Journal of a UFO Investigator

THE FIRST THING I SAW AS WE WALKED INTO THE HALLWAY was the staircase. It impressed me; I don’t know quite why. There was something about the width of the brown wood stairs, or the heaviness of the banister, that gave the feeling of an immensity suggested rather than seen.

Hanging on the wall by the foot of the stairs, framed in wood so dark it was almost black, was the trisected angle, the SSS emblem from Julian’s card. It was painted starkly in black on what looked like parchment. Next to it, similarly framed but in brilliant color, was a manuscript page like the one I’d seen in the Rare Book Room, of the man flying the winged horse.

Equal impossibilities—magical flight and trisecting the angle? Was that what the artwork was supposed to communicate? Before I could ask, Julian led me down the hall and through the doorway of a large, comfortably furnished living room. There was an ornate fireplace, without any fire, in the wall opposite us. Close to the fireplace, lit by the warm yellow light of a standing lamp, a chessboard lay upon a small square table.

She wore a long black evening gown of some velvety material. The chess game, to judge from the positions of the pieces, was in its middle stage. There were four chairs at the table, hers included, but no sign of whoever it was she was playing against. Her tawny blond hair fell almost to her bare shoulders. I saw at once she was attractive, but I didn’t realize how attractive until she looked up from her game, smiled, and rose to join us. She was just about my height or maybe a shade taller. Julian towered over both of us.

“Rochelle Perlmann,” the girl said. She held out her hand, and I shook it. Her grip was firm and strong. I gazed into her face, partly to keep from staring at her bosom.

She turned to me, smiling. “We’ve been having some trouble with the vacuum tubes,” she said. “Last Wednesday one of them just went and shattered . There wasn’t any danger from the force field radiation, not at the levels we’ve been using so far. But the glass was everywhere. We were up till three in the morning cleaning it up, can you imagine?”

“Eighth grade? Really? I would have thought you were at least in ninth, to look at you. I’m in the eleventh grade at Dag Hammarskjold High, in Bala Cynwyd. Don’t look so scared,” she said, laughing. “I’m not that much older than you. I skipped a grade at the beginning of junior high.”

“Yes, and aren’t we glad of that?” said Rochelle. “If I’d skipped two grades, I’d be off to college next fall.”

“I imagine Julian’s already told you,” Rochelle said. “He’s in tenth grade in the Philadelphia schools. So is Tom. You’ll meet Tom in a minute.”

Julian said, “Danny saw that Miraj-Nameh picture in the Rare Book Room and was quite taken with it. I told him you were the expert.”

“Really, Julian. I can’t even read the text. It’s all Persian, except for a few quotations from the Quran in Arabic. Danny, I hope you didn’t come all the way out here for that. I’m bound to disappoint you.”

“Oh, yes, Joseph and Zuleikha.” A frown passed across her face. “The virgin boy; the seductress. The older woman. Oh, yes.”

“Jool-yan!” She glared at him. He put his finger to his lips, made a zipping gesture. The smirk remained. “Come, Danny,” she said, turning to me. “Let’s see what we can make of the miraj.”

She took my hand and led me back into the hall, to the picture of the winged horse hanging at the foot of the stairs. For a moment she examined it. Then she pointed to a few squiggly words, indistinguishable to me from all the rest of the squiggles. She read them aloud, with some relish I thought, moving her finger from word to word.

She looked at me, and we both grinned, as if we’d shared a secret, a hidden link between enemies or at least aliens. My heart began to beat faster. She turned back to the text. “ ‘Praise be to the One,’ ” she translated, “ ‘who carried His slave by night from the Sacred Mosque’—that’s in Mecca—‘to the Most Distant Mosque’—that’s the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem—‘whose neighborhood We have blessed, in order that We might show him some of Our signs.’ That’s from the Quran,” she said. “The only place in the Quran that mentions Jerusalem.”

“No, no.” She laughed. “The miraj.” The word still sounded to me like mirage , although there was something she did with it at the back of her throat that made it a little bit different. “That’s the ‘night journey.’ When God carried Muhammad to Jerusalem in the middle of the night, on the back of a winged horse. Or maybe it was a winged donkey. You see it’s a sort of hybrid, a winged animal with a human face.”

She might have been giving a tour of their lab, explaining her latest experiment. Was that the sort of thing they did here—bred together horses and donkeys, eagles and people, until they got the kind of animal shown in the picture? It didn’t fit very well with vacuum tubes and force field radiation.

“He got off in Jerusalem,” she said, “and he stood on the rock. He saw a ladder. He climbed it into the heavens. . . .”

I looked up the staircase. Darkness. Suddenly from above, I heard a cry, almost a shriek—“I gotta have yuh now or my heart will break!”—and a burst of ugly music. A chorus, something about not being too young to get married. Beyond the top of the stairs, a door closed. And again silence.

“Tom,” she said, nodding to me. Then, as if there’d been no interruption: “He left his footprint on the rock. They say you can still see it there. I never could, though. That’s why the Muslims built their dome around that rock, where the Jewish Temple used to be.”

The memories flooded back. Of the sunlit bedroom, second floor of my grandmother’s house, where my mother lay recovering from her heart attack. She’d propped herself up with pillows; I sat on the bed beside her. I held, so she could look at it with me, the Jewish calendar I’d brought up from the kitchen.

That was August’s picture—a somber painting, done in gray, of walls and arches and pillars sliding into rubble. Even at age five I thought it unlucky, not to be dwelt upon. I hurried on to the next month, the next picture. JACOB’S DREAM.

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.

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.

“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 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.”

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.”