ELLSWORTH, MAINE, FEBRUARY 19, 1983
In the solitude of his study, Eric thought of Becky Clarke, the unexpected love he’d felt for her, the willing gift of her body, then the bitter reality of her betrayal. He knew there was no explanation for the feeling that had swept over him during that one evening he’d been with her. It had been a new experience, and it had shaken him to the bone. Now he thought of her as a part of life he’d missed, a treasure lost and irrecoverable. At times, when he sat alone in his study, the irony was almost more than he could bear, the painful and irreducible fact that he’d spent his life in search of an alien presence when it was a human presence he most powerfully desired.
In the other room his daughter Mary was busily working on a scientific paper for school, but for Eric, the whole vast world of science was reduced to the one thing he could truly claim as his, the one thing that had not been taken from him either by aliens or by humans. The artifact.
The artifact was the unassailable evidence that he had not lived in vain. The artifact was the solid ground in which his life was rooted, and if he gave up his search to decipher it, he felt that his soul would shatter, and he would be as empty as the space from which it had come so many years ago.
He walked to the safe, dialed the combination and removed the artifact. In the gloomy half-light he preferred now, he stared at the indecipherable markings inscribed upon it in the language of another world. This much I have, he thought, this much is mine.
There was knock at the front door, but he left Julie to answer it. It was Chet Wakeman, and he could tell that Mary was suddenly excited, her voice pealing though the house as she greeted her “Uncle Chet.”
After that, he listened to the usual greetings, then Wakeman’s inevitable question.
“So, where’s Eric?”
“In his study,” Julie answered. Eric hurriedly returned the proof to the safe and closed the door just as Wakeman came into the study.
“Hey, Eric,” Wakeman said brightly. “Jesus, turn on some light in here, will ya?” He hit the switch beside the door and the shadows retreated into the far corners of the room. “That little girl of yours is really something,” he said. “You should check in with her once in a while, Eric. She’s a great kid.”
Eric slumped down in the chair behind his desk.
Wakeman gave him a penetrating look. “Whatever happened to you, you need to get over it.”
“You have news?” Eric asked, almost curtly.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Wakeman said. “They pulled the plug on the project, as expected.”
Eric’s eyes reflexively shot to the safe, then back to Wakeman. “Because all our evidence… all our research is gone.”
“That’s right,” Wakeman said. He laughed. “I thought I had a pretty good argument. Told this senator that the reason we didn’t have any evidence is because it was all taken by a flying saucer. He said when they brought it back, he’d restore the funding.”
“It’s too bad we could never find Charlie Keys,” Eric muttered.
“And you know what really burns my ass?” Wakeman said. “That if we had had any funding at all, I could have gotten that positioning system running, and we’d have tracked Charlie Keys by that thing in his head. We could have found him, or anybody else who’d been taken, in twenty-four hours.”
Eric nodded dully. “So what do you do now?”
Wakeman plopped down in the chair across from Eric’s desk. “I thought I might go out to California. Couple of buddies of mine from Yale are going into bio tech.”
Eric’s face soured. “I keep picturing Tom Clarke smiling that smug smile of his and saying ‘Still don’t know how it flies, do you?’” He looked at the safe again. “I want to know what made Tom a believer all of a sudden.”
“You were supposed to get that out of his sister, weren’t you?” Wakeman said with a wink.
“But I didn’t,” Eric said.
Wakeman looked at his friend knowingly. “What you keep picturing is Tom’s sister dumping you. I think that’s what turned you all gloomy, old buddy.”
Eric’s stare was lethal. “My personal life is none of your business, Chet. But just for your information, I’m not finished yet. Becky or no Becky, I still want to know what changed Tom Clarke’s mind.”
LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, FEBRUARY 28, 1983
The baseball in his hand felt like a small, densely packed planet, so heavy Jacob Clarke could barely lift his arm. But he had to lift it. Lisa was at the plate, bat in hand, waiting to swing. And so he summoned his strength, made his mind and will provide the power his body lacked, wound his arm, and sent the ball hurtling toward his daughter.
She swung and with a loud crack the ball lifted higher and higher, into the vast blue where Jacob followed it with his eyes, a terrible weariness falling upon him again, like a long-distance runner at the end of his run, with the finish line retreating from him as quickly as the rising ball, impossible to reach.
The ball hit the fence, and Jacob saw the disappointment in Lisa’s eyes.
“It’s a game of inches,” he explained.
Lisa shook her head. “I swung too late. I thought it was going to sink.”
“That’s why I like baseball,” Jacob told her as he came over and knelt beside her. “You can never make assumptions.”
Lisa punched him playfully. “I thought you liked it because it was impossibly hard and there were all these useless statistics to memorize.” She gave him her best “gotcha” look.
“Well,” Jacob admitted. “That too.”
He returned to the mound, picked up another ball, no less heavy than the first, closed his eyes, as if in a prayer for strength, then felt the weight descend upon him, wrap around him like a leaden shroud, leaving him strangely encased and immobile within his own body.
“Are you all right?”
It was Carol’s voice, and with all his strength he managed to pry open his eyes.
“We’d better get you home,” Carol said gently.
Yes, Jacob thought, home.
At the car, he suddenly stopped before getting in. He felt an urgency in his blood, something deep within him crying out a last instruction. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the small jewel box, and opened it. “It was your grandmother’s,” Jacob told his daughter. He drew out the lone-star earring and placed it around his daughter’s neck. “I love you, honey,” he said. “Every day and twice on Sundays.”
Lisa peered at the star, and watching her, Jacob saw that she sensed its importance, the legacy it bore, the terrible mission she had just been given.
“Some guy will meet you one day,” Jacob told her. “And with one look, he’ll tell you that there’s no other place he wants to be.”
Lisa caressed the earring, her eyes upon it wonder-ingly. Then she looked up and nodded, and at that instant Jacob knew that he had passed it on, done what remained of his duty. And on that thought, his legs buckled under a heaviness beyond human weight and he fell to earth like a dying star.
BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 1, 1983
The lights of the pizza parlor burned garishly, flooding into the car, the passenger seat where Charlie Keys should have been, where his mother had left him sleeping soundly only minutes before.
Amelia stared helplessly at the empty seat, the pizza dropping from her hand and slamming down upon the pavement as she searched the darkness of the parking lot, peeling back the shadows, looking for her son.
Then suddenly, he was there, standing behind her, looking strangely dazed, like one awakened from a deep sleep.
“Charlie,” she said, “you can’t just go off like that. Where were you? Where did you go?”
Charlie peered at her silently, his hand lifting to his throat where she saw three small scars in a triangular pattern.
“What happened to me?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Amelia answered.
“The men we’re running from… does it have to do with them?”
Amelia shook her head. “I really don’t know, Charlie.”
Charlie stared at her worriedly, a look of terrible abandonment in his eyes, like a boy who’d been left behind on the street on in the railway station, and who could not find his way home. “Dad could tell us,” he said.
Amelia drew her son into her arms. “I don’t know if your dad will ever be able to tell us anything,” she said.
NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 16, 1983
Eric stood next in line as Tom Clarke scribbled his name hastily into the book, while the line of people twining through the bookstore’s cramped aisles steadily grew longer.
“Why do you think the aliens took all their stuff back?” the man in front of Eric asked.
Tom grinned. “How do you know they took it all?” He grabbed the next book from the stack and signed it as the man moved away.
Eric stepped up to the table. “Quite a turnout.”
“What do you want?” Tom asked dryly.
“I find I have a lot of free time on my hands,” Eric replied.
“Imagine that.”
“How’s Becky?”
Tom got to his feet, knocking over a stack of books. “Becky is not your business.”
Eric casually gathered up the fallen books and returned them to the table.
“We’re not enemies anymore, Tom,” he said quietly. “I’m a private citizen now. Our ‘friends’ saw to that when they took back all the evidence.”
Tom peered at him warily. “What do you want, Eric?”
“You went from skeptic to believer in a nanosecond,” Eric replied. “I want to know why.”
“Maybe I just saw the light,” Tom answered cagily.
“If you’re talking about the lights in the Mojave, you changed months before that,” Eric said. His gaze bore down upon Tom. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
“I might ask you the same question.”
Eric shrugged, giving up any further effort to win Tom over. “Say hello to your sister,” he said, as he turned and walked to a nearby aisle where Wakeman waited for him.
“Well, what do you think?” Wakeman asked.
“Tom Clarke will never give us anything,” Eric told him.
Wakeman smiled. “You know what I love about chaos theory? It’s about systems that can’t resist outside influence. Something happens somewhere, and the system changes. Which means that at the moment, all we can do is watch the skies.”
Eric shook his head determinedly. “You can watch the skies, Chet, but I’m watching Tom Clarke.”
LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 4, 1986
The apartment still felt empty, and curiously lifeless, as if a strange, invisible energy had been drained from it. Lisa peered at the lone-star earring and thought of her father, how he’d seemed strangely resigned at the end, a man who had done his best and had no more to give. She looked at her mother, the red-rimmed eyes, how bereft she was now, more alone that she’d ever been or dreamed of being.
“He’d been… getting weaker since your grandmother died,” Carol said. “I kept asking him to see someone, but he wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “He was so resigned.”
“He understood what was happening to him,” Lisa said, offering what little comfort was possible for her mother.
“That sounds like something he would say.” Carol touched Lisa’s face. “He loved you so much. He was so proud of you.”
Lisa knew that, and never doubted it, so in the months that followed, and even after her mother had found a simple, kindhearted guitar player named Danny and married him, she still felt that her father was with her in some way. By then, she’d begun to wear her grandmother’s earring around her neck. It was the last thing he’d given her, and she found a strange comfort in keeping it so near.
She was wearing it the day she started classes at Morrison Junior High School three years later, the earring still hanging from a chain around her neck.
“Do you know anybody here?”
Lisa glanced at Nina, took in her shocking pink hair and Husker-Du T-shirt. “No,” she admitted.
“Okay,” Nina said brightly. “So, you wanna be friends for life?”
Before Lisa could answer, a waterfall of paper slid from one of Nina’s notebooks. As she helped her gather them up, Lisa noticed that the drawings were quite good, and decided that Nina was not the frivolous fourteen-year-old she appeared to be.
“I don’t show my stuff,” Nina said self-consciously. She smiled. “I worry about…”
“You shouldn’t worry about what people think,” Lisa said decisively. “If someone doesn’t like them, so what?”
They moved toward a van that rested at the nearby curb, a dusty, beat-up VW.
“That’s my stepdad,” Lisa said. “His name’s Danny.”
Nina looked at Lisa knowingly. “An old hippie?”
“He’s a guitar player,” Lisa told her new friend for life. “He lived near us when my father died. I guess my mother just…” She shrugged. “My mom’s at Berkeley, taking a course in alternative nutrition.”
“So it’s just you and… Jerry Garcia?”
Lisa nodded. “For now,” she said.
But it wasn’t all that bad, Lisa told herself that night as she and Danny prepared pork chops, the two of them listening to the television as President Reagan talked about how the people of the earth had a lot in common, and that if the planet were ever attacked by aliens, the whole world would unite.
After dinner, Nina dropped by. They talked a while, and Lisa demonstrated the drum set Danny had bought for her. Nina won Danny over almost instantly, despite her earnest vegetarianism, and the lack of interest in the pork chops he so proudly offered.
Once Nina left, Lisa took her dog Watson on a walk through the trailer park. She could hear the usual sounds of early evening, couples talking, kids playing, the steady drone of televisions and radios. The trailer park was not a bad place, but on these walks in the evening, Lisa thought of her other home, the one she’d had with her father, and how, during the last few years she seemed only to miss him more, and yet to feel that he was not actually gone at all, but remained around her, she still the object of his loving, but now distant, gaze.
Suddenly Watson stopped and began to growl.
“Watson?” Lisa asked. “What is it?”
Watson bolted forward, racing among the trailers and then into the woods, Lisa in full pursuit, rushing through the undergrowth, catching Watson in brief glimpses ahead of her as he darted through the shadows.
“Watson, come back,” Lisa cried.
But the dog continued to dart through the woods, the lights of the trailer park suddenly extinguishing behind her, Lisa running tiredly, growing exhausted, the woods steadily thinning as she neared a clearing where she saw a man sitting on a log, smoking, his crooked body framed by the side of old carnival truck marked TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.
The carny sat entirely still as Lisa broke into the clearing. Then his eyes shifted over to her, his face wreathed in smoke. “Lisa,” he said. “Today you are a woman.”
MADISON, WISCONSIN, MARCH 4, 1986
Charlie turned onto the darkest stretch of Madison Street. A faint breeze scattered bits of litter across the pavement and rattled the tin signs that lined the deserted street.
He stopped, as if by a hand at his arm, drew in a long breath and steeled himself. If you let this street scare you, he told himself, then you’ll live in fear your whole life long.
He stepped forward resolutely and headed down the street, the breeze at his back, pressing him forward like an invisible hand to where the street made a slow curve toward a bus stop. He could see a man sitting on the bench at the stop, his crooked profile in silhouette beneath the streetlamp, a dusty old carnival truck rooted in the distance, traveling attractions that seemed to have traveled very far.
Charlie stopped, felt a spike of fear, and kept his eyes on the man before him, watching fearfully as he continued to smoke idly, the ghostly curls from his cigarette rising skyward into the darkness like souls released from their long travail.
LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 17, 1986
Lisa wasn’t sure why it had come over her, this sudden interest, only that it grew more intense with each passing day. Now she was reading The Mojave Desert Sightings, by Tom Clarke, a book she’d hardly have noticed before… what? She didn’t know. It had simply come upon her, this need to explore the far-fetched notion that strange beings walked the earth, or hovered above it, looking down, waiting to be discovered.
Carol glanced at Danny worriedly, then across the table to where Lisa continued to read intently, her food untouched before her.
“Are you reading that for an assignment?” Carol asked.
Lisa did not look up from the book. “No.”
“Then why are you reading it?”
Lisa shrugged, her eyes riveted to the page. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I just got curious.”
Danny looked at the book, the photograph of Tom Clarke on the back cover.
“Tom Clarke,” he said to Carol. “That’s Jacob’s brother, right?”
Carol nodded.
“Kind of a fruit-loop.”
Lisa tensed. “I’ll be in my room,” she said.
In her room, she was not sure why she’d suddenly felt so hostile to Danny, or so defensive about Tom Clarke. After all, Danny had always been good to her, and she hardly knew Tom Clarke. And yet, she’d bristled visibly when Danny had made light of Tom. It was almost like he’d insulted her as well, called her a fruit-loop, too.
Strange, she thought, as she sat down on her bed, reading intently once again, her eyes fixed on the page, her mind so focused on the account of the Mojave sightings that she barely noticed when her mother stepped into the room.
“What’s going on, Lisa?” Carol asked.
“Nothing,” Lisa answered. She could see that her mother wasn’t buying it. “I’m fine,” she added reassuringly. “Really.”
Carol sat down on the bed beside her. “Your uncle Tom has a lot of weird ideas, Lisa.” She glanced at the book apprehensively, as if it were a loaded gun. “You’re not starting to… have the same ideas, are you?”
“What if I am?” Lisa replied, a touch of defiance edging into her voice.
“Lisa,” Carol said softly, “you come from a… special family. Your father had an amazing mind. He could look at things and figure them out. With people too. He could see things other people couldn’t see.” She touched Lisa’s hand. “Honey, your life is changing because you’re growing up. You’re not being abducted by a spaceship, you’re being taken into adulthood.” She released a short, awkward laugh. “Of the two, I’d say that’s far and away the scarier proposition.”
Lisa listened as her mother continued, but found her mind continually drawn back to the Mojave sightings, her uncle’s book, so that by the time Carol left her room, she had made up her mind to contact him.