I was sitting up near the top of the hall. A great spiraling splash of stars was on the screen and we were understanding how birth and death were going on all the time on an unimaginably vast scale and then it was time to go and Professor Hynek stacked his notes, which was our sign, though it was hard to say, set against the issues we’d just considered, how such an unimaginably small gesture should have any effect on anything. But there was that end-of-a-class shuffling sound all over the place and we were back on the planet Earth and then a voice was at the door behind us and it said, “The President’s been shot.”
I didn’t go to the dorm for a long while. I knew he was going to die, though it wasn’t quite official yet. I went down to the little beach at the south end of campus, where Sheridan Road takes a jog toward the lake. Nobody was there. I hunched up against the iron jetty and squeezed my eyes shut and filled myself with the smells of rust and dead alewives and there was thunder out to the east, out at the razor cut of the horizon, and there was another smell, the ozone off the lake, which was a thing you knew was big, just from the smell of it, as big as a galaxy. And for a moment I thought to open my eyes and face that horizon and walk out into the lake and just keep walking until it overwhelmed me.
I didn’t expect this. I never thought I was suicidal. But things were suddenly clarified. You look through the eye of a telescope or the glory hole of a john wall and it all comes down to the same thing. You’re a gathering of atoms swirling around some kind of center and you never chose any of it, neither the swirl nor the center, and when you focus your eye you might find a similar body to yours here and there, but there’s light years in between. I loved Jack Kennedy. I didn’t even know that till his beautiful shaggy head was blown apart. I still had never even touched a man, and now I felt a passionate love rush on me hand in hand with death. I was being prepared for the last two decades of the century and the great plague, I suppose. But at the time, without the solace of a single remembered embrace, I could only open my eyes and step to the shore and look out at the lake and very seriously consider putting all this behind me.
Then George was suddenly by my side. “I wondered if it was you,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised at all that he was here. I said, “I want to be holding him in my arms, right now, cradling his head and telling him good-bye.”
And George said, “That smarmy Bouvier girl in the pillbox hat doesn’t have a clue what he needs.”
We didn’t speak another word. You’d think there would’ve had to be a clearer declaration between us, since we’d missed signs that were surely even more obvious about each other all along. But we’d made our way to the moment that most gays do, and sometimes it comes on you in an instant. You go from seeing only darkness to having a very subtle perception of light.
George and I walked back up to the dorm, and with the other men of Elder Hall we watched Walter Cronkite weep and Lyndon Johnson — the cow — take over the country, and then, without a further word, we went back to our room and fully became what we had always been.
I sit with these words for a time. I try always to set aside the ways of my own world, the issues of my own life. My task, of necessity, is to submerge myself in this planet Earth. But I do reflect for a moment on the often rigorous and heavily sanctioned taboos of physical affection in this place. The mores are different on my home planet. Even there, however, I, Desi the Spaceman, am clearly a Manly Man, Fresh as an Irish Spring with a Lot to Like — Filter, Flavor, and a Flip-top Box — and I am a Hero of the Beach whose body will bring me Fame Instead of Shame and whose Lust is for Life. These things are true of me in light of this planet Earth’s public declarations of value that I have found in my collected records of printed matter and in my scanning tapes of the endless transmissions filling the air. Though it is also true that my man’s body is a very skinny one to the Earthman’s eye. But I am certainly not a ninety-seven-pound weakling. I am a seventy-eight-pound Powerhouse of Strength and Vigor. And though the female counterparts on my home planet are exceedingly skinny, too, I am sufficiently in tune, in some instinctive way, with Red-blooded American Male Values so as to have acquired a sincere and intense appreciation for knockers.
But listen to me. I have set aside the values of my species so effectively, given my mission here, that the Lady (meaning me, in this context, Desi the Spaceman) Doth Protest Too Much. On my home planet I would never dream of spending all these words on establishing my masculinity — not that we have words there — though we can be subject to a similar psychological syndrome with our transmitted thoughts — not that I am really guilty of that either, given the relevance of the premise of my masculinity to the larger point I wish to make — a point, by the way, which still remains unmade — and listen to me again, I am beginning to sound like my wife Edna Bradshaw now, digressing into clarification after clarification — even in that clarification, as a matter of fact — though it wasn’t clarifying anything exactly, more like amplifying or even digressing — which is a trait of hers, as well, and one that just as inexorably carries her away from her main point — just as I continue to do now, as these words — quite alarmingly — come unbidden, as they seem veritably to choose themselves.
I leap up from where I sit and I sing a thin, clear note of frustration at full voice. Our New and Improved Tracking Lights cannot even follow me quickly enough and my face is shrouded in darkness for a moment. This reminds me of sleep. My own sleep. I am fortunate that all my studies of this planet have not affected my sleep. I still dream only in music. There is a place where the words cannot follow me. This is a comfort.
The light finds me. I can wave it away, but I do not. I am all right now. I am determined to reassert some measure of power over these words. I have so adamantly established the premise of my masculinity in order to emphasize that in spite of that masculinity, as a member of the primary species on my planet I am free to give the beats of my heart through my fingertips — which is the most intimate of our physical sensations — to anyone, without cultural stigma. I could do so with a male as readily as a female. There are other, gender-defining parts of our bodies, and certainly they are effective in reproduction only in certain prescribed ways, but the pleasure of their use in interpersonal communication is not seen as a matter subject to cultural restraints — unless, of course, made exclusive by a formalized commitment. They are surface parts, after all. And even with the deepest part, the truly hidden part, the most intimate part, we acknowledge no limitation in its sharing. We can choose to share our hearts with anyone.
I realize that a meditation like this is a dangerous distraction. It is not my own kind that I must come to understand. When I descend from this machine, a solitary spaceman, to bring, in the vision of my body, the central message of the universe to this place that has lived too long in cosmic loneliness, I must know who it is that will look upon me. They do not have hands like mine. They cannot freely give the beating of their hearts.