Journal of a UFO Investigator (2 page)

His voice, irritable, calls from the den. “What, Dad?” I yell back.

“How much more you gonna be up?”

“Maybe another half hour.”

I hear him grumble to himself. I hear everything that goes on in this house—this little matchbox the three of us live in, all the rooms jammed together, no doors except for the bedrooms and the bath. We moved here ten years ago, after the heart attack, because the house is all on one floor. My mother can't climb stairs.

She nods at me, as if to say:
You hear that? A half hour. You promised.

 

Does this story—journal, whatever—come from some UFO world? An alternate reality, where I'm still Danny Shapiro, and Jeff Stollard and Rosa Pagliano are still people who've been in my life? Where nevertheless we say things, do things, experience things that have a weight beyond ordinary reality?

It's possible. I've read articles about automatic writing, ouija boards, communication through our souls from the beyond. Mostly I don't believe those articles. They're written by crackpots. I'm a scientific UFOlogist. If we're to solve the mystery of the disks, as we surely will, if only we keep working at it, ignore the idiots who ridicule us, it will be through scientific research and analysis. Nothing else.

The images rose within me this afternoon, as I rode home on the school bus. It seemed half a dream, yet I know I was awake. The other kids' songs, their teasing, their yelps of laughter at jokes I don't quite understand washed around me like water around my bubble of air. It was like remembering things I'd known, but for years had barely thought of.

My mother eases into bed. I hear her through the wall that separates her bedroom from mine.

My hand stops writing. All on its own; my brain just watches what's happening, perplexed, marveling. I lay my pen down. I know I can't force this. I pull my wallet from my pocket, and there's the card, hidden behind the driving learner's permit that arrived yesterday in the mail.

The first phone number was mine. The second—“ORegon 8-0496”—was Jeff Stollard's. Still is, though now they've made it all numbers. In eighth grade, and the summer before that, Jeff and I were best friends. That fall we wrote our science paper on UFOs together; we got all excited, agreed we'd keep on until we found the truth, write a book about it. What are UFOs? Where are they from? Do they come to help us or to conquer and destroy? I still search for answers. Jeff no longer cares.

Christmas vacation of eighth grade—just before New Year's 1963. I walked the mile and a half to Jeff's house. There'd been snow, but the weather had turned sunny, a bit warmer, the sidewalks awash with the melt. Jeff and I ran off the cards on his toy printing press, and in homeroom after vacation we announced our club. Rosa Pagliano came up right away and told me she wanted to join. Me. Not Jeff.

Wherever she is—does she still have the card I signed for her?

I imagine Jeff threw his away long ago.

But I have mine, softened and worn from three years in my wallet. On the back is the heart I drew, pierced with an arrow,
DS & RP
written inside.
This time
, I told myself,
I'll turn it over, look at the heart, bring back my old dreams
. I can't. It hurts too much.

DS
could stand for
Dumb Shit
as well as
Danny Shapiro
.

I wish I'd written my initials out in full, DAS.

The
A
is for Asher, my mother's grandfather, who died in the old country. That's why I read the Bible, so I can understand the old man I never met and know the reason his name is in mine. I don't believe in God. I pray when I'm desperate,
Please, dear Lord, let it not be too late for me
. Too late—to be normal. To be invited to parties, have friends and girlfriends; the feeling deep in my soul says I was half, now I'm whole. No more hunger and thirst . . .

That's my only prayer. Seldom do I resort to it. I know there's no one listening.

I investigate UFOs because unlike God, they are real and can be seen.

 

“Danny!”

My father sounds louder now, and angrier. How would it be to live in a house that's dark and quiet sometimes, where parents go out together and I can be alone? But my mother's too sick. We go out only as a family, to visit my grandmother for the Jewish holidays. Until the break-in we hardly even locked our door. My mother was—she
is
—always home.

“Yes, Dad?” I call out.

“Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep? It's past midnight, for God's sake!”

And only now have I picked up my pen. I should begin to be frightened. Not of his walloping me when he comes storming in; he's never done that. But of the tidal wave blindness of his rage, the bitter words that burn like lava, that will leave me scorched and desolate and sleepless afterward as I struggle to swallow what the three of us spend our lives pretending isn't so. Namely, that he hates me and everything I am.

I run my free hand over my face. No pimples, at least none ripe for lancing. So tonight the worst is unlikely. “Yes, Dad,” I holler. “In a minute.”

It'll be a lot more than a minute. I can't help myself. It's flowing again, pouring through my pen, and will take me, if only I can follow, toward the place of truth, the heart of all secrets—

 

. . . and very quiet, except for the phone on the kitchen wall, ringing loudly over and over. It had been ringing even as I opened the door. My watch read 11:37.

“Hello?”

“Danny! Are you all right?”

Jeff Stollard. I pressed the receiver against my ear, breathing hard. “Damn near crushed me,” I said, as soon as I could speak.

“What? What crushed you? What are you talking about?”

My parents must not have been home. Lucky for me. I could almost hear my father:
Don't your friends know better than to phone you in the middle of the night?
But he wasn't around, nor my mother. Jeff and I could talk freely, as long as we needed. Like the summer before, between seventh and eighth grade, when one or two evenings a week we sailed off on our bikes into the softening light, and when tired of riding, we walked the bicycles, no parents to eavesdrop, until we'd talked through everything we cared to understand. Religion, mostly; how his being Baptist made him different from me, me different from almost everyone in our school. What happens to us, if anything, after we're dead.

“So you got the signal?” I said.

“Told you it'd work.”

My keys were still in my hand, the Delta Device attached. The Delta rested in my palm, a shadow among shadows. I ran my thumb over it. Two small triangles of sheet metal, their edges hammered into curves and soldered together, the wiring pressed inside. It pained me to feel the lumpy, splattery soldering, to remember how the gun had jumped and trembled in my hand. Jeff had done his better, smoother. In metal shop he always did better than I did.

“But what was the emergency?” he said.

I tried to tell him. My teeth chattered; I had to stop and take a few breaths before I could go on. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me this thing actually landed?”

“No, it didn't land! My God, if it had landed—”

“I'm not your God, Danny.”

“For God's sake! I just meant—”

“I just meant, don't take the Lord's name in vain!”

“I'd have been squooshed like a bug!” I screamed, and felt my saliva spray over the receiver. I felt myself getting demerits, over the telephone wires, for being hysterical. “It was bearing down on top of me,” I said. “And—and—”

“And?”

“It spoke to me.”

“Really? What did it say?”

A serious question? Sarcastic? Jeff can be both, and you usually don't know, even from his expression, until afterward.

“ ‘Until the seeding,'”I said.

“The
seeding
?”

He spelled the word out, and I confirmed it.
The seeding.
Even as I wondered how I'd earlier lost the memory of what the disk said and why it just popped out now, talking with him.

“What's
that
supposed to mean?” he said.

I couldn't tell whether he was going to laugh or have me exorcised, try once more to convert me so I won't go to hell when I die. “Until the seeding,” I repeated, and felt the electric tingling shoot up through my legs, my thighs, the two currents meeting in my belly and running upward. My hand shook so I could barely hold the receiver.

“It was heading westward,” I said. “Toward Braxton.”

He didn't answer, and I knew what he was thinking. Rosa Pagliano lives in Braxton. Would the disk stop over her house, as it had over mine? Descend to her, speak to her? Take her inside? I thought of how she'd smiled at me in music class, while everybody was singing that song “And I'll not marry at all, at all, and I'll not marry at all ...” And then I really began to shake.

“Do you think—you know—I should phone Rosa? Let her know—to go outside—she might see it too—”

“You wouldn't dare,” Jeff said.

“Don't be mad—”

But he'd hung up. I stood, receiver in hand, and felt my heart going
thumpa-thumpa-thump
, the way it does in sentimental books. Only this was for real, very unpleasant, and I wanted it to stop, to be as I'd been before I saw the UFO, before I knew there were things in the sky besides moon and planets and stars, airplanes and birds, the ordinary stuff a little kid might know. Once or twice I heard my father yell, “Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep?” It had to have been my imagination. My father wasn't even home—I could not hear him mumbling in his sleep from the bed he'd set up for himself in the den, because he couldn't stand lying next to my mother anymore—and besides I hadn't turned on any light. I hung up the receiver. After a few minutes I lifted it again. With trembling fingers I dialed Rosa Pagliano's telephone number.

TWENTY-NINE DAYS LATER CAME THE BREAK-IN. IT WAS FRIDAY
night, January 18, 1963. My parents and I had gone to Trenton, to my grandmother's, to eat her dinner in honor of the Sabbath, which she had kept on observing in the religious way after my grandfather died, long after my father and even my mother had stopped doing that kind of thing. It's a twenty-minute drive from Kellerfield, Pennsylvania, where we live.

We got back after eleven. My father was the first one in the house.

“All right,” he said. “Which of you two left the door hanging wide open, so anybody in the goddamn world can just walk in and help themselves?”

It wasn't me. When we left home, I'd helped my mother out to the car; she was bundled up against the frigid night in two sweaters and her heaviest winter coat and a blanket draped around her. I made sure she didn't slip on the ice patches in the carport. My father locked up after us. Or, it seemed, didn't lock up.

I was about to point this out. But then my father switched on the kitchen light, and we had other things to think about besides whose fault it was.

My mother took one look, let out a weak scream, and shuffled off as fast as she could move. “I can't look!” I heard her say. The kitchen was ransacked. We didn't dare see what they'd done in the living room. We followed her to her bedroom. It was the same there as in the kitchen: all the drawers open, contents dumped on the floor. She collapsed onto her bed, sobbing, wailing.

“Don't they know I'm
sick
?” she blurted out between sobs.

Burglars should have known not to break into the home of a sick woman. My father stood looking at her, shaking his head, an expression of disgust on his smooth, handsome face, as if at a loss to imagine why having your house broken into should have that effect on anyone. Or maybe I was the one who felt disgusted. He hurried out to the kitchen to phone Sy Goldfarb, our family doctor, to find out what he should do in case this brought on another heart attack. Meanwhile I went to my own room to see what was gone from there. And, at first, was relieved.