I turned to walk back to the elevator, but as I did, Ravenette said, “I’m at the Second Level of Awareness. If you know anything about the movement, you know that’s a rare achievement.”
I actually knew nothing about how the Blue Awareness divided up the levels of esoteric knowledge they supposedly imparted to their followers, but I could imagine that if First Level was the be-all and end-all of Awareness, then being Second Level was probably a big deal.
“Well, I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself,” I said. “But I’m still leaving.”
“Why did you come at all?”
I decided I’d reply with Jack Shepherd’s quip. “You’re the psychic,” I said. “You tell me.”
That didn’t go over very well. Ravenette narrowed her green eyes and said, “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. You’ve stepped into the Wild Blue Yonder and you don’t even know it.”
“You’re right about one thing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She continued as if she hadn’t even heard me. “No one can be exposed to the knowledge in the Wild Blue Yonder without the proper preparation. But at some point in your life, you were somehow exposed to elements of that knowledge and it was too much for your spirit to deal with—which explains why you created the engram. That shadow man. And it’s blocked your path, it’s kept you stuck at the bottom rungs of even this meager life you’re living.”
So now we had come full circle, and were back to the place where Ravenette was going to unblock my psyche and free my soul to find its true path through life, blah, blah, blah. Listening to all this was making me angry; I felt like I was being played. “Look,” I said, “I think all this Blue Awareness stuff is fake. Fake and crazy and I don’t want to hear anymore about it, okay? Enough.”
“You don’t even want to try the Blue Box?” Ravenette said, sounding suddenly sly. “If you went to a session at a Center, I’m sure they explained how helpful it can be in neutralizing engrams. It’s a long process, but generally people seem to feel better—less depressed, for example—even after one session.” Now she rose and walked over to a nearby cabinet, from which she removed something shaped like a shoebox and covered with muslin wrapping. From the way she held it, I could tell that it was heavy in her hands.
She returned to the couch, put the object on the table in front of her and removed the wrapping. What I saw looked, indeed, like a blue metal box with a voltage meter on it. Attached to it by wires were two metal canisters, small enough to grip with your hands. At the Introduction to Awareness meeting I’d gone to years ago, they had presented a slide show that included pictures of a Blue Box and a description of how it worked: you gripped the metal canisters while discussing the circumstances of how your “engram” had evolved—or how you thought it had. During the discussion, the Blue Box directed a tiny electrical current through the wires, supposedly allowing the Aware to measure changes in your body’s electrical resistance. According to the doctrine of Blue Awareness, the resistance corresponds to the “mental mass and energy” of a person’s mind while they sort through the problems caused by their engram. Seeing the box and listening to this explanation had made me laugh; it was also the point at which I’d walked out of the meeting.
“The process involved in using the Blue Box is called scanning,” Ravenette told me. “Usually, we only conduct scans at an Awareness Center, under the most strictly supervised conditions. But at my level, I’m allowed special privileges. We can try it out now, if you like.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told Ravenette. “I used to play with one of those when I was a kid.”
She looked shocked. “That’s impossible,” she told me.
“Well, I don’t think so, because I have one at home.”
At least, I thought I did. I had moved around a lot, but the gadget I was thinking of had been with belongings I’d kept in my father’s house until he passed away, which was around the time I moved back to New York and retrieved my things. The device was another artifact of my Uncle Avi’s life. When he died, there was no one but my father—no other relative or close friend—to go through whatever possessions he left behind. I was a teenager then, and I had gone to Avi’s apartment with my father, who was feeling a great deal of remorse about his estrangement from his younger brother. They had reconciled when Avi had gone into the hospital to be treated for liver cancer, but the disease had run its course quickly and the two brothers had very little time left to spend together.
The day my father and I spent cleaning out Avi’s place after he died was very sad. The apartment—the same one Avi had always occupied, in the same Bronx tenement where I had lived with my parents—was now pretty shabby. It consisted of just a few dim rooms with very little furniture but lots of books, papers, and a closet full of radios, parts of radios, and all kinds of equipment related to radios: antennas, coils of wire, transistors, vacuum tubes, soldering irons and anything else that might be used in building a radio receiver. Also stuck in with all this stuff was a black, shoebox-shaped device that I remembered from my childhood. If you plugged it into an outlet and held onto the canisters attached to it by coils of wire, it made your hands tingle. I used to play with it when Avi was babysitting me. He was always telling me to be careful with it, but even as a small child, I had the impression that it was something like the joke-shop buzzer some kid in my class had—when he concealed it in his palm and shook hands with you, it gave you a mild jolt. As far as I could see, the only difference among the device in Avi’s apartment, the Blue Box depicted on the long-ago slide show I’d seen at the Introduction to Awareness meeting, and now, the one Ravenette was holding, was the color and the fact that Avi’s was made out of Haverkit parts—the name was clearly stamped on the outside casing—just like his radio. In the apartment, I had asked my father if I could have one of Avi’s radios—the same receiver he had brought with him to Rockaway to listen to satellites—which was on a table in the living room, not stuffed in the closet with the other equipment. It was the era when FM stations were just beginning to switch over to broadcasting rock music and all I had was a small transistor radio; I thought that with Avi’s receiver, I could not only get better reception, but maybe listen to stations from other cities, too. Maybe I was being insensitive, thinking of the radio as a boon to my ability to groove to the Beatles and the Stones instead of mourning Avi, but I don’t think I was feeling much of anything in those days, except sorry for myself. I was already a wild kid, depressed and angry, cutting school whenever I could and sneaking out at night to hang out with my friends and get high. In any event, my father said that I could take the radio, so I put it in a carton and, on a whim, took the joke-shop box with me, too. Maybe at the time it seemed like some kind of memento of my childhood, but not then—and certainly not now—did I even entertain the idea that it had the power to do anything other than let you feel the sensation of a tiny electric current traveling along your fingers.
“I don’t believe you,” Ravenette said. “You can’t possibly have a Blue Box.”
“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” I told her. Then I smiled as widely as I could. “But I really do have one.”
“You must have stolen it somehow,” Ravenette asserted, sounding furious.
“I didn’t,” I told her, “but you can think what you like.” I wasn’t in the mood to tell her anything personal about myself, which meant I certainly wasn’t going to mention Avi and how I had acquired my version of a Blue Box. At the same time, I couldn’t resist the impulse to piss her off just a little bit, since it made me feel like I was getting back at her for tricking me into coming here, so I added, “It’s just a toy.”