few seemingly came on foot.
First, it was the Seekers, lured by the seed planted on Frykowski’s website and grown to fruition through the radio broadcasts of Robert Nash.
The Seekers drew the bloggers, East Coasters with their own websites chronicling supernatural happenings.
The bloggers drew the tabloids, and Lansburg appeared in low-quality black-and-white newspapers at checkout stands around the county.
The tabloid frenzy drew serious newspapers. They didn’t come in the same numbers but sent a reporter or two to our sleepy Pennsylvania town. They covered the frenzy, writing about aliens in a tongue-in-cheek way. Yet there was something in that writing that said, while they didn’t believe in extraterrestrials, they wanted to be present. Just in case.
The newspapers drew the camera crews. Lansburg’s lava lamp became a fixture in the background of daily news reports.
Soon our modest town of fifteen thousand was overrun with outsiders. Hundreds of people flooded our motels, set up camps in our fields, filled our town square to capacity. Restaurants ran out of food. Grocery stores ran out of firewood, bottled water, and toilet paper—shoppers had to trek to the Walmart Supercenter in the next town over. Our streets became clogged by vehicles with out-of-town license plates.
And then, when I was positive the frenzy had reached its peak, when I became certain nothing else could surprise me, the media coverage grabbed the attention of the CEO of a popular health supplement MLM.
On September 25, J. Quincy Oswald drove into Lansburg like he owned the place.
Event: J. Quincy Oswald
Date: Sept. 25 (Mon.)
“We’re so honored to have you here,” Mother gushed.
Our entire family, plus J. Quincy Oswald, sat at the dining room table. The table Mother had frantically cleaned after getting Oswald’s call. Our dining room was generally used for its intended purpose twice a year—the rest of the time it was a receptacle for clutter. (See: mail, softball equipment, myTality™ bottles, an assembled 3-D puzzle of the Titanic that Ishmael mystifyingly brought home one day.)
“I’m just thankful I caught wind of the happenings ’round here before startin’ my East Coast tour,” Oswald replied.
His tour.
As if he were a rock star.
“How long are you staying, Mr. Oswald?” Maggie asked.
“Please, honey, call me Oz.”
Oswald had already instructed us to call him Oz. At which my brother had grinned and replied, “Call me Ishmael.” (“Call me Ishmael” is the opening line of the literary classic Moby Dick. I was quite sure my brother had never read the novel, but he never tired of repeating that line.)
“I s’pose I’ll be here for as long as it takes,” Oswald went on.
Father passed the chicken noodle casserole Mother asked him to whip up—though she’d made him add some sort of myTality™ protein powder to the recipe. “As long as what takes, exactly?”
Father’s gruff tone was the single thing that pleased me about the situation.
Oswald looked around the table with a self-satisfied smile. “I was gonna save this for dessert, but might as well jump right in.”
“Please do,” I said.
He sat back in his chair and raked his fingers through his hair in that calculatedly casual way of his. “Listen,” he said. “This is gonna sound out-of-this-world nuts.”
Ishmael and Mother leaned forward, bringing immeasurable shame upon our family.
“When I was a tyke, growin’ up in the Texas backcountry,” Oswald began, “my family lived in a trailer. We had nothin’ back then. And we learned to be just fine with that. I always say, a man who builds his fortune deserves more respect than someone born into it.”
It was likely the wrong time to inform Oswald that our own wealth had been handed to us by an innovative ancestor.
“That trailer, it was no good. My daddy was a drunk and my momma was hardly around. When I needed to escape, I’d grab my sleeping bag and camp out in the back. All those nights, I’d lose myself in the sky.”
Mother put a hand on my arm. “I’m sure Gideon can relate.”
“To Father being a drunk?”
“No.” She swatted me. “The part about the sky.”
Oswald was too wrapped up in his performance to pay us any heed. I wondered whether this was a tale he regularly shared, or if it had been crafted specifically for the occasion.
“One night, something occurred that I never told a soul,” Oswald went on. “I was lookin’ at the sky, and I saw a glow. A light blazed brighter the longer I stared at it. And then, something even more outstanding happened.”
He paused dramatically, taking a moment to make eye contact with each of