And now my wife Edna Bradshaw rushes into the room, the tracking lights flaring upon her, her face tight from concern. “I heard you scream,” she says. She is before me now, her hands fluttering as if they feel their own genetic inadequacy.
“I sang.” I do not wish to raise these complex issues with my quick-to-worry Edna and so I offer not a lie but an incomplete truth.
“Does that pass for singing where you come from?” Edna asks, and I do not hear even a trace of suspicion in her. She is simply filled with fascination and wonder. Her Enquiring Mind Wants to Know. I put my hands upon her bare arms. I give her my heart, pulse beat by pulse beat, taking pleasure in who she is.
“Oh you spaceman,” she says and she draws nearer and puts her arms around me.
Though my species is free to give love to anyone, I feel very happy, holding my wife Edna Bradshaw, that I am who I am.
She turns her face and lays her head on my chest and says, “Desi, you know I’m not the kind of woman who is always prying into her hubby’s work.”
She pauses as if for me to affirm that I do in fact know this assertion to be true. I try to understand her. She has used a word that is unfamiliar to me. I say, “Am I the hubby?”
“Yes, my sweet spaceman, you are the hubby in the picture. Of course, this was true of me with my previous husband as well. I would not pry. I am not a prier. As you may recall my saying, he was a telephone installer, and I always declined to inquire about his wires and his receivers and his clicky hold buttons and so forth.”
“And you have continued this policy with your spaceman hubby. Yes, I can affirm this to be true of you.”
Edna burrows closer to me. She says, “But now that I’m seeing firsthand how you talk to my fellow Earth people, and since I’m kind of helping out, welcoming them and cooking for them and so forth, it’s sort of like I’m working with you, wouldn’t you say?”
Before I am able even to comprehend her question — my mind is always lagging her words by a few moments — Edna goes on, “Even if you wouldn’t say it like that exactly, we are coming to the close of the century, if you don’t mind my saying so, and though my daddy taught me to act certain ways and though there were similar certain ways that folks in Bovary always thought were the right ways for a wife to act, I’ve been taking some mighty big leaps with you, Desi darling, more or less strictly on faith, and I just need to ask you this one thing about your work. Do you have some kind of master plan here for the human race? That is, for the folks on Earth, ’cause you certainly seem real human to me. Of course you do. I’m talking a little stupid now. I don’t mean to suggest you’re not part of, well, the human race. But you are a spaceman. And you’re doing all this interviewing and studying and you do have all these wonderful and pretty scary machines. I’m running on at the mouth now. I know that. But it’s because I’m just a little bit nervous about all this. You know?”
And now she stops speaking and pulls back from me far enough so that she can look into my face and finally await an answer. My mind has fallen far behind. But she is keeping silent, letting me catch up. I say, “We spacemen wish to understand.” I want that to be sufficient, but Edna continues to wait. I say, “We go here and there, as a species. We listen, we watch.” Again, I wish to reveal no more.
But Edna, for all her self-deprecation, is smart. And I am her husband. Even with her species’ characteristic lack of telepathy, she often senses true things about me, things I sometimes am only barely aware of myself. She knows I am being evasive. I try to think how to phrase a further revelation to her. But before I can speak, she begins again.
“I guess I did actually pry a couple of times, with my ex-husband,” she says. “Well, not pry, exactly, because I had fit reason to ask a few questions. He came home from work one lunchtime, and I had made him a Baloney Surprise, which I don’t have to go into, but it is a surprise, I can tell you, and a very pleasant one. But he wasn’t saying much and I happen to look out in the driveway and it seems he’s not driving his telephone-company truck any more. He’s driving a cable-TV truck. I did ask some questions that day and got some answers I probably could’ve done without, except I had to know sometime that he was going to leave me so he could fulfill his lifelong dream of participating in the fast-growing and exciting business of cable TV, leaving behind his job that involved the same old telephones day in and day out. Is it something like that?”
She hesitates again. “Something like what?” I say, and I ask this from a genuine state of confusion.
Edna replies, “Like I really need to know and I’m probably going to find out anyway sooner or later but I’m going to get mighty uncomfortable with the answer and wish it was later?”
I say, “I am devoted to you, my wife Edna Bradshaw.”
“Well, that’s good,” Edna says. “That’s the most important thing. Course, the destiny of the whole planet Earth is pretty important, too. But I love you, Desi, and I know you wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I wish to put my wife’s mind even further at ease but suddenly, beyond her, in the doorway, a silhouette appears, an unexpected visitor, the lights rush to the spot and once again it is the young woman called Citrus, and she lifts her arms above her head and she makes a sound that I presume passes for singing where she comes from and Edna starts and screams and Citrus undulates into the room, her arms waving above her as if they are growing on the ocean floor.
7
I think, as the young woman who calls herself Citrus falls on her knees before me, that my appearance on the eve of this planet’s millennium will come with the effect of a Baloney Surprise. No, perhaps I am wrong about that, for though my wife Edna Bradshaw said the dish was a great surprise—as I imagine it surely must be, knowing both the substance and the cook in question — and in this, my analogy is apt enough — she also said the surprise was a pleasant one. Of that, concerning my mission, I am quite doubtful, even for those like Citrus, who is now clutching at my legs and crying “Hosanna in the highest.” She is not afraid. She is not hostile. But somehow this does not seem Baloney Surprise — like for Citrus. She is in a state of extremity that surely is not pleasant for her. I am anxious to hear her true voice.
Edna bends to her. “Honey, now get on up. You’ve got your hands on my husband’s cute little boney legs and I’m going to get jealous in a minute here.”
Citrus suddenly looks Edna square in the face, making my wife shrink back from her. “He has come,” Citrus says.
“Honey, we’ve got to get rid of that black lipstick and that spiky hair. I’ll be happy to give you a Mary-Lou’s-Southern-Belle-Beauty-Nook special for free if you just get up now.”
I say to my wife, “I believe there is a significant residue of recreational drugs still in her system. This is why she cannot sleep. It may also account for her mistaken impression of your spaceman husband.”
Edna whispers to me, loudly, “I’d say there’s a significant residue of church in this girl, as well, Desi honey.”
“Holy holy holy holy,” Citrus says.
“I’ve always been a churchgoing woman, more or less,” Edna says.
“Hallelujah,” Citrus says.
“But I’ve got to tell you, the folks in Bovary who’d be most dead-set against my marrying you would be the churchgoing folks, if they knew the true facts of my disappearance.”
Citrus, who has prostrated herself before me, rises suddenly up high on her knees, the light flashing on the metal studs and rings which pierce her face and ears, and she lifts her arms, her hands blooming in reverent supplication before my face. She cries, “Praise God. Thank you for your Son who you have allowed me to gaze upon.”