Still wrapped in a blanket I had carried with me from my bed, I padded out to the living room and found the flier and the envelope it had come in still sitting on my coffee table. I picked up the envelope and realized that it did not have a stamp on it. Earlier, though it had obviously registered in the back of my mind, I must have initially overlooked this oddity because I had been so taken by the fact that the mail was hand addressed. What that had to mean was that Ravenette, or someone she had sent to my building, had not only gone to the trouble of hand delivering this flier, they had somehow opened my mailbox and put it inside. I didn’t even know how long it had been waiting for me, since I never bothered to collect my mail on any regular basis. For all I knew, she—or some minion with a set of lockpicks—could have crept over here later on the same night I spoke to her on the radio to leave me this seemingly innocuous flier. But why? Why was it so important to her?
It was certainly possible that she was just trying to bilk me out of some money by sucking me into becoming a repeat client for her supposedly psychic readings—I knew how that went; I’d seen psychic scams exposed enough times on TV—but okay, fine, I could sort of allow some grudging admiration for being creative about that, even if Jack Shepherd was somehow involved. What I couldn’t get over, though, was all the trouble she, they—whoever—were going to in order to entice me to schedule a psychic reading, if that was really what this was about. If Ravenette had my address, then she also had my phone number; she could just as easily have called, or sent the flier through the mail like anyone else would have. This complicated business of hand delivering her message, of breaking into my mailbox—because that’s what had to have happened—was meant to be some kind of message to me beyond the invitation in the flier, but what? Was I supposed to feel that I was being stalked? Or courted? The whole thing was bizarre.
Of course, there was also the fact that she knew about the radioman. It did seem possible, now, that Jack had told her Avi’s story, but on the other hand, there was no way they could have known that I was going to call into the radio show that night and have been prepared to repeat the story to me. Jack’s joke aside, I didn’t care if she really was a psychic—the idea that she could predict a random telephone call was ridiculous. So the more I thought about all these events, the stranger they all seemed.
I was never going to do anything because I was prodded to. Push me one way and I’d be sure to go another, so Jack Shepherd could call me a dozen times and he would never get me to do anything he seemed to be angling for. I would not revisit the circumstances surrounding my dream or make an appointment to hear what else Ravenette “saw” for me just so I could satisfy his curiosity. But as I sat by the stove, wrapped in my blanket, I began to focus less on Jack and more on the fact that Ravenette not only had described the radioman to me, she told me he was pointing to the fire escape. She didn’t know any of the details of the story, but she was close enough to make it very difficult for me to simply dismiss what she had told me as some sort of fluke, a random guess that she happened to have gotten right.
One by one, like nails being pulled from a great, dark wall, dawn was beginning to remove the stars from the sky. I was still really cold, but tired enough that I felt like I could finally fall asleep. I didn’t head right off to bed, though—not yet. I sat by the stove for a while longer, still trying to think things through.
Strange, strange, strange. No matter how many ways I tried to examine the stream of events that led from Jack to Ravenette to the invitation proffered by the blue flier and then added in what I now knew to be Avi’s belief that my dream was real, then strange was the only description I could come up with. (Maybe breaking into my mailbox was also a little threatening, but my well-developed ability to ignore things I didn’t want to worry about helped me lock that idea away for the time being.) To my surprise, I wasn’t as repelled by all of this as I probably should have been. In fact, I felt a sort of compulsion to see what was going to happen next—if I let anything happen. I could, for example, simply throw away the blue flier. Or, I could wait a few hours and call Ravenette. Not because Jack said I should but because, simply, left to make my own decision, I was beginning to think that maybe I wanted to. That was an interesting development, one I attributed to the fact that whatever it was inside me that for so long now had opted for playing it safe—every day in every way—was granting me a one-time pass. Or perhaps I was just being contrarian, which was a character flaw I was secretly proud of. Another explanation I could offer myself was even simpler: I didn’t have to go to work later, and it was clearly going to be another cold day in my apartment. I wondered if, in her place, Ravenette had heat.
~IV~
I did manage to sleep for a few hours, and when I got up in the middle of the morning, I called Ravenette without even giving myself a chance to reconsider my decision. She sounded pleased to hear from me and told me I could come to her place in the afternoon. She gave me an address in Manhattan, and we chatted amiably for a moment or two about which subway line I should take and where I had to change from one train to another.
It was still cold in my apartment, but I did hear faint banging coming from somewhere downstairs, so it seemed like someone was indeed trying to fix the boiler. My neighbor, Sassouma, knocked on my door later in the morning, cradling the baby in one arm and carrying the heater in the other. She also had her purse and a diaper bag, so it looked like she was going to work at the convenience store and taking the baby with her, but I knew there were always other people in the apartment, including her other children, who would be home after school. I told her to keep the heater until we were sure the radiators would be working again. “I’m going out anyway,” I told her. “No problem, no problem.”
I left my apartment earlier than I would have if I were going to work, and decided to walk to the subway. It was a long way—maybe fifteen blocks down a stretch of Queens Boulevard, which was as wide and nearly featureless as a highway. There were six lanes of traffic here, all crowded with speeding cars headed toward the city—a distant mirage of gray skyscrapers huddled under a gray sky—or outward bound for the suburbs of Long Island. The few built-up areas that I did pass included the occasional rooms-by-the-hour motel and a used car lot or two sandwiched between old, brick apartment buildings that looked weary and blank-faced as their windows stared into the steady March wind. It was a cheerless walk, but the exercise warmed me up. I felt like my bones had been frozen and were finally beginning to thaw out.
By comparison, the subway ride was relatively short; it took me maybe half an hour to arrive at a stop that let me off near the edge of Chinatown, in a neighborhood that was transitioning from factory buildings and fire-trap tenements that had been partitioned into tiny rooms for immigrant workers into million-dollar-plus loft spaces for the monied hipsters moving down from Soho to take over the blocks around Canal Street. When I found the address Ravenette had given me, it was in one of these repurposed buildings. The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded façade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.
I rode the elevator—an iron cage that was another remnant of the past, though the ceiling was now crisscrossed with thin tubes of neon lighting that changed color as you rose from floor to floor—which let me out directly into Ravenette’s loft. If I had expected anything like a gypsy-themed parlor featuring tasseled shawls and tufted chairs, I was apparently in the wrong place. The loft gleamed. An expanse of polished wood the color of honey swept off into a living area that featured low couches attended by small side tables made of what looked like highly polished steel. Here, on one of the couches, perched Ravenette, who rose to greet me.