Journal of a UFO Investigator (33 page)

“Yes. Why did you do it?”

He stood up. He brought fresh wood for the fire, which had been about to die out. Then he settled himself, slowly. I was patient. I waited.

“ THEY CAME AFTER ME THAT NIGHT,” HE SAID. “DID YOU
know that?”

“ ‘They'? Who exactly are ‘they' now?”

“Yes. Who exactly are they? That's what we've wanted to find out all along. They came to our hotel.”

And I'd given them the address. I blurted it out, in nervousness and confusion, and they wrote it down. “Twenty-two-oh-eight Orlando Avenue,” I said. “Miami.”

“So you remember that place?”

I nodded. “What a dump.”

“Exactly. Rickety old hotel, all made of wood. One spark, it'd go up in flames. Remember that?”

I looked into our campfire. “I remember. So?”

“It did. Three-thirty that morning.”

He picked up a scrap of wood from beside his booted foot and tossed it into the fire. We watched together as it flared, blackened, crumbled.

“Of course,” he said, “I wasn't there at the time.”

“Three-thirty A.M.? You weren't in the hotel? Then where?”

“Miami Beach. There was a Cuban coffee shop open all night. I went there after I left you at the airport. I sat and drank coffee and read Charles Fort and listened to the Latin music on the radio. All night, until the six o'clock news came on, and they reported the hotel fire. That was the first I heard—”

“
So you left me alone in the goddamn airport, so you could go to some goddamn stupid Cuban coffee shop and read your goddamn stupid Charles Fort?
”

“That's right. And you don't understand why I did that?”

“No, I don't. I haven't got the slightest fucking idea.”

“Fucking idea,” he said. It was the saddest I'd ever heard his voice. Fire-light flickered on his long face.

“I broke every speed limit there was,” he said, “as soon as I heard the news. I had to get back to the hotel, find out what had become of you and Rochelle.”

“Me and
Rochelle
?”

“That's right. You and Rochelle. What's the matter, Danny? Haven't you understood yet?”

 

Of course—me and Rochelle. Two's company, three's a crowd. The tactful thing for number three to do is vanish. Give the young lovers their privacy, a room to themselves.

How was he to know Rochelle wouldn't be on that plane?

“They don't control destiny, those three men,” he said. “In my bad moments sometimes I've thought they do. I would've committed suicide then, I suppose. Except I was afraid they'd be on the other side, waiting to have me.”

“We'd better pray they aren't,” I said.

“
You
pray. You're the Bible scholar. Me, I'm interested in this world, this life. And here they don't rule. Not entirely at least.”

Proof: Julian wasn't at the hotel when the three men showed up in the middle of the night, tied the night manager to a chair, found our room, doused it with kerosene, and set it on fire. Neither was I. Nor Rochelle.

He got there in the morning, just before seven. He saw what was left of the building. He spent nearly an hour. Then he drove straight to Philadelphia, not stopping to rest. He emptied his savings account, headed for the airport, bought a one-way ticket to Israel.

“And that's how Julian Margulies became Sergeant Yehoshua Margaliot?” I said.

He nodded. “The switch went on in my brain after what I saw that morning. The little voice told me I'd had enough Diaspora for one lifetime.”

“Enough high school too?”

“Diaspora, high school. Same shit.”

 

He posed as a reporter. The policeman, keeping people from the building, looked at him real close when he said he wanted to see the remains of our room. “You're a Jew,” the cop said. “Right?”

“Yeah, that's right. I'm a Jew.”

“Then maybe you don't want to go in there.”

He went in anyway. Everything was black: ceiling, walls, floor. The wires in the light fixture in the ceiling had burned or melted, and it had come crashing down to the middle of the floor.

The two beds were charred and shapeless, stank from the kerosene—

—and I said, “Go on, don't stop,” though of course I wished he would stop and say, “That's all, Danny. That's all the story there is”—

—but he could still see, they'd bunched up the sheets and blankets into two humanlike shapes, tied together with wire, one in each bed. Me and Julian. Or so they were meant to be—

“My God,” I said.

Then I said: “There's more, isn't there?”

“There's more.”

They'd taken two Stars of David. Each a foot and a half across. The stars were made of some very solid metal that didn't melt. Julian didn't know what the metal was, whether it was of this earth. It had turned all black, and he was afraid to touch it.

They fastened one star to each of the two dummies, where our chests would have been. They poured on the kerosene.

“The stars got red hot in the fire,” Julian said. “They burned their way through the dummies into the mattresses. Among all the charring, I could still see their mark, in each mattress. Two six-pointed Stars of David, side by side.”

I was sick with dread. I wanted to vomit. I felt as I had that morning when we were inside the disk with the lieutenant and I'd seen on the wall a smear of gray ash that I knew hadn't been tracked in by any lizard.

There was more.

“They'd brought a can of spray paint with them,” Julian said. “They left a message on the tile wall of the bathroom. They must have figured that was where it was most likely to stay legible, even after the fire. Can you guess what it was?”

The voice came through my mouth, but it wasn't my voice. I think it was Pockface's—looking upon me and Julian as I'd looked upon the lake creatures in caftans at the foot of the steps, loathing them with all my soul.

“Dirty Jew, stinking Jew, bloodsucking motherfucking kike”—and I felt my jaws as his jaws, my tongue as his tongue, as the string of obscenities rolled through my lips. “Hitler never should have let you live, should have killed you all—”

Julian shook his head.

“It wasn't that,” he said. “Not like that at all.”

What the three men had sprayed on the bathroom wall, in huge block capitals, was this:

TEN DAYS, IT TURNED OUT, WEREN'T QUITE ENOUGH FOR THE
baby's recuperation.

It was nearly two weeks—just past midnight, the last day of August—before the phone rang in my rented room in Beersheva. Julian, who'd also received a phone call, came to pick me up.

And so we ate breakfast with the soldiers by the first light of dawn, at the bottom of the crater, near the foot of the tower. There was bread, and leben out of plastic containers, and hard-boiled eggs, and tomatoes and cucumbers, which we sliced with our knives on our metal plates. The sounds of Hebrew conversation washed comfortingly over me as I ate. As the sun began to press itself over the horizon, the baby arrived.

At first we didn't notice the jeep winding its way down to the crater floor. I became aware of a hum of astonished voices, moving toward me down the long tables. There was applause also, and cries of “You're the father?”—to which I nodded.

I don't know who carried her to me and eased her into my arms. But it was Shimon who brought the bottle.

“Here,” he said to me. “Take this.”

It was the first time I'd given her the bottle. I stood awkwardly, feeding her, while her blanketed head rested against my shoulder. The men sat around us and watched. Some of them stood, leaning against the tables. They talked and pointed. Often they laughed. Maybe it was my clumsiness that amused them. But I didn't hear any malice in the laughter, only warmth and kindness and friendship.

The dawn had been chilly. Now the rising sun began to warm us. The tower's shadow stretched across the crater; the shadow of the disk at its top lay on the crater's rim. My little girl breathed easily and softly as she sucked on the rubber nipple. She smiled, not at me particularly but at the world at large. She was bigger since the last time I'd carried her, and heavier.

It's true,
I thought.
They do grow faster than we do.

“Excuse me, mister,” one of the soldiers said timidly in English. He was a small dark-skinned man, with a rumpled uniform and a day's growth on his cheeks. “Excuse me that I ask. But the mother of that one—from where is she?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You're not mad at me that I asked?”

“No,” I said. “I'm not mad. But I just don't know.”

“
Eyzo chamoodeleh
,” he said finally, stroking her enormous forehead with the tips of his fingers. “What a cute little girl.”

 

We went up in a helicopter. They let down a rope ladder, its end trembling in the air just outside the disk's entrance. Julian went down first, carrying the baby. I followed, taking care not to look toward the ground. “There, Danny! I've got you!”—and I felt his strong hand gripping my arm, pulling me after him into the disk.

“Julian,” I said once we were inside, “why don't you come with us?”

“Really, Mr. Shapiro! I'm in the army now. The Israel Defense Force doesn't look kindly on its soldiers trotting off on foreign jaunts, in the middle of their service.”

He patted me on the shoulder and laughed. “I'll be along soon enough. Don't you worry.”

The helicopter hovered outside. The dangling ladder jerked and quivered. Julian reached out, grabbed it, swung himself onto it.

“
Julian!
” I called after him.

“
What?
”

The helicopter was making such a racket I barely heard him. “Your old pal Rachel sends regards!” I yelled.

“My old pal
who
?”

“Tell you later,” I said.

 

I held my baby against my chest as I stood, moving back and forth, pulling switches, touching buttons. Her tiny fingers grasped at the collar of my shirt. She squealed with joy as the disk trembled, as my body and hers turned transparent and the disk became transparent around us. She laughed out loud and clapped, as if to say, “Daddy, show me more!”

We lifted from the top of the tower. For a full minute I let the disk hang motionless over the crater. The soldiers watched from below. They must have seen it from the outside as a silvery platter, brilliant in the morning sunlight. Then suddenly I made us flutter down, almost to the ground, in a wobbling motion like a falling leaf.

The soldiers scattered. When they saw it was all right—I was in control; we weren't going to crash—they turned and cheered. They clapped wildly. Some of them danced, strange dances I'd never seen before. Some put their fingers in their mouths to whistle. I shot the disk off at an angle, into the liquid blue of the morning sky, while a baby's laughter gurgled against my chest.

The sparse clouds fell away beneath us. The horizon began to curve. If we kept on like this, in another minute the blue around us would turn violet and then black. The world would turn into a blue and green globe, shining in the blackness, its surface flecked with ragged smears of white. No need to go so far. I arched the disk down toward the blueness of the Atlantic.

The sun glinted off a silvery cylindrical object, tiny in the distance, far below us.

A jetliner.

 

 

—he's on the plane, that boy, the boy from Abu Tor. Flying home to his sick mother, so when he gets there, he'll see her again and make everything right.

Through the window I can make out his face—