Journal of a UFO Investigator (9 page)

My small mouth fell open. It was the same picture, though in a different year's calendar, that I was to see years later in the Rare Book Room. Immense swirling stairway, rainbow arching over its top; winged angels going up and down the golden steps. And
I
was there—five years old, dreaming with Jacob. Longing to climb that ladder into the sky.

My mother gazed from her pillows, at me, at the calendar. She burst into sobs.

“I'll never be able to walk up all those steps,” she said.

“Danny?”

All the while Rochelle had been talking. About the golden Dome of the Rock, now in the place of the Temple, and its red and green carpets and the huge rough rock at its center. Within the rock a cave; beneath it yet another cave, which no one's ever seen. Well of Souls, that hidden hollow is called, because the spirits of the dead come there to pray. . . . With half an ear I'd caught what she said, and a great yearning came over me as when I was five, staring with my mother into Jacob's dream.

“I'd love to see it,” I said. “I'd love to visit Israel sometime.”

“Silly, it's not
in
Israel. You can't even get there from Israel. It's in the Jordanian part of Jerusalem. You know—there's a border dividing Jerusalem in half, between Israel and Jordan. It's been that way fifteen years, since Israel was created. If you've been in Israel, you've got to pretend you haven't before the Jordanians will let you in. And if you're Jewish, it doesn't matter where you come from. They won't let you cross the border.”

“Well,
that's
not very fair!”

“Well, that's the way it is. We had to act like we were Episcopalians when we lived there. Just like Mama, she really
is
an Episcopalian. We went to church every Sunday at St. George's—Oh, there's Tom.”

Footsteps. Creaking wood. A short, plump boy with dark blond hair, dressed like Julian and me in jacket and tie, came down the stairway. “Everything all right up there?” Rochelle asked him.

“Fine. Don't know why the buzzer went off. I took a few minutes to adjust the force field. I think I was able to get the lines smoother, at least if you judge from the filings.”

She seemed to have forgotten I was there. Then she remembered. “Danny,” she said, “this is Tom Dimitrios. Tom—Danny Shapiro.”

We shook hands. His hand felt soft and slightly sweaty. I'd noticed, with some satisfaction, that his voice was nowhere near as deep as mine. “I know you,” I said. “I can't remember how or when, but I've met you somewhere.”

“Never seen you before in my life.”

He seemed very certain, and I decided to take his word for it. Julian meanwhile had materialized in the hallway beside us. “Tom is our expert technician,” he said to me. “Tom, do you have any notion what the viewing conditions are going to be like tonight?”

“They had the weather report on Wibbage,” Tom said. “They said there's a front coming through later this evening. Should get rid of all this haze, I think.”

Wibbage. WIBG, the Philadelphia rock station. No wonder the music had been so hideous. And that was what the Super-Scientists listened to? The same rock and roll as the dumbest, gum-chewing, greasy-hair-combing kids—the Braxton types—in my school? A fantasy died, painfully, inside me. These were just teenagers, after all, and I'd wanted them to be something more. So we could be friends.

“Well, then,” said Julian, “let's have our dinner first. Afterward we'll go up to the observatory and see what can be seen. Danny, let's make the salad. We'll let the young lovers finish their chess game.”

I FOLLOWED HIM INTO THE KITCHEN. IT WAS BRIGHTLY LIT
and filled with a wonderful smell of roast beef. Julian took off his jacket and tied on an apron. He tossed a second apron over to me.
What am I supposed to do with this?
I thought as I caught it, then realized:
Dummy, put it on.

“The potatoes are fine,” Julian pronounced, peering into a pot on the stove. “And the beans are coming along. So I
think
, Mr. Shapiro, we can dig out the greenery and get to work.”

There was a cutting board beside the sink, another on the counter opposite. Julian waved me to the counter and handed me a colander filled with mushrooms. I began, awkwardly, to slice them. He rinsed a bunch of scallions, laid them on his cutting board, and decapitated them all with one grand flourish.

“Well now,” he said, “what do you think of Rochelle?”

“She's—” I groped for the right word, to convey how she'd affected me. “
Gor-
geous!” I exclaimed; and my voice, which I'd thought safely matured, jumped a few octaves on the first syllable.

Julian laughed. Waggle-waggle went the eyebrows. “Ah, you dog, you!
Two
of them! First your secret admirer and now Rochelle. Who will be next, I wonder?”

“My secret admirer?”

“That pretty little blonde with the curly hair who followed us to the car. Don't tell me you didn't see—Careful, Danny! We don't want you slicing off your finger in our kitchen.”

I looked at my left index finger. At first I thought I hadn't broken the skin. But then the blood began to well up, firm and globular at first, then breaking and running all over my fingertip. I went to the sink to rinse it. Julian gave me a dish towel to press against the cut. “I can't believe you didn't notice her,” he said.

“How do you know she wasn't
your
secret admirer?” I said.

“She only had eyes for YOU-U-U,” Julian sang, very much off-key. “A pity. I rather admired her myself.”

“Anyway, didn't you say Rochelle was Tom's girlfriend?”

“Really? Did I say that?” He looked down at the floor.
“Out of here, Mehitabel!”
he cried. A coal-black cat with blazing eyes, who'd been sneaking around our feet, looking for a convenient spot to jump up onto a counter, retreated a few steps. Then she lay down on the floor and emitted a faint whine. “That's Mehitabel,” Julian told me. “The cat.”

“Mehitabel the cat?”

“Mehitabel. The cat.”

“Where does that name come from?” I asked. There was something familiar about Mehitabel the cat. But I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

“Somewhere in the Bible, I think.” He went back to his scallions. The cat began to rear up—“
Down, Mehitabel!
”—and she lowered herself, hissing ominously, pressing first her head and then her belly and hindquarters against the floor. From that position she glared first at Julian, then at me. “I forget,” he said, “have you read the Bible? Who was Mehitabel in the Bible?”

“I used to read the Bible when I was little. Then I stopped. Now I've started again. And I haven't come across any Mehitabel. I think it's from somewhere else, some other book—”

“Maybe. I wouldn't know. Why did you start reading the Bible? You're not getting religion, are you?”

“No. It's not about religion. It's more like history, like where I come from.”

And why that pretty little blonde had to remain my secret admiree. Why there wasn't any way Rosa and I could go on dates even if she wanted to, sneaked kisses the way the kids around us did. The Bible and its history had made me different. The others were the goyim, the shiksas. Reading the Bible, maybe I'd grasp how this came to be.

“And Ezekiel's wheels,” said Julian, convincing me he hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about. “ ‘Ezekiel saw the wheel,' ” he sang. “ ‘Way up in the middle of the air.' UFO sighting, if I've ever heard one.... Uh-oh. Here she comes again.”

The cat was in motion. She trotted up to Julian, then stopped and pressed herself against his leg. He inserted the tip of his shoe under her belly, lifted her slightly, and sent her flying four or five feet. She let out a terrific yowl and ran from the kitchen. “If she tries that with you,” he said, “that's what you do.”

“I just hope she doesn't claw my pants leg off.”

“She probably would, come to think of it. Mehitabel's been with us a year and a half. Showed up on our doorstep one rainy night, hungry, bedraggled, pregnant. We fed her, cleaned her, found homes for her kittens. Now she's sleek, well fed, more little ones on the way. Fifth time now. Lord only knows where she finds the toms. Or what we're going to do with the current batch of kittens.”

“Why don't you have her—what's the word?”

“Spayed?” he said. “Neutered?”

“Yes, that's it. Neutered.”

“What? And deprive poor Mehitabel of one of the great pleasures of a cat's brief life? Egad, sir, what a heartless brute you are. No, no, there's already two tomatoes in the salad. You don't need to cut up a third. And with this, I
think
we are just about ready to eat.”

I CARRIED THE SALAD BOWL TO THE TABLE IN THE DINING
room. Julian followed with the potatoes, the green beans, a basket of rolls, and finally the roast. Rochelle and Tom came in a few minutes later. They didn't say whether they'd finished their game or, if so, who had won.

Julian carved. Rochelle uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured it into four large wineglasses. She smiled at me charmingly. “One of the benefits of having friends old enough to buy liquor,” she said.

I wondered who those “friends” might be. Mostly male, for sure. Older, with experience I could only read about, in books I mustn't get caught looking at. To distract myself, I sipped the wine, which surprised me with its dryness. I'd expected it to be sweet, like the wine my grandmother served for the Passover Seder. Then I sipped some more.

“Take it
easy
,” Rochelle said. “We can't let you pass out on us during dinner. You'll need a clear head when we go up to the tower for observing.”

“What am I going to observe?” I asked.

“You won't know till you've observed it,” she said mischievously. She and Julian laughed.

“We've been studying the moon,” Tom said.

Follow the moon.
Had these people too gotten a telephone call? I looked closely at Tom's pudgy, unsmiling face. He was right: I'd never seen him before. Yet he was also familiar somehow, and I didn't know how.

“There's things on the moon,” he said, “that shouldn't be. Not according to the textbooks. Lights, shadows. Craters that are there when they shouldn't be and aren't there when the maps tell you to expect them. We've all seen them for months now.”

“But . . . ?”

“We don't all see the same things.”

Which, I supposed, was where I came in. “Have you written to M. K. Jessup about this?” I asked. “I mean,” I said—because Tom was staring at me as if I were about the dumbest idiot in the state of Pennsylvania—“you really ought to try to get in touch with Jessup. I know he's interested in UFOs and the moon. He spent about half
The Case for the UFO
talking about that.”

Tom let out a snort, cut off a large bite of meat, and stuffed it into his mouth.

“His other books too—” I began.

“Oh, Danny,” said Rochelle. “If you know how to get in touch with Morris Jessup, you be sure and tell us. I don't think the mail goes where he is. And they haven't figured out how to connect telephones there.”

I felt my skin crawl. I knew exactly what she meant. Since age five I'd lived with hints at death, used when the word itself was too near and terrible to be spoken. “Jessup's dead?”

“Four years ago,” she said. “This very month. Mama still cries when she thinks about it.”

“Killed himself,” said Tom.

“Maybe,” Julian said. “Or maybe not.”

“He killed himself,” Tom said. “His wife had left him, he couldn't get his books published, he was itching to do that radio séance. Him sitting in the afterlife, and the whole damn audience of WOR radio trying to make contact with him. Every insomniac in New York City closing his eyes and saying, ‘Jessup, Jessup, Jessup.' Almost worth killing yourself for.”

“You didn't see the terror on his face,” Rochelle told him.

I stopped eating, put down my fork. “And you did?”

She nodded. “We lived in Coral Gables then. In Florida, right outside Miami. We were back from the Middle East for the first time, beginning of'58. Daddy knew Morris through his navy connections.”

“Navy?” I said. “What did Jessup have to do with the navy?”

“The invisibility experiment,” said Rochelle, as if I'd know exactly what she meant. “And the marked-up copy of
The Case for the UFO
that the Gypsies sent to the Office of Naval Research.”

“That's the book Rochelle found on the car seat,” Julian said. “Next to Jessup's body.”

Car seat? Gypsies? Invisibility experiment? All this was new to me; none of it hung together. I must have looked as bewildered as I felt. “Hello?” Tom said to me. “The year 1943? Philadelphia Navy Yard? Ring any bells?”

“Wasn't it something—” I groped in my memory for something I'd read once or maybe just heard about. “Wasn't there a rumor about a ship . . . made to disappear—”

“A destroyer,” said Tom. “Disappeared from the navy yard here. Then it turns up again, maybe two minutes later, offshore at Norfolk, Virginia. See what I'm saying?”

“Not exactly—”

“You can't
get
from Philly to Norfolk in two minutes!” Tom said loudly. He looked exasperated at my slowness; patience, I gathered, was not his strong point. “Any more than you can get to the earth from—I don't know, from Zeta Reticuli or wherever—fast enough that the trip'll be worth making.
Now
you understand?”