~X~

Over the next couple of weeks, I noticed that my dog—and he was definitely my dog now, as bonded to me as I had become to him—seemed to remain in a heightened state of anxiety, or at least alertness. He was eating less and often, in the night, jumped off the bed to pace back and forth between the bedroom and the front door of my apartment. And every night, when I came home from work, I would see him in the window, ears twitching above his wedge-shaped skull, seemingly poised to leap through the glass and come looking for me if I didn’t get home exactly when I was supposed to.

I began to worry about him a bit, so decided it was time to take him for a checkup. When I’d gotten him, I’d been so overwhelmed by everything that had happened—the break-in on the previous night and then the visit from my neighbor and her cousin, the somewhat grim professor of French literature, Dr. Carpenter—that it had never even occurred to me to ask questions like whether or not the dog needed vaccinations or anything like that. So I made an appointment at a nearby veterinary clinic, and brought him in on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when I was off from work. The vet, a Dr. Tyner, who turned out to be a serious young guy with lots of snapshots of his four-legged patients in the waiting room, earnestly shook my hand after an assistant ushered me into an exam room. Then the doctor took a good, long look at my dog and asked his name.

When I told him, he asked me to spell it and then carefully corrected a mistake in how his assistant had entered it on the chart she had started for Digitaria.

“That’s an unusual name,” he said.

I didn’t want to try to explain the whole story—visitors from the interstellar neighborhood of Sirius and the dark star that was its invisible companion star seemed like a bit much for a first visit to a vet’s office—so I just said that it was a Dogon name, and explained that the Dogon were an African tribe.

“That makes sense,” Dr. Tyner said. “He has the look of a pariah dog. He’s narrow, and has that curled tail.”

I probably looked like I was not happy to have my dog called a pariah, and that made Dr. Tyner smile. “It’s not an insult,” he said. “It just means that they’re hardy animals. They live with nomads and tribespeople who follow their herds. When life’s hard for the people, it is for the dogs, too.”

As he spoke to me, Dr. Tyner was examining Digitaria, who he had hoisted up onto an examining table. All the while, the dog kept his eyes focused on me. And I got the message: he was only enduring this going-over for me, because I wanted him to.

“Well,” Dr. Tyner said, “we’ll give him the regular inoculations, but otherwise, he seems fine. In fact, he seems like a particularly hardy fellow. He is a little thin, but that may be natural for him.”

“I think he’s been anxious,” I said. “I mean, he’s been pacing a lot.”

Dr. Tyner gave me an inquisitive look. “Have you maybe been upset about anything lately? Sometimes dogs pick up on how their owners feel and start acting the same way.”

“My apartment was broken into a couple of weeks ago. That’s actually how I got the dog. Someone gave him to me.”

“So he’s a watchdog,” Dr. Tyner said. “Has anything else happened since you got him?”

I thought about Ted Merrill and his big, threatening smile, but didn’t think I could explain that to the vet, either. “No,” I said. “Not at home.”

“So, Digitaria,” Dr. Tyner said to my dog, who was still standing on the metal examining table, “did you hear that? You’ve been doing your job, so you can relax a little. I’ll even tell you something that might help. Most bad people are afraid of dogs, so just the fact that you’re around is a good thing for your friend Laurie.” And then he patted Digitaria on the head.

I left with a receipt for the $125 I had put on my credit card to pay for the exam, but the cost was balanced somewhat by an appreciation for the vet’s good humor about my concern that the dog was acting a little odd. And I liked that Dr. Tyner talked to him the way I had found myself talking to Digitaria almost from the beginning, as if he understood me, which meant it was reasonable to speak to him in pretty much the same way I did everybody else. Never mind that I knew there was a much more logical case to be made that, other than vets, the people who talked to their dogs as if they understood every word probably were mostly old ladies, or else lonely souls and other odd types.

In any case, maybe the dog did understand Dr. Tyner’s reassurances—at least, I decided to believe he did—because Digitaria did seem to calm down after visiting the vet. Though he kept up his nightly vigil at the window when I was due home from work, the pacing back and forth between the bedroom and front door stopped, and he was even eating a little more. Sometimes he even wagged his tail when he saw me opening a can of his food and since generally, he wasn’t much of a tail wagger, I took a kind of silly pleasure in thinking that I was making him happy.

During these few weeks that I later thought of as a brief lull in our lives, an interlude between my visit from Ted Merrill—which I had started thinking of as the Night of the Big Smile—and what came next, Jack and I kept in touch. Whenever we could arrange it, we met in the city for lunch. He liked to eat somewhere in the Village, where we had both lived at different times when we were younger. Afterward, we sometimes went for a walk around the neighborhood, and Jack and I both took turns pointing out to each other where shops or businesses we remembered used to be but weren’t anymore. From the far west side, near the river, where the Socialist Workers Party had had their headquarters and turned out political tracts on mimeograph machines, to radical bookstores and chess clubs and coffee bars, Jack, in particular, seemed to have a geography in his head that had been overlaid by a new grid of streets, new buildings, and a new millennial affluence that had turned old neighborhoods into fashionable quarters, unaffordable to most of their original residents. But he didn’t seem overly nostalgic about any of this, just interested in how time and change fought with memory to establish precedence. Which was more real: the Village he remembered—more gay than straight, more hipster-friendly than home to fashionistas, more hole-in-the-wall than penthouse in the sky; or the one where we often had to make a reservation at some tiny restaurant on Bedford Street or Jane or Great Jones or Little West Twelfth because the rich and famous (or just plain rich) were edging us out of all the places that people like Jack and I used to take for granted as being ours?

One morning, though, Jack phoned me so early—early for me, anyway—that he woke me up, and asked if we could have a late breakfast. I had to be at work in the afternoon so I wasn’t eager to travel all the way to the Village and then navigate my way by subway back to Queens to catch the AirTrain out to Kennedy, but Jack suggested something else. He wanted to meet at a diner off the Grand Central Parkway. I knew the place because it was near the strip mall where Victor Haberman had his office. On my bus ride to work every day, I still passed my very-much-ex-attorney’s office (I had received a registered letter from him, copied to the Blue Awareness’s attorneys and about half the senior administrative managers of the group listed on their website officially resigning from my “case”) and knew that it had taken weeks for him to clean up the mess that had been left by the blue paint that had been smeared all over his windows, door, and even the sidewalk.

An hour later, I caught the bus heading toward the airport, but got off before my usual stop, right across the street from the diner. It was a hazy morning, the weather almost summery, but this was hardly a spot to appreciate the mild season. Stuck on the edge of the parkway, between Flushing Meadow Park, with its shallow ponds and rusty barbeque pits, and the seemingly mile-high rows of balconied co-ops squeezed together on the boulevard stretching toward the city, the diner had the feel of a place sitting uneasily on a temporary foundation. Everybody inside seemed anxious, gulping down coffee and singed toast in the rush to get from one place to another. This was just a stop on the road when you were in-between destinations and ready to hurry on.

Jack was sitting at a booth near a window that presented a view of the traffic speeding past on the parkway and in the distance, planes lifting themselves off the tarmac at Kennedy and angling upward into the sky. He had a plate of eggs in front of him that he wasn’t eating, and an empty coffee cup.

When I sat down across from him, Jack offered me a quick greeting and then, almost immediately, started explaining why he’d wanted to meet. Something had happened.

“The company that syndicates my show is called Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks,” Jack began. “I knew they’d been working on a merger or a sale for a year now; a number of media conglomerates seemed interested, and as far as I was concerned, it would just mean a change in the name on my contract. But two days ago, I got a call from a friend on the corporate side who told me there’s a new bidder and they’re offering a ton of money. Make that a ton-and-a-half. So you know who suddenly wants to buy the Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks?”

I sighed. “The Blue something, right?”

“Blue Star Communications,” Jack told me. “Both the president of the company and the chairman of the board are Awares. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Blue Star’s single condition for going forward with the purchase of Coast-to-Coast is that, once the deal is done, they drop my show. Meaning, kick me off the air.”

“So now you’re going to suffer because of me.”

“Laurie,” Jack said, “we can go back and forth about who dragged who into this mess, but one thing I know is that this part of it is all my own doing. I’ve gone out of my way to make them angry.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “Because I won’t give them a radio antenna I don’t even have, they’d go to these lengths to . . . what? I don’t even understand what the point is of going after you.”

“Ravenette warned us they would.”

“I haven’t forgotten that. It still seems pretty extreme.”

Jack gave me a wry look. “I take it you haven’t been listening to the show. I told you, I haven’t exactly been trying to placate them. I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately, and they’ve been pretty outspoken about the trials and tribulations of being a member of the Blue Awareness if you’re not high up the ladder. Or in favor with someone who is. Most of the people who’ve talked to me on the air have spent their life savings, or went deeply into debt, to pay for what the group calls Awareness training—all that Blue Box stuff, and more—and then were harassed nearly to the breaking point when they finally left. I guess Raymond Gilmartin isn’t too happy about my having them on the show where they can spill the blue beans, so to speak.”

“Do you think Raymond himself is after you?”

“I doubt that anything the Blue Awareness does happens without his say-so. And this is how they are, this is what they do. It’s bad enough if you’re just a regular member and turn against them. But if you’re someone like me—someone with a public platform—I guess they view that as a real threat. So I’d say we’re way beyond their issues with you now. Way beyond.”

I looked out the window, into the dusty haze of sunshine that had spread itself across the sky, all the way to the horizon. We were almost alone in the diner now. This was the dead time, the half hour or so before morning rolled over into afternoon when no one was ready to sit down and eat lunch yet, or grab more coffee. One waitress was outside taking a cigarette break; another was sitting at the counter, slowly going through a pile of receipts.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m flying out to LA this afternoon; that’s where Coast-to-Coast has its headquarters. I’ve got a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of programming. I want him to tell me to my face that they’re thinking of dropping my show. It can’t be anything financial because I bring in plenty of ad revenue and as far as I know, they don’t have any trouble selling my commercial slots. But just in case this Blue Star deal does go through, I’ve also got a meeting scheduled with the World Air satellite people. They might be interested in carrying my program,” he said. Suddenly, a kind of lopsided grin appeared on his face. “I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I guess that’s a little weird—given the context. A satellite radio company might just save the day.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe Avi’s pulling some strings somewhere.”

“A ghost with influence? He’d make a great posthumous guest for the first satellite show.”

I drank some of the coffee that had been brought to me before the lull and started picking at Jack’s plate of cold eggs. “All this is totally crazy,” I said. “I wish there was a way to just . . . I don’t know. Make it all go away.”

“Too late,” Jack said. “You can’t un-know things.”

“Sometimes I wish I could.”

“Yeah, sometimes we all wish that. But maybe it’s better to be . . .”

I couldn’t help myself; I finished his sentence for him. “Better to be what? Aware?”

He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. Aware. But promise me you won’t go over to the other side while I’m away, all right?”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I replied.

Jack had driven to the diner but had decided that he didn’t really want to leave his car at one of the public lots at the airport, so he asked me to do him a favor by taking care of it for a few days. I said sure, so he paid the bill and then I rode with him to the airport, where we said good-bye and I took over the wheel. I drove the car along the looping roads that ran around the outskirts of the terminals to a distant spot I knew, near the huge sheds where salt and snowplows were locked up during the warmer months. There was an employee parking lot here, where I was able to leave the car and then catch one of the airline courtesy vans back toward the main area of the airport. I was early for my shift, so I sat around in the back of the bar for a while, near the lockers, reading a book. It was a spy novel and I had been absorbed by it, but suddenly it just couldn’t hold my attention anymore. Compared to my own life, the spy’s problems seemed easily solvable. Make a few well-placed phone calls. Shoot someone. Or else say, I give up. Or maybe, if it seemed like it would work better in certain circumstances, I give in.

TWO DAYS later, I had a rare Saturday off. I woke up feeling restless—something that seemed to be happening to me more and more lately—and wandered around my apartment for a while, picking things up and putting them down somewhere else. I was sort of hungry but sort of not. I thought that if I took the dog out for a while I’d work up an appetite, so I put on his leash and led him out of the building. We wandered up toward Queens Boulevard, where I bought some breakfast concoctions at a McDonald’s and then walked back to my neighborhood.

It was a mild day, but overcast. I didn’t feel like going back inside, so I sat on the stoop, sharing the food I’d bought with my dog. After a while, one of Sassouma’s children—a boy of around fourteen—came out of the building, walking the family’s little dust-colored pet. I said hello to the boy, who solemnly smiled back at me. A moment later, Digitaria turned his head and pointed it upward, seeming to sniff the air above the other dog, which did much the same thing, as if both animals somehow occupied a larger space than their actual size would suggest. Then, without any further interaction between them, Digitaria went back to eating part of a biscuit while the other dog quietly followed his owner away, down the block.

I watched them go and then returned to my own thoughts, which, much like my earlier behavior in my apartment, went from one thing to another without lighting anywhere. The problem was that I still felt like I couldn’t settle down. Eventually, it occurred to me that since I had Jack’s car, maybe Digitaria and I could go for a ride somewhere. Maybe the beach, I decided. My last visit to Rockaway, odd and unhappy as it was, had been months ago—long enough to use my talent for dissembling to pretend it hadn’t happened. Besides, I suddenly had a strong yearning to go back, which I decided meant that my happy memories of summers at the beach were reoccupying their rightful place in my mind, which seemed like a good thing to me. When I was a child, I had liked gray days at the beach almost as much as sunny ones. Days that were slightly gloomy were tailor-made for reading or just sitting on the boardwalk, watching the waves stretch themselves toward the shore and then slowly slide back, as if into a great, gray bowl, pulling shells and pebbles with them. Besides, I had recently read in the newspaper about how, after decades of neglect, urban development was finally coming to Rockaway, though the area targeted for gentrification was much farther up the peninsula from where my family used to spend their summers at the Sunlite Apartments. Two or three miles away from that desolate spot, condo developers were putting up new townhouses, building gated communities that were supposedly going to bring this old working class getaway back to some semblance of its former respectability. Why not go see how that was coming along? At least, it would give me something to do with the restless energy that, so far, had been the animating feature of my day. And because I had the car, the dog could ride along with me. On pet food commercials I’d seen on TV, people were always taking their dogs for walks along the beach. Both the people and the pets seemed to enjoy it; maybe we would, too.

I gave the last bites of my breakfast to Digitaria and then led him to Jack’s car, which I had parked a few blocks away. After I unlocked the passenger-side door, he jumped right in and faced forward, giving every impression that he was familiar with the idea of car rides. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and tuned the radio to a station that was playing some hard-line rock and roll.

“We’re going to the beach,” I said to my dog. “You’re going to get to chase some seagulls.” At the sound of my voice, Digitaria turned to me, but then quickly went back to looking out the window. “So here we go,” I said, as I eased the car out of its parking spot and headed toward Woodhaven Boulevard, which I could follow to Cross Bay Boulevard and out across the causeways and bridges that led to Rockaway.

It was a drive of about forty-five minutes. The last part of the trip took us across a toll bridge that grabbed onto the peninsula right in the middle, on the bay side. Turning left would lead me to the streets where I had spent my summers. Turning right took me in an unfamiliar direction, up toward the northern end of the peninsula which, even years ago, had always been the more affluent area.

At the termination of the bridge, I took the unfamiliar turn to the right. At first, as I drove along, I saw what I expected: a few surf shops, some bars and restaurants, the usual street scene of a seaside town. But then, finally—as if the photos I had seen in the newspaper had sprung into life—I found myself driving past block after block of newly erected townhouses painted the color of foam, decorated with trim work in sandy hues. Some of the buildings were shingled like a glossy magazine’s vision of coastal cottages, some bristled with balconies and faux widow’s walks. It certainly didn’t look like the ruined neighborhood I had encountered last winter, nor did it in any way resemble the Rockaway I remembered from childhood. This was something new, something created to fit a new reality, new people, new money. I felt like a complete stranger here, completely out of place.

There were no spaces available to park along the street—signs warned nonresidents away—so I turned around and drove back toward the more commercial area, where I found a parking spot about a block from the beach. I clipped Digitaria’s leash back on his collar, got out of the car and led the dog toward the boardwalk.

In just a couple of weeks, when the summer season officially opened, lifeguards would be stationed at regular intervals along the sand and police cars would be patrolling the boardwalk, so I would never have been able to take Digitaria down to the beach because dogs were officially not permitted. But at this time of year there was no one around to object, so we crossed the boardwalk and went down a wooden ramp to the sand.

Since the day was cool and windy and the sky was overcast, there weren’t very many people on the beach, though an occasional group had set up lounge chairs and umbrellas and were playing cards or just chatting. Other people—some singly, some in pairs—were stretched out on towels, reading or listening to the radio. It was a pleasant scene and I felt more at ease here. Now, finally, I was glad I had come.

Digitaria didn’t seem so sure. He let me lead him onto the beach but then sat down before we’d gotten halfway to the shoreline and stared out at the ocean, which I suppose he’d never seen before. He tilted his head from side to side as if examining this unexpected vista from every possible angle.

He must have finally decided that this new environment was not threatening, because he soon raised himself off his haunches and trotted down to the water. He began—at first tentatively and then eagerly—to splash around at the edge of the waves as they rolled in and out, growling low in his throat. I assumed he was playing some sort of chasing game with the tide, and unclipped his leash to give him more freedom to run around.

But after just a few minutes of carefree play, he suddenly stopped where he stood, and became absolutely still. I could see his body tense as the chilly seawater bubbled around his feet. Slowly, he turned his head to the left. He sniffed the air. His eyes glittered.

And then, as if a tightly wound spring inside him had been released, he took off running. This happened so fast that he quickly became a vanishing object, already passing the first of the wide stone jetties that separated different sections of the beach from each other, before I reacted. I started running after him, calling his name as loudly as I could. As I ran, people turned their heads to stare at me. One man, thinking to help me, ran toward the dog and tried to grab him, but Digitaria just changed course, swiveling away from the Good Samaritan and sprinting straight up the beach, away from the water, finally disappearing under the boardwalk. He was now running free on the streets. My heart was pounding from running and it was only because I was almost out of breath that I didn’t break down into tears. I was sure that I would never see my dog again.

I didn’t know what to do, but some part of my brain had kicked into override mode and I found myself running again, this time heading for the car. I found it without even consciously thinking about where I had parked it, got in and started the engine. My first organized thought since I had seen the dog take off down the beach was to drive around, looking for him. What else could I do?

So I drove up and down the streets in an ever-widening grid, stopping to ask people if they had seen a small, thin dog with a tightly curled tail roaming around anywhere. Everyone said no, so I kept driving. I drove for half an hour, and after that, half an hour more. The afternoon was getting later, the weather turning unseasonably cold. And then it began to rain.

Sheets, buckets, pails of water, rain was pouring from the sky. Streams of water formed along the curbsides; rain pooled in potholes and spread across the asphalt roadbed like a watery veneer. For a few minutes, the rain started to come down so heavily that I couldn’t see well enough to drive, so I pulled over and let the engine idle.

Then, finally, I did start to cry. To the core of my being, I felt incredibly sad, terribly lonely and completely bereft. I remembered reading once—in the magazine TV Guide, of all places—that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to make television shows and movies about pets who are lost or in some kind of trouble because small children tend to identify with small animals in dangerous situations. At that moment, sitting in Jack’s car, imprisoned by the rain, that was exactly how I felt—like I was a helpless child and Digitaria was an extension of me, wandering lost and frightened in the rain. I seemed to be reexperiencing every feeling I’d ever had about abandonment, about being estranged from my family long ago, about being on my own for most of my life and too often living near the edge of the economy, supporting myself but just barely, about needing to take care of myself because there was no one else to help me. All of that got mixed up with my terrible sense of responsibility for having lost the dog and the imminent prospect of having to abandon my search and leave him alone in a world where he would face hunger and cruelty and loneliness. I cried until I had the dry heaves. I cried until I just didn’t have any tears left. I cried until I felt I had cried for everything bad that had ever happened to me in my whole life.

And then, suddenly, as I was leaning back against the car seat with my eyes closed, feeling exhausted as I listened to the rain continuing to pound on the windshield, an image came into my mind. That’s the only way I can explain it. Maybe there was a reason I had thought about the TV Guide, because it was like a screen had been turned on somewhere in some viewing theater in the back of my brain and a scene was being projected in a little bright, white square of light. The scene was made up of pixels of memory and intuition, little bits of experience and dreams and stories. It had a fire escape in it and a small dog orbiting Earth in a satellite and my uncle in his worn-out old suit, showing me how to turn the dial on a radio. Before the scene faded away, I had an idea of where Digitaria might be.

The rain was finally beginning to let up just a little as I eased the car back into the street. I left the condos and surf shops behind, heading down the peninsula on the badly torn-up road that ran between the elevated train tracks and the boardwalk—if you could call it a boardwalk, here, where many of the wooden slats were warped or missing and the beach beyond had been overrun by salt grass and tall stands of sea oats. Now, I was driving up and down the same ruined sidewalks, passing the same empty lots that I had passed by last winter. This was a no-man’s land of litter and rubble and it was going to take a long time for urban renewal to march its way down to this lonely area and reclaim it with bulldozers and backhoes. It had the look of a place that intended, almost deliberately, to continue its decline. The buried foundations of old bungalows, the piles of rotting, painted planks that used to be stairs and porches seemed more like archaeological relics than urban debris waiting to be replaced with upscale versions of what used to be.

Peering through the rain, I kept watch for the dog as I passed the remnant of each cross street, but I didn’t expect to find him yet. I just kept driving until I reached the corner where, up the block, I could see the squat brick box that was the shell of the Sunlite Apartments, framed on either side by the blackened trees that I remembered from the last time I’d been here. The rest of the landscape around me was flat, overgrown with tangled weeds.

I stopped on the edge of the road across from the Sunlite Apartments and turned off the ignition. I sat for a moment, listening to the near silence that now contained only the sharp ticking of the rain on the car’s hood and the occasional rattle of sand and pebbles as a gust of wind blew by. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the wet world.

And there he was. My dog, Digitaria. My entire self—blood, spirit, bone—felt flooded with relief.

The dog was sitting on his haunches, on what remained of the sidewalk outside the entrance to the Sunlite Apartments. Previously, I hadn’t paid much attention to the entrance of the building, but now I did notice that the front door of the building was gone. That made it possible to see inside, but because it was growing dark, from where I stood on the street, I couldn’t pick out any specific structures that might remain. Perhaps some part of the internal staircase was still standing, perhaps some of the apartments were intact, though surely long since claimed by mold and rot. It was impossible for me to know if the dog had tried to get inside, but whatever explorations he might have made were over now and he was simply sitting in the rain, looking at the building and occasionally tilting his head from side to side.

As I walked up beside him, he acknowledged me by moving closer and then leaning against my leg, the way he did at home. I picked up his leash, and wrapped it firmly around my hand. He turned his head and stared at me with those dark, glittering eyes.

I tugged on the leash but he didn’t seem to want to move. He turned back to face the building and then, suddenly, let out a loud yip—a high-pitched, disturbing sound that was something like the noise he’d made when I had come home late, but more urgent. The sound seemed to linger in the night air until the wind swept it away.

After a few more moments of staring intently at the gaping hole where the front door of the building had once been, the dog finally let me lead him back across the street to the car. He jumped in and moved over to the passenger seat. Once I slid into the driver’s side, the dog managed to maneuver his body so that he was lying flat across the seat with his head in my lap. Soon, we were driving back across the bridge and Digitaria was fast asleep. A few times as I was driving, he continued to make that yipping sound, and though it was much softer now, coming from somewhere deep in his sleep, it still made me wonder just what it was that he might be dreaming about.