“I’m worried they’ll do things to us,” Alison said. “What if they can read our thoughts? What if they kidnap one of us?”
“Nothing like that is going to happen,” Gabe said. “Why can’t everyone see that it’s going to be an amazing experience?” He turned toward Alison. “So you don’t like the spaceship either?”
She weighed her words. “No, I like it. But it’s a little sketchy.”
“Why?” Gabe asked.
“Well, for one thing, I think I can see someone in there.”
“Really?” Ernest said. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“I’ll show you,” and with that they bounded down the back steps.
“If you stand right here at this certain angle.” Alison picked out a spot on the grass and pointed at the wraparound band of glass. “Right here, you can see just a shadow of something.”
Ernest went over and stood behind her, following her finger. He saw what she saw—the faintest traces of an interior hub with a lever and some sort of figure with a bulbous head sitting close to the glass, but it wasn’t moving. Maybe it was an alien, maybe not. It could be a dummy, even a decoy, or a shadow. What was it? They’d been watching it for a moment now, all of them crowded near one another, holding their breath, but it hadn’t moved one bit.
“I don’t know what’s real and what’s not in there,” Cynthia said at last.
“Maybe none of it is real,” Gabe said, and immediately felt silly. He didn’t know what he meant.
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