The Fellowship for Alien Detection (16 page)

Such had been Harry Lane's attempt to capitalize on the big real estate bubble a few years ago. Orca View Estates was supposed to be twenty-six luxury homes descending a gentle slope of sustainably harvested forest in a soothing S and ending at a private beach with a clubhouse and a heated pool. There would even be real sand volleyball courts. Each house would be modern and spacious and filled with a bright young family seeking community and solitude. Meticulous landscaping, magical lights at the holidays . . .

It was supposed to be.

But Harry's timing had been six months off, and the market had collapsed. Only one house had been completed, Number One Orca View. Dodger lived there. Number Two had been started and abandoned. The street only extended twenty feet beyond its lot, and at the end was a heaped pile of sand, now green with blackberry, that had once been the perfect fine white for beach volleyball.

Lane Real Estate was gone, too, and now Harry worked at
Viva Value!
It had taken a lot of wrangling for him to get these two weeks off in prime summertime, and so Dodger knew that meant they had to “Make the Most of It” and that they were “On the Clock,” and yet here he was, hiding out next door when his dad was ready to go.

Dodger actually did want to go on the trip. In fact, he really wanted to go, to do his field study, to research the theory that had won him the Fellowship for Alien Detection. The fact that he was actually associating the words
want
and
research
, an academic word, had been enough to win his mom's support for the idea, and one of Harry's famous looking-to-the-left shrugs. And yet that was the problem: Going on the trip meant being in the car for two weeks with his dad. Mom couldn't go. Her firm had just started a big trial.

What would they talk about? When did they ever sustain more than a two-minute conversation? And those were only ever about current events in space science, the one place where Dodger's and Harry's interests actually converged, albeit only somewhat, like two ships passing in a fog, briefly visible to each another as ghostly lights.

Those conversations went something like:

Harry (
innocently
): Hey, did you hear about that new Mars probe?

Dodger (
tentative
): Yeah, it . . . sounds cool.

Harry (
possibly interested
): It's apparently got tools for trying to find microbes up there.

Dodger (
optimistic
): Yeah, they think with the subsurface ice, there could be actual life.

Harry (
like Harry
): Well, it's not exactly little green men, but hey, it's not my money.

Dodger (
shrugging
): Yeah.

And that would be that. How would they possibly manage two weeks—three hundred and thirty-six hours—together?

And yet, not going was no longer an option. Not just because Dodger had actually managed to win this fellowship (“I know,” Harry would say, “who'd'a thunk, right?”), and not just because all that annuity money was on the line (“A big chunk of student loans,” Harry would say, “if somebody ever decides to get his act together for college,”), and not even because of the aforementioned two weeks of
prime
vacation time (“Say good-bye to Maui
this
year.” They'd never been to Maui), or even just the general notion that Dodger could win something. (Harry had a lot of sayings for this, like back in the unfortunate soccer era: “My boy's not exactly what you'd call clutch,” or, after the incident with the football tryout: “He's just never been very aware of himself in space.”)

In all of those past moments, Dodger felt like he could have saved Harry the disappointment by telling him beforehand that things weren't going to go well. But Harry always seemed to think that if they just found the right outlet, the right fix, then Dodger might stop being a sullen, lonely kid who slouched around like a marionette, and become a real boy. Dodger didn't buy it. He felt like he couldn't have done all those things well even if he'd wanted to. It was like something inside him didn't work right, or like he was stuck inside the wrong life, one that was a size too big and fit him all wrong. And that was the biggest reason why he knew he
had
to go on this trip, a quiet painful certainty that he felt deep inside:
because I don't know if I can survive staying here
.

It was a feeling that seemed to be getting worse this last year. Maybe it was the idea of high school coming up. Dodger didn't know who he wanted to be, couldn't picture a future with him in it. And this fellowship might be his only hope for fixing that.

But before he was going to strap himself into the car beside his dad, he needed some inspiration, or maybe
assurance
was the right word. That was why he was over here in Number Two hiding out.

He'd already tried looking at his maps. Usually some time spent with his favorites did the trick. There was French Polynesia and the Cook Islands, a polar view of the Arctic Circle, satellite map of Mars, schematic of ancient Rome. . . . These maps always took him away, not just out of this house or Port Salmon, but out of his life completely. He could imagine himself as someone else entirely, perhaps with a name like Stefanos or John Carlton Wescott, perhaps with a fair dame he'd rescued from savages along the way or even just a cool, quick-witted dog. No matter the specifics, he would always be off exploring, seeking out new worlds, hidden archipelagos, lost caverns, solitary nooks in ancient temples. In short, places to call his own.

The maps weren't working today, though, not even the one he was using for his upcoming field study, which showed the greater American West. Sure, it held the promise of the mystery that he'd discovered, the theory that had won him the fellowship, but right now he needed to be sure that mystery was real, and not just something he'd made up.

And so he dropped his head and started pressing against his temples again. He closed his eyes and searched in the dark, trying to get away from the outside world, the leaking of the unfinished house, the humming of cars and scurrying of rats, searching. . . .

And then he felt a strange, tight sensation, like he was being yanked out of his own head and traveling through a hollow black space. Suddenly there was an earsplitting voice—

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! This is DJ Alpine at KJPR and it's a beautiful spring day here in Juliette! The forecast calls for partly cloudy skies with a forty percent chance of UFO sightings, hey-o!”

The voice lit up his mind, syrupy and electric. Dodger felt himself sinking into it. A peaceful feeling washing over him as the DJ continued. A DJ on a radio station he could hear in his head, from a town called Juliette.

A town that, as far as Dodger could tell, didn't exist.

Port Salmon, WA, July 3, 3:47 p.m.

“You just heard three in a row by Pluto's Fancy, and coming up we've got a brand-new smash by those visitors from another planet, the Orbiters!”

There was a swell of static and the voice retreated, like a wave rushing away from him. Dodger pressed harder on his temples, squeezed his eyes tighter, trying to look into the black behind his mind and find the radio station again.

It had started a little over a year ago, or maybe longer than that. Dodger couldn't be sure because it used to be something that only happened during dreams. Dodger would wake up with memories of this exact voice, this DJ Alpine and his radio broadcast, from somewhere called Juliette. He'd thought it curious even when he'd assumed it was just something his subconscious had created. Usually the radio voice would be part of some larger dream where Dodger would be in these familiar and yet unknown places: a weird murky collage with vacant black borders, the way dreams usually were. Dodger figured the radio was another symbol of this ideal, unknown place he was hoping to find for himself.

Still, some things had been consistent in most all of the dreams with the radio voice, things like the sunny spring weather and the distant mountain covered in snow. There were other images, too, like dark corridors that were maybe caves, and a weird orange light. It made Dodger wonder if his brain was trying to tell him something.

He'd even started drawing his own map of this dream place called Juliette. It had been fun, re-creating that world, an even more satisfying escape than the South Pacific or Patagonia. This place was all his, a world of his own creation.

But that had all changed last fall, when the radio station suddenly started, or more accurately, tuned in, while Dodger was wide awake. The first time it happened, he'd been sitting in the middle of class, decorating one of his book covers. He used duplicate maps to cover his books, and he'd been drawing a serpent curving in and out of the South China Sea, when
Bzzt!
KJPR had started broadcasting in his mind.

Dodger had looked up in a panic, but around him class had been proceeding as usual, with all the other heads hunched over a social studies text and Mr. Laramee droning on. Dodger could see his classroom, but the sounds of the world were gone, replaced by DJ Alpine. Actually, class hadn't continued as usual for very long, because heads slowly started turning in Dodger's direction. He didn't understand why until he caught his neighbor Sadie glancing underneath his desk. When he looked down, he saw that his legs were twitching and his feet were tapping rapidly against the tile floor. It took all of his concentration to get that under control.

There had also been tears coming out of his eyes, and apparently his hair had been kind of floating like someone had rubbed a balloon against his head. This caused a few smirks and whispers among neighbors.

“What?” Dodger had tried to say, and the radio voice had suddenly cut out, leaving Dodger empty, spent, and lonely feeling. And then class had proceeded.

Since then, the station had arrived in his head in one of two ways: either randomly, and in these cases Dodger had learned to recognize the signs that it was coming—teeth chattering, tingly fingers, the urge to pee—and either get to a solitary place or at least brace for it. Or he could tune it in as he was doing now, by concentrating and searching. He couldn't always find it; sometimes weeks went by with no signal, and Dodger would feel certain that it had left him forever. This thought made a hollow pit form inside him, but the radio always returned.

“First let's check in with Dan Spirit for a look at the weekend weather. . . . Okay, looks like we'll have a little cold front blowing through later this evening, and maybe even one last April snow squall. Oh, and one more thing, when you're out and about today, be sure to watch out for all those construction sites in the roadways. Rumor has it, all the cable lines in town are being upgraded.”

Dodger knew that hearing a radio station in his head was in no way normal, and yet, when it was broadcasting, it didn't
feel
weird. If anything, it felt familiar, even comforting, like he somehow knew this voice or this place.

But that was where it got really weird. Once Dodger started hearing the station while he was awake, he'd also started trying to figure out where it was coming from. He'd pored over his extensive collection of United States maps, looking for a town called Juliette. And he found one almost immediately. The problem was, the Juliette he'd found was in Georgia, and besides the fact that the radio in his head was always mentioning canyons and mountains, Dodger also knew that radio station call signs east of the Mississippi began with a
W
. The
K
in KJPR meant that this Juliette was somewhere out west. . . . But there wasn't one. Anywhere. As far as Dodger could tell, the town of Juliette that he heard in his head did not exist in the real world.

Another strange fact about the radio station was that the broadcast Dodger heard was always from the same day: April twenty-fifth, over and over, like the station was on a loop. But not a full-day loop: Sometimes Dodger heard the Juliette morning show late at night, and vice versa.

All of these oddities had led to a disturbing possibility: What if this radio really was all in his mind? Like he was going crazy, his brain malfunctioning?

The one thing that had saved Dodger from diagnosing himself as insane had been winning the FAD. He'd run into the application while reading accounts of alien abductions on a website called We Are the Missing. He'd found that website when he was searching for Juliette online. It had been the source of the only two references that seemed promising.

The first was on a message board of posts under the heading:
“Anybody else hearing voices?”
Far down that very odd thread, there had been a woman in her eighties who lived in a nursing home in Tulsa and claimed that a voice in her head named B. J. Carmine sang her to sleep each night. He was from the Big War, and he called her Julianne. . . . B. J. Carmine and Julianne . . . not too different from DJ Alpine and Juliette.

But it was the second message board that was more promising. This comment thread was titled
“Anybody hearing aliens on their radio?”
and here were a number of posts about people tuning in weird voices from the stars. Buried in this thread was a comment and a series of replies that looked like this:

Thanksforthefish42:

Anyone else tried the PhoneHome radio that EyesOnTheStars sells on EBay? Am getting some kind of strange radio signal from some place called Juliette. DJ is corny LOL but I can't figure out what it is. Maybe hoax or what???