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.
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 answ
er.
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.
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