Dance for me, Scarlet. Dance for your spaceman father. I will be all the things for you that he was not. I can look upon your body — ample as it is, concisely fingered and toed as it is — and I know I will see it as beautiful.
But Scarlet’s body is dust and bones now.
This was not the voice I needed to hear.
I crack my knuckles. But this time the gesture does not soothe me. It only thickens my sadness. Whiplash Willie is dead, too, of course. Willie with his own yearnings, his own keenly felt failures. I myself yearn for a Life from this planet to sit before me and speak its inner words and be, if not happy, then at least content, and if not content, then at least drably unconsidered and bland. One might expect such lives in abundance down there, growing like wheat. But I have found not even one. Not in all the days and nights and days and nights that have passed below me since I first came here. Not one. Not one, even in all these voices that awaited me in our machinery, collected by others long before I arrived. Not one. And I feel, even now, even for the ones who are dead, I feel. What? I feel what? I feel.
That bit of rhetorical irresolution is the fullest expression I am capable of. Like another trill of words that moves in me at certain moments: I am. I am. I feel. I wish to say to each life that sits before me and has just finished speaking, “Arise, and be not afraid.”
I arise now, and I am sore afraid. I feel. I am.
No one has spoken to me yet of LUCK, of that grand golden purpose of the late-night bus trip from the Great State of Texas to the State of Louisiana where they Let the Good Times Roll. But, of course, I have only spoken to three of the travelers so far, and one of those was the driver of the bus. I should put aside the voices from the past and listen anew. I desperately need new words, new lives spoken through my voice. There is so much I still do not understand, and I am keenly aware of the shortness of time. Once again I do not stop to calculate exactly how much. But I know to fear that I will not even have enough time to speak with everyone now sleeping on my ship. I should speak to another of my visitors right now.
But I know that first I will do something rash. I have little hope of encountering, among the travelers on the bus, the sort of life I presently wish to study. It is time to spend a few hours on the planet surface. When the night returns to the place beneath my ship, I will go down, personally, in my very body. I will go with great caution, disguised in the trench coat and wide-brimmed felt hat I wore when I first met Edna Bradshaw in the nearly deserted parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter in Bovary, Alabama. My five-hour mission will be to seek out a kind of life new to my studies, a life full of bland contentedness. A life without yearning.
And though I should gather another voice or two from my present visitors before I go, instead, I return to find my wife Edna Bradshaw still sleeping on our bed. And I lie down beside her and I seek out my own sleep, where dreams never intrude and the Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music, except there are no hills, either, not even the ups and downs of a landscape. Just music.
11
And I wake. I sense it is time for my mission. Edna, I am happy to see, is still beside me, though she stirs now. I move my hand across her and she grows quiet once more. I do not wish for her to wake while I am gone and be alarmed at my absence. I lean to her and touch my fingertips to her face and I hope that she can see me in her dreams, that she can hear my heartbeat there.
I slip away quietly to my preparation room and I open the storage space and I resolve to take extra precautions. I will have layers of disguise: Before the trench coat and felt hat, I become togged to the bricks in bluff cuffs, and I choose the tie that I wore on my first date with my angel cake Edna Bradshaw, a red one with dozens of Tabasco bottles floating on it. She seemed to love that tie. I even put on my size-twenty Converse Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers. Encapsulating footwear is unknown on my planet, and I am still not used to the concept, but I will take no chances on this night. I don my trench coat and cinch the belt, though not too revealingly tight because of what Edna refers to as my Scarlett O’Hara waist — which I understand to refer to its minimal girth — my waist was the first clue to give me away as a spaceman on the night I met her — and I put on my hat and pull the wide brim down low.
It is night. I am ready. I squeak down the corridor in my Chuck Taylors, which are the color, I am pleased to note, of Herbert Jenkins’s bluff cuffs, that is to say, the color of a singing canary. My zoot suit, however, is conservative in color, gray with pinstripes. My trench coat is black, as is my hat. I am a Dude.
And the Dude is behind the wheel of his honker. So to speak. I have no wheel and I have no horn, but I sit in my shuttle ship and I am ready to spin off into the world below and I flex at my fingers, which are turning me into a coward. But to be honest, it is the coward in me that is producing this frequent stiffening in my fingers, not the other way around. In all the Earth years I have been watching this planet, I have actually and personally been to its surface perhaps six or eight times and I have never been in peril. The last time I even came to carry away the woman who fell in love with me the time before. But the time after this one will be so momentous that I am full of anxiety now. And there are always risks, of course. Outside of my spaceship I still have the power to induce sleep and forgetfulness, but only within a very limited physical area. There are many circumstances, in an alien terrain, over which I would have no control whatsoever.
But I put these thoughts from my mind and I launch forth and I rush toward the lights below, veering now to the dark edges of the city, mindful of the searching green strobes from the casino boats. I am being excessively cautious. Though my craft is shrouded, pilot errors can, of course, occur, especially in the transition between modes of propulsion, thus giving an observer below a glimpse of what they call a UFO. But this is a rare phenomenon and I am alert tonight. So I let myself move over the thickenings of trees with streets between and dwellings set side by side by side by side. If the placid lives I seek exist, surely they will be along these quiet streets. I move quickly back and forth and I look for a place to land my craft. Open, preferably dim, with no one apt to walk unsuspecting into an invisible thing. I grow bold. I move over a great ship taking on rice in the orange wash of sodium vapor lamps and I rush along the edge of the lake. The houses here are large and full of the fruits of capitalism and yet I feel a great striving emanating from them and I cut inland and ahead I see what I think for a moment is a Wal-Mart and I grow nostalgic, thinking of the night in Bovary, Alabama, when Edna called out to me as I stood alone and separate, very late into the time of daily darkness, and there were only four scattered vehicles about and no living creatures at all, not until my future wife came out of her shopper’s paradise and spotted me from afar and then called out in sympathetic concern over what, I later realized, she presumed was my misplaced vehicle. “Are you lost?” she said. I am.
And now I see that the place before me is not a Wal-Mart after all. I swoop around it, and the place proclaims itself KROGER FAMILY CENTER OPEN 24 HOURS DRUGS FOOD and next to it, across a street, is a vast open space of fissured concrete, not ideally dim, but clearly abandoned, the structure that was once there reduced to a faint outline of its foundation. I swoop and return. There are railroad tracks running along a street past the front of Kroger, past this open space, and then at an angle across that same street and down a median and heading into the night in the direction of the ship at the lake. I swoop, slowing, and there is a sign at the edge of the open space, dark and fractured: ROLLER RINK.