Gene Doucette: The Spaceship Next Door

In a bit of irony, the restoration uncovered more of the fading tail of the meteor in the top left corner of the mural. The tail—surely nothing more than an accidental brush stroke by the artist—had a thirty-degree angle in it.

The Artist, according to some, had predicted the future.

That was probably Annie’s favorite part of the painting, or it was on that particular day. Other days she ended up transfixed by a background tree, or the symbolic renderings of wild men in the woods—horror show versions of Native Americans with dull eyes, reaching out toward the water like the Karloff edition of Frankenstein’s monster. Sometimes it was the chaos of the water, or the woman on a canoe way behind Josiah, barely given detail other than a bonnet and an open mouth, screaming to warn him.

Sometimes her favorite part was just that nobody knew who painted it or exactly how old it was.

“Stop staring at it.”

Annie was at the library’s front desk, directly beneath the enormous mural. When she sat on the middle stool her head was just below Josiah’s impressively bulgy crotch. That was never one of her favorite parts of the painting.

She turned to discover a slightly paler version of herself.

“I can’t help it,” she said to Violet. “There’s always something new to look at.”

Annie and Violet were the same age, had the same basic physical shape and the same dark brown hair. Anyone filling out a document listing their attendant vital statistics would conclude that they were therefore very similar, and in those simple terms, they were. Annie even thought of Violet that way—as a lost twin sister or lab-created doppelganger, depending on her mood. At the same time, nobody who saw them together could ever mistake them for one another.

To the extent that anyone knew of Violet’s existence, they would say she was a shy girl. Her body language said stay away under most circumstances, or perhaps easily frightened . She was reserved, did not express her opinions easily, assumed nobody was ever talking to her, and didn’t like introducing herself to people. Violet was the sort of person that had to be dragged into a social setting and coerced into interacting, but when she did so the people with whom she interacted usually wondered why the person who had coerced her to do so had bothered.

Vi was home-schooled. She moved into town six years ago, and as Annie liked to joke, if she hadn’t discovered Violet, nobody would know she existed other than her parents. It probably wasn’t true, but it wasn’t that far off either. Vi didn’t hang out with any kids her own age unless she was with Annie, and the only time she ever went into town was to hang out with Annie.

All of which made Annie feel as if she had a responsibility to get others to notice Violet. She appreciated that to a certain extent some people were just by nature unsociable and introverted, and as a highly sociable extrovert she would never entirely understand her friend’s issues. Telling her to just be friendly and all that was probably not helping.

Annie still did it more often than she probably should. Violet was the smartest person she knew, and Annie knew a lot of smart people. (Annie was, by her own estimation, extremely smart. Violet was smarter.) If Violet were in the public school system a lot more people would know this about her, and then maybe Annie wouldn’t have to spend as much time convincing other people how cool her friend was.

“It’s kind of amateurish, really,” Vi said. “The color composition is terrible, and the artistic style… I mean, what is he even doing with his…”

“The pelvic thrust for Jesus, right here?”

“Yes, the groin region. Someone rewrote a lot of history there.”

“He did take several wives, maybe the man had the goods.”

“I think it’s more of a Methuselah touch.”

“Explain.”

“All the exceptionally wise men in the Old Testament ended up living extra-long lives. It was an artistic flourish to put a number behind exactly how wise they were.”

“Methuselah didn’t actually live nine hundred years?”

Annie began singing It Ain’t Necessarily So… in her head, which was a little curious only because while she knew the song was a show tune from Porgy and Bess , she didn’t know how she knew that or when she ever heard the song.

Probably something we watched together , she decided.

She and her mother were always catching up on something older than Annie, and sometimes older than either of them.

“It was nine hundred and sixty-nine years. And no. If he was lucky, he lived to sixty-nine.”

“I am shocked… shocked … that you would suggest a non-literal interpretation of the Bible. In front of Josiah no less. And his enormous member.”

“I’m pretty sure Josiah was sicklier than that too. He was seizure-prone and probably had syphilis.”

“Source, please.”

“Half of the Sorrowers were dead in a year from it and he had multiple wives. And it wasn’t like they picked it up from the Indians.”

“Native Americans, please.”

“Noted.”

“The court finds your argument in favor of Josiah Sorrow having syphilis unconvincing.”

“On what grounds?”

“Speculation!”

She banged a hardbound copy of Essentials of Gardening on the counter to gavel home her judgment.

“If it pleases the court, what time is the judge getting the heck out of this place?”

“I can leave whenever. Nobody’s here.”

This was a common fact of the library, especially in the summer, when the high school that stood behind it and up the hill about a quarter of a mile wasn’t in session. Annie went between deciding that was sad, and not worrying much about it. A lot of books could be found online nowadays, so what could have been interpreted as a lessening of interest in reading was maybe actually a change in the way information was obtained.

True, there were a lot of books that weren’t available in any form other than print. The Sorrow Falls library had plenty of such books, and if it did—it was not in any real sense a large collection—there had to be a ton of such books out there. At the same time, a whole bunch of those books were perfectly dreadful. They were as relevant as historical artifacts, perhaps, like Methuselah’s exaggerated age, but not as valuable resources in and of themselves. They had meta-historical value, at most.

“So what are my reasons for closing early?” Annie asked. “What do you have for me that could be better than this?”

She waved her hand at Josiah’s package.

“I have the car, and cash, and the sun is still out.”

“Oooh!”

“Does it please the court?”

“It pleases the court immensely.”

ANNIE HAD A DRIVER’S LICENSE. She got it as soon as it was legally possible to do so, even though she had almost no use for one, because there was only one car in the family. Annie only drove it once, on the occasion in which she got her license. Since then, she’d driven Violet’s family car twice and that was all. It was okay; she didn’t enjoy the experience—it looked much easier when other people did it—but thought that this was perhaps because she wasn’t a particularly good driver.

Violet, on the other hand, seemed to have access to the car whenever she wanted, and was clearly a better driver. Annie only sort-of knew Violet’s parents and certainly not well enough to ask them what they did for a living or why that existence didn’t require them use of the car, but that was clearly the case. Her mother—Susan—mostly stayed at home, and her father—Todd—seemed to have the kind of job that used a company car and had him leaving for extended periods, but beyond that it was an Adult Thing. Annie knew about plenty of Adult Things in the town, but this was one she never tried understanding.