I remembered the hollow, pyramid-shaped antenna, the hiss of celestial radiation. “I guess so,” I admitted.
“Well, when these amateur astronomers monitored the Watering Hole, that’s where they’d hear this ghost signal, which is what they started calling it. Whenever a satellite was pinging on its advertised frequency, there would almost always be what Avi liked to call ‘whispering at the Watering Hole’ as well.”
“What’s the Watering Hole?”
“Remember Star Trek? Maybe a better term would be a hailing frequency. Literally, it’s the frequency band on the radio dial between eighteen and twenty-one centimeters, which are the wavelengths of hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical—wait, don’t tell me: that’s more than you want to know, right? So let me put it this way: both of those are essential elements of water, and water, most scientists think, is not only necessary for life on Earth but for any kind of extraterrestrial life as well—if it exists. So for radio astronomers, that’s always a critical frequency to monitor for any signals that extraterrestrials might be beaming our way to let us know they’re out there. The idea is that those frequencies would be known to any living beings, so it’s a starting point where everyone could gather and say hello.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “If people expected to hear an alien signal in that frequency range and suddenly, they did, wouldn’t everyone have gone crazy? I mean, contact, right?”
“Right—except the signals were going the wrong way. They weren’t coming from space, they were outbound, from Earth going into space. Unfortunately, nobody could ever pinpoint where, exactly, they were being broadcast from or figure out what their real connection was to orbiting satellites. Eventually, they became just one more weird, unexplained phenomenon. Some people thought they weren’t anything more than a sophisticated hoax. In any event, no one has heard any ghost signals for years now. But they were still being picked up by satellite trackers when your uncle was alive, and he was always fascinated by them. He never let it go. Mostly, because of what had happened to you.”
“You mean because I told him about my dream?”
“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, right?”
I let Jack’s sarcasm just roll on by, along with his remark. “So you had Avi on your show to talk about these ghost signals?”
“He was obsessed with them. I assumed that’s why he never moved, never changed jobs—he wasn’t really interested in anything else but pursuing the truth about those signals. You can still hear them on the Internet—did you know that? You can hear Sputnik’s original telemetry signal and a recording of its ghost, along with most of the satellites that were launched afterward, as well, both by the Soviets and the United States.” Suddenly, Jack took the conversation in another direction. “So tell me,” he said, “what’s out there? On the fire escape.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the fire escape. Ravenette told you that the figure she saw was pointing to the fire escape. What’s out there?”
“Nothing,” I replied.
“Okay. I guess I have to frame the question exactly right to get you to answer me. So here goes: Who is out there?”
“Just me,” I told Jack Shepherd. “Me.”
Of course, I was lying again.
~III~
Who is out there?
Well, I thought, as I clicked off the phone and concluded my conversation with Jack after managing to tell him nothing more than I’d already said, maybe I wasn’t totally lying when I said, Just me, because the honesty of my answer depended on whether or not what happened to me on the fire escape was or was not a dream. Maybe Jack Shepherd wanted to suggest that it was a screen memory—a term I had never heard before—but I wasn’t even going to waste a minute considering that as a possibility. I’d simply had a strange dream, and I couldn’t remember a time when I thought it was anything else. Still, that didn’t stop me from staying up for another hour or two, trying to remember everything I could about that night. Most of my childhood only came back to me in bits and pieces—it was not a happy time and I don’t seem to have much of it tucked away in memory—but the night I met the radioman was an exception. I remembered almost everything about it.
When I was young, there were four adults who formed the core of my family: my mother and father, my Uncle Avi, and my grandmother, the mother of my father and uncle. My grandmother, who lived with my parents, was an immigrant from Ukraine. My father was a factory worker and my mother a housewife. Avi, the college boy-turned-professor was the only one who had not only pursued an education but also had an avocation—his fascination with radios and satellites—that seemed both highly technical and beyond comprehension to his relatives. Because of these things, he was considered to be an eccentric and something of a genius. Perhaps he was both or neither; I have no real idea.
One important thing I do know about Avi was that his teaching salary, small as it may have been, made an important contribution to maintaining the one annual tradition that everyone in my family valued: spending our summer vacation in Rockaway. Once a year, Avi drove our belongings out to the beach in his car, where the adults shared the cost of renting a few rooms in a boarding house called the Sunlite Apartments. It was an old, run-down brick building with white fretwork around the outside balconies, an effect that made me think of a collapsing wedding cake. Inside, there was a warren of tiny apartments with shared bathrooms at the end of each hallway. Even pooling their resources, being able to afford a few weeks at the beach was a stretch for my family, but Avi contributed to the cost of the rent by doing repairs. Among a building full of factory workers on vacation, most of them in the garment trade, and most refugees or the children of refugees from Eastern Europe, my uncle Avi—Professor Perzin, as our neighbors called him—was the only one who knew how to repair the boiler or patch the ancient wiring in the building that was always causing someone’s hot plate to overheat or make the dim hall lights sound like they were sizzling. There were a few tenants who lived in the building all year, and the landlord would sometimes pay Avi to drive out to Rockaway in the winter when it was necessary to have something fixed.
Avi was the only person in the family who could drive, or who had ever owned a car. He was fond of Impalas, long-nosed cars with bench seats in the front. One unseasonably cold March night when I was six, he stuck me in the front seat of the latest Impala, a gold-colored vehicle that, to me, looked as big as a boat, then loaded a homemade radio receiver in the back and drove us out to Rockaway. On the way, he said he had two purposes: first, to fix a blown fuse that had knocked out the electricity for the winter residents of the Sunlite Apartments; but once he got that done, he promised me that he and I were going to be able to use the radio to listen to Sputnik 10, the newest entry in the Sputnik series. This one had just launched and would be passing over the east coast of the United States that night. The space race between the USSR and the USA was in full swing, and though we were catching up—the United States had actually sent a satellite named Explorer I into orbit just a few months after the first Sputnik was launched in 1957—the Soviets kept sending up more Sputniks, like a relentless, endlessly replenishable army of night fliers. Each time one returned to Earth, another was launched, outward bound into space. In school, our teachers were still using the launch of Sputnik as a goad to spur us on to paying more attention to our lessons and growing up to become smart people who could beat the Soviets at their own game. I don’t think I was particularly impressed by this argument—nothing anyone ever said in school energized me very much—but I was interested in the idea that you could listen to Sputnik’s successors, Soviet and American, on the radio. I had the idea that I might actually hear them speak.