Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  Benji followed Papaw to the fairground’s padlocked gate, which was the centerpiece of the rusted chain-link fence in front of the grounds. The fence surrounded the entire fairgrounds; a hundred feet to the left and right, it brushed against the untended cornfields that were threatening to reclaim the carnival land.

  “Mary and Joseph, what a sorry state of affairs that man is,” Papaw said under his breath as he worked the key into the lock. “You know why he’s like that, Benjamin? Men like that, they turn to seed for one reason: They got no home. They had one once, but then they up and left, thinkin’ they could find somethin’ out in the wide world, thinkin’ they’re gonna light this earth on fire. But what’s out there? Heartache, that’s what. Lonesomeness and disappointment. There’s nothin’ more important than knowing your place in this world. You understand that, don’t you, Benjamin?”

  Benji decided to try an experiment, and just shrugged in response.

  “I knew you would. I’m glad we had this talk,” Papaw said, oblivious, and shouldered the gate open.

  They spent a few hours walking the fairgrounds and waving their arms like conductors, directing each of the carnival big rigs toward their designated spaces on the fairgrounds. It was the worst kind of work: boring and stressful. In the few spare moments when Benji wasn’t supervising the movement of several tons of steel (his favorite attraction was the genuinely impressive Ferris wheel, named the Starlight Express, which made a gigantic, eye-like silhouette against the sky), his mind whirled to the saucer. Not so much because he was trying to come up with answers, but because the questions themselves were so intoxicating.

  Incredibly and wonderfully, it really seemed possible that Benji was the first person to ever witness a genuine UFO crash. The most famous crashed-spaceship story was “the Roswell Flying Saucer Incident,” when the US military supposedly recovered a saucer and then told the public, “Heh-heh, funny story: It turns out it was just a weather balloon!” The weather balloon story was a cover-up, but not for a saucer. As was later revealed, the military was covering up the crash of a top-secret balloon designed to detect atomic bomb tests by those pesky Soviets.

  Has anyone else ever just seen real UFOs?

  The answer was yes . . . but it occurred to Benji that this was the wrong question to ask. People always equated “UFO” with “alien spacecraft,” but that definition was inaccurate: UFO meant unidentified flying object. It meant something you couldn’t explain soared through the sky. The term “UFO” was the equivalent of a large question mark, but weirdly, people used the term to essentially say, “There’s no mystery. I’ll tell you exactly what I saw. Period.”

  What are we going to do with the saucer? Benji thought. And then what happens when we do?

  In his head, the smiley emoji lifted its sunglasses and winked.

  Benji checked his phone throughout the morning, but nobody had responded to his text. The silence was easy to shrug off early in the day (after all, few rational humans voluntarily rise before the sun does), but when he clicked the screen on just after eleven, a notification read Message Seen 10:31 AM.

  For the first time, the day’s inner smile wavered.

  He thumbed another text:

  *taps microphone*

  is this thing on? :]

  Almost immediately after he hit Send, an empty speech balloon inflated next to Ellie’s name. The balloon expanded as she typed a response. (The one in his chest did the same.)

  Then, all at once, the animation next to Ellie’s name disappeared. Benji checked to see if his (secondhand) phone had dropped out of network. He had full bars.

  Benji stared at his phone for a few seconds. But the balloon wouldn’t reinflate.

  He was slipping the phone back in his pocket when it started vibrating. The screen lit up with a selfie CR had taken with Benji’s phone: CR, sitting on the toilet, grimacing like he was in the midst of an apocalyptic dump.

  Benji tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice as he answered, “Hey.”

  “Can you talk?” CR said quickly in a hushed tone. “Like, privacy-wise?”

  Benji looked around. He was in the heart of the fairgrounds: the central midway, a wide walking path surrounded by the most popular rides. About a hundred feet away, Papaw shouted at a big-rig driver who was trying to back the haunted house into its slot between the mirror mansion and carousel: “Cut ’er left, now. Hard left. No, Mary and Joseph, hard left!”

  Just to be sure nobody would hear him, Benji left the midway and went to the chain-link fence that separated the cornfield from the fairgrounds, sitting down on a big gas-powered generator. “Yeah, I can talk,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “We’re butt-screwed, that’s what,” CR said. “There are pictures online from last night.”

  Benji’s stomach sank. “What?” How was that possible?

  “I told everyone the party was a no-pic zone, but there are pictures every-goddamn-where.”

  Oh, thank God. It’s just pictures of the party.

  “And half of them are location-tagged! LOCATION-TAGGED, BANJO! What is wrong with, like, our generation?!”

  Even over the phone, Benji could hear CR’s breath speed and shorten; it became a thin, reedy whistle. He’s going to have a panic attack, Benji realized, startled. When CR first moved to Bedford Falls in the summer before sixth grade, he’d had panic attacks every couple of weeks (mostly when he was in cramped spaces, though Benji’s backyard tree house was an exception). But CR hadn’t had one in years.

  “Buddy, just take a breath,” Benji said gently. After a few moments, he heard CR’s breath slow and steady. “If they’re just pictures of the party, what’s the problem?”

  “My dad, obviously,” CR said, sounding marginally in control.

  “Has he seen them?”

  “I’m still alive, so no. He’s sleeping off a hangover. Probably won’t even come out of his room until tomorrow. But they’re on Facebook, and he’s on Facebook, because old people love Facebook. Look, if he sees the pics, he’ll go out to the quarry and he’ll see the hole in the damn ice. Maybe he’d let the party slide, but not shooting down a drone on his property. I looked it up: Shooting down a drone is illegal. IT IS SUPER NOT-LEGAL.”

  Benji’s chest tightened. An image popped into his mind: adults swooping in, stringing yellow DO NOT ENTER tape around the quarry. What if Mr. Noland called the police or the FBI, and the saucer got taken away before Benji even got to learn more about it?

  “Even if my dad doesn’t see the pics, though,” CR said, breath quickening again, “what if—what if there’s a GPS on the drone, and the government tracks it to the quarry? If I get arrested, man, I’m ineligible for scholarships. We have to do something. Please, okay? ASAP. Now. Tonight.”

  “Do what?”

  “I don’t know! Pull it outta the lake, break the GPS, blow it up, light the damn thing on fire. Something, okay?”

  Benji thought about that. He would love to pull the saucer out of the lake. Even if they waited until after the homecoming game to decide what to do, they would have to retrieve it from the ice first anyway. Then they would have the chance to get a closer look at the saucer, inspect it, and once CR and Zeeko saw that it wasn’t a drone, they wouldn’t just want to turn it over without discovering whatever secrets might hide within that chromium-colored mystery.

  That can still happen, Benji tried to tell himself. Once we pull it out, we can all figure out what to do, together.

  But how in the hell, said Papaw’s voice, do you plan to pull it out?

  Benji suddenly felt light-headed. He closed his eyes, thinking. . . .

  And when his eyes opened, he saw something strange.

  Way at the far end of the midway, the front face of the carnival haunted house seemed to be flying into the sky, like Dorothy’s home riding the twister to Oz. A moment passed before Benji understood the illusion.

  A crane. It’s being lifted by a crane.

  “CR, can you get everyone to dele
te the pictures before your dad gets online?”

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. But what if that thing has a GPS?”

  “You know that big tow truck at the quarry?” Benji said. “The one with a magnetic winch, by the gate?” CR grunted impatiently in the affirmative. “Does it still work?” Benji asked.

  “I guess. Why?”

  Benji smiled. “Because I think I’ve got a plan.”

  6

  Benji rode his bike to the Bedford Falls High School football stadium that afternoon after he and Papaw finished at the carnival. CR had practice, which Ellie and Zeeko (as the class videographer and team trainer) would be attending, too.

  Benji cut through “downtown” Bedford Falls to get there, pedaling past the liquor stores and pawnshop and soaped-over storefront windows and fast-food drive-throughs. A ghost moon was rising in the late-afternoon sky, and it brought back a random memory: He was in the backseat of Papaw’s cruiser at night, staring at nothing in particular with his forehead cool against the window, when all of a sudden he gasped, “PAPAW,” in the awestruck voice of every six-year-old kid who ever stumbled upon a discovery of historic dimensions. “THE MOON IS FOLLOWING OUR CAR.”

  Papaw, of course, laughed his ass off. And Benji had realized something: The most beautiful ideas are the most fragile, and the most dangerous. If they shatter, they cut you.

  As you get older, you retreat into the safety of shutting up. You stop sharing your hazardous hopes with anyone . . . even yourself, eventually. To Benji, the really terrifying thing about growing up wasn’t that it seemed hard, but that it seemed so easy, so effortless to make the hundreds of compromises that slippery-slope you into a quietly desperate life.

  Maybe that’s what happened to Bedford Falls, he thought now, feeling he understood something important about his hometown for the first time. Bedford Falls had once been a boomtown for a handful of industries, most recently natural gas, but now it felt futureless. And when people don’t have a future, they get nostalgic instead. Now Bedford Falls was just what (generous) people might call “a sleepy town.”

  Sleepy’s okay. But the sleepiness here seems so dreamless.

  But Benji smiled as he zoomed through the stadium’s parking lot, which was jam-packed because of all the FIGs and reporters here to watch CR. What was going to happen to Bedford Falls now that the saucer had been shot down?

  Whatever it is, this place sure isn’t going to be dreamless anymore.

  Not after tonight.

  The football practice felt a week long. Benji sat waiting on the turnstiles just outside the stadium, hearing the crowd in the bleachers applaud CR’s passes under the hot field lights. Maybe CR had been hurtfully oblivious last night when they were talking about leaving Bedford Falls, but that didn’t matter. Benji felt proud of his best friend, and happy for him.

  When Coach Nicewarner called the end of practice and the crowd started dispersing, Benji’s phone buzzed. Ellie had texted him.

  Can we talk? I’m parked in the gravel lot.

  Benji tapped a response:

  En route!

  She was sitting cross-legged on the hood of her RustRocket station wagon in the crappy spillover lot behind the stadium. How is it possible that she makes everything around her look both better and worse? He didn’t know, but it had been that way since the first time he’d met her in fifth grade.

  Benji’s dad had died in Afghanistan just before Easter that year. His convoy had hit an explosive device on a bridge, and he drowned when his Humvee fell into the river. If Benji was sad about his dad’s death, it was mainly that he’d always felt insufficiently sad about it. He didn’t even really remember him (nor did he remember his mom, who died of ovarian cancer when he was a toddler). His dad had always been deployed or stationed at a base in England.

  On the day it happened, Benji got off the bus, the loops of his backpack straps cutting into his shoulders because he had a double load of books; Zeeko had been sick, and Benji was taking his makeup work to him. Benji was thinking about going on YouTube and watching videos of David Copperfield’s recent performance at the Magic Lantern in Chicago, but then he saw a big black SUV in his driveway, and his first thought was that Papaw had bought an awesome new car and maybe he’d let Benji sit on his lap, steering the steering wheel while Papaw worked the gas pedal, like they’d done in the police station parking lot on Benji’s tenth birthday. There was a gap in Benji’s memory here. On the other side of the gap, a priest and a guy in an army uniform were standing in the corner of the living room, and Papaw, whose eyes looked dark and deeper in his face than normal, like raisins pushed in bread dough, sat on the couch with Benji, asking him if he understood what Papaw had just told him. Benji said, Uh-huh, his body sort of tingling like when his foot would fall asleep. I just, I gotta go give Zeeko his homework.

  From there, Benji’s memories were still frames from a movie. He’s kicking a rock as he crosses the road. The Eustices are hugging him, Dr. Eustice’s chest hair feeling like springy coils under his polo shirt. Benji is standing by a coffin with a flag on it, and he sniffs a few times, and Papaw looks at him like he’s relieved that Benji is finally crying. But he’s not crying: A lot of ladies are wearing different perfumes, and the smell is gross.

  As the months pass, Benji kind of realizes Papaw isn’t the only one who stares at him when they think he’s not looking, like they’re confused by his reaction. Benji tries smiling at them, which seems to make it worse. He feels weird—weirder than normal, even. But he doesn’t know to feel anything other than what he’s feeling.

  Then he gets this idea: Summer is coming up and there’s going to be a countywide fifth-grade talent show in the new high school auditorium, and what could be better than a magic show to make the memory of the old him disappear?

  The day of the talent show, he’s seated between Zeeko and a girl from the other elementary school in town. The girl has blond-almost-brown hair and bright green eyes, and she is so beautiful that Benji feels embarrassed to be next to her. He’s noticed girls before, of course; he’s even liked a couple In That Way, the feelings like flickers of heat lightning in his belly. But this girl makes his blood glow.

  “Badass tuxedo,” she says, and inexplicably doesn’t seem to be making fun of him. “Is that for the show? I’m gonna draw something on the overhead projector; I don’t even know what yet,” she says, talking rapid-fire, leaning in, like she’s sharing something urgent and secret, “but I think it’ll be good—Oh my God, is that a top hat?”

  She grabs the hat, which he’s been turning over in his hands, and puts it on. “Do I look dumb?” she says. In fact, nothing in history has ever looked less dumb. “Can I wear it when I go on? I super swear I’ll give it back. Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Benji Lightman.”

  She smiles so wide that the skin at the edges of her eyes crinkles. With a clarity of thought and emotion he’s never felt in his life, Benji thinks: I love you.

  “I’m Ellie. I’ll tell you my last name if I can borrow the hat after you’re done, Benji Lightman. Deal?”

  It was. He gave a flawless performance that day because of how good and special she had made him feel. That was their perfect beginning. How could it not have a happy ending?

  “Hey, Ellie Holmes,” he said as he reached the RustRocket.

  With a jerky nervousness, she glanced up from her phone, then brushed her bangs off her brow. Her forehead was wrinkled in a way that let Benji see what she would look like when she got a little older. She was going to look great.

  “How’s life?” Benji said. He couldn’t quite suppress anymore the giddiness he’d tamped down most of the day. “Read any good books lately? See any good movies? Shoot down any good flying saucers?”

  Usually his bad jokes got her to smile. But not now.

  “You okay?” Benji said.

  “Umm, well, that remains to be seen.”

  “You still want to go to the quarry, right?”

  �
�CR and Zeeko said to meet them at the front gate,” she replied, which didn’t really answer the question. As she had at the quarry last night, Ellie seemed so uncharacteristically uneasy. He waited for her to go on.

  Finally, she said, “I’m not exactly sure we’re up to this task, Benji.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I’m not trying to be mean, but . . . Look, it’s because of you. You’re worrying me a bit. Last night, you just seemed . . . it was like you didn’t understand how ridiculously serious this whole thing is.”

  “No. Ellie, I’m taking this extremely seriously.”

  “Then why aren’t you freaking out?” She half laughed.

  “Because . . .” No words came. “It’s hard to explain. Here.” He lay back on the hood, pointing his index finger skyward. “Do you ever lie on your back outside when it’s snowing at night, and the snow just looks like white streaks zooming past, and even though it’s sort of silly, you pretend they’re stars and you’re flying at light speed?”

  After a moment, Ellie leaned back, too, and looked up. “Yeah, of course,” she said. She put her hand close to his on the hood.

  “And you know how the night sky feels like . . . like pure possibility?” Benji said. “Just totally beautiful, like anything can happen. And you look at the stars and it’s like your past doesn’t define you. It feels like you are looking at The Future. Like the sky is a time machine.”

  “Well, when I was a kid, anyway.”

  That made Benji uncomfortable for a reason he didn’t quite understand, but he went on. “Ellie, I’m scared, but only a little, because the saucer makes me feel like the sky does. Everything feels big and possible, and I just don’t accept that that is a bad thing.”

  Ellie was quiet a long time before she said, “Benji Lightman, you know what I think? I think that may be bullshit, but it’s the most beautiful bullshit in this world.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”

  “That makes two of us.” She grinned. “I wish I could be that sure. I’m still kinda terrified to give myself to this fully. I trust you, but I don’t trust this situation. Part of me just wants to walk away.