Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  The bells of St. Mary’s, ah hear! they are calling

  The young loves, the true loves who come from the sea

  And so my beloved, when red leaves are falling

  The love bells shall ring out, ring out for you and me!

  Outside the window, red leaves are falling. I want to cry, from the beauty and sadness of it. I look away.

  The red, the yellow leaves turn brown. Then they’re gone. October becomes November.

  Hardest part of the day is lunchtime.

  I sit at a table near the back of the cafeteria, with the other kids nobody wants to eat with. Two small, skinny, homely girls with bad complexions, who I think are sophomores. A fat, ugly boy, also a sophomore, with a crew cut and widely spaced teeth. They’re all morons. Each day at one o’clock, the fat kid pulls out a transistor radio and turns on the news.

  “In the Gulf of Tonkin this morning, at least forty-three men died and sixteen were injured when the U.S. aircraft carrier Oriskany suddenly went up in flames....”

  “My brother’s in the ’Nam,” the kid with the radio says to me. Every day, Monday through Friday, he says that exact same thing. I nod, while behind us the cafeteria murmur of boys and girls together, laughing and flirting as they eat their lunch, ebbs and flows.

  “Sister Rosa, a sixty-four-year-old Vietnamese nun held prisoner by the Vietcong, told her harrowing tale of ten months in captivity ...”

  Sister Rosa?

  Suddenly I see before me Rosa Pagliano’s grave, sweet, almost feline face. Not singing, not laughing now, but solemn and tender. Her full lips slightly open, as if to tell her own story of captivity and torment and exile. To hear mine.

  Rosa, I’m sorry.

  Rosa, I’d love to dance with you.

  Rosa, don’t go—

  A burst of laughter, from behind. I recognize the voices. I turn around. Jeff and his pals and his girlfriend, all cracking up together. One of them starts singing; the others, as soon as they’re able to quit laughing, take up the song. Loud enough the whole cafeteria can hear.

  It’s the Kingston Trio song, about poor ol’ Charlie. The man who went to ride on the MTA and couldn’t get off again and never returned. Who rides forever in underground darkness, maddened by thirst and rage and betrayal. Whose wife once a day goes down to the station ...

  And through the open window she hands Charlie a sandwich

  As the train comes rumblin’ through!

  They sing that line superfast, “through-the-open-window-she-hands-Charlie-a-sandwich,” and when they’re done, they’re almost rolling on the floor, they think it is so funny. I know it’s not me they’re laughing at—they don’t remember I even exist—but that’s what it feels like. I jump up from my chair.

  “Hey! Where you going?”

  It’s the fat kid, the one with the radio. Nobody else seems to notice. “To hell!” I call out.

  No one stops me. Not even the teachers. How could they? I’m invisible. When they find out, I’ll be suspended. Maybe even expelled. I don’t care. Already I’m condemned; why should I care?

  I burst out of the school, into the pale wintry sunlight. It’s cold; my coat is back in my locker; I don’t care. A few minutes later I’m beside the highway, striding northward against the traffic.

  The cars pour toward me, past me. Ton after ton of metal, unceasing, relentless.

  Must be miles I’ve walked. Slower now. When I charged off the school grounds, I thought walking fast and fiercely might purge my fury and pain—my rage at my aloneness, the irretrievable waste of my life. All it’s done is make me tired.

  The sun hangs low above the horizon. The wind blows cold.

  Cars come from everywhere. They dizzy me, fill my ears with their murderous noise. The sun’s light—feeble, waning—is deeper darkness even than that damned cafeteria. Life stretches ahead of me in unending futility, like this car-choked highway.

  This is the world, in which I am condemned to live.

  All I have to do is step out there.

  One second—it’ll all be over.

  If there were anyone to hear me, I would scream. I hear the squealing of the brakes; I feel the splintering of my bones, my head crushed like an egg. I run to a chain-link fence beside the road, grab it with both my hands. I will not release these cold twists of metal, to save my life.

  The sun’s about to set. I can’t spend the night here.

  I let go of the fence. I begin to walk back, slowly and carefully, like an old man crossing an endless sheet of ice. I try not to hear the automobiles.

  CHAPTER 44

  FOR CENTURIES I HUNG ON THE STAKE. MY FLESH CLOSED around it, formed and reformed itself upon the splintery wood. All those centuries long, I remembered the agony of the first piercing.

  My belly, my bowels, my intestines tore themselves away from the wood that had penetrated them. But how could I hold myself apart? It wasn’t possible, fixed as I was. The muscles grew exhausted and limp; the tissues pressed themselves against their mute tormentor. In pain they fused. And so I hung, sometimes screaming but for the most part silent, while the dark flames writhed on the low hills around me and the years silently passed by.

  Somewhere above me, some exile might trudge through the heavy, fat-soaked ashes. He might wonder, as I once did, what burnings could have produced them. Now I know. They’re me. My own burning flesh.

  From immemorial times 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.

  The Elder Gods ... God ... the dero. It’s all the same.

  The three men arrive, to attend to me. They come from bathing in some lake of rot like the one I’ve known. It stains them an inhuman brown. It also makes them live forever.

  At first I feared they’d come to wound me, to add their torments to those of the stake. No doubt those were their orders. But after so many millennia they’d grown bored with torturing. Instead they lounged beside the stake and lit cigarettes, gazing at the dimly burning hills. They began to offer me their cigarettes. Since with my stumps of arms I couldn’t take them, they put them into my mouth and helped me smoke.

  For hours they stand beside me. I think they’re glad for my company, after their own long loneliness. They and I together look upon the dark, smoldering hills and the smoky valley in between, and because I’m fixed on the stake and can look in only one direction, they look in that same direction with me.

  If I’d been judged, I would know why I’ve been sentenced to this place. I’d grasp how I merit this suffering. But there was no judgment. There never is.

  Sometimes, though, the smoky darkness of the sky seems to part. I think then that I can see through to a place that’s in the heavens, yet so close you could almost come fluttering down from it to stand beside me.

  My little girl is there.

  She sits in the lap of a gray-bearded old man whom I’ve never seen except in a picture. It’s Asher, my grandfather’s father. The rabbi, the saint. He holds a glass of ice water to my little girl’s lips and tenderly lets her drink it.

  She seems happy now.

  I realize: she’s given water to drink because she was a good girl, that little daughter of my grandfather. And I am left to burn with thirst because I was supposed to keep her alive and I let her perish. I was supposed to comfort her, and I left her to die alone.

  I killed her.

  She smiles down at me, very lovingly, and I know I am forgiven.

  So I cry and say: Great-grandfather Asher, have mercy on me, and send this little girl to dip her finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in torment.

  But he only shakes his head. I remember then that I’ve seen all this, said all this, done all this a thousand times before. He rattles off his speech: Son, between us and you there is a great gul
f fixed, so that those who would pass from here to you cannot, nor can you pass from there to us....

  He’s lying. I know these holy old men—goddamned liars every one. I crossed greater gulfs than this in a second and a half when I had my disk to fly. I could do it right now, if only I could get myself off this damned stake.

  I look away, insofar as that’s possible for me. I wait for the three men to come back. At least they give me their cigarettes.

  Meanwhile my mother sips her water and smiles graciously down.

  There is something, I think, she doesn’t know. None of them knows it. Not even the three men, who have been everywhere and know everything but are too stupid to know what to make of it.

  My arms have rotted to stumps. But stumps will grow.

  I will pull myself free. Then I will burst forth.

  The prison can hold the body—not the spirit, not the mind. I will burst forth.

  I will smite the door; I will shatter the bolt. I will burst forth.

  I will cut through the fence; I will break through the wall. I will burst forth.

  I will cross the gulf; I will abolish the border. I will burst forth.

  I will stretch out my hand; I will raise myself from hell. I will burst forth.

  And meanwhile I recite this over and over, as my incantation—to ease my thirst, to cool the burning. To smooth the roughness of the stake that pierces me.

  I will burst forth.

  The drawer—that place where they shut away my body as if I were some damned lab specimen—yawns open on its rollers. Its latch and lock are broken. It won’t hold me again.

  I climb out. They want to stop me, but they can’t. They’re too frightened.

  They stare at me. They gape. They turn sick with horror. The kids from school, the teachers, my father, that woman he’s going to marry now that my mother is out of his way: they’re all pale and speechless. They don’t have to tell me what it is that so horrifies them. I know better than they do how I’ve been mutilated.

  When I speak, it’s not in anger. I don’t want to hurt them or frighten them. They’re scared enough as it is. Instead I speak calmly, with grave sadness:

  You must look at me, I tell them. You must listen. You cannot look away.

  I am come from the dead; I am come to tell you all. I will tell you all—

  PART NINE

  TO COOL YOUR TONGUE

  (AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1967)

  CHAPTER 45

  August 20, 1967

  Dear Julian,

  It’s taken me awhile to write. Believe me, I haven’t forgotten you.

  I thought of you back in May, when we started hearing about the Arab armies massing around the borders and saying they were going to push you into the sea. I remembered what you said to me last summer. “There’s always hope. Even on the truck taking you to the gas chambers, there’s hope. That’s one thing you learn every day, being in Israel.”

  (That’s what you said, wasn’t it? It’s what I had down in my journal.)

  Then I thought of you after the fighting started, and a day or so later I passed a newsstand and saw the headline ARAB ARMIES SMASHED IN BLITZ—ISRAEL PROCLAIMS TOTAL VICTORY. And the next few days I read everything about the war in my father’s New York Times, and I saw the photos of the soldiers praying and weeping by the Western Wall, where no Jew was allowed to set foot for nineteen years. I looked for you in all those photos, even though I knew you wouldn’t be there.

  Then when I saw this headline, at the end of June—

  ARABS AND ISRAELIS MINGLE GAILY

  IN UNITED JERUSALEM

  Thousands of Residents Move Between Sectors

  as 19-Year Barriers Go Down

  —as soon as I saw it, I cut the story out so I could send it to you if I knew your address, which of course I don’t.

  I wanted to ask: Were you there on that day, when the Arabs from East Jerusalem poured into Israel and hugged everybody they saw?

  I know you’re all right, that you weren’t killed in the war. It’s not so easy to kill you. Rochelle told me that, the night we said good-bye.

  Yehoshua. I still call you Julian. I can’t help it; I’ll always think of you as Julian; the name Yehoshua doesn’t mean anything to me. Just a guy in the Bible who was a great conqueror and killed a lot of people, and they named the Book of Joshua after him. It makes me sick, to read about those people being massacred. A lot in the Bible now makes me sick.

  When I was so wrapped up in the Bible, it gave comfort to my mother. I think it reminded her of my grandfather, made her feel he wasn’t entirely dead. But I’m living with my father now, and my father doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care anymore if I spend my time researching UFOs. All he cares about is Meg Colton.

  That’s right—you don’t know about Mrs. Colton. I didn’t know either, until a few months ago.

  “I simply cannot understand,” she says to me over the phone yesterday, “why you wouldn’t let me and your father send you back to Israel this summer.”

  “It’s too late,” I said.

  And then, even though she’s calling long distance from Long Island, she starts arguing with me. It may be too late now, she says. But it wasn’t too late back when they first offered me the trip, the night of my high school graduation in June. I got dragged into the argument, even though she doesn’t understand at all what I mean by “too late.” Namely, that being in Israel doesn’t mean anything to me anymore.

  Hard to explain what it was before my mother died. Maybe the promise of a country where the world might be made new and I’d have a place in it, and now I know that’s never going to happen. Even though Jerusalem has been won and become one, just as I said in my journal, and the Arabs have come with laughter and hugs rather than knives and hatred. It’s nice, but it’s nothing to me. I’m not part of it. It’s too late.

  Yet I do wonder: Were you there when the walls came tumbling down? When people crowded back and forth through the Mandelbaum Gate without passports or papers or anything? Did you see them tear down the fence at Abu Tor?

  And what about Rochelle?

  Did you see her the day the two Jerusalems merged into one? Did you recognize each other, call out to each other in the street? Then afterward did you go to talk over coffee? Tell each other your stories, the way last summer each of you told them to me? Did you then—this hurts to ask, but I need to know—did you go to bed together?

  If you did, don’t worry, I’m not mad. But I have to know.

  It should have been you and Rochelle, from the beginning. Not her and Tom. Not her and me, even. Her and you.

  I graduated from high school in June, with honors but not highest honors. I was glad to graduate at all. In November I thought I was going to be expelled for walking out of school in the middle of the day. I wasn’t even suspended. The principal called me into his office and gave me a long lecture on not letting myself and my family down; that was all.

  The night after graduation, I went to a party at a friend’s house. I stayed until three in the morning. I figured Jeff and his girlfriend, Janet, would be there, and I was curious to test myself, whether I could be with them now without envy, without bitterness. I think it would have been OK. But Jeff’s group had a paying gig in Philadelphia that night, so I didn’t see them. Probably I’ll never see them again. Before long I found myself on the couch with a girl named Sandra Gilbert, from my English class. She’s tall and good-looking, with long, smooth coppery hair, and she always made a big point that she was Sandra and nobody was supposed ever to call her Sandy.

  (Which reminds me: I’m not Danny anymore. My name now is Dan. Could you remember that when you answer this letter? Thanks.)

  Sandra and I sat on the couch, while Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band played on the stereo. There wasn’t any alcohol at the party, but I felt drunk. I told Sandra that even though I don’t believe in God, I wish there could somehow be a Day of Judgment, so I’ll know there’s justice in the universe and whatev
er I get will be what I deserve.

  I said to her: “Even if I was condemned, I would want to be judged.” Which is better than the alternative, being condemned without judgment, but I didn’t tell her that because I didn’t think she’d understand. I let my hand rest on her arm, and she didn’t move hers. After a while I kissed her, as a lot of the kids were doing around us. At first she kissed back. Then she pulled away.

  She said, “I have a boyfriend.”

  He’s a sophomore at Rutgers. She met him while waitressing the summer I was in Israel, and now he’s gotten her involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. We got to talking about Vietnam, which was easier than talking about her boyfriend. We agreed the war there is wrong, all wars are wrong, they never accomplish anything. Even a war like yours, which I know you had to fight because otherwise the Arabs would have killed you all. Even if the war can be won and over with in six days, like yours was.

  Yet it must have been so wonderful when the two cities became one, and Jews and Arabs hugged and danced in the streets. Tell me: Were you there that day? Was Rochelle?

  I must have looked unhappy. Sandra must have seen how bad I looked. I’d just tried to kiss my first girl and got told she was going with someone else! After a while she took my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll have a girlfriend in college. The girls there will appreciate you.”

  I sure hope so.

  Soon August will be over. Three and a half more weeks, my father will drive me up to college, and I won’t live at home anymore. I’ve got my license finally, so I may share some of the driving if he doesn’t make me too nervous.