I put my hand on his arm, which I hoped he read as a signal to cut out the sarcastic remarks. I was still trying to stay in my zone of stillness; I didn’t trust myself not to have an instant reaction of hostility to anything Raymond Gilmartin had to say, but that wasn’t what I wanted. The instinct that had warned me to quiet myself in the car was now telling me to be smart about this encounter. I wasn’t at all sure what Raymond Gilmartin wanted from me, but I didn’t think I would find out by being antagonistic.
The young woman opened a door, ushered us into an office and then left us alone. Jack and I were now standing in a large room that had tall windows curtained with heavy fabric in a deep purple color. That was the only vaguely magisterial characteristic about the décor, which was otherwise very businesslike. There was a wide desk that held a computer with two screens, a leather couch, some chairs, a simple area rug on the floor bordered in the same purple as the drapes, a low coffee table that held a silver carafe on a tray along with half a dozen water glasses. Bookshelves lined one entire wall; I walked over to look at the titles and saw that several shelves were taken up by Howard Gilmartin’s novels and nonfiction writings. The majority of the other volumes focused on a host of esoteric subjects including spiritualism, mysticism, time travel, alien abduction, reincarnation, Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife and the complete works of Edgar Cayce. If these were really Raymond Gilmartin’s books, he was apparently interested in ideas that were outside the boundaries of his own religion, which I thought was somewhat surprising. In fact, the selection of books could have served as resource material for Jack’s nightly lineup of guests. I said as much to him, but he didn’t seem to like the comparison.
We were only in the office for a short time before the door opened again and Raymond Gilmartin entered the room. Another surprise—he was alone. I had expected a retinue: lawyers, bodyguards, some entourage of hangers-on. But there was no one. I also expected him to seat himself behind his imposing desk but, instead, he walked over to the couch and gestured for us to join him in this more informal part of the room.
As we arranged ourselves in the chairs and the dog settled himself against my leg, I had a moment to study the leader of the Blue Awareness. He was, I thought, in his midforties, somewhere near my age. He was thin, blade-like in his movements, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a serious demeanor. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, with a matching tie. He struck me immediately as a man without humor, an individual who exuded a sense of great calm when in reality, inside himself he could not rest. I had been feeling so edgy myself lately that perhaps I was simply identifying someone who was in the same state—although certainly, he had a great deal to do with my uneasiness, while I couldn’t imagine that I had any influence on his.
He poured us all a glass of water and then sat back against the couch. “I appreciate your coming here,” he said to me. And then he added, “I see you’ve brought a friend.”
“You know Jack Shepherd,” I told him.
“Do I?”
“Sure you do,” Jack said, with mock cheerfulness. “I’m the guy whose life you’re trying so hard to ruin.”
Gilmartin frowned. “Why would I do that?”
“I have a radio show, Up All Night. At least I did, until your company bought out my distributor. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately and they’ve been telling on you.”
“I can’t imagine what there is to tell,” Gilmartin said. His voice was measured, calm.
Jack wagged his finger at Gilmartin. “Oh, come on now. You people do some pretty crazy stuff. You rough up members who try to leave; sometimes, I hear, you kidnap them and keep them locked up in some reeducation camp out in New Mexico. You encourage Awares to separate from even close family who won’t join your group. You send members’ children to special schools where you teach them that everything every normal school teaches is false doctrine and only Awares know the truth about the world, which is that we’re all asleep, we believe in false prophets, the only real one being your father, Howard, who is . . . what? What is it that you people say about him? Oh yes, he’s sailing around the world solo, writing a new book, expanding on Awareness Doctrine even though he would be way over one hundred years old now. He must be one hale and hearty guy. And he’s due back soon, I hear, along with the aliens who are our true ancestors, the shadow men from beyond our universe . . .”
Gilmartin waved his hand, as if he were bored. “That’s enough, don’t you think? You don’t know anything about us. Or about me or my father. In any case,” he continued, “I don’t remember inviting you. So perhaps you might temper your behavior just a bit.”
I actually agreed with him. Jack’s outburst had taken me completely by surprise. I knew he was angry at Gilmartin, but it had never occurred to me that he would behave like this. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. If anything, I had expected him to be the voice of reason here, the grown-up, but that wasn’t how things were going. And this wasn’t at all how I wanted the meeting to begin.
But Jack stayed on the same track. After Gilmartin’s admonition, he seemed to rear back, as if he had been struck. “Listen, you jerk . . .”
“What is it you want?” I asked Gilmartin, deliberately interrupting Jack. If this meeting devolved into some kind of name-calling fiesta, I wasn’t going to learn anything I needed to know in order to get my life back to some semblance of what it had been before all this craziness started. “You’ve got my radio and the box my uncle built,” I reminded him. “Let’s just not pretend that you don’t. The horn of plenty antenna is long gone as far as I know, so I couldn’t give it to you even if I had it. There’s nothing else that connects us, so why do you keep after me? I mean, you had a pair of goons try to take my dog away from me last night. What were you going to do? Try to trade him back to me for the antenna? I told Ravenette that I don’t have it. You’re going to have to believe me because it’s the truth.”
“I would never have told anyone to do anything that would harm that dog,” Gilmartin said.
“Oh really? Two men in ski goggles came out of a van and tried to grab him.”
“That had nothing to do with me.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. There were a few things I could do at this point: get angry, like Jack; burst into tears, which part of me felt like doing; or keep going round and round with accusations and denials. None of these was a useful path to follow; none would get me any relief. So I tried something else, I tried, simply, to be human.
“Mr. Gilmartin,” I began . . .
“Raymond.”
“Okay, Raymond—just tell me how to make all this stop. How we can arrange things so you go your way and I go mine. I can’t live my life waiting for the next crazy thing to happen.”
“No, of course not,” Gilmartin said. He took a sip of water and then leaned forward. “And so you see, there is something that connects us—because we believe, as you so clearly do, that no one’s life should be chaotic and unpredictable. Once we understand our true nature and devote ourselves to getting closer to it, everything improves. Our work, our relationships . . .”
“I guess my true nature is to be a pain in the ass,” Jack said, unable to keep quiet any longer. Then he pointed at me. “And don’t think this one is a pushover, either. Still waters run deep and all that.”
I was actually beginning to find Jack annoying, and to feel that he was working against me. I knew he probably couldn’t help himself for behaving the way he was and it was probably my own lack of empathy that hadn’t permitted me—perhaps until this moment—to really understand the depth of his fury. Perhaps there were other factors at work, too, but he was still reeling from being forced off the air. It didn’t matter that he had a deal in place to relocate his show; he had been bested by people he didn’t like—and didn’t respect—and because of that, he couldn’t contain his anger.