I am unsteady now on my feet. I must not think. I step off the curb. I move through the Kroger parking lot, circling to the back, fighting off the impulse to take a chance. I cross the train track. I enter a quiet street, leading directly away from Kroger. It is a street named for a class of bryophytic plants which have a small, leafy, often tufted stem which bears its sex organs at the tip. Do not ask me why it was named after such a thing. Perhaps the place was once covered with moss. Perhaps the builder of this street first lay down in a vast blanket of moss, right here, and dreamed of the thing he would build. I move on this street of Moss. Intently now. Trying to hold back the words for a bit, so that I don’t stop in any one square of this sidewalk and spend the rest of the night rendering my words around its unique vantage point on the night. I move on, my sneakers scraping and popping, and I press my attention back to my original intent.
I look in the passing windows, ready to go closer, ready to approach an isolated someone, wave my hand before his face, loosen his words, hear him speak of his contentment — in taking out the trash, in thinking about his father, in facing his work, in living his life on this planet. He would speak in a voice I have not yet heard.
A tree lies on its side by the curb, silver threads of tinsel clinging to it, and I look to the house, a porch swing, a shutter sagging slightly away from a broken hinge, the windows dark, no one there. But now there is a movement, even in the dimness of the unlit front room. I slow my step, only vaguely discerning the figure there, a man, I think, moving for a moment in the darkness and then stopping, standing there. The next house drifts into my view and it is bright but I am wondering about the man I have just seen. Only briefly: his tree thrown hastily from the house, him sitting awake in a dark room only to stand and go nowhere. My machines are full of voices no different from his.
I focus, instead, on this bright house before me, the front window outlined in amber bulbs, the tree still standing inside, ablaze with white lights. I see through the front room and through an arch to a table in the dining room and people are there. I stop. A happy family. Contented with their lives. I take a step toward them, onto their lawn, and another step. I am not alone. Something has told me that all along. Perhaps it is the nose, shining as brightly as the streetlight near Kroger. It is Santa Claus, who stands, inanimate, of course, but life-size, beside an azalea bush. What a sense of holiday whimsy resides in this place. How could there be angst and striving and conflict and disconnection in such a family as this? And there they sit, beneath a chandelier — a cheap chandelier, I realize, its bare bulbs poking out of cloudy glass flower blossoms. Good. There is no pretense here. Only harmony and contentment. At least complacent drabness. A woman is in a chair with her back to me, a young woman, I think, given what I know of hairstyles from my wife Edna Bradshaw. Her hair is long and draped straight behind her. She is very thin. Her skin, which I can see on her arm, is pale. I angle a little to the side as I take more steps toward this house. I can hear the murmur of voices. A window is open somewhere, I think. The night, though in the first stages of the winter season on this part of the planet, is very mild. It is the state of Louisiana, after all, Where Winter Comes to Party. Opposite the young woman at the table is another woman, the wife and mother, her hair short and permed, her face haggard, her mouth drawn down. Perhaps given this appearance by the bared bulb light coming from above. She has been preparing this wonderful meal all day long and she is pleasantly weary and the light shows this on her face. She is looking across at her daughter. Next to both of them at the head of the table is a man, the husband and father. He is leaning forward as if listening, but not to these two women. There are others out of my sight, at the opposite end of the table. The murmur I hear is another male voice, the words rushing and tumbling. And then suddenly the husband and father laughs. He leans back in his chair and throws his head back and laughs.
And his wife and his daughter do not move. Not even to glance in his direction. They are as implacable as the Santa Claus standing next to me, shining his cold red light into the darkness. And I know I have misjudged them all.
I back away, out of their yard. This is what I need. I have come here with my own agenda, but I must look at this world the way it is, so that I will know what to do when I soon return.
I hear the distant cry of a train whistle.
This is a sound that my wife Edna Bradshaw has referred to with great wistfulness, a sound that gave her pleasure to hear when she was alone with her yellow cat Eddie in the middle of the night in her trailer at the trailer park out the state highway that connected Bovary, Alabama, with the rest of what she knew to be the world. This was before she and I had met in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. And she was made happy by the thought that there were all those other lives going on in places far away — suggested to her by the sound of a train going somewhere in the night — but she was right there in a place she knew so well. I think that is the reason she turned me down the first time I asked her to fly away with me. She was content.
I straighten and quake with this thought. I plucked Edna Bradshaw from the very sort of life I went seeking on this night.
But no. She was not content. We met, I asked her for a date, I took her out, we fell in love, I was to be transferred, I asked her to marry me, she said no, I went away. But then she was suddenly very unhappy. Bovary, Alabama, no longer gave her pleasure. She heard this sound of a train whistle — and there it is again, coming nearer, but slowly — she heard this sound after I left, and it only made her sad. Made her yearn to follow it. She wanted to fly from what she had always known, a life that no longer satisfied her.
I look toward Kroger and I find that I, too, am yearning.
The bright lights are calling me. I am afraid that the life without yearning, which I sought, does not exist on this world. Perhaps it does not exist at all, anywhere in the universe, so long as creatures have minds and hearts and must move from one moment to the next. For example, I should go now to my undetected shuttle craft and return to my place in the middle of the air. But, in fact, I yearn to understand Kroger, which, I realize, is to yearn to know more about what is to come, for me. It is one thing for me to sneak around in the dark, unobserved, and smugly believe I understand these creatures. It is another thing to walk into that great swath of fluorescent light, which is full of beer and laundry soap and breakfast cereal and conditioning rinse and the ardent seekers of these things, and to say, Look here, you all, you are not the only beings in the universe.
I step across the steel rail and I move into the parking lot and I am full of hope. I know this place teems with the objects that breed in the physical space between these creatures, the objects that beckon and gather and beget words, words that have shaped my understanding of things in so many ways. And though I have collected and preserved a number of these objects in a certain dedicated space on my ship, and though they even clutter together there in some profusion, there is an inevitable air of artificiality about my collection, like a case full of insects stuck with pins. I need to be inside Kroger, no matter what the risk. I squeak on quickly across the asphalt, the bright white glow calling me, a cheery WELCOME and a vast yellow Smiley Face over the double automatic doors.
I am suddenly struck by this face, which I have seen through my observation machines in many places. But until this moment I have not seen it for what it truly is, the face of a spaceman. No ears. No hair. Large eyes. No lips but a wide, sweet smile. I am a friendly guy, after all. Perhaps this face has prepared a way for me. This word of welcome is for me, Desi the Friendly Spaceman, making a special appearance at the Family Center, Have a nice millennium. I rush toward KROGER.