First appearing in the award-winning anthology Fault Zone: Reverse, this story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Spaceman

My green plastic spaceman glows, hovering in flight far away in the black night of the universe. I admire the graceful arc he travels within the dark secrecy of Grandma’s closet. With the door pulled shut from the inside, I launch my collection of space heroes and ships into the black expanse. The preacher called it that. He said it’s larger than any of us know.

Here, no one stares at me. No one can see the brace holding my leg. Even I can’t see it out here in space where no one knows of my disease. The doctor calls it Perthes disease. The pastor says it’s an infirmity. When you have a disease that’s an infirmity, you’ve got to be healed because the devil has got into you somehow. Back on earth, my brace shows through my pant leg and clinks with every step. Everyone can see and hear my infirmity, my own bit of Satan, the entity responsible for infirmities in people. But in the void of space—the Bible calls it a void— somewhere out there where God lives, no one can see that the Fallen One has got into me. I am the spaceman who glows and flies with perfect legs.

Please God, forgive me of sins. Please Jesus, drive out the Devil!

We pray to God for an hour at Wednesday night prayer meetings. Like always, I am singled out. Because of my sin, I have to sit on the floor, covering my eyes in prayer. Everyone else kneels properly, head in their hands, knees against the wall. I can’t kneel on account of my brace. I can’t even pray to God without my infirmity showing! We pray in church Sunday mornings. We pray at the old-folks home where Grandma takes me clinking along beside her to visit the old ones on Sunday afternoons, back at church again Sunday nights, at meals, rising in the mornings, as I go to bed. To show God I mean it, I pray limping home from school. I made Grandma stop pulling me home in my old wagon. The kids saw me. It was too embarrassing!

God rules with iron authority over everyone. Even sinners. There are lots of sinners—more sinners than us God-abiding folk, Grandma says. God lives in heaven, out somewhere in space. I know this because when the pastor talks about God, he points his finger into the sky. It’s only logical that God rules from out in space. Boys aren’t stupid!

I make sure my spaceman doesn’t fly too high, in case he runs into God, who might not like the intrusion.

The pastor says one of God’s angels, Lucifer, suffered from pride. I think that’s like being uppity. Apparently, you can fly too close to God, and for his sin of flying too close, God banished Lucifer from heaven. He fell to earth, and that was the start of all sin, which is what we pray about, because everyone is “tempted of the devil,” so everyone sins. Even Grandma. And Satan (another name for Lucifer) recruits a lot of people. It turns out, even little kids sin! (And I know that’s true, because some kids my age make fun of me being a cripple. You’ve got to be a sinner to try to hurt someone like that.)

Satan is everywhere, even close by. I know this because Mom and Grandma say my father is Satan himself. This makes sense. My father is mean. He scares me. I try not to let it show because I don’t want mom and Grandma to worry more. Preacher says divorce is a sin, but I’m glad Mom divorced him. Some sins must be a lot worse than others.

And they have another name for him, Alcoholic. I mentioned to Mom that he had a funny smell. She told me it’s how alcoholics smell. He’s always trying “to manipulate you,” they say, to get you to do what he wants. “That’s what Satan does,” Grandma explains. “Old Satan, he’s a sly one,” she says, with that laugh that tells me she knows for sure. “He plays with himself, too.” I don’t know what it means to play with yourself, but it’s got to be of the Devil—something different than playing with the kids in our neighborhood. Grandma knows more than anyone about the Devil except maybe the Pastor.

So, my father is Satan, which means that I’m Satan’s son. And I have his infirmity stuck in me. My crippled leg, there for everyone to see.

Invisible in Grandma’s closet I can make up my own world, my own stories. I can fly in a magic arc across the night that’s like a black lake high above my head, my legs whole, and beautiful, and shimmering.

But the world—the world of prayer and devils—doesn’t go away. I can’t stay here in Grandma’s closet too long. Best get back into that world—that world not far from the world of dreams. Grandma and Mom need me. They don’t have much money and they’ve got to take care of me and pay the doctor bills. They’ll miss me if I stay in here. Best keep away from Willis, though. That’s my father’s earthly name. Satan has so many names. Best try and be as good a boy as I can, given I got this bad start as Satan’s son. Maybe God will see my goodness and save me. Preacher’s always telling us about getting saved. It’s why I’ve got to pray so hard.

Father in Heaven, please wash away my stain. I will not follow him. I know who he is.

If you’re not saved, you go to eternal damnation. Pray, kid! Maybe God will heal you— although I guess He gave up on your father.

Save me, Father! Save me from the flames!

✦

I didn’t see Willis again until I was 21.

It was a warm spring night in the small Oregon town. His sister’s tiny house seemed to hide under the large willow in front. No sooner had I parked my borrowed car than I saw a man limping toward me from the old wooden porch in the dark. First thing I noticed was the limp.

He limps in the left leg, same place I used to. Still do slightly.

“This disease you’ve got, son,” the doctor had begun when I was about to learn at eleven how to walk again without a brace, “it leaves your body just as mysteriously as it enters. No one understands it. When it goes, it leaves your hip with whatever damage it caused. Your left leg will always be slightly shorter than your right. Coulda been worse—a lot worse.”

Willis limps a lot worse than me. Serves the motherfucker right!

No longer afraid to shake hands with the Devil, I reached out to take the hand he offered. It was easy to shake his hand, since I’d left our old-time religion long ago. That way of thinking might have been good enough for Jesus, but it wasn’t good enough for me.

One day when I was ten, I’d sat in the church pew next to Grandma. Everyone was hollering, shaking, and sweating. A woman across the aisle spoke in the unknowable language of God. I’d seen it all that Sunday morning. Yes, I’d seen it all. I’m smarter than everyone here, I’d declared to myself with a ten-year-old’s certainty. Nobody would catch me shaking, sweating, hollering, or speaking in the tongue of God. I would see things the way they are.

That had been the moment I’d separated. The seed of my arrogance took root, the first step toward freedom, the awareness of my difference. I could never go back. I’d shut the door behind me.

But here I was now, come to face Willis mano a mano. Shaking his hand, I thought I was a man. But I still had a boy’s need. Would I follow in his path or make my own way? What had he put in me? I had rejected the religion of my family, but the stories—oh, those stories—still lived inside me. How could I not retain them?

The myth lived on. I wanted to feel that his hands were cold and lifeless. They weren’t. I half expected his skin to wear the scales of a lizard or the slime of a serpent. It didn’t. He was just another sad drunk, making every sad excuse a drunkard makes, even at times speaking in the unknowable language of the lost. I knew the feeling well. I wore the condition myself, getting wasted multiple times a week.

See where all your smarts have got you? You’re just another drunk like him, aren’t you?

Willis said about Mom, “She wouldn’t let me see you, understand?” I recognized his lies right off. They piled up. “I wanted to pay the child support, but you see me here, I’m crippled, I could never work ’cuz of this injury in the army. Couldn’t hold down a job with this leg, now could I? You think I wanted to live here dependent on my sister? She was a beautiful girl, your mother, don’t get me wrong. She was always pretty. But she wouldn’t give a man what he needed.”

His story was stained with all the blame a drunkard spills on the ones who failed him. I felt the urge. I wore the condition. I still blamed Mom and Grandma, too. We, the accursed.

“I’m about to come into a lot of money,” he said. “They’re finally going to compensate me for my injury. I want to give you some. I want you to call me ‘Dad.’ We’ll make up for lost time.”

I see you, Satan, the manipulator.

The night wore on. Many drinks later, I passed out.

I promised to be in touch before I drove away the next afternoon to return to campus. I never saw him again.

Let him feel what it’s like to have his own son repay him in kind—lie for drunken lie. When I get back to campus, I’ll coil up in bed and tell myself another story.

✦

At 23 I bought my cousin’s ’58 Chevy and drove from one history into another. San Francisco was a long way from Idaho. I’d tasted of all the fruit growing in this northern garden some thought of as paradise, but it seemed like hell to me. “Take a degree in law. Come home to practice here. Marry a nice local girl.” I wouldn’t have it anymore. My eyes had been opened again.

What I would find in the place they called “The City.” It was just a name and a point on the map. A friend said it was the place to be, where students were rebelling and smoking pot out in the open. That sounded pretty good. And I’d read the magazine article that said young people should come to San Francisco to participate in “the vortex of cultural change.”

That’s for me! To be part of something new, something revolutionary!

That had been the extent of my preparation when one day, with a few hundred bucks in my pocket, I kissed my apprehensive mother and drove out from Eden, one more Tarot Fool heading off the cliff unaware, one more vagabond swept up into the eternal unknown calling.

The interstate seemed to slither like a long snake through Southern Idaho down into Utah then on into Nevada.

When I tired from the road, I pulled over like my mother advised. I rolled down the windows, inhaled the hot, dry odor of asphalt from the highway, smoked a cigarette, and dozed. I was too restless to dream. This was my big adventure. I feared the beasts I might run across in this unknown world. I’d have to fight them on my own now. I wanted to meet people of different races and from different parts of the world. Maybe people who longed for something more, like I did. I no longer wanted to explain why I read so much.

The winding snake eventually coughed me up into the Tenderloin, a dismal and desperate place where Harry, my only friend there, lived. I parked and got out of the car trying to act confident, like this was old hat, but I was shaking. I wasn’t sure at all what I’d find in this sorry place. Maybe nothing good.

But what was that? Church bells rang from somewhere across the City skyline. I stopped to listen. Maybe their peal had summoned me from afar. What is it that beckons the spaceman, explorer, Fool, or kid searching for more? Soon I was playing pool for beer and food with prison guards and cabbies in the dive bars on Turk Street. I didn’t hear the bells from there.

Sandy saved me when she visited. “I love you. But you’ve got to get out of here or I’m not coming back.”

Sometime later, after I’d heard the stories of so many in our generation, after I’d heard it called the Summer of Love, I thought to myself, Yeah, it’s a nice thought. Especially when you’re high.

What does the Fool look like when he’s come down?

✦

There’s this story of a God who made the world, who set the stars and moon in their places to guide blind travelers of the night. And He created this perfect world and in it he fashioned man out of dust from the ground. And a woman He fashioned from the man’s rib. Unfortunately, the serpent got into the garden He made for them. Living in so much goodness, how could we be anything but disobedient? And for our disobedience God drove us from His perfect garden. Then came two brothers pitted against the other. And now we knew hatred, and before long we had botched the perfect creation made for us by the perfect God we worshipped. And of course, the woman was blamed for everything. That night, I would not learn for decades, when Willis raped her—when I was made. But the pastor and Grandma had agreed. It was the woman’s responsibility, for must she not have enticed the man?

Who can believe that shit? I’d said as a teenager, blossoming in full-petaled arrogance.

Things are never quite so simple. It took me a long time before I could admit how little I knew. Before I could rejoin the human race.

But let us sing in praise of the storyteller, the interpreter of dreams, the Fool.

One storyteller sings an old hymn from long ago, of a fallen angel to blame for all the miseries we heap upon ourselves, practicing the smooth words he’ll use to talk another sucker into temptation.

Another sings a newer song, a song of the beauty of that banished serpent, coiled within his tree of knowledge, in languid waiting for those who desire another bite of the apple. The acquisition of knowledge at times demands a disobedient and hungry mind. I prefer this story. But beware. There is evil out there.

When does a myth become a lie? When we use it to avoid responsibility over and over and to invoke some once-potent magic, now grown sterile. When we use it so that we won’t change. So that we won’t have to find our own way.

When does an old myth become true? Maybe when we use its spirit to animate ourselves into taking the responsibility we’ve always avoided, to lie beside the serpent in his tree of knowledge, tasting good and evil, learning of our arrogance and judgment of others.

It is the advent of Thanksgiving 2020. I think of all who came before me—parents, poets, storytellers, preachers—who told me stories of the world they saw. I think of them often. I remember them as from the worn trails of a past now covered with dust. They gave the best of their infirmities and brilliance. They talk to me still. Someone said gratitude is the highest emotion. I believe it, and with gratitude, I write these words.

However we acquire it, knowledge comes at a cost. The Fool, the spaceman, they’ll pay it. There’s always some old ache, some part of Eden we wish we could get back again. But we’ll stumble on, out here, way past Eden.

Forgive me, Father, for I know not what I do.

And there’s this personal myth, of a spaceman who flew through his Grandma’s closet on a journey into the beyond.