Journal of a UFO Investigator Read Online Free PDF Page A

looking straight at me.
    She laughed as she sang:
    O I’ll not marry a man who’s shy
For he’d run away if I winked an eye . . .
    At first I thought she was laughing at me, telling me the song was right, that boys who are shy like me aren’t worth marrying. Then I realized it was something very different.
    She’s gone. But still I see her laughing. I see her waiting, sweaty and bold, for me to decide whether I’ll dance with her. And I call myself fool, fool, fool , and I can’t go to sleep.
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    The break-in at our house was Friday, January 18, 1963. Four days afterward the phone rang in our kitchen.
    â€œJeff?” I said, picking up the receiver.
    â€œCount the days.”
    The words came out in a weird croak, as if whoever was calling had a high voice and he was trying to make it sound low, adult, mature. “Jeff,” I said, “knock it off, will you? This isn’t funny.”
    No answer. I realized this wasn’t Jeff, or anyone else pulling a prank, but something serious and very strange. Could this be the same voice that had said “Until the seeding”? But that had been less a spoken utterance than a resonance within my mind. These were words coming from a throat, from vocal cords I assumed were human.
    I waited, feeling something like bugs crawling over my skin. The caller, whoever or whatever he was, also waited. Finally I said: “I don’t understand. Count the days from what? To what?”
    Again silence. Had he hung up? I didn’t think so, though I couldn’t hear any sound from the receiver. “Count them forward?” I said. “Or backward?”
    â€œBackward. Follow the moon.”
    Then click! and I knew I’d heard all I was going to. I started to dial Jeff’s number, so I could tell him what just happened. Then I stopped. This was something private to me that I had to work out for myself. It was late afternoon; I was alone in the house. I walked over to the calendar on the kitchen wall and confirmed what I’d remembered. There were twenty-nine days between my UFO sighting and the break-in. A lunar month is twenty-nine and a half.
    Follow the moon .
    Â 
    Jeff and Rosa held hands as we walked to the library from the bus stop, past the Logan Square fountain. In his fine tenor he sang songs from Brigadoon . Jeff is crazy about musicals; even back then he knew dozens of show tunes. He mocked my terrible voice when I tried to sing too. So I stopped trying. “There’s a smile on my face for the whole human race,” he sang to Rosa, and I wished I could chime in with the refrain, “It’s almost like being in love.” But the words would have come out a tuneless croak, as if one of the bronze frogs ringing the fountain had come to life. I walked, silent, behind them.
    It was so cold the fountain had frozen. The frogs, which normally spouted arches of water through their mouths, grew icicle beards instead. “Like Santa Claus!” Jeff hooted, and I tried to laugh. But the whiskered frogs reminded me of my great-grandfather in Lithuania, whose face I knew from the picture that hangs in my grandmother’s house. Shame chilled me through my winter coat. What would saintly, gray-bearded old Asher think of me—his son’s grandson, the bearer of his name—riding buses and subways on the Sabbath with his friends the sheygetz and the shiksa, the girl whose pale, tender face hovered in my half dreams like a rising moon?
    My mother put a lot of the old ways behind her when she married my father. This one she didn’t. It was OK that I had Gentile friends, even girls. But that was when I was little and the girls were just friends. Not anymore. “All the music of life seems to be,” Jeff sang, holding Rosa’s hand but gazing off into the frigid cloudless sky, while she threw me a backward glance, her lips skeptically puckered. “Like a bell that is ringing for me . .