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