When we were little kids, Brian and Emily and I thought the underground passageway that connects the basement to my dad’s workshop was the coolest thing ever. If it was raining or snowing, we could actually walk underneath the earth from the house to the shop. Dad kept a potbellied stove burning on the coldest days, and he’d let us hang out with him if we swept up the ashes and brought in the firewood.
I wasn’t ever supposed to go in there when he wasn’t around, which of course I did. How else was I going to learn about girls and sex? Dad never cleared the cache in his computer, so I could look at all the porn he looked at.
I also learned about the Universe. Dad and I had our own telescopes so we could look at the stars side by side. On his walls were celestial maps and charts, miraculous photos from the Hubble, and a poster signed by Ray Bradbury. The shop was a mini observatory, a weird combination of Hollywood and NASA. For all of my father’s interest in the sky and aliens, he still had a fanboy’s obsession. It wasn’t enough for him to believe a ship had landed in the field next to his house. He needed everyone else to believe it too.
And I did. For a long time, I believed.
Leaving the basement through the secret passageway makes me feel like I’m nine again, giggling with Brian and Em as we sneak underground. I’m about two feet taller now, though, so I have to bend over at the waist to avoid hitting my head on the ceiling of the tunnel. It’s dark in here but I know every step, every inch of the way. When I get to the halfway point between shop and house, I stop and place my hands on the stone ceiling, pressing upward. We used to pretend we could hold the Earth high above our heads; we were superheroes of the underworld.
It could have been a claustrophobic feeling in that tunnel, the thought of tons of dirt on top of us, but it wasn’t. It made me feel safe and secure, although maybe it was having my best friends with me that made me feel that way.
The shop itself is just a small shed with a concrete floor and stone walls, and it’s partially built into a mound of earth in the side yard. From the outside it kind of looks like a hobbit’s home, but I seriously doubt Granddad used Tolkien as his architectural inspiration. More likely, it helped the insulation, keeping it cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
I involuntarily shudder when I step into the shop. It’s chilly here, yes, but it’s also like stepping back in time. So much of what I remember from my childhood is still here: the posters, the maps, the charts, the stove. But something is missing.
The telescope. There’s only one—mine.
Dad must have taken his with him.
As much as I didn’t believe his bullshit anymore, as much as I wanted him to be a regular dad I could count on . . . there’s something really sad about seeing my telescope sitting by itself next to the woodstove.
It looks . . . lonely.
Something sinks into my stomach then, and I feel my muscles tighten around it, squeeze it, crush it. I have to be glad he’s gone. I have to believe it will be better for Mom. For both of us. For everyone.
A chart on the wall catches my eye, one of the few he left behind. It’s a map of potentially habitable planets in what’s called the Goldilocks Zone. An exoplanet has to be in just the right place in order for life—as we know it—to form there. A dwarf planet like Pluto, for instance, is too far away from our sun to support life. It’s an icy rock with a surface temperature of minus 387 degrees Fahrenheit. Still other planetoids, like our moon, are tidal-locked, so one hemisphere is always facing the object it’s connected to gravitationally. With our moon, that means one half of it never sees the Earth. That’s the dark side of the moon.
Aaaannnd . . . how do I still know all this?
Why did it stick in my brain?
I don’t want it there, not any more than I want phone numbers of friends who moved away in my cell phone. Makes me wish I could stick a jump drive into my ear and suck out all the useless information. Maybe then I’d have room for English lit.
I stare at the chart, where Gliese 581c and Kepler-69c are crossed out. Both were once considered options for habitability, but no longer. At least not according to whoever designed this chart.
I run my finger along the poster, tapping each of the exoplanets in turn. Every one of them is classified according to how Earth-like it is as well as how far from us it is. Some of the exoplanets that scientists consider the most likely to be habitable are hundreds of billions of miles away. Those Star Trek crews would have to boldly go pretty damn far to find anything or anyone remotely like us.
Unless, of course, they come to us.
Which is exactly what my father and all his wack-job friends believe happened.
Online, DJ Jones is a minor crazy among an entire internet filled with crazies—legions of UFO chasers and self-professed alien abductees who DJ wrote to and chatted with every day. Like him, they believe we’re not alone in this universe.
When I was a kid, I loved learning about the stars and the Milky Way. I loved watching Captains Kirk and Picard and Janeway whoosh from quadrant to quadrant on the Enterprise, and I loved reading The Martian Chronicles.
It was science. It was real. And what was fiction was science fiction.
But Dad went beyond that at some point.
When Mom and I weren’t looking, he began to engage in conspiracy theories online. He egged his fans on, and they followed him from Twitter to his own blog. He was the Boy Who Was Born Next to a Spaceship Landing. He was Special. He was Blessed by Aliens.
It seemed like, in the blink of an eye, Dad became self-centered and egotistical. He never thought about me or Mom or Uncle Jack anymore. And what kind of a person prefers talking crap online with strangers to working and raising a family? What kind of a person takes off with his brother’s wife?
The kind that we’re better off without (#ibelieve).
Good riddance.
But something else feels weird in this workshop. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe something is out of place. My telescope, maybe? It looks clean, the layers of dust wiped from the tripod and tube. My dad must have done that, hoping I’d come back someday.
I continue to poke around until I give up. I’m not sure what’s bothering me about the place. I take one last glance around the workshop and snap off the light.
No lockbox.
I’m done.
It’s done.