~VI~

Two trains later plus a ride on the AirTrain monorail to the airport, I finally got to work. I was late, which made the afternoon bartender mad at me since he had to work an additional half hour for which he was going to have to fight to get paid, so the evening started out a little on the tense side. Plus, it must have been take-the-last-flights-out-for–big-business-meetings-in-Europe night, because the bar was packed with guys who didn’t have enough miles or points or clout or whatever to get into the first-class lounges, so were getting drunk at The Endless Weekend before flying off to London or Zurich or wherever else it is that thirty-something-year-olds go to help the masters of the universe keep the rest of us broke and begging for crusts of bread, so to speak. This is the kind of crowd that requires lots of service but leaves small tips, so I was not in the best frame of mind while the Knicks pounded up and down the floor of the Garden on three of the TVs in the bar, a pair of British soccer teams hammered each other on a screen in the corner and a rebroadcast of a Jets game was showing on the big flat screen right above my head. It was noisy, it was frantic, I cut my finger slicing limes (and in violation of all the health and safety rules, just ran it under cold water, did not apply antiseptic or a Band-Aid, and went back to work) and by the end of the night I was worn out and ready to kill the first person who gave me a reason to. Luckily, no one did; the manager showed up on time, checked out the register, and helped me lock up. Then, feeling even more exhausted than I usually was after eight hours on my feet, I stalked out of the bar and headed for the bus.

As I waited, I saw that Orion was getting lower in the sky, a sign that, despite the chilly weather, spring was bound to come and send the great hunter and his star dogs to roam the night on the other side of the globe. Other than that, my mind was a blank, or maybe I was deliberately trying to keep it in that state. I didn’t have the energy to think about anything, not a thing.

I thought I would doze on the bus, but couldn’t. I felt too tired to sleep, too weary to really relax. So instead, I watched the traffic passing by—cars on the highway, planes in the sky; they filled the night with lights. I just absorbed the images and the sounds, and let myself be carried home.

When I finally pushed open the front door of my building, I noticed a small pile of mail with my name on it lying in a corner of the outer lobby. That was our exasperated postman’s solution to the problem of me picking up my mail with even less regularity than he delivered it; once the tiny box couldn’t hold any more of the junk it was usually stuffed with, the postman just dumped the rest on the floor. I would have liked to kick the PennySavers and credit card offers out the front door, but then I’d probably get grief from the super for making a mess, so I picked up the pile on the floor, emptied my mailbox as well, and carried everything upstairs.

After I changed into a tee shirt and sweatpants and poured my usual glass of wine, I started going through the mail. I had been avoiding my mailbox like the plague since I’d gotten that communiqué from Ravenette and tonight the weirdness continued: in with the unwanted magazines, newsletters and other junk was an expensive-looking ivory-colored envelope with my name and address typed on the front. I don’t generally get anything addressed to me, personally, on fancy stationery, so once I realized that the return address appeared to be from a law firm I knew, instinctively, this couldn’t be good news.

And I was right. There was a letter inside, typed on the same heavy, ivory-colored stock, but I had to read it twice to grasp what it said because the message was so . . . well, bizarre. Crazy. I mean, the language wasn’t crazy—just the opposite; it was clipped, precise and to the point—but the message was decidedly outrageous. It was from a law firm called Robinson and Reynolds and the letter was signed by someone named Henry Robinson, Esq., writing in his capacity as counsel for Raymond Gilmartin, who was referred to as the “Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness.” After imparting this information, the letter went on to say that it had recently come to the attention of Mr. Gilmartin that I was in possession of a Blue Box. Blue Boxes, Henry Robinson, Esq., stated, were religious, i.e., “devotional” items sacred to the Blue Awareness and, as such, should be returned to the church, specifically to Mr. Gilmartin, who in the second reference to his exalted personage, was described as the “paramount ecclesiastical authority” of the Blue Awareness. This return of said devotional item should be carried out, stated Mr. Robinson, “forthwith.”

The letter seemed so ridiculous to me that my first reaction was just to stuff it in the garbage and forget about it. To begin with, what I had was not really a Blue Box. Further, what were they going to do if I did not—forthwith—get in touch with Mr. Robinson and arrange for the handover of this sacred item? That is, if I could even find it.

I got up off the couch and went into my bedroom, where I rummaged around in my closet for a while. Somewhere in the back, I found what I was looking for: a battered old valise with leather straps that had once belonged to my father. Inside were the few things I always wanted to keep, but had no real use for, including some costume jewelry of my mother’s, a couple of photo albums, and assorted other mementos—including the “toy” that I had taken from Avi’s apartment after he died. The supposed Blue Box. Since I had never explained to Ravenette how I happened to have this device—and since she was obviously the person who had reported to the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness, and/or his representatives, that I had a Blue Box—she must have really believed the accusation she’d leveled at me: that I had somehow stolen the thing or otherwise acquired it in some devious manner. I still didn’t think it was any of her business, but I also had the feeling that the only way I was going to stop her and the chairman from hounding me about this was to write back to Mr. Robinson and explain to him that I was not in possession of a sacred religious object but rather, as I now knew, a simple electronic device that my uncle had built himself.

Even so, I expected to be obsessing about the attorney’s letter for the rest of the night, which was going to make it even more difficult for me to unwind. But that turned out not to be the case. Having come to the decision to write back and, essentially, just say fuck off (actually, to say that for the second time in one day, which might have been a personal record, but maybe not) made me feel a lot better than I had since I’d left Jack’s studio. I took myself off to bed and slept soundly until late the next morning.

And when I woke up, I had what I thought was a great idea: instead of writing back to the Blue Awareness attorney myself, why didn’t I get my own attorney to send an equally snotty letter to Mr. Robinson, Esq.? That would certainly help me feel a lot less like I was just letting myself be victimized by all these crazy people. And I knew just where to find an attorney without too much trouble; every day, as I rode the bus to the airport, I passed a strip mall where there was a storefront lawyer’s office. There was a sign in the window advertising the fact that the attorney, whose name I couldn’t recall at the moment, was an immigration specialist, but I imagined that even so, I could get him to write a letter for me. I already knew what I wanted to say; I just wanted the message to come from someone who could also put “Esq.” after his name.

I looked up the attorney online and found that his name was Victor Haberman. I called, explained what I needed to the receptionist (saying I wanted to respond to a letter I’d received about the disputed ownership of a piece of property) and was told that, indeed, Mr. Haberman could help me with that. I made an appointment for the following afternoon.

The next day, I left earlier than usual and rode the bus only as far as the strip mall. Though the weather was milder than it had been for weeks, the lawyer’s office was close enough to the airport for even light gusts of wind to bring with them the strong odor of jet fuel. Still, there was enough sunshine to suggest that maybe the season was finally going to change itself from winter to spring. A clump of bushes bordering the parking area outside the storefronts was beginning to display some ragged greenery and it felt good to be able to shrug off my jacket as I crossed the parking lot without feeling like I was going to freeze.

Inside, I gave my name to the receptionist, a bored-looking young woman sitting at a metal desk with nothing on it but a calendar, a phone and a computer that she stared at once in a while, tapping a few keys with a decided lack of enthusiasm. I settled myself into a chair and, since there wasn’t a magazine or newspaper around to read, passed the time watching the sunlight and shadows drift across the parking lot that divided the strip mall from the highway beyond.

After a while, the phone on the receptionist’s desk buzzed. Without even answering it, she pointed me toward a door at the end of a short hallway behind where she was seated and told me that Mr. Haberman was now ready to see me.

Victor Haberman turned out to be a slightly overfed middle-aged man with a very businesslike air about him. However, in contrast to his receptionist’s barren terrain, Mr. Haberman’s office was something of an organized mess: there were papers everywhere—on his desk, in piles on the floor, in boxes on the sagging couch shoved up against a wall. It occurred to me that perhaps people just got off the airplanes landing half a mile away and showed up in Haberman’s office asking for help with their immigration status, and that all these papers were really piles of problems and woe.

Haberman shook my hand and then fitted himself into a big, tired-looking leather chair waiting for him behind his desk. I sat opposite him, facing a window that framed a view of the highway. From this vantage point the sky looked white-washed; in the distance, I could see the control tower at the airport, a pale monolith that had the misleading appearance of being empty, abandoned.

“So,” Haberman said, folding his hands in front of him on the desk, “what can I do for you? You said something about a property dispute? That’s really not my field but if it’s a straightforward issue . . .”

“It is,” I interrupted. “At least, I think so. It’s not really about property—I mean, not land or anything like that. It’s about an electrical device my uncle built.”

Hearing that, Mr. Haberman looked interested; maybe he welcomed a change from his usual cases. He stood up, took off his jacket, and draped it across the back of his chair. When he was seated again, he leaned forward and said, “What kind of device?”

“Have you ever heard of the Blue Awareness?” I asked him.

“It’s that celebrity religion, right?” Since I’d walked into his office, the attorney had kept a dour expression on his face that signaled he was a serious man doing serious work, but now, he almost smiled. “My daughter watches those entertainment news shows,” he explained.

I said yes, and added what I knew that was relevant. “As part of the way you advance through the levels of their religion, you go through a process they call scanning, which involves being hooked up to a contraption—a Blue Box is the name they use—that supposedly measures the resistance emanating from your body when you discuss experiences in your past. The memories of those experiences are called engrams. Anyway, my uncle built one of these devices. Now, an attorney for the Blue Awareness wants me to turn it over to them.”

I showed Haberman the letter and, after he’d had a chance to read it, explained as much as I thought would be helpful, including how Avi had built the box as evidence for an FDA lawsuit. “I can’t imagine why I would have to give it to them when it never belonged to them in the first place.”

“Is your uncle still living?” Haberman asked.

“No,” I told him.

“But you have the box?”

“I do. I’ve had it for years—since he died.”

“Do you have any kind of proof that he built the device and didn’t somehow acquire it from these people? Something relating to the FDA lawsuit, for example? That material should be part of the public record.”

I thought immediately of Jack’s thick file. I had no doubt that the kind of documents Haberman was asking for were in there somewhere. Still, I wasn’t eager to get back in touch with Jack Shepherd right now.

“I know who probably has those kinds of documents,” I told the attorney. “But is it really necessary for me to get them?”

“Is that going to be a problem?” Haberman asked, sounding a little suspicious.

“I’d have to talk to . . . a friend of mine,” I explained. “He has a bunch of stuff he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act inquiry.”

“Really?” Haberman said. “The Freedom of Information Act?” He picked up the letter again and studied it for a moment, as if it might have contained some hidden meaning he’d missed the first time he read it. “It’s hard to imagine that ownership of this thing is such an issue. But I suppose if they view it as some sort of religious object . . .”

“There is one thing that might help. The box I have was constructed from parts made by a company that used to manufacture kits to build radios and equipment related to radio broadcasting. The parts are clearly marked with the company name.”

“I don’t think that’s evidence enough to support your claim that it never belonged to anyone else—anyone outside your family. It could have been a prototype, for example. Or built by a member of the group for the purpose they state in their letter—a religious purpose. The problem is that you can’t prove how it came into your possession.” He frowned again. “It would be best if you could get me the backup material, and then I’ll respond to them on your behalf. I’ll need a small retainer up front.”

He wanted $150. Since I’d expected to have to pay something, I’d brought my checkbook with me. I wasn’t happy about having to spend so much money—including, he told me, another $150 once our business was concluded—but I wanted this issue dealt with and out of my life.

I left Haberman with the idea, not a promise, that I’d get the papers he wanted. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to make myself call Jack. I knew that I didn’t want to, but was debating with myself whether I should or not. It would mean telling him about this latest chapter in my unexpected and—well, bizarre, what other word was there for it?—run-in with the Blue Awareness. So far, all Jack had done was get me even more involved with them by pushing me to see Ravenette. Even if he couldn’t have foreseen the consequences, I blamed him for the crap I was dealing with now. On the other hand, of course, was Haberman’s insistence that he needed copies of the documents Jack had. As I waited outside for the next bus to come by, all I could think was shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

That night, at The Endless Weekend, the waitress I was working with kept disappearing into the back to take calls from her boyfriend, which left me busier than I should have been. I didn’t mind it all that much, though, because running back and forth between the bar and the tables kept me too occupied with keeping orders straight and customers’ glasses full to obsess over what I should do. But some part of my mind must have been debating the question, because when the waitress finally decided to get back to work and try to earn some tips, I took a break to make a phone call of my own—one I would have bet another $150 that I would have ended up deciding not to. But I had come up with a plan.

Unfortunately, my plan—which was to ask for the copies but not exactly tell Jack why—had a very brief life span. I called him at midnight, when the various radio networks that syndicated his show took over the airwaves for about eight minutes for a news and weather update. I figured that would naturally limit our conversation. So, without mentioning anything about how unpleasantly our last meeting had ended, I simply asked him if he could fax me copies of the documents relating to my uncle’s role in the FDA lawsuit.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“Because I’d like to have them.”

“Why?” Jack asked again.

“Because I think it would be interesting to read them. Because I’d like to keep them with the Blue Box—I mean, the Wheatstone Bridge—I have. As a kind of record of Avi’s work.”

“Really?” Jack said.

“Really,” I replied.

“You know what?” Jack said. “I don’t think I believe you. From what you’ve told me, you’ve managed to get through your entire adult life without being interested in your uncle’s work. And now all of a sudden, you want to compile some sort of record about this particular aspect of it? Why? What’s going on?”

Even though I was not being honest about my motives, I was taken aback by what Jack had just said. He made it sound like I had no regard for Avi at all, which wasn’t true. Still, it made me feel bad—or maybe guilty. It was my father’s choice to more or less sever his ties with his brother, not mine. When I was a teenager, I could have made the effort to get back in touch with him again, but I had been too preoccupied with my own problems to even think of that. It was something to regret.

I must have fallen silent for a moment, because the next thing I heard from Jack was a sharp question. “Are you still there?”

“Can you just please let me have copies of the papers?” I asked. “I saw a fax machine in your office and we have one here, too. I’ll give you the number. Just send them over to me, okay?”

Maybe I sounded upset enough to make Jack decide to stop questioning me—or it could have just been the fact that the news broadcasts were about to come to an end and he had to get back on the air. “All right,” he said. “I’ll fax them over later. But if something’s happened . . . has Ravenette gotten in touch with you again?”

“I haven’t heard from Ravenette,” I said, and hung up on him.

I half expected that Jack wouldn’t send me the documents until I was more forthcoming about why I wanted them, but he did. Before we locked up for the night, I went into our back office just in case, and found that he’d faxed me twenty-some-odd pages of material pertaining to Avi’s interactions with the FDA about the Blue Boxes. And, there was both a diagram—drawn and labeled in Avi’s handwriting, which I was pleased to see that I still recognized—of the Wheatstone Bridge he had built as well as a photograph of the device. The photo was a copy of a copy, so it was somewhat grainy, but it certainly looked to me like the small, squat black box with the metal canisters attached to it that had spent a good part of its life packed away in my father’s old suitcase.

I took the copies home with me and, on the way to work the next day, dropped them off at Haberman’s office. He wasn’t around, but the bored receptionist managed to will herself to engage in verbal communication long enough to tell me that she would see that her boss got the documents. When he sent off the letter to the lawyers for the Blue Awareness, she added, he’d put a copy in the mail for me, too.

The letter arrived a few days later. I read it and felt satisfied that it sounded formal, serious and final enough to get the attorneys for the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness to leave me alone. I went off to work—I had a Friday to Tuesday shift to do—and managed not to think about Blue anything all through the weekend and on into the next week.

Wednesday morning, I was fast asleep when my phone rang. I felt like I had been ripped from the depths of dreamland and thrown back into daylight. I grabbed for my cell phone, which was on my nightstand, and as soon as I pushed the button to connect to the call, I heard what sounded like a man screaming.

And I was right. The man was Victor Haberman, and he was screaming at me.

“Get over here,” he was yelling into the phone. “Get here right now!”

“Where are you?”

“My office! It’s un-fucking believable.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. Victor Haberman sounded like he was in a state of genuine panic.

“This is your fault!” he shouted. “I’ve called the police!” And then he clicked off the phone.

The police? That didn’t sound good. I got out of bed, splashed my face with water, pulled on some clothes and called the local car service because I didn’t think I had time to wait for a bus. Whatever was going on, I wanted to get to the strip mall quickly. Well, really, I didn’t want to go there at all, but I knew I had to. Haberman had not even given me a clue about what had happened to his office that was freaking him out, but since he was blaming me, it wasn’t hard for me to guess just who was most likely to be involved.

At first, when I arrived at the strip mall, it didn’t seem like anything worthy of causing havoc was going on. That is, until I stepped out of the hired car and started walking toward Haberman’s office. It took a few moments, I think, for my brain to actually register what I was seeing: in the middle of the row of drab storefronts—a nail salon, a Laundromat, a sandwich shop—the plate glass window that fronted Haberman’s office was obscured by wide smears of bright blue paint.

As I approached, Haberman came out the front door and, spotting me immediately, ran up to me and grabbed my arm. His face was red and he still seemed to be just as agitated as he’d sounded on the phone. His breath was ragged. In fact, he sounded like he was panting.

“Look at this!” was about all he could get out as he gestured wildly at the paint-smeared window. I looked again and saw that blue paint had been splattered on the front door, as well.

“Have the police been here yet?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Come and gone,” he choked out. “They said vandalism. Just vandalism. Ha!”

“You don’t think so?” I asked. I was being disingenuous, and I knew it.

“It’s those nuts you had me write to!” he spit out. He was beginning to breathe a little better, but that only seemed to send him back into screaming mode. “Those Blue . . . blue lunatics. It has to be them, right? I mean, blue paint—I get the message. But I had no idea they’d do anything like this. Did you?” he said. Turning to face me directly, his face displayed an accusing glare. “Did you?” he repeated.

Did I? The only honest answer to that was both yes and no. But really, more no, because I simply couldn’t have imagined that they would have responded with such vehemence. Despite what I saw as Jack’s attempts to freak me out about what the Blue Awareness might be capable of, his warnings hadn’t sounded real to me. Or maybe I had just assumed that whenever representatives of the Awareness felt moved to retaliate against someone for a perceived transgression, their actions would be confined to their own members. And I’d also thought that in a time when their most prominent spokespeople were athletes and celebrities and they ran ads on television inviting people to come to their introductory sessions to see how open-minded and inclusive they were, their days of acting thuggishly against those who angered them were past. Looking at the paint splattered across the front of the attorney’s place of business, I had to admit that I had been wrong. The celebrities were their public face. What I was seeing here was their real identity. Behind the pretty people and the TV ads with soft voices speaking in comforting tones, there was still violence. And clearly, some sort of unfettered need to assert power over anyone who crossed them.

I hadn’t yet responded to Haberman’s question, so now he interrupted my thoughts by answering it himself. “They’re angry at you, so they’re taking it out on me.”

“But it’s such a bizarre thing to do,” I said. It was, but that was the point, and I got it. What they had done was supposed to seem bizarre. Something like breaking a window would have been frightening, but this was both frightening and strange. I was getting the feeling that they liked strange. And why not? It was the same inclination they’d shown by breaking into my mailbox. Strangeness was at the root of Howard Gilmartin’s experience with the radioman; he had transferred that sense of strangeness to his stories and to the religion that had grown out of them. And it still remained.

“I’m finished,” Haberman said to me. “I don’t want to be involved with this anymore. I’m going to give you half your retainer back and send them a formal letter explaining that I’m no longer your attorney. I don’t need this kind of trouble.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“I can give you the names of some other lawyers. I think you need someone—a firm—that’s used to dealing with situations like this.”

“Like what?”

Haberman seemed perplexed by my question. “Like having a crazy religious group out to get you.”

“I don’t know if crazy is really the right word.”

“This doesn’t seem crazy to you?” Haberman said, gesturing at his ruined windows.

“It seems extreme,” I agreed. “That’s how they get what they want. Or keep what they have. Either they seduce you or scare you.” I was thinking of Ravenette and her quicksilver change from my new friend, concerned with my welfare, to an angry foe. “Seducing didn’t work with me so now they’re going to try scaring me.”

“Try?” Haberman exclaimed. “Try? This isn’t working?” Again, he waved his hand in the direction of the blue-stained storefront. I found myself wondering if the bored receptionist was still inside, still tapping away at her keyboard, already having lost interest in the incident that had managed to temporarily interrupt what to her probably seemed like just one more endless workday.

“You know what?” I said to him, realizing I was as surprised as he was going to be by my answer. “No. Not really.”

“Then you’re the crazy one,” he said. Angrily, he turned and strode away from me. As I watched him head back toward his office, I saw him pull out his cell phone, punch in a number and quickly start barking at someone else.

I stayed in the parking lot for a few minutes longer, staring at the long, ragged swipes of blue paint. To my eyes, the pattern formed a code I could easily decipher, and what it said was, Watch out, Laurie. Don’t play with us. So Haberman was certainly right. I should have been scared. I wanted to be scared; that would have been the normal reaction to such a clear threat. But the more I stared at the blue paint splashed across the blank windows, the more I felt something quite opposite from fear. It was as if that one-time pass I had given myself when I got Ravenette’s letter, the chance to take a break from the routine of my very ordinary, very as-basic-as-basic-can-get existence, was unexpectedly being renewed. And with it came wandering back all the wild recklessness I had drummed out of myself over the years in order to get some control of my life; that, too, was now making a case for its right of return.

In other words, while I knew that what I should have been doing was considering whether or not to go talk to the police myself, or at least mulling over the possibility of engaging a new lawyer—or maybe a bodyguard—I was, instead, thinking only one thing. And that was, Go ahead. Bring it on.