Raymond shrugged. “The event you’re referring to wasn’t authorized. This, however, most certainly is. However, it’s hardly a kidnapping. It’s an intervention. I am convinced that your hatred for the Blue Awareness is evidence of deep-seated engram damage. The problems and disappointments you’ve had in your life have become like a cancer affecting your mind, your ability to think clearly and to reason. We’re going to help you overcome all that. I told you about our retreat center upstate and everyone who listens to your show heard you say that you’d consider going. Well, now you are. It’s a wonderful facility; we have wonderful, caring Blue Box counselors . . .”
“Who also do wonderful things with sleep deprivation, hallucinogens and other nifty therapies, right? I’ve heard all about what goes on at your retreat centers,” Jack said.
“Everything the counselors do will be designed to help you. You’ll be able to change your outlook, the whole trajectory of your life.”
“Listen to me,” Jack said. He sounded firm, even reasonable, but the look on his face was beginning to rearrange itself into one of alarm. “I can’t just disappear. It doesn’t matter what I said on the radio. People will look for me.”
The answer to this statement came from Ravenette. “You’re going to send everyone an e-mail,” she told Jack. “Something witty and persuasive. That’s exactly the kind of person you think you are, right? Well, we’ll do you a favor. We’ll help you keep that fantasy going for a while. And that blog they have you writing on World Air’s website? Every week, you’ll post an update on your progress.”
“This is crazy,” Jack said. “Don’t either of you realize that?”
“What about you, Laurie?” Ravenette said to me. “Do you think this is crazy? Because basically, that’s what I think is wrong with you, too, and we’re going to help you get better. Heal you.”
“And you think no one will miss her, either?” Jack interjected.
“The vice president of the company that owns Endless Weekend is Aware,” Raymond said. “He understands how important it is that Ms. Perzin go through counseling with us. Ravenette really does feel that your friend is in imminent danger of having a breakdown.”
I was listening to all this with the same sense of duality I had about the Sunlite Apartments. I understood what Raymond and Ravenette were saying they were going to do but there was also a part of me that found it impossible to accept that it was actually going to happen. Not because they couldn’t do what they said but because I couldn’t really believe that they wanted to. Because if they did, it meant that they believed in what they said they did—really believed—and that seemed unimaginable to me.
And so—at the wrong time, in the wrong place—I had an insight about myself: there was a part of me that actually envied Raymond Gilmartin. Which was why I had been so willing to cut him some slack, empathize with him when all the evidence that I should do nothing of the sort was overwhelming. The fact that he believed in something, had some sort of deep faith, was a feat impossible for me to achieve. And I felt the lack of that, felt it over my lifetime, felt it enduringly, achingly. In that respect, even Ravenette was better off than I was. It was an awful revelation. I couldn’t accept the reality of someone else’s faith in anything beyond themselves because I didn’t have any myself. Perhaps that’s why I had finally allowed myself to believe in the radioman’s existence, to be willing to grant the possibility that he might actually be waiting for me in the Sunlite Apartments—because I wanted him to be.
But I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on these thoughts. No matter what I did or did not believe, I had to face the fact that Raymond and his followers intended to herd Jack and me into the van and drive us off into some sort of blue oblivion. And there was no way that I could see to get away from them. The men standing beside Raymond and Ravenette were blocking the path to Jack’s car; we’d never be able to get to it before they got us. And trying to run away wasn’t an option either; where was there to run, in the middle of all this desolation?
I was still desperately going through a mental list of escape routes and coming up with nothing useful when, suddenly, I became aware that my dog had fallen silent. The insistent growling and yipping that he’d kept up since the two Awares had exited the van had stopped. And he had turned away from all of us now, pointing himself toward the ruined boardwalk and the sea beyond. He kept staring in that direction as the crescent moon pulled itself out from behind the ragged, night-colored clouds, allowing me to see the ramp leading down from the boardwalk to the street. At first, it looked like just some bare boards lit by the moon’s weak light. Then, a moment later, that empty space was no longer empty at all.
Dogs were coming down the ramp. Dozens and dozens of dogs. And they were coming from the other direction as well, running up the street toward the Sunlite Apartments. Dogs were also coming through the vacant lots, picking their way between the brambles and the trees. Dogs seemed to be coming from everywhere. Silently, soundlessly, they began to converge in front of the building until there was a line of dogs—hundreds of dogs, small ones, huge ones, and everything in-between—packed tightly together, forming a barrier between me and the other people standing in the broken street in front of the Sunlite Apartments.
It was an astonishing sight. Amazing. And as I tried to understand what I was seeing, I began to pick out a few familiar figures in this giant pack of dogs. Or at least I thought they were familiar; perhaps I was just mistaking one dog for another. But I really did think I saw Sassouma’s dust-colored Dogon dog among the pack. And Buddy, the dog who had visited me in the mausoleum where Avi was interred. And Dax, the dog from the airport. A particular bulldog stood quite near me, and I had a feeling that he would have answered to the name Samson. Near him stood the golden-red pharaoh hound. And though I did not see her, I was sure that somewhere in the pack was another dog whose name I knew: Zvezdochka.
Of all of us, it was Raymond who finally spoke. “How did you do this?” he asked me. His voice had softened; his whole demeanor had changed. Now, he seemed more like the man who had once said to me, I have been waiting all my life.
“I didn’t,” I told him.
“Maybe he did,” Jack said.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jack raised his hand and pointed toward the door of the Sunlite Apartments.
I turned back around so that I was facing the darkness that filled the empty doorway of the ruined building. But now, a piece of that darkness seemed to have detached itself and began moving toward me. The darkness had a humanoid shape, so that it was like watching a shadow walk by itself.
And then, when it was about twenty feet away from me, it stopped. It was hard to see, hard to be sure that what I was seeing was actually there because it—the shadow—seemed blurred around the edges, as if, at any moment, it might lose whatever substance it had and be absorbed back into the night. It had no face, no features, no real structure to its arms or legs or torso. It was just a thin shade that barely stood out from the darkness draped all around. I knew who this was and so, though I should have been, I was not afraid.
I pointed to the repeater, which sat on the ground nearby. “That’s it,” I said to the being that I knew as the radioman. “The Haverkit. That’s what you wanted.”
Suddenly, from behind me, I heard a soft click followed by a momentary flash of light. Someone had a camera and was trying to take a photo.
The radioman’s reaction was swift. Though I saw no mouth that could have produced a sound, somehow, from somewhere inside itself, the figure before me emitted a long, loud, angry hiss.
And then it strode forward, moving faster than I could have imagined possible. It was still hissing and now, as if I were the individual responsible for the camera flash—the one it was angry at—it was coming straight at me.