I let him into the apartment and he took a quick look around. “Jesus,” he said. “They really ransacked the place.”
“I’ve been trying to straighten up,” I replied. “But I don’t think I’ve made much progress. I keep finding myself wandering around holding things I thought I’d put away.”
“Yeah, well. This is a pretty shocking thing to come home to,” Jack said. “It’s going to take awhile.”
Awhile for what? Until I felt less like I was going off the rails? Because that was how I felt right now. Really, really shaky.
“They took the radio,” I heard myself say to Jack.
“What radio?” he asked.
I realized that I had never told him I had Avi’s Haverkit receiver. “My uncle’s,” I said. “The Haverkit receiver he always used.”
“The one from the night on the fire escape? You still have that?”
I nodded. “I did. But I’ll probably never get it back.”
“No,” Jack agreed sympathetically. “The cops will send someone to the Blue Awareness headquarters in Manhattan but they won’t get anywhere. No one ever does, with them.”
“Monsters,” I said, feeling a surge of deep rage.
“They can be,” Jack replied. “But at least they’re gone for tonight and I doubt they’ll be back.” He looked around the room then and noticed that my couch was still near the door. “I see you were setting up the barricades,” he said. “How about if I stay here tonight? Would that make you feel better?”
It made me feel a little ashamed, actually—I was not used to needing anybody’s help to get through even the worst situations. But since he had offered, I realized that yes, it would help a lot if there was someone else in the apartment overnight besides me. It would be daylight in just a few hours but still . . . I didn’t think I was quite ready to tackle the monsters by myself if they came back, even though Jack was right—it was unlikely.
We pushed the couch back where it belonged. I gave Jack some sheets to cover it, and a blanket. Then he took off his shoes, stretched himself out and said good night. I think he was asleep in a few minutes. I lay down in my bedroom and didn’t expect to be able to sleep at all, but I did. Not restfully, though; for the rest of the night, I was fighting blue meanies in my dreams or running away from faceless robbers without finding anyplace to hide.
I finally got up around nine. In the living room, I saw Jack stirring as well. I made coffee and toast while Jack got up and washed.
As we ate breakfast, he said, “Are you going to be all right?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”
“You’re supposed to do whatever will help you let go of this.”
“That’s the problem; I don’t know what that is. Half of me wants to call the lock guy back, tell him to put half a dozen bars on the door and just sit in here and hide, but the other half wants to go punch somebody in the nose.”
“Like who?” Jack asked.
“I could start with Ravenette. It’s about time someone gave her a black eye.”
“Should I apologize about all that again?” Jack asked. “I still feel responsible.”
“It’s my fault as much as yours. I didn’t have to tell her about the Blue Box. It’s just that she seemed so . . . arrogant. I hate people like that.”
That made Jack laugh. “I bet there are a few other categories you could add to that list.”
“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “I’m not exactly a big fan of people. Most people, anyway.”
“We seem to be getting along,” Jack pointed out.
“Well, now we are,” I agreed.
We lingered over our coffee for a while. An hour later, as Jack was finally getting ready to leave, my doorbell chimed.
I froze. My mind ran a warp-speed checklist of who could possibly be ringing my doorbell without having to be buzzed in downstairs, and I came up with exactly nobody. Jack glanced over at me and seeing what I suppose was a look of abject fear on my face, went into the kitchen, picked up an old iron frying pan—probably the only potential weapon he could find—and went to the door.
He peered through the peephole and then turned back to me with a perplexed look on his face. “It’s a woman in some kind of head scarf,” he told me. “She’s holding a baby. And there’s a man in a suit.”
“Sassouma,” I said, with relief. “It’s my neighbor.”
I didn’t know who the man was, but I told Jack to let them in. Sassouma smiled at me but then settled herself and the baby on my couch. Whatever the purpose of this visit, it was apparently going to be explained to me by the stranger who was with her—who had brought with him yet another unexpected guest, a small, thin dog the color of dust.
For a moment, I thought the dog was Sassouma’s, but then I realized that it was a little larger than the animal I sometimes saw with her children. And this one also had another feature that differentiated it from hers: it had an odd, almost wedge-shaped head. When it looked up at me, which it did immediately upon entering the apartment, it regarded me with dark, glittery eyes. And, it occurred to me, that much like the dog I had encountered in the cemetery—the elusive Buddy—it seemed to be sizing me up.
I finally turned my attention away from the dog, and took a good look at the tall, dark-skinned man of indeterminate age who accompanied my neighbor. There seemed to be quite a contrast between the image he presented, which was all business—the suit, the serious demeanor that almost seemed to precede him into my living room—and the fact that he was holding the leash of a peculiar-looking dog.
Everybody said hello, and the man introduced himself as Dr. Carpenter. I got the feeling that he was not in a good humor. Well, that wasn’t my problem; I had enough things to deal with already.
I asked Dr. Carpenter to sit down, which he did, stiffly, on a kitchen chair that had somehow wandered into the living room during what I was now thinking of as the ransacking of my apartment. Jack and I sat down, too, as did the dog. Sooner or later, someone was going to have to start talking about something, and it was going to have to be Dr. Carpenter, since apparently he and Sassouma had some sort of errand they had come to carry out.
Finally, Dr. Carpenter cleared his throat and began an explanation. “Sassouma asked me to come here,” he said. “You know her English isn’t all that good, so she would like me to speak for her.”
Admittedly, my neighbor and I had only interacted on a sporadic basis—and that was generally when I was doing some small thing to help her out, like lending her the space heater—but when we did, we seemed to be able to communicate well enough. So, I was surprised that she felt she needed some sort of middleman to help her say whatever it was she needed to convey to me. “Is there something wrong?” I asked, since the first thing that came to mind was that somehow the goons who had broken into my place had caused some trouble for her, as well. But that turned out not to be the case.
“Sassouma heard people in your apartment last night when she knew you were at work,” Dr. Carpenter said. “She guessed that they were thieves but she was afraid to call the police. She believes that you will understand why.”
I did understand, and I said so. Dealing with the police for any reason was about the last thing she and her family needed, since their immigration status was likely not something they wanted to draw attention to. I certainly didn’t blame Sassouma for that and would have been horrified if anything had happened to anyone in her family because of me. That wasn’t because I was any kind of sweetheart—I surely wasn’t—but because my old hippie self still suspected that karma might yet turn out to be an operating principle on this particular plane of existence and I wouldn’t want anything like people being deported to be on my particular Akashic record.