And I’ve thought about the words that weren’t there in what he said but you could hear them lurking outside my door in the hall ready to jump back in his mouth as soon as he left.
Like: I may seem hard but this is the way the God of the Universe wants me to be, so too bad.
Or: We may have our differences but I’m always right.
Or: I love you, but I’d be ready in a second to offer your life up — or in these wimpy times at least just cast you out of the family — if I figure you’re lost to God’s Word as I see it.
My daddy still had all that in him and on that night he didn’t say anything to contradict it, but in spite of my knowing all the shit things he simply wasn’t saying aloud, I lay there in the dark after he’d gone and I started weeping and quaking and wishing he meant those other things that could never be. I guess it was the pat on the hand or just the tone of his voice or something, and I knew those things were as empty as his words, they were gestures intended for himself, testifying to what a gentle and understanding father he was when in fact he wasn’t anything like that. But still I trembled and wept and then I got angry at myself about it because I knew the truth. I trembled like the tail of our tabby cat when he’s taking a shit, but I couldn’t quite get Daddy out of my system. Not till the next morning. That’s when I went out the door and only I knew what I was going to do and as soon as I hit the end of the driveway, I was fine and I’ve never looked back.
And I started dreaming about Jesus, about the nails in His hands and His feet and how I felt about that, how close I felt to Him over those nails, even though part of me was ready to throw the baby Jesus out with my daddy’s bathwater. And I felt a man’s body-thing about Jesus at that, as terrible as that sounds. It’s like something I’ve learned later, in the places I’ve lived in and from the people I’ve been with. You put metal through your flesh and it’s a real intimate thing, is what I’ve learned. And it really feels like that to me. You say, My body will give way for this hard, sharp thing, you can push a metal thing right through me and there it sits, touching me inside my flesh all the time. You can look at it and you can touch it and you can think about it and you’re looking at and touching and thinking about the inside of my body, where I’m really living and where usually it’s impossible for any other person to get into. But with these rings and these studs and these nails and spikes, somebody else can flow right on inside me, he can be in here with me. And when I found my boyfriend Jared and he found me we just knew that these were things that we had to do with our bodies together. And I knew it was about Jesus, too, from my dreams, though I’ve never said that to Jared. Not my daddy’s Jesus. My own personal Jesus.
Judith Marie Nash who calls herself Citrus falls silent and my own voice falls silent, too, for she was in me and I was in her, as if her words and my voice were nail and flesh. And her eyes fill with tears, as often happens with my wife Edna Bradshaw, and with so many of the beings on this planet. Tears are unknown to my species. But I find them to be wonderful things, much more direct and honest than these endless words, and they taste of the vast oceans of this place, which I know from the offer of my wife to kiss her cheek which was wet with tears on our wedding night, tears she said were prompted by joy. But these tears in Citrus’s eyes are not from joy, I know, and I must acknowledge that even these fragments of the sea are filled with complexity and ambiguity on this planet. They spill over now, Citrus’s tears, and I am moved to Reach Out and Touch Someone. Earlier I had touched Citrus without giving her my heart. Now I lay my hands on hers and I let my heart go, I let it enter her with each beat, and she looks down at this in wonder.
Then she lifts her face again to me and she says, “Are you Jesus come again?” She is perfectly clearheaded now.
“No,” I say. “I am a spaceman.”
And she says, “If the Word is not a literal thing but still a holy thing, then perhaps it was you who was prophesied to come.”
This is an alarming idea. “I would know, wouldn’t I?”
Citrus looks at our hands again. “Perhaps not.”
I feel her longing now, very strongly, as if her heart is beating back into me in return. “I am …” I say only this and fall silent.
“Yes,” she says, as if I have completed the thought.
I struggle on with words. “I am no one,” I say.
“I can feel your sacred heart,” she says, still staring at our hands.
And at this moment there is a thump at the door and my wife Edna Bradshaw has flung it open with her foot. She is standing there, silhouetted by the light from the corridor, one foot up, both her hands holding a tray full of Citrus’s breakfast.
“Are you done?” she asks.
I gently disengage my hands from Citrus’s and she makes a soft sound of understanding and disappointment and yearning and sadness and hope and even more feelings than that, all of which are only diminished and distorted by the naming of them with these words, for they truly exist only in the beating of a heart and a calfskin book drooping in a hand and twin nipple rings and a grilled hamburger on a hilltop and a black slash of a mouth and a pillar of dark smoke and a planet three-quarters covered with tears.
8
Citrus has taken her breakfast from my wife without rising from the place where she spoke to me and she has eaten it with the tray on her lap. She has the most meticulous of manners about her eating, having cut her Spicy, Finger-Lickin’-Good sausage into tiny morsels, which she chewed carefully and separately from her eggs, which she kept separate from her grits, which she kept separate from her biscuit, a time for each thing and each thing in its own time, and each morsel was carefully attended to without a trace left on her mouth, which she gently dabbed with her paper napkin. And she never licked her fingers, and I was grateful for that, as anyone observing my species and the significance of our fingertips might easily understand. I sensed in Citrus’s table manners the influence of her father, though I think she herself was unaware of this connection, given her careful dissociation from him in her body and her words.
My wife Edna Bradshaw stood nearby and watched Citrus eat, her own mouth occasionally opening and biting and chewing faintly as this young woman consumed her food, as if Edna, as well, were part of a species from a distant galaxy, and her mission — like mine in regards to the speaking of words — was to observe the inhabitants of this planet in the eating of food, so that their mastication and hers could become one, as a path to understanding.
When Citrus was finished, Edna took up the tray from Citrus’s lap and she said, “Feeling better, honey?”
Citrus nodded yes and I asked her to return with me to her place on the spaceship and she complied without my even having to wave my hand. Edna gave me a knowing nod, which I did not completely understand, as I guided Citrus out the door.
And Edna’s nod lingered in my head as Citrus and I moved along the corridors, and now we enter her cubicle and Citrus asks, “Am I to sleep?”
“It is best,” I say. “This process is full of stress for your species.”
“Will I ever see Jared again?”
“Why should you doubt that?” I ask, though I mean it not as a question but as a declaration of reassurance. I have learned this particular strangeness of Earth words over the years. Sometimes a question is meant as a statement. Sometimes a statement is meant as a question. For example, “I care about your happiness” can mean, “Will you ever learn to follow my plan for you?” Which, however, though a question, can mean, “I cannot imagine you ever turning out the way I want.” Which, though a statement, can mean, “Will you lead me to cast you away?” Which can mean, though a question, its own answer: “Yes.” These are the times when even my own Extra-Strength brain can grow confused.