“I am sorry,” I say.
“What in heaven’s name for?”
“I made you remember the place that humiliated you.”
“The Dixie-Do Roller Rink? Oh don’t you be worrying your sweet spaceman head. That old life is dead and gone. But people can be pretty cruel sometimes. … Where are you going?”
I have jumped up from the bed, full of anxiety. It is the capacity for cruelty in these creatures that I fear. I say, “There is so little time left.”
“For what?”
This is a question I do not feel prepared to answer. Though I should. By tomorrow all the planet will know. And this is my wife before me. There is nothing in my directive that would prohibit letting my wife know my mission, especially this near to the hour and in the safe confines of our spaceship. But I am not yet prepared to shape these words of explanation. I am frightened.
“Desi honey, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong, my dear wife Edna Bradshaw,” I say.
“I thought we’d pretty much cured you of addressing me in that formal spaceman way. Something is bothering you.”
“I have a task.” I find I can say no more.
Edna waits a few moments and then tries to fill in the blank I have left. “You’re a hardworking man, I know that.”
“I am a hardworking man. This is true. I am an okay Joe. I am a friendly guy. There is nothing to be afraid of. I come in peace, Earthlings.”
“What are you going on about?”
“You have nothing to fear,” I say.
“Then why does your saying that scare me?”
“Why does your being scared of me scare me?” I cry. All of this is going very badly.
And my wife cries in return, “I don’t know why me being scared of you saying not to be scared scares you, but that scares me even more.”
This answer is clear to me. “Because if I scare you by asking you not to be scared — you who are my wife Edna Bradshaw who loves me — then how scared will all the creatures on this planet be when I obey my orders to descend from my spaceship and reveal the existence of spacemen to the whole world?”
And now it has been spoken between us.
Edna lowers herself to the bed. She sits and she is, for the moment, uncharacteristically, speechless.
I begin to hum. But at the first sound of this, Edna’s face turns to me and she is wide-eyed with fear and I stop.
“I am sorry,” I say. “Whenever I Feel Afraid, I Whistle a Happy Tune.”
“That was no whistle,” Edna says, softly.
“A spaceman whistle,” I say.
“They’ll tear you apart down there,” she says.
“What Do Doctors Do To Relieve Tense Nervous Headaches?” I say.
“This is no time for that kind of talk, Desi honey. Turn off that TV in your head.”
Unexpectedly, I find that her words Make My Brown Eyes Blue. I sit down beside her.
“I’ve gone and hurt your feelings,” she says.
“Did you read my mind?” I cry, full of hope.
“I read your face, honeybun. When your feelings are hurt, that wide sweet mouth of yours wrinkles up like a Mary-Lou’s-Southern-Belle-Beauty-Nook marcel wave. Like now.”
“What is wrong with the TV in my head?”
“There’s a lot of good things on TV. I’m not saying there’s not. You’re full of tasty tidbits from your listening in and all. But this is the real world you’re about to face.”
My wife Edna Bradshaw is confirming my worst fears now. There is the world I have learned about all these years and then there is a real world that has eluded me all along. I know nothing.
Her eyes widen. “Now I’ve never seen your mouth do that, honey. Like it was a lie-detecting machine and I just told the biggest whopper ever. I don’t mean to keep on hurting your feelings. But the truth is I’m scared for you.”
I say, “I am scared too.”
“I don’t ever interfere with my man’s work. That’s not what’s done where I come from. But please, Desi, can’t we just go off to some other world now? Let’s try a new place. Listen in on Mars or somewhere.”
“There are only rocks on Mars.”
Edna bends near to me. She places her hand on mine. “Anywhere,” she says. “Please.”
“I am,” I say, “who I am.”
My wife Edna Bradshaw thinks about this for a moment and then she says in a voice that is very soft and with her eyes filling with the tears that still seem so alien to me. “Yes you are,” she says. “And I would not want that any other way.”
I say, “Time has run out for me, Edna Bradshaw my honey-bun. I go down to your planet tonight at midnight. But I am very tired. I must rest. And yet I must talk with more of our guests. Are they not from the real world you speak of? Perhaps I can still learn.”
“Has it done you any good so far, all your interviewing?” she asks.
“I thought yes, for a long while, yes, at least to some extent, but now I am not so sure. Still, I must try. I must listen. I must learn. I … yearn for these things, my wife Edna Bradshaw. That is the word for what I do. Like all of you. I yearn. To seek. To know.”
“Do you also yearn to go down there and tell all those folks who are so full of themselves and have so many ways to hurt one another that they ain’t such big fish in the universe after all? Ida Mae Pickett, my best friend in the world for many years, she yearned once, too, she even said that word one day in the beauty parlor and I didn’t trust it in her mouth, not for one second. She yearned to go off to Montgomery, she said, and make a name for herself doing the hair of capital hostesses and lady lawyers and people like that and maybe even the hair of the wife of the governor of the great state of Alabama someday. And Ida Mae was back in Bovary in no time and she wasn’t talking about Montgomery — rather not say a thing, thank you very much for not asking — and it was plain to see she’d been yearning for the wrong things and found nothing but grief for herself. Don’t talk to me about yearning. Better you should just want a few things. You might can get something you want. But nobody ever gets a yearning, I bet. That just goes on and on.”
“Do you have only wants, my wife Edna Bradshaw?”
“I try.”
“But then is it not true that you yearn not to yearn?”
My wife flutters her hands and she looks here and there about the room. Clunkheadedly, I have made her uncomfortable. “I am sorry,” I say. “It is just a word. I have always scorned these bits of sound on this planet and here I am, pursuing my wife to a state of discomfy with a word. A word I think far too much about. Perhaps I am not in the real world now. Though I have never heard the word in question in the heightened discourse that has so interested me in the unreal world. Oh oh, I yearn for Spaghettios! I yearn for a Twinkie! I yearn for TwoAllBeefPattiesSpecial-SauceLettuceCheesePicklesOnionsOnA SesameSeedBun! I yearn for the Breakfast of Champions! No! These are ‘wants.’ And yes, you are right, my wife Edna Bradshaw. I can have any one of them. So can you. So can anyone. It is simple! It is economical! It is America! I want! I want! I am my wants. I can have my wants. I can be me! I gotta be me!”