Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  That was why I pulled her to me, pressing her tiny face into the softness of my shirt. Why I felt her struggle like a fish against my chest and held her even tighter.

  Why I stopped noticing if she was breathing.

  It was night in the desert. I can’t remember if there was a moon.

  I don’t remember the impact when we struck the ground. What I remember is a blinding white flash, engulfing us all, the radiance of a thousand suns. We all turned transparent, ghostly, almost nonexistent. Then the glow faded, and we faded with it.

  Very far away a coyote wailed.

  It was cold, but at first I didn’t feel it. My chest was crushed so tightly I couldn’t move. My right arm was pinned between my chest and the instrument panel. I tried to use my left hand to free myself. The first wave of pain washed up from below my waist, and I fainted.

  The front of my shirt was wet. Something warm and sticky had dampened it, seeping slowly through the cloth, until my chest was soaked. It began to dry as the night passed. The cloth stuck to my chest.

  Time and time again, as the hours passed, my left hand crawled toward the source of the wetness. It moved almost on its own, as I lay half conscious, sliding in and out of delirium. Then the agony from below blossomed in my brain as an endless series of fungoid smears: angry, glowing red mushrooms of pain, each one following upon the last. I jerked myself into consciousness and pulled my hand away. I then felt the pain with all my mind and knew the absolute and unbearable dominion that pain has over the mind when it’s fully conscious.

  Sometime before dawn, my hand won out. It went where it was trying to go, where I was trying to keep it from going. I felt my fingers palpate the crushed and ruined smear of flesh and bone and blood and tiny, twisted organs—the it that had once been a she—

  That oversize head of hers—trapped, caught between my body and the metal—

  Crushed like an egg—

  Her shattered skull, that delicate eggshell, smashed—

  Her pain and my own, so mingled now I could not tell them apart, filled my empty lungs. I howled them out into the desert night, and at once I filled with them again. And screamed, and screamed some more.

  The coyotes answered me with their yelping, until the desert echoed with our cries.

  Julian?

  We did it, her and me.

  We flew the disk to New Mexico. We unraveled time. Unspun time. Rolled time up like a winter rug.

  Only it didn’t work out quite the way we thought it would.

  Did it?

  Julian.

  Do you even exist anymore?

  The jeeps came first, with the dawn. Then the long line of trucks, olive green, with the words Roswell Army Air Field stenciled on their sides. They began, very carefully and methodically, to dismantle the wreckage of the disk and load it into the trucks. The tall, pockfaced lieutenant, who directed the operation, guffawed as he looked down on us.

  The snaggletoothed sergeant looked closely into my face and snickered.

  “Cripes,” he said to the third man. “What eyes!”

  The third man, who stood just outside my field of vision, didn’t answer.

  “What eyes!” Snaggletooth said again.

  They loaded us into a truck, with the last of our shattered disk. The trucks’ engines started up, in the stillness of the desert morning. We began to move.

  PART EIGHT

  THE BURNING

  (SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1966)

  CHAPTER 41

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 1966. THE DAY AFTER LABOR DAY. First day of senior year in high school. My last year; my strangest.

  Final bell has rung. We’re out of the building, scurrying for our buses—me trying to get used to being here again with the kids I’ve known so long; how odd it is, everyone around me speaks English—when who do I run into but Jeff Stollard.

  He greets me warmly, friendlier than he’s been in years. For a few seconds it feels nice. “How was Israel?” he asks.

  “Pretty good,” I say. “Did you get my letter?”

  “Letter? Yes. The one you wrote me about that place—what was it, Abu Tar?”

  “Abu Tor.”

  I suppose I should ask: “And how was your summer?” But his answer will be about all the folksinging he and his buddies have done, are doing, will do, and I can’t stand to hear that right now.

  “Yes,” he says. “Abu Tor. It sounded very interesting.”

  He looks at his watch. We have ten minutes from the bell to catch our buses; the drivers won’t wait. The engines are running. Their exhaust climbs into the hot afternoon sky. “You know,” I say before I can stop myself, “my mother died.”

  He knew my mother, from back when we were friends and he used to come over my house sometimes.

  “When—when—” He looks, he sounds shocked. “When did it happen?”

  “August. About three weeks ago.”

  “Did you come back from Israel when it happened?”

  “I didn’t know about it until I got back.”

  —and my father picked me up at the airport, and neither of us mentioned her until we were in the car, driving through the humid night, and I said, “How’s Mom?” and he said, “Well, my boy, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” and I said, “Very bad?” And he said—

  “She was a nice lady,” Jeff says.

  There’s sorrow in his face. His body relaxes a little bit, as if he’s thinking, It’s not the end of the world if we miss our buses. As if our bikes were standing between us once more, as in the old times; I can almost feel the handlebars under my palms. In a minute we’ll hop on them and zoom off somewhere. Talk and talk until all this begins to make sense, and the years of silence between us will be like they never happened.

  “It’s really—it’s really—” Jeff says.

  I nod.

  “I wouldn’t have thought ... this would happen,” he says.

  “I didn’t either.”

  —and afterward, after he told me, my father said, “You don’t know how I’ve dreaded this moment,” while all I could think was: The sword has fallen, finally, finally, fallen—

  “But I don’t understand,” Jeff says. “Why didn’t your father let you know when it happened? They’ve got telephones in Israel, don’t they?”

  “Sure. It’s a modern country, just like here.”

  “So why did he wait for you to get back?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. And I really don’t.

  CHAPTER 42

  ALL I KNOW IS THIS:

  I was not judged before I came to this place of torment. There was condemnation, yes, and pain beyond bearing. But no judgment. There’s never any judgment.

  The lamp blazes over my desk. The journal lies open before me. It’s a warm night, early September. I haven’t touched my calculus, my physics, my English lit. I keep expecting somebody to remind me, gently or angrily, that it’s past midnight and tomorrow I’ll be up early for school. No one does. Sometimes I hear my mother moving around the house the way she used to, but it can’t be; it’s my imagination. In the bedroom next door my father’s snoring. He must have moved back there sometime during the summer, after she died. Or after she was taken to the hospital.

  I write:

  First there was the ride in the truck. Then the high-ceilinged building into which she and I were brought. Then we rode the elevator, down down down, deep into the earth, then on the wheeled carts through endless tiled corridors. Nowhere in all this was there any judgment. They never even spoke to us.

  They laid us on the table, under the white fluorescent light. They attached a tag to my wrist and another tag to hers. I couldn’t see what was written on the tags. They separated us then, but not as the sheep are separated from the goats; we were just separated. They put her in one drawer, me in another. They closed the drawer, and all was darkness. I thought I might see her again on the other side. But there is no other side to the darkness.

  There’s only the smoky air and the burning,
bloodied stake that runs through my body and up through my throat and digs with its pointed end into the roof of my mouth. And the low hills around me, blackening in dark red flames.

  Now I know who they are, the three men in black. I knew the moment my father spoke the words Mom is dead and their darkness filled the car, blotting out the headlights and neon signs and even his face behind the steering wheel. And I knew: they’ve won.

  Always they will win.

  In every life theirs is the victory.

  They set me on the table and stripped me. They peeled the cloth from my crushed and mangled body.

  “It’s dead all right,” said Pockface.

  “What do you mean, ‘it’?” Snaggletooth said. He flicked with his forefinger between my legs. “It’s a ‘him’.”

  “It’s an ‘it’!” Pockface roared at him. “You don’t believe me, look at those eyes!”

  The third man worked with his needle, trying to force it into my eye. It was useless. My eyes had turned broad and hard as shells washed up on the seashore after a storm.

  “He looks so fuckin stupid now, doesn’t he?” said Snaggletooth.

  “He’ d look better with a smile,” said Pockface. “Let’s see if we can’t give him a smile.”

  They tried with their fingers to twist my lips into a smile. It didn’t work. My mouth was set firm in death. It was smaller than it had once been, and the lips were thinner. Only my eyes had expanded, swelling in great ovals to cover most of my face.

  “They fly these fuckin disks all over the sky,” said Pockface. “And they look so stupid. How do you figure that, now?”

  Snaggletooth turned to the third man. “You got your razor with you?” he said.

  “What you want a razor for?”

  “See if we can’t give him a nice big smile,” said Snaggletooth.

  —and I would have twisted in pain, in anticipation of their cutting, except that I was already dead, and the dead can’t move, although we can feel everything, everything—

  “Uh-uh, uh-uh,” said Pockface, holding up his big hand. “They open the drawer, they see we been cuttin at him, and then there’s trouble. We don’t want no trouble, do we?”

  So they didn’t cut me, not where anyone could see. But they stood around the table where I lay, and solemnly they recited, looking into my face: “FOOL. FOOL. FOOL.” They took the six-pointed star Rochelle had given me and heated it in the flame of their cigarette lighter, until the metal began to glow. Then they pressed it into my chest. The skin bubbled and blackened, and at last I was branded.

  Maybe that was the judgment. There was no other judgment.

  CHAPTER 43

  JEFF HAS A GIRLFRIEND.

  It’s October, and I see them together everywhere. In the halls, the cafeteria. The auditorium after school, where Jeff and his folksingers go to rehearse their music and clown around together, and his girl sits on the stage, watching, laughing, applauding.

  She’s tall and blond and pretty in a kind of prim way. She’s a junior. I’ve heard him call her Janet.

  I pass them in the hallways while they stand together, laughing and talking and touching hands. At first I thought he might introduce me, so we could all be friends. But whatever relic of friendship there was that first day of school, it didn’t last. Not after he met Janet. If he sees me when he’s with her, he nods to me very cautiously, as if to say: “Yes, I know who you are. But don’t come over and talk right now. This isn’t a convenient time, you see.”

  And Janet looks at me, sort of bemused. As if I were a strange little dog she and Jeff spotted while out on a walk together—deformed, but in a way that’s harmless. As if, say, one of my legs had been lopped off, but I go on trotting on my three little legs almost the same as other dogs do on four.

  In the dark ceiling, over the bed where I can’t sleep, I see Rosa Pagliano’s face. She laughs, not kindly, not graciously. She sings, “I’ll not marry a man who’s shy, for he’d run away when I winked an eye,” and now I know for certain she’s mocking me. I curse my God, my tribe, my family. And at last myself, for having been so slow, so timid. Such a good boy for my mother.

  If after a few hours I haven’t slept, I get out of bed. I turn on the light. I pull out my old UFO Investigators membership card, with the DS & RP heart on the back. I tell myself: I’ll tear it into pieces. That’s what Jeff surely did. Why do I have to carry this burden—of feeling, of remembering—year after year, while my youth is sucked away and I turn old and stooped?

  The UFO Investigators

  Member _____________

  shall be accorded all privileges

  pertaining to that post

  I shove the card back into my wallet. From the other side of my bedroom wall my father snores. He sleeps well these days.

  If he hates me, he doesn’t show it. Since I’ve been back we’ve had a peace pact, the terms unspoken but understood. I will not ask why he didn’t call me in Israel when my mother went into the hospital and he knew she wouldn’t come out alive. He will not ask why I didn’t pick up a phone myself, even though it was clear from his letters that something was badly wrong. We each carry our guilt.

  I don’t ask, “Did she leave a message for me before she died? A letter? Anything?” I know she didn’t. It feels right and appropriate that she didn’t. I don’t know why.

  I don’t ask who he was phoning while she was in the hospital.

  I’ve seen the bills; he left them out on his desk in the den. I suppose he figured I wouldn’t notice. More than two hundred dollars for long-distance calls the last week of July and all through August, starting the day my mother went in. All to one number. In a town I’d never heard of but, when I checked the atlas, turned out to be on Long Island.

  Those are, as they say on TV, “the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”

  A few more such facts:

  Jeff never went out with Rosa Pagliano in eighth grade, any more than I did. I think maybe he asked her out and she said no, and he was too embarrassed to admit it. When we had our big fight—after the eighth-grade dance, and after she’d left town and school was out for the summer—I tried to find out from him if that was what happened. He told me to mind my own blankety-blank business.

  She never went to the Philadelphia library with him and me. Actually, Jeff and I went to Philadelphia together just once. After that I always went alone, because once we’d handed in our science paper and gotten a B+ on it—with a few compliments about our “originality” and “analytic ability”—Jeff didn’t care anymore about UFOs, though he went through the motions of working on a book with me and I nagged him into writing a few pages. The bus didn’t stop in Braxton. It never did. I doubt it ever will.

  But this much is true: Rosa did ask me to dance with her.

  I did say to her, “Never touch the stuff.”

  And the next week she ran off to Florida. Maybe there was a connection, maybe not. I couldn’t ask her mother because even if Helen Pagliano was sober and sane—a big if—she sold her house in Braxton and left soon after Rosa did. Nobody knows where she went.

  That fall I did search the Florida phone books in the Philadelphia library, for listings for Pagliano. I did find a “Pagliano, Joseph” in the Jacksonville directory. I did call that number from a phone booth, stacks of quarters by my side and my heart in my mouth, and the man who answered did say to me, “You got the wrong number, mister.” To this day I don’t know if he was telling the truth or lying.

  Most people, I find, are liars.

  So I have only one way to be in touch with Rosa. It sometimes works. But only very late at night, between 1:00 and 2:00 A.M.

  I take the UFO Investigators membership card. I hold it in my hand, lightly rubbing it as if it were the pocket-size disk Albert Bender’s space-men gave him, or the Delta Device Jeff and I used to tell each other we’d make in metal shop someday. I say, “Kazik, Kazik.” When I do that, I feel perfect certainty that Rosa—wherever she is, Florida or New Mexico or (who
knows?) Wisconsin; married or pregnant, or alone with her children by whoever’d been the last to betray her—still has her card, the one I gave her. She takes it out and looks at it in her despairing nighttimes, just as I do. It reminds her how vast and teeming and rich the sky seemed, how it called to her. To me.

  This is our only contact. She never appears in my UFO journal anymore. Neither does Julian or Rochelle. That journal still flows within me, but in brief, sudden spurts, with weeks sometimes between entries. And when it comes—

  For centuries I hung on the stake—

  When it comes, it is wholly dark and terrible.

  It really was Braxton kids who broke into our house when we went to my grandmother’s for Shabbes dinner. Less for the money, apparently, than for kicks. They got caught three weeks later, in another burglary down our street. They stole our TV—yes, they did, not like I wrote in my journal—but they couldn’t sell it, so the police brought it back, and it’s still in our living room, just like when my mother was alive. It’ll probably be there when I graduate from college.

  And yes, they did take my briefcase. They must have thought it was something valuable. When all they found inside was typewritten pages, straight it went into the garbage.

  My father leaves my pimples alone. He doesn’t fuss at me however late I stay up. At six-thirty he wakes me for school. If I’m half dead from lack of sleep, I comfort myself there’s only so many more days until the weekend. Then he makes breakfast.

  Scrambled eggs and toast with grape jelly; it’s very good. Now I notice, as I never did before, that he wears an apron when he cooks. We don’t talk much. He turns the radio to a station that plays old-timey songs, and we listen while we eat.