Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  I was also trying to summon a UFO. I was thinking very purposefully and singularly about it. I closed my eyes and reopened them dramatically, fully expecting to see a UFO, or two, or even a cluster of them, hovering above my house.

  I wanted badly to believe in aliens. At eleven, I was already deeply atheist, and the lack of meaning in the world terrified me. I had a recurring unwanted thought, usually in bed at night, about what it would be like to die. I envisioned the darkest deep black space imaginable, large enough to encompass everything I knew and didn’t know, everything I ever thought or had or loved rendered meaningless in a single moment, my consciousness ceasing completely. The thought made my chest hot, like the beginning of a panic attack, and I calmed myself by petting my arms and humming little songs.

  The possibility of the existence of aliens gave me hope. If they existed, it would prove that humans could be completely ignorant about certain things. Important things. It would call into question everything we collectively believed in. We would have to throw everything out and start over. Maybe my unwanted thoughts about death could be eased by the fact that nobody could ever know anything for sure.

  I also thought that if aliens did visit, because of my evident specialness and my blind resolve to believe in their existence, I would most likely be chosen to communicate their wishes to my fellow Earthlings. I would be pertinent to the needs of this alien culture, a culture I could not fathom but that would nevertheless also prove beneficial to me somehow. This would give me special privileges within their culture, the nature of which I could not begin to guess but that, if you twisted my arm, probably included access to secret knowledge about Earth, other planets, and the meaning of life, as well as the ability to teleport.

  I did not, however, want to be taken into space. I was afraid of heights, for one thing. I was also somewhat disturbed by the idea of being in a foreign country, even if I was only floating above it. I would agree to be taken onto their spaceship and flown around North America and possibly certain parts of the ocean, as long as I could be home at a reasonable hour. I didn’t want to find out what my nightly death thoughts felt like in space, unless those fears disappeared the moment I saw an alien, dispelling the lonely emptiness I experienced whenever I thought about outer space.

  After a while I gave up trying to summon aliens, but I continued my practice of lying under the swing set and throwing the swing up to let it drop back down, preparing for future surprises that I could pretend to not be surprised by.

  I started planning outdoor sleepovers in a tent in the backyard, hoping the extra time outdoors at night would increase my chances of seeing UFOs. My friends and I would run around the yard until 1 a.m., playing hide-and-seek, trying to scare one another, and endlessly squealing. When we got tired, we would lie on the lawn looking up into the sky.

  “Do you believe in aliens?” I said to my friend Lauren.

  “Maybe,” Lauren said. “That would be cool.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Late one night, as my friends and I settled into our tent to go to sleep, we saw beams from flashlights coming from the front of the house. When we saw the lights in the side yard coming toward us in the backyard, we jumped out of the tent and made a rush for the back door of my house. We watched from the kitchen window as three dark figures opened our tent and tore all the blankets out of it and onto the lawn. I assumed these figures were our angry neighbors, sick of me and my loud friends. I hoped we weren’t going to get in trouble.

  My mom’s husband, Seth, had woken up from the noise of us running inside and slamming the door. We told him there were people in our tent and Seth went outside with a flashlight and yelled, “Hey!”

  The figures quickly left through the side yard.

  We ran to the other side of the house and looked out the living room window. I saw the three figures leave our driveway and heard them enter and pull away in a car that was obscured by the hedges in front of our yard. Then I saw a fourth figure running from the alleyway on the other side of the house. He ran down the street in the opposite direction of the other figures, got into a truck, and drove away.

  “It was probably security guards,” my mom said over and over, as if trying to convince herself that the intruders weren’t dangerous. We lived in a gated community called Hidden Valley, and sometimes, because of my lack of respect for the curfew or other people’s property, we’d had to deal with the community’s hired guards.

  “Why would they go through the tent instead of knocking on the door?” I said.

  “They’re assholes, I guess,” she said. “I should call the police on their asses.”

  •

  Jenna came down from Oregon for summer vacation that year, and we spent every moment together, alternating between staying at my house and our nana and papa’s. One evening my cousin Amy slept over too. We turned the lights off in my room and tried to conjure spirits using scented candles and a handmade Ouija board. As I didn’t believe in spirits, I secretly tried to conjure aliens. There was no reason the aliens wouldn’t choose to communicate through this medium. I moved the planchette across the board, stopping at the letters that “felt right” to me. I didn’t tell the others what I was doing, but I also didn’t consider it cheating. I thought if aliens did exist and they were trying to communicate with us, it was just as likely that they would choose to control the planchette as it was that they would choose to control my subconscious mind. I was allowing them to choose this path, if that was easier for them.

  Often, instead of meaningful words or sentences, I would spell out lines of pure gibberish. This didn’t discourage me, though. I took it as a sign that whatever the aliens were trying to spell was too esoteric for my understanding, or that my subconscious mind was too powerful to be controlled by aliens.

  In the middle of a series of far too many consonants, Amy started screaming and ran out of my room. I followed her, laughing, thinking she was pretending to have seen a ghost. Jenna came out of my room moments later.

  “I saw a man looking in your window,” Amy said. “I’m not playing. Someone was outside.” I had a large window in my room that had no blinds or curtains. It faced a narrow alleyway filled with bushes.

  “I saw it, too,” Jenna said. She seemed shaken. “I’m not going back in there. Where’s your mom?”

  “What did it look like?” I said, hoping to hear a description of a gray alien.

  “I don’t know,” Amy said. “I just saw a face and ran.”

  We knocked on my mom’s door and I told her what Amy and Jenna had seen.

  “Go around front and see if anyone is in the alleyway,” my mom said. “I’ll go out back and see if anyone is in the yard.”

  Amy was too scared to leave the house, so Jenna and I went out front. We didn’t see anything, so we went back inside and then to the backyard. My mom was standing next to our porch, swinging a baseball bat at the air in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Ahhh,” my mom yelled, and continued swinging the bat.

  Jenna ran back into the house and began screaming while running circles around the kitchen and living room. I followed her.

  “What are you doing?” I said again. She continued to scream and run circles. I went back outside and my mom was beating the ground with the baseball bat. I went back inside and Jenna was still running in circles. Feeling helpless and confused, I sat down on the couch

  with Amy.

  Eventually my mom came in from the backyard and locked the door.

  “I saw glowing red eyes,” she said. “Like a dog’s eyes. But it didn’t come after me. It stayed where it was, as if it were on a leash.”

  After that night I started hearing a weird sound outside my window at night. It was a distinct scraping sound that occurred inconsistently throughout the week. I might hear it on Wednesday at 10 p.m., and then not again until the weekend
.

  I thought I heard the same sound coming from the kitchen during the daytime once, but then it was identified as my mom rubbing a kitchen knife against a knife sharpener stick.

  “A deranged murderer,” I said flatly to Jenna when she heard the sound too.

  “Don’t say that!” she said.

  •

  I was given rollerblades for my birthday. I would rollerblade in circles around our block. The lot behind our house was empty, and I liked to look into our backyard from the front of the lot. I would try to see the house as someone unfamiliar with it would see it. Did we look All-American, with our swing set and tiny, half-assed garden? Did we look trashy, with the plastic orange safety mesh stapled around our porch railing in lieu of wooden posts? Sometimes my mom would be outside on the lawn with my baby brother, River, and I would wave to them as I skated by.

  One day as I skated by, I noticed a car parked in front of the empty lot. Inside, two people who resembled the parents from Matilda were pointing and gesturing at the back of my house. I skated back around to the front of my house, where my mom was watching River scoot around in his play car.

  “Mom,” I said. “Some weird people are looking at the back of our house from Bear Valley Road.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know!”

  I skated around the loop again and they were still stalled in front of the empty lot. I slowed down to try to hear what they were saying. They watched me as I skated by, and then sped off.

  “This weird car slowed down in front of our house,” my mom said when I had gotten back around the block.

  “Was it a white car?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “That’s them. So trippy,” I said.

  “If they come around again I’m going to chase them down the street,” Seth said when my mom told him what happened. “This is private property. You can’t just spy on people.”

  I had initially hoped that the Matilda couple were aliens dis-

  guised as people, like in the movie Men in Black, but now I was worried that they might be CIA agents, targeting my house because they knew I was trying to communicate with aliens.

  But maybe that meant I was closer to reaching them than I thought.

  My friends Lauren and Lauren and I had a sleepover in a tent on one of the Laurens’ back porch. In the morning, Lauren’s mom was going to drive us to the mall in Santa Rosa to buy school clothes. I hadn’t really wanted to go shopping because my mom wasn’t going to give me any money, and it seemed boring to watch my friends pick out clothes when I couldn’t. But I’d agreed to go because I wanted to be part of the tent sleepover.

  We lit candles in the tent and made up ghost and alien stories until we fell asleep. I woke up in the middle of the night with an intense pain on my left arm. I couldn’t see what was happening to it in the dark, but I could feel that something was on my arm, and I rubbed off whatever it was as I unzipped the tent and went inside to find the kitchen light. Lauren’s mom heard me and came out from her bedroom. She inspected my arm with me. What looked like white, bloated skin was falling off my arm where I had been

  rubbing it.

  “Is that wax?” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. We woke up Lauren and Lauren and inspected the tent. The candles had been put out and were intact where we had left them.

  “Maybe the flashlight battery leaked on your arm,” Lauren’s mom said.

  “Maybe,” I said, suspecting the real explanation was far more out of this world. Perhaps aliens were trying to mark me, indicate that I was a human to be trusted, helped out, or lifted into the air for an amusing trip around familiar North American skies.

  We inspected the flashlights. Their batteries and cases looked the same as always, and they appeared to be functioning normally.

  “What the hell,” Lauren’s mom said.

  In the morning, I went home to tend to my injury instead of going shopping in Santa Rosa. I pretended to be disappointed.

  The scraping sound continued outside my bedroom window that night. I hadn’t heard it in a few days, and I had missed it. The slow, rhythmic scraping had begun to have a calming effect on me.

  I didn’t really believe there was an alien outside my window, but the sound felt connected to the aliens. It seemed as if all the inexplicable events of the summer were connected somehow, even though none of them made sense on their own and didn’t seem to fit together either.

  As obsessed with aliens as I thought I was, I can’t remember doing any actual research or looking into other people’s alien sightings or consuming alien culture. Alien movies scared me, and the creepy, violent nature of movie aliens didn’t fit my idea of what aliens were. Stories of UFO sightings and abductions by dopey Middle Americans didn’t paint the picture I had in my head either. Government alien cover-ups were okay, but focused too much on the government, and not enough on the personalities of aliens. Crop circles were interesting to me, and fit in with my idea of what aliens were (mysterious but screwball). I liked watching TV shows about crop circles, though I never sought them out.

  I was mostly interested in my own fabricated idea of aliens. The aliens I thought about were gentle, loving, and highly invested in my well-being but not necessarily in the well-being of anyone else. They were surrogate parents who would someday lift me from my Earthly troubles and explain away all the things that scared me.

  One night after having dinner at McDonald’s, we came home to find the front door of our house unlocked and ajar. We looked around our house suspiciously, tiptoeing around corners and swinging open closet doors.

  Later in the night, Seth complained of a clicking sound in the earpiece of the phone.

  “I think we’ve been bugged,” he said. “And the front door . . .”

  “I don’t think we’ve been bugged and I think the door thing is unrelated,” my mom said, sounding irritated. “One of us probably forgot to shut the door all the way and the wind pushed it open.”

  Seth called the community security guards anyway, and reported a break-in.

  “We’ll write it down, but we don’t really investigate that kind of thing,” the security guard said. “What street do you live on again?”

  The security guard told Seth they had just caught a Peeping Tom a block from our house, looking into a window at a teenage girl. The Peeping Tom was a landscaper hired by the community board to perform routine maintenance, but had been fired before the incident.

  “Jesus Christ,” my mom said. “Why the hell do we live here again?”

  I got a chill remembering the face Amy saw in my window. We were being watched that night, and maybe many nights before and after that night. Maybe it also explained the strange scraping sound.

  I felt scared and violated, but since he was caught before we found out about him, I didn’t feel worried about my safety. I mostly felt disappointed. A Peeping Tom was not paranormal at all. In fact, it underlined my need for an extraterrestrial intervention. This planet sucks, I thought.

  That night, as I lay on the lawn counting shooting stars, I heard the familiar scraping sound coming from the alley by my bedroom window.

  Aha, I thought, using a British accent in my head for some reason. Perhaps there is mystery yet on this Earth.

  3

  vandal

  The first house we ever toilet-papered belonged to somebody we didn’t know at all. My friends and I had chosen the house for being a safe-but-not-too-far distance from my house, very distant from the Hidden Valley security guard shacks, somewhat secluded from other houses, but close to a variety of trees and shrubs and fences—places we could hide if we needed to.

  We did a terrible job that first time—a few throws over a tree and the rest wadded up and tossed around the lawn before we ran away giggling—but the experience filled me with adrenaline.

  My house ha
d become a popular house for sleepovers, because my mom would let us “sneak” out as much as we wanted. With my core group of friends—Catlin, Anabelle, Lauren, and Lauren—I would walk around the empty golf courses that were off-limits during the day. We would lie on the impossibly fine-cut grass and talk about secret stuff, because that time of night in an off-limits place was made for secrets.

  It was my mom who had first mentioned toilet-papering.

  “You guys have never toilet-papered a house?” she had said. “Ever? How weird.”

  That first night, my friends and I left through the sliding glass door in my bedroom, my mom whispering behind us, “Don’t get caught! I’ll leave a light on for you guys.”

  After that, I became obsessed with toilet-papering houses. Strangers’ houses, houses of people I vaguely knew, houses I wished I lived in, houses I used to live in that were now occupied by other tenants, the house of the teacher I had never had class with but who I heard was mean, the house of the people who’d refused to buy Save the Rainforest T-shirts from me the year before when I was trying to win a Cat in the Hat hat by outselling my classmates.

  Everything about toilet-papering houses was gratifying: the supply organization, the sneaking around, the security guards driving around looking for vandals like us, the potential for punishment. But possibly the best part was riding my bike past the house the next morning to check whether it was cleaned up or not. Knowing that the evidence of my vandalism was available for all to see in the light of day made me feel powerful. I liked thinking about the confusion I’d inspired in residents the next morning, and how I’d never be suspected because I was just a little girl.

  That year we were twelve, and friend dynamics were beginning to feel more complicated. There was always some issue between us. Catlin would be mad at one of the Laurens, or Anabelle and Lauren would be fighting, or Catlin and I would be competing for one of the Laurens’ attention, or Anabelle would be convincing us that Catlin wasn’t our friend. The five of us rarely hung out all together. This was fine with me, as it was easier to sneak around with only two or three people. It also allowed me to rotate who I would take with me toilet-papering so that I could satisfy my insatiable enthusiasm for it without anybody getting burned out.