Roswell
by J. T. Green
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Water dripped in a far room while my father’s voice abused the still corners of our home. I huddled in the bay window, unmoving, resting my forehead against the cold glass. I’d wanted to be an artist, more than anything in the world. I looked at the picture again. Lilly had folded it within a large envelope, along with a smaller letter addressed only to our parents.
The paper was wrinkled and jaundiced by time. I had drawn it for my sister when I was nine and she was eighteen. That was seven years ago. She had taken it with her to college. I was astonished now at the level of skill. Had I really drawn that?
The picture was of an alien, the stereotypical Roswell type: large, round head, sad eyes, tiny mouth, and long — nearly fragile — arms. And behind the creature? An enormous, powerful sun.
Written across the bottom, added recently, in Lilly’s hand, was: “Do you remember?”
Lilly was an astrophysicist. A postdoc at Stanford. Had been, that is, until she’d run away with her professor.
Her alien obsession began when we were kids. Father’s mentor was rumored to have covered up the Roswell crash of 1954. It must have planted a seed in us, because we had both been hopelessly enamored by the stars. Her obsession continued. Mine did not.
If the coverup was true, I suppose Father was in a way complicit in the most spectacularly atrocious denial of our species’ existence. It would not have been surprising.
Father never would say, though as children, not yet totally defeated by our parents, we would ask him endlessly. He and Mother — Mother in particular — were of that old-guard, the kind of power-hungry, post-colonial, closet-racists that the ’60’s and ’70’s had tried to wash away, so that as children of these stiff-backed, all-too-serious types, coming of age around 1980, we found them hard to understand. There was a rigidity, a seriousness, that treated manners and respect for the old ways as the very fabric of social order, something hard to see by 1984.
Lilly had become a scientist, against all protestations, not an agent of power, as my parents intended. I think they believed it was all a joke, for how else could they reconcile their own daughter’s disobedience, when manipulation was their trade?
Lilly was awe-inspiring and funny and absolutely wonderful. But this letter, unlike the picture, had been addressed to Father and Mother, and just why had she written it? She knew who they were. If it contained what I supposed, it could destroy her.
“If I believed it was detectable,” Father said, faintly audible in the distance, “I wouldn’t recommend it. The images are active in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, same as the drug.”
It was peaceful for a moment, and I enjoyed the even delicacy of the silence.
“Yes,” he continued, “very popular television shows with the freshman this year. Perfect triggers.” Then, my father’s overwhelming laugh. “Well, what do you expect? Kids these days believe Night Rider and LL Cool J are high art.”
I stood, folding the picture and then tucking it away. I gravitated toward his study. I did not want to deliver the letter, but the very timbre of his voice compelled me.
“Well, we’d simply blame it on the Russians,” he said. “Damn sure wish you were still at the helm, old man. How’s retirement? Any good verses?”
I knocked thee times, evenly.
“James, got to go,” Father said. “My youngest is home. Yes, she’ll start next year!”
I entered. Father’s office was all oak and crystal and hardbound books. He wore a tweed jacket, and his beard was black with veins of white in it.
“Sarah, how are you?” he said, setting the receiver down. There were two phones on his desk. A normal white phone, and a red phone, twin to the white, but with a bulb on the side that glowed orange when in use. I watched as that light blinked out. This red phone was bolted to the desk with a steel conduit running from the back to the wall.
“Sir, a letter,” I said.
He looked at me, smiling softly. I knew he enjoyed my company, but I did not know if he loved me. He took the letter, and my eyes caught on his large, gold ring, the center of which had the skull and crossbones.
“What’s this?” he asked, holding the letter, but even as he spoke he cut the top of the letter with a knife.
Two heavy, mahogany chairs guarded his desk. I did not sit, but rather let my eyes wander about his office. I always felt that some new piece of information could be found here, something that would explain more of what he was. But if it existed, I’d never found it.
There were pictures of Father yachting. Two photos with presidents, and one with the former head of the CIA. “The only good one,” he would say. My favorite was of Father kneeling with a Green Beret in a field in Vietnam, a beautiful, young Vietnamese woman with a nón lá tilted down just over her eyes, her hands bound behind her back, knees pressed into the mud. The Green Beret was pointing off-scene, an M16 resting against one knee. The photo was black and white. Father was in a sweat-stained shirt, a tie loose about his neck. Behind them all, an enormous mushroom cloud of fire. Neither man appeared concerned, only focused. Of course, it was an odd picture, as Father was a psychiatrist, even during Vietnam.
As Father read, I thought of Lilly’s other letters. Secret letters she’d written only for me. I was home for summer, and they were hidden in my room back at school, but I could recall each, word for word.
Dear Sarah,
I know Father and Mother can’t understand, but I hope you will. George and I are happy. I don’t care if he is Father’s age. We spend all night dreaming about what’s out there. Of what makes up reality and the cosmos and what makes us what we are. He’s so smart and kind. The things he knows about the universe... to hear him talk, it’s to lose yourself in the brightness of the sun, or to soar around the edge of a black hole, witnessing space and time bend.
He treats me gently, S.
Be happy for me,
L
Dear Sarah,
George’s funding came through! We’re building a giant radio dish. Oh, when I think of what we might find!
There are many theories as to why, in a universe this vast, we’re seemingly alone. Some are dark theories.
We are not publishing our data. You are the only one who knows.
All my love, and wish us luck,
L
Dear Sarah,
We’ve done it! A nonrandom signal. Still deciphering. George thinks it may represent instructions. It’s so exciting! No time to write more. Keep our secret. CONTACT IMMINENT. I CAN FEEL IT.
L
That was three months ago. Now this one, addressed to Father and Mother only. I didn’t know for sure what it said, but I knew what had driven her to write it: the same force that was compelling me to deliver it.
My eyes left the wall of Father’s study and fell on his desk. I caught sight of an official-looking document. It contained two columns. I was in advanced chemistry at the Phillips Academy. I might only be sixteen, but I knew that the left column contained chemical names. The first was sodium thiopental. On the right were university names.
Father shifted the letter in his hands. I glanced up quickly. He was looking at me, a very neutral look, but his right hand dropped from the letter, and without breaking eye contact, casually moved another sheet of paper over the one with the chemical and school names.
“You know I don’t like you to be involved in my work, Sarah,” he said, leaning back in his chair.
“Sir,” I said.
“Someday you will be very involved.”
“Of course,” I said, blushing.
“In either case, let’s just say: don’t eat at the school cafeteria when you go to Yale.”
He had made a joke. He did that sometimes, and it always made me uncomfortable.
“This is a very disturbing letter,” he said. “Have you seen your mother?”
“No,” I said.
He sighed. “Let’s go find the boss, then, shall we?”
* * *
Mother stood with her back to us, looking out of the window. She wore a grey and white dress suit. Her spine was taut. You could imagine each vertebra stacking into a rigid column.
“And who is this man, again?” Mother asked in her faintly British accent.
You know full well who he is, I thought.
“An astrophysicist. Good training. A Stanford man,” Father said, and I loved him intensely for that.
“Family?”
Father was silent. It was a rhetorical question.
“I thought so. Typical. Free love and all of that, I suppose? And they’re doing what?”
“Spectroscopy of some variety. Attempting extraterrestrial contact.”
“How... dreamy,” she said. “All of that grooming, wasted.” She shook her head. “Not likely our connections will help her much out there.”
The old grandfather clock counted out the silence.
“Fix it,” she said at last.
“How?” Father asked.
I sat on the divan. My eyes snapped to Mother. I straightened my back, my hands pressed tight in my lap.
“This is your trade, doctor.” She let the words hang. “But know this: I want her to believe in her deepest heart this is where she belongs.”
“I understand,” Father said.
Mother turned. The light behind her left nothing but a shadow of a woman. “Do it yourself, Gabe,” she said.
My head whipped to Father. He didn’t flinch, but I could tell, through a subtle tightening of his body, that this was an extreme request.
“I haven’t been in the field in a very long time, Miranda,” he said.
She turned to me, ignoring him. “And take her.”
“Me?” I asked, before I could check the words.
Mother arched an eyebrow.
“This family is in a particular business,” she said. “No better time to jump in than with a family affair.”
* * *
Three days later, Father bought an old 50’s pickup from a man on the other side of town, where the houses shrank and bent. Now, in our driveway, the Chevy looked more like a rusty boat than a truck.
“Will it run?” I asked.
“It’s less conspicuous. New Mexico is farmland, and poor. A truck like this” — he shrugged — “it will look like any other.”
Then, Father told me to pack as if we were camping.
“I thought we were getting Lilly?”
He stretched his back, ignoring the question. “I didn’t sleep well last night,” he said. “I’m not looking forward to sleeping upright in a truck.”
I did the best I could, we had not been camping since I was six, and the next morning I stood before the pickup wearing my casual riding clothes with a tin-cloth backpack slung over one shoulder. Father was dressed in a white button-down oxford with khakis that tapered to gators over leather shoes. The shoes were scuffed and creased, but well cared-for.
As he approached the truck, I shut my eyes. The sun was low. It was early morning and brisk, and the October air still smelled of dew. The birds were wild with the first light of day, and I thought of that old saying, about how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by J. T. Green
