“Much shorter note now,” Rosa said. “In a different handwriting. ‘I agree completely. JDS.’ Now those initials: could they possibly stand for—”
“Jeffrey Duncan Stollard,” I said. I put the emphasis on the Duncan, and most especially the Dunc.
Rosa gave a loud sigh. She closed the book and handed it back, not looking at me. She rested her head against the seat, closed her eyes. Had she slept the night before? That mother of hers; what had she been doing now? If Rosa were to bare her legs like in seventh grade, would I see once more that crazy woman’s marks upon them?
Meanwhile Jeff was talking, trying to get her attention.
The three men, who according to Bender’s new story were glowing-eyed aliens from another solar system, had given Bender a small metal disk. He could contact them by squeezing the disk and saying the word Kazik, sort of like our Delta Devices.
“Bender says”—Jeff laughed, as though this were something funny that maybe he could get Rosa to laugh about too—“they kidnapped him, see, and took him on board their spaceship. Then they implanted something in his brain. So any time he even thought about telling anybody who they were, what they were doing to him, he got these terrible headaches. And if he did ever tell anybody—”
“Yeah?” said Rosa, her eyes wide open.
“Poof! He’d disintegrate, right on the spot!”
“His whole body?” said Rosa. “It’d just disintegrate?”—
—I’ve got to stop writing. I should never have put these things on paper. Mom will find them, on one of her prowls through here while I’m at school. She’ll see how I’m describing our break-in, which happened, sure, but not the way I’m telling it—
She’ll know what I’ve thought, felt, imagined about Rosa Pagliano, the shiksa.
Will my mother disintegrate like Bender, once she knows?
Or will it be me who’s turned to powder, in an instant’s blinding flash?
CHAPTER 3
WHEN WAS I FIRST IN LOVE WITH ROSA?
I ask myself that after I’ve gone to bed sometimes, when I can’t sleep and I toss and turn, hearing my mother do the same on the other side of the wall. Probably Thursday, December 20, 1962, the night Jeff and I had our meeting at the Kellerfield library to put the final touches on our science paper on UFOs.
That was a good paper, A or A+ for sure. We’d started it two months before, the same day Kennedy announced the blockade on Cuba, and we joked that if there were war, we’d never have to hand it in, because we’d be dead and so would all the teachers. Now it was finished. We proofread it together, and when we were done, we gathered up our books and went outside the library and stood by the bicycle rack. Talking.
It was very cold that night. No moon; the stars clearer than I’d ever seen. They looked almost like the twinkling lights on the Christmas tree I’d wanted so badly when I was little, but my mother had always said no. We talked about Rosa.
“I like her,” Jeff said.
“I like her too,” I said.
“Then you’re my rival,” said Jeff. “How shall we settle this? Duel to the death?”
I felt pained, as if I hadn’t been understood. I looked toward the stars—the red of Betelgeuse, the ice-blue, diamond-blue glitter of Sirius. That’s what the Christmas tree is, a ladder winding its way up through the stars, toward the biggest star of all. Happy are they who climb it.
“I didn’t mean I liked her in that way,” I said.
“I did mean I liked her in that way,” said Jeff.
I swallowed hard. Maybe I did kind of like Rosa in that way. But a girl whose name proclaimed shiksa? Living in Braxton with her mother, a dyedhaired divorcée who did awful things to her when no one was looking? My mother’s not a snob, or a bigot either, but she has her feelings. Also, Jeff had spoken first.
There were new things in this sky that I hadn’t read about in my astronomy books or found on my star charts. I didn’t know what they were.... That very day, in music class, we’d sung the song about the girl who wouldn’t marry at all, at all, and Rosa sat behind me to my right. She sang loud, clear, and I thought how pretty her voice was. Then I turned around, and what did I see but those warm brown eyes looking straight at me.
She laughed as she sang:
O I’ll not marry a man who’s shy
For he’d run away if I winked an eye . . .
At first I thought she was laughing at me, telling me the song was right, that boys who are shy like me aren’t worth marrying. Then I realized it was something very different.
She’s gone. But still I see her laughing. I see her waiting, sweaty and bold, for me to decide whether I’ll dance with her. And I call myself fool, fool, fool, and I can’t go to sleep.
The break-in at our house was Friday, January 18, 1963. Four days afterward the phone rang in our kitchen.
“Jeff?” I said, picking up the receiver.
“Count the days.”
The words came out in a weird croak, as if whoever was calling had a high voice and he was trying to make it sound low, adult, mature. “Jeff,” I said, “knock it off, will you? This isn’t funny.”
No answer. I realized this wasn’t Jeff, or anyone else pulling a prank, but something serious and very strange. Could this be the same voice that had said “Until the seeding”? But that had been less a spoken utterance than a resonance within my mind. These were words coming from a throat, from vocal cords I assumed were human.
I waited, feeling something like bugs crawling over my skin. The caller, whoever or whatever he was, also waited. Finally I said: “I don’t understand. Count the days from what? To what?”
Again silence. Had he hung up? I didn’t think so, though I couldn’t hear any sound from the receiver. “Count them forward?” I said. “Or backward?”
“Backward. Follow the moon.”
Then click! and I knew I’d heard all I was going to. I started to dial Jeff’s number, so I could tell him what just happened. Then I stopped. This was something private to me that I had to work out for myself. It was late afternoon; I was alone in the house. I walked over to the calendar on the kitchen wall and confirmed what I’d remembered. There were twenty-nine days between my UFO sighting and the break-in. A lunar month is twenty-nine and a half.
Follow the moon.
Jeff and Rosa held hands as we walked to the library from the bus stop, past the Logan Square fountain. In his fine tenor he sang songs from Brigadoon. Jeff is crazy about musicals; even back then he knew dozens of show tunes. He mocked my terrible voice when I tried to sing too. So I stopped trying. “There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race,” he sang to Rosa, and I wished I could chime in with the refrain, “It’s almost like being in love.” But the words would have come out a tuneless croak, as if one of the bronze frogs ringing the fountain had come to life. I walked, silent, behind them.
It was so cold the fountain had frozen. The frogs, which normally spouted arches of water through their mouths, grew icicle beards instead. “Like Santa Claus!” Jeff hooted, and I tried to laugh. But the whiskered frogs reminded me of my great-grandfather in Lithuania, whose face I knew from the picture that hangs in my grandmother’s house. Shame chilled me through my winter coat. What would saintly, gray-bearded old Asher think of me—his son’s grandson, the bearer of his name—riding buses and subways on the Sabbath with his friends the sheygetz and the shiksa, the girl whose pale, tender face hovered in my half dreams like a rising moon?
My mother put a lot of the old ways behind her when she married my father. This one she didn’t. It was OK that I had Gentile friends, even girls. But that was when I was little and the girls were just friends. Not anymore. “All the music of life seems to be,” Jeff sang, holding Rosa’s hand but gazing off into the frigid cloudless sky, while she threw me a backward glance, her lips skeptically puckered. “Like a bell that is ringing for me . . .”
The microfilms were kept in the library’s Newspaper Room, on the ground floor below street leve
l. With much laughing and touching, Jeff showed Rosa how to thread them onto the spool. So now there were three of us, not just him and me like the weeks before. For hours we sat at the microfilm machines, our index cards filling with UFO sightings from the archives of obscure newspapers all over the country. Luminous disks in the nighttime. Silvery by day, sparkling in the sun as they weaved among the clouds. Egg-shaped UFOs, cigar-shaped UFOs. UFOs of fluorescent red, and every other possible color.
Patterns eluded us. It took faith to believe they’d emerge. With cramped hand and weary eyes I looked up from my work toward Rosa. She and Jeff sat in front of her machine, not writing, not reading, just holding their hands in the green-tinged light over the screen. Jeff put his hand on top of Rosa’s. Then she put her other hand on his, then his over hers.... In a minute they were giggling at their game, and I tried not to watch while I hoped a librarian, some elderly scold, would come over to remind them this was a library, a quiet place for solemnity and seriousness.
I turned back to my own machine. I cranked the handle; I watched the pages of long-destroyed newspapers whiz by under my nose. When I stopped, I saw the newsprint on the screen beneath me, looking so real it seemed I could reach out and touch the paper.
But there was no paper. There was only the screen. If I held my hand close above it, the newsprint appeared on the back of my hand as well as the surrounding screen. My hand then took on a ghostly appearance, not invisible exactly but transparent, as though my bone and flesh had become unreal. The only things real were the letters and words of the long-forgotten stories, shining upon my skin.
CHAPTER 4
Somewhere in Chicago, it is reported, there is an apartment house where the elevator stops conventionally at the basement level. But it also goes down, down, down to a much lower level, when the down button is pushed in a certain coded manner....
AND IN A TINY TOWN IN PENNSYLVANIA LIVES A METALWORKER named Richard S. Shaver. He receives through his welding gun—or maybe his memories—revelations from under the surface of the earth. Of beings called dero, survivors of an ancient race of space travelers abandoned on Earth when the sun turned poisonous. Its rays made the dero mad; their madness made them evil. They live underground, in a network of hidden caves. The UFOs are their secret airships. They are the devils of the ancient myths.
“From immemorial times,” Shaver was told, “the dero have had their Hells in the underworld, and it has never ceased. You see, you surface Christians are not so far wrong in your pictures of Hell, except that you do not die in order to go there, but wish for death to release you once you arrive. There have always been Hells on earth, and this is one of them.”
Crackpot stuff, I always thought. Only a nutcase could believe it. Now I’m not so sure.
After lunch I left Jeff and Rosa in the Newspaper Room and took the elevator to the Rare Book Room on the third floor. “Follow the moon”—and to do that, I needed to find Jewish calendars because the Jewish year is lunar. I was told they’d be in the Rare Book Room.
In the elevator I was alone. I pressed the button marked “3.” As soon as the doors closed, I began pressing buttons rapidly and at random. I don’t remember which ones I pressed. To my relief, or maybe disappointment, I didn’t go down, down, down. The elevator car shuddered and paused. I thought I was going to be trapped between floors. Then it moved again and stopped back at the first floor. Three young men who looked like college students got in. Again I pressed “3.”
I’d never been in the Rare Book Room before, and I was curious and a bit excited about what I might find. At the entrance was a turnstile. Just inside, to the left, were a desk with a sign saying J. MARGULIES and, behind the desk, several file cabinets. No one sat at the desk or at the large reading table in the middle of the room. Rows of books were locked behind a thick chain-link barrier, ceiling to floor. No windows; no apparent sign of life.
I’ll leave, I thought, and come back later.
But the turnstile would go only one way. I didn’t feel much like climbing back over it. My best bet was to wait and see if this “J. Margulies” might turn up.
Framed exhibits, pages from old manuscripts and books, hung on the walls. One of these caught my eye. The page within the frame was about twelve by eighteen inches. Dense lines of writing, in a delicate undulating script that I supposed to be Arabic, surrounded a beautifully colored central picture. The picture’s focus was something that looked like a winged horse with a human face, flying through the night sky. Its rider wore a turban and ornate, flowing robes. Above horse and rider, enormous stars glared out of the deep indigo.
The exhibit to the right was also interesting. Here again was a central picture framed by the mysterious, delicate writing. A large, voluptuous woman, with huge black eyes and flowing hair, grasped the clothing of a smaller, young-looking man. The artist had dressed both of them elaborately but managed to leave much of the woman’s bosom naked.
I examined the picture closely. I read both labels. The one, of the winged creature that had first attracted me, read: MIRAJ-NAMEH, PERSIA, FOURTEENTH CENTURY. The other was labeled JOSEPH AND ZULEIKHA, MUGHAL INDIA, SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
“May I help you?”
I turned, startled, to see a young man towering over me. That at least was my first impression. It took me a moment to realize he was a teenage boy, just a few years older than myself. He was tall, well over six feet, and extraordinarily thin. He had brown hair and slightly buckteeth. He was neatly dressed, in a blue blazer, a dark tie, and a white shirt that looked heavily starched. How he’d gotten so close without my hearing him, I couldn’t imagine.
“May I help you?” he said again.
“Yes, certainly.” That was all I could say. I could not for the life of me remember what I’d come here for. Then it came back to me. “They told me this was the place to find Jewish calendars.”
“Jewish calendars? You mean, those things the funeral homes put out? Well,” he said. Then he said: “What do you want those for?”
I hadn’t expected the question. Could I tell him I wanted a moon-based calendar to “count the days” backward in lunar twenty-nine-day cycles? Suburban burglary . . . UFO encounter . . . and so on, back through the cycles, through the years, until unexplained events of every sort were brought into the pattern? Impossible. I’d be packed off to the loony bin for sure.
“Never mind. None of my business, is it?” He threw himself into the swivel chair that was behind the J. MARGULIES desk, spun around in it, and began rummaging through one of the file drawers. “What years do you want?”
“Ohhh . . .” I started to say, Back through 1947. That was when the UFOs first began to appear, two and a half years before I was born. But he looked up at me and frowned, suspiciously, I thought, and it seemed wiser not to ask for too much. “Let’s just try the last few. Start with 1960.”
“Hmmm.” He leaned back and stretched as he pondered this. The chair, which wasn’t in the best condition, lurched backward. “That means we need to go back to Rosh Hashanah 1959. What year is that in the Jewish calendar, do you remember?”
I didn’t. Still, it was some comfort he’d heard of Rosh Hashanah and seemed to know it falls a few months before everyone else’s New Year. “Let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, leaning forward again. “Here’s 5723, which looks like this year. And 5722, which is last year. These are the years reckoned from the Creation, aren’t they?”
I nodded.
“How quaint. Not to say ridiculous. Tantum malorum, et cetera and so forth. That’s Latin. I don’t suppose you’ve learned any Latin, have you?”
“Huh? What?”
“Old saying. Tantum malorum religio suadere potuit—‘So many evils has religion brought about!’ Tribal morality, for instance. Also obscurantism, like thinking the world was created six thousand years ago. Or there’s no life anywhere but the skin of this planet. Now I’ve probably offended you. I can see it by your face. Don’t tell me you’re religious? Studying to be a rabb
i, or something?”
Creep. I suppressed a grimace. “No,” I said, “I’m not at all religious. And about those calendars . . .”
“Yes, yes. That’s what you’re here for, the calendars. Not to listen to me chatter. Here’s 5723, here’s 5722. And 5721, which takes us back to September 1960. That’s all we have, I’m afraid.”
“That’ll be fine.” I scooped up the three calendars. “Why do they keep these in the Rare Book Room anyway?”
“Lord knows,” he said, glancing at them. “The deathless artwork, I suppose. Got your library card with you?”
I gave him my card. He looked at it, looked at me. I thought I saw him nod, and that made me uneasy. He ran the card through a machine and stamped the calendars. “Building use only,” he said, handing them to me. “Give them back at any of the library desks before you leave today. You don’t have to come back up here.”
“Got it.”
I flipped through the most recent of the calendars. It advertised a different funeral home from the calendar hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen but otherwise seemed pretty much the same. Each month was accompanied by a gaudy Bible illustration. I didn’t recognize most of the pictures. I’d loved Bible stories when I was little, but lost interest in them a long time past and mostly forgotten them. September’s picture, JACOB’S DREAM AT BETH-EL, was of an enormous shining, undulating staircase, its top hidden in distant clouds. Angels in robes climbed their way to and from the endless heights. Below it was printed: “ ‘And he took one of the stones of the place, and put it under his head, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it’—Gen. 28:11-12.”
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 3
