Neon Green. Margaret Wappler
in silence until Gabe sharply veered off into another aisle and disappeared, muttering something about finding more overpriced snacks. The family went on without him. In front of the sunscreen display, Ernest held up a severe white bottle emblazoned with gold numbers.
“How about this?”
“Seventy-five?”
“It’s the strongest stuff on the market; it says so right here.”
“Dad, it looks terrifying, like some kind of engine oil.” Alison snatched the bottle from his hands. “Active ingredients: avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, octocreylene, triethanolamine. You guys will barely buy lotion with alcohol in it. Why is all this craziness OK?”
Ernest drew in a breath to speak but then stopped. Alison loved when she could stem, if only for a moment, the tide of education from her dad’s mouth.
“Forty-five,” Ernest said. “You can still get a little bit of color from that.”
At the register, Ernest purchased two reusable bags, the same kind his boss, Jean, had brought to the meeting, despite the steep price.
“I’ve fallen for it,” Ernest mumbled to Cynthia. “These are nice bags. But see how they also have plastic? Karen would charge a nickel for each of those, as a deterrent.”
“They’re really nice bags,” she said, rubbing the fabric sacks. “And now everyone will know you shop at Demeter Foods. Pretty fancy!” She jabbed him in the back with her finger.
On the way out the door, the heat from the outside blasted their air-conditioned skin. As they loaded the groceries into the car, Gabe waved at the blond woman behind the WIN A VISIT FROM JUPITER! table. She treated him to a sweet wink.
4
The spaceship descends toward the home of the nuclear family, living in one of the psychic detritus clusters of the universe, otherwise known as the suburb. The utopian landscape is precise and ordered, a video-game grid of
school, park, church, houses;
school, park, church, houses;
school, park, church, houses . . .
. . .that gets more focused as the spaceship gets closer. The flying object cuts through layers of atmosphere, as delicate as filigree, made up of natural molecular ephemera and seminoxious particles of clingy waste: the hairspray and the weed killer and the evaporated windshield wash and the fumes from a polyurethane glue used for a children’s toy that is not recommended for below age eight.
The top layers of the atmosphere—the mesosphere, the thermosphere, the exosphere—is made up of garbage and noise, signals from appliances cross-hatching into a graphic density, slivers of metal from aircraft flying on the slipstream, burning lava rock and auroras that vibrate and hum. Closer to Earth, the troposphere is ransacked and violated by the phenomenon known as weather—clouds fattening with water that condenses, bursts, and clatters down to the ground. The spaceship lowers through it all, leaving behind the moon—a pink scrape in the sky—to settle in the backyard of the Allen family.
When the spaceship landed in the backyard at exactly 8:57 P.M. on August 18, seven days after the first day of school, Cynthia was the first of the family to see it through the kitchen’s picture window. A flying saucer made of silver sheets of bolted metal hovered over the trimmed grass emitting a low humming noise that pained her teeth, like pressing sugar into a cheap metal filling. At just about twenty-five feet across, the spaceship fit snugly between the house and the weeping willow tree in the backyard. Five delicate tentacles shot out of the belly of the spacecraft and pierced the ground, one of them cleaving through the fruit of Ernest’s heirloom tomato plant.
“What?” she shrieked, somewhere between delight, disbelief, and dread.
The saucer rooted further into the grass, vrooming its engine. Above the metal portion of the spaceship, separated by a band of lights, a dark glass top. Twirling lights hysterically crawled around the yard, hot white lights that could shrink pupils into black dots.
Cynthia’s hands dripped with the hot, soapy dishwater she’d abandoned to come to the window. “Ernest? Come here!” she screamed, planted to her spot. “Ernest, where are you?” The water, now cool, ran down to her elbows as she plugged her ears. The humming reached a semi-excruciating pitch, vibrating her sternum and surging up through her feet. “Oh my god, oh my god,” she moaned, but she could hear only the sound of her voice muffled inside of her head.
She remembered then that Ernest was at an Earth Day meeting and wouldn’t be home until late. Her relief that he’d snagged a job he enjoyed—finally!—outweighed her admittedly unreasonable irritation that she’d have to parent this disaster alone. What if they were scared? Wasn’t she scared? Was that why her muscles twitched, as if she were about to leap into a dark shaft? Unable to stop watching, she waited for the kids to come down. Some strange knowledge swept in, tidal and moonlit: the spaceship, she thought, was meant to be here, but she couldn’t tell if it was bringing release or terror.
Upstairs, Gabe played his sister an album that’d been forced upon him by a senior with a Mohawk that sagged from liberty spikes to wisps by three P.M. On school nights, between seven and eleven, Gabe and Alison’s world shrank to the confines of their home, and the options for amusement dwindled as well: watch TV, listen to music, play video games, talk to their parents, talk on the phone. At some point, Alison would usually draw for a while in her room. Sometimes, Gabe would read, lately about the Vietnam War. He was glad he wasn’t eighteen in 1968 but oddly jealous too. Everything seemed so meaningful back then.
“If I don’t like this band,” Gabe said, “Todd said that it means I don’t like punk, which means I’m basically a stupid, worthless fag who will end up married to that half-retarded girl Tracy who works at TCBY.”
“Harsh verdict,” Alison said as she painted her thumbnail with a black Sharpie. “Do you even like that guy Todd?”
“No,” Gabe said, “but still.”
The music sounded sawed-off and gritty. Gabe wasn’t so sure he liked it exactly, but it intrigued him, like looking at pictures of Istanbul or Anchorage.
Alison sat listening for several moments and squinting around the room before she finally said, “Who’s this again?”
“Fugazi,” he answered.
Alison scrunched up her face. “Fooo-gah-zee. Always the ugly names with these punk bands,” Alison mocked in a prim voice. “Is it satanic, or just trash?”
Gabe turned it up as a dare. Alison raised him and flicked up the volume knob even more, inspired as the music redrew all the room’s features, rendering it debauched and arrogant, but also carefree.
In her baggy jeans and too-big striped sweater, Alison popped up on the bed but then didn’t know what to do. After a moment, she jumped around in place, her hands a little off to the side like she might be carrying a guitar or maybe it was just a household saw. Then she flipped her brown hair around in a fit of head-banging, imitating the long-coated metal guys on MTV. For extra snazz, she threw in a plié from her long-abandoned ballet training. Gabe rolled his eyes. He was pretty sure Fugazi weren’t headbangers.
The song ended and another crashed into being. Dizzy from the thrashing, Alison collapsed onto Gabe’s bed in giggles. She pressed her face into the mattress. The flannel bedspread hadn’t been washed in maybe a month or so, and Alison smelled her brother on it—vaguely minty from shaving cream and toothpaste, plus the lavender dandruff shampoo that Cynthia bought him from Karen’s that she always handed to him in a covert paper sack, as if it didn’t end up in the same shower caddy as everyone else’s stuff.
Above Gabe’s bed, a pinned poster of the rock star Ziggy Stardust, with his rooster pouf of pink-red