First Day On Earth (5 page)

29.

 

It was loud and bright, with webs of fire falling all around me. And then the light embraced me, like a kiss. It kissed me and it felt so warm. The light was singing to me. It lifted me off the ground where I’d lain down to get a good look at the stars. My back arched and it felt like all my bones were snapping. But they weren’t. I went into the light. It lifted me up. There were hands all over me. Small, moist hands. They pinched me, and the sting of it felt like fire ants biting me up and down my body. They were taking something essential from me. Something from my insides. The light was so bright and the instruments they used to hold me down were cold.

They were gray. Little gray men. I swear they were gray. With big eyes. All pupils and no color. That was how I knew that it was like I said and not like what everyone else thought. Those eyes had no color.

I never saw their mouths move, but I could hear them. The words were meaningless but I knew that they were talking about me. It was a swarm of sounds inside my head. I remember thinking that listening to a song in their language would be painful.

But after a while, even painful things become familiar, and so I let their incomprehensible words push through me. I spent most of the time with my eyes closed, my lids too heavy to open. I think I was drugged but still conscious. Every part of me was being tugged on. When I could open my eyes, the light was too bright. That light pierced me, and my eyes refused to make sense of what I was seeing. But I knew I was a slab of meat floating on a bed of metal, with that buzzing inside my head and those hands and instruments all over me.

That didn’t mean much, until later, when I started getting flashes. Of hallways and cages. Of one of them taking my hand and patting it, like it was trying to comfort me. Of another one explaining unexplainable things to me with words I could not understand. Of being given a hot liquid meal that tasted like yerba maté. But I can’t ever call up a fully formed memory. Not much comes to mind except the brightness and the certainty that something happened to me. It’s more like a
feeling
. With eyes.

The police found me in the dirt three days later. Nowhere near the fireworks. Miles away from the town. How do you explain that?

You can’t.

Some people think I ran away. But I didn’t. I didn’t even know that it was three days later. I thought I’d been gone for an hour.

I didn’t walk to the desert. I didn’t like walking that much, not when I was twelve, so I definitely wouldn’t have walked from Indio all the way to the 62 highway. I just wouldn’t have. They put me there. They put me back close to where they
thought they found me. Hell, from space it probably is like exactly where they found me. ‘Cause when you’ve come a million light-years, what’s a mile or two?

But no one believed me.

They said that maybe I didn’t run away, that maybe I had a seizure. That I had some kind of brain attack that made me walk for miles in the desert on a hot summer night and stay there for three days. They said they knew that something was up because of my brain waves. Because of the levels of stuff in my muscles. Because of the bruising consistent with a seizure of some kind. They said that it fit that I smelled burnt toast the whole time. They said that my life had been full of trauma and that it was just a psychotic episode.

But that didn’t explain the weird scoop in my leg. I tried to tell them that I’d never had a hole like that in my skin before. They didn’t count it as new because it looked all healed up.

They put me on drugs to keep me calm.

But I don’t take them anymore. ‘Cause there is nothing wrong with me.

And I know what I know because I know.

30.

 

I wipe my hands on the sides of my pants and look around. Everyone starts to clap.

“Thank you for sharing,” Earl says. He gives me the thumbs-up. Then he moves on to the next piece of business. He reads from an alien abduction handbook.

I have just shared and it’s like nothing has happened.

Greg is picking at his Styrofoam cup. Nadine is blowing her nose. Hooper is looking at the clock.

“It’s almost time for the meeting to end,” Hooper says.

I can barely hear him because I start shaking. I’m not cold or anything, but my whole body is trembling. I wonder if maybe I’m having a fit. I wonder if I should be worried.

I want to cry.

I’ve shared a million times about my dad and mom in my Alateen meetings or group therapy and I’ve felt nothing. But here, telling this story, it’s like showing my most secret parts. It’s like being naked. It’s like being at your ugliest and that being no big deal.

I wonder if it’s that what I said is just so normal to everyone here that there’s no need for a reaction. Or if it’s just that
no one here really cares about anyone else’s story. It’s hard to know what’s true.

I take the back of my sleeve and wipe my now-wet eyes and running nose.

I am surprised when Hooper puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s close to me and he smells. It’s not a good smell or a bad smell — it’s a weird animal smell.

“Steady, Mal,” he says. “Steady.”

And then Earl says his final words and it’s time to go.

Outside of the community center, other people from the group mingle and linger on the steps. They are talking easily, laughing and making plans. Greg is debating Earl about the finer points of SETI. Nadine is making movie plans with Devon. None of them come up to me and ask me any more details about what I said. Secretly, I’d be glad if one of them came over to me and compared their abduction with mine. But all of our stories are not the same.

I look up at the sky.

How many ships are up there?

Or are there none at all?

I climb on my bike and pedal hard, getting the rhythm of the wheels to move faster than the speed of my thoughts.

When I get home, my mom is passed out on the floor. The TV is on. And for the first time in forever, I don’t help her up off the floor and steer her toward her bed. I leave her where she is with the TV still on.

I just want to go to bed.

Sharing has made me lighter.

Sharing has made me tired.

31.

 

To make it up to Mark and Sameer, I agree to go to the movies with them on Saturday. We are at the mall waiting for our movie to start. We have an hour to kill, so we’re sitting silently in the food court. Mark is playing a game on his iPhone. Sameer is reading a thick-ass urban fantasy book. And I am staring at remnants of the molten belly bomb of a pizza I just devoured as though there is a worm living in my stomach.

For all I know, there
is
a worm living in there. An alien parasite. Perhaps I’m a host.

We’re going to see a disaster movie. There’s going to be a tsunami, an earthquake, a volcano, and a flood. The special effects are going to be awesome. The sound is going to be extra loud. Which is funny, because here we are, a bunch of guys who love loud movies, and yet we are the quietest teenagers in the mall.

Even when we occasionally gather at Sameer’s to play video games, we’re quiet. When one of us wins, we don’t yell or whoop or give each other noogies. We just nod triumphantly. Like we don’t want to show off. Or we’re sorry that one of us is the alpha male for a minute.

I look over at the other table, where there are a bunch of teenagers I don’t know who are horsing around. They behave exactly the way you think normal kids horse around. They kind of wrassle with each other. They laugh, as though they are so together. A unit. A group. My eyes shift, and I see them as a monster, one body with a bunch of different heads. When they move, they do it together, as one being. None of them individual in any way.

Maybe that’s what’s wrong with Mark, Sameer, and me.

We’re in our own bodies. We’re uniquely ourselves, with no clue how to be in a group.

On the other side of the food court, I see Josh, Colm, Suki, and Posey. They behave the same way, like a group monster. Although, as I study them carefully, I notice that Posey looks like she’s trying to separate. It’s as though she has one foot that’s her own that keeps trying to step out in a different direction. But she’s not succeeding, and they keep pulling her back in.

After the movie is done, we walk back to my car, sipping the rest of our sodas and making small comments about the film. We debate about whether or not the director has lost his touch or if he’s kicked it up to a new level. Sameer votes kicked it up. Mark votes lost his touch. I remain neutral.

I bet that Josh and his group all think the same thing. No dissenting voice.

We go back to Sameer’s and order more pizza and play more video games.

Sameer’s parents come in to tell us to turn down the volume, and we do.

We don’t have a conversation about anything other than the game we’re playing or the movie we’re watching or the song we’re listening to.

I wonder what they would say if I told them about my mom, who is most likely drunk and passed out at my house. Or about my father and how I want to punch him in the face. Or how I cried like a baby when Dr. Manitsky had to put a puppy I found two months ago to sleep, because it was so sick that it was kinder to kill it. Or how I was abducted by aliens four years ago.

I look at Sameer, the light from the TV smoothing out the acne on his face, and Mark, whose ponytail looks historic. And I wonder what’s bursting inside them.

After losing the battle in the game for the fourth time, I pass my controller over and get up to leave.

We never know how to say hello or good-bye, the three of us. It’s always been a bit awkward.

Tonight when I get up, I rub my hands on my jeans. And then I shake each of their hands like I’m an ambassador from another planet mimicking human customs.

Sameer smiles, and nods, and I know he’s impressed that I’ve solved a simple human puzzle.

Hello and good-bye are not as simple as everyone thinks.

32.

 

It’s raining really hard. I see a dog trotting down the street. I slow down my mom’s car and follow it. It’s obviously lost.

I roll down my window and call to it.

I whistle.

It stops and looks at me. It’s panting. It’s a big golden retriever. That dog’s got a great smile. I stop the car and I open the door. I call the dog in. The dog looks at me. Looks down the road.

It starts trotting again.

I follow it.

That’s when I see him.

Hooper.

He’s in a box in the underpass staying out of the rain. The dog goes right up to him and Hooper puts his hand out. The dog lies down at his feet. I pull up and park and get out of the car.

“Hooper,” I say.

“Mal.”

“Is that your dog?”

“This dog?”

“Yeah, I thought maybe it was lost.”

“It is probably lost. This dog does not belong to me. But it is a nice dog.”

“I was going to take it to the pound.”

“Good idea, Mal,” Hooper says. Then he says something to the dog. The dog gets up and comes trotting up to me. I open the back door of my car and the dog goes in and lies down on the backseat. Totally comfortable, it closes its eyes.

“Do you live here?” I ask Hooper.

“When it’s raining,” Hooper says. “This large structure protects me from the elements.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Sometimes,” he says.

“Do you want to go get a burrito?” I say.

I don’t know if he has any money.

“My treat,” I add.

Hooper smiles.

“Let me get my things, Mal.”

He gets his little backpack. It’s got lots of pockets and it’s very high-end. So are Hooper’s shoes, I notice.

He gets into the car and sits very still as I drive to Juanita’s Burritos.

33.

 

I think Hooper might be a crazy homeless person.

We are sitting at Juanita’s, me and Hooper, and Hooper is on his fourth burrito. He’s got salsa on his shirt. He’s chewing with his mouth open. And he looks like he’s in heaven.

“Taste is very interesting,” he says between bites. “This one with the beef is very different from the vegetarian one.”

I keep sipping on my soda while he goes on about the differences between the burritos that he’s sampled.

“And the different kinds of salsa. Mild. Medium. Hot. It’s quite brilliant.”

I’m not afraid of people who other people think are crazy. My mother is crazy and I’m not afraid of her. She just sees the world differently than other people. For her it’s a suspicious place, full of darkness and disappointment. Like the very light of the world doesn’t exist anymore. But Hooper is full of excitement. He’s crazy in a different way.

I want to ask him about his abduction. I want to ask him if he really thinks that it happened to him. But I don’t, because I think maybe that might be rude. There might be a reason he’s never volunteered anything in the group. And also I don’t want him to
start talking crazy, like so crazy that it’s something that I can doubt happened to me.

As much as I like some of the people in the group and think that they totally believe that what happened to them happened, some of them seem unreliable. Like Julie, this woman who is convinced that the aliens keep impregnating her. That she’s got fourteen children growing up on another planet. Or Laird, who has the broken iPod that he receives transmissions on. Or the woman who came once and proclaimed herself the Queen of Mars, then never came back to another meeting.

But Hooper seems different. He seems like when he finally shares his story, everything that happened to me is going to make some kind of sense. I don’t want him to be unreliable.

For right now, I keep quiet and dissuade him from buying another burrito. The last thing Hooper needs is to get the runs in his box under the freeway.

I don’t feel comfortable bringing Hooper back to his box under the freeway. But I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do.

He’s dead asleep beside me. It takes me a while to shake him awake when we get to the place where he “lives.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “I am better there. More space to think.”

I let him out and he goes back.

He sits in his box.

I sit in my car.

I can’t press the gas and leave.

I roll down the window.

“Hooper,” I say. “I think there’s a shelter next to the pound. Can I take you there?”

“A shelter?” he asks.

“You know, a homeless shelter.”

“There are such things?” he asks incredulously.

I might have to accept that he’s totally crazy. I nod.

He gets up, checks his area, gathers some more things, and gets back in the car. The dog barks once, happily.

Hooper helps me take the dog to the pound. And then we get him checked into the shelter.

“Thank you, Mal,” he says. He’s got tears in his eyes.

“No problem,” I tell him.

I get into the car and I hum a little as I drive away. I feel pretty good about myself.

When I get home, my mom is sitting at the kitchen table and she’s happy that I brought her a burrito, her favorite kind.

When my mom smiles, when the clouds break up enough to let some of her sunlight come through, it’s like old times.

Tonight, she gets out the Scrabble board.

Today was a good day.