Only it occurred to me, now, as I lay on the couch, that maybe I had the sequence of events wrong. I didn’t like that idea because of its implications, but what if the dream about the radioman hadn’t come to me after we drove home from Rockaway but rather, while I was still tied to the fire escape by Avi’s belt? Meaning, what if it really happened in the few minutes that I was alone, under the stars, with the radio? Could I have fallen asleep so quickly, and awakened when Avi came back?
That possibility alone wasn’t disturbing; what was, was the alternative: that it wasn’t a dream. At the edges of the scene—the shadowy figure disappearing down the stairs—I was sometimes able to identify additional shreds of recollection, bits of conversation with Avi during which he, too, knelt down to listen closely to the radio’s speaker and then asked me if I had moved the antenna or touched the dial. If those bits of memory were real and not something I had added in over the years, then either the dream extended further than I had allowed myself to remember or the conversation had actually taken place. And if it had taken place . . . well, then maybe Jack Shepherd was onto something. But that was too much to think about, too new an idea to add into a scenario that I was comfortable with. At least, comfortable enough so that at the moment, I simply didn’t want to think about it anymore.
I was always making resolutions not to stay up all night after I got home from work, and I decided now to try to enforce some self-discipline on that score and go to bed. My intentions were good but didn’t quite pan out. I did get myself as far as the bedroom but that’s where my laptop was, so I found myself turning it on and carrying it over to the bed. I sat down, opened a browser and looked up the Sputnik launches. I quickly came across a list of them all and the information for number ten noted that it had made one orbit of Earth and carried a wooden dummy representing a person and a real, live dog, just as Avi had told me. Interestingly, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was soon to become the first human being to journey into space, had been the one who named the dog and the name he gave her—Zvezdochka—meant “little star.” But had she survived her flight? I remembered, again, how as a six-year-old, I had wondered if the dog in the satellite was frightened. Scrolling down the web page, I saw that there was a grainy, black-and-white image that had been transmitted from the satellite during flight: it was Zvezdochka, looking, I thought, wide-eyed and curious as the capsule that held her flew through the stars.
But again I wondered, had she survived? I read farther and finally found what I was looking for: a few sentences that described how, at the conclusion of the flight, the satellite was recovered successfully with the dog, alive and well, inside.
I wasn’t sure why, but I felt a real sense of relief that Zvezdochka’s travels through the starry void had ended not only without any harm coming to her, but probably with a well-deserved pat on the head from Yuri Gagarin, as well. I felt comforted by that. I felt like, for a while, it would be okay to let go of the things that were bothering me. To lie down and go to sleep.
BUT WHEN I woke up late in the morning, the question Jack had asked me was still on my mind: Who is out there? My answer hadn’t changed—it remained, Just me—and the best way to leave it at that was to let the question fade away, much as the dream had until Jack Shepherd brought it up again. So, I decided to get myself out of bed and go through my usual routine—coffee, shower, cable news, and then off to work—as a way of putting some distance between myself and any possible strange, stray thoughts that might have been provoked by my conversation with Jack. But as soon as I threw off my blanket, I realized that it was freezing in my apartment. And I didn’t hear steam banging in the radiators as it usually did in the morning, which meant that there was no heat in the building, and not for the first time this winter.
I bundled myself into a pair of jeans and a sweater, threw on a coat and went out into the hall to knock on my neighbor’s door. I wanted to be sure that the problem wasn’t just in my apartment before I started making phone calls to try to get the heat turned back on.
My neighbors were nice people, though I was never sure how many of them there were. The core group was a mother and father—he drove a taxi, she worked in a convenience store—and a whole bunch of small children. There was also an ever-changing cast of relatives and friends who came and went and, I assumed, also lived in the apartment from time to time. They were Africans, though I had never quite sorted out which country, exactly, they were from. I knew that some of them—the parents, certainly, and probably some number of the relatives—were illegal, and because of that, they would never complain about anything that went wrong in the building. But as soon as the mother opened the door, it was clear that they, too, had no heat because she was also wearing her coat, and the baby she held in her arms was wrapped in a heavy blanket.
“No heat again?” I asked.
The mother shook her head. From where I stood in the hall, I had a view of the kitchen, and I could see two small children, each wearing layers of sweaters, sitting on the floor near the stove, which was the only source of warmth in the apartment. With them was a dog, a small, thin creature the color of dust that I had occasionally seen being walked by one or another inhabitant of the apartment.
“I’m going to call the landlord,” I said.
“No, no, no,” my neighbor said. “We wait. Wait.”
“If we wait, no one will do anything,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll call. I’ll complain.”
“No, no,” she said again, looking frightened.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “I promise.” I pointed at the baby in her arms. “Baby will get sick,” I said, and then gestured at the children. “Too cold for everybody.”
I felt bad about the way I was communicating with her—I thought I sounded like a condescending idiot, but I didn’t think she spoke much English, and I was doing the best I could. When I went back to my apartment, I pulled a small space heater out of my closet, which I had bought last winter when we didn’t have heat for nearly a week, turned it on so I could warm up a bit and started my telephone campaign. Avi, I thought as I started dialing, instead of how to listen to satellites, why didn’t you teach me something useful, like how to fix a furnace?
I didn’t really know anyone else in the building, though I thought many of the other tenants also were undocumented, so I might be the only one in the whole place who would register a complaint about the lack of heat. Which is exactly what the landlord’s wife told me when I got her on the phone, as if accusing me of lying about the fact that the temperature in the building had fallen to a level I described to her as arctic. She said she’d tell her husband “when he got home,” which could have meant a few hours or even a few days. He wasn’t a very pleasant man and he always did everything he could to delay any needed repairs. So, my next call was to the city’s heat emergency hotline, where I demanded some help. I told the woman I was speaking to that I had complained about this problem numerous times before, and if she would just look up the record for my building, she would see how often we went without heat. That hardly seemed to diminish the windy sigh of boredom in her voice, but I knew from experience that once I called, someone from the city eventually would show up to make repairs if the landlord didn’t do it himself.
I started toward the bathroom to take a shower and then I remembered that of course, if there was no heat, there would be no hot water. I was already angry about how cold it was in my apartment, and the realization that I couldn’t even take a shower made me furious—and then it made me want to cry. I knew that my reaction was all out of proportion to the actual situation, but being without the basic creature comforts like heat and hot water always rattled me. I think it made me feel like I was responsible, somehow—like I wasn’t able to do the one really important thing I had been in charge of from the time my mother died: taking care of myself. Maybe I didn’t do it all that well and maybe, even when I did, things tended to hover right around the barely managing level, but it mattered to me that at least I kept myself housed and fed and strong enough to deal with whatever came my way. The fact that I had to heat up water on the stove in order to wash myself and walk around my few small rooms wrapped in my winter coat seemed like evidence that I was failing at something very fundamental about maintaining the quality of my life, and I didn’t like it.