First Day On Earth (6 page)

34.

 

There are so many animals in the pound. The young ones, the puppies and kittens, are cute, but the old ones, toothless or limping, are cute, too. They’re all in cages, just looking at you like they can’t understand what they’ve done to be locked up like this.

I know exactly how they feel. Even on the good days, because I know that good days only last a day.

Maybe it would be better to be free.

Maybe if I wished on enough stars, those aliens would come back and take me with them. It might be better to be an experiment. Maybe I could do good for humanity by being probed. Or maybe those aliens would be so smart that they could take the part of me that hurts so much and cut it out of me. They can have the part that makes me feel so bad, the part that makes me think that sometimes I can’t put one foot in front of the other. And maybe if they did that to me, and returned me to Earth, I could point them to my mother. They could take her up in their spaceship, and use those instruments on her and give her some peace.

Because surely if they can fly all the way across the universe, to our galaxy, to our solar system, to our planet, then they must
be very advanced. They must know things. They must have some kind of answer.

And if you have an answer, then pain can go away.

Because it makes sense. It’s understood.

If my mom could understand. If I could help her to understand, then maybe she’d go outside again. Face the sun. Drink it in. Lift up her arms and twirl. She would maybe laugh, and all the brown dead plants in the garden that she has forgotten about would turn green again. And bloom.

They must have a ray gun for that.

I often wonder where the tracking device — if I have one — could be inside of me. How small it is. If skin and muscle are growing around it. If it just looks like a tumor. I wonder if there is anything I could do to shut it off.

I wonder why aliens would care about me.

And if they do care about me, why did they leave me?

35.

 

Why
is the hardest question in the world to answer.

36.

 

She’s in the living room. It’s the day after our good day. She’s got her hand splashed over her forehead, like she’s got a headache.

“Mal,” she says as I come into the room and put a plate of spaghetti down in front of her. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Well, I’m sure you’d do fine,” I say.

“One day you’ll go,” she says. “One day you’ll go to college. Be a man of your own. Have a family. I’ll be forgotten. I’ll be all alone.”

I don’t know what to say.

There is a thread that goes from me to her. It’s a lifeline. Only it’s not keeping me alive.

Maybe if I got far enough away to snap it, she’d take the trash out on her own. Remember to eat more than just one meal. Wash her face. Take her pills. Start going to talk to someone.

Maybe, if I was so far away she could never find me again, then she’d hit rock bottom and start to climb out of this mess.

37.

 

Hooper doesn’t show up for group again for a couple of weeks, and when he does, he seems like a different man. He’s cleaner, more put together. The thing about Hooper is that cleaned up and happy, he looks like he’s about seventeen. But he must be about thirty. The other thing that is different about him is that he doesn’t look like a crazy homeless person. He looks like a regular guy. But he still smells weird.

After group, he comes up to me.

“Mal!” He’s very excited. “I would like to take you out for a burrito,” he says. When he grins, his smile looks wrong. His teeth look like baby teeth, as though he never lost them. They are sharp and tiny and make his young face look even younger. It distracts me for a moment, but then I snap out of it.

“That’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to buy me one. But I’ll totally go with you.”

“No, I insist,” he says. “Burrito is now my favorite food.”

On the way to the parking lot, he tells me about how they found him a room, with a bed and a lamp and a sink with running water. And he’s got a little job in the kitchen at the shelter.

He gets into my car and he gives me all kinds of weird directions until we end up far out of town, at the foothills of the Sierra Madre, where there are wide-open spaces, horses, and tumbleweeds. There, in the middle of nowhere, is a taco truck. Like a real-deal taco truck. He walks up to the guys, who wave and call out “
Hola,
Hooper” to him.

Then he orders in fluent Spanish.

“You speak Spanish?” I ask.

“They speak Spanish,” he says, pointing at the men and women working the taco truck. A few weeks ago, he didn’t know what a burrito even was, much less how to say it. Now he speaks with a more pleasant accent than my Spanish teacher.

We eat the burritos and mine is the best burrito I have ever tasted in my life.

The sky is clear and the moon rises. There is a bright star near it.

“That’s Jupiter,” Hooper says. “No life there. Only here.”

“Yeah,” I say.

We stare at the sky for a while, because there’s nothing that’s more beautiful than the night sky. I remember, even though it hurts, that I learned all the constellations by name because my dad started teaching me them and made it seem like it was something that he’d finish doing with me. Like the night sky was only for us to share. And now, we can’t. After he left, that first year, I learned them all on my own. I went to the library and took out a book on it, just so that when he came back I’d be able to go out into the desert with him and impress him with my
celestial knowledge. For a while there, learning those constellations by myself was like having him still with me. I would imagine how when he came back, he’d be so happy that I had loved him that fiercely. He’d see how special I was and he wouldn’t want to leave again.

But it’s been almost six years and he hasn’t come back, even though I just about killed myself learning all of those constellations. All for nothing. And no matter how hard I try to forget the patterns in the sky, I can’t.

I get that feeling in my chest. The one where I feel the hurt inside of me like an extra organ that was put in my body the wrong way.

I look up at Cassiopeia. It’s the easiest to spot. Like a
W
hanging in the sky.

Why
begins with
W
.

“Do you ever wonder where your aliens came from?” I ask.

“My aliens?” Hooper says.

“The ones who abducted you? I mean, I look up at the stars and I wonder, which one is their home? Why did they come here? Why did they take me?”

I don’t say the other thing that I always wonder about my aliens:
Why haven’t they come and taken me again?

Hooper laughs. He shakes his head. Takes a bite out of his burrito. Laughs again. Looks at me. Puts his long hand on my shoulder in a friendly way.

“I wasn’t abducted,” Hooper tells me.

“But you’re in group,” I say.

This is it. The moment where he’s going to call me a fraud. Say what happened didn’t happen. That it was just a dream. A made-up fantasy. A childish wish. I make a fist. I will punch him in the face if he says that. I will get into my car and leave him here to find his own way home.

“It seemed like the right place to go,” he says, and then sprinkles some more cilantro onto his burrito.

“Why?” I ask.

“I thought you understood.” He’s looking at me like he’s genuinely upset that I haven’t gotten it.

“No,” I say. “I don’t.”

“Mal, I am an extraterrestrial,” he says. “What?”

He points to the sky. “That star — you earthlings call it Epsilon Eridani. That’s my star. All I want to do is get off this planet and go home. But although it hangs there in the sky, close enough for me to see with my naked eye, it’s ten-point-five light-years away.”

I don’t say anything. I just burn up with that feeling where all the cells in my body are on fire. It comes back in a swoosh. I throw my burrito down on the table. My soda goes flying. My pants are wet. Hooper offers me a napkin. I refuse it.

I can’t believe that Hooper is making a joke, because he doesn’t seem to be the joking type. But there he is, sitting there across from me with a smile on his face. I want to punch him.

I get up and walk away.

On the way to the car, I punch a spiny succulent that’s in my way.

It hurts, and that’s the point.

When I reach the car, I collapse into my seat. I put the key in the ignition but I don’t turn the car on. I sit there, my head reeling.

Part of me wants to drive away. Leave him here, like I would have if he’d made fun of me. But I would never actually leave him alone here. I would never abandon anyone. So I sit in the car, going over what he’s just said. Even though I’m sitting down, my hands grip the steering wheel as though it’s going to keep me from falling down. Because the ground is the sky, and the sky is the ground. That’s how upside down I feel.

How will I drive home when the world has gone so topsy-turvy?

I laugh.

Then I laugh again.

“Mal, get a grip. Hooper is a crazy homeless man who thinks he’s an alien,” I say out loud to myself.

But I am thinking about his teeth. And about his long, weird hands. And about how he can speak Spanish. And his unnameable smell.

I am sure of one thing: If he is an alien, he’s not one that I’ve already met.

“Eating makes me sleepy,” Hooper says, sliding into the passenger seat next to me. He clicks his seat belt on and immediately falls asleep, leaving me with my mind racing.

I try to wake him up. I pinch him. I shake him. I tickle him. He just mumbles that this body makes him tired and forces him to sleep in order to digest.

Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe
I
need
him
asleep so I can digest what he’s said to me.

I turn the car on.

As I back up, with my arm over the passenger seat, I glance over at Hooper.

He looks peaceful. He looks kind. He looks good.

My father emitted that kind of goodness. But it wasn’t the truth. Inside there was only darkness. If he had any good in him, he would have never done what he did to my mother and me. Or, at least, he would have cared about what he did.

Is Hooper a soul in a meat sack hiding a hideous dangerous alien being inside?

Is he in group looking for people to abduct?

Is he evil?

Worse.

Is he going to leave me, too?

He looks nothing like the aliens that I remember from what happened to me. I know humans that look more alien than Hooper.

38.

 

Even back in school, I can’t stop thinking about what Hooper said to me about being an alien.

I can’t put a finger on this feeling that I have.

Anger. Betrayal. Joy. Disbelief.

Hooper is or isn’t an alien. He is or isn’t a crazy homeless man.

Either can be true.

I punch my locker. Then I punch it again. The cuts on my knuckles open and start to bleed.

I see a couple of kids around me cringe. They scatter away from me, taking solace near the water fountain. They think I’m going to punch them next. They think that this is the day I’m going to go ballistic. They probably have their hands on their cell phones in their pockets, ready to whip them out and call 911.

But I’d hurt me before I’d hurt them.

I lean my head against the cool of the metal locker. The coolness seeps right down into my brain and I feel calm for a minute. Even though the bell is about to ring. Even though I am going to fail the history exam that I didn’t study for. Even though my
knuckles are bloody from punching the cactus last night after Hooper said what he said.

“Hey,” Posey says. She’s standing right next to me. Unafraid. She stands there with me the same way I see her mom stay with the feral animals. She is slow and careful with her voice and with her movements. The amount of time that it takes for her hand to move from her hip to her face to brush away a stray piece of hair is an eternity.

“We’re fostering that dog,” she tells me.

“What?” I croak.

“That dog you brought in. My mom brought her home.”

“Oh,” I say.

“My mom thinks she’s going to make a great dog; she just needs to be acclimated to people.”

I am glad for the dog.

39.

 

I am actually upset that I don’t believe Hooper.

Which is a hard thing for me to process. I mean, how come I believe that I was abducted by aliens, but I don’t believe that he could be one?

It seems like I should believe him. Otherwise, what is the truth?

I ride my bike over to the shelter. I have to ask Hooper about what he said.

About being an alien.

It’s the first time that I’ve been to his room. It feels ridiculous to confront a man in a tiny studio with an orange bedspread, a cream-colored landline telephone, and brown curtains drawn closed to block out the bright California sun. I am talking about the universe and there is a mysterious stain on the carpet.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

He looks much too calm to be an alien.

“Everything,” I say.

“I do not know how to answer that question,” Hooper says. “Can you be more specific?”

“Did your people abduct me?”

“My people don’t bring people up, Mal. We only send people down.”

“That’s the answer of a person who is not really an alien,” I say.

“Are you having trouble trusting me?” Hooper says.

He is sitting on his bed and I am sitting on the only chair in the room. His paisley-patterned secondhand-store button-down shirt clashes with everything, including how I think he should look if he weren’t a liar.

“You look like a human and you don’t abduct people,” I say. Then I ask, “Do you know why the other aliens took me?”

“I don’t know,” Hooper said. “I don’t know them.”

I feel stunned. As though he should know. As though there’s some kind of alien crossroads where they all get together and talk about the funny earthlings. Where they compare notes. Or do battle.

“Mal, let me tell you about my people,” he says.

I am suspicious, but I am also all ears.

He goes on to say that his planet’s technology is okay but not that great. They can go longer distances but not with large ships. They are interested in exploration and science.

I must look disappointed.

“The universe is very big,” Hooper says.

He sweeps his hand to span the sky. I look up. And I swear that on his ceiling there are stars. Have I been stunned? Is he in my brain? I recognize the Big Dipper and Orion, distorted by the stucco.

“There are some stars,” Hooper says. “And Earth is here.”

He points to the wall next to the sink, where there are no stars. I notice on the bedside table there’s a lamp, the kind you can get at Target that projects the night sky on your ceiling.

“We are standing on a tiny planet, orbiting a small, uninteresting sun, on an outer arm of the galaxy we live in,” Hooper says.

He opens his silver bag and unfolds a star chart. The chart is alive with lights that blink and twinkle. There are things that rotate, and points that move slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the form of rocket ships.

He points to the stars on the ceiling and then to their corresponding spots on the star chart.

“Every star a sun. Many planets. Many are dead. Lifeless rocks with nothing, not even an amoeba. Some gaseous giants where no life, not even a creative or spirited life-form, could figure out how to survive there.”

Next to some of the stars, there is a symbol. Along the bottom of the chart there is a string of them.

 

The symbols roll along blinking and changing, like a news ticker.

I run my finger along them. The symbols and the stars are slightly raised, like Braille.

I don’t know if they are really moving. I don’t know if I can trust my eyes. Or my fingers. Or my heart.

“All these stars, the ones with small symbols on them, life
is there. Some planets have a kind of life that is unfamiliar. We might not call it life. Bugs. Single-cell life-forms. Plant life. Even animals. I have stepped on some of those worlds. Observed. Never harmed.”

Then he moves my attention to another symbol.

 

“All these symbols are the ones with life that thinks. The ones with civilizations. The planets that house a sort of life as we know it, planets with life-forms that speak and build and think and dream.”

There are thousands of stars on the chart, but only twenty-seven stars with those symbols.

“One of those stars is the star that shines on the place where I live,” I say.

“Sol,” Hooper says, pointing to this one lonely star, far away from the others.

It’s sitting there. Far-flung, away from anything else. Alone. Abandoned. In exile from all the other stars that have even simple life on the planets around them.

“That kind of life. That kind of heart. That kind of dreamer, it’s rarer than anything.” Hooper pushes the chart toward me. “You can keep that if you want.”

It’s too beautiful a thing to give to me. I would lose it in a pile of mess in my room. Or shove it in my locker at school with a tuna sandwich. Or leave it open to fade in the sun on the front seat of my car.

“This is the copy,” Hooper says.

He hands me the star chart now, closing my fingers around it. “No, I couldn’t. I mean, what would I do with it?” “I find it a pleasant thing to look at.” I fold up the map carefully and put it in my bag. In my gut, I believe him.