Journal of a UFO Investigator

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © David Halperin, 2011 All rights reserved

 

Publisher's Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of
the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Halperin, David J. (David Joel)
Journal of a UFO investigator : a novel / David Halperin.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47565-2

1. Teenagers—Fiction. 2. Unidentified flying objects—Fiction.
3. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 4. Pennsylvania—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3608.A54925J68 2011
813.6—dc22 2010034999

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

My legs crumpled. The frozen earth, its winter-brown grass red in the blood-colored light, slammed against my body. I lay in a twisted
S,
my face turned upward, the back of my head wedged against the ground. The disk—solid, heavy, bigger than a bus or even a boxcar—fell quivering a few hundred feet above me. Its crimson glare pulsated, darkening slowly, all at once brightening. It swallowed up the sky.

“Danny!”

“Danny!”

The door opens. She comes in.

 

My mother. She leans on the dresser, just inside the doorway to my bedroom, breathing hard from the strain of walking twenty feet.

“I've been knocking. Didn't you hear me?”

“No,” I lie. But it's not quite a lie. I heard her knock but didn't entirely hear it, just as I see her every day, but not entirely. Right now I hardly see her at all. My desk lamp is the only light I have on. Outside its circle, she's in shadow.

She shuffles over to me, in her bedroom slippers. She always wears her bedroom slippers.

“Danny. Do you know what time it is?”

I glance at the last words I've written—
images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain—
and move my hand to cover the paper. A mistake; I've called her attention to it. I look at my watch. “About eleven thirty,” I say.

“Almost a quarter to twelve.”

“Eleven thirty-seven.” I correct her.

“It's a school night. You know that.”

“I know.”

She persists: “Christmas vacation is over.”

Oh, yes, don't I know it? January once more. Wake with the alarm before it's light, ride the school bus through the bitter gray morning. Try to do the reading I didn't do last night. Then stagger from class to class, boredom to boredom, my eyes foggy with all the sleep I haven't gotten. Eleventh grade now. I turned sixteen last month.

She stands beside me, resting her weight on the back of my chair, touching my shoulder with her fingers. I lean forward. It makes me nervous when my mother touches me. I smell the sour sickness of her body. I don't turn around, but I can see her in my mind: spindly limbs, gaunt, peaky face. Her thick cat eyeglasses, the lenses like teardrops. I wear glasses too.

“What are you writing?”

“Oh . . . something for English class.”

“English was my best subject,” she says.

When she was in high school, I guess. English is my best subject also. When I write, the teachers tell me, I sound almost like a grown-up.

“A story?” she says, leaning over me, trying to read what I've written.

“Sort of. We're supposed to write . . . a kind of journal.” I'm making this up as I go along. “Of somebody who we are. Who we might be.”

“A story,” she says, as if that made it so. As if she still knew me from inside out, top to bottom, the way she did when I was little.

But this isn't a story. And it has nothing to do with any English assignment. Writing a story, I know the twists and turns in advance. I know how it's going to come out. This . . . journal, I guess, comes from a place I don't yet know, and it unfolds itself inside me, bit by bit, so I can't see beyond the next folding.

“You know it upsets Daddy,” she says.

“What upsets him?”

“You staying up to all hours like this. Night after night.”

And not even out on dates, like a normal teenager. I know the way my father thinks. Sixteen; at that age I ought to go out with girls. I don't; therefore I'm weird. Abnormal. Not really his son. I investigate UFOs; that makes me weird. I study the Bible too; that makes me weirder. He has no idea what I'm going through.

Neither does she, though most of the time she's nicer about it. I touch my hand to my pants pocket; my wallet's there. When she's gone, I'll take it out, look at the card.

“Danny!”