Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  Yes, Shimon. I am hungry and very thirsty. I would give anything right now to have a nice orange soda. Let’s jump out of the car, Shimon, you and I, and we’ll get falafel and sodas for everyone. And then I’ll be lost in a flash, and you won’t find us.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “What’s she doing?” said Shimon.

  At first I didn’t realize he was talking about the baby. She stirred inside her blanket. Feebly she pressed her oversize head against me. She’d never done that before.

  “She sound ... just like a cat,” said Shimon.

  Yes. Like a cat. Yet I had the sense the faint mewing wasn’t coming from her throat, but from higher up, somewhere behind her huge black eyes. I didn’t understand how that was possible.

  “What’s she want?” Shimon said uneasily. “What’s she need?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The mewing was louder now, almost a squeal. In that cry I felt something strange and terrible. I peered into her face and saw no expression, any more than a flute or an oboe or a badly played violin has an expression. The sergeant briefly turned around. His mouth hung open. I knew that man; I’d seen him somewhere. I didn’t have time to think where.

  “Can’t you make her stop that noise?” said Shimon.

  It grew louder by the second. I pulled her to my chest and began to stroke her, trying to be gentle. “Shhh, it’s all right ...” The third soldier growled something in Hebrew and put his fingers in his ears.

  She didn’t clutch at me or resist. She felt in my arms like a bag of straw. Yet the wail she gave out was deafening. It was bigger than she was, than all of us, rising from below, splitting its way upward, filling the car and my ears and mind until I felt ready to explode.

  “Make her sto-o-o-op!” Shimon screamed. I could barely hear him.

  “Shhh, shhh, shhh ...” I whispered in her ear.

  The sergeant turned to stare. He let go of the steering wheel. A second later came the crash.

  I don’t know what it was we slammed into. We jerked forward; the doors flew open; there was yelling. The sergeant’s voice was the loudest of many. No one noticed when I jumped from the car.

  And began to run.

  She lay in my arms, silent now as the dead. The breath cut into my chest; my swollen foot dragged behind me like an anchor. I ran beneath gray arches, among dingy buildings where the narrow stone-paved alleys twisted into one another and there wasn’t any street or sidewalk. Rotting vegetable rinds squashed beneath my feet.

  A narrow stairway, between high windowless buildings, led down to an alley. The steps were high and smooth and hard, also slippery where crushed watermelon fragments oozed their juice. I’d just started down when I saw the men gathered at the foot of the steps.

  About a dozen men such as I’d never seen before. Not one woman. Pale and bearded; long caftans of greasy, fish belly white, striped with pale blue. They watched me with dead dark eyes, in which I expected hatred but saw only blankness.

  My grandfather’s fathers.

  From half-opened lips came the hum of their chanting. Kha. Kha. Kha—

  —b’shivt’KHA b’veyseKHA

  uvlekht’KHA vaderekh

  uvshokhb’KHA uvkoomeKHA—

  —when thou sittest in thy house

  when thou walkest in the way

  when thou liest down and risest up—

  —thou must recite, thou must remember, the commandments of thy God. Thou must gather by the moonlit ashen shores of a dead book and a broken promise, quench endless thirst with waters of thine own rot—

  I knew these men. I detested them, and for that hatred I despised myself, knowing I’d betrayed the generations that had borne me, allied myself to evil beyond imagining. My feet trembled. I stood still, not descending, not retreating.

  The baby shuddered against my chest.

  She began to make soft mewing sounds, the beginnings of that sirenlike howl I couldn’t bear to hear again. I turned. I climbed back up the steps, careful not to slip on the watermelon. When I looked behind me, the men had vanished.

  I drifted, strengthless, among the alleys. No benches; no stoops. No place to sit and rest. When I heard heavy boots running behind me, I didn’t even try to get away.

  The sergeant’s powerful body thudded against mine, almost knocking me over. It swept me like wind at the seashore. His arm held firm around my shoulders, and once more I ran, as part of his running, and now I wasn’t tired. Nor did my foot weigh me down. Swiftly we ran, faster than I’d have thought possible, and didn’t stop until we’d reached a trafficked street.

  He stood by the curb and held my arm tightly and waved his other arm in a great sweep. He shouted something, very loud. A taxi braked. He yanked open the rear door, pushed me in, and jumped in beside me. He spoke to the driver in rapid Hebrew. “Hadassah,” I heard him say. “Hadassah.”

  I slumped in the seat. I stared at two huge foam rubber dice that hung from the rearview mirror, while I caught my breath. “Todah rabah,” I said as soon as I could talk. “Thank you very, very much. Todah rabah.”

  The sergeant looked out the window. He gave a deep sigh. He said: “Oh, you’re very welcome, I’m sure. But really, Mr. Shapiro, I’d have expected a somewhat more effusive greeting from you. We haven’t seen each other since our drive to Miami three years ago, have we?”

  CHAPTER 33

  “ JULIAN !!! ”

  “Sssh! Sssh!” He choked with laughter; his face was red from struggling to hold it in. “That’s not my name anymore. Hasn’t been for years now. They don’t look kindly on Diaspora names in these parts.”

  “But how in the world did you—”

  “I’m Yehoshua now. Or Joshua, if you really must. That’s the way you say Yehoshua in English.”

  “I know.”

  His laughing fit had passed. He relaxed into the seat. “I’ve made aliyah. But surely you’d guessed that. You know what making aliyah means, don’t you?”

  “It’s the expression for immigrating to Israel. Right?”

  “Absolutely right. May-achooz, one hundred percent, as we say around here. Literally, it means ‘going up.’ You want to go up, my boy, this is the way to do it. Fine view from up here.”

  I supposed he meant that last remark figuratively. But it might have been literal too. We’d left the downtown streets behind, winding our way up into the barren brown hills around Jerusalem. Their slopes glared hot in the morning sun.

  “Julian. I mean, Yehoshua. There’s a lot of talking we need to do.”

  He nodded and said something I couldn’t catch. His buckteeth, which I only now noticed, pressed into his lower lip.

  “How did you happen to be on guard at the border at the time I was crossing? Was that just coincidence or what?”

  “Coincidence,” he said thoughtfully. He seemed to relax a bit, as though he’d expected me to ask a different question—like where had he been that night at the airport?—and now was relieved I hadn’t. “That would be an awful lot of coincidence for one night, wouldn’t it? Still, coincidences do happen. So it might have been coincidence, really. What do you think?”

  “Don’t be cute, Julian. I don’t have the energy. I haven’t slept since the night before last. And you and your friend Shimon weren’t exactly good company, remember?”

  “No,” he said, “I guess we weren’t.”

  “You and Shimon and that third character—what was his name? Somehow I never got his name.”

  “Itzig.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Itzig the wit. Itzig the humorist.”

  “Now, take it easy, Danny—”

  “Itzig, with his jokes about my baytzeem.”

  He fumbled nervously at a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. “Incidentally,” I said. “Speaking of my baytzeem. What kinds of things would your—your comrades-in-arms be doing to me right now? If I hadn’t managed to escape.”

  Out came the cigarettes. He looked toward the tiny, frail creature wh
o lay in my arms, her breathing louder and more strained than I’d ever heard it. He put the cigarettes back into his pocket.

  “Nothing very terrible,” he said. “They might have roughed you up a little bit. More to scare you than anything else. You don’t have to worry. I’d have found a way to stop it if it had gotten out of hand.”

  “ ‘Found a way’? Aren’t you the one giving the orders?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, I’m the sergeant, they’re the privates. I’m the one who tells them what to do. But no, I’m not a free agent. There are limits. I’m under those limits, just as you are.

  “Believe me,” he said. “These are strange times. And my guess is you haven’t grasped just how strange.”

  “Explain it to me,” I said.

  “You must understand, Danny, that Shimon and Itzig don’t know a lot of the things you and I know. Neither do most of the people in the higher ranks. Some do. That’s how I was able to get myself posted to Abu Tor. But most don’t.”

  “Get yourself posted? So then you did—”

  “No, no. Let me finish. They know there’s something odd going on. But they won’t let themselves think about it. For everything that happens there’s an official explanation, and they believe it all. Just like the man in the street. Like back in the States when it came to UFOs. You remember that, don’t you? They pride themselves on being very practical, very matter-of-fact. We’re very much the realists, we Israelis. So realistic we can’t see that the ... curtains are fraying. They’re almost worn away by now. Only a few threads left—”

  “The curtains?”

  “And those threads are already beginning to snap.”

  “Julian, what—”

  “They’ve heard something about the Makhtesh. You can’t be in the army and not hear about the Makhtesh, these days. They think it’s all just rumor. There was a leak at the Dimona reactor, they think, and that’s why the roads are blocked off—”

  “Julian,” I said, “what the hell are you talking about?”

  CHAPTER 34

  THEY PUT HER ON A COT UNDER AN OHYGEN TENT, WHILE THEY paged Dr. Zeitlin. Julian and I sat on vinyl chairs beside the cot. He explained to me why we had to wait for Dr. Zeitlin. Of all the Hadassah doctors, he said, only Zeitlin knew what was going on at this Makhtesh. Only Zeitlin would have some inkling of what the creature was that he needed to treat. Every several minutes there was an announcement on the public-address system, of which the only word I could make out was Zeitlin.

  Dr. Zeitlin didn’t appear. I sat slumped in the chair, going in and out of a doze, wondering from time to time what the Makhtesh was and what might be happening there.

  Finally they found a cot for me, and I got a few hours of real sleep. We were up before dawn. Julian brought me a uniform.

  “I forgot to tell you,” he said as I followed him out the hospital doors. “You’re honorarily in the army till this business is finished. Nobody’s going to stop a pair of uniformed soldiers.”

  The stars glittered above us as, in the strange khaki clothing, I climbed behind the wheel of the jeep. Venus, more brilliant than I’d ever seen it, rose in the east. Julian showed me how to shift the gears.

  I wish I could say it broke my heart to leave my baby in the care of strangers, that I could hardly bring myself to begin our journey, that my spirit stayed with her in her hospital bed. Truth was, I felt liberated and exhilarated as I guided the jeep onto the dark, empty road and saw the hospital’s dim bulk recede in the rearview mirror.

  “Did Zeitlin ever show up?” I asked.

  “Oh, eventually,” Julian said with a yawn. “Everybody shows up eventually. You just have to spend half your life waiting for them.”

  “He examined her?”

  “Yes, he examined her. He also read the letter you brought across from that Arab doctor—what was his name?—Talibi. He read it very attentively. He’s obviously got a lot of respect for Talibi. I have the impression the two of them know each other.”

  “How would that be?” I asked. “An Israeli and a Jordanian—how could they ever meet?”

  “International conferences maybe.” He yawned again. “Or maybe from the time before independence. Zeitlin’s old enough to have been in practice back then, and I assume Talibi is too. In those days there wasn’t any barbed wire border slicing Jerusalem in two, the way there is now.”

  “Jerusalem will be one,” I said.

  “What?” said Julian.

  I gripped the wheel hard. My voice sounded as strange to me as it evidently had to Julian, and I was overcome by the feeling I was speaking and acting in a dream. I was afraid I’d run the jeep off the road.

  “Who said that?” said Julian.

  “I don’t know. I think it was them. The aliens, the Elder Gods—I don’t know what to call them. But them.”

  “Think, Danny, think.” I could hear the fear and excitement in his voice. “Did they say Jerusalem was going to be one, O-N-E? Or won, W-O-N?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  It was a long time before either of us spoke.

  “Is there hope?” I said finally.

  “Hope? For what?”

  “You know. For her.”

  “There’s always hope,” Julian said. “Even on the truck taking you to the gas chambers there’s hope. That’s one thing you learn every day, being in Israel.”

  “But is there hope for her?”

  “Just drive, Danny.”

  The road snaked down from the mountains into the desert. The sun rose upon us as we passed Peniel.

  I mean, Beersheva.

  It was a dusty, ramshackle place, hot even at that hour. A few trucks lumbered through the rutted dirt streets. A few bedouin led their camels. By the edge of town, not far from the last rows of prefabricated apartment buildings, the bedouin had pitched their black goat-hair tents. Then we left these behind too, and we were alone in the flinty barrenness of the Negev.

  “Like to switch drivers?” Julian said.

  I did, very much. My swollen foot felt made of lead. I braked in the middle of the road. It didn’t matter; we were the only traffic. We climbed out of the jeep and urinated on the stony ground.

  At the Yeroham intersection we turned left. We kept on until we reached the roadblock. It took Julian nearly twenty minutes to talk our way through. I understood then why he’d wanted me to be in uniform.

  “You’re sure there’s no radiation?” I said once we were on our way. The warning sign at the roadblock had been so emphatic I needed his assurance one more time.

  “Of course I’m sure. The government had to come up with some plausible reason why all the roads to the Makhtesh are cut off. Everybody knows Dimona is only ten miles away. Everybody knows there’s a nuclear reactor at Dimona. So, voilà, a radiation leak at the reactor, blown this way by southerly winds, danger to life and limb. Et cetera and so forth.”

  “And they went and evacuated everybody out of Dimona, just to make the story believable?”

  “And out of Yeroham, for good measure.”

  “That’s pretty extreme, isn’t it?” I said.

  “They’re pretty scared,” said Julian.

  The Greater Makhtesh, he explained, was a huge crater that looked as if it had been scraped off the lunar surface and dropped into the Negev desert. One of the geological wonders of Israel.

  For weeks now, odd things were happening there.

  He spoke of white globes bubbling up from the crater’s floor. The layers of ancient rock in its walls changed colors, even shapes. The bands of red sandstone, or the yellow or the white, might thicken. They might contract. They might shift their positions. They might change, in broad daylight, right before your eyes—

  “That doesn’t make any sense, Julian.”

  “It doesn’t? Why not?”

  “Layers of rock, in place for hundreds of millions of years, suddenly start shifting all by themselves?”

  He shook his head.

  “The curtains are fray
ing,” he said. “The fabric is unstable. Something is bursting in on us, and we don’t know what it is.”

  —and finally came the night of the red mist. It began as a shining red globe, swelling up, darkly luminous, like a balloon from the crater’s floor—

  “Or like that thing I saw through the telescope! Remember, Julian? That night in the tower, observing the moon—”

  “The old SSS house,” he said. “How I do miss it.”

  —then pulsating, then throbbing. Then exploding; and the Makhtesh filled with a thick red mist, a lake of luminescent blood. At dawn the mist faded. The tower remained, with the disk perched at its top—

  It was the first thing I saw that desert morning as we drew near the rim of the Makhtesh. It looked exactly the way the Gypsies had drawn it in their book. The metal gleamed dully in the fierce sunlight.

  “Julian! I’ve been there before!”

  —on the moon, my head in the moon woman’s lap, listening to what I thought was the lapping of waves. She was real after all, and the moon tower was real, and here’s one like it standing before me, in this moon crater in the middle of the desert—

  I think I fainted. I would have fallen out of the jeep if Julian hadn’t grabbed my shoulders and held me all through the dizzy ride to the crater’s floor.

  Abandoned mining machinery lay scattered around the tower, like Tinkertoys at the feet of a giant.

  CHAPTER 35

  “SO,” JULIAN SAID, “DO YOU THINK YOU CAN FLY IT?”

  I looked around, still out of breath from climbing the tower. Outside, everything had seemed a bizarre chaos, as if this were the moon after all and not the Negev. Here in the disk it was all familiar. There was the control panel with its buttons and switches and levers, arranged as I’d come to know them beneath a swollen moon, in a time outside time. I knew it all, the way you know a home in which you haven’t been very happy, perhaps, but where you’ve lived so long you can’t imagine home anywhere else.