~III~

Who is out there?

Well, I thought, as I clicked off the phone and concluded my conversation with Jack after managing to tell him nothing more than I’d already said, maybe I wasn’t totally lying when I said, Just me, because the honesty of my answer depended on whether or not what happened to me on the fire escape was or was not a dream. Maybe Jack Shepherd wanted to suggest that it was a screen memory—a term I had never heard before—but I wasn’t even going to waste a minute considering that as a possibility. I’d simply had a strange dream, and I couldn’t remember a time when I thought it was anything else. Still, that didn’t stop me from staying up for another hour or two, trying to remember everything I could about that night. Most of my childhood only came back to me in bits and pieces—it was not a happy time and I don’t seem to have much of it tucked away in memory—but the night I met the radioman was an exception. I remembered almost everything about it.

When I was young, there were four adults who formed the core of my family: my mother and father, my Uncle Avi, and my grandmother, the mother of my father and uncle. My grandmother, who lived with my parents, was an immigrant from Ukraine. My father was a factory worker and my mother a housewife. Avi, the college boy-turned-professor was the only one who had not only pursued an education but also had an avocation—his fascination with radios and satellites—that seemed both highly technical and beyond comprehension to his relatives. Because of these things, he was considered to be an eccentric and something of a genius. Perhaps he was both or neither; I have no real idea.

One important thing I do know about Avi was that his teaching salary, small as it may have been, made an important contribution to maintaining the one annual tradition that everyone in my family valued: spending our summer vacation in Rockaway. Once a year, Avi drove our belongings out to the beach in his car, where the adults shared the cost of renting a few rooms in a boarding house called the Sunlite Apartments. It was an old, run-down brick building with white fretwork around the outside balconies, an effect that made me think of a collapsing wedding cake. Inside, there was a warren of tiny apartments with shared bathrooms at the end of each hallway. Even pooling their resources, being able to afford a few weeks at the beach was a stretch for my family, but Avi contributed to the cost of the rent by doing repairs. Among a building full of factory workers on vacation, most of them in the garment trade, and most refugees or the children of refugees from Eastern Europe, my uncle Avi—Professor Perzin, as our neighbors called him—was the only one who knew how to repair the boiler or patch the ancient wiring in the building that was always causing someone’s hot plate to overheat or make the dim hall lights sound like they were sizzling. There were a few tenants who lived in the building all year, and the landlord would sometimes pay Avi to drive out to Rockaway in the winter when it was necessary to have something fixed.

Avi was the only person in the family who could drive, or who had ever owned a car. He was fond of Impalas, long-nosed cars with bench seats in the front. One unseasonably cold March night when I was six, he stuck me in the front seat of the latest Impala, a gold-colored vehicle that, to me, looked as big as a boat, then loaded a homemade radio receiver in the back and drove us out to Rockaway. On the way, he said he had two purposes: first, to fix a blown fuse that had knocked out the electricity for the winter residents of the Sunlite Apartments; but once he got that done, he promised me that he and I were going to be able to use the radio to listen to Sputnik 10, the newest entry in the Sputnik series. This one had just launched and would be passing over the east coast of the United States that night. The space race between the USSR and the USA was in full swing, and though we were catching up—the United States had actually sent a satellite named Explorer I into orbit just a few months after the first Sputnik was launched in 1957—the Soviets kept sending up more Sputniks, like a relentless, endlessly replenishable army of night fliers. Each time one returned to Earth, another was launched, outward bound into space. In school, our teachers were still using the launch of Sputnik as a goad to spur us on to paying more attention to our lessons and growing up to become smart people who could beat the Soviets at their own game. I don’t think I was particularly impressed by this argument—nothing anyone ever said in school energized me very much—but I was interested in the idea that you could listen to Sputnik’s successors, Soviet and American, on the radio. I had the idea that I might actually hear them speak.

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.

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.

I left the house as soon as I could. I’d be early for work but at least it would be comfortably warm in the airline terminal, and I could just sit around for a while, watching the planes take off until it was time to start my shift. I was halfway down the block, heading for the bus stop as I picked my way through the smashed-up cars parked all over the street, waiting for service at the repair shops, when a thought occurred to me—a small idea with a little bit of light around it that managed to float up through my anger. I hesitated for a moment, but then turned around and went back to my apartment.

I found two long extension cords, plugged them into each other, and then into my little heater, which I carried next door. I knocked on my neighbor’s door again—what was her name? Sassouma, I thought, or something like that—and again, when she answered, she had the baby in her arms.

“Here,” I said, offering her the heater. She shook her head, but I persisted. We had lived next door to each other for years and she had, occasionally, asked me for little bits of help, like reading something that came in the mail or filling out school forms, so I knew she wasn’t worried that I might want to extract money from her or something like that in return for the use of the heater. I had already figured out that what would concern her would be the cost of the extra electricity. These little electric heaters were helpful, but they were energy vampires, and when you’re on the kind of budget that people in this building no doubt lived on—myself included, though I was probably better off than most of my neighbors—things like that mattered a lot. “I’m going to work,” I said. “I don’t need it. And look.” I pointed to the extension cord, which was snaking out of my apartment, under my locked door. “My electricity,” I said. “I’ll make the landlord pay me back.” That, of course, was never going to happen, but Sassouma seemed to think I had it in me to work this miracle, and she finally took the heater from me, saying thank you, thank you.

I thought that doing something nice for someone else—something that would burnish my karma and make me feel like I really was managing well enough to be able to be generous to my neighbor—would make me feel better, and it did, but for just a little while. By the time I got to work, my unhappy mood had returned.

I bought a newspaper and a sandwich, and then settled myself into a seat near a gate that wasn’t currently in use. Nearby, nervous people were waiting for an outbound flight to Los Angeles. Even months after the terrorist attacks, a feeling of dread always seemed to hang over the airport, unless, of course, you were in The Endless Weekend, where as far as we were concerned, It had never happened, so I deliberately sat facing away from the anxious passengers, looking out the glass walls of the terminal. Spring was late in coming this year, and the afternoon was still dull and wintry. I watched the big planes taxi out on the runways and lift off into the hard sky, turning as they climbed over Jamaica Bay, headed either out over the ocean or inland, toward the far coast.

It did help a little to be warm, and then, when I started my shift at the bar, to be busy. Some nights everyone seemed to be drinking beer, and some nights I seemed to be on continuous cocktail duty. For whatever reason, this turned out to be a Jack Daniel’s night, which meant fewer quiet drinkers and contemplative travelers and many more raucous guys hooting and hollering at the TV screens. One of the cable channels was showing the rebroadcast of a British soccer game, and even that had its loud fans. As flights were announced and customers came and went, I just kept refilling the shot glasses. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was surprised by how quickly the night went; when the manager showed up to cash out my register and help me close up, I hadn’t yet even glanced at a clock.

But the night’s frantic pace caught up with me once I was on the bus, and I felt exhausted. I dozed more deeply than usual as we traveled along the Grand Central Parkway and then turned onto the deserted residential streets, coming fully awake only when the bus driver called out, “Hey, bartender! Isn’t this your stop?”

I was still feeling a little blurry when I unlocked the front door of my building, but then the cold hit me. I had completely forgotten about the heat problem, but now it seemed to be icier inside than outdoors. At least there was a hand-lettered sign taped near the mailboxes explaining that the boiler needed parts and would be fixed by the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know if the landlord had left it or workmen from the city, but either way, it was a good-news, bad-news situation for me because, while at least I knew that someone was working on the problem, my electric heater, as I saw when I went upstairs, was still in my neighbors’ apartment. It was too late at night to ask for it back and besides, my supposedly rising stock of karma would surely plummet somewhere below zero if I did that. So, I went inside, kept my coat on, and tried to get my mind off how cold I was by watching TV.

A couple hundred cable channels—more?—and there was still nothing on that I seemed to be able to pay attention to. I didn’t feel like listening to Jack Shepherd tonight, or fooling around with the radio, so I picked up my laptop and wandered around the Internet for a while. Eventually, even that began to bore me. Maybe being cold was making me restless and unable to concentrate. Finally, I decided to go through my mail, which was piled on my coffee table; at least I could sort through the bills I had to pay and start on that chore. But almost the first thing I came across was a letter—or what looked like an actual letter, addressed to me in someone’s handwriting. I didn’t recognize the writing and there was no return address. That was peculiar enough, but the envelope, too, was unusual: it was a deep sapphire blue, a rich hue that didn’t look like anything you’d find in a greeting card store, for example, or anywhere else that I could think of.

Maybe because of that, I had a kind of creepy feeling about this strange piece of mail, but when I finally opened it, what was inside seemed pretty mundane: it was a flier, printed on blue paper the same rich color as the envelope, offering a “Free Psychic Reading by Ravenette, World-Renowned Psychic.” At the bottom, in the same handwriting as was on the envelope, the world-renowned psychic had penned me a decidedly melodramatic note—Dear Laurie: I hope you’ll come to see me. Live on the radio wasn’t the best place for me to tell you all that I see.

When the phone rang about twenty minutes later, I had a feeling I knew who was going to be on the line, and I was right.

“Laurie?” Jack Shepherd said. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”

“Are you ever really on the radio?” I asked him. “Or are all your shows taped repeats so you can spend your time on the phone with me?”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m just calling to say hello. I kind of enjoyed our chat last night. It was interesting.”

“Maybe for you.”

“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “You’re annoyed with me. I have to tell you though, I’m not sure why.”

“That Ravenette person,” I responded. “The so-called psychic. Did you give her my phone number or anything like that?”

I hadn’t been asked to leave my home address on the tape when I’d called into the radio show, but even I knew that on the web, once you had some information about an individual, even just their name and phone number, it was pretty easy to ferret out everything else about them that you wanted to know.

“No,” he told me. “Why are you asking?”

“Because she sent me a flier and I’m wondering how she got my address.”

“She’s a psychic.”

“Very funny.” My impulse, at that moment, was to do something dramatic, like tear up the flier—and do it close enough to the phone so that Jack could hear me—but I didn’t. I just folded it up and put it back into the envelope it came in. “She’s just trying to drum up business,” I said, having decided that the “free” reading would somehow undoubtedly end up costing me tons of money.

“I don’t know if that’s all there is to it. She did ask for your number,” he admitted, “but I didn’t give it to her. Cross my heart.” He almost seemed to be playing the injured party, but that didn’t last long. Just a few moments later, he reverted right back to the personality I had gotten acquainted with in our last phone call: the guy with a lot of questions to ask. “To be honest with you, even though she sort of cut you off when you were on the air, later she did seem like she really wanted to talk to you some more. Like there was something specific she wanted to tell you—or maybe ask you. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

He was baiting me, and I knew it. “I thought we went through all this last night. There is no more.” I hoped I sounded definitive.

“Okay, fine. But if you do decide to see her and if there is something else to the story, something you’d like to share, maybe you’ll come on my show?”

“Something else like what?”

Now, on the other end of the phone, there was only silence, but in that silence, I imagined that I could hear Jack Shepherd thinking, calculating. Ravenette, apparently, wasn’t the only one who had something she wanted to tell me—so did he. He was just trying to figure out how long I would stay on the line and listen.

“Well,” he said, “when we talked the other night, you didn’t really give me a chance to chat with you about what Avi told me. What he told me about you, I mean—you and the radioman. But I’ve never forgotten it, because it was so strange.”

Jack paused for a moment waiting for a reaction from me, but I didn’t intend to give him one. I said nothing. I just listened. Finally, he continued.

“Avi said there was a night he had you with him when he drove out to Rockaway, to the building where you used to spend the summers. He fixed some electrical problem and then took you out onto the fire escape to listen to a satellite broadcast, but then he had to leave you alone for a few minutes. He said he used his belt to secure you to the railing so you’d be safe and when he returned, you were right where he’d left you and you couldn’t have reached the radio. But when he went back to it, he noticed that the frequency had been changed from the point on the dial where he remembered leaving it. Now, it was tuned to the Watering Hole. Someone had not only changed the frequency, they had turned the horn of plenty in the right direction to pick up signals on that band.”

Jack paused there for a moment. I stayed on the line, but I still wasn’t saying anything, so he kept talking.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? When Avi left you, the radio was receiving . . . I think he said a music station from Finland. He had lost the Sputnik telemetry signal and had been tuning around to try to get it back. But then he left—just briefly, he said. Very briefly. When he came back, it was tuned to the Watering Hole frequency, and on that frequency, it was picking up some sort of sound—similar to the ping of the telemetry signal, but not exactly the same. That was the first time Avi ever heard the ghost signal for himself. He said you told him that a man who looked like a shadow—you called him the radioman—had ‘changed the station.’ ”

I finally found my voice again. “Avi must have gotten mixed up,” I said.

“Your uncle didn’t seem to me like the kind of person who got mixed up about anything,” Jack replied.

That sounded like a challenge and it made me angry. “So is that the ploy? Is that what this is all about? I’ll bet you arranged with your friend Ravenette to get me to come see her so she can tell me more made-up stuff that will convince me to come on your show and talk about my childhood visit from a little green man. Are you that desperate for people to talk about crazy things?”

“First of all, I’ve never even met the woman before; she’s just someone with a lot of celebrity clients and a reputation for being good at what she does, so she filled up some air time for me. Second, I don’t ever, knowingly, put anyone on my show who’s making up a story and I don’t participate in hoaxes of any kind.”

“Okay, fine. I’m still not going to see her.”

“So don’t go,” Jack said. “Don’t find out what really happened.”

“As if she could tell me.”

“Apparently she did tell you,” Jack said. “At least part of the story, anyway. Think about that, will you?”

I was getting really pissed off now. Who was this man to be meddling in my life like this? Or at least trying to, because that’s what it felt like. I was about to hang up when it occurred to me that he’d said one thing—one—that I was interested in and if he felt free to ask me all sorts of questions, then I had one for him.

“What’s the horn of plenty?” I asked. I had never heard Avi use that terminology.

“It’s an antenna. It looks sort of like a metal cone, or maybe a better way to describe it is that it resembles a cornucopia—a horn of plenty. It’s the kind of antenna that an amateur would need to tune into the Watering Hole. Back in the sixties, they used to be huge; no one had built one small enough to transport from place to place that actually worked. Your uncle Avi was the first.”

So he meant what I had thought of as the upside-down pyramid antenna. Great. I had a new piece of knowledge. And now, as far as I was concerned, case closed.

“That’s it?” Jack said. “That’s the only thing you’re curious about?” He sounded exasperated. “You’re really not interested in anything else?”

“Not if we’re going to have this same conversation every night, no.”

“All right then,” Jack said. “Fine. I have to get back on the air anyway.”

We hung up on each other—I think we were competing for who could do that first, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on a cell phone, since there’s no receiver to slam down—and then I turned the TV back on, but still couldn’t seem to follow the story line of any show I happened upon. I read for a while, but couldn’t concentrate on that either. Finally, I tried to get to sleep, but it was so damn cold in my apartment that even wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, I was too uncomfortable to doze off. I got out of bed, went into the kitchen and turned on the stove, staring into the glass door of the old, grimy Hotpoint as if it were a fireplace. At least it warmed me up a little.

It was now about three A.M. I remembered reading somewhere that this was the hour when the majority of people who otherwise seem perfectly healthy tend to drop dead. Fantastic. This is what I was thinking about in the middle of the night, in my cold apartment, with the sound of some giant truck motor outside making my windows rattle. Maybe I could think about that, instead? What might they be smuggling tonight? Tires? DVDs? Fake designer handbags?

But smuggled goods didn’t seem very interesting at that moment, because I had suddenly started thinking about that sapphire blue flier again. When was it that I had called into Jack’s show—just a night or two ago? How, then, had Ravenette managed to get that piece of mail to me so quickly? Unless the postal service had suddenly become efficient and reliable—which maybe it was in some residential neighborhoods of the city but certainly not here, in automobile alley where the mailman seemed to only stop by when he was in the mood—it was surprising that I had gotten her communiqué in anything less than a week. But why was that even bothering me? I wasn’t sure, but it was.

Still wrapped in a blanket I had carried with me from my bed, I padded out to the living room and found the flier and the envelope it had come in still sitting on my coffee table. I picked up the envelope and realized that it did not have a stamp on it. Earlier, though it had obviously registered in the back of my mind, I must have initially overlooked this oddity because I had been so taken by the fact that the mail was hand addressed. What that had to mean was that Ravenette, or someone she had sent to my building, had not only gone to the trouble of hand delivering this flier, they had somehow opened my mailbox and put it inside. I didn’t even know how long it had been waiting for me, since I never bothered to collect my mail on any regular basis. For all I knew, she—or some minion with a set of lockpicks—could have crept over here later on the same night I spoke to her on the radio to leave me this seemingly innocuous flier. But why? Why was it so important to her?

It was certainly possible that she was just trying to bilk me out of some money by sucking me into becoming a repeat client for her supposedly psychic readings—I knew how that went; I’d seen psychic scams exposed enough times on TV—but okay, fine, I could sort of allow some grudging admiration for being creative about that, even if Jack Shepherd was somehow involved. What I couldn’t get over, though, was all the trouble she, they—whoever—were going to in order to entice me to schedule a psychic reading, if that was really what this was about. If Ravenette had my address, then she also had my phone number; she could just as easily have called, or sent the flier through the mail like anyone else would have. This complicated business of hand delivering her message, of breaking into my mailbox—because that’s what had to have happened—was meant to be some kind of message to me beyond the invitation in the flier, but what? Was I supposed to feel that I was being stalked? Or courted? The whole thing was bizarre.

Of course, there was also the fact that she knew about the radioman. It did seem possible, now, that Jack had told her Avi’s story, but on the other hand, there was no way they could have known that I was going to call into the radio show that night and have been prepared to repeat the story to me. Jack’s joke aside, I didn’t care if she really was a psychic—the idea that she could predict a random telephone call was ridiculous. So the more I thought about all these events, the stranger they all seemed.

I was never going to do anything because I was prodded to. Push me one way and I’d be sure to go another, so Jack Shepherd could call me a dozen times and he would never get me to do anything he seemed to be angling for. I would not revisit the circumstances surrounding my dream or make an appointment to hear what else Ravenette “saw” for me just so I could satisfy his curiosity. But as I sat by the stove, wrapped in my blanket, I began to focus less on Jack and more on the fact that Ravenette not only had described the radioman to me, she told me he was pointing to the fire escape. She didn’t know any of the details of the story, but she was close enough to make it very difficult for me to simply dismiss what she had told me as some sort of fluke, a random guess that she happened to have gotten right.

One by one, like nails being pulled from a great, dark wall, dawn was beginning to remove the stars from the sky. I was still really cold, but tired enough that I felt like I could finally fall asleep. I didn’t head right off to bed, though—not yet. I sat by the stove for a while longer, still trying to think things through.

Strange, strange, strange. No matter how many ways I tried to examine the stream of events that led from Jack to Ravenette to the invitation proffered by the blue flier and then added in what I now knew to be Avi’s belief that my dream was real, then strange was the only description I could come up with. (Maybe breaking into my mailbox was also a little threatening, but my well-developed ability to ignore things I didn’t want to worry about helped me lock that idea away for the time being.) To my surprise, I wasn’t as repelled by all of this as I probably should have been. In fact, I felt a sort of compulsion to see what was going to happen next—if I let anything happen. I could, for example, simply throw away the blue flier. Or, I could wait a few hours and call Ravenette. Not because Jack said I should but because, simply, left to make my own decision, I was beginning to think that maybe I wanted to. That was an interesting development, one I attributed to the fact that whatever it was inside me that for so long now had opted for playing it safe—every day in every way—was granting me a one-time pass. Or perhaps I was just being contrarian, which was a character flaw I was secretly proud of. Another explanation I could offer myself was even simpler: I didn’t have to go to work later, and it was clearly going to be another cold day in my apartment. I wondered if, in her place, Ravenette had heat.