Free Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin Page B

animal with a human face.”
    She might have been giving a tour of their lab, explaining her latest experiment. Was that the sort of thing they did here—bred together horses and donkeys, eagles and people, until they got the kind of animal shown in the picture? It didn’t fit very well with vacuum tubes and force field radiation.
    â€œWhat was that?” I said.
    â€œThat? What?”
    â€œI thought I heard—from upstairs—”
    A noise like a cat’s howl, but to musical accompaniment if that were possible. She shrugged.
    â€œHe got off in Jerusalem,” she said, “and he stood on the rock. He saw a ladder. He climbed it into the heavens. . . .”
    I looked up the staircase. Darkness. Suddenly from above, I heard a cry, almost a shriek—“I gotta have yuh now or my heart will break!”—and a burst of ugly music. A chorus, something about not being too young to get married. Beyond the top of the stairs, a door closed. And again silence.
    â€œTom,” she said, nodding to me. Then, as if there’d been no interruption: “He left his footprint on the rock. They say you can still see it there. I never could, though. That’s why the Muslims built their dome around that rock, where the Jewish Temple used to be.”
    Used to be . . . no longer is . . .
    Jerusalem Is Destroyed.
    Where had I seen those words?
    The memories flooded back. Of the sunlit bedroom, second floor of my grandmother’s house, where my mother lay recovering from her heart attack. She’d propped herself up with pillows; I sat on the bed beside her. I held, so she could look at it with me, the Jewish calendar I’d brought up from the kitchen.
    JERUSALEM IS DESTROYED.
    That was August’s picture—a somber painting, done in gray, of walls and arches and pillars sliding into rubble. Even at age five I thought it unlucky, not to be dwelt upon. I hurried on to the next month, the next picture. JACOB’S DREAM.
    My small mouth fell open. It was the same picture, though in a different year’s calendar, that I was to see years later in the Rare Book Room. Immense swirling stairway, rainbow arching over its top; winged angels going up and down the golden steps. And I was there—five years old, dreaming with Jacob. Longing to climb that ladder into the sky.
    My mother gazed from her pillows, at me, at the calendar. She burst into sobs.
    â€œI’ll never be able to walk up all those steps,” she said.
    â€œDanny?”
    All the while Rochelle had been talking. About the golden Dome of the Rock, now in the place of the Temple, and its red and green carpets and the huge rough rock at its center. Within the rock a cave; beneath it yet another cave, which no one’s ever seen. Well of Souls, that hidden hollow is called, because the spirits of the dead come there to pray. . . . With half an ear I’d caught what she said, and a great yearning came over me as when I was five, staring with my mother into Jacob’s dream.
    â€œI’d love to see it,” I said. “I’d love to visit Israel sometime.”
    â€œSilly, it’s not in Israel. You can’t even get there from Israel. It’s in the Jordanian part of Jerusalem. You know—there’s a border dividing Jerusalem in half, between Israel and Jordan. It’s been that way fifteen years, since Israel was created. If you’ve been in Israel, you’ve got to pretend you haven’t before the Jordanians will let you in. And if you’re Jewish, it doesn’t matter where you come from. They won’t let you cross the border.”
    â€œWell, that’s not very fair!”
    â€œWell, that’s the way it is. We had to act like we were Episcopalians when we lived there. Just like Mama, she really is an Episcopalian. We went to church every Sunday at St. George’s—Oh, there’s Tom.”
    Footsteps. Creaking wood. A short, plump boy with dark