Journal of a UFO Investigator

SHE LIES ON THE FLOOR , BESIDE HER BED . MY FATHER’S IN pajamas, kneeling. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get here. That I hadn’t been too wrapped up in the journal world to grasp she was crying for help.

She’s terrified. I feel her terror of her own crumbling body. She’s still in her blouse and skirt; she must have been up late, about to undress for bed. Her large eyes stare blindly, focused on nothing. Where’re her eyeglasses?

She cried in this room, this afternoon, reading the “Me(g)hitabel” letter from Long Island. She cried again in the kitchen when I showed her my letter from the Bible contest; she told me afterward those were tears of joy. All through dinner she was quiet, moody. She didn’t say anything about the Long Island letter. She doesn’t know I know about it.

I stand in the bedroom doorway. Should I come in, try to help? Or will I be in the way? Neither of them notices me. The yellow light of the bedside lamp surrounds her fallen body like a spotlight.

He takes her by the shoulders, gently, and raises her onto the bed. That’s when he notices the covers aren’t turned down. “Just sit a minute,” he says. The small chair beside the bed has toppled onto the floor; he sets it upright. He helps her to the chair, pulls down the sheet and blankets, helps her back into bed.

“It fell. I leaned on it so I could get into bed, and it fell. I always rest on it when I go to bed and when I get up. It’s never fallen before!”

She sounds hysterical. Also furious. Why has her chair betrayed her? Will everything around her now play her false, abandon her? I feel the guilt stab at me that I want so badly to win this contest, to leave this summer.

Nobody answers. They don’t even look at me. Maybe I spoke so softly they didn’t hear. Now I see her glasses—on the floor, unbroken. They must have flown off her when she fell. I go over, pick them up.

She lies in bed, shivering, sobbing. She hasn’t tried to cover herself; must be too weak, too frightened. He sits down next to her. She reaches for his hand, grabs it. He pulls away. Then he takes her wrist, thin as a stick, and holds it. Taking her pulse?

Tears glitter in her hollow eyes. I’m still holding her glasses; I don’t know whether I should offer them to her, to him, to no one. He presses and pokes at different parts of her body, to see where she’s been bruised.

He pulls up her skirt. On the left thigh is a huge ugly bruise, already turning purple. He presses with his fingers, and she moans.

He turns to me. He gives me a strange look, not angry, almost tender. But not really loving. Just strange. He takes the glasses from my hand and puts them on her face. She laughs.

She’s still laughing, even while tears drip down her cheeks. In that book of theirs Archy was Mehitabel’s cockroach pal. Her scribe. Her confidant. Which didn’t keep her from trying to eat him every now and then.

I know my mother’s talking about the Long Island letter. From his face, I see my father doesn’t know. She must never have given it to him; he can’t figure out why she just called him Archy. I do understand. But she won’t look at me.

Yet I see her. Her puffed-up legs. Her withered, strengthless arms. Her swollen stomach—like the bellies of naked, emaciated children, in news photos of African famines. I think, She’s hanging by a thread, and suddenly I know what’s going to happen. I tell myself maybe it won’t. The horrible feeling—the despair and the grieving for her already, even though she’s still here, still alive—passes after a moment.

She doesn’t speak to me. When I reach the doorway, I look back. He’s sitting on the bed beside her, holding her hand, singing:

We were sailing along on Moonlight Bay,
We could hear the voices singing, they seemed to say:
“You have stolen my heart, now don’t go ’way”—
As we sang love’s old sweet song on Moonlight Bay!

That song. Whenever I hear it, I think of spiders and sticky webs I can never get off my skin. I go to my room, start to slam the door behind me. Then I catch myself; I close it gently. I sit at my desk and wait for my father.

Passage of Time in the Book of Job Essay—1966 National Bible Contest

Why is it history’s cruelest tyrants who hold absolute power? Why do the freedom fighters, the boldest and most outspoken thinkers, die abandoned in torture chambers? Why, even in free lands, do the good and virtuous die young and suffer horribly?

Those are the questions posed many centuries ago, by the Hebrew writer of genius who gave the world the Book of Job—

My father knocks, then walks in. He glances at the pages of typescript I’ve read over and over while waiting—carbon copy on onionskin paper. The original is in an office somewhere in New York City. “That the essay you sent in for the contest?”

My heart beats faster. I know exactly what he’s going to tell me, though maybe not right away. I have to drop out of the contest, my mother’s too sick. We can’t leave her alone, even for a day, to go into New York City. Certainly I can’t be away from her all this summer if I win, which now I’m sure I don’t have a chance to. I’ve heard about those finals: they ask you a million nit-picky questions about the biblical book you’ve chosen to write your essay about. Miss one question, you’re dead.

My instinct is to cover my essay, hide it from him, find a way to slip it out of sight when he’s not looking. No need. It doesn’t matter if he reads this; it isn’t the UFO journal. That’s back in my dresser drawer, under my shirts, its usual hiding place.

He says: “What was all that stuff you were hollering to yourself in here? ‘Who are you, what are you?’—something like that?”

He glares at me; in my mind I shrink to nothing. To keep myself from vanishing, I look at my essay, let my fingertips graze the edges of its pages. This isn’t like the UFO journal, doesn’t come from a special place of truth as the journal does. It’s in school assignment style, though in school they’ll never care about what the passage of time feels like when you’re in pain. But like the journal, it might pass for grown-up writing. I suppose that’s why I’m in the finals. I run my fingers over the thin, crinkly sheets, hoping that’ll give me strength to endure what’s coming.

My father looks up toward the bookshelves over my bed, where I keep my UFO books. He pulls one down, flips through it. M. K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO. “You still believe in this stuff?” he says.

“Jesus.” He shakes his head. I feel his exhaustion, how badly he must have needed that “Cheerio, my deario!” I want to ask who Me(g)hitabel C. is; I hold myself back. “How do you do it all?” he says.

“Well,” he says, and I know what he’s thinking. Of course I have time for this stuff. I don’t have a social life: no friends, no girlfriends.

How should I know? We haven’t been friends since our fight over Rosa, the summer after eighth grade. But that isn’t really what came between us. Jeff just . . . changed. Taught himself the guitar. Found friends who have good voices, not like mine, so he can sing with them. When they’re together, he acts like he doesn’t know me. And I feel all over again the desolation of my solitude.

Just once, a November afternoon two and a half years ago . . . he came up to me, touched my shoulder. He said, “Kennedy’s been shot.” As if I needed to know that, and he had to be the one to tell me. As if the gravity of death were the one thing we still could share.

When Jeff and I were friends, my father wrote him off as one more “zombie” like myself. Now we hardly speak, he’ll be the model of American boyhood. “Not anymore,” I say, and it still hurts.

I look away. I’ve had my learner’s permit for the past four months, since the day before the journal started bubbling up inside me. It sits in my wallet unused, next to my UFO Investigators membership card. I can’t ask my father to take me out for driving practice; I know the rage that’ll erupt over my every mistake. So what am I supposed to do with it?

“Sure don’t want to tell me anything.” He gives a short laugh. “It’s your mom you could always talk to. Isn’t it?”

Not anymore.... I wonder if I should protest, try to soothe his feelings. He closes The Case for the UFO and puts it back on the shelf. “What I don’t get,” he says, “is why both? Why this and the Bible? What have they got to do with each other?”

I could go off, if I wanted, on how there are UFOs in the Bible. Ezekiel’s vision of the wheels. What really were those angels Jacob saw going up and down the ladder? But this isn’t the point. “I—I—they both interest me, that’s all.”

His voice has changed. Not using questions to prove to me how my life is all wrong, but like he’s genuinely interested. Like he really wants to know.

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?

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.

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?”

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?

I’ve already told him; already he’s forgotten. I try not to sound exasperated. “The next Sunday. The fifteenth.”

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?

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 knew I must leave this place at once, before the creatures realized I’d killed one of them and came back for revenge.

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.

Everything around me hummed and buzzed. I turned transparent, then invisible. I could feel my fingers, not see them, as they pressed, twisted, danced nimbly over the controls. The disk lifted off the ground, tilted at an angle. Then it shot off into the black, moon-ridden sky.

I climbed high, very quickly. If I wanted, I could have a bird’s-eye view of the dark, stunted world I was leaving. But I didn’t have the stomach to look at it too closely. I had an impression of vast desolate expanses, chalk white, dotted with clumps of charred, blackened vegetation. Brownish specks that looked like animals dragged themselves across the deserts. On the horizon, moonlight glittered off the endless lake.

Quickly it vanished in the distance. It was a tiny world, really, for all the strength of its gravity. Soon it was only a splinter, drifting in the blackness of space.

The stars surrounded me on all sides, above and below. Above me Orion swaggered. Scorpio crawled beneath my feet. I set my course for the unfamiliar brilliance of Canopus, and the Southern Cross—

For a minute, maybe two, I hung motionless in space. Behind me loomed the moon. It was the same moon anyone can see, that I’ve seen all my life. There were no towers, no waves, no waters of any kind. No place where a boy and a moon woman might rest from their journeys and thirst. Probably none of it ever existed in the first place. There were only the craters, and the mountains, and the broad burning wastes that were once foolishly called seas. Mare Imbrium, Mare Nubium, Mare Tranquillitatis.

Somewhere in the blackness ahead of me, I knew, there was a slit wide enough for me to pass through. In the massed fabric of reality there’s always a slit. You must find it. Then gather the power to force your way through, and shoot yourself toward that slit as though out of a gun. On the other side you’ll be in sunlight once more. Where you were born to be.