Journal of a UFO Investigator

Where else could we have gone? I don’t know the other solar systems, and in this one there isn’t any other planet where we might live. On Mercury you melt in the heat; on Venus you suffocate beneath the clouds. Mars is cold, and you can’t drink the water. The others are monstrous chunks of rock, where there’s no water at all, and your own weight crushes you the minute you land.

The moon? Once I’d been to the moon, in a time out of time. But you can’t live there except inside a tower, and there aren’t towers on the moon anymore. So we came back.

I held my baby tight as we flew and tried not to see her face. Her eyes had turned strange. The pupils had swollen into opaque blacknesses. Within the blackness of each eye was a slit, running from corner to corner. Beyond the slit: blackness beyond blackness.

I wrapped her in the blanket and held her with both my arms, close against my chest. Her mouth hung open, drooling, while she gasped for air. “Here,” I said to her as I held her small heart to mine, “take breath from my lungs. Breathe with my lungs, and you’ll be able to live.”

But I knew, even then, it was impossible.

We flew over ocean. Then over land. It was nighttime; many must have seen the disk passing overhead. Some teenage UFO investigator must have written in his journal that it was a luminous disk ... deep red, darker at the edges than near the center.... It moved westward at a leisurely pace.... And the story begins all over.

Westward. Not pausing, this time, to bring the disk down. I was exhausted, desperate to land. Yet—from Dimona to Alamogordo was the plan, and Alamogordo lay still to the west. Westward rides the sun.

Catch up with the sun, keep pace with it, and we’d have light. A single day, an hour, would go on forever.

One endless minute, in eternal sunshine.

The disk’s inner light began to dim. These mechanisms wear out, just as ours do. They fail by degrees and imperceptibly. When at last they’ve worn away, you’re surprised to find yourself in the dark.

Shadows appeared around the disk’s edges. At first they were mostly transparent, like the floaters that pass across your field of vision—unnoticed, unless you choose to notice them. At first I chose not to notice.

She saw them. I know she did. That must have been why she began to sing.

“Ay-bee-cee-dee-ee-eff-gee ...”

Her song rang pure and clear and sweet, not in my ears but in my mind. With my ears I heard her gasping as she sucked air through her mouth, trying to fill the emptiness in her lungs. But in my mind, sometimes even now I hear some echo of her song. I can then believe, if only for a second or two, that she’s still with me.

I held her in my arms, the way she once held me.

And the shadows thickened, and the sound of kha-kha-kha chanting around us grew louder, until at last I had to admit the truth. It was the lake creatures. They were inside the disk; they’d been there from the beginning. That smear of ash on the disk’s wall that I’d so wanted to believe was a lizard—it wasn’t. It was them.

Their handprint. Their mark, their warning. Their way of saying: We are inside.

We will always be inside.

“Don’t stop,” I said to her.

She stopped on the G. I’d hoped she wouldn’t. I’d hoped this time she would remember, go on and sing me the rest of the letters, and everything would turn out all right.

“Please don’t stop.”

I must have sounded panicked. She must have picked that up in my voice, and it frightened her. Except for her breathing, she was silent as a stone.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s not so hard.”

—but her eyes were turning blind, her pupils solid shells of blackness—

“I know the letters. I’ll teach them to you.”

I tried to sing: “Aitch-ai-jay-kay ...”

Silence.

“Come on!” I pleaded. “Sing along with me.

“Aitch-ai-jay-kay-ell-em-en—”

Desperate, I searched her eyes. All black, unrelieved black. Not even a split in them. Not even the dark crevasse.

The disk flew wild, rudderless, without a pilot.

She twisted in my arms. She mewed like a cat.

“No,” I said. “Not that cry again. Please.”

—careening through the night sky, a few thousand feet above the flinty desert—

The mewing. Louder. Ready to transform itself into a shriek. To spew out the pain and horror that lay hidden behind the black eyes.

“Shhh. Quiet. I can’t bear it. You understand? I won’t be able to bear it.”

—arching downward, downward—

Then came the cry. Just like in the car, with the soldiers, and Julian at the wheel. Such a cry I’d never heard before. I’d hoped never to hear it again.

It filled the disk, every cubic centimeter, every space curved and angular. With all the grief, rage, abysmal fear she’d carried inside that frail body all the days of her brief life. It howled through my soul and body, and I knew I’d go crazy if it didn’t stop. To save her, and me too, I had to make it stop.

That was why I pulled her to me, pressing her tiny face into the softness of my shirt. Why I felt her struggle like a fish against my chest and held her even tighter.

Why I stopped noticing if she was breathing.

It was night in the desert. I can’t remember if there was a moon.

I don’t remember the impact when we struck the ground. What I remember is a blinding white flash, engulfing us all, the radiance of a thousand suns. We all turned transparent, ghostly, almost nonexistent. Then the glow faded, and we faded with it.

Very far away a coyote wailed.

It was cold, but at first I didn’t feel it. My chest was crushed so tightly I couldn’t move. My right arm was pinned between my chest and the instrument panel. I tried to use my left hand to free myself. The first wave of pain washed up from below my waist, and I fainted.

The front of my shirt was wet. Something warm and sticky had dampened it, seeping slowly through the cloth, until my chest was soaked. It began to dry as the night passed. The cloth stuck to my chest.

Time and time again, as the hours passed, my left hand crawled toward the source of the wetness. It moved almost on its own, as I lay half conscious, sliding in and out of delirium. Then the agony from below blossomed in my brain as an endless series of fungoid smears: angry, glowing red mushrooms of pain, each one following upon the last. I jerked myself into consciousness and pulled my hand away. I then felt the pain with all my mind and knew the absolute and unbearable dominion that pain has over the mind when it’s fully conscious.

Sometime before dawn, my hand won out. It went where it was trying to go, where I was trying to keep it from going. I felt my fingers palpate the crushed and ruined smear of flesh and bone and blood and tiny, twisted organs—the it that had once been a she—

That oversize head of hers—trapped, caught between my body and the metal—

Crushed like an egg—

Her shattered skull, that delicate eggshell, smashed—

Her pain and my own, so mingled now I could not tell them apart, filled my empty lungs. I howled them out into the desert night, and at once I filled with them again. And screamed, and screamed some more.

The coyotes answered me with their yelping, until the desert echoed with our cries.

Julian?

We did it, her and me.

We flew the disk to New Mexico. We unraveled time. Unspun time. Rolled time up like a winter rug.

Only it didn’t work out quite the way we thought it would.

Did it?

Julian.

Do you even exist anymore?

The jeeps came first, with the dawn. Then the long line of trucks, olive green, with the words Roswell Army Air Field stenciled on their sides. They began, very carefully and methodically, to dismantle the wreckage of the disk and load it into the trucks. The tall, pockfaced lieutenant, who directed the operation, guffawed as he looked down on us.

The snaggletoothed sergeant looked closely into my face and snickered.

“Cripes,” he said to the third man. “What eyes!”

The third man, who stood just outside my field of vision, didn’t answer.

“What eyes!” Snaggletooth said again.

They loaded us into a truck, with the last of our shattered disk. The trucks’ engines started up, in the stillness of the desert morning. We began to move.