“Later, after the plane had taken off, I read everything he’d put in the manila envelope. Except, of course, the sealed letter. I still don’t know exactly what that was, although I can pretty much guess.
“There were recommendations. A letter in Arabic, to whom it may concern, saying what a wonderful tenant I am and how I take care of the property I rent as though it were my own. Two letters about how good a translator I am, how fluent and effective a writer, how diligently and faithfully I work for my employers. One was a to whom it may concern letter, written for businessmen. The other was addressed to a friend of his named Rasheed Abdel Salaam, in the Jordanian Ministry of Tourism. He’d put two hundred Jordanian dinars in cash inside the envelope, just to get me started.
“He took my arm and led me past the stewardess who was taking tickets, down the jetway into the plane. He didn’t leave until I was buckled into my seat. I never saw him again.”
CHAPTER 29
THE DAY DECLINED AS ROCHELLE TALKED. THE SHADOWS OF the evening stretched out among the mouths of the burial caves. The breeze chilled my bare foot.
“Rochelle, who are they?”
“ ‘They’? Who are you asking about now? The three men? Those lake creatures of yours? Who?”
How to answer? I tried to remember what I’d told her the night before—things recalled between stretches of sleep and lovemaking, my hands drinking themselves drunk upon her cool, naked skin. They’d been fragments, disordered and disjointed. Much, no doubt, I had kept to myself.
“All of them, I guess. And . . . her.”
Rochelle must have understood who I meant; she threw a quick glance toward her watch. “We have a little time left,” she said. “How’s your foot?”
“Hurts. More than it has for a while. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
She smiled faintly. “Swollen foot,” she said, pronouncing it as though it were some kind of name or title.
I asked what she meant by that.
“Never mind,” she said. “You’ll understand when you’re ready. Now tell me. What did you think of Tewfik Makdisi’s theory about the men in black?”
“That they’re Zionists?”
“Yes. Do you agree with him?”
“Do I—? That’s the biggest crock I’ve ever heard!”
“Oh, really? Why?”
“Goddamn it to hell, Rochelle!” She smiled, more broadly now. It was her smile, as much as anything, that was getting me angry. “Didn’t I tell you the things they said to me while I was tied to their chair?”
“Yes, you told me . . .”
The Jewish this, the Jewish that. The crooked Jew lawyers and the lying little kike who deserved to be blinded, a needle through his eyeball. Of course I’d repeated it all to her. How could I not?
“And you want to say they’re part of some Zionist plot? I say: bullshit!”
“Say it quietly. We’re in Jordan, remember.”
“Total ... horseshit! You want to know who’s a Zionist? My grandpa! Or he was, while he was alive. And if there was ever a saint on this earth—”
“Shhh, Danny. Danny. Here the three men in black are Zionists. Not just ‘seem to be.’ Are.”
“What?”
“Everything is Zionism and the Zionists. Everything you don’t like, that you’re afraid of. It was the Zionists who assassinated Kennedy. Did you know that?”
“How naive of me.” My voice trembled, and I feared if I didn’t get hold of myself, I might cry. “I thought it was Lee Harvey Oswald who killed Kennedy.”
“Oh, Oswald pulled the trigger. But the Zionists put him up to it. Because Lyndon Johnson would then be president, and the Zionists figured Johnson would be more pro-Israel than Kennedy was. Which he has been, so that proves it, you see.
“There was a photo,” she went on. “They sold it on the street corners here about two months after the assassination. It showed Lee Harvey Oswald and Ben-Gurion together, smiling and shaking hands. If you looked real closely, you could see the line where the two original photos had been taped together. But that didn’t stop people from buying it. Or believing it.”
“So Oswald and Ben-Gurion were buddies? That’s what they think?”
“Not exactly. The Zionists used Oswald as a tool. They got rid of him afterward so he wouldn’t talk. That’s why they got Jack Ruby to shoot him right after he shot Kennedy.”
“Jack Ruby was Jewish,” I said.
“Yes, Danny. Originally Jack Rubinstein. You can’t live in Jordan without knowing that. People here who don’t know anything else about the United States know that: Jack Ruby was Jewish. And that proves the whole thing is true. You understand what I’m saying?”
That we pick our demons, maybe, and then build our worlds around them? Was it Julian who’d told me that? Or did I figure it out on my own?
“But the three men—what’s this got to do with them?”
“Oh . . . how to say it? Take Albert Bender. Who were they, do you think, when they scared him into silence? Anti-Semitic bullies, like with you? Or Zionist conspirators, the way they would have been with Tewfik Makdisi? Of course not. Bender isn’t Jewish, and he isn’t Arab. I don’t imagine Zionism, or Israel, or Jewish issues mean much to him. You understand?”
“I think so, maybe. But, Rochelle—”
“Tell me what Bender was afraid of. What he couldn’t stop thinking about. What he wanted, more than anything in the world, and knew he couldn’t have. Tell me all that. Then I’ll tell you who the three men were when they came knocking on his door.”
So that was why they were three? For fear, for want, for obsession? Yet they’d been real! “That skin of theirs, with the weird stain?” I said. Without meaning to, I looked down at my arm. It did seem that my own stain had faded since I’d been with Rochelle. “I don’t think that was my imagination. You and Tom saw it—”
“And other people they’ve visited. I’m sure you didn’t imagine it.”
“But let me finish, will you? Where you’re going with this, it sounds to me like you’re saying they’re nothing but a myth. Is that it?”
“Yes. The three men are a myth. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“So they’re not real!”
“What are you talking about? Of course they’re real.” She bent toward me; she took both my hands in hers. “If they’re not real, why those scars on the back of your neck? Why is Tom Dimitrios dead and not alive? Why can’t I go back home?”
“I don’t understand, I don’t understand—”
“Listen. That place you went down to: where do you suppose that was? In this earth or out of it? In this solar system or out of it? In this universe or out of it?”
I tried to answer, stumbling, knowing I wasn’t making sense. Rochelle kept nodding. I spoke of the earth, the moon. The point of gravitation neutral in between, yet close by the moon, where the UFOs’ mother ship hangs motionless, not pulled either way. Where the mother ship is its own gravity ...
But why had I gone down and not up to get there?
Why inward, not outward?
“It won’t add up scientifically,” I said finally. “I’ve run it a hundred different ways, a thousand times over. There’s no way I can get it to work.”
“Scientifically, no. But ‘science is a turtle’—you remember that? Julian told me he wrote that on the back of our card the day he met you, just to tease you a little. To get you thinking.”
“ ‘Science is a turtle that says its own shell encloses all things.’”I was surprised how easily I finished the quotation. “But tell me now. What is there that isn’t a turtle?”
“Maybe nothing . . .”
“Not religion! Don’t ever tell me religion is anything more than a turtle. I’ve been inside one religion, and it’s the tightest, most suffocating turtle shell there ever was!”
I felt it strangling me even as I spoke. The thirst for chosenness that makes a lovely, spirited young girl into a thing forbidden and abominable. The suffe
ring; the duty to the dead. All through your youth you bear them as a yoke, even as your days speed by like a weaver’s shuttle. Yet how sweet and homelike it seems, while you’re inside. A shiver of rage passed through me. From my hands into Rochelle’s.
She squeezed them hard; she let them go. “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “I came across it in one of my wee-hours-of-the-morning reading sessions those nights I couldn’t sleep. In one of my ‘quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.’ I’ve thought about it a lot since last night.”
I leaned toward her. My heart beat faster. This was going to be the answer, the explanation of what I’d been through. Or the nearest thing to it she’d ever give me.
“It’s about a man named Timarchus,” she said, “in ancient Greece. A friend of Socrates’s. He went down into a cave by night, the way you went into that red disk. Only, three men in black weren’t chasing him. Or maybe they were. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details.
“There were snakes in the cave. He didn’t like snakes. He must have felt about them—well, the way you felt about being with those lake creatures.
“But here’s the part I remembered, when you told me what happened to you. The cave became the sky. And when Timarchus went down into it, he found himself in the sky, close to the moon. The underworld turned out to be like a cone stretching through space, between the earth and the moon. And he was at the tip of the cone—”
“Point of gravitation neutral!” I burst out.
“No. No. That’s science, remember. You’re trying to force things back into that turtle shell. Just listen to me.
“The moon was covered with a fine white powder, which turned out to be made from the souls of the dead. Other dead souls were trying to land there, so they could come out on the moon’s other side, to the Elysian Fields. . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She looked horribly sad.
“What happened to Timarchus?” I said. “Did he ever come back from the cave?”
“Oh, yes. He came back.”
“And he told his story?”
“Yes. He told his story.”
“And then?”
“He died. Three months later.”
It’s only a myth, I told myself. I felt a bit foolish. I’d let myself get so worked up by the portentousness of her tone, its oracular feel, that I’d really expected this to be something important. If science and religion are just turtles contemplating their own shells, then these old myths—what can they possibly be?
I looked away into the burial cave. Any moment I might see something monstrous rise from its depths, bearing the answers to all our questions—or, perhaps, itself the answer. I slid my good foot into its shoe. The other foot resisted.
“Swollen foot,” Rochelle said.
All at once I knew what she meant. Oedipus. That’s what his name means, because of how his feet were pinned together when the king his father left him to die on the icy mountainside. Oedipus, who jabbed out his eyes with pins torn from his mother’s corpse when at last he found the truth he’d searched for.
Or it found him.
“Are they the same?” I said.
“Are they—”
“The lake creatures. The dero. Are they?”
“Danny. I told you the night we met: there’s a continuum. We don’t know how to put things into their categories. Most of the time we’re better off not trying.”
“But it does sound like the dero. What they did to me on that table—like what the dero do to their victims. Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said very quietly. “At the beginning. When they’re getting started.”
Getting started. How fortunate I’d been to have mastered the disk’s controls just in time. “Why won’t you look at me, Rochelle?”
“I am looking!” She stared fiercely, pleadingly, into my eyes; once more she took my hands. “Why do you need to know? What does the classification matter?”
“It matters . . . because of her.”
She knew exactly what I meant. I saw it in her face.
“I don’t know just how they took my . . . seed. Maybe on that operating table; maybe on the moon while I was blacked out. I don’t know. Either way it was the lake creatures who took it. Who used it—”
“No use, no use to think this way—”
“And if they’re the dero . . . and the dero are pure evil—”
Then I was father to a dero child. An infant demon, just human enough you’d want to shelter and nourish her like any baby. Until she’d grown too big, too smart, too powerful to be stopped—
“Should we kill her?” I said. “Or at least let her die?”
“No!”
Her cry echoed off the cliffs. Her face, in the shadow of the ancient graves, turned into something itself ancient—wrinkled, decaying, twisted in a pain beyond anything I could imagine. The vision I’d seen once on the SSS tower had been real. No trick of the moonlight, as I’d convinced myself it must have been.
The instant passed. She was Rochelle once more, her tears overflowing. She bent over me, threw her arms around me, pressed my face into her chest.
“No, Danny. Please. Don’t even talk like that. We’ve got to keep her alive, and heal her, and protect her, and let her grow up. It’s more important than anything we’ve ever done or will do. Take my word for that.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she comes from the dero or the Elder Gods or from something else, some race of beings that isn’t either gods or dero, but a species like ours. Trying to keep their planet from blowing up, long enough to move on to their next stage. Just like us.
“Only they’ve crossed the threshold. At least some of them have. And now they’ve sent her—they’ve sent you—to help us across too.
“I don’t know if that’s true. All I know is, I like you a lot a lot a lot. And I didn’t hurt Tom, and I will never hurt you. And I will never tell you anything I don’t know to be true. This I know: that little child is a blessing, not a curse. For you and me. The whole world, in time. We need to give her a chance to live.
“We’ve got to go now. It’s late. Dr. Talibi is waiting for us; Jameela’s waiting. She’s waiting. For all I know, her mind is already grown, it was grown from birth, and she knows everything that’s happening around her.
“Don’t worry about the shoe. You don’t have to force it. I’ll carry it for you. Walk on your good foot, and lean on me. Here. I’ll help you up.”
“Swollen foot,” I said. Her strong hand reached out, took my arm, raised me from the burial stone where I’d been sitting. “Oedipus. You were smart to see that. But, Rochelle, it’s only a myth.”
“Myths are real,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. They have to be real. Otherwise they wouldn’t stay around for centuries. They’d vanish like last year’s top tunes.
“That’s it, Danny. Take the steps one at a time. Keep your arm around my shoulder. Don’t worry; we’ll make it to Dr. Talibi’s. He’s only a few blocks away.
“Hold on to me, and walk on your good foot.
“That’s it.”
CHAPTER 30
THE MOON BLOSSOMED, SWELLED. THEN IT DWINDLED ONCE more. When it became a pale sliver in the east, it was time for me to go.
Rochelle and I stood outside the Church of St. Peter in Gallicantu, on Mount Zion, and watched the sun set across the Valley of Hinnom.
“There’s where you’ll take her across,” Rochelle whispered. “Down into the valley, then up the other side to that ridge, where you see those houses. Keep to the right, though. The border runs between the houses. If you cut too far to the left, you’ll still be in Jordan.”
Damn that Talibi, I thought. I held the binoculars to my eyes. I focused on the tightly built cluster of limestone houses on the ridge opposite us, the place called Abu Tor. The houses all looked the same, though Rochelle had explained some of them were on the Israeli side, some on the Jordanian. The border was all but invisible. I barely
made out a barbed wire fence cutting across a street, separating its two ends.
“And we can’t just go to the Jordanian part of Abu Tor?” I said. “And sneak over to the Israeli side from there?”
“Too dangerous. Too many guards. Better to go across the valley.”
The valley wasn’t exactly safe either. Rochelle had warned me about the land mines planted there in 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence, and never removed. I turned the binoculars into the dark shadows of the valley, looking for some trace of those mines. But of course you can’t see a land mine when you look at the surface of the ground. That’s the whole point.
“Hadassah,” Dr. Saeed Talibi had said three weeks earlier, when he was done examining my baby. He spoke the word softly yet emphatically, with a strange Arabic enunciation, ending the second syllable with a prolonged hiss. In his white coat he hurried to his desk, began to write. Rochelle and I sat across from him, our hands touching. “Hadassah,” he said again.
“What do you mean, ‘Hadassah’?” I said.
I might as well not have spoken. A steady, cherubic smile lit his plump face; he covered sheet after sheet of office stationery with long paragraphs of English, which I soon gave up trying to read upside down. When he was done, he folded the papers and sealed them in an unmarked envelope. He handed it to Rochelle.
While Jameela, the peasant woman from the Galilee with her large gold-capped teeth and black embroidered dress, sat in a chair by the opposite wall. She smiled and crooned to the infant in her lap, a baby with a catlike face and huge black, slanted eyes. And tiny lungs, which struggled noisily to suck oxygen from our ungiving air.
The sun’s edge touched the horizon. The church’s bright mosaics glowed in its last rays. Rochelle and I spoke in whispers, though there wasn’t anyone near. The acoustics of the place were strange. Every now and then we’d hear, coming out of empty air, a fragment of conversation or the drone of a tourist guide: “—this church, built in 1931 over the place where Peter denied Our Lord, the night he was brought before the authorities—” Then the voice faded away and we looked around, and sometimes we could spot the person who’d been talking. Sometimes we couldn’t.
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 21
