I step forward. I say, “Can I help?”
Nobody answers. They don’t even look at me. Maybe I spoke so softly they didn’t hear. Now I see her glasses—on the floor, unbroken. They must have flown off her when she fell. I go over, pick them up.
She lies in bed, shivering, sobbing. She hasn’t tried to cover herself; must be too weak, too frightened. He sits down next to her. She reaches for his hand, grabs it. He pulls away. Then he takes her wrist, thin as a stick, and holds it. Taking her pulse?
“Anything broken?” he says.
Tears glitter in her hollow eyes. I’m still holding her glasses; I don’t know whether I should offer them to her, to him, to no one. He presses and pokes at different parts of her body, to see where she’s been bruised.
“It hurts here.” She points to her thigh.
He pulls up her skirt. On the left thigh is a huge ugly bruise, already turning purple. He presses with his fingers, and she moans.
He says: “I don’t think it’s broken. You’ll be all right.”
“Dad,” I say.
He turns to me. He gives me a strange look, not angry, almost tender. But not really loving. Just strange. He takes the glasses from my hand and puts them on her face. She laughs.
“Archy,” she says.
She’s still laughing, even while tears drip down her cheeks. In that book of theirs Archy was Mehitabel’s cockroach pal. Her scribe. Her confidant. Which didn’t keep her from trying to eat him every now and then.
I know my mother’s talking about the Long Island letter. From his face, I see my father doesn’t know. She must never have given it to him; he can’t figure out why she just called him Archy. I do understand. But she won’t look at me.
Yet I see her. Her puffed-up legs. Her withered, strengthless arms. Her swollen stomach—like the bellies of naked, emaciated children, in news photos of African famines. I think, She’s hanging by a thread, and suddenly I know what’s going to happen. I tell myself maybe it won’t. The horrible feeling—the despair and the grieving for her already, even though she’s still here, still alive—passes after a moment.
“Leon. Will you stay with me?”
He nods to her. To me he says: “Go to your room. I’ll be there in a bit.”
She doesn’t speak to me. When I reach the doorway, I look back. He’s sitting on the bed beside her, holding her hand, singing:
We were sailing along on Moonlight Bay,
We could hear the voices singing, they seemed to say:
“You have stolen my heart, now don’t go ’way”—
As we sang love’s old sweet song on Moonlight Bay!
That song. Whenever I hear it, I think of spiders and sticky webs I can never get off my skin. I go to my room, start to slam the door behind me. Then I catch myself; I close it gently. I sit at my desk and wait for my father.
Passage of Time in the Book of Job Essay—1966 National Bible Contest
Why is it history’s cruelest tyrants who hold absolute power? Why do the freedom fighters, the boldest and most outspoken thinkers, die abandoned in torture chambers? Why, even in free lands, do the good and virtuous die young and suffer horribly?
Those are the questions posed many centuries ago, by the Hebrew writer of genius who gave the world the Book of Job—
My father knocks, then walks in. He glances at the pages of typescript I’ve read over and over while waiting—carbon copy on onionskin paper. The original is in an office somewhere in New York City. “That the essay you sent in for the contest?”
I nod.
“Guess they must have liked it.”
“I guess.”
He sighs. He sits down on my bed. He says: “When’s the finals? This Sunday?”
“A week from this Sunday. May the fifteenth.”
My heart beats faster. I know exactly what he’s going to tell me, though maybe not right away. I have to drop out of the contest, my mother’s too sick. We can’t leave her alone, even for a day, to go into New York City. Certainly I can’t be away from her all this summer if I win, which now I’m sure I don’t have a chance to. I’ve heard about those finals: they ask you a million nit-picky questions about the biblical book you’ve chosen to write your essay about. Miss one question, you’re dead.
My instinct is to cover my essay, hide it from him, find a way to slip it out of sight when he’s not looking. No need. It doesn’t matter if he reads this; it isn’t the UFO journal. That’s back in my dresser drawer, under my shirts, its usual hiding place.
He says: “What was all that stuff you were hollering to yourself in here? ‘Who are you, what are you?’—something like that?”
So he was awake. We all were. In a death house, sleep comes hard.
I feel myself turn red. “I don’t remember.”
“You ought to know better than to go yelling like that in the middle of the night. With Mom so sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
He glares at me; in my mind I shrink to nothing. To keep myself from vanishing, I look at my essay, let my fingertips graze the edges of its pages. This isn’t like the UFO journal, doesn’t come from a special place of truth as the journal does. It’s in school assignment style, though in school they’ll never care about what the passage of time feels like when you’re in pain. But like the journal, it might pass for grown-up writing. I suppose that’s why I’m in the finals. I run my fingers over the thin, crinkly sheets, hoping that’ll give me strength to endure what’s coming.
My father looks up toward the bookshelves over my bed, where I keep my UFO books. He pulls one down, flips through it. M. K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO. “You still believe in this stuff?” he says.
“Yes. I do.”
“I thought it was the Bible you were interested in now.”
“That too.”
“Jesus.” He shakes his head. I feel his exhaustion, how badly he must have needed that “Cheerio, my deario!” I want to ask who Me(g)hitabel C. is; I hold myself back. “How do you do it all?” he says.
“I don’t know. I find the time.”
“You’re not flunking out of school, are you?”
“You’ve seen my report cards.”
“Well,” he says, and I know what he’s thinking. Of course I have time for this stuff. I don’t have a social life: no friends, no girlfriends.
“How’s your buddy Jeff Stollard these days?” he says.
I stiffen. “OK.”
“What’s he doing with himself?”
“He’s in eleventh grade. Same as me.”
“I know what grade he’s in. But what’s he doing? How does he spend his time?”
How should I know? We haven’t been friends since our fight over Rosa, the summer after eighth grade. But that isn’t really what came between us. Jeff just . . . changed. Taught himself the guitar. Found friends who have good voices, not like mine, so he can sing with them. When they’re together, he acts like he doesn’t know me. And I feel all over again the desolation of my solitude.
Just once, a November afternoon two and a half years ago . . . he came up to me, touched my shoulder. He said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” As if I needed to know that, and he had to be the one to tell me. As if the gravity of death were the one thing we still could share.
“He’s interested in folksinging,” I say.
“Folksinging. Not UFOs.”
When Jeff and I were friends, my father wrote him off as one more “zombie” like myself. Now we hardly speak, he’ll be the model of American boyhood. “Not anymore,” I say, and it still hurts.
“Has he learned to drive?”
“He’s got his license.”
“That’s good. Good for him.”
I look away. I’ve had my learner’s permit for the past four months, since the day before the journal started bubbling up inside me. It sits in my wallet unused, next to my UFO Investigators membership card. I can’t ask my father to take me out for driving practice; I know the rage that’ll erupt over my
every mistake. So what am I supposed to do with it?
“Does Jeff go out with girls?” he says.
“Some. I think. Not much.”
“Sure don’t want to tell me anything.” He gives a short laugh. “It’s your mom you could always talk to. Isn’t it?”
Not anymore.... I wonder if I should protest, try to soothe his feelings. He closes The Case for the UFO and puts it back on the shelf. “What I don’t get,” he says, “is why both? Why this and the Bible? What have they got to do with each other?”
I could go off, if I wanted, on how there are UFOs in the Bible. Ezekiel’s vision of the wheels. What really were those angels Jacob saw going up and down the ladder? But this isn’t the point. “I—I—they both interest me, that’s all.”
“You believe in the Bible?” he asks.
His voice has changed. Not using questions to prove to me how my life is all wrong, but like he’s genuinely interested. Like he really wants to know.
“Sort of. I believe it’s history.”
“There are other history books. Why the Bible?”
Because it’s the history that might explain me, and my parents and grandparents and that gray-bearded great-grandpa whose picture is in my grandmother’s house, his name embedded in mine. Why all of us are the way we are. Why Jeff has his friends and I’m alone . . . But how do I say this?
“Come over here,” he says.
I obey. He gestures for me to sit down next to him on the bed. When I do, he looks at me like he’s about to say something really important. But all he does is reach out and touch my face.
“A new pimple?”
I nod.
“Still with those pimples,” he says.
He sounds almost sympathetic, and I realize that this time we’re not going into the bathroom to lance it. Maybe it’s not true, what I’ve always believed. Maybe he doesn’t hate me. Maybe this is something complicated beyond my grasp, by things I don’t remember, that happened before I was born. And that aren’t written in the Bible.
“Shhh!” he says suddenly, even though I haven’t said a word. He jerks his face toward the wall. “You hear that?”
I didn’t, but now I do. A faint moaning, from the other side.
“You go to bed,” he says, jumping up. “I’ll check on her.”
At the doorway he stops, turns to me. He throws me a peculiar look, like when we were in her bedroom and I was holding her glasses. This time I know what he means: I never walked out on you and your mom. Give me some credit for that, will ya?
Yes, Dad, I will. I mean, I do.
“When’s your contest?” he says. “This Sunday?”
I’ve already told him; already he’s forgotten. I try not to sound exasperated. “The next Sunday. The fifteenth.”
“You don’t have to worry. I’ll drive you there.”
What? He’s on my side! He wants to help me, let me fly, even collude in my flight; I don’t know why. Whatever—I need to express some gratitude, don’t I? Thank you, Dad. That’s really nice of you. Easy enough words, aren’t they?
Yet they refuse to come. I give a mute nod.
Later, in bed I fall into a hideous dream. I’m running, using all my strength, trying to gain momentum so I can hurl myself through a vast, tangled spiderweb spun in a tunnel through which I’ve got to pass. No stopping; no turning back; and if I don’t hit the exact right spot, I’ll be caught forever.
The spider is there, suspended, just outside my field of vision . . . and I wake, drenched in sweat. The words She’s hanging by a thread, hanging by a thread run through my mind.
No more sleep tonight. I climb out of bed, retrieve my journal from beneath the shirts. For hours I write. When the room lightens in the dawn and my alarm clock goes off, I’m still hunched over that notebook, the pen twisting in my cramped-up fingers like something alive.
I knew I must leave this place at once, before the creatures realized I’d killed one of them and came back for revenge.
I write of sitting awake, fighting sleep for hours or days, poring over the Gypsies’ book and what I remember of how the moon woman operated the disk’s controls. Until at last I can work them skillfully as she, pilot the disk on my own.
Everything around me hummed and buzzed. I turned transparent, then invisible. I could feel my fingers, not see them, as they pressed, twisted, danced nimbly over the controls. The disk lifted off the ground, tilted at an angle. Then it shot off into the black, moon-ridden sky.
I climbed high, very quickly. If I wanted, I could have a bird’s-eye view of the dark, stunted world I was leaving. But I didn’t have the stomach to look at it too closely. I had an impression of vast desolate expanses, chalk white, dotted with clumps of charred, blackened vegetation. Brownish specks that looked like animals dragged themselves across the deserts. On the horizon, moonlight glittered off the endless lake.
Quickly it vanished in the distance. It was a tiny world, really, for all the strength of its gravity. Soon it was only a splinter, drifting in the blackness of space.
The stars surrounded me on all sides, above and below. Above me Orion swaggered. Scorpio crawled beneath my feet. I set my course for the unfamiliar brilliance of Canopus, and the Southern Cross—
I will win that trip!
For a minute, maybe two, I hung motionless in space. Behind me loomed the moon. It was the same moon anyone can see, that I’ve seen all my life. There were no towers, no waves, no waters of any kind. No place where a boy and a moon woman might rest from their journeys and thirst. Probably none of it ever existed in the first place. There were only the craters, and the mountains, and the broad burning wastes that were once foolishly called seas. Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium, Mare Tranquillitatis.
Sea of Rains. Sea of Clouds. Sea of Tranquillity.
Somewhere in the blackness ahead of me, I knew, there was a slit wide enough for me to pass through. In the massed fabric of reality there’s always a slit. You must find it. Then gather the power to force your way through, and shoot yourself toward that slit as though out of a gun. On the other side you’ll be in sunlight once more. Where you were born to be.
Miss it, and you wander in darkness and endless thirst.
My heart beat hard as I thought of the chance I was taking, that I always must take.
A minute passed, maybe two. I waited for courage.
PART FIVE
A SONG OF ASCENTS
[JULY 1966]
CHAPTER 24
FROM BELOW MY FEET CAME A LOUD, SCRAPING NOISE. THE disk’s momentum dragged it over the rocks until it ground to a stop. The impact slammed me into the edge of the control panel, and I slid to the floor and for several minutes lay there.
My leg: broken? But the pain ebbed, slowly, and at last I realized it was only a bad bruise. I listened in the darkness to what sounded like the waters of a stream beneath me, while I tried to remember how I’d gotten here. Only a few images remained. The disk hurtling forward into space, fast as I could make it go. Colored lights shooting past like meteors; white luminous globes flowing up toward what seemed a crevice, carrying me with them. Then the long, grinding drag over wet rocks.
The rocks at least weren’t my imagination. I could see them glistening through the gaping hole in the disk’s side. A stream, faintly gleaming, flowed among them. As soon as I felt strong enough to stand, I stepped cautiously out of the disk and looked around for whatever suns or moons this world might contain. There weren’t any. I was in a cave, wide and high, but without any opening for light to come in. Only gradually did I understand that the water was the source of its own light, that it itself shone, as though light had somehow been made liquid.
The thing I’d flown was a dark, ruptured shell, its bottom and sides torn open in a dozen places. I’d never fly it again. I crawled inside to retrieve The Case for the UFO, then left the disk behind and limped my way upstream.
The grade steepened; the cavern narrowed. The noise of the rushing water grew louder. Walls began t
o emerge from the blackness, though their tops were too high for the water’s light to reach. The stream tumbled into itself in small waterfalls, turning into rainbows as it fell from rock to rock. Often I stopped to rest. Yet it wasn’t long before I rounded the stream’s last bend and saw before me an enormous round hollow like the inside of a globe. Bright water gurgled from a spot low on the rock wall.
I looked down: a clear, bubbling pool, fed by the spring, into which I longed to dip myself. I looked up and saw the dim outlines of a vast rock skull, its roof curving in a smooth arch, one cyclopean eye socket far up along its wall, barely visible in the lofty darkness. That was the opening of the shaft that led out of here, to which I’d have to climb sooner or later.
The Well of Souls.
All around were the souls, gathered to this place beneath the Rock in Jerusalem where the dead come to pray. I wondered if I was now one of them. But if I were dead, my swollen foot and bruised leg shouldn’t hurt as much as they did. Nor did I much resemble the others. They were white and smooth and sexless, almost indistinguishable, all with puffy round limbs and faces like infants’. Yet some had been men and some women. Somehow I could tell them apart.
They bathed in the pool. They drank from it; they stretched upon the water-smoothed rocks by its edge. They paid me no attention, and I assumed I was invisible to them. The UFO, like the navy ship in that experiment, turns its riders invisible, and some recover afterward, but most do not. And I imagined the dead could not see me any more than the living.
Asher!
The voice cried out, in my mind rather than my ears. At first I thought it was saying “ashes” and speaking of the world from which I’d come. But then it called again, and this time I recognized that soul, and that I was the one being called.
So he did see me. But did he know who I was? Or mistake me for his own father?
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 16
