Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  “Doesn’t he speak Hebrew?” the lieutenant said to Julian.

  Julian paid no attention. The lieutenant outranked him, but apparently that had stopped mattering. Julian watched me closely as I ran my fingers among the buttons, and I thought how I’d learned all this from the book we’d searched for so long and how I’d lost the book, and that didn’t matter, for books are dispensable once they’ve become part of you.

  “He’s in the army,” the lieutenant said loudly, gesturing toward me. “And he still doesn’t speak Hebrew?”

  “New immigrant,” said Julian.

  I walked around the disk, letting my hand trail along the surface of the control panel. Julian followed. The lieutenant leaned against the wall and watched us both.

  “Julian,” I said.

  “Danny!” He saw my expression, and his face filled with alarm. “What’s the matter?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. I felt paralyzed with exhaustion and dread, and at first I didn’t know why.

  “Danny! What’s wrong, buddy? Are you OK?”

  I pointed to a small grayish smear on the wall, a few inches above the floor.

  Julian crouched to examine it. He stood up, pale with rage. “Ohh ... the idiots!” he burst out. “The damn idiots! Them and their cigarettes! You tell them, over and over ... and they don’t even have the sense to use a goddamn ashtray!”

  The lieutenant stopped smirking. He ran over to us, his arms waving. He shouted into Julian’s face. He jabbed his finger at the insignia on his own uniform, as though aggrieved beyond bearing. Julian shouted back, pointed accusingly at the spot on the wall. I dug my nails into my palms and waited for the nausea to pass.

  “Julian,” I said, “I don’t think this is cigarette ash.”

  “Of course it’s cigarette ash! What the hell else could it be?”

  I knew what it was. I’d walked in it each time I’d gone to the lake. I’d wondered at its heaviness, its strange greasiness. Something had brought that ash in here; but when? And how? “Maybe a lizard tracked it in,” I said, more to myself than to Julian.

  “A lizard? Are you serious?”

  I wasn’t, really. I just wanted some way to make the ash smear into something normal, earthly. I hoped its resemblance to a six-fingered hand would turn out to be my imagination. That it didn’t mean the things I’d left behind had followed me, were here to meet me.

  “Well,” I said, “it doesn’t look like it’s from a cigarette, that’s all.”

  “What would a lizard be doing up here? Where would it have stepped in ashes? There aren’t any ashes—”

  The lieutenant had stopped shouting. “What did he say?” he said to Julian.

  Julian translated for him. Then the lieutenant began explaining. He spoke earnestly and at considerable length, looking at both me and Julian, although it was all Hebrew and I could hardly understand a word. When the lieutenant finished, Julian turned to me.

  “He says it probably was a lizard,” Julian said. He’d mostly calmed down, though his voice still shook a little. “He says the lizards are all over the place, and they might even have climbed up this tower, and there’s a dark, sandy soil in parts of the Makhtesh that looks a lot like ash, and—Well, that’s what he says anyway.”

  “Yes,” I said. My heart’s pounding had eased, and I no longer wanted to vomit. “It probably was a lizard.”

  The lieutenant took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the stain from the wall.

  CHAPTER 36

  “ SO THE CURTAINS ARE FRAYING? ” I SAID TO JULIAN THAT night.

  “All around us,” he said. “Wherever you turn, they’ve worn thin as tissue paper, ready to fall apart. Can’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?”

  At that moment I couldn’t feel it. The bottle of Maccabee beer I held in my hand seemed reassuringly ordinary. The stars shone above us in their old familiar patterns. They hadn’t fallen. They showed no sign of being about to fall.

  Those stars were the only light beyond our fire. We were camped just outside the Makhtesh, a few hundred yards from the rim, but after the sun set, the crater had vanished in the darkness. The beer was warm, but it tasted good. Julian had tried to teach me to smoke cigarettes—“Make a real Israeli out of you.” After a few puffs I’d decided to pass.

  “Why New Mexico?” I said. “Why not the White House lawn?”

  Julian laughed. “ ‘If they’re real,’ ” he said in a crackly old man voice, “ ‘why the dickens don’t they land on the White House lawn?’ That’s what the UFO skeptics always say, isn’t it? How many times have you had to answer that tired old argument?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why aren’t we going to land on the White House lawn?”

  “I don’t really know. It’s just what they said you had to do: take the disk to southeastern New Mexico and land it there. They haven’t given any reasons. They usually don’t, you know.”

  “Any guesses then?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Julian, nodding. He drank the last of his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He set the bottle carefully on the ground.

  “From Dimona to Alamogordo,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s my guess. You can tell me yours in a minute. I’m guessing that me and my—whatever she is—”

  “Yes. Don’t we wish we could understand what that baby is?”

  “Whatever. She and I are supposed to retrace the steps of the nuclear age. Right? Isn’t that right?”

  “Not bad,” said Julian. “Go on.”

  “Nineteen forty-five we test the first atom bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Fireball four times as hot as the sun. ‘The radiance of a thousand suns ... I am become as death, the destroyer of worlds.’ That’s what Oppenheimer said after the test, wasn’t it? From that Indian book, the—the—”

  “Bhagavad Gita,” said Julian.

  “Bhagavad Gita. I was about to say that. Quit interrupting me, Margulies.”

  “Margaliot. That’s the Hebrew form of the name. Julian Margulies is past. All gone. I’m Yehoshua Margaliot now.”

  “I said, don’t interrupt. Anyway, then comes Hiroshima, then Nagasaki—”

  “And Roswell. Don’t forget Roswell.”

  “Roswell?” I stared at him. “What’s Roswell got to do with this?”

  “It’s where the Five Hundred Ninth Bomb Group was headquartered after the war. Those are the fellows who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that?”

  “And now—” My mind had gone spinning off in a new direction; I struggled to bring it back to what I’d been trying to say. “Now it’s twenty-one years later, and here we are in Israel, the newest country in the world, which is also the place of the oldest religion in the world, and there’s a nuclear reactor at Dimona. They’re building bombs, ten miles away from us, like the one Oppenheimer exploded at Alamogordo—”

  “Only bigger. Better. Destroy more worlds,” said Julian.

  “And this is still a drop in the ocean, compared to the murderous stuff America and Russia have got—”

  “Good,” said Julian. “Very good.”

  “So we’re off from Dimona to Alamogordo—or, I don’t know, maybe to Roswell—to bring a message to the people of the world. From the—how shall we say it?—the Others. And the message is: Stop it!”

  “Not bad,” said Julian. “You’re on the right track. But that’s all very preachy, isn’t it? Our benevolent space brothers appear on their flying disks. ‘Peace, earthling! We come to save you from your self-destructive ways! Put away your swords, guns, bombs, live in peace and harmony,’ et cetera and so forth. Straight out of a B movie, right?”

  “Except I’m not exactly a space brother,” I said.

  “Don’t count on that, Shapiro. But let it be. Don’t you think a sermon like that is apt to be—well, of rather limited effectiveness? We earthlings have been preaching that stuff at one another for the past twenty years. Yet every yea
r goes by, there’s more nuclear bombs. Isn’t that so?”

  “And less than four years ago we nearly—”

  We nearly used them. I stopped speaking. Almost, I’d stopped breathing. In the starlit darkness I felt myself back in that fourth week of October, when I was in eighth grade and the Russians sent missiles to Cuba, and Kennedy sent ships to stop them. All that week the dread of the bombs hovered over us, something monstrous in the sky, ready to fall and snuff us out ...

  And I became a UFO investigator.

  “OK,” I said. “We’re not going to New Mexico with the message of peace. What will we be doing, then?”

  “Death is ‘the destroyer of worlds,’ ” said Julian. “Right? That’s what the Bhagavad Gita says, isn’t it? Right?”

  “All right. I grant that. Let’s go on.”

  “Well ... suppose there’s something that’s the destroyer of death?”

  “What?”

  The fire had blazed up. I saw his face clearly. I said: “You’re not joking, are you?”

  He shook his head no.

  “So who are you talking about?”

  “Guess.”

  I could guess. Once more I heard Rochelle’s voice:

  She’ll live, Danny, and grow, and do what she was sent here for. And in a few years this world is going to be so different from anything we’ve ever known we’re not going to recognize it. So different we’ll think we’re living on another planet.... Once more I saw Rochelle’s lovely, earnest face, her skin gold in the setting sun, planning with me how I would carry my magic child across the border.

  And now she would live. The field telephone had rung that afternoon with good news. Zeitlin’s treatment had worked. The baby was breathing normally. They’d give her ten days in the hospital—two weeks at most—to rest, heal, build up her resistance. Then they’d drive her down to the Makhtesh. Where I would be waiting.

  I wanted, more than anything in the world, to hold Rochelle in my arms again. I took a swallow of beer.

  Meanwhile Julian talked. About Einstein and his unified field theory, about the single web of which space and time are woven. What has been woven, Julian said, can also be unwoven.

  “So I’m unweaving time?”

  “Well, that’s putting it a bit drastically, but—”

  “I’m destroying death by unweaving time,” I said. And when I saw him nod, I said: “That’s what the UFOs are about, isn’t it?”

  No wonder the curtains were fraying.

  “I’m rolling up the past twenty years,” I said, “like a winter rug. The way you do before you stuff it into the attic.”

  Julian shook his head. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t put it that way exactly. The twenty years will still have been here. You’ll still have been born. So will I. At least I think we will.”

  “Then what exactly am I unweaving?”

  “One thread from that rug, that fabric, that web—pick whatever image you like. One particularly dangerous, let’s say cancerous, thread. Leave it be, and it’ll destroy the rest. We’ll all die, and be as though we hadn’t been.”

  A meteor flared in the black sky.

  “Julian,” I said, “I don’t think this is going to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t do this with time. I mean, it’s all very nice to make up these images, of threads and webs and whatever. But you can’t pull out a thread from time, and save the rest or destroy the rest, or whatever you’re going to do. I mean, time doesn’t work that way.”

  “Doesn’t it? Are you sure? Don’t you remember ...”

  He spoke of an afternoon many years ago. Of a young boy who’d come to a library in a big city with his friends and stepped apart from them in that library—not for very long, that boy thought. When he went to find them again, they were gone. The library was empty: full of books, full of sunlight. But no people anywhere.

  What did I think that was if not a thread plucked out of time?

  “ ‘Science is a turtle,’”I said very slowly. “ ‘that says its own shell encloses all things.’ ”

  “Charles Fort,” said Julian. “So you do remember.”

  “Do you still read Charles Fort? Can you even find his books here in Israel?”

  “In the libraries? The bookstores? Of course not. We’re a practical people, we Israelis. We wouldn’t waste shelf space on The Book of the Damned. They’re still the excluded, as far as we’re concerned. We’ve had enough experience with exclusion and damnation, thank you. We don’t need any more.”

  “Abandonment too, Julian?”

  I suppose it was his mentioning The Book of the Damned. Otherwise I don’t know why I picked that moment to ask the one question that had hardly left my mind since the night he disappeared.

  “I understand why Jeff left me,” I said. “Rosa too—”

  “Rosa? The girl who wanted you to dance, and you wouldn’t?”

  “I couldn’t. You know why. And she had to move on—”

  “Naturally.”

  “—and so did Jeff. And I wouldn’t—I mean, I couldn’t—because of—”

  “Your dying mother.”

  “No, Julian. She’s going to live.”

  The best medical care in the region, if not the world—how could she not live? “But you—” I said.

  “But why did I leave you? All by yourself in that airport. To face whatever might be there.”

  “Yes. Why did you do it?”

  He stood up. He brought fresh wood for the fire, which had been about to die out. Then he settled himself, slowly. I was patient. I waited.

  CHAPTER 37

  “ THEY CAME AFTER ME THAT NIGHT,” HE SAID. “DID YOU know that?”

  “ ‘They’? Who exactly are ‘they’ now?”

  “Yes. Who exactly are they? That’s what we’ve wanted to find out all along. They came to our hotel.”

  And I’d given them the address. I blurted it out, in nervousness and confusion, and they wrote it down. “Twenty-two-oh-eight Orlando Avenue,” I said. “Miami.”

  “So you remember that place?”

  I nodded. “What a dump.”

  “Exactly. Rickety old hotel, all made of wood. One spark, it’d go up in flames. Remember that?”

  I looked into our campfire. “I remember. So?”

  “It did. Three-thirty that morning.”

  He picked up a scrap of wood from beside his booted foot and tossed it into the fire. We watched together as it flared, blackened, crumbled.

  “Of course,” he said, “I wasn’t there at the time.”

  “Three-thirty A.M.? You weren’t in the hotel? Then where?”

  “Miami Beach. There was a Cuban coffee shop open all night. I went there after I left you at the airport. I sat and drank coffee and read Charles Fort and listened to the Latin music on the radio. All night, until the six o’clock news came on, and they reported the hotel fire. That was the first I heard—”

  “So you left me alone in the goddamn airport, so you could go to some goddamn stupid Cuban coffee shop and read your goddamn stupid Charles Fort?”

  “That’s right. And you don’t understand why I did that?”

  “No, I don’t. I haven’t got the slightest fucking idea.”

  “Fucking idea,” he said. It was the saddest I’d ever heard his voice. Fire-light flickered on his long face.

  “I broke every speed limit there was,” he said, “as soon as I heard the news. I had to get back to the hotel, find out what had become of you and Rochelle.”

  “Me and Rochelle?”

  “That’s right. You and Rochelle. What’s the matter, Danny? Haven’t you understood yet?”

  Of course—me and Rochelle. Two’s company, three’s a crowd. The tactful thing for number three to do is vanish. Give the young lovers their privacy, a room to themselves.

  How was he to know Rochelle wouldn’t be on that plane?

  “They don’t control destiny, those three men,” he said. “In my bad
moments sometimes I’ve thought they do. I would’ve committed suicide then, I suppose. Except I was afraid they’d be on the other side, waiting to have me.”

  “We’d better pray they aren’t,” I said.

  “You pray. You’re the Bible scholar. Me, I’m interested in this world, this life. And here they don’t rule. Not entirely at least.”

  Proof: Julian wasn’t at the hotel when the three men showed up in the middle of the night, tied the night manager to a chair, found our room, doused it with kerosene, and set it on fire. Neither was I. Nor Rochelle.

  He got there in the morning, just before seven. He saw what was left of the building. He spent nearly an hour. Then he drove straight to Philadelphia, not stopping to rest. He emptied his savings account, headed for the airport, bought a one-way ticket to Israel.

  “And that’s how Julian Margulies became Sergeant Yehoshua Margaliot?” I said.

  He nodded. “The switch went on in my brain after what I saw that morning. The little voice told me I’d had enough Diaspora for one lifetime.”

  “Enough high school too?”

  “Diaspora, high school. Same shit.”

  He posed as a reporter. The policeman, keeping people from the building, looked at him real close when he said he wanted to see the remains of our room. “You’re a Jew,” the cop said. “Right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I’m a Jew.”

  “Then maybe you don’t want to go in there.”

  He went in anyway. Everything was black: ceiling, walls, floor. The wires in the light fixture in the ceiling had burned or melted, and it had come crashing down to the middle of the floor.

  The two beds were charred and shapeless, stank from the kerosene—

  —and I said, “Go on, don’t stop,” though of course I wished he would stop and say, “That’s all, Danny. That’s all the story there is”—

  —but he could still see, they’d bunched up the sheets and blankets into two humanlike shapes, tied together with wire, one in each bed. Me and Julian. Or so they were meant to be—