THE SURFER

Kelly Link

In the dream I was being kidnapped by aliens. I was dreaming, and then I woke up.

Where was I? Someplace I wasn’t supposed to be, so I decided to stand up and take a look around, but there was no room and I couldn’t stand up after all. My legs. And I was strapped in. I was holding on to something. A soccer ball. It slid out of my hands and into the narrow space in front of me, and it took two tries to hook it up again with my feet. The floor kept moving up and down, and my hands were floppy.

“One more pill, Dorn. Oops. Here. Have another one. Want some water?”

I had a sip of water. Swallowed. I was in a little seat. A plane? I was on a plane. And we were way up. The clouds were down. There was a woman who looked like my mother, except she wasn’t. “Let me take that,” she said. “I’ll put it up above for you.”

I didn’t want to give it to her. Even if she did look like my mother.

“Come on, Dorn.” My father again. Wasn’t he supposed to be at the hospital today? I’d been at soccer practice. I was in my soccer clothes. Cleats and everything. “Dorn?” I ignored him. He said to the woman, “Sorry. He took some medication earlier. He’s a bad flier.”

“I’m not,” I said. “A bad flier.” I was having a hard time with my mouth. I tried to remember some things. My father had come by in his car. And I’d gone to see what he wanted. He was going to drive me home even though practice wasn’t. Wasn’t over. I drank something he gave me. Gatorade. That had been a mistake.

I said, “I’m not on a plane. This isn’t a plane and you’re not my mother.” I didn’t sound like me.

“Poor kid,” the woman said. The floor bounced. If this was a plane, then she was a something. A flight attendant. “Wouldn’t he be more comfortable if I stowed that up above for him?”

“I think he’ll be fine.” My father again. I kept my arms around my. My soccer ball. Keeping my shoulders forward. Hunched so nobody could take it. From me. Nobody ever got a soccer ball away from me.

“You gave me Gatorade,” I said. The Gatorade had had something. In it. Everything I ought to know was broken up. Fast and liquid and too close up and then slow like an instant. Replay. My lips felt mushy and warm, and the flight attendant just looked at me like I was drooling. I think I was.

“Dorn,” my father said. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Saturday,” I said. Our first big match and I was missing practice. My head went forward and hit the soccer ball. I felt the flight attendant’s fingers on my forehead.

“Poor kid,” she said.

I lifted up my head. Tried as hard as I could. To make her understand me. “Where. This flight. Is it going.”

“Costa Rica,” the flight attendant said.

“You,” I said to my father. “I. Will never. Forgive. You.” The floor tilted and I went down.

When I woke up we were in Costa Rica, and I remembered exactly what my father had done to me. But it was too late to do anything about it. By then everything had changed because of a new flu scare. Costa Rica could have turned the plane around, but I guess by that point we couldn’t have gotten back into the States. They’d shut down all the airports, everywhere. We went straight into quarantine. Me, my father, the flight attendant who didn’t look anything like my mother, after all, and all the other people on the plane.

There were guards wearing N95 masks and carrying machine guns to make sure we all got on a bus. Once we were seated, a man who really needed a shave boarded and stood at the front. He wore an N95 mask with a shiny, tiny mike-pen clipped to it. He held up his gloved hands for silence. Sunlight melted his rubbery fingers into lozenges of pink taffy.

People put down their cells and their googlies. I’d checked my cell and discovered three missed calls, all from my coach, Sorken. I didn’t check the messages. I didn’t even want to know.

In the silence you could hear birds and not a lot else. No planes taking off. No planes landing. You could smell panic and antibacterial potions. Some people had been traveling with disposable masks, and they were wearing them now. My father always said that those didn’t really do much.

The official waited a few more seconds. The skin under his eyes was grayish and pouched. He said, “It’s too bad, these precautions that we must take, but it can’t be helped. You will be our guests for a short period of observation. Without this precaution, there will be unnecessary sickness. Deaths that could be prevented. You will be given care if you become ill. Food and drink and beds. And in a few days, when all have been given a clean bill of health, we will let you continue with your business, your homecoming, your further travel arrangements. You have questions, but I have no time for them. Excuse me. Please do not attempt to leave this bus or to go away. The guards will shoot you if you cannot be sensible.”

Then he said the whole speech all over again in Spanish. It was a longer speech this time. Nobody protested when he disembarked and our bus started off to wherever they were taking us.

“Did you understand any of that? The Spanish?” my father asked. And that was the first thing he said to me, except for what he’d said on the plane, when it landed. He’d said, “Dorn, wake up. Dorn, we’re here.” He’d been so excited that his voice broke when he said here.

“If I did,” I said. “Why would I tell you?” But I hadn’t. I was taking Japanese as my second language.

“Well,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. And don’t worry too much about the machine guns. They have the safeties on.”

“What do you know about machine guns?” I said. “Never mind. You got us into this situation. You kidnapped me.”

“What was I supposed to do, Dorn?” he said. “Leave you behind?”

“I have a very important match tomorrow,” I said. “Today. In Glenside.” I had my soccer ball wedged between my knees and the back of the seat in front of me. I was wearing my cleats and soccer clothes from the day before. For some reason that made me even more furious.

“Don’t worry about the match,” my father said. “Nobody is going to be playing soccer today. Or anytime soon.”

“You knew about this, didn’t you?” I said. I knew that doctors talked to each other.

“Keep your voice down,” my father said. “Of course I didn’t.”

There was a girl across the aisle from us. She kept looking over, probably wondering if I had this new flu. She was about my height and at least twice my weight. A few years older. Bleached white hair and a round face. Cat’s-eye glasses. Her skin was very tan, and she wasn’t wearing a disposable mask. Her lips were pursed up and her eyebrows slanted down. I looked away from her and out the window.

Everything outside the bus was saturated with color. The asphalt deep purplish brown. The sky such a thick, wet blue you expected it to come off on the bus and the buildings. A lizard the size of my forearm, posed like a hood ornament on the top of a Dumpster, shining in the sun like it had been wrought of beaten silver, and its scales emeralds and topazes, gemstone parings. Off in the distance were bright feathery trees, some fancy skyscrapers, the kind you see on souvenir postcards, mountains on either side of us, cloud-colored, looking like special effects.

I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs my father had given me, or if this was just what Costa Rica looked like. I looked around the bus at the other passengers in their livid tropical prints and their blank, white, disposable masks, at the red filaments of stubble on my father’s face, pushing out of his skin like pinprick worms. So okay. It was the drugs. I felt like someone in one of my father’s Philip K.

Dick paperback science fiction novels. Kidnapped? Check. In a strange environment and unable to trust the people that you ought to be able to rely on, say, your own father? Check. On some kind of hallucinogenic medication? Check. Any minute now I would realize that I was really a robot. Or God.

Our bus stopped and the driver got out to have a conversation with two woman soldiers holding machine guns. There was a series of hangar buildings a few hundred yards in front of us. One of the soldiers got onto the bus and looked us over. She lifted up her N95 mask and said, “Patience, patience.” She smiled and shrugged. Then she sat down on the rail at the front of the bus with her mask on again. Everyone on the bus clicked on their cell phones again. It didn’t seem as if we were going anywhere soon.

There was a clammy breeze, and it smelled like some place I’d never been to before, and where I didn’t want to be. I wanted to lie down. I wanted a bathroom and a sink and a toothbrush. And I was hungry. I wanted a bowl of cereal. And a peanut-butter sandwich.

That girl was still looking at me.

I leaned across and said, “I’m not sick or anything, okay? My father gave me a roofie. I was at soccer practice, and he kidnapped me. I’m a goalie. I don’t even speak Spanish.” Even as I said it, I knew I wasn’t making much sense.

The girl looked at my father. He said, “True, more or less. But, as usual, Adorno is oversimplifying things.”

The girl said, “You’re here for the aliens.”

My father’s eyebrows shot up.

The fat girl said, “Well, you don’t look like UCR students. You don’t look wealthy enough to be tourists. Besides, tourist visas are hard to come by unless you’ve got a lot of money, and no offense but I don’t think so. So either you’re here because you work in the software industry or because of the aliens. And no offense, but you look more like the latter than the former.”

I said, “So which are you? Aliens or software?”

“Software,” she said, sounding a little annoyed. “Second year, full scholarship to UCR.”

About three decades ago, a software zillionaire in Taiwan had died and left all his money to the University of Costa Rica to fund a progressive institute of technology. He left them his patents, his stocks, and controlling shares in the dozen or so companies that he’d owned. Why? They’d given him an honorary degree or something. All the techie kids at my school dreamed about getting into one of the UCR programs, or else just getting lucky in the visa lottery and coming out to Costa Rica after college to work for one of the new start-ups.

“I’m Dr. Yoder,” my father said. “General practice. We’re on our way out to join Hans Bliss’s Star Friend community, as it happens. Their last doctor packed up and left two weeks ago. I’ve been in contact with Hans for a few years. We’re here at his invitation.”

Which was what he’d told me in the car when he picked me up at practice. After I’d drunk Gatorade.

“Amazing how easy it is for some rich lunatic like Bliss to get visas. I bet there are twenty people on this bus who are headed out to join Bliss’s group,” the girl said. “What I’ve never figured out is why everybody is so convinced that if the aliens come back, they’re going to show up to see Bliss. No offense, but I’ve seen him online. I watched the movie. He’s an idiot.”

My father opened his mouth and shut it again. A woman in the seat behind us leaned forward and said, “Hans Bliss is a great man.

We heard him speak in Atlanta and we just knew we had to come out here. The aliens came to him because he’s a great man. A good man.”

I had gone with my father to see Hans Bliss talk at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia last year. I had my own opinions.

The girl didn’t even turn around. She said, “Hans Bliss is just some surfer who happened to be one of a dozen people stupid enough to be out on an isolated beach during a Category 3 hurricane. It was just dumb luck that he was the one the aliens scooped up. If he’s so great, then why did they put him back down on the beach again and just take off? Why didn’t they take him along if he’s so amazing? In my opinion, you don’t get points just for being the first human ever to talk with aliens. Especially if the conversation only lasts about forty-seven minutes by everyone else’s count. I don’t care how long he says he was out there. Furthermore, you lose points if the aliens go away after talking to you and don’t ever come back again. How long has it been? Six years? Seven?”

Now the whole bus was listening, even the bus driver and the soldier with the gun. The woman behind us was probably twenty years older than my father; she had frizzy gray hair and impressive biceps. She said to the girl, “Can’t you see that people like you are the reason that the aliens haven’t come back yet? They told Bliss that they would return in the fullness of time.”

“Sure,” the girl said. You could tell she was enjoying herself. “Right after we make Bliss president of the whole wide world and learn to love each other and not feel ashamed of our bodies. When Bliss achieves world peace and we’re all comfortable walking around in the nude, even the people who are fat, like me, the aliens will come back. And they’ll squash us like bugs, or harvest us to make delicious people-burgers, or cure cancer, or bring us cool new toys. Or whatever Hans Bliss says that they’re going to do. I love Hans Bliss, okay? I love the fact that he fell in love with some aliens who swooped down one stormy afternoon and scooped him up into the sky and less than an hour later dropped him off, naked, in front of about eighteen news crews, disaster-bloggers, and gawkers, and now he’s going to wait for the rest of his life for them to come back, when clearly it was just some weird kind of one-night stand for them. It’s just so sweet.”

The woman said, “You ignorant little—”

People at the front of the bus were getting up. A man said something in Spanish, and the girl who didn’t like Bliss said, “Time to go.” She stood up.

My father said, “What’s your name?”

The soldier with the machine gun was out on the asphalt, waving us off the bus. People around us grabbed carry-on bags. The angry woman’s mouth was still working. A guy put his hand on her arm. “It’s not worth it, Paula,” he said. Neither of them were wearing face masks. He had the same frizzy hair, and a big nose, and those were his good features. You could see why he was hoping the aliens might come back. Nobody on Earth was ever going to fall in love with him.

“My name’s Naomi,” the girl said.

“Nice to meet you, Naomi,” my father said. “You’re clearly very smart and very opinionated. Maybe we can talk about this some more.”

“Whatever,” Naomi said. Then she seemed to decide that she had been rude enough. “Sure. I mean, we’re going to be stuck with each other for a while, right?”

My father motioned for her to step out in front of us. He said, “Okay, Naomi, so once I tell the people in charge here that I’m a doctor, I’m going to be busy. I’d appreciate it if you and Adorno kept an eye on each other. Okay? Okay.”

I didn’t have the energy to protest my father’s request to Naomi to babysit me. I could hardly stand up. Those drugs were still doing things to my balance. My eyes were raw, and my mouth was dry. I smelled bad, too. I stopped when we got out of the bus, just to look around, and there was the hangar in front of us and my father pushed me forward and we funneled into the hangar where there were more soldiers with guns, standing back as if they weren’t really making us do anything. Go anywhere. As if the hangar was our decision. Sun came down through oily windows high above us, and somehow it was exactly the sort of sunlight that ought to fall on you on a movie set or in a commercial while you pretend to sit on a white, sandy beach. But the hangar was vast and empty. Someone had forgotten to truck in that white sand and the palm trees and the beautiful painted background. Nobody was saying much. We just came into the hangar and stood there, looking around. The walls were cinderblock, and a warm wind came in under the corrugated roof, rattling and popping it like a steel drum. The floor was whis-pery with grit.

There were stacks of lightweight cots folded up with plastic mattresses inside the frames. Foil blankets in tiny packets. So the next thing involved a lot of rushing around and grabbing, until it became clear that there were more than enough cots and blankets, and plenty of space to spread out in. My father and I carried two cots over toward the wall farthest away from the soldiers. Naomi stuck near us. She seemed suddenly shy. She set up her cot and then flopped down on her stomach and rolled over, turned away.

“Stay here,” my father said. I watched him make his way over to a heap of old tires where people stood talking. An Asian woman with long twists of blue and blond hair took two tires, rolling them all the way back to her cot. She stacked them, and then she had a chair. She sat down in it, pulled out a tiny palmtop computer, and began to type, just like she was in an office somewhere. Other people started grabbing tires. There was some screaming and jumping around when some of the tires turned out to contain wildlife. Spiders and lizards. Kids started chasing lizards, stomping spiders.

My father came back with two tires. Then he went and got another two tires. I thought they were for me but instead he rolled them over to Naomi. He tapped her on the shoulder and she turned over, saw the tires, and made a funny little face, almost as if she were irritated with my father for trying to be nice. I knew how she felt. “Thanks,” she said.

“I’m going to go find out where the bathroom is.” I put the soccer ball down on my bed, thought about it, and picked it up again. Put it down.

“I’ll come,” my father said.

“Me too.” Naomi. She bounced a little, like she really needed the toilet.

I put my soccer ball down on the gritty concrete. Began to guide it across the hangar with my feet and my knees. My balance wasn’t great, but I still looked pretty good. Soccer is what I was made to do. Passengers in white masks, soldiers with guns turned their heads to watch me go by.

The October after I turned fourteen I became the first goalie for not one but two soccer teams: the club team that I’d belonged to for four years, and the state soccer team, which I had tried out for three days after my birthday. Only a few months later, and during state matches I was on the field more than I sat out. I had my own coach, Eduardo Sorken, a sour, bad-tempered man who was displeased when I played poorly and offered only grudging acknowledgment when I played well. Sorken had played in the World Cup for Bolivia, and when he was hard on me, I paid attention, telling myself that one day I would not only play in the World Cup but play for a winning team, which Sorken had not.

There was a smudgy black figure on the outside wall of the ranch house back in Philadelphia where I lived with my father. I’d stood up against the house and traced around my own outline with a piece of charcoal brick. I’d painted the outline in. When my father noticed, he wasn’t angry. He never got angry. He just nodded and said, “When they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, you could see the shapes of people who’d died against the buildings.” Like that’s what I’d been thinking about when I’d stood there and blackened my shape in. What I was thinking about was soccer.

When I kicked the ball, I aimed for that black silhouette of me as hard as I could. I liked the sound that the ball made against the house. If I’d knocked the house down, that would have been okay too.

I had two expectations regarding my future, both reasonable. The first, that I would one day be taller. The other, that I would be recruited by one of the top international professional leagues. I favored Italy or Japan. Which was why I was studying Japanese. Nothing made me happier than the idea of a future in which, like the present, I spent as much time as possible on a soccer field in front of a goal, doing my best to stop everything that came at me.

A pretty girl in a mask sat cross-legged on the floor of the hangar, tapping at her googly, earplugs plugged in. She stopped typing and watched me go by. I popped the ball up, let it ride up one shoulder, around my neck, and down the other arm. During flu season, up in the bleachers, during matches, everyone wore masks like hers, bumping them up to yell or knock back a drink. But our fans painted their masks with our team colors or wrote slogans on them. There were always girls who wrote DORN on the mask, and so I’d look up and see my name right there, over their mouths. It was kind of a turn-on.

Sometimes there was a scout up in the bleachers. I figured another year or two, another inch or two, and I’d slip right into that bright, deserved future. I was the future. You can’t stop the future, right? Not unless you’re a better goalie than me.

I went in a circle, came back around, making the ball spin in place. “Hey,” I said.

She gave me a little wave. I couldn’t tell whether or not she was smiling, because of the mask. But I bet you she was.

I was magic out on a field. In front of a goal. I stopped everything. I was always exactly where I needed to be. When I came forward, nobody ever got around me. I put out my hands and the ball came to me like I was yanking it through the air. I could jump straight up, so high it didn’t matter how short I was. I had a certain arrangement with gravity. I didn’t get in its way, and it didn’t get in mine. When I was asleep I dreamed about the field, the goal, the ball sailing toward me. I didn’t dream about anything else. This year, on the weekends, I’d been wearing that black silhouette away.

I stood a few feet away from the girl, letting her see how I could keep the ball up in the air, adjusting its position first with one knee, then the other, then my left foot, then my right foot, then catching it between my knees. Maybe she was a soccer fan, maybe not. But I knew I looked pretty good.

I was already a bit taller than that silhouette I’d painted. If you measure yourself in the morning, you’re always a few centimeters taller. I’m named after my mother’s father. (Italian, but you probably guessed that. Her mother was Japanese. My father, if you’re curious, is African American.) I never met my grandfather, although one time I’d asked my mother how tall he was. He wasn’t. I wish they’d named me after someone taller. My father is six foot three.

I circled back one more time, went wide around my father and Naomi. The little lizard-chasing, spider-stomping kids were still running around in the hangar. Some of them were now wearing the foil blankets like capes. I kicked the ball to a little girl and she sent it right back. Not too bad. I was feeling much better. Also angrier.

You could have gotten half a dozen soccer matches going all at once in the hangar. According to my watch it was less than two hours until the start of the match back in Glenside. Sorken, my coach, would be wondering what had happened to me. Or he would have been, except for the flu. Matches were always being canceled because of flu or civil unrest or terror alerts. Maybe I’d be home before anyone even realized what had happened to me.

Or maybe I’d get the flu and die like my mother and brother had. That would show my father.

Along the wall closest to the hangar doors where we’d come in were the soldiers who were still guarding us. Whenever people tried to approach them, the guards waved them back again with their machine guns. The N95 masks gave them a sinister look, but they didn’t seem particularly annoyed. It was more like, Yeah, yeah, leave us alone. Scram.

The makeshift latrines were just outside the hangar. People went in and out of the hangar, got in line, or squatted on the tarmac to read their googlies.

“So you’re pretty good with that thing,” Naomi said. She got in line behind me.

“Want my autograph?” I said. “It will be worth something someday.”

There was a half-wall of corrugated tin divided up with more tin sheets into four stalls. Black plastic hung up for doors. Holes in the ground, and you could tell that they had been dug recently. There was a line. There were covered plastic barrels of water and dippers and more black plastic curtains so that you could take a sponge bath in private.

I tucked my soccer ball under my arm, took a piss, then dunked my hands into a bucket of antiseptic wash.

Back inside the hangar, airline passengers sorted through cardboard boxes full of tissue packs, packets of surgical masks, bottled water, hotel soaps and shampoos, toothbrushes. A man with an enormous mustache came up to my father with a group of people and said, “Miike says you’re a doctor?”

“Yes,” my father said. “Carl Yoder. This is my son, Dorn. I’m a G.P., but I have some experience with flu. I’ll need a translator, though. I’ve started learning Spanish recently, but I’m still not proficient.”

“We can find a translator,” the man said. “I’m Rafe Zuleta-Arango. Hotel management. You’ve already met Anya Miike”—the woman who’d made the chair out of old tires. “Tom Laudermilk. Works for a law firm in New New York. Simon Purdy, the pilot on the flight down.” My father nodded at the others. “We’ve been talking about how we ought to handle this. Almost everyone has been able to make contact with their families, to let them know the situation.”

My father said, “How bad is it? A real pandemic or just another political scare? Any reports of flu here? I couldn’t get through to my hospital. Just got a pretty vague official statement on voice mail.”

Zuleta-Arango shrugged. Miike said, “Rumors. Who knows? There are riots ongoing in the States. Calexico has shut down its borders. Potlatch Territories, too. Lots of religious nuts making the usual statements online about the will of God. According to some of the other passengers, there’s already a rumor about a new vaccine, and not enough to go around. People have started laying siege to hospitals.”

“Just like last time,” my father said. Last time had been three years ago. “Has anybody talked to the guys with the guns? I thought Costa Rica didn’t even have an army. So who are these guys?”

“Volunteers,” Zuleta-Arango said. “Mostly teachers, believe it or not. There was a quarantine situation here four months ago. Small outbreak of blue plague. Lasted about a week, and it didn’t turn into anything serious. But they know the drill. Simon and I went over and asked them a few questions. They don’t anticipate keeping us here longer than a week. As soon as someone at the terminal has sorted through the luggage, they’ll get it out here. They just need to check first for guns and contraband.”

“My kit’s in my luggage,” my father said. “I’ll set up a clinic when it shows. What about food?”

“We’ll be getting breakfast soon,” Purdy, the pilot, said. “I’ve gotten the flight crew together to set up a mess table over by the far wall. Looks like we’ve got two kerosene grills and basic staples. Hope you like beans. We’ll make an announcement about the clinic when everyone sits down to eat.”

I’d been caught in a quarantine once before, during a trip to the mall. Hadn’t turned out to be anything serious, just a college student with a rash. During the really bad flu, three years ago, I’d stayed home and played video games. My father had been stuck over at the hospital, but our refrigerator is pretty well stocked with frozen pizzas. My father stays over at the hospital all the time. I can take care of myself. When I got the e-mail about my mother and my brother, I didn’t even page him. It’s not like he could have done anything anyway. I just waited until he got home and told him then.

Lots of people died from that flu. Famous actors and former presidents and seven teachers at my school. Two kids on my soccer team. A girl named Corinne with white-blond hair who used to say, “Hey, Dorn” to me whenever I saw her in the hall at school. She came to all my games.

Our first meal in the hangar, served from a series of the largest pots I’d ever seen: reconstituted eggs and fried potatoes and lots and lots of beans. That was our second meal, too, and every meal after that, as long as we were in the hangar. Be glad that you’ve never had to live in a hangar with eighty-four people eating beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For variety, there were little fat yellow-green bananas and industrial-size jars of these rubbery, slippery cylinders that Naomi said were hearts of palm.

My father said a couple of things to me. I ignored him. So he started talking to Naomi instead, about aliens and Costa Rica.

After breakfast I went back and lay down on my cot and thought about how I was going to get home. I had made it as far as some weird place where everyone was running around, setting fire to these inflatable germ-proof houses, when I woke up, face and arms and legs stuck to the plastic mattress with sweat, confused and overheated and pissed off. I didn’t know where I was or why and then, when I did, it didn’t make me any happier. The girl Naomi was sitting on the floor beside her cot. She was reading a beat-up old paperback. I figured I knew who she’d borrowed it from.

“You missed the excitement,” she said. “Some executive type got all worked up and tried to pick a fight with the guards. He said something about how they couldn’t do this to him because he’s a U.S. citizen and he has rights. I thought we gave up those years ago. Zuleta-Arango and some of the others held him down while your father stuck him with a muscle relaxant.

“Have you read this?” she said. “I haven’t seen one of these in years. Me, reading a book. I feel so very historical. We got our luggage back, so that’s one good thing, although they’ve taken our passports away. I’ve never even heard of Olaf Stapleton. He’s pretty good. Your dad doesn’t exactly travel light. He’s got like a hundred more actual books in his luggage. And you snore.”

“I do not. Where is he?”

“Over there. In the office he set up. Taking temperatures and talking to hypochondriacs.”

“Look,” I said. “Before he comes back, we need to get something straight. You’re not my babysitter, okay?”

“Of course I’m not,” she said. “Aren’t you a little old for a babysitter? How old are you? Sixteen?”

“Fourteen,” I said. “Okay, good. That’s settled. The other thing we need to straighten out is Hans Bliss. I’m with you. He’s a loser, and I don’t want to be here. As soon as they lift quarantine, I’m calling my soccer coach back in Philadelphia so he can buy me a ticket and get me out of here.”

“Sure,” she said. “Good luck with that. It would be terrible if a global flu epidemic meant the end of your soccer career.”

“Pandemic,” I said. “If it’s global, it’s a pandemic. And they’re working on a vaccine right now. Couple of days and a couple of jabs and things will go back to normal, more or less, and I’ll go home.”

“This is home,” Naomi said. “For me.”

While she read Stapleton, I went through the luggage to see what my father had packed. The things he hadn’t: my trophies, my soccer magazines, the braided leather bracelet that a girl named Tanya gave me last year, when we were sort of going out. I liked that bracelet.

What he had packed bothered me even more than what he hadn’t, because you could tell how much time he’d spent planning this. He’d brought maybe a third of his collection of paperback SF. And in my duffel bag were my World Cup T-shirts, my palmtop, my sleeping bag, my toothbrush, two more soccer balls. An envelope of photos of my mother and of my brother, Stephen. The little glass bottle with nothing inside it that my mother gave me the last time I saw her. I wonder what my father thought when he found that glass bottle in my dresser drawer. It was the first thing he ever gave my mother. She liked to tell me that story. It didn’t work out between them, but they didn’t hate each other after the divorce, the way some parents do. Whenever they talked on the phone they laughed and gossiped about people as if they were still friends. And she never threw away that bottle of nothing. So I couldn’t, either.

My father collects books, mostly sci-fi, mostly paperbacks. Most people keep their books on a googly or a flex, but my father likes paper. I read one of his books every once in a while when I got bored. Sometimes my father had written in the margins and on the blank pages, making notes about whether these were hopeful portraits of the future, or realistic, or other stories he was reminded of. Sometimes he doodled pictures of blobby or feathery aliens or spaceships or women whose faces looked kind of like my mother’s face, except with tentacles coming out of their heads or with insect eyes, standing on pointy rocks with their arms akimbo, or sitting and holding hands with men in space suits. My father read his paperbacks over and over again, and so sometimes I left my own comments for him to find. He’d packed two suitcases for himself, and one was mostly books. I pulled out Ray Bradbury’s R Is for Rocket and wrote on the first page of the first story, down in the bottom margin, “I HATE YOU.” Then I dated it and put it back in the suitcase.

One of the two small offices in the hangar became my father’s clinic. He spent most of the day there—among the passengers on our flight there were seven diabetics, one weak heart, two pregnancies (eight months, and five months), a dozen asthmatics, a migraine sufferer, three methadone users, one prostate cancer, one guy on antipsychotic medication, and two children with dry coughs. My father set up cots in the second office for the children and their parents, reassuring them that this was only a precaution. In fact, they ought to think of it as a privilege. Everyone else was going to be camping out in the hangar.

He came back smelling of hand sanitizer and B.O. “Feeling better?” he said to me.

I’d changed T-shirts and put on some jeans, but I probably smelled just as bad. I said, “Better than what, exactly?”

“Dinner’s at seven,” Naomi said. “They divided us into meal groups while you were asleep, Dorn. Meal groups with cute names. The Two-toed Sloths—Perezosos de dos Dedos—and the Mono Congos, howler monkeys to you, and the Tucancillos. That’s us. Us Tucancillos get dinner first tonight. We’re rotating dinner slots and chores. We do the dishes tonight, too. The Mono Congos are on latrine duty. I am really not looking forward to that.”

It was beans and rice and eggs again, along with some kind of pungent, fibrous sausage. Chorizo. I loaded so much food on my plate that Naomi called me a pig. But there was plenty of food for everybody. After dinner, Naomi and I went out to wash dishes in the area that had been rigged for bathing. After I’d rinsed several stacks of smeary plates and sprayed them with disinfectant, I poured a dipper of water over my own head.

I was washing dishes at a barrel next to the girl that I’d showed off for earlier. Not an accident, of course. Even with her mask on, she was better than pretty this close up. “American?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “From Philadelphia. Liberty Bell, Declaration of Independence, AOL Cable Access Riots of 2012. Are you Costa Rican?”

“Tica,” she said. “I’m a Tica. That’s what you say here.” She had long, shiny hair and these enormous baby-animal eyes, like a heroine in an anime. She was taller than me, but I was used to girls who were taller than me. I liked her accent, too. “Me llamo Lara.”

“I’m Dorn,” I told her. “This is Naomi. We met on the bus.”

“Hola,” Naomi said. “I’m at UCR. Dorn is here with his father because of Hans Bliss and the aliens. Because, you know, Hans Bliss said that the aliens are going to show up again real soon and this time he knows what he’s talking about. Not like all those other times when he said the aliens were coming back.”

Several Tucancillos stopped washing dishes.

“Hans Bliss is a big deal here,” Lara said.

I glared at Naomi. “I’m not really interested in this guy Bliss. I’m just here because my father kidnapped me.”

My father had got out of dish duty when Zuleta-Arango announced some kind of committee meeting. Figures. First he kidnapped me, and now I was stuck doing his dishes.

“Hans Bliss can kiss my fat ass,” Naomi said. Now some of our fellow Tucancillos were beginning to seem really irritated. I recognized the woman from the bus, Paula, the one that Naomi had already gotten riled up. The younger guy who had grabbed Paula’s arm, back on the bus, was—I saw now—wearing a SHARE THE BLISS, HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT T-shirt. He gave Naomi a meaningful look, the kind of look that said he felt sorry for her.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Cool,” Naomi said. “Porta a mi. Wait a minute, look over there. Is that an alien? Does it want to say something to us?”

Everyone looked, of course, but it was just a huge, disgusting bug. “Whoops,” Naomi said. “Just a roach. But I hear our friends the roaches love Hans Bliss, too. Just like everyone else.”

The woman Paula said, “I’m going to punch her right in that smug little mouth! If she says one more word!”

“Paula,” the big-nosed guy said. “She isn’t worth it. Okay?”

Naomi turned around and said, loudly, “I am too worth it. You have no idea how worth it I am.”

The guy just smiled. Naomi gave him the finger. Then we were out of there.

While we were walking back, Lara said, “Tengala adentro. Naomi, I am not saying that I am a big fan of Bliss, but do you think that he was lying about his encounter with these aliens? Because I have seen the footage and read the eyewitness accounts, and my mother knows a man who was there. I don’t believe it can all be a hoax.”

Naomi shrugged. Back in the hangar, people were sorting through their suitcases, talking on cell phones, tapping away furiously at their peeties and googlies. We ended up back at the wall where our cots were, and Lara and I sat on the floor. Naomi hunkered down on her tires.

“I believe there were aliens,” she said. “I just resent the fact that the first credible recorded contact with an extraterrestrial species was made by an idiot like Bliss. People who decide to go surfing in a Category 3 hurricane ought to be up for the Darwin Award, not considered representative of the human race. Well, not considered representative of the best the human race has to offer. And we only have Bliss’s story about what the aliens said to him. I just don’t buy that an intelligent race, the first we’ve ever come into contact with, would casually drop by to tell us to be happy and naked and polyam-orous and vegetarian and oh yeah, destroy all nuclear stockpiles. All of those are good things, don’t get me wrong. But they’re exactly the kind of things you expect a retro-hippie surfer like Bliss to say. And the result? What’s left of the United States, not to mention Greater Korea, Indonesia, and most of the Stans are all stockpiling weapons faster than ever, because they’ve decided it’s suspicious that aliens apparently want us to destroy all nuclear weapons. Which kind of puts this whole flu thing into perspective, you know? If Bliss’s aliens come back, there are going to be a lot of missiles pointed right at them, a lot of fingers hovering on those special fingerprint-sensitive keypads.”

“And a lot of naked people lined up on beaches everywhere, singing ‘Kumbaya’ and throwing flowers,” I said.

“Including you?” Naomi asked. Lara giggled.

“No way,” I said. “I’ve got better things to do.”

“Like what?” Lara said. I started to think she was flirting with me. “What kind of things are you into, Dorn?”

“I’m a soccer player,” I said. “A pretty good one. I’m not bragging or anything. I really am good. You saw me, right? I’m a goalie. And I’m kind of feeling like an idiot right now. I mean, if I’d known my father was planning to kidnap me and bring me down here, I would have at least learned to say some stuff in Spanish. Like, This man is kidnapping me. How do you say that? I don’t know anything about Costa Rica except the usual stuff. Like there are a lot of beaches down here, right? And software. And iguana farms? I know a kid down the street whose father lost his job, and his father keeps saying he’s going to raise iguanas in the basement under special lights and sell the meat online. Or else raise llamas in his backyard. He hasn’t made up his mind. His kid said iguana tastes like chicken. More or less.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” Lara said. “It’s okay that you don’t know Spanish. You’ll learn.”

“I hope we’re out of here soon,” Naomi said, “because I have exams coming up. Is your phone working, Lara? My googlie keeps crashing when I try to get on. I just want to know if they’ve shut the university down.”

Lara thumbed her phone. “My battery is almost dead,” she said at last. “But I know the situation of the schools. They’re closed for the indefinite future. My mother spoke to her cousin a few hours ago. Still no outbreak of this flu in San Jose or any other place in Costa Rica, but the government is asking people to stay at home except in situations of emergency. Just for a few days. All of the cruise ships are anchored offshore. My cousin runs a cruise-supply company, which is how she knows. The army is dropping food and supplies onto the decks of the boats. I’ve never been on a cruise. I wish I were on a boat instead of in here. On the talk shows, they are talking about the flu. How perhaps it was manufactured and then released accidentally or even on purpose.”

“They say that every time,” I said. “My father says sure, it’s possible, but you’d have to be really stupid to do something like that. And anyway, all we have to do is sit here and wait. Wait and see if anyone here is sick. Wait and see if anyone out there comes up with a vaccine. Once they get a vaccine cultured, they get it distributed pretty quickly. The question is, what do we do for fun in the meantime?”

“No point in studying if we’re doomed,” Naomi said, sounding nonchalant. “Maybe I should wait and see how bad this flu really is.”

“We’re safer in here than almost anywhere else,” I said. At dinner, my father had made some announcements. He’d said clinic hours would run every day from eight A.M. until four P.M., and that if anyone began to feel achy or as if they had an elevated temperature, they should come talk to him at once. He said the odds that someone in the hangar would have the flu were minimal. He’d already talked with everyone who’d been on the flight and there was no one coming from Calexico or from anywhere farther west than Cincinnati. Our plane had started out the previous morning in Costa Rica and there hadn’t been any changes of crew, except a flight attendant who got on in Miami after spending her day off at home, with her daughter. He explained that if we got sick at all, it would probably be some kind of stomach bug or mild cold, the kind of stuff you usually got when you traveled. Anya Miike had stood next to him, translating everything he said into Spanish and then into Japanese for these two guys from Osaka.

People had set up card games in the hangar. They’d brought out duty-free gins or tequilas or marijuana or those little bottles of Bailey’s. Kids were drawing with smart crayons right on the concrete floor of the hangar, or watching the anime Brave Hortense, which someone had loaded onto a googly with a fancy bubble screen. Big, fat tears were plopping out of Brave Hortense’s eyes, faster and faster, and the evil kitten who had made her cry began to build a raft, looking worried. A few feet away from us, a man was streaming a Spanish-language news program. The newsfeed became a Spanish-language song set to a languid beat. Elsewhere you could still hear news coming from tinny or expensive little speakers. There was good news and there was bad news. Mostly flu news. Flu in North America, and also in London and Rome.

None in Costa Rica. The music made a nice change.

“I love this song,” Naomi said. “It’s on all the time, but I don’t care. I could listen to it all day long.”

“Lola Rollercoaster,” Lara said. “She always sings about love.”

“jQue tuanis! What else is there to sing about?” Naomi said.

I rolled my eyes.

People sprawled on their tires and talked in Spanish and English and Japanese and German and watched the guards who were watching them. A man and woman began dancing to the Lola Roller-coaster song; others joined them. Mostly older people. They danced close to each other without quite touching. I didn’t see the point in that. If someone in here came down with the flu, dancing two inches apart wasn’t going to be much of a prophylactic. Lara looked like she wanted to say something, and I wondered if she’d ask me to dance. But it turned out that her mother, a not-bad-looking woman in a pair of expensive cornsilk jeans, was waving her back over to where they’d set up cots.

“I’ll see you later,” Lara said. “Buenas noches, Naomi, Dorn.”

“Buenas noches.” And then, “I think she likes me,” I said, when she got out of earshot. “Girls usually like me. I’m not bragging or anything. It’s just a fact.”

“Yeah, well, that’s probably why her mother’s calling her back over,” Naomi said. “An American boy like you is no catch, even if you do have a wicked nice smile and nice green eyes.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Everybody knows that American boyfriends and girlfriends only want one thing. Costa Rican citizenship. Look over there. See that macha, that blond girl? The one flirting with the cute Tico?”

I looked where Naomi was pointing. “Yeah,” I said.

“She probably came down here on a tourist visa, hoping to meet guys just like him,” Naomi said. “This is a real stroke of luck for her. We’re going to be in here for at least five or six days. Lots of time for flirting. If I looked like her, I’d be trying to pull off the same thing while I’m at UCR. I’d rather cut off my legs than have to go back and live in the States. At least here they can grow you a new pair.”

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“Really?” Naomi said. “If girls seem to like you, Dorn, realize that it’s probably not for your brains or your keen grasp of sociopolitical-economic issues. Tell me what you like best about our country. Is it the blatantly rigged elections, the lack of access to abortion, the shitty educational system? Is it the fact that most of the states where anyone would ever actually want to live would secede like Calexico and Potlatch, if they had someone like Canada or Mexico to back them up? Is it the health care, the most expensive and least effective health-care system in the world, the national debt so impressive it takes almost two whole pages of little tiny zeros to write it out? Tell me about your job prospects, Dorn. Who would you just kill to work for? Wal-Mart, McDisneyUniverse, or some prison franchise? Or were you going to join the army and go off to one of the Stans or Bads because you’ve always wanted to get gassed or shot at or dissolved into goo when your experimental weapon malfunctions?”

“Professional soccer,” I said. “Preferably in Japan or Italy. Whoever offers the best money.”

Naomi blinked, opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She pulled out a bar of chocolate and broke off a piece still in the wrapper and gave it to me. We pushed our masks up and chewed. “This is good,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Even the chocolate is, like, ten times better down here. Oh boy. Look over there.”

I turned around. It was that woman again. Paula. She was standing in a row of about two dozen other women and men and she was taking off all her clothes. Then she was standing there naked. They were all taking off their clothes. The homely guy who’d been wearing the HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT T-shirt turned out to have a full-color portrait of Hans Bliss—on his surfboard, on a towering wave, about to be lifted up by the aliens—tattooed across his chest. It was pretty well done. Lots of detail. But I didn’t spend too much time looking at him. There were more interesting things to look at.

“These are the people that my dad wants to go hang out with?” I said. I thought about getting out my camera. There were other people with the same idea, holding out their cell phones, clicking pics.

“Look, a priest,” Naomi said. “Of course there would be a priest. A Church-of-the-Second-Reformation priest, too, by the look of him. Try not to drool. Surely you’ve seen naked women before.”

“Only on the Internet,” I said. “This is better.”

A guy in a black suit and a priest’s collar was striding over toward the protestors, yelling some things in Spanish. A naked man, so hairy that he was hardly naked at all, really, stepped out of the line with his arms out wide. Hans Bliss’s Star Friends believed in embracing all of mankind. Preferably in the nude. (Or as nude as you can get when you’re still wearing your stupid little face mask.)

The priest had apparently had run-ins with Star Friends before. He picked up a tennis racket beside someone’s suitcase and commenced swinging it ferociously.

“What’s he saying?” I asked Naomi.

“Lots of stuff. Put on your clothes. Have you no shame. There are decent people here. Do you call that nothing a penis. I’ve seen bigger equipment on a housecat.”

“Did he really say that?”

“No,” Naomi said. “Just the stuff about decency. Et cetera. Now he’s saying that he’s going to beat the shit out of this guy if he doesn’t put his clothes back on. We’ll see who’s tougher. God or the aliens. My money’s on God. Does your father really buy into all this? The nudity? The peace, love, and Bliss uber alles?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He just really wants to get a chance to see aliens. Up close.”

“Not me,” Naomi said. “Maybe I’ve just seen too many animes where the aliens turn out to be, you know, alien. Not like us. I am really, really tired of these Bliss people. Can I borrow another sci-fi book? Do women ever write this stuff? A story with some romance in it would be nice. Something with fewer annotations.”

“Connie Willis is fun,” I said. “Or there’s this book Snow Crash. Or you could read some Tiptree or Joanna Russ or Octavia Butler. Something nice and grim.”

The priest continued to shout at the naked Star Friends and make menacing, swatting motions with the tennis racket. Other passengers got involved, like this was a spectator sport, yelling things, or whistling, or shouting. My father and Zuleta-Arango and the rest of the committee were walking over. The guards watched from their station by the hangar entrance. Clearly they had no plan to get involved.

It was twilight. The sky through the windows was lilac and gold, like a special effect. There were strings of lights looped along the walls, and a few worklights that people had found in one of the offices and set up strategically around the hangar, which made it look even more like a movie set. You could see the blue-white glow of googly screens everywhere. And then there were the bats. I don’t know who noticed the bats first, but they were hard to miss, once the yelling started.

The bats seemed almost as surprised as we were. They poured into the hangar, looking like blackish, dried-up, flappy leaves, making long, erratic passes back and forth, skimming low and then winking up and away. People ducked down, covered their heads with their hands. The Hans Bliss people put their clothes back on— score one for the bats—and yet the priest was swinging his tennis racket at the bats now, just as viciously as he had the nudists. A bat dipped down and I ducked. “Go away!”

It went.

“They have vampire bats down here,” Naomi said. She didn’t seem bothered at all. “In case you’re wondering. They come into people’s houses and make little incisions in the legs or toes and then drink your blood. Hence the name. But I don’t think these are vampire bats. These look more like fruit bats. They probably live up in the roof where those folds in the steel are. Relax, Dorn. Bats are a good thing. They eat mosquitoes. They’ve never been a vector for flu. Rabies, maybe, but not flu. We love bats.”

“Except for the ones who drink blood,” I said. “Those are big bats. They look thirsty to me.”

“Calm down,” Naomi said. “They’re fruit bats. Or something.”

I don’t know how many bats there were. It’s hard to count bats when they’re agitated. At least two hundred, probably a lot more than that. But as the people in the hangar got more and more upset, the bats seemed to get calmer. They really weren’t that interested in us. One or two still went scissoring through the air every now and then, but the others were somewhere up in the roof now, hanging down above us, glaring down at us with their malevolent, fiery little eyes. I imagined them licking their pointy little fangs. The man with the music turned it off. No more sad love songs. No more dancing. The card parties and conversations broke up.

My father and Zuleta-Arango walked up and down the makeshift aisles of the hangar, talking to the other passengers. Probably explaining about bats. People turned off the worklights, lay down on their cots, pulling silver foil emergency blankets and makeshift covers over themselves: jackets, dresses, beach towels. Some began to make up beds under the cots, where they would be safe from bats if not the spiders, lizards, and cockroaches that were, of course, also sharing our temporary quarters.

Half a soccer field away, Lara sat on a cot leaning back against her mother as her mother brushed her hair. She’d taken off her mask. She was even better looking than I’d thought she’d be. Possibly even out of my league.

Naomi was looking, too. She said, “Your parents are divorced, right? That’s why your father kidnapped you? Have you called your mom? Does she know where you are now?”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She and my brother lived out on a dude ranch in Colorado. They caught that flu three years ago when it jumped from horses.”

“Oh,” Naomi said. “Sorry.”

“Why be sorry? You didn’t know,” I said. “I’m fine now.” My father was headed our way. I took off my mask and lay down on my cot and pulled the foil blanket over my head. I didn’t take off my clothes, not even my shoes. Just in case the bats turned out not to be fruit bats.

All night long, people talked, listened to newsfeeds, got up to go to the bathroom, dreamed the kind of dreams that woke them up and other people, too. Children woke up crying. Naomi snored. I don’t think that my father ever went to sleep at all. Whenever I looked over, he was lying on his cot, thumbing through a paperback. An Alfred Bester collection, I think.

We settled into certain routines quickly. Zuleta-Arango’s committee set up a schedule for recharging googlies and palmtops and cell phones from the limited number of outlets in the hangar. After some discussion, the Hans Bliss people rigged up a kind of symbolic wall out of foil blankets and extra cot frames. That was the area where you went if you wanted to hang out in the nude and talk about aliens. Of course you could just wander by and get an eyeful and an earful, but after a while nude people just don’t seem that interesting. Really.

My dad spent some of the day in the clinic and some of his time with Zuleta-Arango. He hung out with the Hans Bliss people, and he and Naomi sat around and argued about Hans Bliss and aliens. Somebody started an English/Spanish-language discussion group, and he got involved in that. He set up a lending library, passing out his sci-fi books, taking down the names of people who’d borrowed them. There were plenty of movies and digests that people were swapping around on their googlies, but the paperbacks had novelty appeal. Science fiction is always good for taking your mind off how bad things are.

I still wasn’t speaking to my father, of course, unless it was absolutely necessary. He didn’t really notice. He was too excited about having made it this far, impatient to get on with the next stage of his journey. He was afraid that while we were quarantined, the thing he’d been waiting for would arrive, and he’d be stuck in a hangar less than a hundred miles away. So close, and yet he couldn’t get any closer until the quarantine period was over.

I figured it served him right.

Most of the passengers in quarantine were returning to Costa Rica. The foreign passengers were almost all in Costa Rica because of tech industry stuff or the aliens. Mostly aliens. Because of Hans Bliss. Some of them had waited years to get a visa. There were close to a thousand Star Friends in Costa Rica, citizens of almost every nation, true believers, currently living down along the Pacific coastline, right next to Manuel Antonio National Park; Lara had been to Manuel Antonio a few times on camping trips with friends. She said it was a lot nicer than camping in a hangar.

The first day, the Star Friends quarantined in the hangar got through, on their cell phones and on e-mail, to friends already out with Hans Bliss. My father even managed to speak to Hans Bliss himself for a few minutes, to explain that he had made it as far as San Jose. The Star Friends community was under quarantine as well, of course, and Hans Bliss was somewhat put out that his doctor was stuck at the airport. Preparations for the imminent return of the aliens were being hampered by the quarantine.

Like I said, I saw Hans Bliss speak in Philadelphia once. He was this tall, good-looking blond guy with a German accent. He was painfully sincere. So sincere he hardly ever blinked, which was kind of hypnotic. When he stood on the stage and described the feeling of understanding and joy and compassion that had descended upon him and lifted him up as he stood out on that beach, in the middle of that ferocious storm, I sat there gripping the sides of my chair, because I was afraid that otherwise I might get up and run toward the stage, toward the thing that he was promising. Other people in the audience did exactly that. When he talked about finding himself back on that beach again, abandoned and forsaken and confused and utterly alone, the man sitting next to me started to cry. Everyone was crying. I couldn’t stand it. I looked up at my father and he was looking down at me, like what I thought mattered to him.

“What are we doing here?” I whispered. “Why are we here?”

He said, “I don’t like this any better than you do, Dorn. But I have to believe. I have to believe at least some of what he’s saying. I have to believe that they’ll come back.”

Then he stood up and asked the crying man to excuse us. “What were they like?” someone yelled at Bliss. “What did the aliens look like?”

Everybody knew what the aliens looked like. We’d all seen the footage hundreds of times. We’d heard Bliss describe the aliens on news shows and in documentaries and on online interviews and casts. But my father stopped in the aisle and turned back to the stage and so did I. You would have, too.

Hans Bliss held out his arms as if he was going to embrace the audience, all of us, all at once. As if he was going to heal us of a sickness we didn’t even know that we had, as if rays of energy and light and power and love were suddenly going to shoot out of his chest. The usual agents and government types and media who followed Hans Bliss everywhere he went looked bored. They’d seen this show a hundred times before. “They were beautiful,” Hans Bliss said. People said it along with him. It was the punch line to one of the most famous stories ever. There had even been a movie in which Hans Bliss played himself.

Beautiful.

My father started up the aisle again. We walked out and I thought that was that. He never said anything else about Hans Bliss or Costa Rica or the aliens until he picked me up at soccer practice.

I put on my running shoes. I stretched out on the concrete floor and ran laps around and around the hangar. There were other people doing the same thing. After breakfast, I went over to an area where no one had set up a bed and started messing around, kicking the ball and catching it on the rebound. Nice and high. Some people came over and we played keep-away. When there were enough players, we took two cots and made them goals. We picked teams. Little kids came and sat and watched and chased down the ball when it went out-of-bounds. Even Naomi came to watch. When I asked her if she was going to play, she just looked at me like I was an idiot. “I’m not into being athletic,” she said. “I’m too competitive. The last time I played organized sports, I broke someone’s nose. It was only kind of an accident.”

Lara came up behind me and tapped me on the back of the head.

“¿Cómo está ci arroz? What’s up?”

“You ever play soccer?” I said.

She ended up on my team. I was pretty excited about that, even before I saw her play. She was super fast. She put up her hair in a ponytail, took off her mask, and zipped up and down the floor. Our team won the first match, 3—0. We swapped some players around, and my team won again, 7—0, this time.

At lunch, people came by the table where I was sitting and nodded to me. They said things in Spanish, gave me the thumbs-up. Lara translated. Apparently they could tell how good I was, even though I was being careful on the concrete. I didn’t want to strain or smash anything. This was just for fun.

After dinner there was some excitement when the bats woke up. Apparently nobody had really been paying attention that first night, but this time we saw them go. They bled out into the twilight in a thin, black slick, off to do bat things. Eat bugs. Sharpen their fangs. Nobody was happy to see them come back, either, except some of the little kids, and Naomi, of course. This whole one corner of the hangar floor was totally covered in bat guano. My dad said it wasn’t a health risk, but as a matter of fact, one of the joggers slipped on it the next day and sprained an ankle.

The next day: more of the same. Wake up, run, play soccer. Listen to Naomi rant about stuff. Listen to people talk about the flu. Flirt with Lara. Ignore my father. I still wasn’t ready to check in with Sorken, or to check e-mail. I didn’t want to know.

That afternoon we had our second invasion. Land crabs, this time, the size of silver-dollar pancakes, the color of old scabs, and they smelled like rotting garbage. There were hundreds of them, thousands of hairy, armored legs, all dragging and scratching and clicking. They went sideways, their pincers held up and forward. Everybody stood on their cots or tires and took pictures. When the crabs got to the far wall, they spread out until they found the little cracks and gaps where they could squeeze through. A boy used his shirt to catch three or four crabs; some of the kids had started a petting zoo.

“What was that about?” I said to Naomi.

“Land migration,” she said. “They do that when they’re mating. Or is it molting? That’s why they’re so stinky right now.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” I said. “Bats and crabs and stuff?”

“I don’t date much,” she said. “I stay home and watch the nature feeds online.”

By lunch that second day we knew about outbreaks of flu in New New York, Copenhagen, Houston, Berlin, plenty of other places. The World Health Organization had issued the report my father had been predicting, saying that this was a full-on pandemic, killing the young and the healthy, not just the very young and the very elderly. We knew there were hopeful indications in India and in Taiwan with a couple of modified vaccines. The mood in the hangar was pretty unhappy. People were getting calls and e-mails about family members or friends back in the States. Not good news. On the other hand, we appeared to be in good shape here. My father said that in another two or three days, Costa Rican health officials would probably send a doctor out to sign off that we were officially flu-free. The two children with the dry coughs turned out just to have allergies. Besides that, the most pressing health issues in the hangar were some cases of cabin fever, diarrhea, and the fact that we were going through our supply of toilet paper too fast.

On the third day in the hangar we built better goals. Not quite regulation, but you’d be surprised what you can do with some expensive fishing gear and the frames from a couple of cots. Then practice drills. I sat out the first quarter of the first game, and a Tico with muscle-y legs took the goal. We still won.

The hangar guards changed over every twelve hours or so. After a while they were kind of like the bats. You didn’t even notice them most of the time. But I liked watching them watch us when we played soccer. They were into soccer. They took turns coming over to watch, and whistled through their teeth whenever I blocked a goal. They placed bets. On the third day a guard came over to me during a time-out, and pushed up his N95 mask. “jQue cache!” He made enthusiastic hand gestures. “jPura vida!” I understood that. He was a young guy, athletic. He was talking fast, and Naomi and Lara weren’t around to translate, but I thought I had a pretty good idea what he was saying. He was trying to give me some advice about keeping goal. I just nodded, like I understood what he was saying and appreciated it. Finally he clapped me on the shoulders and went back over to his wall like he’d finally remembered that he was a guard.

Naomi was working her way through Roger Zelazny and Kage Baker. She was a pretty fast reader. First a Baker novel, then Zelazny. Then Baker again. I kept catching her reading the endings first. “What’s the point of doing that?” I said. “If you cheat and read the end of the book first, why even bother reading the rest?”

“I’m antsy,” she said. “I need to know how certain things turn out.” She turned over so she was facing the wall, and said something else in Spanish.

“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t really all that invested. I was rereading some Fritz Leiber.

About fifteen minutes later, Lara came over and sat down on the cot next to Naomi. She picked up the stack of books that Naomi had already read, commenting in Spanish on the covers. Naomi laughed every time she said something. It was annoying, but I smiled like I understood. Finally Lara said, in English, “All of these girls have the large breasts. I did not know science fiction was about the breasts. I like the real stories. Stories about real astronauts, or scientific books.”

“My father doesn’t really go in for nonfiction,” I said. I didn’t see what was so bad about breasts, really.

“It makes for depressing reading,” Naomi said. “Look at the space program in the old disunited States. Millionaires signing up for outer space field trips. The occasional unmanned flight that conks out somewhere just past Venus. SETI enthusiasts running analysis programs on their personal computers, because some guys blew up the Very Large Array, and guess what, when the real aliens show up, some guy named Hans Bliss says something and they go away again. Poof.”

“Our space program is state of the art,” Lara said. “Not to brag, like Dorn is always saying. But we will be sending a manned flight to Mars in the next five years. Ten years tops. If I keep my grades up and if I am chosen, I will be on that flight. That is my personal goal. My dream.”

“You want to go to Mars?” I said. I’m sure I looked surprised.

“Mars, to begin with,” Lara said. “Then who knows? I’m in an accelerated science and physical education course at my school. Many of the graduates go into the program for astronauts.”

“There are advanced classes at UCR doing some work with your space program,” Naomi said. “I don’t know much about it, except that it all sounds pretty cool.”

“We sent a manned flight to the moon last year,” Lara said. “I met one of the astronauts. She came and spoke at my school.”

“Yeah, I remember that flight,” I said. “We did that, like, last century.” I was just joking, but Lara didn’t get that.

“And what have you done since?” she asked me.

I shrugged. It wasn’t really anything I was interested in. “What’s the point?” I said. “I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they’ll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a space program, is, I don’t know, it’s like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bliss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don’t see the point.”

“The point is to go to space,” Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. “To go to space. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back.”

“Okay,” I said. “But not everybody gets a chance to go to Mars on a spaceship, either. Maybe not even you.”

I was just being reasonable, but Lara didn’t see it that way. She made this noise of exasperation, then said, emphatically, like she was making a point except that she was saying it in Spanish and really fast, so it didn’t really tell me anything: “jTurista estupido! jUsted no es hermoso como usted piensa usted es!”

“Sorry?” I said.

But she just got up and left.

“What? What did she say?” I asked Naomi.

Naomi put down her paperback, The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth. She said, “You can be kind of a jerk, Dorn. Some advice? Hazme caso—pay attention. I’ve seen you play soccer and you’re pretty good. Maybe you’ll get back to the States and get discovered and maybe one day you’ll save some goal for some team and it will turn out to be the block that wins the World Cup. I’ll go out to a bar and get drunk to celebrate when that happens. But my money’s on Lara. I bet you anything Lara gets her chance and goes to Mars. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when she isn’t playing soccer or hanging out with us, she’s studying for her classes or talking with the pilots about what it’s like to fly commercial jets. And she also knows how to get along with people, Dorn. Maybe you don’t have to be a nice guy to do well in team sports, but does it hurt?”

“I am a nice guy,” I said.

“Stupid me,” Naomi said. “Here I was thinking that you were arrogant, and, um, stupid, and what was the other thing? Oh yeah, short.” And then she picked up the Zelazny again and ignored me.

Lara didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. She didn’t come back when we played soccer in the afternoon, and even though it was the Tucancillos’ turn to do the dishes, she didn’t turn up.

We still had plenty of surgical masks, but by the fourth day hardly anybody was wearing them. Just the sticklers and the guards in their N95s. I think everybody else was using the remaining supply for toilet paper. I wore one like a headband during soccer. I kind of needed a haircut. I couldn’t do anything about that, but I did have a bath on the fourth night, after dinner, in one of the makeshift bathing stalls. Some of the people on the flight didn’t have a lot of clothes in their suitcase, and so some borrowing had been going on, and there were clothes and various species of underwear draped over tires. I leaned against the outside wall of the hangar, away from the latrines, and admired the sunset for a bit. Not that I was a huge fan of sunsets, but the ones here were bigger, or something. And it smelled better out here. Not that you noticed how bad it smelled in the hangar most of the time, but once you came outside you realized you didn’t want to go back in, not immediately, at least.

And the guards didn’t seem to mind. There wasn’t really anywhere for us to go. Just asphalt and runways. Still no planes coming in. Nobody to watch the sunset with me, which was an odd thing to think, since I’m usually pretty comfortable being alone. Even out on the field, during the game, the goalie is alone more often than not. Lara wasn’t talking to me. I wasn’t talking to my dad. Naomi and I weren’t talking to each other. The sun went down fast, regardless of how I felt about the whole thing, and yeah, I know that’s a melodramatic way to think about a sunset, but so what? Universe 1, Dorn 0.

When I came back into the hangar, Lara was over in the petting zoo, just sitting there. A dog was curled up on her legs and she was thumping its belly, softly, like a drum.

The petting zoo was an ongoing project. There were the three smelly crabs and a skinny brownish snake in a plastic makeup case that the kids fed beetles to. Some girl had caught it when she went out to use the bathroom. There were lizards in recycled food containers and a smallish iguana one of the guards had donated. There were even two dogs who got spoiled rotten.

I wandered over, trying to come up with something interesting to say. “What’s up?” was all I came up with.

She looked up at me, then down again. Petted the dog.

“Watching the iguana,” she said.

“What’s it doing?” I said.

“Not much.”

I sat down next to her. We didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally I said, “Naomi says I shouldn’t be such a jerk. And also that I’m short.”

“I like Naomi,” Lara said. “She’s pretty.”

Really? I thought. (But I knew better than to say that out loud.)

“What about me?”

Lara said, “I like watching you play soccer. It’s like watching the soccer on television.”

“Naomi’s pretty brutal, but she’s honest,” I said. “I may never get tall enough to be a world-class goalie.”

“You’ll be taller. Your father is tall. Sometimes I have a temper,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

“What did you say exactly?” I asked.

“Learn Spanish,” she said. “Then when I say the awful things to you, you’ll understand.” Then she said, “And I am going to go up one day.”

“Up?” I said.

“To Mars.”

She wasn’t wearing her mask. She was smiling. I don’t know if she was smiling at me or at the idea of Mars, but I didn’t care all that much. Mars was far away. I was a lot closer.

My father was on his cell phone. “Yes,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to him.” He hung up. He said, “Dorn, come sit down for a minute.”

I didn’t say anything to him. I just sat down on my cot.

I realized that I was looking around, as if something had happened. Naomi was over against the wall, talking to the HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT guy, the one with the big nose. He was a lot taller than Naomi. Did Naomi mind being short?

My father said, “Your coach. He wanted to talk to you.”

“Sorken called?” I said. I felt kind of sick to my stomach already, even though I wasn’t sure why. I should have listened to those messages.

“No,” my father said. “I’m sorry, Dorn. It was Coach Turner. He was calling about Sorken.”

And I understood the difference immediately. “Sorken’s dead.”

My father nodded.

“Is everybody else okay? On the team?”

“I really don’t know,” my father said. “Mr. Turner hasn’t been able to reach everyone. A lot of people around Philadelphia came down with flu, just like everywhere else. If I’d had more time to plan, I don’t think I would have booked that flight. You were right, you know. I got an e-mail from a colleague out in Potlatch who thought something was coming, and meanwhile I’d been in touch with Hans Bliss off and on, and the visas had just come, and it seemed like a minor risk, getting us onto the flight, getting us through the airport. I thought if we didn’t leave right then, who knew when we’d get here?”

I didn’t say anything. I was remembering how Sorken used to come down on me when I was being a showoff, or not paying enough attention to what was going on, on the field, during practice. Sorken wasn’t like my dad. If you weren’t paying attention to him or you were sulking, he’d throw a soccer ball at your head. Or one of his shoes. But I’d just left those messages from him on the phone. I didn’t even know where my phone was right now.

I’d never really thought about Sorken getting the flu and dying, but it had always seemed like there was a good chance that my father would catch something. A lot of hospital workers died during the last pandemic.

My father said, “Dorn? Are you okay?”

I nodded.

“I’m sorry about Sorken,” he said. “I never really sat down and talked to him.”

“He didn’t have much time for people who didn’t play soccer,” I said.

“It always looked like he was riding you pretty hard.”

“I don’t think he liked me,” I said. “I didn’t like him most of the time. But he was a good coach. He wasn’t ever harder on me than he should have been.”

“I told Coach Turner that you wouldn’t be back for a while,” my father said. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what we’ll do. If we’ll be allowed to stay. There’s been some talk in the hangar. Rumors that our government is responsible. That we were targeting Calexico. It doesn’t seem likely to me, but we weren’t going to be very popular down here, Dorn, even before people starting making up stories like that. And I’m not going to be much more popular back in Philadelphia. I checked in with my team. Dr. Willis yelled for about five minutes and then she just hung up. I skipped out even though I knew they were going to need me.”

“Maybe you would have gotten sick if we’d stayed,” I said. “Or maybe I would have gotten sick.”

My father studied his hands. “Who knows? I was planning to tell you about the visas. Give you a choice. But then I just couldn’t leave you. You know, in case.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was talking to Paula and some of the other Hans Bliss people. As of this morning they haven’t been able to get hold of anyone out that way. At the colony. They’ve been under quarantine, too, remember? And no doctor. Just two OB-GYNs and a chiropractor.”

“Everything will be fine,” I said. I was a regular cheerleader. But I couldn’t help looking around again, and this time I could see all the things that I’d been trying not to see. All around us, other people were having, had been having, conversations just like this one. About people who had died. About what had been going on while we were trapped in here.

I said, “The aliens are coming back to see Hans Bliss, remember? So there’s no way that Hans Bliss can just keel over dead from something like flu. Those aliens probably vaccinated him or something. Remember how he said he didn’t ever get sick anymore?”

“Good point,” my father said. “If you’re gullible enough to buy all the things that Hans Bliss says.”

“Hey, you two,” Naomi said. She looked flushed and happy, as if she’d gotten the last word again with the Hans Bliss guy. She didn’t seem to be annoyed with me. And I couldn’t really be annoyed with her, either. Everything she’d said was true, more or less. I hadn’t known her very long, but I already knew that that was the terrible thing about Naomi.

My father took the soccer ball out of my hands. I don’t even know when I’d picked it up, but it felt right to let go of it. He put it down on the floor, sat down beside me on the cot, and patted my leg. “It will all be fine,” he said, and I nodded.

My brother Stephen was older than me by four years. He didn’t like me. According to my father, when I was a baby Stephen used to unfasten my seat belt and also the strap that held my baby seat in. When I was five, he pushed me down a flight of stairs. I broke my wrist. My mother saw him do it, and so once a week for the next two years Stephen went to see a counselor named Ms. Blair in downtown Philadelphia; I remember I was jealous.

When our parents got divorced, Stephen was ten and I was six, and they decided they would each take custody of one child. Stephen thought that this was a great idea. His goal had always been to become an only child.

My mother went back home to Dalton, Colorado, where she took over the bookkeeping at her family’s fancy dude ranch and spa.

Whenever I flew out to visit, Stephen made sure I understood that it was all his. His house, his horses—all of them—his mom, his grandparents, his uncles, aunts, cousins. He came back east to stay with us once, and then he developed an inner-ear condition that made it impossible for him to fly. So he didn’t ever have to come visit again. He didn’t like my father much either.

The last time I saw my mom and Stephen, Stephen was applying to colleges. He didn’t seem to loathe me as much as usual. He was practically an adult. I was just a kid. I was athletic, which he wasn’t, but my grades were pitiful. I was small for my age. He could tell how annoyed I was that he was tall and I wasn’t, and somehow it made things better. He had a girlfriend, a massage therapist at the spa, and he didn’t even care that she made a point of being nice to me. I had a pretty good time on that trip. My mother and I rode out and went camping down in the canyons. Stephen’s girlfriend cooked dinner for us when we got home. It was almost like we were a family. Stephen showed us a movie he’d made to send along with his college applications. When I said I liked it, he was pleased. We got into arguments the way we always did, but this time I realized something, that Stephen liked a good fight. Maybe he always had, or maybe he’d just grown up. If you stood up to him, it made him happy. I had never tried standing up to him before. He was applying for a visa so he could go study at a big-deal film school in Calexico.

A few months later, the horses at the dude ranch started dying. My mother e-mailed and said my uncle had brought the local vet in. They were putting the sick horses down. When we talked on the phone, she sounded terrible. My mother loved horses. Then people on the ranch started dying, too. Sometimes a flu will jump from one species to another. That’s why a lot of people don’t keep cats or birds as pets anymore.

I talked to my mother two more times the next day. Then things got worse, real fast. My father was staying over at the hospital, and lots of people were dying. My mother got the flu. She died. Stephen died. The girlfriend got sick, and then she got better again. She sent one e-mail before she got sick and one after she got better, which is how I found out what had happened. Her first e-mail said that Stephen had wanted her to tell us how much he loved us. But he probably died in quarantine. He probably felt like he was getting a cold, and then I bet his temperature shot up until he was delirious or completely unconscious and couldn’t say anything to anyone. My dad said that their kind of flu was fast. So you didn’t suffer or anything. I think the girlfriend was just making all that up, about Stephen and what he supposedly said. She was a nice person. I don’t think he’d ever said anything to her about how much he disliked me. About how he used to try to kill me. You want the people you like to think that you get along with your family.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, telling my father when he finally came home. And we haven’t talked about it much since then. I don’t know why it’s easier for some people to talk about aliens than to talk about death. Aliens only happen to some people. Death happens to everyone.

That night in the hangar, I dreamed about Sorken. He was standing in front of the goal, instead of me, and he was talking at me in Spanish, like the Costa Rican guard. I knew that if I could only understand what he was saying, he’d be satisfied, and then I could take the goal again. I wanted to say I was sorry that he was dead, and that I was sorry that I was in Costa Rica, and that I was sorry I hadn’t ever called him back when he left all those messages, but he couldn’t understand what I was saying because I couldn’t speak Spanish. I kept hoping that Lara would show up.

Instead the aliens came. They came down just like Hans Bliss had said, in this wave of feeling: joy and love and perfect acceptance and knowingness, so that it didn’t matter anymore that Sorken didn’t remember how to speak English and I didn’t know Spanish. For the first time we just understood each other. Then the aliens scooped up Sorken and took him away.

I grabbed on to the frame of the soccer goal and held on as hard as I could, because I was sure they were going to come back for me. I didn’t want to go wherever it was, even though it was beautiful, so beautiful; they were even more beautiful than Hans Bliss had said. A wave of warm, alien ecstasy poured over me, and then I woke up because Naomi was hitting me on the shoulder. She had a plate of food with her. Breakfast.

“Stop moaning about how beautiful it is,” she said. “Please? Whatever it is, it’s really, really beautiful. I get that, totally. Oh shit, Dorn, were you having a wet dream? I am so very embarrassed. Oh yuck. Let me go somewhere far away now and not eat my breakfast.”

I wanted to die. But instead I got changed under the foil blanket and then went and got my own breakfast and came back. Naomi had her nose in a book. I said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just something that happens to guys, okay?”

“It happens to girls, too,” Naomi said. “Not that I want to be having some sex-education discussion with you. Although you probably need it, from what I hear about American schools nowadays.”

“Like you had it so much better,” I said. “And my dad’s a doctor, remember? I know everything I need to know and lots of other stuff, too. And what were you doing last night? You woke me up when you came to bed. I don’t even know when it was. It was late.”

“My parents homeschooled me,” Naomi said. “They wanted me to have every advantage.” Her eyes were all red.

“What?” I said. “Are you sick? Is everything okay?”

“I think so,” Naomi said. She scraped her nose with a sterile wipe. “I talked to my mom last night. She says that Vermont is still under martial law, so she can’t get out to see my grandmother. She can’t get her on the phone either. That’s probably bad, right?”

“It might not be,” I said.

Naomi didn’t say anything.

“At least your mom and dad are all right,” I said.

She nodded.

“Here,” I said. “Let’s get a book for you. Something cheerful. How about Naomi Novik?”

We sat and she read and I thought about stuff. Sorken. My father. My mother. My brother Stephen. I thought about how the kind of thing that Stephen thought was funny when he was alive wasn’t really anything that I thought was funny. For example, when he pushed me down the stairs. I remember he was giggling. The last time I was out visiting my mother, it was different. He laughed at some of the things that I said, and not like it was because he thought I was an idiot. We got into one of those arguments about something really stupid, and then I said something and he just started laughing. I wish I could remember what I said, what we were arguing about.

Naomi looked up and saw me looking at her. “What?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hey,” she said. “Do you surf?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“Not much to do out there on the beach with Hans Bliss,” she said. “Not a lot of soccer players. Everybody goes surfing. You know that Hans Bliss guy? Philip? The one with the tattoo and the mother. Paula.” The one with the big nose. “He was telling me this story about a guy he knew, a surfer. One day this surfer guy was out in the water and he got knocked under by this really big wave. He went down and his board shot out from under him, really sliced him. But he didn’t realize what had happened until he got out of the water, because the water was really cold, but when he got out of the water and pulled his suit down, it turned out that the fin on his board had cut his ball sac right open, and he hadn’t felt it because the water was so cold. When he pulled his suit down, his testicle fell out and was just hanging there, way down on his leg on, like, this string. Like a yo-yo.”

“So?” I said. “Are you trying to gross me out or something? My dad’s a doctor, remember? I hear stories like this all the time.”

Naomi looked nonplussed. “Just be careful,” she said. “What’s up? Bad news?”

I’d found my cell phone, and I was trying to decide whether or not to listen to Sorken’s messages. But in the end I just deleted them. Then I went and got some people together to play soccer.

It was the fifth day, if you’re counting, and nobody in the hangar had the flu, which was good news, but my father still had his hands full. There was the pregnant woman from Switzerland who had come over to join Hans Bliss. A couple of days in quarantine, and she decided that she’d had enough. She threw this major tantrum, said she was going into labor. The best part: she took off all her clothes before she threw the tantrum. So you had this angry, naked, pregnant woman yelling stuff in German and French and English and stomping her foot like Gojiro. It totally broke up the soccer game. We all stopped to watch.

My father went and sat on the floor next to her. I went and stood nearby, just in case she got dangerous. Someone needed to look out for my father. He said that he’d be happy to examine her, if she liked, but she probably wouldn’t go into labor for another month, at least, and we weren’t going to be stuck in here that long. And anyway, he’d delivered babies before. All you really needed was boiling water and lots of towels. I think he was kidding about that.

Just a few hours later, a Tico doctor showed up with a full mobile clinic. By that point we were just kind of kicking the ball around. I was showing off some for Lara. The doctor’s name was Menoz, and it was all pretty much like my father had said it was going to be. My father and Dr. Menoz talked first, and then they looked at the clinic records my father had been keeping. I hung around for a bit, hoping that Dr. Menoz would just go ahead and tell us that we were free to go, but it seemed like it was going to take a while. So Lara and I went around and got one last soccer match together. A lot of people came and watched.

That guard who’d talked to me a few times was, like, my biggest fan now. Whenever we were playing he yelled and clapped his hands, and he’d dance around when I stopped a goal. All the guards came over to watch this time, not just him, as if they knew that the rules didn’t really matter now. So much for quarantine.

Before we started for real, something strange happened. My guard put down his gun. He talked to his friends, and they gave him a high five. Then he came out onto the field. He even took off his N95 mask. He smiled at me. “I play, too,” he said. He seemed proud of having this much English. Well, it was more English than I had Spanish.

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. I waved at the other team, the one Lara was on. “Play for those guys. They need all the help they can get.”

It was around three in the afternoon, and it was warm, but there was a breeze coming in through the vents up in the tin roof and through the big metal doors. Like always, there was music playing on someone’s googly, and the little kids were having a conference over in the petting zoo, probably figuring out what to do with all of the freaky little animals they’d collected. I was almost enjoying being here. I was almost feeling nostalgic. It wasn’t like I had a lot of friends in the hangar, but most people knew me well enough to say hi. When I wanted to get a match going, there were always enough people to play, and nobody got all that upset about the fact that my team won most of the time. Whatever happened next, I didn’t think I’d be spending a lot of time playing soccer. Wherever we ended up, nobody was going to know much about me, about what I could do in a soccer game. I’d just be some American kid whose dad was a doctor who had wanted to see aliens.

Naomi, who had decided she enjoyed refereeing a match every once in a while, threw the ball in, and that hangar guard was on it immediately, before anyone else even thought about moving. He was amazing. He was better than amazing. He went up and down the concrete as if no one else was on the floor. And he put the ball past me every single time, no matter what I did. And every time, when I failed to stop him, he just grinned and said, “Good try. Good try.”

The worst part is that he did it without even taking advantage of my height. He didn’t go over me. He just went around. The way he did it was so good it was like a bad dream. Like science fiction. Like I was Superman and he was Kryptonite. He seemed to know what I was going to do before I did. He knew all about me, like he’d been taking notes during all those other games.

After a while both teams stopped playing and they just watched while he did all sorts of interesting stuff. If I came forward, he skimmed around and behind me. Score. If I hung back in front of the goal, it didn’t matter. He put the ball where I wasn’t. I didn’t give up, though. I finally stopped a goal. I felt good about that, until I realized that he’d let me have the save. I hadn’t really stopped anything.

And that was the last straw. There he was, grinning at me, like this had just been for fun. He wasn’t even breathing hard. I made myself grin back. He didn’t realize I knew he’d let me save that last goal. He didn’t even think I was that smart. He clapped for me. I clapped for him. Everyone who had been watching was clapping and yelling. Even Lara. So I just walked away.

I didn’t feel angry or upset or anything. I just felt as if I’d found out something important. I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. I’d thought I was amazing, but I wasn’t. Some guy who’d spent five days standing against a wall holding a gun could walk in and prove in about ten minutes that I wasn’t anything special. So that was that. I know you’ll think that I was being melodramatic, but I wasn’t. I was being realistic. I gave up on soccer right then.

For some reason, I was thinking about the little empty glass bottle that my father gave my mother, that my mother gave me. I wondered what Sorken would think when I told him I was quitting soccer, and then I remembered Sorken was dead. So I didn’t have to worry what he thought.

Something was going on with the Hans Bliss group. They’d disassembled their modesty wall. Actually, they’d just kicked it over. They were huddled together, looking really bad. Utterly hopeless. I could sympathize. My father and Zuleta-Arango and Dr. Menoz were there too, so I went over. My father said, “Dr. Menoz had some news about the Star Friends community.”

“Not good news,” I said.

“No,” my father said. He didn’t sound particularly upset, but that’s my father. He doesn’t ever seem particularly anything. “One of the last arrivals came in from Calexico, and he had the flu. They weren’t being very careful in the community. Hans Bliss didn’t believe they were in any real danger. Lots of physical contact. Communal eating. They didn’t have good protocols in place. No doctor. They had no doctor.”

“It might not have made any difference,” Zuleta-Arango said. “There were deaths on one of the cruise ships, too. And in a few neighborhoods of San Jose, a few cities, they have set up additional quarantine zones. There are deaths. But the mobile units are being supplied with vaccines, which Dr. Menoz says will do the trick. It isn’t as bad as it’s been in the States. We have been lucky here.”

“Not all of us,” my father said. “Hans Bliss is dead.”

The pregnant woman began to wail. Lots of other people were crying. My father said, “The remaining community is in bad shape. As soon as quarantine is lifted here, I’ll go out to see how I can help, if they’ll let me.”

Dr. Menoz popped his cell phone closed and struck up a conversation in rapid Spanish with Zuleta-Arango, Miike, and Purdy. The Hans Bliss people were still standing there. They looked like they’d been pithed. That guy Philip, the one with the surfer friend, the one that Naomi seemed to like, blew his nose hard. He said to my father, “We’ll all go out. There will be things that they need us to do.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“Yes,” my father said. “What about you? I can’t send you home.”

Dr. Menoz said, “As of right now, I’m authorized to lift quarantine here. This news is good, at least? There will be a bus outside the hangar within the hour. It will transport all of you into San Jose, to a center for displaced travelers. They are arranging for the necessary series of vaccinations there. Shall I make the announcement or would you prefer to do it?”

Zuleta-Arango made the announcement. There was something anticlimactic about it. Everyone already knew what he was about to say. And what he said wasn’t really the thing that we needed to know. What we didn’t know was what was going to happen next. Where we would be sent. What would happen in the next few weeks. When the flight ban would be lifted. Where the flu had come from. Whether or not the people that we loved would be okay. What we would find when we got home.

Naomi had already packed up her duffel bag. She said, “Lots of people have been coming by, bringing back your father’s books. I finished the last Kim Stanley Robinson. I guess there are still a couple of short-story collections. I heard about Bliss. That really sucks. Now I feel bad about calling him an idiot.”

“He was an idiot,” I said. “That’s why he’s dead.”

“I guess,” Naomi said. “What’s in that bottle?”

Like I said, the glass bottle with nothing inside it was the first present that my father ever gave my mother. He told her that there was a genie in the bottle. That he’d bought it at a magic shop. A real magic shop. He said that he’d already made two wishes. The first wish had been to meet a beautiful girl. That was my mother. The second wish was that she would fall in love with him, but not just because of the wish. That she would really fall in love with him. So already you can see the problem, right? You wouldn’t fall for some guy who was telling you this. Because if you fall in love with someone because of a wish, how can it not be the wish that makes you fall in love? I said that to my mother one time and she said that I was being too literal minded. I said that actually, no, I was just saying that my father’s made-up story was kind of stupid.

My mother always said that she’d never used that last wish. And I didn’t understand that either. Why didn’t she use it when they were getting divorced? Why didn’t she use it to make Stephen like having a little brother better? I used to think that if I had the bottle I’d wish for Stephen not to hate me so much. For him to like me. Just a little. The way that older brothers are supposed to like younger brothers. There were other wishes. I mean, I’ve made lists and lists of all the wishes I could make, like being the best goalie there has ever been. Like getting taller by a few inches. Other stuff that’s too embarrassing to talk about. I could come up with wishes all day long. That it wouldn’t rain. That I’d suddenly be a genius at math. That my parents would get back together.

I hadn’t ever made any of those wishes, not even the soccer wish, because I don’t believe in wishes. Also because it would be like cheating, because when I was a famous goalie I’d always wonder if I were really the best soccer player in the world, or whether I’d just wished it true. I could wish that I were taller, but maybe one day I will be. Everyone says that I will be. I guess if I were Paula or one of the Star Friends, I’d wish that Hans Bliss had been smarter. That he hadn’t died. Or I’d wish that the aliens would come back. I don’t know which of those I’d wish for.

I gave the bottle to Lara when she came over to say good-bye. I didn’t really mean anything by it.

She said, “Dorn, what is this?”

“It’s a genie in a bottle,” Naomi said. “Like a fairy tale. Dorn says that there’s one wish left in there. I said that if he gave it to me, I’d wish for world peace, but he’s giving it to you instead. Can you believe it?”

Lara shook the glass bottle.

“Don’t do that,” I said. “How would you like to be shaken if you were an invisible genie who’s been trapped in a bottle for hundreds of years?”

“I don’t believe in wishes,” Lara said. “But it is very sweet of you, Dorn, to give it to me.”

“It belonged to my mother,” I said.

“His dead mother,” Naomi said. “It’s a precious family heirloom.”

“Then I can’t keep it,” Lara said. She tried to give it back.

I put my hands behind me.

“Never mind then,” Lara said. She looked a little annoyed, actually. As if I were being silly. I realized something: Lara wasn’t particularly romantic. And maybe I am. She said, “I’ll keep it safe for you, Dorn. But I have something important to tell you.”

“I know,” I said. “You were watching the guard walk all over me. During that last game. You want to tell me to pick a new career.”

“No, Dorn,” Lara said. Even more annoyed now. “Stop talking, okay? That guard isn’t just a guard, you know? He was on the team for Costa Rica. The team that was supposed to go to the World Cup three years ago, before the last influenza.”

“What?” I said.

“His name is Olivas,” Lara said. “He got into a fight this summer and they kicked him off the team for a while. He sounds like you, Dorn, don’t you think? Not very bright. But never mind. He says you are good. Talented.”

“If I were any good, he wouldn’t have been able to walk past me like that, over and over again,” I said. But I started to feel a little better. He wasn’t just a guard with a gun. He was a professional soccer player.

“No, Dorn,” Lara said again. “You are good, but he is very good. There is a difference, you know?”

“Apparently,” I said, “there is a difference. I just hadn’t realized how big. I didn’t know he was, like, a soccer superstar. I thought that maybe he was just average for Costa Rica. I was thinking that I ought to quit soccer and take up scuba diving or something.”

“I hadn’t realized that you were a quitter,” Lara said. She still sounded very disapproving. Her eyebrows were knit together, and her lower lip stuck out. She looked even prettier, and it was because she was disappointed in me. Interesting.

“Maybe you ought to get to know him better,” Naomi said, looking at me looking at Lara like she knew what I was thinking. “Dorn needs to pack. You two will have plenty of time to talk on the bus. It’s not like you’re never going to see each other again. At least, not yet. Lara, pele el ojo. Your mother is coming this way.”

“Es un chingue,” Lara said. “¡Que tigra!” She sighed and kissed me right on the mouth. She had to dip her head down. Then she dashed off. Zip. When I thought about it, I wasn’t looking forward to getting to know her mother, and her mother sure wasn’t looking forward to getting to know me.

“So,” Naomi said. She was grinning. “You know what Lara told me a few days ago? That she wasn’t ever planning on having boyfriends. You can’t get serious about boys if you want to go to Mars. So much for that. Not that you’ll care, but you aren’t the only one who got lucky.”

“What?” I said. “Did that blond girl come over to show you her engagement ring or something?”

“No,” Naomi said. She waggled her eyebrows like crazy. “I got lucky. Me. That cute guy, Philip? Remember him?”

“We’re not thinking about the same guy,” I said. “He’s not cute. I know cute. I am cute.”

“He’s nice,” Naomi said. “And he’s funny. And smart.”

I didn’t know so much about nice. Or smart. I finished packing my suitcase, and started in on my father’s. I wished I hadn’t given away that little glass bottle. I could have given Lara a paperback instead. “You must have a lot to talk about.”

“I suppose,” Naomi said. “You know the best part?”

“What?” I said. I looked around for my father and finally spotted him. He was sitting on a cot beside the pregnant woman, who probably had a name but I’d never bothered to find out. She was sobbing against his shoulder, her mouth still open in that wail. Her face was all shiny with snot. I was betting that if her baby was a boy, she’d name him Hans. Maybe Bliss if it was a girl.

A girl walked by, dragging an iguana behind her on a homemade leash. Were they going to let her bring the iguana on the bus?

Naomi said, “The best part is he has dual citizenship. His father’s from Costa Rica. And he likes smart, fat, big-mouthed chicks.”

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

“Don’t be so sarcastic,” Naomi said. “It’s an unattractive quality in someone your size. Want a hand with the suitcases?”

“You take the one with all the books in it,” I said.

People were still packing up their stuff. Some people were talking on their cell phones, transmitting good news, getting good news and bad news in return. Over by the big doors to the hangar, I ran into the guard. Olivas. I was beginning to think I recognized his name. He nodded and smiled and handed me a piece of paper with a number on it. He said something in Spanish.

Naomi said, “He says you ought to come see him practice next month, when he’s back on his team again.”

“Okay,” I said. “Gracias. Thank you. Bueno. Bueno.” I smiled at Olivas and tucked his phone number into my shirt pocket. I was thinking, One day, I’ll be better than you are. You won’t get a thing past me. I’ll know Spanish, too. So I’ll know exactly what you’re saying, and not just stand here looking like an idiot. I’ll be six inches taller. And when I get scouted, let’s say I’m still living down here, and let’s say I end up on the same team as you, I won’t get kicked off, not for fighting. Fighting is for idiots.

Naomi and I went out onto the cracked tarmac and sat on our luggage. Costa Rican sunlight felt even more luxurious when you were out of quarantine, I decided. I could get used to this kind of sunlight. Lara was over with her mother and some other women, all of them speaking a mile a minute. Lara looked over at me and then looked away again. Her eyebrows were doing that thing. I was pretty sure we weren’t going to end up sitting next to each other on the bus. Off in the distance, you could see somewhere that might have been San Jose, where we were going. The sky was blue, and there were still no planes in it. They were all lined up along the runways. Our transportation wasn’t in sight yet, and so I went to use the latrines one last time. That’s where I was when the aliens came. I was pissing into a hole in the ground. And my father was still sitting inside the hangar, his arm around an inconsolable, enormously pregnant, somewhat gullible Swiss woman, hoping that she would eventually stop crying on his T-shirt.

It was kind of like the bats. They were there, and after a while you noticed them. Only it wasn’t like the bats at all and I don’t really mean to say that it was. The aliens’ ships were lustrous and dark and flexible; something like sharks, if sharks were a hundred feet long and hung in the air, moving just a little, as if breathing. There were three of the ships, about 150 feet up. They were so very close. I yanked up my pants and pushed the latrine curtain aside, stumbled out. Naomi and that guy Philip were standing there on the tarmac, looking up, holding hands. The priest crossing himself. The kid with her iguana. Lara and her mother and the other passengers all looking up, silently. Nobody saying anything yet. When I turned toward San Jose, I could see more spacecraft, lots more. Of course, you already know all this. Everyone saw them. You saw them. You saw the aliens hovering over the melting ice floes of Antarctica, too, and over New New York and Paris and Mexico City, and Angkor Wat and all those other places. Unless you were blind or dead or the kind of person who always manages to miss seeing what everybody else sees. Like aliens showing up. What I want to know is did they come back because they knew that Hans Bliss was dead?

People still argue about that, too. Poor Hans Bliss. That’s what I was thinking: Poor, stupid, lucky, unlucky Hans Bliss.

I ran inside the hangar, past Olivas and the other guards and Dr. Menoz and Zuleta-Arango, and two kids spinning around in circles, making themselves dizzy on purpose.

“Dad,” I said. “Dad! Everyone! The aliens! They’re here. They’re just outside! Lots of them!”

My father got up. The pregnant woman stopped crying. She stood up too. They were walking toward me and then they were running right past me.

Me, I couldn’t make up my mind. It seemed as if I had a choice to make, which was stupid, I know. What choice? I wasn’t sure. Outside the hangar were the aliens and the future. Inside the hangar it was just me, a couple hundred horrible bats sleeping up in the roof, the remains of a petting zoo, and all of the rest of the mess we were leaving behind. The cots. Our trash. All the squashed water bottles and crumpled foil blankets and the used surgical masks and no-longer-sterile wipes. The makeshift soccer field. I had this strange urge, like I ought to go over to the field and tidy it up. Stand in front of one of the cobbled-together goals. Guard it. Easier to guard it, of course, now that Olivas wasn’t around. I know it sounds stupid, I know that you’re wondering why aliens show up and I’m still in here, in the empty hangar, doing nothing. I can’t explain it to you. Maybe you can explain it to me. But I stood there feeling empty and lost and ashamed and alone until I heard my father’s voice. He was saying, “Dorn! Adorno, where are you? Adorno, get out here! They’re beautiful, they’re even more beautiful than that idiot said. Come on out, come and see!”

So I went to see.

KELLY LINK was born in Miami, Florida, and grew up on the East Coast. She attended Columbia University in New York and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She sold her first story, “Water Off a Black Dog’s Back,” just before attending Clarion in 1995. Her later stories have won or been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr., World Fantasy, Hugo, and Nebula awards.

Link’s stories have been collected in Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners. She has edited the anthology Trampoline; coedits The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, and Ellen Datlow; and coedits the zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet with Grant. She is currently assembling a new collection of short fiction for teenagers and adults, to be published by Viking.

Visit her Web site at www.kellylink.net.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Like Dorn’s father, when I travel I cram as many books as will fit into my suitcase. What follows is a very incomplete list of the science fiction and fantasy authors whose books I’ve lugged around with me over the years, and who I imagined Dorn would also be familiar with: Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Alfred Bester, Kage Baker, M. T. Anderson, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, R. A. MacAvoy, Terry Pratchett, Sheri Tepper, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Margo Lanagan. Of course, since this story takes place in the future, Dorn and his father have read a number of excellent books that I’ve never heard of. Possibly some of them will be written by the readers of this anthology.