In hindsight, I could guess, now, that there was yet another reason we went to Rockaway that night: my mother was often in a lot of pain and welcomed any excuse she could find to get me out of the house so I wouldn’t have to see how sick she was. And as usual, Avi was my babysitter. He didn’t seem to mind and I was excited by the idea of going on an unplanned trip, into the night. Why not? I was a kid. Any change in the daily routine was interesting.
In any event, once Avi and I got to Rockaway, I was struck by how different the community was in the winter: the streets were deserted, the rows of bungalows and boarding houses mostly shuttered for the season. And the cold seemed more biting because the sand swept around my feet by eddies of wind felt as sharp as the scrape of a whisk broom.
Avi parked in front of the building, which also looked very different to me; its wedding-cake cheeriness had vanished, as if I had only imagined how welcoming the Sunlite Apartments seemed in the summer. Now, most of the windows were dark and the building itself had a squat, grim appearance. I thought it looked a little frightening.
In the basement, Avi pretty quickly got the fuse fixed and the lights back. Then he led me up the stairs to the top floor, to the one small room he occupied during our summer getaway. The only apartment he had the key to, it faced the backyard and had no balcony, but there was a fire escape right outside. Once we were inside, he opened the window, lifted me onto the rusty metal flooring of the fire escape and climbed out after me, carrying the radio equipment in an old milk crate. The cold, clear air out by the ocean, he explained, was a good place for radio reception, and like thousands of other shortwave radio operators around the globe, we were going to tune into the new Sputnik’s telemetry broadcast frequency, which had been published in all the amateur radio enthusiasts’ magazines.
As much as I understood of what he was saying, there was something else about this particular Sputnik that was on my mind that night—my uncle also told me that it had a dog aboard and I was wondering if it was scared.
Out on the fire escape, Avi told me to sit down, to be careful and not to move around too much so I wouldn’t accidentally slip between the railings and fall the five stories down to the yard. I was so bundled up in corduroy pants, a sweater, a jacket, a knit hat and mittens that I could barely move anyway, so I did exactly as I was instructed.
I remember that the sky looked really close to me that night and it was easy to identify the animals and hunters and dipping cups made out of stars. I kept imagining that I could see one of the stars moving slowly across the sky, guessing that it might be Sputnik 10, but Avi told me it was unlikely that we would actually be able to pick out the dim, reflected luminescence of the satellite.
After a while, Avi got his radio receiver assembled and attached the pyramid antenna, affixing it in what seemed to me like an upside-down fashion, with the narrow end fitting into the radio and the wide mouth open to the sky. He twisted the antenna this way and that as he listened to what sounded to me like nothing more than static coming out of the receiver’s speaker. And then, all of a sudden, Avi said, very softly, “Listen, Laurie. There it is.”
I really had expected to hear a faint, tinny voice—syllables spoken, perhaps, with the inflection of a robot. Or perhaps the barking of a dog. Instead, what I heard coming out of the radio receiver was a tinny, echoing beep.
I probably would have been a little disturbed by the eeriness of the sound except for the fact that Avi seemed so enthralled by it. To him, I guess, the metallic pinging was the equivalent of Greetings, Earthlings, and he was thrilled to have been able to tune into this salutation from outer space. We listened for a few minutes and then, all of a sudden, the radio went silent.
Frowning, Avi started fiddling with the tuning dial, trying to find the satellite signal again. I remember hearing voices coming out of the radio; someone was chattering in a language I didn’t recognize, and that was followed by music and more voices as Avi continued to turn the dial—but the heartbeat-like beeping sound we had been listening to remained elusive.
Finally, Avi glanced up toward the roof. There was a set of metal stairs that led up to the roofline, but they were rusty and doubtful looking. There was even one spot where a bolt was missing, allowing one or two of the ladder-like rungs to wrench themselves away from the brick wall. Avi frowned again, and then said, “Laurie, I have to go fix something.”
He explained that he had to go up to the roof for a few minutes, but he didn’t want me to try to climb the rickety steps with him. I guess he was equally concerned about leaving me alone five floors above the ground because he took off his belt, pulled it through one of the loops on my pants, then worked it around the railing and fastened it, so that I was now, effectively, belted to the fire escape. Once again, he told me to stay still and started to climb toward the roof.
So there I was, all alone, with the night sky clamped down on the earth like a star-filled hat and some tinny, foreign music playing on the radio. At that point, I did start to get a little scared, overcome with the kind of thoughts that made sense to a six-year-old: What if Avi didn’t come back? What if I got stuck on the fire escape forever? What if it got colder and colder and I started to freeze? And what if Sputnik 10—now lurking silently somewhere above my head—was more dangerous than its predecessors and started to do something evil like shoot bullets down at defenseless children who were sitting on fire escapes when they probably should have been home in bed?
Of course, Avi returned very shortly and the radio was once again broadcasting what had now become a familiar electronic pinging sound. We listened for a while longer and then Avi packed up the equipment. Soon, we were back in the Impala, heading home.
And that would have been that, except for the fact that almost immediately afterward—beginning while I dozed during the car ride home—I had a dream that in the weeks and months that followed, even years, repeated itself over and over again. In the dream, just after Avi climbed the ladder to the roof, someone else climbed up from what I thought was the floor below, or maybe even from the yard. Someone? What else should I call him? He—it—was a flat, gray figure, featureless, dim, hard for me to see. And yet, I could see him; I was sure of that. I watched as he came up the fire escape stairs and then walked over to the radio. But first, he turned toward me and raised his hand so I would pay attention as he extended one finger and brought it close to the oval shadow that was his face, a gesture that I understood as clearly as if he had spoken. Shhh, he was saying. Don’t speak.
And so I didn’t. I watched as he knelt down and made some adjustments to the upside-down pyramid antenna and then turned one of the dials. I understood those actions, too, because they were just what Avi had done: he was adjusting the radio’s reception and tuning in a specific frequency.
Then, when it appeared that he was satisfied with his work, he knelt down and put his head close to the radio’s speaker. The foreign voices and the music were gone now and I could once again hear the metallic pinging of the satellite, but it sounded somewhat different—a little fainter, maybe; each ping just a little farther apart. A moment later, just as quickly as he had bent down, the radioman, as he had now become in my mind, stood up and without making any other sign of recognition that I was still there, turned and disappeared back down the fire escape stairs.