Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  Wibbage. WIBG, the Philadelphia rock station. No wonder the music had been so hideous. And that was what the Super-Scientists listened to? The same rock and roll as the dumbest, gum-chewing, greasy-hair-combing kids—the Braxton types—in my school? A fantasy died, painfully, inside me. These were just teenagers, after all, and I’d wanted them to be something more. So we could be friends.

  “Well, then,” said Julian, “let’s have our dinner first. Afterward we’ll go up to the observatory and see what can be seen. Danny, let’s make the salad. We’ll let the young lovers finish their chess game.”

  CHAPTER 8

  I FOLLOWED HIM INTO THE KITCHEN. IT WAS BRIGHTLY LIT and filled with a wonderful smell of roast beef. Julian took off his jacket and tied on an apron. He tossed a second apron over to me. What am I supposed to do with this? I thought as I caught it, then realized: Dummy, put it on.

  “The potatoes are fine,” Julian pronounced, peering into a pot on the stove. “And the beans are coming along. So I think, Mr. Shapiro, we can dig out the greenery and get to work.”

  There was a cutting board beside the sink, another on the counter opposite. Julian waved me to the counter and handed me a colander filled with mushrooms. I began, awkwardly, to slice them. He rinsed a bunch of scallions, laid them on his cutting board, and decapitated them all with one grand flourish.

  “Well now,” he said, “what do you think of Rochelle?”

  “She’s—” I groped for the right word, to convey how she’d affected me. “Gor-geous!” I exclaimed; and my voice, which I’d thought safely matured, jumped a few octaves on the first syllable.

  Julian laughed. Waggle-waggle went the eyebrows. “Ah, you dog, you! Two of them! First your secret admirer and now Rochelle. Who will be next, I wonder?”

  “My secret admirer?”

  “That pretty little blonde with the curly hair who followed us to the car. Don’t tell me you didn’t see—Careful, Danny! We don’t want you slicing off your finger in our kitchen.”

  I looked at my left index finger. At first I thought I hadn’t broken the skin. But then the blood began to well up, firm and globular at first, then breaking and running all over my fingertip. I went to the sink to rinse it. Julian gave me a dish towel to press against the cut. “I can’t believe you didn’t notice her,” he said.

  “How do you know she wasn’t your secret admirer?” I said.

  “She only had eyes for YOU-U-U,” Julian sang, very much off-key. “A pity. I rather admired her myself.”

  “Anyway, didn’t you say Rochelle was Tom’s girlfriend?”

  “Really? Did I say that?” He looked down at the floor. “Out of here, Mehitabel!” he cried. A coal-black cat with blazing eyes, who’d been sneaking around our feet, looking for a convenient spot to jump up onto a counter, retreated a few steps. Then she lay down on the floor and emitted a faint whine. “That’s Mehitabel,” Julian told me. “The cat.”

  “Mehitabel the cat?”

  “Mehitabel. The cat.”

  “Where does that name come from?” I asked. There was something familiar about Mehitabel the cat. But I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  “Somewhere in the Bible, I think.” He went back to his scallions. The cat began to rear up—“Down, Mehitabel!”—and she lowered herself, hissing ominously, pressing first her head and then her belly and hindquarters against the floor. From that position she glared first at Julian, then at me. “I forget,” he said, “have you read the Bible? Who was Mehitabel in the Bible?”

  “I used to read the Bible when I was little. Then I stopped. Now I’ve started again. And I haven’t come across any Mehitabel. I think it’s from somewhere else, some other book—”

  “Maybe. I wouldn’t know. Why did you start reading the Bible? You’re not getting religion, are you?”

  “No. It’s not about religion. It’s more like history, like where I come from.”

  And why that pretty little blonde had to remain my secret admiree. Why there wasn’t any way Rosa and I could go on dates even if she wanted to, sneaked kisses the way the kids around us did. The Bible and its history had made me different. The others were the goyim, the shiksas. Reading the Bible, maybe I’d grasp how this came to be.

  “And Ezekiel’s wheels,” said Julian, convincing me he hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about. “ ‘Ezekiel saw the wheel,’ ” he sang. “ ‘Way up in the middle of the air.’ UFO sighting, if I’ve ever heard one.... Uh-oh. Here she comes again.”

  The cat was in motion. She trotted up to Julian, then stopped and pressed herself against his leg. He inserted the tip of his shoe under her belly, lifted her slightly, and sent her flying four or five feet. She let out a terrific yowl and ran from the kitchen. “If she tries that with you,” he said, “that’s what you do.”

  “I just hope she doesn’t claw my pants leg off.”

  “She probably would, come to think of it. Mehitabel’s been with us a year and a half. Showed up on our doorstep one rainy night, hungry, bedraggled, pregnant. We fed her, cleaned her, found homes for her kittens. Now she’s sleek, well fed, more little ones on the way. Fifth time now. Lord only knows where she finds the toms. Or what we’re going to do with the current batch of kittens.”

  “Why don’t you have her—what’s the word?”

  “Spayed?” he said. “Neutered?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Neutered.”

  “What? And deprive poor Mehitabel of one of the great pleasures of a cat’s brief life? Egad, sir, what a heartless brute you are. No, no, there’s already two tomatoes in the salad. You don’t need to cut up a third. And with this, I think we are just about ready to eat.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I CARRIED THE SALAD BOWL TO THE TABLE IN THE DINING room. Julian followed with the potatoes, the green beans, a basket of rolls, and finally the roast. Rochelle and Tom came in a few minutes later. They didn’t say whether they’d finished their game or, if so, who had won.

  Julian carved. Rochelle uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured it into four large wineglasses. She smiled at me charmingly. “One of the benefits of having friends old enough to buy liquor,” she said.

  I wondered who those “friends” might be. Mostly male, for sure. Older, with experience I could only read about, in books I mustn’t get caught looking at. To distract myself, I sipped the wine, which surprised me with its dryness. I’d expected it to be sweet, like the wine my grandmother served for the Passover Seder. Then I sipped some more.

  “Take it easy,” Rochelle said. “We can’t let you pass out on us during dinner. You’ll need a clear head when we go up to the tower for observing.”

  “What am I going to observe?” I asked.

  “You won’t know till you’ve observed it,” she said mischievously. She and Julian laughed.

  “We’ve been studying the moon,” Tom said.

  Follow the moon. Had these people too gotten a telephone call? I looked closely at Tom’s pudgy, unsmiling face. He was right: I’d never seen him before. Yet he was also familiar somehow, and I didn’t know how.

  “There’s things on the moon,” he said, “that shouldn’t be. Not according to the textbooks. Lights, shadows. Craters that are there when they shouldn’t be and aren’t there when the maps tell you to expect them. We’ve all seen them for months now.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “We don’t all see the same things.”

  Which, I supposed, was where I came in. “Have you written to M. K. Jessup about this?” I asked. “I mean,” I said—because Tom was staring at me as if I were about the dumbest idiot in the state of Pennsylvania—“you really ought to try to get in touch with Jessup. I know he’s interested in UFOs and the moon. He spent about half The Case for the UFO talking about that.”

  Tom let out a snort, cut off a large bite of meat, and stuffed it into his mouth.

  “His other books too—” I began.

  “Oh, Danny,” said Rochelle. “If you know how to get in touch
with Morris Jessup, you be sure and tell us. I don’t think the mail goes where he is. And they haven’t figured out how to connect telephones there.”

  I felt my skin crawl. I knew exactly what she meant. Since age five I’d lived with hints at death, used when the word itself was too near and terrible to be spoken. “Jessup’s dead?”

  “Four years ago,” she said. “This very month. Mama still cries when she thinks about it.”

  “Killed himself,” said Tom.

  “Maybe,” Julian said. “Or maybe not.”

  “He killed himself,” Tom said. “His wife had left him, he couldn’t get his books published, he was itching to do that radio séance. Him sitting in the afterlife, and the whole damn audience of WOR radio trying to make contact with him. Every insomniac in New York City closing his eyes and saying, ‘Jessup, Jessup, Jessup.’ Almost worth killing yourself for.”

  “You didn’t see the terror on his face,” Rochelle told him.

  I stopped eating, put down my fork. “And you did?”

  She nodded. “We lived in Coral Gables then. In Florida, right outside Miami. We were back from the Middle East for the first time, beginning of’58. Daddy knew Morris through his navy connections.”

  “Navy?” I said. “What did Jessup have to do with the navy?”

  “The invisibility experiment,” said Rochelle, as if I’d know exactly what she meant. “And the marked-up copy of The Case for the UFO that the Gypsies sent to the Office of Naval Research.”

  “That’s the book Rochelle found on the car seat,” Julian said. “Next to Jessup’s body.”

  Car seat? Gypsies? Invisibility experiment? All this was new to me; none of it hung together. I must have looked as bewildered as I felt. “Hello?” Tom said to me. “The year 1943? Philadelphia Navy Yard? Ring any bells?”

  “Wasn’t it something—” I groped in my memory for something I’d read once or maybe just heard about. “Wasn’t there a rumor about a ship . . . made to disappear—”

  “A destroyer,” said Tom. “Disappeared from the navy yard here. Then it turns up again, maybe two minutes later, offshore at Norfolk, Virginia. See what I’m saying?”

  “Not exactly—”

  “You can’t get from Philly to Norfolk in two minutes!” Tom said loudly. He looked exasperated at my slowness; patience, I gathered, was not his strong point. “Any more than you can get to the earth from—I don’t know, from Zeta Reticuli or wherever—fast enough that the trip’ll be worth making. Now you understand?”

  “I guess . . . what you’re trying to say is—I mean—”

  Tom gave an angry, bitter laugh, almost a cough. I wanted to grab him by his tie and shake him until he explained just what about me he found amusing. “No,” I said, “I don’t understand. I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  He shook his head, tore a roll in two, and began mopping up the gravy on his plate.

  “Danny,” said Rochelle very patiently, “in 1956, Morris Jessup started getting incredibly strange letters, from a man he was never able to track down. About an experiment in the navy yard thirteen years earlier, during the war. . . . So!” She broke into a smile. “Lights going on inside, I see!”

  They weren’t really. But at least I wasn’t getting any more confused. “Go on,” I said.

  “The letter writer sounded half crazy,” she said. “But only half. That was what got Morris all excited. Most of the people in that experiment, the men who’d been made invisible, had gone insane from it. They’d become paralyzed, frozen. Sometimes they’d catch on fire too. ‘They burned for eighteen days.’ The whole experience was ‘Hell Incorporated.’ That’s what the man who wrote the letters said. Hell Incorporated.”

  “ ‘The experiment was a complete success,’ ” Julian said. “Remember that, Rochelle? ‘The men were complete failures.’ ”

  Rochelle shivered and grimaced. “Yes, Julian. I remember. That’s from one of the letters,” she said to me. “No, I don’t know what it meant. Neither did Morris. But it seemed like the kind of thing you know is true, even if you don’t have one speck of evidence for it.

  “And the man claimed to have more evidence than anyone could possibly want. He kept asking Morris to put him under hypnosis, to bring back all the details he’d forgotten. Morris couldn’t wait. He thought this was the clue to antigravity. How the UFOs fly. How we can fly, if we’ve a mind to.”

  I thought of Rosa. How flight was practically the only thing on her mind these days, and how excited she’d be if she were here with us. And that I was glad she wasn’t, I didn’t know why. I really must ask to use their phone, give her a call.... “Think of it this way,” said Tom. “The Philadelphia experiment was to Einstein’s unified field theory what Alamogordo was to E = mc2. Only without the mushroom cloud.”

  “So did he?” I asked Rochelle. “Did Jessup ever hypnotize the man?”

  “Danny, he never could find the man.”

  “Or maybe,” said Julian, “they found him.”

  He drew his finger across his throat. His eyebrows jumped up and down in comic Groucho mode, just like in the kitchen. Only here the effect was macabre, chilling. Over the empty dinner plates I looked from Julian’s face to Rochelle’s to Tom’s. Then back to Rochelle. What exactly would I tell Rosa when I did phone her? That I was safe, I could trust these people, we wouldn’t need the police? Was I sure of any of this?

  “Morris got a call,” said Rochelle, “from the Office of Naval Research in Washington. Someone had sent them a copy of his book The Case for the UFO. Not just the book. There were annotations all over the pages. Three different people had written notes to themselves and one another, all through the book. It was like they were passing Morris’s book back and forth among them, underlining passages, writing comments like ‘Now he’s getting close,’ or sometimes, ‘He doesn’t understand, none of the gaiyars can understand.’ ”

  “Gaiyars?” I said.

  “A word Gypsies sometimes use for people who aren’t Gypsies. That’s why we think they were Gypsies, these three men. They talked like they were some secret society, the ones in the know. About the invisibility experiment—they had a lot to say about that—and about the UFOs, and all the kinds of things we want to know. I mean, we, the SSS. The government too, most likely. Though they’ll never come out and say it.”

  “And that book,” I said. “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen it.”

  She moved her empty wineglass back and forth, as though she were writing some invisible message to herself on the tablecloth. The clock ticked loudly in the silent house.

  “How to tell it?” she said. She stared into the glass. “We found out Morris was dying from the Dade County police. Most of the deputies were Daddy’s friends. They phoned him that evening, as soon as they found Morris in the park. There was nobody else they could phone. His wife had packed up and left him. He lived all alone in the house at the end of our street.

  “I’d never seen Daddy drive like that. He must have run three or four red lights on the way to the park. I don’t think he’d run a red light in his life before that evening.”

  “Your father took you with him?” I felt a strange creeping sensation, as though something were beginning to crawl over me, into me, through me. As when my father had taken me—

  “The sun was setting when we reached the park,” Rochelle said. “Morris’s car was there, the way I’d seen it a million times in front of his house. He was behind the wheel, the way he always was. But he was slumped back in the seat, dead, his eyes staring open. Danny, you have never seen eyes looking like that.

  “He looked like he’d been gasping for breath,” she said. “He was gasping for breath, actually, when they found him. That was what the deputy said. He’d run a hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window, the police said, and cranked up the car.”

  “Or somebody did it for him,” said Julian.

  Rochelle nodded. “The hose was still the
re when we came supposedly. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t look at anything, except Morris’s face. And the book on the seat next to him.”

  “The book—” I said.

  “Yes, Danny. Morris’s Case for the UFO. I’d read it a few years before, when it first came out and I was nine and we lived in Jerusalem. That was about all I had to do with myself those summers in Jordan, sit in the garden and read books from the British Council Library. That, and learn Arabic and French. Wasn’t like I had any friends to play with . . .

  “And now there was that same book, lying next to his body. Only it wasn’t the same. Be patient—you’ll understand in a minute what I mean. I stole it.”

  “You what?”

  “I was pretty good at stealing, even back then. The deputy wasn’t paying attention. He was yelling at Daddy. ‘What’d you bring her here for?’ he kept hollering. And Daddy yelled back that it was important I be there, important I see this, that I see—”

  —and “What’d you bring him in here for?” the bundle on the bed had croaked out when my father brought me into her room—so weak, but still I could hear her; I let out such a howl—

  “I think I would have gone insane,” I said.

  “Maybe you would have,” said Rochelle. “Maybe I did. Anyway, they were so busy screaming at each other, Daddy and the deputy, they didn’t notice me. And they’d left the car door open.

  “I reached in. I grabbed the book.

  “I was wearing a big, loose smock then, like an artist, and a pair of jeans. I stuffed the book into the front of my jeans, under the smock. And I took it home with me, and Daddy never saw it. I stayed up all that night, with my flashlight under the covers, just like in the comics, reading it.

  “Because this wasn’t the ordinary book, Danny. Not the one I’d read in our garden in Jerusalem. It was the special copy, the marked-up copy, that the Gypsies or whoever had sent the Office of Naval Research, and afterward they passed on to Morris for his reaction. With all the annotations. And the drawings.