I see my destiny. Millions of eyes are upon me. I descend and the eyes grow wide and the bodies surge and the hands clutch.
“You go on, get aboard now,” Edna is saying.
The press and heat of Citrus is gone from me now.
I look and she is going up into the bus and Hank is standing there in the doorway, turning aside to let Citrus pass, but he is looking at me.
Then there is only Hank in the doorway and he squares around. “Mr. Desi,” he says.
The crowd is still in my head. A million voices — two million — rise in fear and then in rage and I am aflame, A Flame with Such a Burning Desire. For what? For what?
Hank says, “You should appear in New Orleans. They might understand there.”
“The Big Easy,” I say.
“It’s just down the highway.”
“Let the Good Times Roll,” I say.
“I’m sure they’ve got a big party tonight,” he says. “Plenty of media.”
“Thank you for the suggestion.”
“I’d be comfortable there,” Hanks says, and he winks and he nods and he disappears into the dimness of the bus and the door closes.
Then a hand and arm of my wife Edna Bradshaw comes in through my arm and she is beside me and holding on tight and we cross the great floor of the Reception Hall together. We turn at the door and a panel is there, which I open, and faces are pressed against the windows all along this side of the bus. Our friends are looking at us and waving and Edna and I wave in return. Then I touch the panel and the Reception Hall is filled with a bright light and the floor beneath the bus slides open and the bus descends, the hands still waving, the bus sinks down till the faces dip beneath the level of the floor and then the waving fingertips are gone and the roof of the bus and the floor slides and it seals itself shut and the light vanishes and there is a sudden jagged clutch of fear inside me, as if my friends have just gone down with a great ship to a watery grave. But I know their wheels will soon be spinning on Interstate 10. They will be chasing their luck once more. And so will I.
18
When a girl from Bovary, Alabama, finds herself married to a bona fide spaceman and she goes away to far galaxies and tries to be a good wife out there in outer space, in spite of all her life up to then she being afraid of change and taking a chance and going too far from home — and let’s face it, when I say “girl” I don’t mean “girl,” I mean a forty-something woman who prior to this extraordinary thing happening to her had a life of what they call, in the hairdressing parlors of Bovary, “dignified simplicity” or sometimes “simple Southern grace” or sometimes just “lost hopes and blown chances”—I can admit all that now, being forty-plus and having a life like that — so when such a woman like me finds herself alone in an invisible spacecraft sitting in a field of witch grass out behind the place where her motor home once sat, the very place where her spaceman husband parked this very craft on the night he came a-courting her after having met her in the parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter, like God Himself had wanted us to meet — when she finds herself sitting there and she’s all alone in an alien vessel except for her yellow cat Eddie purring on her lap and she doesn’t know whether her dear sweet spaceman husband is being ripped to pieces by an angry Earth mob even at that very moment, and she being under directions from him to wait for two hours after midnight, New York City Time, and if she doesn’t get his radio message by that time she is to push a certain button and step out of this machine and try to resume her life in her former hometown and try not to read the newspapers for a few days because under those circumstances the news was certainly going to be bad about what had happened to her husband, and when a woman like that — who’s me, of course — even has a way to make a record of her voice while she waits, which her husband has showed her as he is saying good-bye and putting her in this spacecraft and is giving her a kiss in that sweet lipless way of his — though being lipless isn’t a way, exactly, it’s more like a condition, which just goes to show how much I love him because the touch of his spaceman mouth is about as happy a thing for me as I could ever imagine and I pray that I will have a chance to be that happy again — but he gave me a kiss and he showed me what to do and here I sit, and in a situation like this, even with the chance to talk — and I don’t think there’s a tape or anything in this thing to run out, I can go on as long as I want — but when a woman — even a woman like me — finds herself in a situation like this, she is pretty much left at a loss for words, which is what I am right now. Except to say that when the door was closing and I was looking at my spaceman husband maybe for the last time ever, he began to do something I have never seen him do.
Desi wept.
19
Citrus’s kiss is still burning on my cheek when my hand goes to the ship’s guidance panel. My wife Edna Bradshaw, along with our yellow cat Eddie, has already been dispatched to wait in a place where she can resume a life on Earth if her spaceman husband in fact fulfills the destiny of Murdered God.
And I wept. In sending Edna Bradshaw away not knowing if I would ever see her again, I at last found my way to the Earthlings’ private sea. I opened a door inside me and there it was, and I strode forward and into the waves and there were voices all around me, all the voices I had taken into my own mouth, all the voices who knew how to live intensely in that sensual space out there between one mind and another, and the sea rose up and filled my eyes and I closed the door of the shuttle craft and Edna was weeping too.
And yet, poised now before the guidance panel, it is not the track of my first tears that I am feeling as I make these last decisions that will seal my fate, it is Citrus’s kiss, a kiss that burns like a brand on my body. And the brand is NYC. New York City. I am Signed Sealed ’n’ Delivered. I even move my hand and my spaceship slides smoothly across Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and so forth, picking up the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and all I can think is, New York Here I Come. And yes, I understand that this coming I am about to make — the coming of a real-live rootin’-tootin’ no-doubt-about-it space alien — especially at this millennially portentous moment — will be just about as big, newswise, on planet Earth as if I were the coming of the man Citrus believes me to be.
But even as I think those things, I also think of my chosen twelve racing through the night. Come to Louisiana For to Have Some Fun. Then I think of Hudson’s words, and Hank’s. I do not have to maximize the risks. There might be a place more inclined to accept me. And I think of my great yummy pecan ball of a wife sitting in the place where I came to woo her, frightened for me now, expecting to be widowed. And I think about me. Me me me me me. Why not me? I am. That is me. What does me want? What does me yearn for?
Okay, I think. Okay. I move my hand and I am back in Louisiana. I speed to the Crescent City, the Queen of the South, the City that Care Forgot, New Orleans. And I consult the information we have on the place and midnight is approaching and I hover now twenty miles directly above the exact spot in New Orleans that seems to me, from what is known by our research, to be the exact right spot for my purpose, and I magnify the image of New Orleans on my screen and I see the curve of the Mississippi River through the French Quarter and there is a public park and a square and I zoom in on this image and I see my destination and I magnify it and this choice of New Orleans was no cop-out, I realize. There is a vast throng of people here, too, also prone to freak out, I presume, and Hank was right, there is plenty of media. Too much of all of that, people and media and the potential for mass terror. I can feel no difference between this and Times Square. And I am seizing up just as badly here. But I cannot compromise any further.