“Do you think he was jealous of you?”
“For having some lost soul cry on my shoulder? I hope not.”
Since that line of questioning wasn’t producing the kind of fireworks that Jack was clearly attempting to ignite, he tried another angle. “Let’s focus in on Howard Gilmartin a little more specifically, on what you know about him from personal experience. Am I right about the fact that there was no desert, no secret radar installation, no black ops outpost called the Wild Blue Yonder? I want to remind our audience that those are the experiences that Gilmartin said led him to create the Blue Awareness. Rabbi? What do you have to say about all that?”
“Actually, those were stories Howard wrote after the war. I read some of them. They weren’t bad.”
“But that’s what they were, right? Just stories? His real encounter with the radioman was on your ship, up on the radars, and it scared him. Just about scared the life out of him, I’d say. And on top of that, he wasn’t given any secret knowledge, he wasn’t entrusted with any supposedly lost information about the origins of human beings.”
“Do you mean, did he ever tell me anything like that? No,” the rabbi admitted, but he sounded reluctant to endorse even this implied suggestion that Howard Gilmartin was an outright liar. He obviously didn’t give any credit to Gilmartin’s ideas but it just didn’t seem to be in his nature to directly criticize his old comrade in arms, either.
“I have one last question,” Jack said, though this turned out to be more of a barrage than a single query. “Tell me, honestly, do you think the being that you met in the chapel was real? In other words, do you think there are aliens on Earth? Here, on this planet, right now? Do you think they’re abducting people—you know, I’m sure, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who claim to have had abduction experiences. Do you think others are encountering the same beings you and Howard did, or is something else at work here? Maybe there are different races of aliens that have visited, or are visiting our planet. In light of all those possibilities, where do you think that leaves the Blue Awareness and its followers?”
“I couldn’t begin to speculate about any of that, Mr. Shepherd,” the rabbi said. “All I can do is refer you to Shakespeare. As the bard said, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”
I could almost hear Jack grinding his teeth in frustration. He was doing everything he could to stir up controversy, but instead, he was getting poetry.
And he got something else too: the sound of a dog barking.
This time, it was Jack who reacted with laughter, though it sounded forced. “I guess you can tell we have another guest in the studio tonight,” he said, addressing his audience. “Rabbi Friedman brought his dog with him. What’s his name, Rabbi?”
“We call him Sammy, but officially, his name is Samson. Samson the bulldog,” the rabbi said. “And he’s usually very quiet. My apologies.”
“No need,” Jack said. “We’ve got open phone lines here. We welcome all opinions—human and otherwise.”
Both Sammy’s interruption and Jack’s comment may have been unplanned, but they provided an opportunity to end the segment on a light note. Jack said good-bye to his guest and then the same spooky, synthesizer-generated music that had signaled the end of Raymond Gilmartin’s appearance on Up All Night began to play.
I turned off the radio and, almost immediately, my cell phone rang. Of course it was Jack, who said the next half hour of his show was a taped segment, so he had time to talk. “What did you think?” he asked.
“He seems like a very nice man,” I said. “The rabbi.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Jack said impatiently.
“I know.”
“So?”
I sighed, loud enough so that Jack could hear me. I wanted him to. “So? You want me to tell you that you proved Howard Gilmartin was a phony. Maybe you did—a little—and maybe you didn’t, but we both know what you really wanted is to get some sort of rise out of Raymond by mocking his father—but I don’t know why. What are you doing, Jack? Daring Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater to Rockaway? It’s not enough just to ask him, if you’re still so dead set on doing that?”
“I did ask him. And he did say yes.”
I was so taken aback by this response that it more or less shut me up. I did give more than a passing thought to arguing with Jack about how counterproductive his behavior seemed to me, but I knew it was an argument I would never win because Jack was clearly getting a great deal of satisfaction out of whatever game he thought he was playing with Raymond. We ended up just having a long, complicated conversation about when we could make the drive out to Rockaway. When was Jack free, when was I, what days had Raymond said he would be available? The whole exchange seemed unreal to me, like we were planning some innocuous shopping excursion or a trip to the movies. We settled on the following Sunday afternoon, just a few days away.
Later, at home, when I finally got myself to bed, I was prepared for a restless night, but it was Digitaria who seemed unable to settle down. He kept jumping out of bed and then getting back in again. I thought he was thirsty, or hungry, but he wasn’t making any detours to the kitchen where his water bowl and food dish were; instead, he kept padding back and forth between the bedroom and the front door.
There was no way I could pretend not to understand what was going on. Though all I wanted was to plunge back into the depths of a dreamless sleep and not think about the reasons for his restlessness—there were too many of them, all disturbing—it was clear to me that my dog was on high alert.
~XVIII~
It was a rain-washed afternoon, blustery and dark. I felt chilled even though I was wearing a jacket, so I asked Jack to turn on the heat in the car as we inched along the Belt Parkway, headed out toward the Rockaway Peninsula. Digitaria was sitting in the back seat along with the Haverkit repeater, assembled from the parts that Jack had managed to acquire. It was wrapped in an old quilt meant to protect it during what I was beginning to think of as a ride to nowhere, because that was where we seemed to be going: nowhere fast.
The traffic was horrendous; there were multiple accidents and endless congestion caused by rubbernecking drivers trying to get a look at the smashed vehicles and trails of shattered glass. We had hoped to be out at the beach before dark but that wasn’t going to happen now; we were in the decline of the season, when the days seemed to close themselves out with a grim immediacy that brooked no negotiation with the light of afternoon. The fall horizon was already serving up the night’s cold slice of moon.
The only benefit I saw to the fact that we were way behind the schedule we had set for ourselves was that we might not meet up with Raymond. We were almost an hour past the time that Jack said he had told him we would be waiting outside the Sunlite Apartments. Jack had tried Raymond’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail so I was hoping that by now, he had just given up on us and gone home.
The closer we got to Rockaway, the more uneasy I became. I couldn’t sort out which thing was bothering me the most: the combustion that might result from Jack and Raymond meeting outside of the controlled environment of Jack’s studio or Raymond’s office, or the idea that a shadow man might really show himself to me on the grounds of a deserted building where I used to live. Or maybe it was the fact that I could hear my dog panting feverishly in the seat behind me. If there had been enough room, I knew he would have been pacing back and forth.
Finally, not far ahead, I saw the sign that said, “To the Rockaways.” Once we made it down the off-ramp, the traffic cleared up and there were no more delays. We followed a road that led through a series of small communities built on the canals that fed into the bays whose waters washed in and out of the ocean with the tides. Then it was over one last bridge, and we were—I was—back in Rockaway, heading down the peninsula to the vacant lots and broken sidewalks that were now the domain of the Sunlite Apartments.