12
Edna Bradshaw was still sleeping when I returned. Everyone on the ship was sleeping. But when I lay down beside my wife, she stirred without opening her eyes and her arms came around me as if she knew in her very dreams what it was that I needed at that moment. I was grateful.
I am frightened. Even lying here now with my wife Edna Bradshaw’s arms about me, even with a fetching scent of something coming from her, a good scent that seems to come straight from her knockers, which tower above me in her embrace and which are so unlike anything among my species, even with all of that, I can think only of my imminent public appearance on this planet, how it will be fraught with danger and needs a careful plan, and how even the vague first glimmerings of such a plan are still far from my mind. I continue to believe that whatever I am to do, whatever I am to say, has to be shaped by all the voices of creatures, alive and dead, floating in the vast energy fields of my memory machines and, more to the present point, all the voices now sleeping on my ship and ready to speak. These latter voices are surely as close as I can get to the exact tenor of this particular era, the fin de siècle state of consciousness of the creatures I will face in vast numbers in a very short time.
And so, without letting go to further sleep myself, I gently disengage from my wife’s arms and I rise and enter into the corridor and as I move toward the place where they are all waiting I let myself try to calculate exactly how much time I have before I must descend from my machine in plain sight.
It is not an easy calculation to do in one’s head.
My time is not their time.
And I am surely wrong in doing a thing like this without my machines.
And I stagger to a stop.
I have gotten close to a bottom line but I have averted my eyes at the last moment, professing ignorance, feigning ignorance, hoping for ignorance, and I move off now to our control room and I am before my machines and I am a simple movement of my hand away from having the precise answer and I am Hot as a Firecracker and Ready to Explode. I am also having trouble drawing a breath. The hand I finally move is a slab of rock, a layer hacked from a desert excavation full of the fossils of life on this planet long ago dead.
And my eyes try to see the numbers that appear before me as if they are hieroglyphs from an extinct language. Unreadable. But this cannot last for long. My mind peeks. And the heat in me swells and roils. I knew it was not long, the time left to me. But the numbers before me are a terrible surprise.
I have twenty-two hours and eleven minutes.
I envy the roaches of the planet Earth. I am ready to check in, quite willingly, to a place where I cannot check out.
But I am who I am.
And this is my life.
And there are so many voices to hear before I offer myself up.
And so I go out of the control room and I move again in the corridors of my spaceship, move quickly, and I am among my visitors — I realize now that I may not have a chance to hear them all — and so I choose the visitor whose very name derives from what all of these sojourners were seeking on their bus when I caught them up in the clouds, a thing that I, too, seek for myself. I awaken, to a state of dreamspeak, the young man named Lucky.
He sits before me now and I am — I hear how words create their own states of being and this one I wish were true — I am Lucky. I am an all-American guy, through and through red white and blue, and that is the fact. I don’t even remember Vietnam. Not even a little bit. My mother and father, they talk about it all the time while I am growing up. You should have seen the clouds in the sky at twilight. You should have seen the teakwood furniture in our house. You should have seen the Emperor of Jade pagoda. And I say, Right. You should see the Astros play the Cardinals. Maybe you can get lucky and see Mark McGwire hit a home run. I go to one game this past season and he hits a ball about ten rows into the upper deck. I root for the Astros but I like to see big home runs and this one was about as big as they get.
See, even my name is Lucky. I could call myself Joe or Ed or Bill or anything I want since I am an American and since my parents gave me a Vietnamese name. I don’t blame them, understand, I was born in Vietnam and all, but things went bad over there, as everybody knows, and my parents and my sister and me ended up running away. And you can’t carry your teakwood furniture on a sampan stuffed full of refugees in the South China Sea. So we came to the USA with basically the clothes on our backs — realize, I don’t have a single memory of any of this — and then at some point it became clear that the communist government wasn’t just going to up and topple over and we were pretty much stuck here — stuck is how my parents saw it — and they realized it was time for me to have a name that my fellow Americans would understand. So they let me choose. It was when I was twelve years old.
Knowing how they feel about what they lost, that must have been a bad day for them. We all of us sat around our kitchen table in our little condo out in the Bellaire part of Houston and we had a stack of name-your-baby books and we all chose new names. Our family name was Nguy
n. For sure, nobody American could say that. But when people tried and just chose to duck that Ng sound at the start, they often ended up saying something that sounded like an American name: Wynn. So my father made the family name first order of business and that’s what he said it was going to be. Wynn. Which was fine by me. I was already a baseball fan and I knew about my Astros even back to when they were the Colt 45s, before I was born, and one of the early Astros greats was Jimmy Wynn, who hit ninety-six home runs in the three seasons from ’67 to ’69. He was a little guy and they called him the Toy Cannon. I like to think of him all through those bad years of the war out there in the air-conditioned comfort of the Astrodome, this little man, getting just his pitch, guessing just right on the fastball or the curve ball and he’d swing and be right on the money, right on the sweet spot on his bat, not a millimeter off — there is some guesswork to good hitting, you see; it takes some luck to hit the long ball — I like to think of him hitting big home runs in 1967 and 1968 and 1969 and him jogging around the bases, not having to rush because everything was already decided in his favor. It was like he was preparing a place for me. I’m sorry for my parents and what they lost and its never being okay for them, but Jimmy Wynn was laying down this track for a guy who looked to be Vietnamese but ended up an American, cheering his Astros and free to chase his own luck. Me.
So my sister goes first on that day and she doesn’t even look in the books. She’s fifteen and it’s clear she’s been thinking about this for a long time, probably been wanting to ask my parents for this very thing but she’s too good and obedient and old-fashioned a daughter to open her mouth. She even claims to remember the furniture and the sunsets some, back in Vietnam. Nancy, she says.