Читать книгу Neon Green - Margaret Wappler - Страница 12

5

Ernest and Cynthia diligently avoided most chemical cleansers, but fabric softener was her weakness. She kept a bottle stashed behind the washing machine in the garage, like an office drunk with her whiskey pint in the desk drawer. Quick, while nobody’s looking, just a nip! The top around the spout was gooey with blue paste; the scent was an unmitigated blast of toxins just waiting to twiddle your endocrine system—including alphaterpineol, limonene, and other chemicals that had been declared “problematic” by the EPA—but Cynthia reveled in it. As the water filled the washer, she poured some in the blue ball that would toss around in the cycle and eventually burst open. Cynthia never used it with Ernest’s clothes, but sometimes she forgot and threw it in with the linens. If Ernest caught a perfumed gust while making the bed, he’d complain about her secret addiction to “that smiling bear juice,” and dramatically cough. Turns out they couldn’t hide much of anything from each other.

In the yard, Gabe waited in a lawn chair, ready to observe the spaceship once it started its nightly show. The garage vents were blowing out soapy gusts that swirled around the ship and then dissipated. Cynthia wondered if the smell of the laundry would agitate the occupants. Wait, did they possess anything like a nose? There were no photographs or films to consult regarding what they looked like or how their bodies (if that was an accurate term) worked. Every article ever written about the Jupiter tribe said this kind of information was known by top government departments but couldn’t be released. How awful looking were these aliens?

For the first two weeks of the spaceship’s backyard occupation, Cynthia kept a cautious distance. She wasn’t calling New World every day like Ernest, demanding that it be removed, only to be put on hold for twenty minutes, but she wasn’t exactly comfortable around it either. She’d been avoiding the laundry because of its proximity to the ship, but after a fabric mountain formed in all of their closets, she had to take action. For the last few weeks, even a little before the spaceship landed, she’d been experiencing colorful, weird dreams that wouldn’t shake off in the daylight: her fingernails melting, all of her teeth falling out of her mouth, the skin peeling off the soles of her feet in calloused sheets. So far, she’d just barely convinced herself that her subconscious was a morbidly imaginative child who shouldn’t be encouraged.

From the garage, Cynthia saw Gabe look up just as the spaceship rocked into its first spasm. The twirling lights and the motorized pops that went off every few minutes made the spaceship seem like an abandoned pinball game in the corner of the arcade, beckoning with its jingle. Their neighbor Tom wandered down the driveway and around the side of the house with a few beers hanging from a plastic six-pack ring, the kind Ernest always carefully snipped with his scissors so that no birds would get their beaks caught in it while foraging in a landfill. In his other hand, he carried a telescope attached to a tripod.

“Wow!” Tom exclaimed. “This is fucking fabulous!”

Though Tom was a good friend, the Allens had grown accustomed to finding all sorts of barely recognized neighbors and benevolent trespassers standing in their backyard, watching the ship with expressions that ranged from rapturous to disappointed. Some ran their hands over the legs of the ship and some wouldn’t touch it at all. Others listened to the racket and couldn’t decide what to think—was it stupid or great? A sign of the universe’s staggering magnitude or just another smaller power manipulated by the United States?

“What do you think it’s doing?” Tom yelled, even though at the moment the spaceship was in a quiet period between pops. Yelling came naturally to some around the spaceship, as if its size and sheer alienness might swallow voices.

From her folding table, Cynthia could see Gabe’s face light up at the chance to explain the spaceship’s routine.

“It’s some sort of energy test. They’re checking all their resources.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read about it in the pamphlet.”

“I thought it was trying to say something.”

“Say something? Like, in a language?”

“Yeah”—Tom shrugged—“like, to communicate something about its mission or why it’s here.”

Gabe looked strained. He’d made it his purpose to understand as much about the ship as possible and here was something he’d never considered. Was it trying to talk? Was this ecstatic accounting really a message? If so, what was it trying to say?

Tom set up his telescope on the concrete near the back stairs. The spaceship reared up with another series of vibrations, followed by an amphetamine pop, prompting Tom to keep his hands steady on the telescope until it passed.

“I think you offended it,” Gabe jabbed, “with the telescope.”

“Where’s your dad? He’s not out here?”

“Nope,” Gabe said. “Not interested.”

Tom laughed as he centered the long tube on a fixed area of the sky. “He’ll come around. Hey, do you need to print out any papers for school? I got the dot matrix all hooked up again. Whole bunch of floppy discs too if you need ’em.”

“I’m OK, thanks. What are we looking at in there?” Gabe pointed to the telescope.

“I’ll tell you in a minute. I’m going to get your dad.”

Tom’s enthusiasms were always hard to resist, so Ernest was lured out by the time Gabe had put his eye to the telescope. In the past, Tom had turned Ernest on to hot sauces and mustards he sold at his hip New Orleans-influenced restaurant downtown, along with sun-warped tapes of long-lost jazz players from the 1950s and secret walking paths along the lake (“you gotta go south, past Hyde Park”). In Tom’s basement, they often lost themselves in music—Tom at the drums, hitting the hi-hat; Ernest fumbling through guitar chords. They’d loop over patterns that arose from listening to each other. In those moments of rare connection with another man (he usually found women so much more gratifying to talk to), Ernest would think that he’d rather be related to Tom, who happened to have bought the house next to him some ten years ago, than the one distant brother he did have.

The spaceship, as it wound down, shifted its lights from white to green, bathing the yard in the cool tone. Only a few lights around the band and a few underneath the ship, near the legs, were lit. Finally: calm. The hum of the motor ticked a little bit like an air-conditioning unit just turned off. The quietude of the yard, and the suburb beyond it, poured back in. Cynthia hoisted her basket of laundry and headed for the house.

“You cold out here?” she asked Gabe.

“No, it’s fine.”

Cynthia passed Tom and Ernest on the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Tom said to Cynthia. “We’re going to look at a comet.”

“What comet?” Cynthia asked.

“There’s a small comet passing by. Actually it’s been visible for weeks now, but it’s supposed to be at its brightest tonight. We also have a rare appearance from Jupiter.”

Cynthia docked the laundry basket at the top of the stairs and joined them at the telescope. Through the lens she saw a smattering of chipped stars and, in the corner of the sky, a denser patch of smeary light with a bright white head, static to the eye, yet some luminous energy it gave off suggested that an enormous, dense struggle was going on. She waited for it to move, but instead, she caught tiny pulsations. Micro-dust swelled and then drained away. To the side, Jupiter, an orange-and-smoke-white marble.

“Why isn’t the comet moving?”

“Well, you can’t really track it with your eye, but it is. Look at it an hour later and it’ll be in a different place.”

“Can I see?” Gabe crowded at his mother’s back. Cynthia fell off-balance and into the telescope. At the last second, Ernest caught the equipment and righted it.

“Watch out, Gabe,” Ernest said.

“But I didn’t even push that hard.”

Gabe waited for his mom to defend him, but she was distracted by a tinge of dizziness that remained.

“You know what, space cowboy? Why are you even out here? You’re still grounded.”

Gabe shot his dad a dark look. The punishment for his enrollment in the sweepstakes—handed down in large part because of Ernest’s ongoing frustrations with New World’s supervisors, who kept blowing off his complaints, promising to get back to him and then never calling back—had been erratically enforced, at best, and he was tired of humoring it.

“Why can’t I look at the comet? It’s educational.”

“It’s also pleasure, which you’re not allowed to experience right now.”

Ernest knew he was being a touch unfair, but Gabe’s presumpt-uousness, and subsequent lack of remorse, pissed him off beyond belief.

“Take a quick look,” Cynthia said, “and then go back upstairs.”

Tom gestured for Gabe to step up to the telescope, but Ernest’s cold stare halted him.

“Wait, what exactly am I being punished for? It’s just a spaceship, Dad, not the Death Star. Most of the time it’s just sitting back here, doing nothing.”

“Doing nothing? The noise pollution is offense enough. I barely slept last night—”

“Who cares about your sleep? Take a nap!”

In a flash, the support from his mother and Tom vanished. Ernest seized the power again. “Gabe, are you trying to talk me into letting you off the hook or punishing you more? Work on your strategy, my friend. Go upstairs. No TV, no telephone, no socializing, no looking at comets in space. Sorry, good night, don’t order any more spaceships to the house, please.”

Tom didn’t laugh but Gabe could tell he wanted to, at least a little bit. Adults who weren’t your parents were sometimes even worse assholes; they possessed no real empathy, no seeing themselves in you. Gabe left them to gawk at the comet and eat canapés, or whatever adults ate when they bullshitted around with each other, and stormed inside.

Close to midnight, Gabe turned on the shortwave radio, back in his bedroom, anger keeping him awake. He was picking up another broadcast, not the white-out static of the station where the woman mournfully called for her children, but another woman who sounded so clear, minus a few pops and flurries, she could’ve been sitting at the foot of Gabe’s bed. In a quiet but excited voice she said:

“Hello?

“Hi, you don’t know me, but I am talking to you. You can’t see me, obviously, but here’s my voice. Right here. Isn’t that weird? I’m a voice. I’m a radio. I’m this electromagnetic tone separated from my body, solitary, traveling to you.

“If you’ve never heard this voice before, welcome to The Book of Connections. I decided I wanted to talk to people but I don’t want them to talk back.” She laughed self-consciously. “I know that sounds antisocial, but that’s exactly it. You can be social but not communicate. Sometimes I try to talk to people and I fail. I fail to say the things I really mean. Which in the end means I was only moving my lips around a series of sounds.”

She paused for a moment, long enough for Gabe to sigh with recognition.

“Sometimes I also call this show The Book of Missed Connections, because you can’t talk about one without the other. You and I are now connected, and I like thinking about that. It does not matter if we would’ve stopped each other on the street to talk. It does not matter if we went to school or work together. Being born into the same family or town or cult is irrelevant. I get to talk to you. It’s selfish but pure.

“You can also turn me off. That is your power.

“Would you like to turn me off?”

Pause. Gabe tried to guess her age, her face. She sounded American, serious, and young, but not as young as him. Likely somewhere in the stretch of adulthood that occurred past age twenty-five, the contours of which Gabe couldn’t yet distinguish. He tried to picture a physical appearance, but her voice filled his imagination, blotting out any ideas about a face, eyes, skin tone, weight, hair. She was floating, or, as she said, she was a voice, a radio, and that was enough. Her voice: curious, playful, confident, poised; maybe she was an actress.

“OK, good. Glad you’re still here. I should warn you: I have no plans tonight. True, I never have plans because I like to wildly roam. I like to discuss whatever’s on my mind, with an eye to connection or slippage, to the smallest of occurrences or the biggest of phenomena. Most of the people crawling on this planet I will never get to meet. Neither will you. This is the fact of being human: knowing that a multiplicity of others thrums around you, existing, dying, being born or reborn. There is a beautiful ache in that. But even the people who you are very close to, in proximity or blood, you can also miss them. Missed connection. Missed contact from very close. A part of you or many parts of you may make contact or intersect, but never the whole you. Two shadows will overlap for a time, and I believe that is the closest you can really get to someone: the space and time when your shadows merge. It can happen right before you drift off to sleep or in another moment, usually when you’re not talking. It is an understanding and comfort that happens almost without awareness or desire. It is a soft folding into another. Train yourself to revel in it when it happens.”

The next night, Ernest again walked down Grove Avenue, on his way to Aurora Park. He listened to the sounds of the neighborhood, which seemed placid and concerned with its own minor business. Someone dragged their rubber garbage pail down the driveway, the wheels crunching over gravel. In the distance, the same dog barked every few seconds. He waved hello to a neighbor who was raking back the drapes on his living room window. The air was warm, like he was walking through his own breath.

Ernest headed for the field house, cutting across the park’s lawn, which glowed a darker green in the twilight. A long time ago, the park had been a gas manufacturing plant. After the plant closed in the 1950s, it was gifted to Prairie Park. By the mid-1960s, the suburb (which liked to call itself a “village” in its self-promotional literature, as if all the roofs were thatched and the women balanced gourds of water on their heads) had converted the area into a small park.

Ernest could smell the cut grass, so clean it seemed edible. He remembered a few years ago when patches of the park’s grass inexplicably died. The park district employees fed it with fertilizer, white perlite balls as big as berries, in an effort to revive it. Ernest asked them why they didn’t return the park back to its native grasses. They looked at him like he was some possessed dust bowl minister proposing an exorcism. Glorified crabgrass was out of the question.

In the field house, Ernest found the Earth Day committee mingling and sipping coffee. Most of them were businesspeople or fellow environmentalists from the neighborhood volunteering their time, but a few of them were fellow paid consultants, like Ross, who also brought his sharp-faced wife, Marcy, to all the meetings. She was a caterer and usually handled the food and drinks. After Ross poured his coffee at the side table, he turned and gave Ernest a rousing shoulder clap as if Ernest had just told him an uplifting story. It was Ross’s way. His love of backslapping—just men, never women—was part of his masculinity recipe, combining equal parts vigor with physical affection.

“How’s it going, Ern? I’m almost scared to ask, but how’s that spaceship?”

“How much time do you have?”

“At least you don’t have this.” Ross pulled up his sleeve to reveal an inflamed rash on his forearm and hand. The skin looked freshly burned with oozing red pustules.

“What happened? Poison ivy?”

“Nope, an allergic reaction after visiting my brother at his furniture manufacturing plant. He’s working with some family of ours in Indonesia, importing and exporting. Hey, do you know how much glue and chemicals and flame retardant are all over your couch?”

“Ah, yes, flame retardants. I once tried to find a couch that didn’t have them. Long story short: they all do.”

Ross grimly shook his head as the men pulled out chairs to join the circle. Now that Ernest was here, the meeting could start. He kicked it off on a high note: “So what’s on everyone’s dream list for next year’s party? What would we love to see at the event? Sky’s the limit for now.”

“Booths from some of the best restaurants in Chicago,” Marcy said.

“Good, what else?”

“What about some roller coasters?” another member suggested.

He politely wrote it down in the notebook.

“I know,” Ross said with a gleam in his eye. “What about some kick-ass music? Something that could really draw a crowd!”

Some names were tossed out: Chicago, for obvious civic pride reasons; Earth, Wind, and Fire, because someone had seen them at a benefit lately (likely while drunk and highly suggestible). Ernest scribbled down all the suggestions while watching for a reaction from Jean, his prickly boss from Prairie Park’s department of cultural affairs, but he couldn’t gauge her blank expression.

“The right live band could draw a big crowd,” Ernest ventured, “but would it just attract a bunch of party people who don’t care about the cause?”

“But if we educate even ten percent on the issues, it’d be worth it.”

Jean spoke up: “Let’s get a killer live band. Great suggestion, Ross!”

Ernest inwardly grimaced. He should’ve been more enthusiastic. Why not? What, he didn’t like music?

Jean wasn’t done. “Let’s have a big booth from Demeter Foods. Have we reached out for a sponsorship yet? We should go after them for platinum. Their logo would look great on the banners.”

“I don’t know,” Ernest said.

Jean frowned. Of course she would love Demeter. She had the eco-affluent look down pat: expensive hiking gear worn for everyday life, eighteen-karat gold earrings hammered by indigenous people toiling in a mountainous enclave somewhere, and a short, elegant hairstyle that saved time for more heroic tasks. But he always suspected her convictions were partially rooted in some liberal fashion ideal. If Jean couldn’t wear beautiful, expensive things that displayed her magnanimous care for all the world’s peoples and its land, would she still be as committed?

“Are we sure this is who we want at platinum?” Ernest said. “They are pretty corporate, after all.”

“What do you mean? Don’t be thrown off by the nice floors or the decent Pinot Noir selection. It’s still the real deal.”

“But what about Karen’s?” Ernest asked. He’d been a devoted shopper at the tiny health-food store for years now, hunting through the cramped aisles for the latest take on carob—carob carrot buns, carob power nuggets, carob milkshakes, shredded carob, the possibilities were endless.

“Still there,” Jean said dismissively “looking tired as ever.” Then remembering herself: “And of course we welcome her involvement as always. But she can’t afford platinum level; you know that, Ernest. If we want a big headliner for the music, the platinum sponsor needs to be in place ASAP.”

He nodded and took a sip out of his cup. “What is this coffee, by the way?”

“You haven’t tried this yet?” Marcy said. “It’s from Ghana.”

“By way of Demeter,” Jean added wryly, winking at the others.

“Ghana? It’s delicious,” Ernest said, holding out the cup in front of him. “Too bad it had to be served in Styrofoam.”

“It’s all the field house has,” Marcy said, trying to quell any defensiveness in her voice, but it was always so hard with Ernest, the vigilante.

Cynthia liked to take walks at dawn. This morning, she was especially motivated to escape her tension-filled house, but she couldn’t find her keys. Probably nothing would happen if she left the door unlocked—and she would’ve done that twenty years ago without hesitation, young and without children and almost defiantly trusting of the world—but she’d long ago trained herself out of recklessness that had no tangible rewards. If it had a reward, different story, which was why she happily justified driving twenty miles over the speed limit whenever she was running late. And speeding gave her a jolt, to thread the needle on the expressway with expert control.

Dressed in a faded fleece pullover, Cynthia wandered across the thick Persian rugs in all the rooms on the first floor, looking for her key chain. She made a note to tell the Polish cleaning lady, who vociferously chewed tiny pellets of sugar-free gum, to take better care vacuuming next Friday. Immediately she knew she wouldn’t say anything, because all of their conversations devolved into semi-comic, semi-excruciating exchanges as Ewa pretended to understand what Cynthia was saying and Cynthia pretended that Ewa wasn’t faking comprehension. Just as well, Cynthia thought. She always preferred to avoid pointless conflict. She scanned the surfaces of the living room’s heavy oak furniture, ran her hands over shelves packed with books and knickknacks, but the keys still eluded her.

In the kitchen, she rifled through the breakfront, the surface piled with yellowing magazines—the Nation, the Whole Earth catalog, Gourmet—splattered in canola and grape seed oil. The kitchen, and to a lesser degree the entire house, smelled of recipes past—ginger, garlic, rosemary, and the tangy odor of compost from Ernest’s specially ordered box from the Sierra Club.

Drifting around some more, she finally found her keys exactly where she always left them: dangling on the arm of a wooden African statue planted on the kitchen counter. How confusing. Hadn’t she checked that spot first, and didn’t she see it empty? She couldn’t remember whether she’d checked it, but she must’ve, right? When she forgot simple things like this, it made her suspicious that age was stealing in, wiping out her small abilities first before closing in for the big take.

Out the kitchen window, the sun was breaking over the metal of the spaceship; tiny drops of dew clung to the legs. Cynthia glanced at it as she reached for her keys, not bothered by it—not that much anyway—mostly just eager to forget about it for now. “Compartmentalizing,” her therapist friend called it. But then she was rooted in place. She wasn’t moving.

Why wasn’t she moving?

The metal and the dew merged into one substance, as if the spaceship legs had sprouted glistening bumps. She couldn’t stop staring at the drops, the sun glinting off the metal and the water, millions of bright pinpoints.

Why wasn’t she moving?

An idea blasted in, as if yelled by someone in her ear: the spaceship is here to find something or someone.

No: the spaceship is here to get something or someone and go back.

What? she asked herself, or the voice. Was the voice separate from her or was it her self, an all-knowing self? Whoever it was, the line was now dead. The yelling was gone. She could move her legs again.

She snatched her keys and rushed out the door, away from the spaceship, away from Ernest, away from the kids. A rash temptation suddenly occurred to jump in the car and speed off cross-country, but she decided to walk until she felt calm again.

Outside, stringy clouds were paralyzed into place, hanging low behind the houses. A high wind chilled her cheeks and lashed at her eyes, naked in her skull. She tried to shake off the vision—had she just had a vision?—by focusing on the houses painted in Prairie Park’s favored colors of twig, mud, and taupe. Her brain ticked off the chemicals in those exterior house paints—toluene, xylene, and other petroleum distillate solvents—but it didn’t really work and then she was back to thinking about the voice, which hadn’t sounded crazy or alarming, per se, more like a voice delivering urgent and clear information.

She laughed, which she did whenever she felt truly confused, and kept walking in a bubbly kind of trance punctuated by talking to herself. OK, it was true that ideas or sensations visited her from time to time, communicated in blasts of words or vivid pictures. Some of them were wrong, some of them were right, and most fell into the not-applicable category. Did it matter what this one said? It wanted something or someone? She laughed again. Fatigue, stress, or whatever was streaking through her nerves and would run its course eventually. The spaceship had forced in new antagonism between her and Ernest; when they’d talk about it, he’d get so crabby and hint that her permissiveness with Gabe was somehow to blame. Never those words outright but close enough. Forget it. Marital storms blew in and blew out. Let’s concentrate on the present world, she told herself. Prairie Park: rosy sun, small businesses yet to open, houses still warm and dark with sleep.

The fantasy remained intact until she reached Aurora Park. In the middle of the lawn, a man in a drab uniform was digging out clumps with a small hand shovel and dropping them into a white plastic container with measurements on the side. They were the only two people in the park. The man immediately noticed her and issued her a stern glance before returning to his task. He shielded his activity from her sight with a twist of his boxy figure. Cynthia wondered what could be happening in the plain light of day that prompted such covert actions.

Cynthia, eager to have a task to focus on outside herself, resumed walking the park’s circumference but kept her eye out for other pieces of information that might clarify the man’s mission. In the service driveway near the field house, she noticed a parked van from the local gas utility. She had never noticed one of those here before—typically it was a truck from the department of parks and recreation, if any vehicle at all. It seemed to her that the service people of Prairie Park—the utility workers who appeared in the backyard measuring the amount of electricity used that month or fixing a gas line, with no explanation about what might be wrong with it—were always moving in the background, seemingly directed by a scent cloud like an army of ants to repair and reinforce the infrastructure. Most of the times that she saw them, it was clearly routine maintenance. But this guy’s work seemed different, significant in some way.

As she walked out of the park, something shiny in the dirt caught her eye: a trace of gold chain. She bent down and dug it out with her fingers. Once she freed it, the piece was revealed: a long necklace with a magnifying glass on the end, smeared with dirt and some sort of goop, fertilizer maybe. When she got home with the necklace, she washed it under the hot tap with soap, but still the goop tainted the glass with an amber haze. She tried to chip it off with her fingernail but the goop would not budge. She hung the necklace on a hook in the kitchen, to remind herself to bring it to the Aurora Park lost and found.

Gazing out the kitchen window at the ship, his lips hovering over a steaming cup of exceptionally delicious morning coffee—the one from Ghana that he’d slipped into Demeter to buy—Ernest watched the panel on the spaceship’s underside slide open. He could hear it through the back screen door. The chunky sound of the panel sliding to the side reminded him of a cheap VCR ejecting a tape. Then a torrent of bright green liquid splattered onto the patch of dying grass.

“What the hell was that?” Ernest asked no one in particular.

Alison looked up from her notebook, where she was drawing the spaceship camped in the backyard, just in time to witness the dumping. The panel closed with the slow purpose of an elevator, almost as if to allow for one last expulsion, if the machine decided it must.

“I’ve seen that happen before.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, a few days ago?”

“And you didn’t say anything?”

“It didn’t seem important.”

“What could be more important than green sludge dumping on our lawn?”

“It’s waste from the ship, Dad,” Gabe said as he entered the room. “It’s just what it does.”

“Oh, this is just what it does? How often is this supposed to happen?”

Gabe rushed in to speak but realized he didn’t know the answer.

“See? This is exactly what I was afraid of when you got this dumb thing to land at our house. What kind of waste anyway? These aliens haven’t figured out a better way?”

When no one replied—Cynthia was out or she might’ve tried to calm him—Ernest stood up with intention.

“We’re going to start keeping a log. Everything the ship does, we’ll record it. Even if it does nothing in particular, we will write down ‘stationary’ If it pukes up green liquid on the lawn, we’ll write ‘dumping noxious green liquid on the lawn.’ We’ll make it a daily log. We’ll keep track of its every movement.”

Logging was a ritual intrinsic to Allen family life. Ernest frequently used it to teach his children the importance of conservation. For several weeks last year, when he determined that Alison’s showers were exorbitantly long and probably draining Lake Michigan, he made the kids keep track of their water usage. Cynthia tried to dissuade him—“Ernest, don’t you think they may need some sort of private time in there?”—but he didn’t see what kind of private time required more than fifteen minutes of hot water pressurized at forty pounds per square inch.

Of course, the monitoring was handily manipulated by anyone in the household with a different agenda. Alison and Gabe fabricated inordinately long shower times for the other—an hour and forty minutes! Five days!!—in the wrinkled notebook Ernest nailed to the bathroom wall. So many pranks were executed via the notebook that it was eventually abandoned.

“I don’t want to keep a log,” Alison said. “It’s just a thing back there now, like the weeping willow tree or the garage. Although it’s more fun to draw because it’s so weird.”

“We have to keep track of what it’s doing so I can report to the New World people.”

“The New World people don’t want to talk to you, Dad. They’re too busy.”

“I’m having your mom the attorney call next time. That pamphlet didn’t say anything about dumping waste on the lawn. Might be time to get litigious.”

Gabe regarded his sister with scornful curiosity. “Alison, do you just not even care about a spaceship in your backyard? That might even be worse than hating it.”

“I care. But it gives me the creeps sometimes.”

“The creeps about what?”

“That someone’s watching us in there.”

“Really? You’re still worrying about that? There’s no evidence for that.”

“Well, there’s no evidence against it either. I don’t know. One minute it wasn’t here, and then the next it is and now everything’s totally different. Like what would we be doing right now if it weren’t here? I want to go back to that.”

Gabe didn’t agree aloud, but he admitted to himself that she had a point. The spaceship, on some level, always occupied his mind, never totally forgotten about, its image flashing when he wandered the hallways at school or rode his bike. He’d brought some of his classmates over, including kids he’d barely spoken to before, to gawk at it and ask questions like “What if the aliens are having sex in there right now?” and comments like “My dog would totally pee on its legs.” The attention thrilled and exhausted him.

The teachers were curious too. Desperate to capitalize on the excitement, his English teacher turned it into an assignment for the class. “I want you guys to write a paper about how the main characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia, would react to a spaceship suddenly landing at Airstrip One,” Mr. Levin said. “Would it frighten them? Give them hope? What would be their reaction?”

Kerry, a pretty girl in the front row, raised her hand.

“Does the spaceship look exactly like the one at Gabe’s house?” she asked, looking at Gabe and smiling.

In the kitchen’s junk drawer, beneath a detritus of pens, tape measures, paper clips, and solar calculators, Ernest found an old notebook. He flipped to a fresh page, speaking out loud as he wrote: “September 12:11:40 A.M., ship pukes out green liquid, approximately 10 gallons, onto the lawn.”

He delivered the notebook to Gabe. “I want you to be the primary keeper of the log.”

Ernest didn’t bother explaining his rationale and Gabe didn’t press.

“No problem.”

“Daily posts. You can be the one to keep track of how it trashes our lawn and reduces your hearing every night. How’s that tinnitus, by the way?”

“It’s nothing,” Gabe said, before adding in a goofy rapper voice, “I’m going to murder this notebook like it was the SATs.”

Alison laughed. “Yeah, dawg.”

“You too, Alison,” Ernest said. “I have a feeling you might be a less biased witness than Dr. Dre over here. Write down all the creepy things he won’t write down.”

“That’s encouraging sibling rivalry, Dad. Are you and Mom going to contribute too?”

“Of course.”

“How about Athena?” Alison pointed to their white cat, resting in a sunny spot on the floor. “We all have to do our part.”

“She’s off the hook for now. She doesn’t like the spaceship either.”

Ernest walked to the window. Traces of the neon-green sludge were still visible, but most of it seemed to have already sunk in, working its way through the dirt and the tiny roots that carried nutrients into the central part of the grass. He wondered what would kill the grass first—the sludge or the oncoming winter?