So how could I do any better by Gladys?
Quiet now, Willie. Quiet for now. The console flickers and goes dark. It would do me no good at this moment to crack my knuckles. I have an Achy Breaky Heart, and it is best to let this voice slide back into the darkness.
I straighten up sharply. I am afraid I have let my bus go too far.
But no. I see. It is all right. The bus is rushing on alone down there. The time has come. I move my hands over the dark surface before me and I make a great light and it gathers beneath my ship and then descends like a pillar of fire and it seizes this bus and the wheels rush on, spinning wildly but touching nothing now save the air, and the bus rises quickly, so quickly that any creature there below would instantly doubt its eyes. And inside, the pilgrims seeking Luck have all fallen into a deep sleep.
I rise. I step into the brushed-smooth metalloid corridor ringing with silence. I move along quickly. Gliding, my wife says, a thing that never ceases to amuse her.
Yes. I am married. Yes, to someone from this planet. In spite of the censure of many on the planet where I come from. And there is a faint clicking now. Tiny feet dashing at me from behind. This is the approach of my wife’s subspecies companion, Eddie. He is a cat. Or, through my wife’s voice, my darling adorable cat or my sweet little yellow cat or my cute-enough-to-eat cat—and this latter name alarms me, I must admit, though she assures me she would never actually employ this means of admiration for Eddie — and, by extension — she has spoken, at my request, directly to this point — for me either.
Eddie dashes ahead down the corridor, anxious to see our new arrivals, I think. It is hard for me to know about Eddie. I am not telepathic with any species other than my own, even primary species. And when it comes to the subspecies, it is, of course, even more difficult. Eddie’s vocabulary is severely limited. Though there is nuance to his few words. I can distinguish his put-food-before-me-instantly meow from his I-will-now-try-to-eat-a-piece-of-your-hand-and-it-is-not-because-you-are-cute meow. But there are things in his head, always, that I wish to know. He feels things very strongly, even his languor, even his serene arrogance. If there were only time, I would like to listen carefully enough to him so that I could hear. I would like to listen to every cat on this planet. To every sparrow. To every fish. But there is so little time now. I find myself moving faster along the corridor, just at the thought of this. The time is near for me. They have chosen a moment for themselves down there, the turning of a millennium. And so it shall be for me. As I hurry along this corridor I fervently hope there might be from this bus some voice, some few tracks of words, that will help me understand how to do what I soon must do with this planet.
And then she is before me. My wife. My Edna Bradshaw. My darling adorable Edna. My cascade-of-unedited-words Edna. My cute-enough-to-eat Edna. I try this thought in my head now, by her example, and I must admit there is an oddly pleasurable stirring at it.
“Greetings, my wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say as I approach her. And I am struck anew with a further paradox of words on this planet. In my private inner self I am able to shape these words much more fluently and expressively than when I attempt to offer them through my mouth. On my planet we still have mouths and mechanisms to make sounds, but we use them primarily in the effort to create music or direct expressions of feeling that bypass the lumpenness of rational, denotated thought. For a time I assumed that this discrepancy between what is inside me and what comes out through my uttered words was a function of my, shall I say, alienness. But I no longer think that. And this is one of the reasons I am still searching desperately for answers about the inhabitants of this planet. I believe it is the same for them.
“I’m so excited,” Edna says and she does a thing with her body that still bypasses my rational thoughts quite effectively. Somehow she manages to make the tightly fitted, profusely ruffled, dramatically low-cut dress that she wears hold absolutely still while she wiggles — or I might say even undulates — within it. I am a skinny male creature, quite excessively skinny, as are all of those who inhabit my planet, the female creatures even more so. Edna is not. She is often critical of herself for this, though I think she is also quite proud of her knockers. “You have never seen a set of knockers like these, I bet.” This is, for me, a memorable observation from my cute-enough-to-eat Edna. She made her observation on the occasion of our first becoming lovers, when I had asked her for a date and took her far out of her galaxy and parked in a quadrant of quiet space.
Edna’s hand flies out now and thumps me on the chest. I assume she is reading the images from my inner self at this moment. But of course she is not. She will, however, occasionally thump me from an excess of love. “Oh you spaceman,” she will say.
But this time she is nodding again and again toward my chest where I am still smarting from this gesture of her love. I look. I am wearing a pinstripe suit which Edna says is much too big for me but which I cannot part with, having been warmly complimented on it by a fine old gentleman we took up from a late-night diner in Chicago about thirty years ago. I had put my suit on to greet him, a suit which I had inherited from a predecessor, and Herbert Jenkins was made to feel instantly at ease by it. He had once worn a zoot suit that looked very much like this one.
“This will make everybody feel right at home,” Edna says, and I focus on the lapel of my suit and a square white tag is affixed there. It reads: Hi, my Name is DESI.
She now has a similar tag in her hand and is waving it over her own chest. She says, “You know, this is a problem I simply didn’t anticipate. I am showing a good many of my assets, am I not. And my assets don’t like the idea of adhesives sticking to them. I once had a bee sting right there.” She places a fingertip on the steep slope where her knockers bunch together in the middle, and without a pause — my wife Edna Bradshaw seems sometimes never to draw a breath no matter how many words she speaks — without a pause, she continues, “And it got so red and full of puss — forgive me for talking like this about unpleasant matters, but it’s to the point, really. Which is, I put an adhesive bandage over that bee sting, and when I come to take it off, it felt like I was taking all my skin with it. So you see I don’t have a place right at the moment to put my name tag, and you have to have name tags with strangers. I want to be a good hostess, especially this being my first time, and I’m trying to figure all this out without a great deal of guidance — I don’t mean to be critical, my sweet spaceman lover — but I am struggling.”
She falls silent for a moment and her hand with the tag hovers before her and then, in a burst of inspiration, quickly descends past her knockers and toward the ruffled expanse below and it thumps down there and Edna cries out in satisfaction, “That should do.”
I take a step back — a necessary procedure to adjust the sight lines — and there, floating on a wave of ruffles in the center of her stomach, are the words: Hi, my name is EDNA. And I bend nearer because there is more, written in a small hand: (Mrs. Desi, your spaceman host. Nothing to worry about.)
I am pretty fast on the uptake. Needless to say, we have no use on my planet for such tags as these. But I perceive their function and I realize that Edna’s first impulse was the correct one, to put this declaration higher on the body, so that one’s eyes can take in the greeting with ease. I also understand how it is impossible — given her decision to join me in my first encounter with the new arrivals and to wear her special party dress for the occasion — for her to wear this tag in the appropriate area. I also understand, from many observations of the people of this planet, that this could cause her some social awkwardness and even embarrassment. So I gently peel the tag from my lapel and reattach it to my own middle-body area.