CHAPTER 47

I KNOW I’M CRYING. I CAN’T STOP. MY TEARS SPILL ONTO the paper, onto Julian’s letter, onto the pen through which his words pour out. By the dresser my suitcase is packed, my journal inside, though I’m leaving all my UFO books here in the bedroom of my childhood.

“Danny!”

It’s my father. He knows I’m not Danny anymore. Sometimes he forgets. I don’t say anything. It’s hard, but I wait him out.

“Dan!”

“What, Dad?” I call back.

“Ready to go!”

So this is good-bye. I won’t live here anymore. All summer I’ve looked forward to this, getting out of his and Mrs. Colton’s hair, living in a dorm, going to bed whenever I please. Leaving this soiled, tattered cocoon behind me. But now—

“Five minutes, Dad! OK?”

“OK. Five minutes.”

I said five minutes; I meant five minutes. That’s all it’ll take.

It’s a bright, blowy day, warm for September. The windows in my bedroom have been open until now, when I shut them. I go to the bookcase over the bed to say good-bye.

One by one I touch them, the odd, disreputable books that shaped and consoled my teenage years, kept over my bed so I could reach for them when sleep wouldn’t come. Albert Bender, Flying Saucers and the Three Men. Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned. And of course M. K. Jessup, The Case for the UFO.

I pull The Case for the UFO down from the shelf. I flip through the pages. Plenty of annotations. All of them mine.

No Gypsies passed this book hand to hand, writing into it the secrets of UFOs and invisibility. Maybe that wonderful book, that special copy, really exists. Maybe someday I’ll find it. But this isn’t it. Just an ordinary book, by a UFO investigator with fifty-nine years of loneliness behind him, more than three times my seventeen. Who finally couldn’t face any more years. So he went to his car, ran a tube from the exhaust pipe into the window, turned the ignition ...

I shudder. My fingers curl, as if to grasp at a chain-link fence. I promise myself: never again.

It may be better at Carthage; it may be worse. I will never let myself come near that again.

 

I close my eyes. Once more I feel myself climbing the wall from the Well of Souls, toward the entrance of the tunnel that leads from death into life. I hold the book tight, so it won’t fall from my hand. Below me are jagged rocks; if I slip, all my bones will be shattered. Amid the rocks I can see the bursting bubbles that are the souls of the human generations—

One of them my mother’s.

I clutch hard at the book, so I won’t start up again with the crying. But it’s too late; they’re already flowing, those tears—

“Danny ! Dan!”

—and in the act of clutching I swing out from the rock wall and nearly lose my grip. I don’t think twice. I let go the book, grab on to the wall. The book falls with a splash into the waters below, scattering the crowd of departed souls—

It tumbles onto my bedspread.

There I leave it.

I hurry out to the car, on a windy autumn day, clouds blowing across the empty blue sky.