Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  “But all I’m asking you to do—”

  “If you’re afraid of what’s going to happen to you once you get into that boy’s car, then don’t get in!”

  We argued, even yelled a little bit. Eventually I brought her around. When Julian and I left the library together that afternoon, Rosa was on the corner, looking like she was about to cry. Of course I didn’t say hello. I didn’t nod to her, and I looked at her as briefly as I could as Julian and I walked past. But I glimpsed her shining brown eyes fixed on me and was seized by a ghastly certainty that this was the last time I’d ever see her. Sadness weighed on me so heavily I could barely pick up my legs to walk. Julian meanwhile chattered away about “Clarion,” the tenth planet hidden behind the dark side of the moon, whose slinky space brunettes—centuries old yet ageless—pick up lucky and not exceptionally truthful earth males for rides in their UFOs. As far as I could tell he’d seen nothing at all.

  The heat was unusual for the beginning of April. Even with the Pontiac’s windows opened wide, the breeze blowing in, I felt myself sweating. I touched the knot of my tie. I wished I could take it off or at least loosen it. Julian looked perfectly cool, dressed in a blue blazer very much like the one I was wearing. I’d half expected him to wear his black suit, but this was evidently not an occasion for it.

  “How do you manage to have a driver’s license at age fifteen?” I asked him. “I thought you had to be sixteen even to get a learner’s permit.”

  “That’s not a commandment from Mount Sinai, you know. It’s not even a federal regulation. There’s plenty of states out west where everybody has a license by the time they’re fourteen. Sometimes even twelve. The farm boys and girls need to be able to drive the machinery into town. Otherwise the work won’t get done.”

  “What farm machinery do you need to drive in Philadelphia?”

  “Ha-ha. How witty we are this afternoon. The fact is that the commonwealth of Pennsylvania has taken a very considerable interest in the research of the SSS. All private and discreet and off the record, of course. If we’re to continue this research, which they very much desire we should, we need our mobility. Which means automobility, the way things currently stand. So exceptions are made, though naturally we all take care that the general public doesn’t hear about it.”

  “Exceptions—” I wondered whether such an exception could be made for me. How wonderful to drive, take my car wherever I pleased. It wouldn’t make a difference then whether the bus stopped in Braxton or not. But could I learn? Would I be safe? My mother used to drive, almost like my father though without his confidence, until once when she was pregnant with me she wrecked his car in what she calls a “moment of inattention.” I take after her, she’s told me often, with my dreamy ways.

  “Matter of paperwork,” Julian said. “We ought to see about getting it done for you. You already know how to drive a car, I assume?”

  I swallowed. I shook my head.

  “Really? That surprises me. We’ll have to teach you then. I wouldn’t worry about it. Anybody over the age of ten or eleven has the motor skills to drive. The only thing people our age lack, most of them, is judgment and responsibility.”

  “And the state of Pennsylvania trusts you to have judgment and responsibility?”

  “Of course they do. So does the library administration, when they put me in charge of our rare books. You cannot imagine how valuable some of those items are, or how fragile. We have sixteen bound manuscripts, one hundred and forty-seven incunabula. Somehow the library trusts me—”

  “One hundred and forty-seven what?”

  “Incunabula. It may now be one hundred forty-eight, actually. Depending on whether we were able to bid—”

  “Julian.”

  “Hm-hmmm,” he said encouragingly, after a moment.

  “Julian, like—isn’t an incunabulus—I mean—isn’t it—isn’t it—Well, you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t know what you mean. No idea at all, in fact. Why don’t you give me some help here?”

  “I mean, I thought an incunabulus was a demon, or a ghost, or something. Isn’t it? Something that gets into bed with people who are sleeping alone, I mean, and—and—”

  “Fucks them? Screws them? Balls them? Has carnal knowledge of them?”

  “Well . . . yes!”

  “I seem to have the general idea then,” said Julian. “To answer your original question, yes, we do have one hundred and forty-seven of them in the Rare Book Room. In the file cabinet behind the librarian’s desk. We give them out on overnight loan to our hornier patrons. Just one more service from your Philadelphia Free Library.”

  “Seriously, Julian!”

  “Seriously, Shapiro, your problem is that you’ve got sex on the brain. An incunabulum—with an m at the end, please—is a book printed before the year 1500. What you have in mind is an incubus. Or maybe really a succubus. Probably much more a succubus than an incubus.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “An incubus, dear sir, is a male demon who fucks, screws, et cetera and so forth, women ripe for his attentions. The succubus is female, does all of the above but to some lucky man. Or lucky boy. Especially if he’s sleeping on his back. Sleep on your back in succubus territory, my friend, and you’re asking for trouble.”

  I took a few seconds to digest this.

  “Julian,” I said finally, “you remember Antonio Villas Boas?”

  Villas Boas was a Brazilian farmer, abducted a few years earlier by a UFO with a spacewoman on board. “Remember?” said Julian. “How could anyone forget?”

  “Would she have been . . . sort of like a succubus?”

  “Interesting thought. Blond, wasn’t she?”

  “Whitish blond hair,” I said. “Long slits for eyes—”

  I shifted in my seat; below my belt I felt myself hardening. High and well-separated breasts. Thin waist and small stomach. Wide hips and large thighs. These were other details Villas Boas had given of the alien who’d taken him captive and twice had used him. I didn’t want to repeat them to Julian; I didn’t even want to remember them. But did I have a choice?

  “Well,” he said at last, and I wondered if he’d been thinking the same things I had. “If you’ve got to be kidnapped by an extraterrestrial, I suppose you could do worse. Still, there’s a lesson there for us.”

  “Which is?”

  “Next time it’s dark, and a red fluorescent disk flutters down into your cabbage patch, don’t wait around to take pictures. Just drop your hoe and run like hell.”

  “Huh? Red fluorescent disk?” Somehow I’d forgotten that detail. “What did you say?”

  “I said, we’re at our destination,” Julian said loudly, as though I were hard of hearing. He signaled, braked, and turned off the narrow two-lane road—we’d left the expressway long before—onto what sounded like a gravel driveway. “Our own little observatory, laboratory, and think tank. Otherwise known as Super-Science Society headquarters. Isn’t it a beauty?”

  There was a house at the end of the driveway. In the gathering darkness I could barely make out its shape, but it seemed to be large, at least two stories. There was a tower, looking something like a silo, attached directly to the house. I could not see how high the tower was. For all I could tell, its top might have reached unto heaven.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FIRST THING I SAW AS WE WALKED INTO THE HALLWAY was the staircase. It impressed me; I don’t know quite why. There was something about the width of the brown wood stairs, or the heaviness of the banister, that gave the feeling of an immensity suggested rather than seen.

  Hanging on the wall by the foot of the stairs, framed in wood so dark it was almost black, was the trisected angle, the SSS emblem from Julian’s card. It was painted starkly in black on what looked like parchment. Next to it, similarly framed but in brilliant color, was a manuscript page like the one I’d seen in the Rare Book Room, of the man flying the winged horse.

  Equal impossibilities—magic
al flight and trisecting the angle? Was that what the artwork was supposed to communicate? Before I could ask, Julian led me down the hall and through the doorway of a large, comfortably furnished living room. There was an ornate fireplace, without any fire, in the wall opposite us. Close to the fireplace, lit by the warm yellow light of a standing lamp, a chessboard lay upon a small square table.

  A girl sat at the table, studying the chessboard.

  She wore a long black evening gown of some velvety material. The chess game, to judge from the positions of the pieces, was in its middle stage. There were four chairs at the table, hers included, but no sign of whoever it was she was playing against. Her tawny blond hair fell almost to her bare shoulders. I saw at once she was attractive, but I didn’t realize how attractive until she looked up from her game, smiled, and rose to join us. She was just about my height or maybe a shade taller. Julian towered over both of us.

  “Allow me to introduce—” Julian began.

  “Rochelle Perlmann,” the girl said. She held out her hand, and I shook it. Her grip was firm and strong. I gazed into her face, partly to keep from staring at her bosom.

  “I’m Danny Shapiro,” I said.

  “Pleased to meet you, Danny.”

  “One, two, three,” said Julian, pointing to Rochelle, me, and himself in turn. “But where is the fourth?”

  “Tom? He’s up in the lab. We heard the buzzer go off, and he went to check.”

  “Is everything all right?” Julian sounded worried.

  “We’ll know in a few minutes.”

  She turned to me, smiling. “We’ve been having some trouble with the vacuum tubes,” she said. “Last Wednesday one of them just went and shattered . There wasn’t any danger from the force field radiation, not at the levels we’ve been using so far. But the glass was everywhere. We were up till three in the morning cleaning it up, can you imagine?”

  “Sounds pretty awful,” I said.

  “Oh, it was. Where do you go to school, Danny?”

  “Abraham Lincoln Junior High, out in Kellerfield. I’m in eighth grade.”

  “Eighth grade? Really? I would have thought you were at least in ninth, to look at you. I’m in the eleventh grade at Dag Hammarskjold High, in Bala Cynwyd. Don’t look so scared,” she said, laughing. “I’m not that much older than you. I skipped a grade at the beginning of junior high.”

  “She would have skipped two or three,” said Julian, “except her family kept moving her all over the world.”

  “Yes, and aren’t we glad of that?” said Rochelle. “If I’d skipped two grades, I’d be off to college next fall.”

  “And then what would the SSS do?” said Julian.

  “I imagine Julian’s already told you,” Rochelle said. “He’s in tenth grade in the Philadelphia schools. So is Tom. You’ll meet Tom in a minute.”

  Julian said, “Danny saw that Miraj-Nameh picture in the Rare Book Room and was quite taken with it. I told him you were the expert.”

  “Really, Julian. I can’t even read the text. It’s all Persian, except for a few quotations from the Quran in Arabic. Danny, I hope you didn’t come all the way out here for that. I’m bound to disappoint you.”

  “He also was interested in Joseph and Zuleikha,” said Julian.

  “Oh, yes, Joseph and Zuleikha.” A frown passed across her face. “The virgin boy; the seductress. The older woman. Oh, yes.”

  “Old enough to be his mother, wasn’t she?” Julian smirked.

  “Jool-yan!” She glared at him. He put his finger to his lips, made a zipping gesture. The smirk remained. “Come, Danny,” she said, turning to me. “Let’s see what we can make of the miraj.”

  She took my hand and led me back into the hall, to the picture of the winged horse hanging at the foot of the stairs. For a moment she examined it. Then she pointed to a few squiggly words, indistinguishable to me from all the rest of the squiggles. She read them aloud, with some relish I thought, moving her finger from word to word.

  “Arabic?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “It’s written from right to left?”

  “Uh-huh. Like Hebrew.”

  She looked at me, and we both grinned, as if we’d shared a secret, a hidden link between enemies or at least aliens. My heart began to beat faster. She turned back to the text. “ ‘Praise be to the One,’ ” she translated, “ ‘who carried His slave by night from the Sacred Mosque’—that’s in Mecca—‘to the Most Distant Mosque’—that’s the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—‘whose neighborhood We have blessed, in order that We might show him some of Our signs.’ That’s from the Quran,” she said. “The only place in the Quran that mentions Jerusalem.”

  I must have looked confused, because she said: “Oh, don’t you know the story of the miraj?”

  “The mirage?”

  “No, no.” She laughed. “The miraj.” The word still sounded to me like mirage , although there was something she did with it at the back of her throat that made it a little bit different. “That’s the ‘night journey.’ When God carried Muhammad to Jerusalem in the middle of the night, on the back of a winged horse. Or maybe it was a winged donkey. You see it’s a sort of hybrid, a winged animal with a human face.”

  She might have been giving a tour of their lab, explaining her latest experiment. Was that the sort of thing they did here—bred together horses and donkeys, eagles and people, until they got the kind of animal shown in the picture? It didn’t fit very well with vacuum tubes and force field radiation.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “That? What?”

  “I thought I heard—from upstairs—”

  A noise like a cat’s howl, but to musical accompaniment if that were possible. She shrugged.

  “He got off in Jerusalem,” she said, “and he stood on the rock. He saw a ladder. He climbed it into the heavens. . . .”

  I looked up the staircase. Darkness. Suddenly from above, I heard a cry, almost a shriek—“I gotta have yuh now or my heart will break!”—and a burst of ugly music. A chorus, something about not being too young to get married. Beyond the top of the stairs, a door closed. And again silence.

  “Tom,” she said, nodding to me. Then, as if there’d been no interruption: “He left his footprint on the rock. They say you can still see it there. I never could, though. That’s why the Muslims built their dome around that rock, where the Jewish Temple used to be.”

  Used to be . . . no longer is . . .

  Jerusalem Is Destroyed.

  Where had I seen those words?

  The memories flooded back. Of the sunlit bedroom, second floor of my grandmother’s house, where my mother lay recovering from her heart attack. She’d propped herself up with pillows; I sat on the bed beside her. I held, so she could look at it with me, the Jewish calendar I’d brought up from the kitchen.

  JERUSALEM IS DESTROYED.

  That was August’s picture—a somber painting, done in gray, of walls and arches and pillars sliding into rubble. Even at age five I thought it unlucky, not to be dwelt upon. I hurried on to the next month, the next picture. JACOB’S DREAM.

  My small mouth fell open. It was the same picture, though in a different year’s calendar, that I was to see years later in the Rare Book Room. Immense swirling stairway, rainbow arching over its top; winged angels going up and down the golden steps. And I was there—five years old, dreaming with Jacob. Longing to climb that ladder into the sky.

  My mother gazed from her pillows, at me, at the calendar. She burst into sobs.

  “I’ll never be able to walk up all those steps,” she said.

  “Danny?”

  All the while Rochelle had been talking. About the golden Dome of the Rock, now in the place of the Temple, and its red and green carpets and the huge rough rock at its center. Within the rock a cave; beneath it yet another cave, which no one’s ever seen. Well of Souls, that hidden hollow is called, because the spirits of the dead come there to pray. . . . With half an ear I’d caught
what she said, and a great yearning came over me as when I was five, staring with my mother into Jacob’s dream.

  “I’d love to see it,” I said. “I’d love to visit Israel sometime.”

  “Silly, it’s not in Israel. You can’t even get there from Israel. It’s in the Jordanian part of Jerusalem. You know—there’s a border dividing Jerusalem in half, between Israel and Jordan. It’s been that way fifteen years, since Israel was created. If you’ve been in Israel, you’ve got to pretend you haven’t before the Jordanians will let you in. And if you’re Jewish, it doesn’t matter where you come from. They won’t let you cross the border.”

  “Well, that’s not very fair!”

  “Well, that’s the way it is. We had to act like we were Episcopalians when we lived there. Just like Mama, she really is an Episcopalian. We went to church every Sunday at St. George’s—Oh, there’s Tom.”

  Footsteps. Creaking wood. A short, plump boy with dark blond hair, dressed like Julian and me in jacket and tie, came down the stairway. “Everything all right up there?” Rochelle asked him.

  “Fine. Don’t know why the buzzer went off. I took a few minutes to adjust the force field. I think I was able to get the lines smoother, at least if you judge from the filings.”

  She seemed to have forgotten I was there. Then she remembered. “Danny,” she said, “this is Tom Dimitrios. Tom—Danny Shapiro.”

  We shook hands. His hand felt soft and slightly sweaty. I’d noticed, with some satisfaction, that his voice was nowhere near as deep as mine. “I know you,” I said. “I can’t remember how or when, but I’ve met you somewhere.”

  “Never seen you before in my life.”

  He seemed very certain, and I decided to take his word for it. Julian meanwhile had materialized in the hallway beside us. “Tom is our expert technician,” he said to me. “Tom, do you have any notion what the viewing conditions are going to be like tonight?”

  “They had the weather report on Wibbage,” Tom said. “They said there’s a front coming through later this evening. Should get rid of all this haze, I think.”