d much rather me be Henry. But I’ve never been a Nelly, even for an evening, even for just the sport of it, even when I was going through that early teenage thing when it was clear I wasn’t going to fit the profile of a real man in America. That was at the end of the bad old fifties. It wasn’t easy.
But my mother’s clothes, for instance, never did have an allure for me, though I’ve always appreciated it in my lovers, those who had that sweet soft edge to them. Me being inclined to walk without rolling my shoulders and wiggling my butt — I think it just made me love all the more those guys who were natural like that. Some of my friends, when I say things like this, they think I’m overcompensating. Gay men don’t have to be one thing or another, they’d say. There’s plenty of us in leather and studs and also in tailored suits or football pads or Arrow shirts and chinos and they never vamp at all. Never. The Lady — meaning me — doth protest too much, making this point so strongly.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe there’s part of me I’m just trying to make be still. But I don’t think so. I am what I am. When I realized I was gay, it was just a matter of how I wanted to express the feeling of love. When I loved somebody, loved the way the person spoke or thought or looked, then the part of their body that was hidden became like a secret, it took on a kind of magic, it became more than itself, it became a way to touch not only their body but everything else they were. But when I started feeling love like that, the male parts could take on the magic for me and the female parts couldn’t. It was as simple as that. All pussies looked alike, and every cock was wonderfully, specially different, as different as a voice or a personality.
My Adam — that’s what we used to call our first male sexual partner — didn’t come along for a few years. I kept my feelings to myself. Being who I am, nobody ever guessed. So I went off to Northwestern University in the fall of 1963, and this was a good school, I was pretty smart, and my parents lived in Chicago and I was just an El ride away from them. But I did stay in a dorm, way up on the north edge of the campus. My roommate was from Pittsburgh. His name was George. We slept in the same room, an arm’s length away from each other across the narrow floor, and we never knew about each other. Not for nearly three months. That’s how scared everybody was back then, or naive. When we went down to the shower at the end of the hall, we both hid in our terry-cloth robes, from each other and especially from all the others on the floor, and we didn’t dare let our eyes wander, for fear of being found out.
Then the thing nobody ever dreamed of suddenly happened and I was in a lecture hall when it did, watching slides of nebulae and spiral galaxies and dying stars. Our professor was named Hynek and he had a pointed gray goatee and thick glasses and he’d won me over right away. I was going to major in astronomy. He was also an adviser to the Air Force about UFOs, and I liked that, too. There was a whole other kind of creature in the universe, there was a distant world where things were drastically different from what everybody thought was right and normal. Needless to say, I liked the idea of that.