I land. I wait. It is late. It is dim here in the center of Roller Rink. I wonder what Roller Rink was. I wonder why such a thing has escaped my notice over the years. Perhaps for the same reason that it has now been reduced to an empty swath of concrete and a crumbling sign. Something went terribly wrong. Once Roller Rink was as proud an edifice of the planet Earth as Kroger or Wal-Mart, but those of this world turned against it and it crumbled into emptiness.
My mind is overheating. I even imagine the people of Lake Charles, Louisiana, storming Roller Rink with pitchforks and burning torches crying for its death, tearing it apart with their hands. But I know how words always strive to be something other than they are, to gather around the thing they have their eyes on and run at it from the shadows, from unexpected directions, I know this about the words on this planet and so I know, in fact, I am not pondering the past fate of Roller Rink but the imminent fate—very imminent, I am afraid — of the spaceman known as DESI who has been ordered to expose his actual physical self in a grand and irrefutable and unambiguous way to all the people of this world and to share a fundamental truth of the universe. Come Quick. It’s Alive!
Lookit, I say to myself. I could have sat and dreaded the future back on the home spacecraft without the unpleasantness of wearing sneakers. If I am going to make this visit, I should Just Do It. The street beyond the train track is empty. The street between Roller Rink and Kroger is empty. The Kroger parking lot has only a scattered few cars and no creature is visible. So I step from my craft.
The air is quite mild and it smells faintly of wood fire. A dog barks in the distance. The sky to the west is tinted orange from oil refineries, and there, cutting above the distant rim of trees and then sliding silently off, is the thread of green light from the casinos. But my way lies into the quiet streets of the neighborhood. I move through the vanished Roller Rink, resolving to ask my wife Edna Bradshaw about this place, and I stop at the street and look over at the Kroger parking lot.
I never did actually enter Wal-Mart that night in Bovary, Alabama. Our machines have given us views, of course, inside all of the various edifices on this planet, but there is something that cannot be reproduced through any technology. On this planet, one has to stand in a place, in one’s own body, to understand its influence on the lives here. That is one reason why I am taking these risks right now. There is an ethos to every spot. I look around. I have moved perhaps fifty paces from my craft, which, I am happy to observe, is invisible in the Roller Rink space. But things are quite different, even just over here. For instance, I can no longer smell burning wood. Instead, there is a smell of trees. Fir trees. They are piled off the street curb to my right. A dozen small, scrawny trees, intended, I know — how spotty and minute is my understanding of this place — intended to be placed in the home at this time of the year and decorated with lights to celebrate the birth of the man for whom Citrus mistook me on the spaceship earlier, a celebration whose primary day has recently passed. I hesitate here with the dead trees, which were apparently too thin to have been worth purchasing — I presume in a sales operation across the street at this Kroger Family Center, in spite of its avowal simply to provide DRUGS and FOOD, or perhaps in the space of this departed Roller Rink — whichever, the trees would be trucked in and piled up and sold and then the excess dumped, as with this dozen trees — I am conscious of the ways of commerce on this planet and you do what you can to make a buck and if you can sell ice cubes to Eskimos, you go for it — though why that phrase should leap into me in this context, I have no idea, because though it does have to do with commerce, its application is misplaced in this circumstance, for Kroger’s customers would have more use for a holiday tree than an Eskimo would have for ice — but standing here, I sense myself drifting erratically on a thin smoke of nervous words, sounding once again like my wife Edna Bradshaw, and I wish I was with her now, lying beside her on our bed as she sleeps her image-laden sleep.
However, I am not. I am here. And the thought from which I started to drift is this: The place where I stand at this moment is new to me. Perhaps that thought wasn’t the exact starting point, but it is close to it. And this is true of the planet Earth: fifty paces away, things are different. Drastically so, if you are alert. And fifty paces more, five paces even, the world will change once again. There is no dog barking now. I hear the mechanical click of the traffic light as the tint on my hands changes from green to amber and then another click as it changes from amber to red. In short, though I can acquire clear images of Kroger from my machines, I do not truly know Kroger, do not know its essence, and so I wish to enter into that place, squeaking across its floor in my Chuck Taylor sneakers. But I am held back by recognizing the inherent risks in doing this, perhaps manageable risks at this hour but perhaps not. The traffic light clicks again and I look up and the large red eye closes and the large green eye opens, and I realize how far from the inherent characteristics of mind of a member of my own species I have been borne. I would say “borne by words” but I can hear how I am sounding on that matter, as well. I have become a whiner. Kvetch. Kvetch. That is all I hear out of me. And surely I am not out of my normal mind simply because of words. Perhaps I should go with the flow. My wife Edna Bradshaw frequently shows evidence of this same syndrome of rambling free association and she is clearly not alarmed by it, indeed seems almost to enjoy it, rolling words out of her head that follow one tiny bright object until it passes another one and then veers off following that one and so on and so on. I look down at my sneakers. Their yellowness, like a singing canary, like Herbert Jenkins’s zoot suit — though I never actually saw his zoot suit — the yellowness of my Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers has paled and darkened here on the street at night. But now, Click. The yellow sharpens a bit. From the streetlight again. I look at the light, straight into its amber eye. “Oh shut up your incessant clicking,” I say aloud. And it clicks again. This is not your planet, it says. And it opens its red eye and glares hotly at me. It is the air, causing this wandering. As much as words. It is the smell of smoke, which I am picking up again. And the smell of dead trees. And the dog barking again. No, a different dog, in some other, distant place. I am rushing, inside. It is not the words that are carrying me. The words and I are companions. We are being carried together on this deeper current inside me, which itself comes from the smoke and the trees and the dogs and a thousand other nuances of the night. The click of the street light. The orange glow of the western sky. The rasp of grit beneath my sneakers at the tiniest movement of my feet. The smooth-contoured inertness of the cars in the Kroger lot. And perhaps the words, after all, as well. On my own planet, the primary focus of our lives, moment to moment, is inside our minds, and to touch each other, we leap cleanly across the sensual particularities of our outer world, hardly noticing them at all. But on a planet built with words, which are valenced with the same charge as streetlight clicks and dog barks and sneaker rasps, I must deal directly with all these things of the senses lying between my inner world and the inner world of anyone else. I have no choice. And they run deep in me, these sensual things. In ways that both demand and defy the words. Suddenly I find my hands floppy with desire. I think of dear Edna Bradshaw. Edna, come quick. It’s alive!