Journal of a UFO Investigator (37 page)

Then when I saw this headline, at the end of June—
—as soon as I saw it, I cut the story out so I could send it to you if I knew your address, which of course I don't.

I wanted to ask: Were you there on that day, when the Arabs from East Jerusalem poured into Israel and hugged everybody they saw?

I know you're all right, that you weren't killed in the war. It's not so easy to kill you. Rochelle told me that, the night we said good-bye.

 

Yehoshua. I still call you Julian. I can't help it; I'll always think of you as Julian; the name Yehoshua doesn't mean anything to me. Just a guy in the Bible who was a great conqueror and killed a lot of people, and they named the Book of Joshua after him. It makes me sick, to read about those people being massacred. A lot in the Bible now makes me sick.

When I was so wrapped up in the Bible, it gave comfort to my mother. I think it reminded her of my grandfather, made her feel he wasn't entirely dead. But I'm living with my father now, and my father doesn't care. He doesn't even care anymore if I spend my time researching UFOs. All he cares about is Meg Colton.

That's right—you don't know about Mrs. Colton. I didn't know either, until a few months ago.

“I simply cannot
understand
,” she says to me over the phone yesterday, “why you wouldn't let me and your father send you back to Israel this summer.”

“It's too late,” I said.

And then, even though she's calling long distance from Long Island, she starts arguing with me. It may be too late
now
, she says. But it wasn't too late back when they first offered me the trip, the night of my high school graduation in June. I got dragged into the argument, even though she doesn't understand at all what I mean by “too late.” Namely, that being in Israel doesn't mean anything to me anymore.

Hard to explain what it was before my mother died. Maybe the promise of a country where the world might be made new and I'd have a place in it, and now I know that's never going to happen. Even though Jerusalem has been won and become one, just as I said in my journal, and the Arabs have come with laughter and hugs rather than knives and hatred. It's nice, but it's nothing to me. I'm not part of it. It's too late.

Yet I do wonder: Were you there when the walls came tumbling down? When people crowded back and forth through the Mandelbaum Gate without passports or papers or anything? Did you see them tear down the fence at Abu Tor?

And what about Rochelle?

Did you see her the day the two Jerusalems merged into one? Did you recognize each other, call out to each other in the street? Then afterward did you go to talk over coffee? Tell each other your stories, the way last summer each of you told them to me? Did you then—this hurts to ask, but I need to know—did you go to bed together?

If you did, don't worry, I'm not mad. But I have to know.

It should have been you and Rochelle, from the beginning. Not her and Tom. Not her and me, even. Her and you.

 

I graduated from high school in June, with honors but not highest honors. I was glad to graduate at all. In November I thought I was going to be expelled for walking out of school in the middle of the day. I wasn't even suspended. The principal called me into his office and gave me a long lecture on not letting myself and my family down; that was all.

The night after graduation, I went to a party at a friend's house. I stayed until three in the morning. I figured Jeff and his girlfriend, Janet, would be there, and I was curious to test myself, whether I could be with them now without envy, without bitterness. I think it would have been OK. But Jeff's group had a paying gig in Philadelphia that night, so I didn't see them. Probably I'll never see them again. Before long I found myself on the couch with a girl named Sandra Gilbert, from my English class. She's tall and good-looking, with long, smooth coppery hair, and she always made a big point that she was
Sandra
and nobody was supposed ever to call her Sandy.

(Which reminds me: I'm not Danny anymore. My name now is Dan. Could you remember that when you answer this letter? Thanks.)

Sandra and I sat on the couch, while Sergeant Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band played on the stereo. There wasn't any alcohol at the party, but I felt drunk. I told Sandra that even though I don't believe in God, I wish there could somehow be a Day of Judgment, so I'll know there's justice in the universe and whatever I get will be what I deserve.

I said to her: “Even if I was condemned, I would want to be judged.” Which is better than the alternative, being condemned without judgment, but I didn't tell her that because I didn't think she'd understand. I let my hand rest on her arm, and she didn't move hers. After a while I kissed her, as a lot of the kids were doing around us. At first she kissed back. Then she pulled away.

She said, “I have a boyfriend.”

He's a sophomore at Rutgers. She met him while waitressing the summer I was in Israel, and now he's gotten her involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement. We got to talking about Vietnam, which was easier than talking about her boyfriend. We agreed the war there is wrong, all wars are wrong, they never accomplish anything. Even a war like yours, which I know you had to fight because otherwise the Arabs would have killed you all. Even if the war can be won and over with in six days, like yours was.

Yet it must have been so wonderful when the two cities became one, and Jews and Arabs hugged and danced in the streets. Tell me: Were you there that day? Was Rochelle?

 

I must have looked unhappy. Sandra must have seen how bad I looked. I'd just tried to kiss my first girl and got told she was going with someone else! After a while she took my hand.

“Don't worry,” she said. “You'll have a girlfriend in college. The girls there will appreciate you.”

I sure hope so.

Soon August will be over. Three and a half more weeks, my father will drive me up to college, and I won't live at home anymore. I've got my license finally, so I may share some of the driving if he doesn't make me too nervous.

I'm going to Carthage University, in upstate New York. That's the same college my parents went to, where they met before the Second World War. Mrs. Colton went there too. Her name wasn't Colton in those days. I think she and my father were boyfriend and girlfriend before he met my mother. I think they must have kept something up even after he got married, even after my mother got sick. Maybe especially after she got sick.

Did I ever tell you about the letter that came for my father the spring before my mother died? The one signed “Me(g)hitabel C.” that she opened and that sent her into tears, her last spring on earth? Of course “Me(g)hitabel C.” was Meg Colton.

I suppose, out of loyalty to the dead, I ought to hate Mrs. Colton. But mostly she just bores and irritates me.

First thing, when Dad introduced us last March, she squeals at me: “Why, you're the spitting image of your mother!” I think she's imagined ever since that I
am
my mother, come from the dead to judge her for what she did, fool with my husband while I was dying. That's why they were so eager to send me back to Israel this summer, to get me out of their way, so I won't make them feel guilty for what they're doing.
Were
doing—

Of course.

That's why he let me go last summer.

So I wouldn't be around, so I wouldn't know about him and Mrs. Colton.

He could have stopped me. He knew she was going to die. I knew too, but I couldn't admit it, I wanted so bad to get out of that house. He could have sat me down, said,
Son, you won your Israel trip fair and square, but you can't go. Not this year. Next summer you will, yes, I promise you that, but now you can't, because she's very sick, and if you go, you'll never see her again, and I won't let you carry that guilt, that pain.
I would have been mad; I would have hollered; I would have argued. But I would have stayed if he'd said so. He didn't. Now I know why.

I'm a cynic these days, Julian.

You would have appreciated that when we first met. You were pretty cynical yourself, if my journal is any witness. But I don't think you are anymore. Now I think you'll be disappointed in me. I can't help it, though. This is how I am.

 

Amazing. This letter has gone on for pages, and I've hardly mentioned UFOs.

I haven't stopped believing. UFOs are real. I know that, as truly as I know you're real, Rochelle's real, the three men are real. It's just that I no longer believe—how can I put this?—that they're accessible. They're in the sky; I'm on earth. I used to think, if I researched them, investigated the sightings, learned the physics of how they fly, I might be transported with them into the skies. Last summer I
was
transported, sort of. I flew, I really did, to Israel and back. But then I crashed. I'm still digging myself out of that wreckage.

Maybe UFOs will work for you. They won't for me anymore. I have to find another way.

A few nights ago I had a strange dream. It's still with me; I can't get it out of my head. Maybe that's why I'm writing to you now, after putting it off for so long.

It was the night of August 17. That's one year to the day after my mother's death, though it was two weeks later I found out she'd died. The three men in black were in the dream, threatening me, warning me. Saying over and over, “Fog, thy name is UFO!”

Their faces were covered with black silk. No trace of any eyes or nose or mouth underneath. I realized, even in the dream, they must already be dead. It was one of the scariest dreams I've ever had, but I wasn't scared. Not then, not afterward. The first thought that came to me when I woke up was how appropriate it is, that
fog
and
UFO
share two out of three letters.

Well, Dr. Freud, what do you make of that?

Here's what I think: when we watch the sky, we're looking in the wrong direction. The real mystery is right here, among us. It's the mystery of boys and girls who become men and women, whether they want to or not; and sometimes they don't marry at all, at all—as in that silly old song Rosa and I sang to each other. But mostly they do marry, sometimes the right person but most often the wrong one.

Then they get sick. Then they die. And the rest of us go on living, because we have to.

 

What do you think, Julian? Shall I take my UFO books with me to Carthage? Just on the off chance I might change my mind, find I still have energy for UFO work, when I'm not studying or writing papers or—what the hell, why not?—trying to find a girl to go out with?

No. I'm not going to take them. But I'm not going to throw them out either, the way my father wants me to. They stay right here in my room, on the bookshelf above the bed where I've slept since I was five years old and we moved into this house. They're clumsy books, even silly most of them. But they're part of me. I won't deny them.

You're part of me too, Julian. That's why I'm writing to you now, before I leave for college and become a different person, someone I can't imagine.

I don't have your address, so I don't know how I'm going to send this letter. Maybe just: “Sgt. Yehoshua Margaliot, Israel Defense Force, Israel.” Sort of like “Santa Claus, North Pole” don't you think? Yet the letters always seem to get there.

I think this one will too.

Be well, Julian. Take care of yourself. Write soon.

When you see my old pal Rachel, tell her I said hello.

 

Your friend,

Dan

September 14, 1967

 

 

Dear Dan,

 

Or “Mr. Shapiro,” as I like to think of you. Don't worry—I won't try to call you Danny.

You needn't have worried, either, about your letter reaching me. Whatever you write, whatever you say, whatever you think will always find its way to me if you want it to. And you needn't concern yourself with whether I'm real, as your allusion to Santa Claus would perhaps suggest. I am entirely real. So is Rochelle. You've always known that.

In other words, yes, Virginia, there is a Yehoshua Margaliot.

Still a sergeant in the Israel Defense Force, unscathed by this awful war, which I'm delighted we won but bitterly sorry it happened at all. It shouldn't have happened. That night by the Makhtesh when you and I drank beer together and talked about plucking the cancerous thread from the fabric of time, I would have sworn nothing like this would ever happen again. But the Makhtesh is empty now. Not only is the disk gone—you know better than anybody, you were the one who flew it—but the tower it rested on has vanished. In a red mist, just as it came. The Makhtesh is nothing anymore but a crater in the desert.

And we've been through one more war.

Your friend Sandra Gilbert is right. They're all wrong, all terrible. They don't accomplish anything except that if you're lucky, you're still alive when they're over, which is a real, if transitory, achievement. I was at the Wall with the paratroopers the day we took the Old City, and I saw all the praying and the crying. I did some of it myself, though I've never been what you call a religious man. But of course, as you say, you won't find me in any of the photos. I'm not the sort of fellow who tends to appear on film.

And yes, Rochelle and I are together once more. (Though I think I will discreetly dodge your question about our sleeping arrangements.) We didn't meet on that splendid day you wrote about, of Jews and Arabs dancing together in the streets of Jerusalem. I wasn't even in Jerusalem that day. I'd been assigned to guard duty in Nablus, one of the Jordanian towns we've conquered and now are going to have to occupy, for longer than any of us cares to think. Nobody's dancing in the streets there.