I'm staying in the motel room where the fat businessman from Seattle killed himself. I don't mind, and I doubt he would either.

He'd come to see a UFO and checked into Marla's motel for 6 nights last May. He bought a plastic sky-watching picnic chair and a pair of Heaven-Gazers plastic binoculars from the Heavens Above Souvenir & Gift Shop, put on his best X-files T-shirt and, at dusk, strolled on up to Visitors Point to wait for his very own close encounter.

He went up there six straight evenings, stopped out there all night with a blanket and a thermos flask and a set expression.

Never saw a thing.

He'd come back when it started getting light again and eat one of Marla's breakfasts while she mopped the diner floor around him: Marla's special pancakes, buttered and dripping maple syrup, thin crisp strips of streaked bacon, fried bread. Each morning she'd ask him if he'd seen anything, and every time he told her no, not this time.

The last day he was staying here, he didn't stop for breakfast and Marla didn't get her chance to ask him if he'd seen a UFO yet. She didn't even know the fat businessman had come back until they heard the gun go off in the motel room.

Perhaps the disappointment of not seeing any aliens after the three hour flight and five hour drive to get here was just too much for him to take. The note he left tacked to the dressing table mirror, held in place with a wad of chewed bubble-gum, didn't shed much light on his death. It simply said, in the same small meticulous block capitals he'd used when he checked in:

"IT'S ALL A JOKE."

I only met the fat businessman twice. The first time was when I drove past him, on my way up to patrol the garden of the house where my great-aunt used to live, the same as I do every night. He'd got into town earlier that day and he was heading to Visitors Point for his first night of UFO-spotting.

It was a warm evening, and I was enjoying my sunset-lit drive, going slow with the windows down. I remember seeing him in the side of the dusty road and thinking how badly he looked like he wanted to talk to someone. He smiled and waved as I came level with him. His smile showed a lot of very small, very white teeth - like milk teeth - and the wave was nervous and a little sad. Maybe that was why I stopped.

"Pretty," he said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine, and he gestured towards the sun slipping away behind the rocky horizon.

I nodded, seeing the plastic chair he'd have paid too much for at Heavens Above and the flimsy-looking binoculars hanging around his thick pasty neck.

"Hoping for a sighting?" I asked.

A very round face creased into a grin that made him look oddly young. "Oh yeah," he replied, adding: "I've come all the way from Seattle". He looked up at the sky, stained livid streaming orange to the west, deepening through improbable shades of lilac and violet to indigo. A few clouds glowed pinkly, underlit by the sun's dying rays. "You don't get skies like this back in the city," he said, head still upturned. "Tall buildings, traffic, too much pollution. You can't even see the stars most nights, never mind a U.F.O." He seemed to zone out for a couple of moments, then he said - almost to himself: "but I always knew they were out there."

He looked back to me. "You live around here?"

"I guess," I answered. I'd been born in the nearest hospital to here [an hour and fifteen in the ambulance, my mother had said], and I'd stayed here my whole life, other than the year it had taken me to drop out of medical school.

"You're lucky," he said. "Living in a part of the world like this."

I repeated my previous response, more for the sake of having something to say than because I felt particularly lucky.

"Ever seen one?" he asked, sounding excited but kind of shy about it. "A UFO, I mean."

I smiled. "Boy, did you pick the wrong person to ask," I said, and he looked confused. "I think I'm the only person in this town who hasn't."

And thinking that a good line to leave on, I wished him luck with his sky-searching, and drove away.

The second time I saw him, daylight was just breaking, and I was driving to a farm to check out a cattle mutilation that had been reported. I was making an early start, hoping I could get there before the heat and flies conspired to make the smell too bad. He was crossing the road back to Marla's place, with his blanket folded up under his arm, dragging the plastic chair in the dirt dejectedly. He looked tired, but he still recognised me [or my truck]. The wave he gave this time was less nervous, but a little sadder. I blasted the horn twice in greeting, but I didn't have time to stop and talk.

Thinking about it now, I'm pretty sure that was the last day of his visit.

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