I left Haberman with the idea, not a promise, that I’d get the papers he wanted. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to make myself call Jack. I knew that I didn’t want to, but was debating with myself whether I should or not. It would mean telling him about this latest chapter in my unexpected and—well, bizarre, what other word was there for it?—run-in with the Blue Awareness. So far, all Jack had done was get me even more involved with them by pushing me to see Ravenette. Even if he couldn’t have foreseen the consequences, I blamed him for the crap I was dealing with now. On the other hand, of course, was Haberman’s insistence that he needed copies of the documents Jack had. As I waited outside for the next bus to come by, all I could think was shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
That night, at The Endless Weekend, the waitress I was working with kept disappearing into the back to take calls from her boyfriend, which left me busier than I should have been. I didn’t mind it all that much, though, because running back and forth between the bar and the tables kept me too occupied with keeping orders straight and customers’ glasses full to obsess over what I should do. But some part of my mind must have been debating the question, because when the waitress finally decided to get back to work and try to earn some tips, I took a break to make a phone call of my own—one I would have bet another $150 that I would have ended up deciding not to. But I had come up with a plan.
Unfortunately, my plan—which was to ask for the copies but not exactly tell Jack why—had a very brief life span. I called him at midnight, when the various radio networks that syndicated his show took over the airwaves for about eight minutes for a news and weather update. I figured that would naturally limit our conversation. So, without mentioning anything about how unpleasantly our last meeting had ended, I simply asked him if he could fax me copies of the documents relating to my uncle’s role in the FDA lawsuit.
“Why?” Jack asked.
“Because I’d like to have them.”
“Why?” Jack asked again.
“Because I think it would be interesting to read them. Because I’d like to keep them with the Blue Box—I mean, the Wheatstone Bridge—I have. As a kind of record of Avi’s work.”
“Really?” Jack said.
“Really,” I replied.
“You know what?” Jack said. “I don’t think I believe you. From what you’ve told me, you’ve managed to get through your entire adult life without being interested in your uncle’s work. And now all of a sudden, you want to compile some sort of record about this particular aspect of it? Why? What’s going on?”
Even though I was not being honest about my motives, I was taken aback by what Jack had just said. He made it sound like I had no regard for Avi at all, which wasn’t true. Still, it made me feel bad—or maybe guilty. It was my father’s choice to more or less sever his ties with his brother, not mine. When I was a teenager, I could have made the effort to get back in touch with him again, but I had been too preoccupied with my own problems to even think of that. It was something to regret.
I must have fallen silent for a moment, because the next thing I heard from Jack was a sharp question. “Are you still there?”
“Can you just please let me have copies of the papers?” I asked. “I saw a fax machine in your office and we have one here, too. I’ll give you the number. Just send them over to me, okay?”
Maybe I sounded upset enough to make Jack decide to stop questioning me—or it could have just been the fact that the news broadcasts were about to come to an end and he had to get back on the air. “All right,” he said. “I’ll fax them over later. But if something’s happened . . . has Ravenette gotten in touch with you again?”
“I haven’t heard from Ravenette,” I said, and hung up on him.
I half expected that Jack wouldn’t send me the documents until I was more forthcoming about why I wanted them, but he did. Before we locked up for the night, I went into our back office just in case, and found that he’d faxed me twenty-some-odd pages of material pertaining to Avi’s interactions with the FDA about the Blue Boxes. And, there was both a diagram—drawn and labeled in Avi’s handwriting, which I was pleased to see that I still recognized—of the Wheatstone Bridge he had built as well as a photograph of the device. The photo was a copy of a copy, so it was somewhat grainy, but it certainly looked to me like the small, squat black box with the metal canisters attached to it that had spent a good part of its life packed away in my father’s old suitcase.
I took the copies home with me and, on the way to work the next day, dropped them off at Haberman’s office. He wasn’t around, but the bored receptionist managed to will herself to engage in verbal communication long enough to tell me that she would see that her boss got the documents. When he sent off the letter to the lawyers for the Blue Awareness, she added, he’d put a copy in the mail for me, too.
The letter arrived a few days later. I read it and felt satisfied that it sounded formal, serious and final enough to get the attorneys for the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness to leave me alone. I went off to work—I had a Friday to Tuesday shift to do—and managed not to think about Blue anything all through the weekend and on into the next week.
Wednesday morning, I was fast asleep when my phone rang. I felt like I had been ripped from the depths of dreamland and thrown back into daylight. I grabbed for my cell phone, which was on my nightstand, and as soon as I pushed the button to connect to the call, I heard what sounded like a man screaming.
And I was right. The man was Victor Haberman, and he was screaming at me.
“Get over here,” he was yelling into the phone. “Get here right now!”
“Where are you?”
“My office! It’s un-fucking believable.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. Victor Haberman sounded like he was in a state of genuine panic.
“This is your fault!” he shouted. “I’ve called the police!” And then he clicked off the phone.
The police? That didn’t sound good. I got out of bed, splashed my face with water, pulled on some clothes and called the local car service because I didn’t think I had time to wait for a bus. Whatever was going on, I wanted to get to the strip mall quickly. Well, really, I didn’t want to go there at all, but I knew I had to. Haberman had not even given me a clue about what had happened to his office that was freaking him out, but since he was blaming me, it wasn’t hard for me to guess just who was most likely to be involved.
At first, when I arrived at the strip mall, it didn’t seem like anything worthy of causing havoc was going on. That is, until I stepped out of the hired car and started walking toward Haberman’s office. It took a few moments, I think, for my brain to actually register what I was seeing: in the middle of the row of drab storefronts—a nail salon, a Laundromat, a sandwich shop—the plate glass window that fronted Haberman’s office was obscured by wide smears of bright blue paint.
As I approached, Haberman came out the front door and, spotting me immediately, ran up to me and grabbed my arm. His face was red and he still seemed to be just as agitated as he’d sounded on the phone. His breath was ragged. In fact, he sounded like he was panting.
“Look at this!” was about all he could get out as he gestured wildly at the paint-smeared window. I looked again and saw that blue paint had been splattered on the front door, as well.
“Have the police been here yet?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Come and gone,” he choked out. “They said vandalism. Just vandalism. Ha!”
“You don’t think so?” I asked. I was being disingenuous, and I knew it.
“It’s those nuts you had me write to!” he spit out. He was beginning to breathe a little better, but that only seemed to send him back into screaming mode. “Those Blue . . . blue lunatics. It has to be them, right? I mean, blue paint—I get the message. But I had no idea they’d do anything like this. Did you?” he said. Turning to face me directly, his face displayed an accusing glare. “Did you?” he repeated.