Journal of a UFO Investigator (22 page)

“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?

“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 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.

 

I
will
win that trip!

 

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 to 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.

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?

I was four when he died. He taught me to read the year before, from the comic pages of the newspaper, me sitting on his lap, on the porch of the big old house that was his and my grandmother's, where on Sabbath afternoons he sat and read from his old Hebrew books. The Bible; other books too. But the Bible was the one I always remembered.

“I'm not Asher,” I said.

I would have told him my name, but I didn't remember it. In the place I'd been, names are forgotten; that must be true here also. “You're my grandfather,” I said.

He heaved himself up from the water and sat on a stool-shaped rock beside it. The stream had carved that shape, hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. He was pale and naked, a huge plump baby, his skin shiny as a soap bubble.

I wanted to sit in his lap this once more, but I was afraid if I did, he would burst. He motioned me toward a rock beside his. I sat down; with my body I shielded
The Case for the UFO
from the water that splashed up from the pool. I glanced toward my legs, stained an unnatural brown. They contrasted oddly with my grandfather's paleness. The bright water would probably wash away the tint if I bathed in it. But I wouldn't try that. I wasn't ready to become a soul quite yet.

He said:
Why are you alone?

What else would I be?
I wanted to say.
I've always been alone.
Before my mother got sick, I might have had friends. But I didn't, and then she did.

“You need to be proud of me,” I said. “I won a contest. It was on the Bible, and I read the Bible until I learned it better than anybody. I wrote an essay on it, about how time can seem fast and slow at once. Then I went to New York and answered questions better than anyone else could. That's how I won.”

I didn't tell him about the UFOs. I didn't think he'd understand.

“I read it in English,” I said. “I don't know Hebrew, the way you did. But I'll learn this summer. I'll be in Israel until the end of August. That was the first prize.”

I'd always wanted him to teach me Hebrew. I wanted to know those strange-sounding words, that blocky script he pored over with such love. But we never got beyond the newspaper comics and sometimes a few lines from the Bible in English. Then he died.

“Beg pardon?”

I felt the rebuke in his words. I went on talking, a little bit desperately. I'd loved him more than I ever loved my father. There were times I wished my father had died and not him. He would never have tormented me over my pimples; he would have taken me out driving and taught me, patiently, just as he taught me to read.

“Don't you remember?” I said. “You always wanted to go to Israel. The night the UN voted there should be an Israel, you were so happy you cried. I wasn't born yet, but Grandma told me about it. And every year you saved money, and you would have gone, but that heart attack—”

“I'm only going for the summer, for God's sake! She'll be all right. She promised me—”

Yet what does it mean, an invalid's promise? “Don't you worry about me; I'll be fine!” Tears trickled from her eyes as she spoke, as though we were saying good-bye forever and not for eight weeks.

Louder now, in my mind and possibly also my ears. I knew exactly what I was expected to do. Break down weeping, beg forgiveness, promise I'd leave at once and go home to sit beside her. Rage swelled my throat, strong as when I sat atop the lake creature, smashing its face into the floor.

“Why isn't she with
you
?” I screamed.

My body twitched at each thud of my heart, as my voice echoed off the walls of the hollow and I realized what I'd just said. I wondered if the souls would turn in unison to condemn me as the most evil of sons. Wishing his mother dead.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean that.”

“It's only one summer,” I said. “I've never been away before.”

Silence. Then he sighed. He bent to the water and drank. At that moment he looked like one of the bubbles in the water. I knew he'd begun to forget me, and I became afraid. I'd waited twelve years to talk with him, and we would never speak again.

“I have a book,” I said.

He looked up, with what I imagined to be a trace of interest.