Like a wheel turning, I could almost see her trying to think her way back through everything that had just happened in order to return to where she had started, which was in a place that definitely had nothing to do with prayers. From what I knew about the theology of the Blue Awareness—if it could even be called a theology—the concept of a universal creator would have been an anathema. After all, the goal of becoming “Aware” was to expand your consciousness in a way that would eventually allow you to evolve to the same exalted level of mind as the alien beings who were our true ancestors. Why would you pray to them when your aim was to become them?
Suddenly, she stopped her pacing and whipped around to face me. “This is all your fault,” she said. “I don’t know how you tricked Raymond into thinking that you could be trusted, because you’re sick. You’re damaged, deranged. I told you when we first met: this . . . this gray thing is a creation of your own perverted mind. It’s an engram, a manifestation of the pain and anger inside you that keeps you chained down to a miserably low level of consciousness. That’s what I made contact with—not a living entity but some kind of projection of your own neuroses. Someone needs to lock you up for about a year with a Blue Box and a trained Aware to help you rid yourself of this insanity. You’re the one who wants there to be some great big fat God off in the ether somewhere, waiting to receive prayers he might or might not answer a billion years from now. My guess is probably not, because there is no such thing. There is no God, Laurie, there is only mind. Only consciousness. The way to the infinite is through becoming Aware, rising through the levels of consciousness to the higher planes. Once we achieve that, we will deserve to join the beings who left us here. To join with them, to understand their minds and therefore, the true nature of the universe.”
“Ravenette. I didn’t say there was a God. He did.”
“I don’t believe that. It’s you—all this is coming from you. There’s no other explanation.”
After making this declaration, Ravenette began screaming at me to leave, to get out of the loft. She was working herself into a rage, repeating to me over and over again that my mind was perverted, my spirit too dangerous for her to be around for another second. I was just rising to my feet when she suddenly lunged at me as if to literally push me toward the door.
But she had forgotten about the dog. Lying at my feet, he had seemed to be fast asleep, but in the moment that Ravenette came toward me, he jumped up and positioned himself between us. Then he began to howl, producing the same threatening, high-pitched yipping that I remembered from the time that we had been confronted by the men in the blue van. It was worse than a growl, more frightening because the sound seemed to enter your body and make your blood sizzle. And, I realized, it now carried with it an even more familiar marker: the same high-frequency tone that had distorted Ravenette’s voice when she was speaking for the radioman. Or, as she had now decided, when she was speaking for my supposedly dangerous engram.
The dog stopped Ravenette from advancing toward me, but she continued to demand that I leave. There was no point in staying, anyway, no point in trying to talk to her any further. I took hold of the dog’s leash and tried to lead him away, but it took all my strength to get him to move. He bared his teeth and continued to howl at Ravenette until I finally managed to pull him into the elevator.
He calmed down when we were back on the street, but then he started panting and couldn’t seem to stop. I hadn’t even yet started to process everything that had just happened but my first thought was that I’d better get Digitaria some water before he keeled over. It was about two thirty in the morning now—but two thirty in the morning in New York—so there were still plenty of places open. There were half a dozen people hanging around outside a bar down the block and across the street, a brightly lit minimart had its door wide open.
I was about to step off the curb and head toward the store when I felt someone brush past me. I turned around and saw the same girl in the short silver skirt that I had encountered earlier. She had an odd look on her face. When I’d seen her before, I’d thought she seemed dreamy, but now . . . her eyes seemed vacant, her features slack. I thought she probably wanted to pet the dog again but I wasn’t in the mood for that right now, so I moved away from her. Turning back in the direction of the minimart, I once again went to step off the curb but somehow—and seemingly, impossibly—there was the girl again, standing right in front of me.
“Excuse me,” I said, as I went to walk around her. But as I did, her eyes grew bright and her body seemed to stiffen. My dog had an immediate, but completely unexpected reaction to the change in her body language: he stopped panting and began to wag his tail.
The girl in the silver skirt, however, paid no attention to him. She stepped in front of me again and pushed her face close to mine. Then, opening her mouth wider than seemed humanly possible, she let out a long, high-pitched hiss.
~XVI~
So listen, sister, do damaged, perverted engrams generally manifest themselves in other people? Do they hiss at you when you’re walking down the street? I so much wanted to go back up to Ravenette’s loft, grab her by the throat and start screaming at her myself that I almost turned around and rang every intercom button on the door until someone let me in. But what would be the point of getting into a debate with her? The reality of the only world she would accept was the one described by the beliefs of the Blue Awareness, so arguing with her would have been a waste of time. Besides, what would I be arguing for? The existence of an alien being in some parallel universe who had seemingly lost some piece of equipment that he needed to send prayers out into infinity? It sounded crazy even to me, but I was at the point—far past it, really—when I had no choice but to accept that it was so. Perhaps more than anything, it was the way the dog was reacting that made it impossible for me to come up with any other explanation. On some level, somewhere deeply encoded in the flesh and chemicals of which he was made, he was recognizing the presence of another being, a consciousness that was familiar to him. And that consciousness had communicated its purpose, or at least, what it perceived its purpose to be. That much seemed clear.
But it was also extremely bizarre. Aliens, prayers, perhaps even the existence—or the search?—for God himself. How was I supposed to incorporate all this into what I understood my life to be? How was I supposed to get on the bus in the afternoon, spend the night in an airport bar mixing up Cosmos and then go home to watch the late night infomercials knowing that behind some sort of screen—some divide between the reality I could see and something else I could not—things were going on that I simply could never comprehend? The tiny glimpse I had been given of that other reality, which could even be one of many, of an infinite number, was just enough to make it impossible for me to use my most powerful survival tooclass="underline" the ability to compartmentalize, to deny what I did not want to know about. Or else to simply run away, as would have been my instinct when I was younger, because there was no “away” that I could get to. Not only was there no longer a hippie trail to follow (maybe there was still some commune, some network of crash pads somewhere, that welcomed forty-plus-year-olds, but I had no idea how or where to find them), but even if there were, I had a feeling that now, whether I was walking down a rural road in the back of beyond or wandering on a city street, I would hear that high-pitched, sizzling hiss come out of the mouth of a driver passing by in a car or a child on a swing. Or maybe a hawk swooping down from the windy sky. I would hear it until I helped the radioman get what he wanted, even if I had no idea what that might be.
All of this, all these thoughts and images, flashed through my mind as the girl in the silver skirt slowly turned away from me and drifted slowly down the sidewalk, as if nothing had happened. I watched her go for a moment, trying to collect myself. I looked around to see if anyone on the street had reacted to her bizarre behavior, but no one seemed to have paid her, or me, any attention. It was just another latenight scene in the city, another weird interaction that came and went.