I hadn’t expected to hear this. I think I had been telling myself that it would be many more weeks—even months—before Jack finished constructing the repeater. More time to stay in a sort of in-between zone where nothing had to happen.
“I thought you were calling about Raymond.”
“The segment is over,” Jack said.
“I know,” I told him. “I heard you.”
“Well, I’m glad, because I have an idea.”
I carried the phone into the kitchen and drank some orange juice from the carton. The dog, of course, followed me. I put the juice away and patted him on the head.
“Laurie. Are you still there?” Jack asked impatiently. “I have another guest on in a few minutes.” “I’m here, I’m here. What’s your idea?”
“I want to ask Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater out to Rockaway.”
“This thought just came to you tonight?”
“I’ve been mulling it over for a while, but tonight just kind of clinched it for me. Raymond Gilmartin is so sure of himself—and he’s so deluded. Showing him the radioman would just blow him out of the water.”
“That’s not the point of what we’re doing. And even if we actually see the radioman—if he comes to get the repeater—that may just reinforce Raymond’s belief that he’s some sort of emissary from our . . . what? Our ancestors? Creators?”
“I don’t think so. Raymond Gilmartin is such a narcissist—among other things—that he’ll expect your friend . . .”
“He’s not my friend.” How many times had I said this to Jack?
“He will expect your shadow to shake his hand and tell him to keep up the good work. Or at least give him some sign of recognition. After all, he’s made it his life’s work to try to emulate these beings.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a little vindictive?”
“That’s because my engrams are in serious need of repair. You heard Raymond.”
I walked back to the bedroom with the dog still at my heels. Outside, in the street, a car went by, and I could see the reflected glow of the headlights moving in bright bars across my living room ceiling.
“You know,” I said to Jack, “this may not work. Nothing may happen.”
There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone, but a different kind of silence than the dead air on the radio. This void pulsed with questions. Finally, Jack asked one. “Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “There’s still a lot of room in this story for it all to be some kind of fantasy.”
“Whose?”
“Mine. Yours. Ravenette’s. Raymond’s. The list goes on.”
“I’m going to invite him, Laurie.”
“It’s a mistake,” I told him. But he had already hung up the phone.
WE DIDN’T do anything right away. Partly because I was working a lot—one of the other bartenders had quit without notice, and I ended up working a week straight, with no time off—and partly, I think, because Jack was having a fine time continuing his campaign against the Blue Awareness and wasn’t ready yet to hold out a flag of truce, even a fake one. Almost every night on his show, one of the guests was either an ex-Aware or someone who had produced some kind of exposé—a book, a documentary—about the Blue Awareness. What he was doing made me uneasy so I stopped listening to Jack’s program and I told him so. He didn’t try very hard to change my mind about that.
But one night, when I was at work, the waitress I was working the shift with answered the phone near the bar. She said a few words that I couldn’t hear because of the constant babbling of the televisions, and then held out the receiver to motion that the call was for me. I shook my head—I was too busy with customers, at the moment, to go to the phone—so she wrote down a message for me and then went back to her tables.
A few minutes later, I read the message, which the waitress had scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I wasn’t surprised that it was from Jack, since I couldn’t imagine who else would call me here. It seemed that he wanted me to listen to the show later, specifically, the segment that began at one thirty.
So a few hours later, I was back in my own neighborhood, walking Digitaria while I once again listened to the Up All Night show through my set of earphones. I planned to give Jack maybe five minutes; if he had on another troubled ex-Aware, I still wasn’t interested. My focus right now was not on the Blue Awareness and how they screwed people over on the path to the Wild Blue Yonder, where all would be revealed—or not. I had other things on my mind.
And tonight, apparently, so did Jack’s guest. When I tuned in the station, I heard the tail end of a question Jack was asking—something, I thought, about Howard Gilmartin—and then I heard him address his guest as Rabbi Friedman. The next thing I heard was a man’s voice that sounded a bit frail, but genial. He said, “Well, yes. I knew Howard. We were very friendly, in fact—at least back then. We served together on a carrier in the South Pacific. That was quite awhile ago.”
“Almost sixty years,” Jack agreed.
“True. But my memory is still pretty good.” This assessment was accompanied by a laugh that was full of self-amusement.
“I understand something unusual happened to you, on your ship.”
“Yes, I guess you could say it was very unusual. It changed my life, as a matter of fact.” Again, the rabbi laughed. The sound was soft, soothing, like he was telling a joke about himself, a joke he liked to repeat and hoped that everyone listening to him would appreciate.
A few moments later, he continued with his story. “I was the Morse Code operator, so I worked in the radio shack with Howard. We were in the South Pacific, in the thick of the war, so as you can imagine, it was a very tense time. We saw a lot of fighting—a lot. I wasn’t particularly religious in those days, but there was a nondenominational chapel on the ship that I used to go to once in a while. I had been to Hebrew school, you see, and I still remembered how to pray in Hebrew, so sometimes I did. That helped a little.”
“Helped?” Jack broke in.
“Well, I was scared, you see. Sometimes I wasn’t so much, but sometimes I was. And when I was, I went to the chapel and prayed. One night . . . oh, I guess I got lost in what I was doing—just thinking more than praying, actually—but after a while, I thought I felt someone sitting beside me. I turned, but I didn’t see anyone. So I went back to my prayers but then the feeling returned. The feeling that someone was with me. This time, I didn’t exactly turn to look, but I kind of glanced to the side and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. Someone. The silhouette of a man . . . well, of a person, anyway, but flat and gray. No real face, no features, but . . . a living being. Well, that was certainly something I should have been scared of, but somehow I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. I felt that the best thing to do was just to go back to my prayers. And so I did. I started praying pretty seriously. And as I did, I felt the shadow person slip his hand in mine. And then he began to cry. I mean, I couldn’t see him crying or hear him or anything like that, but I knew that’s what he was doing.”
“Well . . . wow. What can I say? That’s a pretty strange encounter you’re describing,” Jack said.
“It would certainly seem to be, wouldn’t it? But . . . well, whenever I tell this story, it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I mean, when I think back.”
“Do you tell it a lot?”
“Oh yes. I’m very open about it. As I said, it’s a very important experience for me. Anyway, I know I should have felt that something truly bizarre was happening, but I didn’t, you see. The . . . person? I always call him a person though I suppose he wasn’t. Well, I sympathized with him because it was like I could feel some of what he was feeling. I mean, I got the sense that he had a job to do, just like me, and he was trying to do it. And, also like me, he was far from home and he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get back.”