“There is nothing. I’ve told you that. Nothing to remember, no details to add. So maybe now the best thing to do would be to just stop bothering me about all this. Okay, Jack? Just leave me alone. You, that crazy Ravenette and all the aliens from here to . . . Vulcan!”
Well, Vulcan might not have been the wittiest thing to come up with, but it did seem to resonate with Jack—though not in exactly the way I would have wanted—because he lifted his right hand, separated his fingers and gave me the Vulcan high sign.
“Live long and prosper,” he said with a grin. He was trying to make amends by being amusing, but I was having none of it.
“Fuck you,” I said. And then I got up and walked out.
Once I was on the street, for the first few moments, I was so hyped up that I couldn’t even remember where I was. Grim buildings leaning down toward me, a broken chain-link fence, the dull clang of a buoy rocking in the salty current of the nearby river; my head finally cleared and my breathing calmed down. Of course. I was in Brooklyn, a million miles away—or so it felt—from where I had to be in an hour and a half: back at the airport, back at my station behind the bar. It was just a job, just the normal thing I did night after night, but right now, it felt like a lifeline. Enough with shadows and mysteries. Maybe, for a brief while, I had been intrigued by the idea that somewhere, somehow, there was something else besides the regular routine of my daily life waiting to be revealed to me. But now, I didn’t know who I was angrier at, myself or Jack—or maybe even Avi—for making it seem possible that there was. It was clear to me that there wasn’t. Was not. Period. End of story.
And that was what I kept telling myself as I tried to find my way back to the train.
~VI~
Two trains later plus a ride on the AirTrain monorail to the airport, I finally got to work. I was late, which made the afternoon bartender mad at me since he had to work an additional half hour for which he was going to have to fight to get paid, so the evening started out a little on the tense side. Plus, it must have been take-the-last-flights-out-for–big-business-meetings-in-Europe night, because the bar was packed with guys who didn’t have enough miles or points or clout or whatever to get into the first-class lounges, so were getting drunk at The Endless Weekend before flying off to London or Zurich or wherever else it is that thirty-something-year-olds go to help the masters of the universe keep the rest of us broke and begging for crusts of bread, so to speak. This is the kind of crowd that requires lots of service but leaves small tips, so I was not in the best frame of mind while the Knicks pounded up and down the floor of the Garden on three of the TVs in the bar, a pair of British soccer teams hammered each other on a screen in the corner and a rebroadcast of a Jets game was showing on the big flat screen right above my head. It was noisy, it was frantic, I cut my finger slicing limes (and in violation of all the health and safety rules, just ran it under cold water, did not apply antiseptic or a Band-Aid, and went back to work) and by the end of the night I was worn out and ready to kill the first person who gave me a reason to. Luckily, no one did; the manager showed up on time, checked out the register, and helped me lock up. Then, feeling even more exhausted than I usually was after eight hours on my feet, I stalked out of the bar and headed for the bus.
As I waited, I saw that Orion was getting lower in the sky, a sign that, despite the chilly weather, spring was bound to come and send the great hunter and his star dogs to roam the night on the other side of the globe. Other than that, my mind was a blank, or maybe I was deliberately trying to keep it in that state. I didn’t have the energy to think about anything, not a thing.
I thought I would doze on the bus, but couldn’t. I felt too tired to sleep, too weary to really relax. So instead, I watched the traffic passing by—cars on the highway, planes in the sky; they filled the night with lights. I just absorbed the images and the sounds, and let myself be carried home.
When I finally pushed open the front door of my building, I noticed a small pile of mail with my name on it lying in a corner of the outer lobby. That was our exasperated postman’s solution to the problem of me picking up my mail with even less regularity than he delivered it; once the tiny box couldn’t hold any more of the junk it was usually stuffed with, the postman just dumped the rest on the floor. I would have liked to kick the PennySavers and credit card offers out the front door, but then I’d probably get grief from the super for making a mess, so I picked up the pile on the floor, emptied my mailbox as well, and carried everything upstairs.
After I changed into a tee shirt and sweatpants and poured my usual glass of wine, I started going through the mail. I had been avoiding my mailbox like the plague since I’d gotten that communiqué from Ravenette and tonight the weirdness continued: in with the unwanted magazines, newsletters and other junk was an expensive-looking ivory-colored envelope with my name and address typed on the front. I don’t generally get anything addressed to me, personally, on fancy stationery, so once I realized that the return address appeared to be from a law firm I knew, instinctively, this couldn’t be good news.
And I was right. There was a letter inside, typed on the same heavy, ivory-colored stock, but I had to read it twice to grasp what it said because the message was so . . . well, bizarre. Crazy. I mean, the language wasn’t crazy—just the opposite; it was clipped, precise and to the point—but the message was decidedly outrageous. It was from a law firm called Robinson and Reynolds and the letter was signed by someone named Henry Robinson, Esq., writing in his capacity as counsel for Raymond Gilmartin, who was referred to as the “Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness.” After imparting this information, the letter went on to say that it had recently come to the attention of Mr. Gilmartin that I was in possession of a Blue Box. Blue Boxes, Henry Robinson, Esq., stated, were religious, i.e., “devotional” items sacred to the Blue Awareness and, as such, should be returned to the church, specifically to Mr. Gilmartin, who in the second reference to his exalted personage, was described as the “paramount ecclesiastical authority” of the Blue Awareness. This return of said devotional item should be carried out, stated Mr. Robinson, “forthwith.”
The letter seemed so ridiculous to me that my first reaction was just to stuff it in the garbage and forget about it. To begin with, what I had was not really a Blue Box. Further, what were they going to do if I did not—forthwith—get in touch with Mr. Robinson and arrange for the handover of this sacred item? That is, if I could even find it.
I got up off the couch and went into my bedroom, where I rummaged around in my closet for a while. Somewhere in the back, I found what I was looking for: a battered old valise with leather straps that had once belonged to my father. Inside were the few things I always wanted to keep, but had no real use for, including some costume jewelry of my mother’s, a couple of photo albums, and assorted other mementos—including the “toy” that I had taken from Avi’s apartment after he died. The supposed Blue Box. Since I had never explained to Ravenette how I happened to have this device—and since she was obviously the person who had reported to the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness, and/or his representatives, that I had a Blue Box—she must have really believed the accusation she’d leveled at me: that I had somehow stolen the thing or otherwise acquired it in some devious manner. I still didn’t think it was any of her business, but I also had the feeling that the only way I was going to stop her and the chairman from hounding me about this was to write back to Mr. Robinson and explain to him that I was not in possession of a sacred religious object but rather, as I now knew, a simple electronic device that my uncle had built himself.