Journal of a UFO Investigator (20 page)

“Rosa,” I said.

I repeated, “Rosa,” although I believed her when she said she wasn't. She was taller than Rosa had been, and her silver-blond hair was longer. Her eyes never blinked. They were two broad slits, slanting upward from high cheekbones. They glowed yellow like candle flames. At their core was an oval of hot darkness.

“Because this is a place where names are forgotten. Especially my own.”

She nodded as if she had understood. I waited for her to call me by my name so I could be real. The disk's fluorescent glare was gone, as if somebody'd at last found the switch and turned it off. The only light was the moon's, shining on her gleaming skin.

“There was a girl I knew named Rosa,” I said. “A long time ago.”

She did look a bit like Rosa. Her lips parted as Rosa's had when she'd stood before me, waiting to know if I would dance.

“I loved you all along,” I said. “But Jeff told me first how he liked you, and he was my friend—I mean, I thought—”

How ridiculous this all was. But what do you expect of an eighth grader?

I said: “There was my mother too.”

I had to protect her. She was afraid of the shiksas, and of their brothers, who, when she was little, used to waylay the Jewish kids and call them names and sometimes beat them up. Almost three years have passed since I saw Rosa, and even though I said no to that dance, my mother is sick beyond healing. Last Sunday we brought a chair for her out to the backyard so she could sit, bundled up, for ten minutes in the cold April sunshine.

Of all that's happened, not one thing can be undone.

The silver woman reached out her hand. After a moment I took it. I didn't think to notice whether it had five fingers or six. Moonlight spilled like heavy liquid from her hand to mine.

I tried to ask her name. The words wouldn't come out; my throat was so tight. Probably she had no name. She led me to the instrument panel, and there we stood as her fingers danced among the buttons and keys. I recognized some of the patterns I'd learned from the Gypsies' book, which I'd begun to try out for myself but so timidly, so clumsily. She wasn't clumsy or timid. The disk trembled; it vibrated. I felt it rise like an elevator.

In a moment you'll disappear,
she said.
Don't be frightened. It's what has to be.

I looked down at my body. Through it I saw the stars. Then we weren't rising anymore but falling—toward the moon, which grew larger, visible now from all sides because the disk had turned transparent just as I had. She too. I felt the warmth from her body, but I couldn't see her at all. Just the stars around us, through us, and everywhere the speckled blackness tumbling about us like an acrobat. The moon getting bigger and bigger; we were plunging toward it, weightless. Her fingers tightened around my hand. With my lips I groped for hers. She pushed me away.

Not now. Wait for the seeding
.

“How long to wait?” I said.

Soon
.

“Are we going to the place of the seeding?”

Yes. But not together
.

I wanted to ask what she meant by that. Before I could speak, the moon exploded upon us, expanding, until its silvery glare was everywhere I looked. In those last few seconds I grew crushingly heavy. What would happen to me? Would my bones crumble under my weight? Would I lie, a helpless pool of breathing liquid inside my baglike skin? They didn't, and I didn't, and suddenly the pressure eased once more. I kept my eyes closed until I trusted myself to open them.

 

“Where are we?” I said.

My head was in her lap. I felt weirdly light, as if I were going to sail off into space at any minute. I couldn't see her, but I didn't know if that was because she was still transparent or if my head was at the wrong angle. I wondered if the seeding was already past, if I'd been part of it and yet somehow missed it.

“Are we on the moon?”

Colored shapes streamed through the black sky above us. A flotilla of glowing objects, like the one that stopped over my house and hurled itself down upon me. Like the gas station signs, the evening before my mother's heart attack, when my father drove us home from a picnic in the country and I lay with my feet in his lap and my head in hers, and I watched the blazing disk of Gulf and the red star of Texaco and the winged, bloodred horse of Mobilgas stream through the sky beyond the car window. I was safe then and happy. For the last time.

Far beneath me I heard a faint murmur, which I took to be the lapping of tiny waves.

“We're in one of the towers,” I said. “Aren't we?”

Just like in the crater that the Gypsies had drawn in their book. There must be many such towers on the hidden side of the moon—way stations for vast and thrilling journeys among the stars. The waves surely broke against its base.

“So there
is
water here,” I said.

And I
could
drink from the moon, as she'd bidden me do. From water that was sweet and pure and good. I felt relief beyond anything I'd known.

I listened to the rustling, the humming. I began to doze. I slipped away....

 

I start to be scared. I remember what my grandmother's told me, about the stroke that was the beginning of all this, a few years before the heart attack. I'd been very tiny; my mother had held me in her arms and sung me the alphabet song. Then all of a sudden her face had gone blank, and she couldn't remember what letter came after
G.

That's all it says. Handwritten, on a fancy-looking piece of notepaper. I don't know what it means. But I remember now who Mehitabel is. Mehitabel the cat. The alley cat. From that book
Archy and Mehitabel
he gave her while they were courting. “Cheerio my deario!” was Mehitabel's motto; she ran with her tomcats, one batch of kittens after another, none of which she ever wanted. She left them out in the rain to drown—

I don't know what this means. I don't know who lives in Long Island or why there's a
g
inserted into
Mehitabel
, or whether the
C
stands for
Cat
or something else. I'm scared, I'm terrified, I don't want this to be real. I want to turn around and get out of here, but I'm afraid I'll make noise, she'll wake up—

 

I tried to sit up. I couldn't.

“That's not water,” I said.

No answer.

“At first I thought it was water, washing against something, very softly. But it isn't. It's louder now. Much louder. It's a humming, like the hum of a machine. And now it sounds like chanting, the chanting of many voices—”

I spoke to myself, not the moon woman. I knew she wasn't there anymore.

“And it
is
chanting, and it's getting louder. I can make out the syllables—”

Kha. Kha. Kha
.

Again I tried to sit up, to see what was going on. Again I couldn't. I tried to move my limbs, any of them. I couldn't, not in the slightest, and I knew how dreadfully I'd been tricked.

THEY SWARMED AROUND ME, OVER ME. THEY COVERED ME LIKE
spiders.

The lake creatures. Inside the disk now. And I lay in the center, on the altar. The operating table. Of course that was what it was; I'd known all along. I stared, helpless, up toward the moon.

Cords crisscrossed my arms, body, legs. They cut into my naked flesh. I couldn't see, but I knew their ends were tied to the knobs along the table's sides. So that was what those knobs were used for. I'd known already. From the moment I first thought of it as the altar, I had known.

I pulled against the webbing. The cords yielded, very slightly. In that bit of give I felt a trace of hope.

They drew open my eyelids, placed clips so I couldn't close them, couldn't blink. They pressed their slit eyes against mine, and I felt my own eyes slitted top to bottom by the contact. I expected pain, but there wasn't any. Only the sense of membranes pulled open, tissues torn apart as though they were a fabric stretched against my skin, and deep in my stomach a faint nausea that might have been worse than pain.

Then they moved to my mouth.

My lips—forced apart. Fingers pressed against my tongue, down toward my throat. I tried to bite, but my jaws didn't work right, as though they'd been rusted. I let out a moan. It was drowned amid the creatures' chant, filling the disk like a mechanical hum.

This was what they'd been waiting for, why they hadn't come inside. I'd needed to become ready. I twisted myself against the cords; again I felt that minuscule yielding, no more. Tubes pushed up my nostrils . . .

Were they trying to kill me? I didn't think so. Probably didn't even want to hurt me. To them, my pain made no difference. They wanted to pry me open, to clean me out. Purify me of my filth and pus, my blood and excreta and tears. My human existence.

The six-fingered hands, claws projecting from the tips, moved downward from my throat. Across my breastbone. Down my stomach. I tried to press my legs together, as they dragged past my navel.

“
A-A-A-A-GHHHHH!
”

My cry was so loud, so jagged with fear I think every living thing in this burned-out, forsaken world must have heard it.

They flinched at the sound. Not much, but a little. Yet their cords held. And then I felt the probing, and then the cutting, and then the hollow needle sunk deep into my tenderest part. My body began to twitch beyond my control. With each spasm I cried out, “Let me die!” until that became a chant of my own, a counterpart to their
kha, kha, kha
. At each convulsion I grew emptier and weaker, the blackness in my eyes thicker and more like smoke.

At last darkness mastered me, and it was all I knew.

 

I expected them still in the disk when I opened my eyes. But there were only two. They stood on either side, helping me sit up. My hands were tied behind my back.

“That was the seeding,” I said. “Wasn't it?”

My feet dangled over the edge of the altar. A large, transparent flask-shaped vessel sat on the floor beneath my injured foot, which was red and horribly swollen. I watched in disbelief as a thick drop, milky white, oozed glistening from beneath my big toenail and fell away toward the flask. For a moment it hung, quivering, at the end of a translucent thread. Then it fell with a splash into the liquid.

“You didn't have to do that,” I said.

“If you needed this from me”—I gestured with my head toward the flask—“you could have gotten it . . . the normal way.”

Like the Brazilian farmer with his she-alien, taken into her glowing red disk. With her wide hips and large thighs, she'd twice drawn his seed. But then I would have had pleasure, and that wasn't the plan.

I smiled in hatred. I played with my fingers at the cords that held my wrists together, probing for any bit of looseness.