“My God,” I said.
Then I said: “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“There’s more.”
They’d taken two Stars of David. Each a foot and a half across. The stars were made of some very solid metal that didn’t melt. Julian didn’t know what the metal was, whether it was of this earth. It had turned all black, and he was afraid to touch it.
They fastened one star to each of the two dummies, where our chests would have been. They poured on the kerosene.
“The stars got red hot in the fire,” Julian said. “They burned their way through the dummies into the mattresses. Among all the charring, I could still see their mark, in each mattress. Two six-pointed Stars of David, side by side.”
I was sick with dread. I wanted to vomit. I felt as I had that morning when we were inside the disk with the lieutenant and I’d seen on the wall a smear of gray ash that I knew hadn’t been tracked in by any lizard.
There was more.
“They’d brought a can of spray paint with them,” Julian said. “They left a message on the tile wall of the bathroom. They must have figured that was where it was most likely to stay legible, even after the fire. Can you guess what it was?”
The voice came through my mouth, but it wasn’t my voice. I think it was Pockface’s—looking upon me and Julian as I’d looked upon the lake creatures in caftans at the foot of the steps, loathing them with all my soul.
“Dirty Jew, stinking Jew, bloodsucking motherfucking kike”—and I felt my jaws as his jaws, my tongue as his tongue, as the string of obscenities rolled through my lips. “Hitler never should have let you live, should have killed you all—”
Julian shook his head.
“It wasn’t that,” he said. “Not like that at all.”
What the three men had sprayed on the bathroom wall, in huge block capitals, was this:
WE WILL FIND YOU
WHEN WE COME BACK WE WILL FIND YOU
WE ALWAYS FIND THOSE WE WANT
CHAPTER 38
TEN DAYS, IT TURNED OUT, WEREN’T QUITE ENOUGH FOR THE baby’s recuperation.
It was nearly two weeks—just past midnight, the last day of August—before the phone rang in my rented room in Beersheva. Julian, who’d also received a phone call, came to pick me up.
And so we ate breakfast with the soldiers by the first light of dawn, at the bottom of the crater, near the foot of the tower. There was bread, and leben out of plastic containers, and hard-boiled eggs, and tomatoes and cucumbers, which we sliced with our knives on our metal plates. The sounds of Hebrew conversation washed comfortingly over me as I ate. As the sun began to press itself over the horizon, the baby arrived.
At first we didn’t notice the jeep winding its way down to the crater floor. I became aware of a hum of astonished voices, moving toward me down the long tables. There was applause also, and cries of “You’re the father?”—to which I nodded.
I don’t know who carried her to me and eased her into my arms. But it was Shimon who brought the bottle.
“Here,” he said to me. “Take this.”
It was the first time I’d given her the bottle. I stood awkwardly, feeding her, while her blanketed head rested against my shoulder. The men sat around us and watched. Some of them stood, leaning against the tables. They talked and pointed. Often they laughed. Maybe it was my clumsiness that amused them. But I didn’t hear any malice in the laughter, only warmth and kindness and friendship.
The dawn had been chilly. Now the rising sun began to warm us. The tower’s shadow stretched across the crater; the shadow of the disk at its top lay on the crater’s rim. My little girl breathed easily and softly as she sucked on the rubber nipple. She smiled, not at me particularly but at the world at large. She was bigger since the last time I’d carried her, and heavier.
It’s true, I thought. They do grow faster than we do.
“Excuse me, mister,” one of the soldiers said timidly in English. He was a small dark-skinned man, with a rumpled uniform and a day’s growth on his cheeks. “Excuse me that I ask. But the mother of that one—from where is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re not mad at me that I asked?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not mad. But I just don’t know.”
“Eyzo chamoodeleh,” he said finally, stroking her enormous forehead with the tips of his fingers. “What a cute little girl.”
We went up in a helicopter. They let down a rope ladder, its end trembling in the air just outside the disk’s entrance. Julian went down first, carrying the baby. I followed, taking care not to look toward the ground. “There, Danny! I’ve got you!”—and I felt his strong hand gripping my arm, pulling me after him into the disk.
“Julian,” I said once we were inside, “why don’t you come with us?”
“Really, Mr. Shapiro! I’m in the army now. The Israel Defense Force doesn’t look kindly on its soldiers trotting off on foreign jaunts, in the middle of their service.”
He patted me on the shoulder and laughed. “I’ll be along soon enough. Don’t you worry.”
The helicopter hovered outside. The dangling ladder jerked and quivered. Julian reached out, grabbed it, swung himself onto it.
“Julian!” I called after him.
“What?”
The helicopter was making such a racket I barely heard him. “Your old pal Rachel sends regards!” I yelled.
“My old pal who?”
“Tell you later,” I said.
I held my baby against my chest as I stood, moving back and forth, pulling switches, touching buttons. Her tiny fingers grasped at the collar of my shirt. She squealed with joy as the disk trembled, as my body and hers turned transparent and the disk became transparent around us. She laughed out loud and clapped, as if to say, “Daddy, show me more!”
We lifted from the top of the tower. For a full minute I let the disk hang motionless over the crater. The soldiers watched from below. They must have seen it from the outside as a silvery platter, brilliant in the morning sunlight. Then suddenly I made us flutter down, almost to the ground, in a wobbling motion like a falling leaf.
The soldiers scattered. When they saw it was all right—I was in control; we weren’t going to crash—they turned and cheered. They clapped wildly. Some of them danced, strange dances I’d never seen before. Some put their fingers in their mouths to whistle. I shot the disk off at an angle, into the liquid blue of the morning sky, while a baby’s laughter gurgled against my chest.
The sparse clouds fell away beneath us. The horizon began to curve. If we kept on like this, in another minute the blue around us would turn violet and then black. The world would turn into a blue and green globe, shining in the blackness, its surface flecked with ragged smears of white. No need to go so far. I arched the disk down toward the blueness of the Atlantic.
The sun glinted off a silvery cylindrical object, tiny in the distance, far below us.
A jetliner.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
“If you’ll look out your right-hand windows, ladies and gentlemen, you’ll see something very unusual. Something most air travelers don’t get to see. At least, not up close like this.
“There’s no reason to think it’s dangerous. Because, you see, this flying saucer has been keeping us company for several minutes now, and if it were going to blast us with a death ray, we figure it would have done that already. And it hasn’t. So there’s no reason to think it’s going to do it now.
“We don’t know where it’s coming from or what it is. At first, when it came shooting down from above and behind us, I thought it might be a falling star. But it stopped in midair, a few miles ahead, like it was waiting for us to catch up. And we did catch up. We went right past it. And when we passed it, I saw it trembling, like a big silver leaf in a strong wind.
“And then I thought we’d seen the last of it. But what does it do but come curving up like a boomerang, and there it
is ahead of us, not moving, just off our right wing. In a couple of minutes we’re going to pass it again.”
—he’s on the plane, that boy, the boy from Abu Tor. Flying home to his sick mother, so when he gets there, he’ll see her again and make everything right.
Through the window I can make out his face—
“It’s flying with us now, ladies and gentlemen. It and us, together. Like two good old friends. Like boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands.
“It looks different now, seems to me. At first it was silvery, metallic. Now it’s got a liquid quality. Whiter, more pearly. Like a teardrop, shining on your cheek.
“Tilting a little now ...
“Looks to be about fifty feet from the wingtip.
“Less than fifty, really ...
“Coming closer now ...
“Thirty feet ...
“Less than thirty feet ... more like twenty. Now less than twenty—”
“SHE’S FIBRILLATING!”
“SHE’S FIBRILLATING!”
A jolt, as of electricity, shot through the plane. The passengers leaped against their seat belts. The disk, which had touched the plane momentarily, darted away at terrific speed, as though it and not the plane had been stung.
CHAPTER 39
FOOL! I SCREAMED AT MYSELF AS THE PLANE TURNED INTO A silvery pinpoint and then vanished. I heard the cry echo from every corner of my skull. Idiot! Half-wit! Numskull!
You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?
You had to move in, closer and closer, trying to see. Trying to grasp—
What was that sudden flash that cut my eyes like a knife, stabbed into them like a needle?
My eyes hung open, gaping. They dripped darkness.
The sky turned purple around us. The sun glared in its center, ferocious, malignant. The ocean, and the entire planet, fell away in the distance.
It’s all dark. Everything around me is dark. No sound, either, except occasionally the noise of thunder.
It was a dream but not just a dream, like the dreams that had come to me in the underworld. It erupted inside the disk, and I was in it, wide awake, and there was no escaping. Outside was emptiness. Absolute blackness, speckled with points of light.
I’m alone, and little again, and we’re in my grandparents’ house. In my arms, a stuffed bear. The bear once had a name, but now he has none, because I know he isn’t real; he’s only a piece of cloth sewn together around other pieces of cloth. He’s nothing at all.
There must be others somewhere. I think I can hear their voices down the hall—distant, behind closed doors. Or maybe it’s just the thunder.
We spun off into space. I knew what was happening in that dream that was no dream and all the things that have happened because of it. I couldn’t stop them.
I get out of bed. I’m in a hallway, and it’s dark, and I can make my way only by keeping my hand on the wall. Ahead of me is a faint strip of light. I set my course toward that light.
It’s coming from beneath the closed door.
I feel my way around the door. There’s the cut glass knob. I know that doorknob; I’ve been here before. Now I turn the knob and push the door open. Only an inch or two. I’m very scared.
My mother is lying in her bed. I know it’s her, though I can’t see her. For a moment I’m not sure if it’s a bed she’s on or an operating table. But then I know it’s a bed. My father stands by her, his back to me. Two other men. One of them is Sy Goldfarb, who was our family doctor even before I was born. Who warned her she’d better abort me, her health wouldn’t stand her having a baby.
The third man must be a doctor too. Suddenly he says, in a loud, worried voice: “She’s fibrillating! She’s fibrillating!”
The lightning flares. The thunder crashes.
Then I’m by a window, and my father is with me. Sy Goldfarb and the “she’s fibrillating” doctor must be gone somewhere. We kneel together, my father and I. We look out on the rain-soaked street, the cars swishing back and forth and their lights glaring off the wet pavement. The lightning has passed, and the thunder is a faraway rumbling, but it’s raining hard.
My father doesn’t say anything. But he squeezes my left shoulder, and I know he wants me to look, because there’s something very important happening in this street, something that will change all our lives and I must see and remember it. And at first I can’t see it. But then I do.
Backing out of the driveway. Turning into the street. Speeding away from the house. Hurtling like a spaceship into infinite blackness.
The ambulance. My mother inside.
CHAPTER 40
WE CAME BACK.
Where else could we have gone? I don’t know the other solar systems, and in this one there isn’t any other planet where we might live. On Mercury you melt in the heat; on Venus you suffocate beneath the clouds. Mars is cold, and you can’t drink the water. The others are monstrous chunks of rock, where there’s no water at all, and your own weight crushes you the minute you land.
The moon? Once I’d been to the moon, in a time out of time. But you can’t live there except inside a tower, and there aren’t towers on the moon anymore. So we came back.
I held my baby tight as we flew and tried not to see her face. Her eyes had turned strange. The pupils had swollen into opaque blacknesses. Within the blackness of each eye was a slit, running from corner to corner. Beyond the slit: blackness beyond blackness.
I wrapped her in the blanket and held her with both my arms, close against my chest. Her mouth hung open, drooling, while she gasped for air. “Here,” I said to her as I held her small heart to mine, “take breath from my lungs. Breathe with my lungs, and you’ll be able to live.”
But I knew, even then, it was impossible.
We flew over ocean. Then over land. It was nighttime; many must have seen the disk passing overhead. Some teenage UFO investigator must have written in his journal that it was a luminous disk ... deep red, darker at the edges than near the center.... It moved westward at a leisurely pace.... And the story begins all over.
Westward. Not pausing, this time, to bring the disk down. I was exhausted, desperate to land. Yet—from Dimona to Alamogordo was the plan, and Alamogordo lay still to the west. Westward rides the sun.
Catch up with the sun, keep pace with it, and we’d have light. A single day, an hour, would go on forever.
One endless minute, in eternal sunshine.
The disk’s inner light began to dim. These mechanisms wear out, just as ours do. They fail by degrees and imperceptibly. When at last they’ve worn away, you’re surprised to find yourself in the dark.
Shadows appeared around the disk’s edges. At first they were mostly transparent, like the floaters that pass across your field of vision—unnoticed, unless you choose to notice them. At first I chose not to notice.
She saw them. I know she did. That must have been why she began to sing.
“Ay-bee-cee-dee-ee-eff-gee ...”
Her song rang pure and clear and sweet, not in my ears but in my mind. With my ears I heard her gasping as she sucked air through her mouth, trying to fill the emptiness in her lungs. But in my mind, sometimes even now I hear some echo of her song. I can then believe, if only for a second or two, that she’s still with me.
I held her in my arms, the way she once held me.
And the shadows thickened, and the sound of kha-kha-kha chanting around us grew louder, until at last I had to admit the truth. It was the lake creatures. They were inside the disk; they’d been there from the beginning. That smear of ash on the disk’s wall that I’d so wanted to believe was a lizard—it wasn’t. It was them.
Their handprint. Their mark, their warning. Their way of saying: We are inside.
We will always be inside.
“Don’t stop,” I said to her.
She stopped on the G. I’d hoped she wouldn’t. I’d hoped this time she would remember, go on and sing me the rest of the letters, and everything would turn out all right.
/> “Please don’t stop.”
I must have sounded panicked. She must have picked that up in my voice, and it frightened her. Except for her breathing, she was silent as a stone.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s not so hard.”
—but her eyes were turning blind, her pupils solid shells of blackness—
“I know the letters. I’ll teach them to you.”
I tried to sing: “Aitch-ai-jay-kay ...”
Silence.
“Come on!” I pleaded. “Sing along with me.
“Aitch-ai-jay-kay-ell-em-en—”
Desperate, I searched her eyes. All black, unrelieved black. Not even a split in them. Not even the dark crevasse.
The disk flew wild, rudderless, without a pilot.
She twisted in my arms. She mewed like a cat.
“No,” I said. “Not that cry again. Please.”
—careening through the night sky, a few thousand feet above the flinty desert—
The mewing. Louder. Ready to transform itself into a shriek. To spew out the pain and horror that lay hidden behind the black eyes.
“Shhh. Quiet. I can’t bear it. You understand? I won’t be able to bear it.”
—arching downward, downward—
Then came the cry. Just like in the car, with the soldiers, and Julian at the wheel. Such a cry I’d never heard before. I’d hoped never to hear it again.
It filled the disk, every cubic centimeter, every space curved and angular. With all the grief, rage, abysmal fear she’d carried inside that frail body all the days of her brief life. It howled through my soul and body, and I knew I’d go crazy if it didn’t stop. To save her, and me too, I had to make it stop.
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 25