The Indestructible Man Page 9

  Little Green Men

  For the past three weekends my son has been communi-cating with aliens on a build-it-yourself short-wave radio. When I bought the kit I assumed we would assemble it together some evening after Margot dropped him off. Instead, as soon as he opened the box he sent me to the store for some cheese doodles and root beer, and went to work on it himself. By dinner he was finished.

  Adam is a smart boy—maybe too smart. When he was four he adjusted the record player to spin backwards, giggling and grabbing his toes while the Chipmunks sang in reverse; at eight he helped me build a TV from scratch, sneaking into the garage early in the morning to finish the job alone. So I was not surprised when he tired of listening to the police band and weather reports and began fiddling with the wiry guts to increase the radio’s range. He first connected it to the old UHF loop, then to the TV antenna outside, pulling in signals from farther and farther out: a folk-rock station in Maine, a French soccer game, a Japanese talk radio program. Then the signals disappeared, replaced by faint squeals and beeps which he insisted could only be transmissions from outer space, an alien ship passing near Earth. He claims he can even make out voices speaking an unearthly language, and has since wired his walkie-talkie to the radio to communicate with them directly. I smile, tell myself someone with a transmitter is having a bit of fun. But since he seems to be enjoying himself, I try not to stifle him.

  I offer to take him to the movies, rent a video, buy him a turtle sundae at the frozen custard stand—anything to divert him for a while—but he rarely leaves his room. Margot says I should take him to the campground by the lake, but he has terrible luck with poison ivy and thinks fishing is cruel. He can have friends over if he wants, but he has not seen his old crowd since the move and seems to view the separation as permanent. He is ten, intelligent but awkward, and has yet to make friends at his new school.

  Taking into account the signal lag and the time of night his “aliens” transmit, he has decided their ship must be fairly close—possibly on the dark side of the moon or somewhere between the earth and Venus. Since they have been transmitting for nearly three weeks, he speculates they must be on a mining expedition or a mission to map our solar system. His desk is covered with carefully-penciled charts of the planets, attempts to pinpoint the spaceship’s exact position, the reflector telescope I bought him for his birthday trained on the night sky to catch a glimpse of them. I do not move anything when I straighten up his room; he would be furious if I disturbed his delicate work.

  Adam and I have agreed not to mention the radio to his mother. Margot has enrolled him in the gifted program at school, and asks his teachers for extra assignments to make sure he is properly challenged. She has planned his entire future—SATs by age twelve, the math-and-science academy downstate by fifteen, Ph.D. by twenty—and would see this as a dangerous distraction. I sometimes tell her she may be pushing him too hard; she quickly reminds me I can no longer tell her anything.

  Late Friday night I hear trilly gurgling sounds from Adam’s bedroom. I burst through the door, thinking he is having a seizure or choking on popcorn, but find him hunched over the radio, walkie-talkie in hand, listening for a response through the little plastic earpiece. He is a bit startled when I open his door, but waves me in anyway.

  “What’s going on?” I ask him. “Sounds like you’re dying in here.”

  “Oh, sorry,” he says. “Just practicing.”

  “Practicing what?”

  “They’re teaching me words. The sounds are a little hard to make.” His hand goes to the earpiece; he listens carefully for a moment, picks up the walkie-talkie and makes a “ffff” sound into the microphone, clicks his tongue. He tries it a few more times, then waits for a voice to squawk its approval through the earphone.

  “And what word is that?” I ask him, snickering.

  “Hello, I think.”

  “Right,” I say. “Mind if I listen?”

  “Go ahead,” he says. “They’re a little shy, though.”

  I take the earpiece and listen carefully for a minute, but hear only static. “Yep,” I say. “They’re chatting up a storm.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously,” he says, and holds out his hand for the earphone.

  I hand him the receiver. “Sorry.”

  He smiles. “You’ll see.”

  “I’m sure.” I smile back, muss his spiky blond hair, and leave him to his work.

  The “aliens” only transmit between nine and two—Adam says it has to do with the earth’s rotation relative to the ship’s position—so on Saturday he is free until well after dinner. He gets up at eleven and pulls a stool up to the breakfast bar, curls his toes around the metal footrest.

  “Long night?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m trying to get them to tell me exactly where they are.”

  “Sounds important.” While I fix him a bowl of Sugar Pops he reaches for my mug and samples my coffee. He is slowly developing a taste for it, but mine is twice as strong as Margot’s, and after one sip his face scrunches up and he sticks out his tongue.

  “Puts hair on your chest,” I tell him, and pull down my shirt collar.

  “Gross,” he says. He pours himself a cup, dumps in half the sugar bowl and enough milk to make the coffee cool and yellow, tests it again, and nods his satisfaction.

  “So how’s school?” I ask, and slide him his cereal bowl across the bar—his favorite trick when he was younger, though now he hardly notices.

  “Okay, I guess,” he says. “Mrs. Barczak keeps piling homework on me. I only get to watch TV when I’m here. Mom says it’s poison.”

  I am not surprised—anything outside her plans for him is ‘poison.’ “But they’re treating you all right?”

  He scoops up a bite of cereal, careful to drain the milk from the spoon before eating it. “Mrs. Barczak’s pretty nice. She has a big birthmark on her cheek that’s shaped like Alaska.”

  I take a long swig of coffee. “I bet it’s hard not to stare.”

  “Sometimes,” he says. “You don’t want to get too close, though—her breath smells like rotten coffee grounds.”

  I top off his cup. “I’ll have to remember that in case I meet her.”

  He holds his mug and stares out the window a moment, lost in thought. “I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be out there,” he says. “I think they stayed longer because of me. I should probably tell somebody.”

  “But not Mom,” I remind him.

  “I mean somebody from the government. A scientist, maybe. Do you know of anyone?”

  “No idea, pal.”

  He sighs, slams his coffee. “I guess I’ll look it up later. I’ve learned about twenty words now. You might have to make the call, though—I don’t think they’d believe me.”

  “We’ll see,” I tell him. I imagine the reaction of some government official as I tell him I am speaking to extraterrestrials on a U-Bild-It radio kit. Still, I do not try to change the subject. It may not be normal conversation for a ten-year-old, but for the first time since the divorce he actually seems happy.

  For most of the afternoon we munch on fried chicken from the supermarket and watch sitcom reruns, making fun of the actors in the commercials. Eventually Adam dozes off on the couch, a drumstick dangling loosely from his fingers. I cover him with an afghan and turn off the TV to let him rest. When the sun goes down Adam snaps awake like a zombie and bolts toward his room, hunches over the desk for his nightly surveillance.

  Just before two I find him asleep in front of the radio, face-down on the plywood, the tiny earphone lying beside his face. When I come in to help him into bed I hear a strange sound from the earpiece. I pick it up and listen as a low, inhuman growl pierces the static. I have seen my share of foreign films, but this sounds like no language I have ever heard. The voice speaks quickly, then hesitates, waiting for a reply.

  “Hello?” I say into the walkie-talkie. “Who is this?”

  The voice immediately stops.
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br />   “Hello?”

  Adam lifts his head from the table, rubs his eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, pal. Let’s get you to bed.”

  He squints at me, at the earpiece still in my hand. “What are you doing with that?”

  “Nothing.” I lay it gently beside the walkie-talkie. “Just putting things away.”

  His face breaks into a tired smile. “You heard them, didn’t you?” I stand there without answering, probably looking guilty, until he nods. “I knew you would.”

  Over breakfast the next morning Adam asks what I heard; instead of answering I ask if his new school has a decent basketball team. He takes the hint and plunges a spoon into his cereal with a satisfied grin: sooner or later, I will believe him.

  At four-thirty Margot appears on the doorstep, gives three slow, menacing knocks, and waits on the porch for me to produce him. She is supposed to pick him up at five, but if I complain she comes even earlier the next time. She cannot stand to leave him with me any longer than necessary. She never comes in; we are on speaking terms again, but we have little to talk about. I tell Adam to take his time, make her wait a little longer just for fun. When he emerges from his bedroom with his duffel bag I raise a finger to my lips; he nods and repeats the gesture.

  I watch Margot pull away from the curb; Adam waves out the window until the car disappears around the corner. Then I tiptoe into his room and stare at the diodes and wires and circuit boards splayed across his desk. Next to the mass of electronic guts is a stack of diagrams—the wiring between the components, a list of frequencies where he’s heard signals, tiny scribbled translations of the words he’s learned, charts of the planets with red X’s marking where the ship might be. I turn on the power, toggle through the dial, listen for them. But it is the wrong time of day, and after a few minutes I turn the radio off, arrange the components exactly as Adam left them, and cover them with an old pillowcase.

  Wednesday afternoon Margot calls my mobile phone while I am showing a lakeside cottage to a retired couple. She is crying. I have never heard her cry—not when I told her I was leaving, not even at her father’s funeral—so I panic, thinking Adam has been hit by a car or fallen off his bike and cracked his skull. I ask what’s happened and grab my jacket, nearly bowling over Mrs. Stevens on the way to the door.

  “Adam’s teacher,” she sobs. “She thinks something’s wrong. His schoolwork’s been slipping and he’s getting picked on a lot. She wants to see both of us.”

  I drop my jacket onto the porch and sit on the wooden landing. “Is that all? The way you sounded I thought he’d broken his neck.”

  She stops crying. “Aren’t you worried? It isn’t like him to slack off in school. She says he might be depressed.”

  “No kidding. Did she get that from the school counselor, or did she come up with it herself?”

  “This is serious. If you aren’t interested, I’ll go alone.”

  “No, I’ll come.” I find it hard to imagine anything seriously wrong with him; he took the divorce as well as could be expected, and he is still a few years away from discovering girls or drugs. But with Margot everything is the end of the world.

  She sniffles into the receiver, and for a minute I feel some obligation to help calm her. “He’s a good kid. It can’t be that bad.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she says. “Tomorrow at four.”

  I hang up, stare at the phone in my hand. For a moment I envision Adam spouting alien curses at his teacher, but I know he is too smart for that. I tell myself it is nothing serious—just a reaction to the divorce, the move, the new school.

  “Trouble at home?” Mr. Stevens asks.

  “It’s nothing,” I say, and lead them down to the water.

  When I get to the school Margot’s car is already there. I reach Adam’s classroom to find Margot and Mrs. Barczak sitting at the desk, drinking coffee and chatting. The birthmark looks more like Texas than Alaska, but I try not to stare. She invites me to sit down; she and Margot have taken the only two adult-sized seats in the room, so I ease into an ancient plastic chair scaled for a fourth-grader, knees hiked up to my chest.

  “Mrs. Barczak and I had an interesting talk,” Margot says, sipping at her Styrofoam cup. I can smell cigarette smoke on her breath; she must have started again.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Barczak says. “As I was telling Ms. Abelson, Adam has started drifting off in class—he looks out the window, doesn’t pay attention, and doodles during class time. Yesterday after school I found these in his desk.” She pulls out a spiral notebook full of pencil drawings. “I’m not sure what they are, but he seems to be spending a lot of time on them.” She hands me the notebook. I instantly recognize Adam’s planetary charts and frequency lists, but pretend to flip through the pages. “Never seen them before.” I offer them to Margot; when she declines I know she has already seen them.

  “He spends most of the day either drawing these or staring at them,” Mrs. Barczak says. “Some of the other children have also been giving him a hard time lately. Last week I had to separate Adam from another boy who was calling him names—‘space cadet,’ to be specific.”

  I feel a hard lump at the base of my throat, and loosen my tie. “Isn’t that your responsibility?” I ask, and decide to teach him to box at some point. “You can’t just let the other kids hassle him.”

  Mrs. Barczak smiles at me as if I am one of her ten-year-olds. “Sometimes new students get picked on for a while,” she says. “We try to step in, of course, but it usually ends after the first couple of weeks. In Adam’s case, it’s actually gotten worse. Apparently he’s been telling his classmates he built a radio that lets him talk to space aliens.”

  “Do you know anything about this?” Margot asks, her face expressionless, and I know this has become an interrogation.

  Since they both know, there is no point in being evasive. “It’s just a game,” I tell them. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

  “Mr. Green,” Mrs. Barczak says, “Adam is extremely bright, but I’m concerned he’s taking this ‘game’ a bit too far. It’s affecting his schoolwork and his relationships with other children, and it could be a sign of some larger problem—depression, or a learning disability.”

  “What should we do?” Margot asks.

  “I’d like him to speak to the school psychologist,” Mrs. Barczak says. “She can get a better idea of what the problem is.”

  “I really don’t think that’s necessary. If you just talk to him—”

  Margot cuts me off. “Our son thinks he’s talking to Martians, and you just want to let him carry on like it’s perfectly normal? You should have put a stop to this a long time ago.”

  “It’s the most interest he’s shown in anything in months.”

  She looks at me sadly, and for a second I see moisture gathering in her eyes. “It isn’t healthy. Something might really be wrong with him.”

  I would like to tell her I heard something, that Adam is not completely deluded. “But he’s happy.”

  Margot sighs. “We can’t let him go on like this.” She turns to Mrs. Barczak. “We’ll bring him in.”

  Just before we meet with the school psychologist, I lead Adam into the boys’ restroom. I tell him this will be over quickly if he says he was only playing a game, and his imagination got the better of him.

  “But Dad,” he says, “I heard them. I talked to them. And so did you, even though I know you won’t admit it in front of Mom.”

  I straighten out his shirt collar. “I don’t know what I heard.”

  “That psychologist can’t make me say I didn’t. Neither can Mom. Besides, I can prove it.” He pulls a mini-cassette from his pocket.

  “What is that?”

  “I recorded them last weekend. When they hear this, they’ll have to believe me.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” I warn him.

  “But it’s the truth.”

  I nod and do not argue; he is determined to
tell his story, and nothing I say will change his mind.

  The school psychologist asks us to call her Miss Martha. She is very young, a year or two out of grad school at most. She is wearing a long denim skirt and her hair is in dreadlocks. The office walls are lined with posters bearing smiling cartoon animals, each with a gratingly positive caption: You are special; There’s no one else like you; Smile and the world will smile back. For the moment Margot and I are allowed to stay; we sit on either side of Adam on the orange suede couch.

  Miss Martha pulls up a chair and sits facing Adam, a yellow legal pad across her lap. His whole body tenses up when she comes near, but he soon begins to relax.