Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - FOLLOW THE MOON
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
PART TWO - SUPER-SCIENCE SOCIETY
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
PART THREE - MIAMI AIRPORT
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
PART FOUR - MOONLIGHT BAY
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
PART FIVE - A SONG OF ASCENTS
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
PART SIX - ROCHELLE’S STORY
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
PART SEVEN - THE CRY
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
PART EIGHT - THE BURNING
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
PART NINE - TO COOL YOUR TONGUE
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
Acknowledgements
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © David Halperin, 2011 All rights reserved
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Halperin, David J. (David Joel)
Journal of a UFO investigator : a novel / David Halperin.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-47565-2
1. Teenagers—Fiction. 2. Unidentified flying objects—Fiction.
3. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 4. Pennsylvania—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A54925J68 2011
813.6—dc22 2010034999
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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To Rose
who taught me to believe
PART ONE
FOLLOW THE MOON
[JANUARY 1966]
CHAPTER 1
THE UFO FELL FROM THE SKY ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 20, 1962, the week of my thirteenth birthday. The event itself, after more than three years, I recall with perfect clarity. Many of its circumstances, however, have blurred in my mind.
I can’t remember, for instance, where I’d been that evening. I was certainly coming home from somewhere, maybe a meeting of some sort. I see myself standing before the house, on the front lawn, just a little off the sidewalk, ready to go inside yet looking steadily into the sky. It was very cold, and it must have been late, certainly after 10:00 P.M. Orion was high in the southern sky over the house, Sirius not far below and to the east. All the stars were extraordinarily clear, their colors very marked. I could make out the red of Betelgeuse, the ice-blue, diamond-blue glitter of Sirius. There was no moon.
The object appeared in the east. I don’t know what called my attention to it. I was not surprised to see it. I’d been a UFO investigator for two months, since the fourth week in October. I knew such things were there in the skies, if only I was ready to look toward them.
It was a disk, glowing deep fluorescent red. Darker at the edges than near the center. Apparent size about twice what the full moon’s would have been if the moon had been visible. It moved westward at a leisurely pace, toward me, briefly obscuring the stars as it passed beneath.
My camera was in my bedroom, third dresser drawer. My father’s binoculars were on a shelf in his den. I was torn whether to run into the house to get them, knowing the thing might be gone when I came out. I suspected it wasn’t likely to register on film. While I stood trying to decide, it came to a dead stop over the house.
How long it stayed motionless, I don’t know. I didn’t think to look at my watch. Suddenly it began to flutter downward, in a classic falling leaf maneuver, as if to land or crash on top of me. I tried to run; my feet wouldn’t move. They tingled as if electricity were running through them, the way the body tingles when lightning’s about to strike. Or when a nightmare begins and I don’t yet know how it will end.
My legs crumpled. The frozen earth, its winter-brown grass red in the blood-colored light, slammed against my body. I lay in a twisted S, my face turned upward, the back of my head wedged against the ground. The disk—solid, heavy, bigger than a bus or even a boxcar—fell quivering a few hundred feet above me. Its crimson glare pulsated, darkening slowly, all at once brightening. It swallowed up the sky.
My hand at least would move.
I felt around my pocket for my key chain, found the thick metal triangle, the Delta Device. I squeezed—
The disk stopped. Hung in midair.
Not because of the Delta. It can’t have had that power. But after a few seconds I felt the gadget vibrate in my hand, and I knew: yes, this works, just as Jeff Stollard and I had planned. Another moment, and I might be crushed to death. But not in silence.
And the disk—
“Danny!”
—spoke to me. The words it said I have forgotten. M
aybe they weren’t words, just sensations, images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain—
“Danny!”
The door opens. She comes in.
My mother. She leans on the dresser, just inside the doorway to my bedroom, breathing hard from the strain of walking twenty feet.
“I’ve been knocking. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” I lie. But it’s not quite a lie. I heard her knock but didn’t entirely hear it, just as I see her every day, but not entirely. Right now I hardly see her at all. My desk lamp is the only light I have on. Outside its circle, she’s in shadow.
She shuffles over to me, in her bedroom slippers. She always wears her bedroom slippers.
“Danny. Do you know what time it is?”
I glance at the last words I’ve written—images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain—and move my hand to cover the paper. A mistake; I’ve called her attention to it. I look at my watch. “About eleven thirty,” I say.
“Almost a quarter to twelve.”
“Eleven thirty-seven.” I correct her.
“It’s a school night. You know that.”
“I know.”
She persists: “Christmas vacation is over.”
Oh, yes, don’t I know it? January once more. Wake with the alarm before it’s light, ride the school bus through the bitter gray morning. Try to do the reading I didn’t do last night. Then stagger from class to class, boredom to boredom, my eyes foggy with all the sleep I haven’t gotten. Eleventh grade now. I turned sixteen last month.
She stands beside me, resting her weight on the back of my chair, touching my shoulder with her fingers. I lean forward. It makes me nervous when my mother touches me. I smell the sour sickness of her body. I don’t turn around, but I can see her in my mind: spindly limbs, gaunt, peaky face. Her thick cat eyeglasses, the lenses like teardrops. I wear glasses too.
“What are you writing?”
“Oh . . . something for English class.”
“English was my best subject,” she says.
When she was in high school, I guess. English is my best subject also. When I write, the teachers tell me, I sound almost like a grown-up.
“A story?” she says, leaning over me, trying to read what I’ve written.
“Sort of. We’re supposed to write . . . a kind of journal.” I’m making this up as I go along. “Of somebody who we are. Who we might be.”
“A story,” she says, as if that made it so. As if she still knew me from inside out, top to bottom, the way she did when I was little.
But this isn’t a story. And it has nothing to do with any English assignment. Writing a story, I know the twists and turns in advance. I know how it’s going to come out. This . . . journal, I guess, comes from a place I don’t yet know, and it unfolds itself inside me, bit by bit, so I can’t see beyond the next folding.
“You know it upsets Daddy,” she says.
“What upsets him?”
“You staying up to all hours like this. Night after night.”
And not even out on dates, like a normal teenager. I know the way my father thinks. Sixteen; at that age I ought to go out with girls. I don’t; therefore I’m weird. Abnormal. Not really his son. I investigate UFOs; that makes me weird. I study the Bible too; that makes me weirder. He has no idea what I’m going through.
Neither does she, though most of the time she’s nicer about it. I touch my hand to my pants pocket; my wallet’s there. When she’s gone, I’ll take it out, look at the card.
“Danny!”
His voice, irritable, calls from the den. “What, Dad?” I yell back.
“How much more you gonna be up?”
“Maybe another half hour.”
I hear him grumble to himself. I hear everything that goes on in this house—this little matchbox the three of us live in, all the rooms jammed together, no doors except for the bedrooms and the bath. We moved here ten years ago, after the heart attack, because the house is all on one floor. My mother can’t climb stairs.
She nods at me, as if to say: You hear that? A half hour. You promised.
Does this story—journal, whatever—come from some UFO world? An alternate reality, where I’m still Danny Shapiro, and Jeff Stollard and Rosa Pagliano are still people who’ve been in my life? Where nevertheless we say things, do things, experience things that have a weight beyond ordinary reality?
It’s possible. I’ve read articles about automatic writing, ouija boards, communication through our souls from the beyond. Mostly I don’t believe those articles. They’re written by crackpots. I’m a scientific UFOlogist. If we’re to solve the mystery of the disks, as we surely will, if only we keep working at it, ignore the idiots who ridicule us, it will be through scientific research and analysis. Nothing else.
The images rose within me this afternoon, as I rode home on the school bus. It seemed half a dream, yet I know I was awake. The other kids’ songs, their teasing, their yelps of laughter at jokes I don’t quite understand washed around me like water around my bubble of air. It was like remembering things I’d known, but for years had barely thought of.
—images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain. And while I tasted the relief that I wasn’t going to be squashed after all, at the same time pondering how remarkable it was that this disk, this alien craft, should descend over me like a spider on its thread and speak to me mind to mind—
My mother eases into bed. I hear her through the wall that separates her bedroom from mine.
—the object pulled up, lifted back into the sky, shrank to the apparent size of a silver dollar held at arm’s length. Then a quarter. Then a dime. It moved away, continuing its interrupted path westward, until it vanished in the distance—
My hand stops writing. All on its own; my brain just watches what’s happening, perplexed, marveling. I lay my pen down. I know I can’t force this. I pull my wallet from my pocket, and there’s the card, hidden behind the driving learner’s permit that arrived yesterday in the mail.
The first phone number was mine. The second—“ORegon 8-0496”—was Jeff Stollard’s. Still is, though now they’ve made it all numbers. In eighth grade, and the summer before that, Jeff and I were best friends. That fall we wrote our science paper on UFOs together; we got all excited, agreed we’d keep on until we found the truth, write a book about it. What are UFOs? Where are they from? Do they come to help us or to conquer and destroy? I still search for answers. Jeff no longer cares.
Christmas vacation of eighth grade—just before New Year’s 1963. I walked the mile and a half to Jeff’s house. There’d been snow, but the weather had turned sunny, a bit warmer, the sidewalks awash with the melt. Jeff and I ran off the cards on his toy printing press, and in homeroom after vacation we announced our club. Rosa Pagliano came up right away and told me she wanted to join. Me. Not Jeff.
Wherever she is—does she still have the card I signed for her?
I imagine Jeff threw his away long ago.
But I have mine, softened and worn from three years in my wallet. On the back is the heart I drew, pierced with an arrow, DS & RP written inside. This time, I told myself, I’ll turn it over, look at the heart, bring back my old dreams. I can’t. It hurts too much.
DS could stand for Dumb Shit as well as Danny Shapiro.
I wish I’d written my initials out in full, DAS.
The A is for Asher, my mother’s grandfather, who died in the old country. That’s why I read the Bible, so I can understand the old man I never met and know the reason his name is in mine. I don’t believe in God. I pray when I’m desperate, Please, dear Lord, let it not be too late for me. Too late—to be normal. To be invited to parties, have friends and girlfriends; the feeling deep in my soul says I was half, now I’m whole. No more hunger and thirst . . .
That’s my only prayer. Seldom do I resort to it. I know there’s no one listening.
I investigate UFOs because unlike God, they are real and can be seen.
“Danny!”
My father sounds louder now, and angrier. How would it be to live in a house that’s dark and quiet sometimes, where parents go out together and I can be alone? But my mother’s too sick. We go out only as a family, to visit my grandmother for the Jewish holidays. Until the break-in we hardly even locked our door. My mother was—she is—always home.
“Yes, Dad?” I call out.
“Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep? It’s past midnight, for God’s sake!”
And only now have I picked up my pen. I should begin to be frightened. Not of his walloping me when he comes storming in; he’s never done that. But of the tidal wave blindness of his rage, the bitter words that burn like lava, that will leave me scorched and desolate and sleepless afterward as I struggle to swallow what the three of us spend our lives pretending isn’t so. Namely, that he hates me and everything I am.
I run my free hand over my face. No pimples, at least none ripe for lancing. So tonight the worst is unlikely. “Yes, Dad,” I holler. “In a minute.”
It’ll be a lot more than a minute. I can’t help myself. It’s flowing again, pouring through my pen, and will take me, if only I can follow, toward the place of truth, the heart of all secrets—
Shivering—from the chill, from the terror of the death that had hovered above me and now was gone, at least for now—I pulled myself up from the ground. I brushed bits of dirt and grass from my heavy coat. I felt in my pocket for my keys and let myself into the house.
It was dark there . . .
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 1