The Indestructible Man (13 page)

“No kidding. Did she get that from the school counselor, or did she come up with it herself?”

“This is serious. If you aren’t interested, I’ll go alone.”

“No, I’ll come.” I find it hard to imagine anything seriously wrong with him; he took the divorce as well as could be expected, and he is still a few years away from discovering girls or drugs. But with Margot everything is the end of the world.

She sniffles into the receiver, and for a minute I feel some obligation to help calm her. “He’s a good kid. It can’t be that bad.”

“I hope you’re right,” she says. “Tomorrow at four.”

I hang up, stare at the phone in my hand. For a moment I envision Adam spouting alien curses at his teacher, but I know he is too smart for that. I tell myself it is nothing serious—just a reaction to the divorce, the move, the new school.

“Trouble at home?” Mr. Stevens asks.

“It’s nothing,” I say, and lead them down to the water.

When I get to the school
Margot’s car is already there. I reach Adam’s classroom to find Margot and Mrs.
Barczak
sitting at the desk, drinking coffee and chatting. The birthmark looks more like Texas than Alaska, but I try not to stare. She invites me to sit down; she and Margot have taken the only two adult-sized seats in the room, so I ease into an ancient plastic chair scaled for a fourth-grader, knees hiked up to my chest.

 
“Mrs.
Barczak
and I had an interesting talk,” Margot says, sipping at her Styrofoam cup. I can smell cigarette smoke on her breath; she must have started again.

“Yes,” Mrs.
Barczak
says. “As I was telling Ms. Abelson, Adam has started drifting off in class—he looks out the window, doesn’t pay attention, and doodles during class time. Yesterday after school I found these in his desk.” She pulls out a spiral notebook full of pencil drawings. “I’m not sure what they are, but he seems to be spending a lot of time on them.” She hands me the notebook. I instantly recognize Adam’s planetary charts and frequency lists, but pretend to flip through the pages. “Never seen them before.” I offer them to Margot; when she declines I know she has already seen them.

“He spends most of the day either drawing these or staring at them,” Mrs.
Barczak
says. “Some of the other children have also been giving him a hard time lately. Last week I had to separate Adam from another boy who was calling him names—‘space cadet,’ to be specific.”

I feel a hard lump at the base of my throat, and loosen my tie. “Isn’t that your responsibility?” I ask, and decide to teach him to box at some point. “You can’t just let the other kids hassle him.”

Mrs.
Barczak
smiles at me as if I am one of her ten-year-olds. “Sometimes new students get picked on for a while,” she says. “We try to step in, of course, but it usually ends after the first couple of weeks. In Adam’s case, it’s actually gotten worse. Apparently he’s been telling his classmates he built a radio that lets him talk to space aliens.”

“Do you know anything about this?” Margot asks, her face expressionless, and I know this has become an interrogation.

Since they both know, there is no point in being evasive. “It’s just a game,” I tell them. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

“Mr. Green,” Mrs.
Barczak
says, “Adam is extremely bright, but I’m concerned he’s taking this ‘game’ a bit too far. It’s affecting his schoolwork and his relationships with other children, and it could be a sign of some larger problem—depression, or a learning disability.”

“What should we do?” Margot asks.

“I’d like him to speak to the school psychologist,” Mrs.
Barczak
says. “She can get a better idea of what the problem is.”

“I really don’t think that’s necessary. If you just talk to him—”

Margot cuts me off. “Our son thinks he’s talking to Martians, and you just want to let him carry on like it’s perfectly normal? You should have put a stop to this a long time ago.”

“It’s the most interest he’s shown in anything in months.”

She looks at me sadly, and for a second I see moisture gathering in her eyes. “It isn’t healthy. Something might really be wrong with him.”

I would like to tell her I heard
something
, that Adam is not completely deluded. “But he’s
happy
.”

Margot sighs. “We can’t let him go on like this.” She turns to Mrs.
Barczak
. “We’ll bring him in.”

Just before we meet with the school psychologist
, I lead Adam into the boys’ restroom. I tell him this will be over quickly if he says he was only playing a game, and his imagination got the better of him.

“But Dad,” he says, “I heard them. I talked to them. And so did you, even though I know you won’t admit it in front of Mom.”

I straighten out his shirt collar. “I don’t know what I heard.”

“That psychologist can’t make me say I didn’t. Neither can Mom. Besides, I can prove it.” He pulls a mini-cassette from his pocket.

“What is that?”

 
“I recorded them last weekend. When they hear this, they’ll have to believe me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” I warn him.

“But it’s the truth.”

I nod and do not argue; he is determined to tell his story, and nothing I say will change his mind.

The school psychologist
asks us to call her Miss Martha. She is very young, a year or two out of grad school at most. She is wearing a long denim skirt and her hair is in dreadlocks. The office walls are lined with posters bearing smiling cartoon animals, each with a gratingly positive caption:
You are special
;
There’s no one else like you
;
Smile and the world will smile back
. For the moment Margot and I are allowed to stay; we sit on either side of Adam on the orange suede couch.

Miss Martha pulls up a chair and sits facing Adam, a yellow legal pad across her lap. His whole body tenses up when she comes near, but he soon begins to relax.

“Mrs.
Barczak
tells me you’re very involved with some kind of game, maybe more than you should be.”

“It isn’t a game,” Adam says plainly.

“Adam,” Miss Martha says, leaning closer to him, “Sometimes our imagination runs away with us, and it’s hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t. It happens to grown-ups, too.”

“But this isn’t my imagination,” he says. “This could be important.”

Miss Martha smiles sweetly. “So you’ve been talking to aliens from outer space?”

Adam looks at me, then his mother. “Tell her the truth, dear,” Margot says, smiling tensely. She wants him to say he was just pretending so we can go home. But I know he won’t.

“Yes,” Adam says.

Miss Martha’s smile disappears for an instant. “But Adam,” she says. “You’re a very bright young man. You know aliens aren’t
real
.”

He seems astonished by her ignorance. “How can you say that?”

“Adam,” Margot starts to warn him, but Miss Martha urges her to let him speak.

Even before Miss Martha answers I know she is hopelessly out of her depth; he has absorbed information from dozens of astronomy guides and PBS documentaries, and we have had these debates before.

“Well, for starters,” she says, “we’ve never seen any.”

Adam sighs, looks at her as if she is a dense child. “We’ve never seen black holes, either, but we know they’re real. Besides, there are millions of stars just like the sun, and we know some have planets. We
know
. Some of them could be like Earth.”

Miss Martha’s lips curl inward and she jots a few notes in her pad, regrouping. “But Adam,” she begins again, “if you really are talking to aliens, why are you the only one who can hear them?”

He rubs his chin, takes a deep breath. “I
kinda
wondered about that too,” he says. “I guess I was the only one listening. The big radio telescopes can pick up a lot more, but they usually look for signals far out in space. This one’s close.”

I try to stifle a grin; if my son is a lunatic, he is a smart one.

Miss Martha crosses off a note in her pad. “Sounds like a big discovery. Any reason you haven’t shared it yet? With someone besides your classmates, that is.”

He smiles proudly. “I’ve written down all the frequencies where I heard them. I’m going to call somebody when I figure out where their ship is.”

“Adam, stop it,” Margot says, suppressing tears. Her face is pasty white; her thin, spidery fingers clutch the upholstery. “You can’t really believe all this.” She glares at me as if to say,
This is all your fault
.

“But I can prove it,” he says. He pulls his tape recorder from his pocket and presses the play button. For a few seconds, I hear a conversation, the ‘aliens’ trying to teach Adam their language. The voice is familiar, but there are others too, their words made up of sounds I have never heard from a human throat.

With a trembling hand Margot snatches the tape recorder and shuts it off. “This is ridiculous,” she says.

He glances at me, about to ask for backup, and I try to think of some way to explain this that will not land me in court. Margot would love an excuse to “revisit” our custody agreement, an unspoken threat she carries like a gun.

Miss Martha comes to the rescue. “Adam, you haven’t really made friends here yet, have you?”

Adam rolls his eyes and sighs deeply. “I guess not. But what’s that got to do with the aliens?”

“It can be hard not having someone to talk to. With your parents split up, it must be even harder. Don’t you ever feel lonely or sad?”

 
He shakes his head sadly. “You’re not even listening to me. You think I’m just making this up, like an imaginary friend.”

“Adam,” Margot says sternly.

“It’s all right,” Miss Martha says. “If you don’t mind,” she says, turning to Margot, “I’d like to talk to Adam alone for a few minutes.” She gestures toward the door.

“You see how far you’ve let this go?” Margot whispers as we step out into the hall and Miss Martha closes the door behind us. “Why didn’t you stop it? Guilt?”

“Go to hell,” I whisper back. I kneel in front of the door, press my ear to the wood.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Margot says.

“What does it look like?” I say, and wave her over.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Margot says, then kneels down next to me.