~II~

The next day, I slept even later than I usually did. When I finally got up in the early afternoon, I badly wanted coffee. I was still barely conscious when I dragged myself into the kitchen and poured water into the coffeemaker. I waited for it to brew, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just listening to the noise of the day banging away outside.

Luckily, since I worked nights and slept during the hours when most of the rest of the city was at work, my bedroom was in the back of the building I lived in so it was relatively quiet. But my living room faced a busy street lined with body shops, car parts wholesalers and other automotive repair services. Some of them also carried on some kind of black-market operations that involved lots of hurried loading and unloading of big trucks late at night. (They were smuggling cigarettes from the Midwest Indian reservations, one of my neighbors said; another thought electronics were involved.) Occasionally, coming home from work on the last late-night bus to make the run from Kennedy airport, where I did my bartending, to where I lived at the far end of Queens, I’d have to walk around a Diamond Reo or a Peterbilt with a forty-foot trailer parked right up on the sidewalk, close to the buildings, with only its running lights on and its engine idling. If a giant truck that took up half the block could be inconspicuous, that seemed to be the intent; like you wouldn’t notice it, or shouldn’t, if it snuggled up to the iron gates drawn across the entrance to a row of garages. Sometimes I’d see a couple of men loading or unloading boxes from the back of one of these trucks. They went about their business efficiently, without making too much of a racket—I had to admit that. The morning was another story.

Six days a week, from early in the morning until around seven in the evening, the noise that penetrated into my front room was pretty impressive, even with the windows closed tight. The neighborhood I lived in was often referred to as automobile alley because the car repair businesses lined the streets for about ten blocks in every direction except south, where the grassy inlets and salt marshes of Jamaica Bay jutted up against the boundary shores of the borough. My building, an old brick high-rise with a couple of dozen apartments, had the look of a relic from better days that had been marooned here, all by itself, when sometime in the past the neighborhood was gradually taken over by the men and machines who fix smashed cars. But its location was exactly what kept the place affordable for me. I had thought of moving from time to time, but where would I go that would be any better for what I could manage to pay?

When I finally had enough caffeine to wake me up—halfway, anyway—I wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch. I meant to turn on the TV and watch the news on one of the cable channels, but that’s when the previous night decided to come back to me. I had help in the way of some visual props: facing me on the coffee table was the near-empty bottle of wine I had decided to relax with when I came home from work and, of course, the radio, a big, clunky black box that while missing its exotic pyramid antenna still had a utilitarian directional antenna attached. I liked to fiddle around with the radio in the same sort of way I liked to surf the web—I’d just tune up and down the various bands to see what I could find. I enjoyed listening to people talk out there in the dark—the ham broadcasters relaying gossip to each other, boats anchored in the shipping channels, pilots guiding their planes home to the airport where I worked or to the smaller landing strips out on Long Island and in New Jersey. Once in a while, I tuned into the atomic clock, installed on a military base in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Ceaselessly, second by second, it declared the exact time in a stern, robotic voice that, late at night, could easily be mistaken for the voice of doom. I could also pick up international programs, and one of my favorites, when I could find it, was an American expat living in Chile who read e-mails and letters from people who had picked up his broadcast. He said hello, they said hello back. I’d sent the guy a postcard, once, that I’d bought at the airport—a picture of the Statue of Liberty photographed on a sunny day—and waited for two weeks afterward for him to say hello to me. When he finally did, it seemed like an accomplishment, like I’d made a connection or closed a circle.

I actually had listened a number of times to the program I’d tuned into last night. For a while, the big topic up for discussion on the show had been the increased sightings of UFOs that had coincided with 9/11, and the theory that the terrorist attacks had alarmed “the aliens”—people on the radio talked about aliens like it was a given that we were being visited by other-worldly beings on a regular basis—to the point where they might be considering some form of direct intervention in the affairs of our quarrelsome little planet. But many months had already passed, and since nothing like that had happened (that we knew of, anyway, as the occasional caller liked to point out), the discussion had turned to other looming dangers and esoteric mysteries, like a ghost hunter who had described his experiences with the angry dead and various self-described “out-world” archaeologists who discussed the Sphinx-like formation that formed the supposed “face” on Mars. But I had never actually called in when they opened the phone lines for questions. I still couldn’t figure out what had possessed me to phone in last night—boredom, maybe, or the effects of the wine. But whatever, I certainly hadn’t expected anything like what I got: a stranger’s voice describing a room I hadn’t been in for decades and a shadow that I had met in a dream. It was bizarre. Inexplicable. As was the fact that the shadow was pointing to the fire escape—as if I needed to be reminded about what had happened out there—that is, what had happened in my dream. I had never forgotten it but I also hadn’t thought about it in what seemed like eons, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in thinking about it now. And if there was anything I was really good at, it was finding ways to avoid what I didn’t want to think about. That’s what the radio was for, and my computer, and the TV. Besides, there were a couple of things I had to do before I left for work in the late afternoon, like go to the supermarket, which was a long hike from my building. So, I decided that buying groceries was more important than dwelling on my late-night encounters with weirdness in radio land. I got dressed, plopped a baseball cap on my head, and headed out the door.

By the time I got home, showered and pulled on clean clothes, it was time to get to work. I locked up my apartment and walked a few blocks past the body shops and garages to where the sidewalks ended at the road that fronts the marshland at the edge of Jamaica Bay. The bus I had to take to get out to Kennedy airport followed a route along the bay, winding along the back roads past more garages, junkyards and small factories until it turned onto the Grand Central Parkway where the driver could finally hit the gas pedal and join the traffic speeding toward the airport and then on to the city, beyond.

There was a chain-link fence near the bus stop where I waited that prevented access to the reedy wetlands beyond. The waters around here had once been an oily morass but were better now, after years of clean-up efforts. In the spring, there were often egrets standing along the shoreline, looking like white handkerchiefs blown in with the breeze, and even the occasional heron or cormorant. But it was winter now and the migrating birds had not yet returned. The appearance of the gray water lapping against the rocky shore was dulled by cold; the leafless trees planted along the street side of the fence looked skinless, barely alive.

When the bus arrived, I got on and took a seat among the other workers on their way to put in their hours on the night shift at various service jobs at JFK or the hotels around the airport that cater to the traveling public. We all knew each other—not by name, but recognized one another from this daily commute, though no one exchanged a greeting. At this time in the afternoon, we were generally the only people who used this bus route: maids, cleaners, cooks, clerks, mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and other low-rung personnel, with our identity cards hung around our necks. Except for the clatter of traffic and the airplane engines screaming overhead as we got closer to Kennedy, we rode together in silence, disembarking singly or in small groups as the bus finally entered the airport grounds and made the rounds of the terminals.

I worked in the oldest terminal, in a sports bar that’s part of a regional chain called The Endless Weekend. Our motto, printed on our napkins and on the black tee shirts we were required to wear with black jeans was, We Party All the Time. (I sometimes entertained the idea that I had been hired for this job less because of my bartending skills, though I did have those, than for the fact that I was dark haired and dark eyed, which fit in with the color scheme some corporate manager somewhere had picked out for the hired help.) We had five high-def TVs in the bar and they were all tuned to either a game of some sort or a sports-talk program; those were the rules and there were penalties for breaking them if any of the supervisors who did random spot checks of our operations found that we had tried to fiddle with the preset channels. In the bar, where there were no windows, it was always meant to be some version of a boozy, neon night where serious drinking was celebrated and team rankings were debated with unbridled fervor.

Five nights a week, on a rotating schedule, I was the bartender at The Endless Weekend, working with just one waitress. We used to have more staff but the company had downsized the workforce when the travel industry took a nosedive after September 11. I had worked at this same bar for a couple of years but the waitresses tended to come and go. In the past year or so, many of them were laid-off flight attendants whose lives had been upended by the problems that the airlines were experiencing. Bankrupt airlines—particularly a few notable regional carriers—had looted the employee pensions, sold their computers, their furniture and even their planes, and left their workers with little to fall back on. It was a sad story that I had now heard over and over from more than half a dozen women who had thought of themselves as professionals with good jobs that provided both decent benefits and serious responsibilities but had to face the fact that, in the end, once the world of work stripped their résumés down to the essence of what they did, potential employers thought of them as waitresses. A woman handing you a beer and a napkin, whether on a plane or in a dive bar on some lonely road, was a waitress. At The Endless Weekend, the main skill required for this job was that you could stand on your feet eight or more hours a day, smile even at idiots, and fit the jeans and tee shirt. It was supposed to be a big secret and, of course, completely illegal, but if you wore anything larger than a size ten, you’d never get the job.

I tried to be sympathetic every time I heard this tale of woe from a new waitress—and I was—but only to a point. It was hard for me to really empathize with the loss of something I had never had, like a real career. For me, bartending was just one more in a series of similar jobs I’d had after I graduated from high school. That was in 1972, an unsettled time of international crises, abundant Acapulco gold and disco music invading all the radio stations. I had no close family ties anymore and no idea of what to do with myself, so I joined the vestiges of the wandering tribes of kids in vans who had headed to California, then up to the Pacific Northwest, and then, finally, dispersed to rural communes to wait for the revolution that everybody already knew was never going to come. I had lived in Canada for a while, in Alberta, and then in rural upstate New York, but plains and mountains were not my thing; if I couldn’t see water and know the ocean was nearby, I felt trapped. The edges of the country, the coasts, were better for me; I liked the feeling of being able to sail away if I needed to. Not that I was going anywhere anymore or knew the first thing about sailing in any real sense; it was just an idea I had, something dating back to my traveling days. Given a few minutes notice, I thought I could still throw some shirts in a backpack and head out. Where didn’t matter as much as the fact that I could just go if I had to. If the need arose.

Eventually, I made my way back to New York—home was home, no matter how rough a start it had offered—and had found work in restaurants and shops. I worked cash registers, managed a kitchenware store, even fired pottery in an old warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan for a while and then delivered packages on a bike I navigated through the New York City streets, keeping myself just a level or two above an existence that involved real deprivation. It did occur to me now and then that I should go back to school, though for what I didn’t know. I paid attention to those ads that came on TV late at night, offering the chance to enroll in a school that taught sound engineering or how to be a medical assistant or a pastry chef, but I couldn’t picture myself doing any of these things. I just wasn’t a mainstream person; I knew how to manage at the margins of the system but I just couldn’t quite push myself up onto even the lower rungs of the middle class, where I suppose I should have been at this point in my life, at the tail end of my forties. It was the same with the relationships I’d had—boyfriends, girlfriends—things just seem to come apart without my really understanding why. I didn’t stick to things, I drifted away from people. At least, that had been my pattern for as long as I could remember.

My current job, which I had more or less lied my way into (though I had worked at enough restaurants to have picked up some bartending skills and learned more as I went along), was actually one of the longest I’d had. A lot of that had to do with changing times. There just weren’t that many jobs available anymore for someone with the kind of post-hippie-jack-of-all-service-trades résumé I had, so for once, I was playing it safe and not even looking around for another job. Having already survived a round of staff reductions at The Endless Weekend, I was just more or less keeping my head down, my mouth shut, and serving drinks with an ever-present smile, as instructed by the supervisors who also dictated our all-sports-all-the-time TV fare. They were in charge; I just did what I was told to do. At work, they—the supervisors, the corporate bosses I never saw—more or less owned me, and I understood that. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I needed to pay rent, I needed to buy groceries, and so I needed to work.

Tonight, at The Endless Weekend, ice hockey season was underway, so while watching the money on the bar, keeping my charge receipts in order, and generally trying to pretend that yes, indeed, this was the place where a perpetual party was going on, where every guy was a hunk, every gal a babe, and every conversation sparkled with wit, I worked on through the hours of a game that was interrupted by a bench-clearing fight and then went into overtime. I knew that because part of my training for this job had involved being instructed that it was my responsibility to keep track of the action displayed on the TV screens. People wandering in at the middle of some game would often ask about the score and we were supposed to be able to tell them. I guess it made the bar seem like more than it really was: a destination instead of just a stopping-off point in a journey elsewhere. So, I kept an eye on the hockey game as well as an international soccer match playing on one of the screens. The see-sawing score in the soccer game paid off with a nice tip when a South African fellow (I didn’t even have to ask; I had become an expert at accents) stopped in for a couple of shots and wondered if I knew what was going on. Sure, I said. And I did.

The night manager, who was responsible for this bar along with several others around the airport with different names but owned by the same parent company, came by just after midnight to start checking the receipts and bundling the cash into the safe for collection by an armored car service. Around one A.M., when he was finished and we had helped to clean up, I was free to head back home. I was looking forward to doing nothing much at all until I had to come back to the airport tomorrow night.

The terminal was a sleepy place at this hour of the night. The TSA people were around, of course, drinking thermos coffee and eating sandwiches they had packed at home because the restaurants were all closed—and they couldn’t really afford to buy the overpriced, overpackaged stuff they sell in those places, anyway—and there were always a few cops strolling around with their big dogs that you weren’t supposed to pet. The cops were friendly and I knew most of them by name, just as I knew their dogs, but even as I said hi, I could see the German shepherds watching me as I passed by, sniffing the air.

As I was walking through the terminal, I was stopped by someone else I knew to say hello to, the driver of one of those electric carts that the airlines use to transport disabled passengers. He offered me a lift so I took a slow ride with him, sitting in the seat beside him as the car beeped its way down the long airport corridors lined with lighted panels advertising great places to visit and things you’d want to take with you on your dream journey: fabulously expensive luggage, extravagant jewelry, and sunglasses that cost more than the moon.

I left the airport through a service exit that let me out near the cargo bays used by the food-service companies. There were a couple of refrigerated trucks parked in the bays, but I didn’t see many people around except for a pair of security guards. I showed them my ID badge and they let me continue on my way.

The cargo area led me to a parking lot for the food-service employees; it was almost empty at this time of night, but because it had electric fencing all around, I had to pass through the entry gate, which meant showing my badge to another guard. After that, I was back on a municipal street, though you could hardly call it that: there was a narrow grass verge along the edge of the parking lot and on the other side of the two-lane road that ran past this back end of the airport, a long stretch of tangled marshland. Beyond, there were briny estuaries that freshened with the tides and fed into the deep-water bay. The landscape presented much the same vista as the bus stop where I waited on the first leg of my journey back and forth to work.

The night had turned out to be colder than I expected and I had on the wrong kind of jacket. Shivering, I tried to distract myself by picking out the constellations overhead—the stars Castor and Pollux were easy to spot in Gemini, as was Orion, with the three sisters in his belt, a nebula wielded as a sword and his hunting dogs chasing him through the black sky. From the many nights I had waited here for the bus, I knew how to follow the progress of these starry markers across the seasons as fall turned to winter and then to spring when they disappeared below the horizon until the year changed over again.

When the bus finally came, I found my usual seat in the back and settled in. A while later, as I was nearing my stop, I became aware of a little jingly tune, muffled but clearly audible, that was coming from my shoulder bag. It took a few seconds for me to register what it was, and then I thought. My phone? Really? Who could possibly be calling at this hour of the night?

I pulled out the phone and said hello. In response, a man spoke to me. “Is this Laurie Perzin?” he asked.

“Who are you?” I demanded. I wasn’t going to identify myself until I knew who was on the other end of the line.

“This is Jack Shepherd,” he said. His voice had an impatient, ironic edge to it. And even at this late hour, he sounded full of energy.

Suddenly, the name and the voice fit together. Now, I knew who I was talking to. “Oh,” I said. “Up All Night.” That was the radio show I had called into last night. Jack Shepherd was the host of the program. I was going to ask him how he’d gotten my number, but then I remembered that when I’d initially dialed into the show, a taped message asked me to leave my contact information while I waited to speak to the guest on the radio. I assumed it was to call back in case someone in the call-in queue was disconnected. So that was the answer to that question—but a much more important one was why he was phoning me at all.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I thought you and I could have a chat,” Jack Shepherd said.

“A chat? It’s after one in the morning.”

“Yeah, well, I thought since you were a listener you were probably also a night bird. I mean you called in around this time, so I thought it would be okay to call you. Besides, I had a guest cancel on me, so the first hour of the show tonight is a taped segment, which means I’m not on live for a while and to be honest with you, I’m kind of bored. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself when it occurred to me that the perfect thing would be to call you up. And I’m right about the night bird thing, aren’t I? You don’t sound like I woke you up.”

“You know what?” I told Jack Shepherd. “I’m on a bus right now and it’s not the best place to talk. I should be home in a little while. I’ll call you back then.”

I didn’t give him a chance to try to persuade me to stay on the line—I just clicked off the phone. I couldn’t imagine what Jack Shepherd wanted to talk to me about, but the first thing that came to mind was that he was trying to pull some kind of a scam. Someone I had never met was calling me in the middle of the night, sounding just a little too familiar, I thought, a little too chatty; that seemed pretty suspicious to me, no matter who he was. And who was he, anyway? Some guy filling up the overnight hours by talking to every weirdo with a theory about how the government was concealing the truth about alien abductions or a method for decoding the secret messages hidden in the geometry of the Great Pyramid. I might call him back and I might not, but I wanted to think about it first.

When I got home, I opened another bottle of wine. This one had a laughing frog on the label. (What can I say? I just pulled these things out of the discount bin; I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about who made them.) Outside my window, I heard a truck pull up across the street. Its air brakes heaved a long sigh and then the street was quiet again, except for the occasional thud of a crate hitting the sidewalk. The smugglers were at it again.

I let the truck’s arrival distract me for a while, but once the noise outside settled down, I started thinking about whether or not I should return Jack Shepherd’s call. His number was in my phone, so all I had to do was hit a button or two. But I was still hesitant. What if my first instinct was right and he was trying to trick me in some way, tell me I wasn’t on the air when I really was and then involve me in some kind of embarrassing conversation? I had just about convinced myself that must have been his motive when my phone rang. I knew, even without looking at the number, that it was him again. I didn’t want to answer the phone but it’s very hard for me to just let a phone ring without picking it up. It sounds too much like it’s yelling at me.

I said hello and Jack immediately started talking. “Okay, so you didn’t call me back. Or maybe you were going to and I’m just jumping the gun.”

“You’re right,” I told him. “I wasn’t going to call.”

“Well then,” Jack said, “you would have missed out on some interesting information. That is, if you’re Avi Perzin’s niece.”

I listened to a kind of faint crackling in the phone—more background noise generated by the universe, I imagined—pinging from cell tower to cell tower across the river of night. On the other end of the connection, Jack Shepherd was listening to me breathe.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes. And yes, Avi was my uncle. How did you know him?”

“I had him on my show a couple of times. That was a lot of years ago—a lot—but he was an interesting guy. He made an impression.”

“Avi was on your show?”

I couldn’t think of why that would be. The last time I had seen Avi, I was still a child and I remembered him as a tall, lanky man, awkward and shy. The only member of my family that I knew of who had any kind of higher education, he had spent his life teaching science at a community college in the Bronx. When I was young, I was with him a lot of the time because my mother had been diagnosed with lupus soon after I was born, and with my father away all day working, Avi, who seemed to spend as much time at home studying and grading papers as he did teaching, often ended up as my caretaker. We all lived in the same apartment building in the Bronx, so at least a few times a week, my mother would send me up a couple of flights of stairs to Avi’s apartment. It was there, on wet afternoons and cold evenings with the heat banging in the radiators, that Avi told me about things like the properties of the ionosphere and about how radio and television waves could drift out into space and keep on going for an unimaginably long time (so that I envisioned people on other planets being able to watch episodes of my favorite cartoons if they could just reel them in with the right antenna).

My mother died when I was around eight and then my father had a falling out with Avi, who was my father’s younger brother. A cousin later told me that as far as she knew, the argument was about nothing much and mostly one-sided—my father was just angry at everyone after my mother passed away. My father remarried not long afterward to a jealous woman who didn’t want him to reconcile with his brother, and so prevented that from happening. We soon moved to New Jersey, which I hated; I was lonely and angry myself after I lost my mother, and the dreary, down-market landscape of the suburb we lived in made me feel like I was spending my days pacing a cage I had to escape. I had little contact with my uncle after that, though I did know that he had never married, never moved from the Bronx or changed teaching jobs, and died of cancer in his forties. There was nothing in this biography that I thought would suggest he’d be a suitable guest for a radio show devoted to strange occurrences and unexplained phenomena, but I was wrong. It turned out there was a lot I didn’t know about Avi.

“I used to invite him on pretty regularly,” Jack continued. “And once or twice he mentioned you—I mean, he mentioned that he had a niece named Laurie. When you called in last night, I thought I remembered that—after all, how many Laurie Perzins can there be?—so I went through my files. I don’t have the tapes from shows I did that long ago, but I still have my notes, and I realized I was right. One of the last times Avi was on my show, he talked about you. Well, not on the air—but afterward. He talked to me.”

That would probably have been when I was a teenager and already long gone from Avi’s life, so I was still puzzled. And, though I didn’t want to give this guy Jack Shepherd the impression that I was all that interested in what he was saying, the truth was that I was very curious. “Why?” I asked. “Do you remember what he said about me?”

There was a pause before Jack Shepherd answered. I got the feeling he was constructing the right way to answer me. Finally he said, “Yes, actually. I do.”

But that’s all he said. He was going to make me work for the answer—or at least pretend that’s what I was doing. “Okay,” I said. “You got me. What did he tell you?”

“He said that once, when you were a child, you told him you’d had a kind of close encounter. With someone you called the radioman.”

Instantly, I was aware of all kinds of internal alarms going off. I framed my response cautiously. “That’s interesting. Do you know what he meant?”

“You mean who, don’t you? And my guess would be he was referring to the same guy who came through to Ravenette last night. The psychic I had on—that’s her name, in case you didn’t catch it.”

“Maybe what she’s psychic about is people’s dreams, because that’s the only place I ever saw . . . that thing. Him. The radioman. I must have told Avi about it.” I didn’t remember doing that—in fact, I didn’t remember ever telling anyone about the shadowy figure but it was possible. Anything was possible, right?

“Well, you were a little kid,” Jack continued, mildly enough. “I guess it was easy to convince yourself that you had a dream. Sometimes, though, dreams can be like screen memories. You know, images, pictures, that screen out things you might not want to think happened to you in real life. Like an alien encounter.”

The idea seemed ridiculous to me. “Please,” I replied. “What are you suggesting? That I met ET? He wasn’t anything like that.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Fine. Definitely no cute guy with a glowing finger. But that still leaves me wondering about something. Why did you call him the radioman?”

I didn’t answer this question, preferring to ask one of my own. “Why was Avi on your show? You still haven’t explained that to me.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I have no idea. If you want to tell me, fine. If not, I’m hanging up.”

“You’re kind of cranky, aren’t you?” Jack said.

“I’m tired,” I told him. “I’ve been working all night.”

I realized that, despite my resolve to be careful, the conversation had taken on a bantering tone that wasn’t exactly unfriendly. Maybe I just couldn’t help myself; working in a bar, you get used to talking to people you just met as if you’d known them for years. But Jack Shepherd seemed to have adopted a similar attitude. Perhaps because he’d known Avi, he thought he knew me. But nobody really knew me. If I had a mantra, that was it. Nobody knew me.

“Night’s the best time to work,” Jack said. “It sharpens the focus, don’t you think?” The focus on what, he didn’t say. But he did, finally, start to talk about Avi. “So,” he began. “Avi Perzin. You know he was interested in tracking satellites, right? Well, it seems that at some point, he went to a conference of amateur radio guys—hams, mostly, but also satellite trackers—and he heard someone give a presentation about a strange phenomenon that seemed related to satellite launches. Apparently, from the time that the Soviets launched the first Sputnik, people who were tracking satellites could hear the telemetry signal that the orbiters broadcast on the frequency that was given out to the public—the Soviets, in particular, always liked to do that; they especially liked amateur radio operators to track their launches because that provided independent verification of their feat—but they also could hear another, faint pinging on a different frequency. At least, the ones who were playing around with what amounts to homegrown radio astronomy, like your uncle. You do know he was doing that, right?”

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.