Gene Doucette: The Spaceship Next Door

“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.”

“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.

A lot had been written about that year, some of it good, most of it pop psychology of the worst sort. All the analyses worked with the same thesis: the modern psyche was more fragile than anyone imagined, and all it took to reveal that was an alien ship that didn’t even do anything. Mostly, they proved only that the best history was the kind written long after the fact.

Three years later, there was still a higher-than-average suicide rate internationally, and one or two major religions continued to cope poorly— do aliens have souls was becoming a large enough topic of dispute to cause a philosophical schism in Christianity, and was the basis of two new major cults—but overall there was no longer the sense that the entire planet was resting on the edge of a cliff.

Ed thought that was probably healthy. He also thought it was a little soon to stop worrying about the ship.

MAIN STREET DID SORT of sit on the edge of a cliff, if one looked at it from a purely geographic perspective. The SUV—in a slow crawl down the street thanks in part to a traffic light every fifty feet—came to just past the halfway point, where southern edge of the gigantic Hollis Paper Mill could be seen on the left.