And so, I put my spacecraft on a timed instruction. I place a transmitter to the ship’s voice recorder on the lapel of my freshly starched white shirt with my Tabasco necktie and gray pin-striped suit, and I am ready, if I die, to send this vessel, empty of all but voices, back to my home planet on its own. My epitaph. And I will be content, at least, that my wife will have her old life back. Content to have the bits and pieces of my body dispersed by fire or worms or the deep sea or even held in stasis in jars in secret government labs. Content with that. Yes. Content because I will, in death, be here, on the planet Earth. Content because I will thus, in a sense, remain close to Edna Bradshaw and close to Minnie Butterworth and close to Whiplash Willie Jones and to Herbert Jenkins and to Viola Stackhouse and Hudson Smith and Claudia Lambert and all the rest of them. And that is the Bible.
And I move my hand and my spaceship descends, straight down, from twenty miles above Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, to ten miles above to five to one and the ship is cloaked and invisible, and on the screen I see the crowd roiling in anticipation, for the millennium has only a little more than a minute left in it and I am coming, I am coming to you, planet Earth, you will soon understand, and I am half a mile above and a quarter mile and my hand now is poised to uncloak this craft and my body is roiling like the crowd, roiling with the heat of the stars that you creatures there below know only as tiny bits of ancient light, I fall to you, I fall and I move my hand now and I make the ship visible to everyone and beneath me is St. Louis Cathedral with three spires, the center one, the tallest, pointing straight up at this wondrous sight, this vessel from outer space. I place the craft on its automatic settings and quickly I glide to the center of the control room.
And I wait, stiffly, Without a Song in my Heart, and the light flares, fills my eyes, catches me tight, and I begin to sink down. I close my eyes and I try to Whistle a Happy Tune, but my mouth is too rigid to pucker and I am free of the ship and I am in the night air and I open my eyes, there are corridors of light and blooms of fireworks and a steady roar of human voices beneath me and I look down and the high center spire is aimed right at me and I move my hand and adjust the beam and I slide out, and the square before the cathedral unfolds before me, teeming with life, and I am ready to see them, see all these faces turned up to me, to this extraordinary sight, a spaceman in a felt hat and gray suit with hot-sauce bottles floating on his tie coming down in a beam of light. I focus. I blink my big old spaceman eyes and I concentrate my superior vision and I am descending into a great sea of plumes and feathers and masks and I look harder as I descend and I am passing the highest tip of the spire and I descend toward an enormous pink rabbit — the Energizer battery bunny who Keeps On Going — and a human Coke can, a face framed in the ring of the pull tab, and a woman warrior with plastic breastplates and brandishing an aluminum-foil sword and a nearly naked King Neptune with trident and sea-shell jockstrap and a man shrouded in a great, full-body rubber sheath with French Tickler top and a gang of bikers in black leather but with great swaths of their jackets and pants missing showing their flesh beneath, and I look more widely at the crowd and some faces are clearly focused on me, some hands point and wave, and I realize I am missing my opportunity, I am being the spectator not the show, and I wave in return and a trio of nuns, side by side, see me and they return my wave and then in unison they clap their hands against the center of their chests — it is the mea culpa, they feel they have sinned — and I am about to spread my hands before them, to offer them reassurance, but before I do, they all three open wide the fronts of their habits and expose their breasts — three pairs of pink, wondering eyes stare up at me — and the habits close and the nuns acknowledge the applause of those around them and they receive the kisses of the bikers and I am falling into confusion in this column of light and I scan the crowd, trying to understand, and suddenly I realize that I have won, at last, the attention of much of the crowd, I feel all eyes on me, and the nuns have taught me something — a precious lesson I should have learned already — I have dressed in my suit and shirt and tie, as if I were an Earthling myself — what a basic blunder I have made — and I rip off my hat and my tie, and my spaceman face, at least, is nakedly clear — I will not fail in what I must do — I heighten my voice to be heard far and wide and I do not plan what to say, I trust the words to come, and I begin, “I am a friendly guy come from a distant planet. You are not alone.” And though my voice is loud, the crowd is louder — they are not alone, they are one voice, uttering a sound like the sea, roaring in a storm — and I am descending farther, getting closer and closer, but I sense the moment of all eyes being on me has passed, most of the eyes have remained where they were even as I have moved — in spite of my face being clearly visible now — and I glance back and above me and it is the clock they were watching — and they still are — the new millennium is coming, only seconds away, and they are focused on this moment, on this moment in their senses, in the company of each other, and I look out at them and they are indeed a vast sea, they are moved by a great rising wave, all of them together, bunny and biker, Neptune and nun, Coke can and condom, they are one people, and I know why I have made my blunder, why I descended dressed as one of them, and I fall in my column of light past the great front doors of the cathedral and I know my own yearning clearly now, even as a man in ostrich feathers and a woman in combat fatigues press back against the crowd to make a place for me. And the crowd cries out “Three, two, one!” and then there is a great roar and my eyes are full of tears and the wave lifts us all and I swim into the crowd hugging and being hugged, kissing and being kissed.
20
I am. Still. I am more than ever. I sent the ship back to where it came from. I told my species to stay away for a century or two, at the very least. My wife Edna Bradshaw and I have taken a little place in an old slave house in a courtyard full of jasmine and bougainvillea in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Edna does hairdressing. People talk to her. She talks to them. She is happy about that, though I will be forever grateful to her for her willingness to give up those things to be my wife, when we could never have expected this outcome. Eddie the yellow cat likes our little place, too, though I sometimes must rescue a gecko from his grasp.
I feel at home here. I work in Jackson Square. My colleagues are the fire-eaters and the jugglers and the painters and the fortune-tellers. I sit at a little table and my sign says, TALK WITH A SPACEMAN. I do what I have always done. I listen to the voices of this planet, one at a time. I am a good listener. Some people think I really am a spaceman, an incarnate glimpse into the infinite and mysterious elaboration of the universe. Some people think I am just one of them in costume, an Earthbound creature caught in time and yearning his way along. Look around. Listen to each other. I am both, and so are you. So let’s go around the corner, you and I, and get a flaming dessert together. Lately I’ve been thinking there’s a revelation to be had from a sweetly burning banana.