The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  The reporter was sitting alone in a booth in the back of Joanne’s Diner, typing at a modest pace on a laptop that would have been a spiral notebook only a few years earlier. He checked his watch every couple of minutes, and looked up every time the bell above the door announced someone’s entry or exit.

  “How long’s he been here?” Annie asked Beth. Beth was four years older than Annie, and a member of the diner’s ownership family, the Welds. She was also the closest thing Annie had to an older sister, largely because the Welds were in the habit of adopting locals who helped out in the diner, and everyone was in the habit of adopting Annie. It was a popular local tradition.

  The only sign to ever grace the diner was one that said DINER on it, but everyone called it Joanne’s. This was sort of funny for anybody familiar with the Welds, because nobody in the family was, or had ever been, named Joanne. It was true that for about fifteen years in the late middle period of the Twentieth century, the diner employed a waitress who called herself Joan, and it was also true that Joan was a very popular lady in the way some ladies could be at times (Annie took this to mean she had large breasts, but Beth had a much more salacious interpretation) and so it was very possible “the Diner” became “Joan’s Diner” and later—because that ‘s’ and ‘d’ in the makeshift title was awkward when shoved together like that—it became “Joanne’s Diner” before finally becoming “Joanne’s”. It was equally possible there was another explanation, for which no adequate historical record existed. What remained true was that there was no Joanne in the establishment, and it did not appear there ever had been.

  It was a local tradition, therefore, to tell intrepid reporters who had just arrived that they absolutely must A: eat at Joanne’s, and B: ask to speak to Joanne, as she had all the best information.

  It was an entertaining prank, and also served the important purpose of notifying locals when someone contributing to the official record was in the vicinity. For while there was no Joanne, her diner was the closest thing to an information hub the town had.

  “About an hour. Don’t know who he’s waiting on.”

  “His escort, probably,” Annie said. “He’s going to see the ship.”

  Beth flexed an eyebrow. “How do you know that?”

  Annie shrugged, which wasn’t an answer, but it also sort of was. Annie knew people and people told her things. It was just how things were. If anyone in town knew that, it was Beth.

  “Well, if that’s true he must be more important than he looks,” Beth said.

  “Maybe. What do important people look like? I can never tell.”

  Annie put down the half full buss pan she was ostensibly supposed to be transporting to the back of the diner. There was an industrial-sized dishwashing machine in back made by a company called Hobart that everyone just called Bart. Bart was always hungry and always complaining and occasionally—more often than not of late—needed a visit from a specialist, because Bart was getting old. There were a not inconsequential number of customers who believed there was a human named Bart in the back, who was perhaps chained there and not permitted to leave.

  The breakfast rushes came in shifts, and this was a moment between those shifts, so Annie had already fed Bart.

  She grabbed a coffee urn and headed to the back of the diner, winking at Beth as she went.

  “Refill?” she asked, to the journo.

  “No thanks,” he said, not looking up. She thought he looked younger up close, like just-out-of-college young. That didn’t make a lot of sense contextualized with his opportunity to see the ship up close, though. She expected a more seasoned individual.

  Annie sat down on the opposite side of the booth and waited for him to notice.

  It took a lot longer than it should have.

  “Hello?” he said, confused.

  “Hi.”

  He saw the coffee urn and successfully associated it with the person he had just spoken to, rather than concluding she materialized in the seat somehow, which would have been cooler but far less likely.

  “I really don’t want more coffee. I’ve had enough for now, thanks.”

  “Oh, I know. You’re a reporter.”

  He looked past her and down the length of the diner, perhaps in anticipation of discovering someone capable of explaining Annie.

  “You couldn’t possibly be Joanne.”

  “No, Joanne isn’t here.”

  “So I was told.” His eyes went back the laptop, which was the kind of thing people did when they wanted to signal in a less-rude sort of way that the conversation they were having was over. It actually was rude, but it was a socially permissible rude. It had the effect of making the person they were dismissing seem like they were the rude ones.

  Annie didn’t have a real sense of shame, though, so it didn’t work. This could have been why people told her things.

  “She doesn’t actually exist,” Annie said.

  “Joanne of Joanne’s Diner doesn’t exist?” he said, not looking up. He did stop typing, though.

  “Now you have it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Annie. Annie Collins.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “And you work here?”

  “Just part time. I don’t wait tables, though, mostly I just pick up and feed Bart, answer the phone sometimes. Less during the school year.”

  “Well that’s fascinating.”

  She decided he was older than the college-age impression he first gave off. The way to tell was by looking at people’s necks. He was at least thirty.

  “I work in the library too. Have you seen the library yet? It’s down at the south end of Main. We have municipal buildings on each end and right in the middle. It’s very feng shui. Probably not what the founders were thinking, but still.”

  “I’m nearly positive feng shui has nothing to say about city planning.”

  He had one of those voices that made him sound smart. Clean elocution, crisp word-choice. Someone people might respect but simultaneously dislike. She decided he probably wasn’t really a journalist.

  “I agree, but most people around here don’t know that. Or what feng shui is, and if they did they probably wouldn’t know it’s mostly crap.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think it’s probably something invented by an interior decorator to charge more per hour.”

  He looked up from the screen, which was a great triumph for Annie.

  “How old are you again?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “And you’re Annie.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Annie, maybe you can tell me why you’re sitting here?”

  “Because you’re a reporter.”

  “According to whom?”

  “Joanne.”

  “I’ve never met Joanne. And you said a minute ago she wasn’t real.”

  “I did, but that doesn’t mean Joanne didn’t tell me you were a reporter.”

  “Are you in a special needs class of some kind, Annie?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ed Somerville.”

  “Ed short for Edward?”

  “Edgar.”

  “I can see why you’re rolling with Ed. What time are you supposed to see the ship?”

  He coughed, looking in five directions in two seconds, and closed his laptop. She hoped he remembered to hit save on whatever he had going on there.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Annie Collins.”

  “Sixteen year old Annie Collins.”

  “You keep saying it like you expect me to get it wrong. Don’t I look sixteen?”

  “You probably do. It’s a tough age to pin down in some people.”

  “Well I am. Ask anyone. Most folks know me around here.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I dunno. I’m that kind of girl, I guess. Not in a bad way. Probably not in a bad way.”

  “I really don’t understand what
’s going on.”

  “Well, we haven’t had a reporter around in a while. What’s your angle?”

  “My angle?”

  He was definitely not a reporter.

  “You answer questions with questions a lot, that’s a terrible habit. Your angle, for the piece you’re here to write. I assume write and not telecast because I don’t see any cameras and, I mean… well, you don’t look like on-air talent.”

  “Thanks?” His expression suggested he thought maybe he was losing his mind.

  “So is it: Sleepy spaceship town returns to normal, or Local community embraces alien fanatics, or what?”

  “I don’t have an angle yet.”

  “Of course you do. Oh! I bet it’s one of those big long form pieces, right? The Atlantic Monthly or something like that?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “Those always sell well. But that isn’t it either, is it? You’re just agreeing with me so I’ll stop guessing.”

  “Why do I have to have an angle?”

  “Because if you don’t have an angle, you’re not here for a puff piece at all, you’re here for some other reason. And that would mean something happened to report about, and we all know that can’t be true because there hasn’t been anything new about the ship since the day it landed. And if there was something new, well… I can think of a lot of people who would want to know all about that.”

  He stared at her for a few beats.

  “You’re sixteen.”

  “Haven’t turned seventeen since the last time you asked.”

  “It’s possible a sixteen year old is attempting to blackmail me right now, so I wanted to re-establish that.”

  “I understand.”

  “So I’m clear: you think I’m a reporter, and that I’m going to be getting a close-up of the only thing in this town anyone cares to see, and that I’m doing this because something’s happened involving that very thing. And you’d like me to know if I don’t… do something for you? You’ll tell everybody this. Do I have that correct?”

  “I would never say blackmail, that’s a terrible word. I’m an innocent young woman.”

  “Right. And what is the thing you would like for me to do?”

  “I am offering my services,” she said. She more or less decided on this the second she said it.

  “Come again?”

  “Not those services, dude. God.”

  “What kind of services?”

  “As I said, everyone in town knows me and I know everyone. A reporter such as yourself would benefit from having a person such as myself around.”

  “For information?”

  “For all sorts of things. Everyone here’s been interviewed a dozen times. If you want to get good answers instead of the usual answers, you need someone there to call bullcrap on them when they say it.”

  “I think I can detect my own… bullcrap… just fine, thanks.”

  “Oh, yeah? Maybe you can ask Joanne when she gets here.”

  “You’d like to be my tour guide.”

  “Sure, you can call it that. I prefer translator. Like in The Killing Fields.”

  “Northern Massachusetts is a poor substitute for Cambodia.”

  “But you see my point.”

  “I do,” he said. “Except you’re bluffing.”

  “I am?”

  “Oh yes.”

  The front door chime rang, and as was the case every other time this happened, Ed looked at the door. In this instance, though, he saw someone he was expecting. Annie turned around to see a man she didn’t recognize. He was in civilian clothes, but he had the sort of crispness she’d seen many times before in members of the army.

  “Huh, looks like they changed the press liaison,” she said.

  “Never mind him,” Ed said, as he collected his laptop and his bill and stood.

  “Last chance.”

  “It’s an interesting offer, Annie Collins. But I don’t need a translator.”

  “And you think I’m bluffing.”

  “I know you are. I know the type.”

  “What type is that?”

  “The type who likes secrets but not gossip. But it’s a pleasure to meet you, and I thank you for the offer.”

  He shook her hand, as if this had been a job interview—which it sort of had been—and headed to the front register to handle his bill. A minute later he was out the door and climbing into a black SUV.

  “So?” Beth asked, when Annie returned the coffee urn to the counter. “What’s his story?”

  “Not sure yet,” Annie said. “But he’s definitely not a reporter. Which makes him a whole lot more interesting.”

  4

  The Little Things

  “Was that Annie Collins you were sitting with?”

  This was the first thing Brigadier General Morris had to say to Ed, as soon as they were in the back of the car, at which point Ed began to wonder if he was losing his mind or if everyone else in this town had lost theirs and he was only catching up.

  “That’s what she said her name was. Do you know her?”

  “I know of her. We’ve never been introduced. You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”

  Ed’s security clearance was actually higher than the general’s, so he wasn’t sure what to make of the question. Surely the man understood that not revealing classified information to a sixteen year old on his first morning in town was an expectation for someone with his permissions.

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “No offense intended, son. She has a knack, that one.”

  “Does she.”

  “You spent any time in a war zone, Mr. Somerville?”

  The general had a gosh-howdy sort of cadence, but it hid a shrewdness.

  “Some might say I’m doing that right now, general.”

  He laughed. “Sure, and you might be one of those people. I’ve read your papers. I mean a live ammo war zone. Well I’ll tell you. Every occupied village, town, and neighborhood has an Annie Collins. If you want to succeed at whatever it is you’re planning, you want to find that person.”

  “To… to shoot them?”

  “No, no, they’re too important. Besides, if you shoot ‘em someone’ll take their place. No, to get them on your side. My point, we know all about Annie Collins. We leave her be, and maybe someday we’ll need her help for something. So what did she know?”

  Ed remained convinced either he or everyone around him was going mad.

  “She knew I was going to see the ship.”

  The army man nodded slowly.

  “I guess that’s okay.”

  “I didn’t tell her that.”

  “Never said you did, son.”

  The SUV was taking them down Main, a doublewide road with the kind of retail variety that only came from organic growth over time. It had the sort of homey, old-next-to-new-next-to-old series of façades that most open-air shopping malls had been trying to replicate for years without success.

  Maybe the most interesting thing about how the spaceship impacted the local economy and industry of Sorrow Falls was that it had had almost none. One of the most consequential events in history happened right up the road, and that event brought in a lot of money, yet more than half of the real estate of Sorrow Falls Main Street looked the same, and by all accounts was the same. Lots of owner-occupied shops (residences above the storefront were very popular in these parts) with the only difference being most of these owners now had a big vacation house to head off to when they wanted.

  The sudden influx of cash to the local economy did have consequences, though, most obviously in the half of Main that flipped: it now had a Denny’s and a McDonalds and a Marriott and a lot of other things that made no sense in most mill town communities. Likewise, a fair number of the original witnesses didn’t even live in town any more, thanks to the money they made telling their stories and the dearth of large estates in the immediate vicinity. If Ed wanted to interview the sheriff from that night, he’d have to
travel to Nantucket, for example.

  But Sorrow Falls still felt and looked an awful lot like the Sorrow Falls of old, according to just about everyone. It was Ed’s first time in town, but he’d been studying the place from afar for three years.

  In this, he was almost completely alone. The others focused on the ship, and he did too, but he considered the town a part of the whole. Even now, seeing in person how normal it all was, he was sure there was something wrong somehow with this town.

  It would have made for an interesting story angle, if he were actually a reporter.

  I have to get better at pretending to be one, he thought.

  If there was one thing he learned from his exchange with Annie, it was that Sorrow Falls town had a lot of media savvy people, and those people knew how real reporters acted, which was more than Ed could say. He was definitely going to have to work on his cover if he was going to get any answers.

  * * *

  A lot more had changed outside the town line than inside. The first time Ed really appreciated this was when he drove into town, because crossing the river to Main felt like entering a different Disney World kingdom—which only reinforced the notion that the homey-ness of Sorrow Falls was being maintained artificially somehow. In contrast, the border towns saw franchising as the only way to capitalize economically on the random good fortune of their neighbor, and so the number of hotels and motels and chain restaurants and souvenir shops and so on increased almost exponentially the further one got from downtown Sorrow Falls.

  Of course, beyond that was the rest of the world, which suffered a global nervous breakdown shortly after the President’s instantly famous “We Are Not Alone” speech, and had calmed down only a little bit since.

  The first outward manifestation of collective insanity was the spate of mass suicides. These quickly became so routine that they stopped being newsworthy after a few months. It turned out there were an awful lot of people who—individually and in groups—decided the world was either ending or already had, and wanted to beat the rush to the afterworld. There was also a significant increase in religiously motivated terrorist acts. Ed never really understood the connection to those and the ship, but nobody else seemed to either. And of course there were riots, which happened all over the place, with the bigger ones in such disparate locales as New Delhi, Perth, and Cincinnati.