~XVII~

The days went on. I slept, I got up, I walked my dog, I went to work and then came home and went through the cycle again. I was in a strange state, a kind of suspended animation, in which few sensations seemed to get through to me. Instead of being in the world, I felt like I was walking along a corridor just outside, seeing everything through a kind of filmy curtain. Sometimes, drifting through the motions of work or riding the bus or walking down the street, my mind would clear for a moment and I would be able to focus on what I was involved in and it would occur to me that maybe I had gone crazy. Maybe I was deluded. Maybe I was imagining things. Dogs were bringing me messages? An alien sitting in a room that was not really a room—not in this world, anyway—was waiting for me to give him back the lost component of an interstellar radio network? Beings who were not human were consumed with sending prayers into space in order to speak to God? Maybe instead of wasting my money on rent and food I should ask Jack to watch Digitaria for a while and check myself into some sort of clinic.

But it was actually Jack’s phone calls—he spoke to me now almost every day—that kept me tethered to the strange reality that was now the framework of my life. He was making progress building the repeater, and actually seemed to be enjoying himself, as if he, too, sometimes forgot the real purpose of his task. We talked about that one night, late, when he was off the air, and agreed that it was hard to hold the idea in mind of what we were really doing; the subject came up in the context of a surprising piece of information he wanted to share with me.

“Guess who wants to come on the show?” Jack asked.

“I can’t guess,” I said. “I just got back from work a little while ago. I’m too tired.”

“Raymond Gilmartin.”

That was a surprise—and it certainly got my attention. “Why?” I asked. “The last time you suggested that, he threw you out of his office.”

“You haven’t been listening to my show, have you?”

I hadn’t because once I found out how much it actually cost to buy the special radio you needed to listen to the satellite service, as well as to pay the subscription fee, I decided that I could live without it. I was kind of embarrassed to admit that to Jack, though. So, hemming and hawing, I said, “I’ve been meaning to sign up for the service, but . . .”

“Never mind,” Jack said. Maybe he’d guessed at the reason I wasn’t listening in or maybe he was just being nice—maybe both—because he immediately offered a way to fix what, to him, must have seemed like a problem that needed an immediate solution. “I’ll get you a radio and pay for the service. I should have at least one loyal listener.”

I said thanks and then waited for Jack to circle back to the subject of Raymond Gilmartin, which he did, almost immediately. What he told me was interesting, but I still didn’t think it explained much.

“I’ve been after them—the Blue Awareness—ever since Raymond kicked me out that night,” Jack said. “Well, before, of course, but that just made me . . . oh, let’s say, it made me even more pissed off. So I’ve had lots of ex-Awares on, and they’ve been pretty frank in revealing just about everything they know about the movement. I have to say, they’ve told some very interesting tales about Raymond, in particular. Apparently, he’s revised a lot of the Awareness doctrine to make it more to his liking. Howard Gilmartin was a grandiose, narcissistic paranoid, but the picture I’m getting is more of someone who wanted to play out his fantasies than a man who was deeply invested in having people create a cult around him. It’s Raymond who built a small group of followers into a worldwide movement. I’ve actually had on a number of people who joined the Blue Awareness when Howard was alive and left during Raymond’s tenure as the movement leader. They all say that Raymond is totally inflexible; you can’t disagree with him or question him in any way. For example, did you know he was the one who came up with the idea of engrams and Blue Boxes? He really believes that he has a duty—a mission—to make people adopt his beliefs.”

Though I hadn’t known these specific details, overall, I didn’t think the information was all that surprising. It seemed to go without saying that Raymond was picking and choosing from his father’s ideas then adding in his own to create a religion that suited his own strange view of the world and what lay beyond. But just as obviously, he was doing a very good job of it, because, from what I knew—and despite all the disgruntled followers Jack could find—people seemed to be joining the Blue Awareness in record numbers. So why bother to go on Jack’s show? Why give Jack that satisfaction—and the buzz it might create for his program? What was in it for Raymond?

I asked Jack that question and he said, “To be honest, I don’t care. Though I imagine he thinks he can get the better of me, just like he did last time.”

Oh boy, I found myself thinking. This is some guy thing. Jack Shepherd lost a fight with Raymond Gilmartin and now he wants to get back at him, no matter what.

“You’re not going to mention the repeater, are you?”

“Jesus, no,” Jack said. “Not to Gilmartin. That story is for later.”

Later? What did he mean? “Wait a minute,” I said. “You never even asked me about that. I wanted you to help me—not to talk about . . . well, about anything. Not on your show.” The idea made me panicky. My life was already weird enough without hearing it discussed on the radio. Helping shadow men send prayers out into the distant universe—that didn’t sound like how the ideal Endless Weekend employee should be spending her spare time. If the story got out, I could easily guess how quickly I would get fired.

“I would never mention your name,” Jack said.

“Oh, great. That makes me feel so much better.”

“Stop worrying, Laurie. Everything will be fine.”

“That’s what they say in the movies just before the psycho killers show up.”

Jack sighed. “We’ve got enough going on, don’t you think? Don’t bring up psycho killers.”

After we hung up, I went to sleep, got up the next morning, and the cycle of days began again, though after that phone call with Jack there was one big change in my life, and that involved my dog. Digitaria now seemed to be on edge all the time. For the first time since he’d been with me, I had to restrain him from lunging at people in the street whose look I guess he didn’t like. And at night, keeping his vigil at the edge of the bed, he’d sometimes make that odd yipping sound, but softly, as if he were talking to himself. You totally are crazy, I said to myself the first time I had that thought—Digitaria is talking to himself—and then rolled over and went back to the broken, fitful sleep that now characterized my nights.

Raymond Gilmartin was scheduled for his on-air talk with Jack about a week after I first heard that he was going to do the show. I was very nervous about what direction their conversation might take since the last thing I wanted to hear was either of them mention my name on the radio. Ravenette had found me that first time with very little trouble—who knew what other kinds of crazies might be moved to invade my life if they heard anything about my connection to what was undoubtedly going to sound like some kind of alien invasion? I tried to put Jack and Raymond out of my mind for a while, and it helped that I had to work on the night of the interview. I managed to keep myself occupied by tracking the sports scores and suggesting elaborate mixed drinks to customers; making Singapore Slings and Mai Tais kept my hands busy and my thoughts engaged with inconsequential tasks.

But afterward, after the bar had closed down and I was waiting for the bus on the service road that separated the food service parking lots from the marshland edging Jamaica Bay, I couldn’t keep my attention focused on trivialities anymore. Looking up into the night, I saw that Orion and his hunting dogs were climbing back into the ink-colored sky, making their return from their summer hiding place below the horizon. Recognizing these constellations led me immediately to locate Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, which is pinned to the snout of the Great Dog constellation. Along with its lesser companion, the Minor Dog, Canis Major faithfully follows Orion the hunter throughout the seasons, never leaving his side. I tried to imagine the companion that belonged to Sirius itself—Digitaria, the invisible other, the dwarf star bonded to its massive twin by the bonds of ancient, interstellar forces. But that’s all it could be: imagination. Sirius is a bright dot in the sky, but a single point of coldly burning light is what it must remain to any Earthbound observer. The human eye, unaided by a telescope, cannot see that Sirius has company. It is impossible.

With Orion and his fierce pets on the ascendant, these were still the supposed dog days of summer, but it was actually late in September, and the night air was cool. I had brought a hoodie with me, rolled into a ball and stuffed into my shoulder bag, so I pulled it out and zipped myself into it, hoping the bus would show up soon.

It finally did, though the ride home seemed to take forever. Once I got to my block, the usual scenario was playing itself out: a long Diamond Reo was parked up against the wall of an alley near my house, its running lights on and its engine idling softly. Two men were unloading cartons from the back. I knew they were not the pair who had helped me out last summer, when the men in the yellow goggles had tried to steal Digitaria—I had never seen those two workers again. Tonight, I barely even glanced at the guys pulling swag from the truck as I walked on toward my building.

I unlocked the vestibule door with my key and started up the stairs to my apartment. As usual, it was long past midnight, but as I opened my door, I heard my neighbor’s door open as well. I waited while Sassouma walked down the hall toward me, carrying a small FedEx box.

I wasn’t all that surprised that she was awake, since she sometimes came home very late from the convenience store where she worked. I assumed that she had retrieved the package from the hall where the FedEx deliveryman had left it, but I had no idea what it might be until she handed it to me and I saw that the label had Jack’s return address on it.

As we chatted for a moment—I asked about her children and her husband, and she answered as best she could with her limited English—Digitaria came out into the hallway and she patted him on the head. Down a few doors, I could hear her little dog barking for her to come back, so we said good night and I went inside.

Before I took Digitaria outside for his walk, I opened the package and found that it contained a radio, a small one, about the size of an old-fashioned transistor, but much sleeker looking. It was slate gray in color and had an array of buttons under a small, gray screen, and I quickly realized that it was the satellite radio Jack had promised to get for me. I’d forgotten all about that, but now, here it was. Jack had once called me a radio freak, and he was right—that was one thing I certainly had in common with Avi. This was a completely new kind of radio, and as soon as I had it in my hands, I was intrigued.

The radio came with instructions for activating it, which involved a phone call to a twenty-four-hour customer service line, and in a few minutes, I was able to push the On button and watch as the radio lit up and the screen displayed a scrolling menu of more than a hundred channels to select from.

One thing the radio did not have, though, was a speaker; to listen to it, you either had to plug it into a stereo system or listen with headphones. I tuned the radio to a station dedicated to playing classic hits of the sixties, then rooted around in my top dresser drawer until I found a pair of earbuds, which I plugged into the radio, and soon I heard the Beatles singing yeah, yeah, yeah, as if they were inside my brain. Not bad. Not bad at all.

I found Digitaria’s leash and led him outside for his walk. In the short time I’d been upstairs, whoever was responsible for unloading the Diamond Reo had finished their work. The truck was gone. The street was otherwise empty, so it was just me, the dog, the music in my head, and the starry pictures of men and beasts drawn on the night sky.

Maybe it was just the music, but for the first time in a while, I felt like I was coming back to myself, like my spirit—whatever that was—had been absent from my body but was beginning, gingerly, to fold itself back in. I felt calmer, a little stronger, a little more centered. So, as I walked, I found myself putting aside my aversion to hearing what Jack and Raymond might have to say to each other. After all, Jack had promised to keep the focus on the Blue Awareness, and what difference did it make to me, really, if he and Raymond went at each other about that? Besides, Jack never spent his entire show talking with only one guest; the odds were that I had already missed Raymond’s segment and Jack was on to some other topic, like the existence of poltergeists or which lost civilization might have built the Bimini Road.

But like everything else, lately, what I didn’t want to happen was exactly what did: as I tuned through the stations, I suddenly heard Jack’s voice. He said something I didn’t quite catch, and received an answer from his guest who was, unmistakably, not a poltergeist hunter or anyone else but Raymond Gilmartin. The radio provided a clear, finely modulated sound, which made me focus on the quality of the voices speaking to me through the headphones. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now, listening to Jack and Raymond, I realized the two men’s voices presented as much of a contrast as their personalities: Jack’s was rough, but tinged with irony—very New York—while Raymond’s was polished and smooth, the voice of someone who gave a lot of speeches to attentive audiences.

As I listened, though, whatever good humor Jack projected quickly vanished. He kept pushing Raymond to talk about specific issues that ex-Awares had brought up on his program, such as the accusation that the Blue Awareness was set up to extract escalating fees from members for seemingly endless Blue Box sessions, which were required for rising from one level of “Awareness” to another, meaning, to have more and more of what Jack characterized as Raymond’s “bizarre doctrine” revealed to them. But Raymond dismissed all that as complaints from disgruntled individuals who were also, possibly, mentally ill. They needed more Blue Box sessions, Raymond suggested, not fewer; and then left that issue entirely to defend Blue Awareness doctrine, which, he said was based on irrefutable truth—and you could hear the capital “T” in that word as it rolled out of his mouth.

By the time he got to this point in the conversation, I was climbing the stairs back to my apartment. Once inside, I unclipped the dog’s leash and as he sat beside me, I listened to Raymond describe, in his own words, how one ascended to the Wild Blue Yonder.

He repeated what I already knew, but put it in a way that I had not heard before. He said that humanity was stuck in a low level of evolution. That an alien race—ancient, brilliant, god-like in their knowledge and abilities—had seeded the universe with beings meant to develop, over time, into equally god-like creatures, capable of straddling the many dimensions of time and space and becoming equal partners with their creators. But we humans had forgotten this history, had lost our way and rejected our destiny because we had become too enamored of the corporeal world, of material pleasures and what Raymond called “idiotic pastimes,” such as sports, climbing the corporate ladder, and dieting—he was particularly opposed to diet fads because, as he explained, if you spent enough time having your engrams analyzed and “cleansed” by Blue Box sessions, your body would always remain fit and healthy.

But he reserved his harshest criticism for what he called “the stupidest pastime of all,” which was religion—at least any religion based on a belief system other than the tenets of the Blue Awareness. As Raymond spoke, his voice remained smooth as oil, but I heard something else in it: the visual image came to me of little fires burning around the edges.

“The mistake people make,” Raymond said, “and they have made it for centuries, is in thinking that something we call ‘God’ exists outside ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the universal awareness we seek through religion—through begging for the intervention of some kind of Big Daddy who exists apart from us—is what keeps us in the dark. It’s what keeps us ignorant. The elders—the beings who brought us here—already have all the knowledge, all the understanding needed to be truly alive, to truly understand the nature of consciousness and the forces of infinity. This is what they seeded within us. Now, they are simply waiting for us to evolve, to become their partners in roaming the universe. In understanding and even transforming it. They are waiting for us,” Raymond repeated emphatically. “But we’ve forgotten that. Instead of growing into the infinite, we’ve grown more deaf, dumb and blind with every generation.”

Then there was silence. It was an unnerving experience to just sit and listen to the dead air settling like dust in my earphones. But I knew that Jack was deliberately creating silence—the one thing you never hear on the radio—because he wanted to make everyone uneasy, Raymond and his listeners alike.

Finally, Jack responded to Raymond by posing a set of questions that he had clearly been leading up to throughout the interview. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked. “I mean, totally wrong? What if the aliens—given that they really are here, that they even exist—aren’t interested in us at all? Never were? Never had anything whatsoever to do with the presence of human beings on Earth? What if they don’t care if we live or die? Evolve or disappear? If that’s the case, what’s the point of the Blue Awareness? Wouldn’t you just have to . . . well, give up? Disband?”

Jack had sworn not to mention what I’d told him and while technically, he hadn’t, I felt he was skirting the edges of his promise to me. And while I had no way of knowing whether Ravenette had revealed the same information to Raymond, I had a feeling that Jack and Raymond were now interacting on two levels: they were conducting a conversation meant for the consumption of their radio audience, but they also were having a deeper, more personal argument. I could imagine them, now, speaking to each other through clenched teeth.

“That’s ridiculous,” Raymond said.

“Why?” Jack asked. “For about forty years, I’ve been talking to all kinds of people—scholars, archaeologists, writers, historians, even men and women who’ve had abduction experiences—and it seems that our concept of alien life interacting with ours always hinges on them meaning us well, trying to teach us things we don’t understand, or else doing us harm. Sticking probes down our throats—or elsewhere.” Jack chuckled at his own innuendo, and then went on. “But I’m just wondering, what if they’re as confused as we are about . . . what it all means? You know? Why we are here? Who put us here? Who put them on whatever planet—in whatever dimension of time and space—they come from? In other words, who do you think they pray to?”

“There is no need to pray to anyone,” Raymond said, sounding cool again. Calm and collected. “What we need is to develop the universal spirit within ourselves. To nurture it while driving out the painful memories and internalized messages that prevent us from evolving toward the infinite.”

“In other words,” said Jack, “we’re supposed to be performing spiritual surgery on ourselves.”

Raymond seemed to like this analogy. “In a way, yes,” he replied. “That is what you can accomplish with the Blue Box, if you dedicate yourself to it. In fact,” he said, “I have an invitation for you. If you can spare some time—let’s say a week or so—we have a retreat upstate where you could work with a trained Blue Box counselor. I’m sure it would do you a great deal of good—and change your mind about us. About the Awareness.”

Jack chuckled again. “Maybe I will take you up on that offer,” he said. “In the meantime, I think we’re coming to the end of this segment, so let me thank you, Raymond Gilmartin, for visiting us at Up All Night.”

Raymond replied with a string of muttered niceties I knew he didn’t mean, and then some spooky, space-age kind of music came on. A few moments later, Jack was back on the air, announcing that his next guest was an expert on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. I wasn’t interested, so I turned off the radio.

I puttered around my apartment for a while, folding laundry that had been waiting to be put away and doing other minor chores. As I worked, I allowed myself to feel some relief at the fact that whatever remained of my privacy still seemed to be intact—at least, I hadn’t heard my name mentioned on the show—when the sound of my telephone ringing jolted me out of what ended up being a very temporary sense of calm.

“I’m finished,” I heard Jack say as soon as I picked up the receiver.

“What?” I didn’t understand what he meant.

“The repeater,” he said. “I’m finished. I didn’t get a chance to call you before the show went on the air.”

I hadn’t expected to hear this. I think I had been telling myself that it would be many more weeks—even months—before Jack finished constructing the repeater. More time to stay in a sort of in-between zone where nothing had to happen.

“I thought you were calling about Raymond.”

“The segment is over,” Jack said.

“I know,” I told him. “I heard you.”

“Well, I’m glad, because I have an idea.”

I carried the phone into the kitchen and drank some orange juice from the carton. The dog, of course, followed me. I put the juice away and patted him on the head.

“Laurie. Are you still there?” Jack asked impatiently. “I have another guest on in a few minutes.” “I’m here, I’m here. What’s your idea?”

“I want to ask Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater out to Rockaway.”

“This thought just came to you tonight?”

“I’ve been mulling it over for a while, but tonight just kind of clinched it for me. Raymond Gilmartin is so sure of himself—and he’s so deluded. Showing him the radioman would just blow him out of the water.”

“That’s not the point of what we’re doing. And even if we actually see the radioman—if he comes to get the repeater—that may just reinforce Raymond’s belief that he’s some sort of emissary from our . . . what? Our ancestors? Creators?”

“I don’t think so. Raymond Gilmartin is such a narcissist—among other things—that he’ll expect your friend . . .”

“He’s not my friend.” How many times had I said this to Jack?

“He will expect your shadow to shake his hand and tell him to keep up the good work. Or at least give him some sign of recognition. After all, he’s made it his life’s work to try to emulate these beings.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little vindictive?”

“That’s because my engrams are in serious need of repair. You heard Raymond.”

I walked back to the bedroom with the dog still at my heels. Outside, in the street, a car went by, and I could see the reflected glow of the headlights moving in bright bars across my living room ceiling.

“You know,” I said to Jack, “this may not work. Nothing may happen.”

There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone, but a different kind of silence than the dead air on the radio. This void pulsed with questions. Finally, Jack asked one. “Do you really think that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “There’s still a lot of room in this story for it all to be some kind of fantasy.”

“Whose?”

“Mine. Yours. Ravenette’s. Raymond’s. The list goes on.”

“I’m going to invite him, Laurie.”

“It’s a mistake,” I told him. But he had already hung up the phone.

WE DIDN’T do anything right away. Partly because I was working a lot—one of the other bartenders had quit without notice, and I ended up working a week straight, with no time off—and partly, I think, because Jack was having a fine time continuing his campaign against the Blue Awareness and wasn’t ready yet to hold out a flag of truce, even a fake one. Almost every night on his show, one of the guests was either an ex-Aware or someone who had produced some kind of exposé—a book, a documentary—about the Blue Awareness. What he was doing made me uneasy so I stopped listening to Jack’s program and I told him so. He didn’t try very hard to change my mind about that.

But one night, when I was at work, the waitress I was working the shift with answered the phone near the bar. She said a few words that I couldn’t hear because of the constant babbling of the televisions, and then held out the receiver to motion that the call was for me. I shook my head—I was too busy with customers, at the moment, to go to the phone—so she wrote down a message for me and then went back to her tables.

A few minutes later, I read the message, which the waitress had scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I wasn’t surprised that it was from Jack, since I couldn’t imagine who else would call me here. It seemed that he wanted me to listen to the show later, specifically, the segment that began at one thirty.

So a few hours later, I was back in my own neighborhood, walking Digitaria while I once again listened to the Up All Night show through my set of earphones. I planned to give Jack maybe five minutes; if he had on another troubled ex-Aware, I still wasn’t interested. My focus right now was not on the Blue Awareness and how they screwed people over on the path to the Wild Blue Yonder, where all would be revealed—or not. I had other things on my mind.

And tonight, apparently, so did Jack’s guest. When I tuned in the station, I heard the tail end of a question Jack was asking—something, I thought, about Howard Gilmartin—and then I heard him address his guest as Rabbi Friedman. The next thing I heard was a man’s voice that sounded a bit frail, but genial. He said, “Well, yes. I knew Howard. We were very friendly, in fact—at least back then. We served together on a carrier in the South Pacific. That was quite awhile ago.”

“Almost sixty years,” Jack agreed.

“True. But my memory is still pretty good.” This assessment was accompanied by a laugh that was full of self-amusement.

“I understand something unusual happened to you, on your ship.”

“Yes, I guess you could say it was very unusual. It changed my life, as a matter of fact.” Again, the rabbi laughed. The sound was soft, soothing, like he was telling a joke about himself, a joke he liked to repeat and hoped that everyone listening to him would appreciate.

A few moments later, he continued with his story. “I was the Morse Code operator, so I worked in the radio shack with Howard. We were in the South Pacific, in the thick of the war, so as you can imagine, it was a very tense time. We saw a lot of fighting—a lot. I wasn’t particularly religious in those days, but there was a nondenominational chapel on the ship that I used to go to once in a while. I had been to Hebrew school, you see, and I still remembered how to pray in Hebrew, so sometimes I did. That helped a little.”

“Helped?” Jack broke in.

“Well, I was scared, you see. Sometimes I wasn’t so much, but sometimes I was. And when I was, I went to the chapel and prayed. One night . . . oh, I guess I got lost in what I was doing—just thinking more than praying, actually—but after a while, I thought I felt someone sitting beside me. I turned, but I didn’t see anyone. So I went back to my prayers but then the feeling returned. The feeling that someone was with me. This time, I didn’t exactly turn to look, but I kind of glanced to the side and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. Someone. The silhouette of a man . . . well, of a person, anyway, but flat and gray. No real face, no features, but . . . a living being. Well, that was certainly something I should have been scared of, but somehow I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. I felt that the best thing to do was just to go back to my prayers. And so I did. I started praying pretty seriously. And as I did, I felt the shadow person slip his hand in mine. And then he began to cry. I mean, I couldn’t see him crying or hear him or anything like that, but I knew that’s what he was doing.”

“Well . . . wow. What can I say? That’s a pretty strange encounter you’re describing,” Jack said.

“It would certainly seem to be, wouldn’t it? But . . . well, whenever I tell this story, it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I mean, when I think back.”

“Do you tell it a lot?”

“Oh yes. I’m very open about it. As I said, it’s a very important experience for me. Anyway, I know I should have felt that something truly bizarre was happening, but I didn’t, you see. The . . . person? I always call him a person though I suppose he wasn’t. Well, I sympathized with him because it was like I could feel some of what he was feeling. I mean, I got the sense that he had a job to do, just like me, and he was trying to do it. And, also like me, he was far from home and he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get back.”

“Do you think that’s why he was crying?” Jack asked.

“Oh, no. That wasn’t the reason. He was crying because we were in the presence of God.”

Jack made a noise in his throat that came through the radio as a kind of gulp. I was surprised that he sounded surprised; I assumed he knew what his guests were going to talk about, so he should have been familiar with the story the rabbi was telling. But maybe he hadn’t heard all these details. Maybe he had been thrown off guard.

He soon recovered enough to ask another question. “Is that what you thought, too?”

“No. But I guess I had started praying so fervently that the other radioman believed I was in touch with some sense of God that he wasn’t. That he couldn’t find.”

“You knew he was some kind of radioman.”

“Oh yes. That was his job. He was setting up some kind of radio network. I know how odd it sounds, but that’s what he was doing. His . . . people, I guess you’d call them—well, his people are broadcasting prayers. All through the universe. They’re hoping that someday, in some way, God will reply. You know, find a way to let them know He hears them. That He’s . . . somewhere. And He’s listening. That’s what all religious people want, in one way or another. At least, in my very humble opinion, that’s what I think people want, people who are devout. Or perhaps even people who aren’t.”

“How did you know what he was doing?’ Jack asked. “Your . . . visitor.”

“I think he told me,” the rabbi said. “When he was holding my hand. Somehow, he told me. There were no words but . . . I knew. I understood.”

I was riveted by this conversation. So much so that I found I had wandered far beyond the bounds of the usual route I followed when I was walking the dog. I was near a deserted canal that ran behind the auto repair shops, a polluted scar that remained from the time when small barges were part of the commercial traffic in this area. The struts of a broken crane leaned over the water, looking like a monster getting ready to dip a long, rusted finger into a poison well. This was probably not the greatest place to linger, but I didn’t care. I sat down on an empty oil drum and listened as the rabbi continued to describe what had happened to him that long-ago night. Digitaria seemed to simply accept that we were stopping in this unexpected place for a while and made himself comfortable on the ground, keeping close enough to me so that I could feel the weight of his body against my leg.

Jack seemed to have recovered from his surprise about the turn the story had taken and he zeroed in on the narrative, the step-by-step details that the rabbi was recounting. “And then?” Jack coaxed. “What happened after you realized that the radioman was crying?”

“That’s really it, all of it, to tell you the truth. Except that, after a while, I felt this sense of pressure on my hand—almost like the person was squeezing it.”

“He was hurting you,” Jack interjected.

“No, no, not at all,” the rabbi replied. “It was just like when you’re holding someone’s hand and you squeeze it, just before you say good-bye. It’s just an extra gesture of contact, of touch between two . . . well, persons. People. So when he did that—my visitor—I just instinctively looked down and saw that what I thought was a hand wasn’t really that at all. What I mean is, I felt like my hand was intertwined with another but no—laying across my palm was a band of light. Moveable, incandescent light. Whitish, bluish, sort of.” The rabbi chuckled softly. “I guess I’m having a hard time explaining myself.”

“You’re doing fine,” Jack assured him, but he sounded a little confused himself.

“He let me see him,” the rabbi continued. “At least part of him; the part I was touching. That was what he really looked like, I think. Light. Not filmy or diffuse but . . . well, flexible. Flexible light.” The rabbi chuckled again. “That’s as close as I can get to a description.”

“You never saw his face?”

“No,” the rabbi said. “Nothing more than what I’ve told you. He let me see just that part of him. Another gesture, I guess.”

The rabbi continued. “A couple of nights after this, Howard and I were down in the crew’s quarters. His bunk was across from mine and for once, all the other bunks around us were empty, which was unusual. On a ship like that, you’re almost never alone. So maybe it was just that it was quiet and that we weren’t on alert or anything that started us talking. And I just blurted it out . . . about the radioman. About how I’d felt him next to me in the chapel, and he was crying. Howard started questioning me then. He wanted to know exactly what the radioman looked like. I did the best I could to describe him—you know, my impression of a flat, gray shape sitting beside me—and then Howard said he had something to tell me. He said he thought he’d seen the same figure up on the radars maybe a month or so prior. His radioman, though, had acted very differently than mine. He had made some sort of awful noise—it sounded threatening, Howard said—and made it very clear that Howard was not to come near him.”

“Did you ever tell Howard what else you saw? That you actually got a glimpse of what the radioman really looked like?”

“But I didn’t—not for sure. I just saw that band of light.”

“Even that? You didn’t tell Howard?”

“What would have been the point? Howard’s experience was so much different than mine; his was angry, confrontational. I didn’t want to make it seem like I had been given a gift that had been withheld from him.”

The rabbi sounded philosophical, which didn’t suit Jack’s style of questioning, so he tried to find a way to elicit a more definitive answer. “Given your different experiences, do you think that you and Howard actually met the same, uh, person?”

“I don’t know,” the rabbi responded. “And I don’t know that it matters, really.”

“But they—or he, if it was the same radioman—acted so differently.”

“Well, we all act differently, don’t we, at different times? I mean, even the most confident, aggressive person can have a moment of vulnerability. Especially if you’re around someone who you think will be sympathetic.”

“And you were.”

“I guess you could say that. But you could also say that what happened to me was a turning point, so if I gave the radioman a moment of comfort, what he gave me was . . . well, a purpose to my life. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what happened. After the war, I tried different things, different jobs, but I was very unhappy. Eventually, I realized that what I wanted was to feel what the radioman thought I felt that night, in the chapel. I wanted to feel the presence of God. And so . . . well, eventually, I enrolled in a Jewish theological seminary and became a rabbi.”

“Who has stood in the presence of God?”

The rabbi’s gentle laugh seemed to soften the bluntness of Jack’s question. “We all do that, whether we know it or not. Let’s just say I have been trying to be deserving of that awareness.”

“To coin a phrase?”

The rabbi laughed again. “No, no, it certainly wasn’t me who had anything to do with Howard coming up with that name. The Blue Awareness.” I could almost picture Rabbi Friedman shaking his head in amusement. “Well, I suppose it’s what we’re trying to become aware of that matters in the end.”

Jack went on questioning him. “Did you and Howard Gilmartin keep in touch after the war?”

“No,” the rabbi replied. “As a matter of fact, after the night we talked about the radioman, he barely spoke to me again. The fact that we’d had such different experiences seemed to drive a wedge between us—at least from his point of view. I think he was already trying to, well, let’s say process what had happened to him.” Another chuckle punctuated that last part of the story and the rabbi said, “You can tell I’ve had some psychology training, right? Well, the point is that I imagine he was already thinking quite differently than I was about what had happened to us both.”

“Do you think he was jealous of you?”

“For having some lost soul cry on my shoulder? I hope not.”

Since that line of questioning wasn’t producing the kind of fireworks that Jack was clearly attempting to ignite, he tried another angle. “Let’s focus in on Howard Gilmartin a little more specifically, on what you know about him from personal experience. Am I right about the fact that there was no desert, no secret radar installation, no black ops outpost called the Wild Blue Yonder? I want to remind our audience that those are the experiences that Gilmartin said led him to create the Blue Awareness. Rabbi? What do you have to say about all that?”

“Actually, those were stories Howard wrote after the war. I read some of them. They weren’t bad.”

“But that’s what they were, right? Just stories? His real encounter with the radioman was on your ship, up on the radars, and it scared him. Just about scared the life out of him, I’d say. And on top of that, he wasn’t given any secret knowledge, he wasn’t entrusted with any supposedly lost information about the origins of human beings.”

“Do you mean, did he ever tell me anything like that? No,” the rabbi admitted, but he sounded reluctant to endorse even this implied suggestion that Howard Gilmartin was an outright liar. He obviously didn’t give any credit to Gilmartin’s ideas but it just didn’t seem to be in his nature to directly criticize his old comrade in arms, either.

“I have one last question,” Jack said, though this turned out to be more of a barrage than a single query. “Tell me, honestly, do you think the being that you met in the chapel was real? In other words, do you think there are aliens on Earth? Here, on this planet, right now? Do you think they’re abducting people—you know, I’m sure, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who claim to have had abduction experiences. Do you think others are encountering the same beings you and Howard did, or is something else at work here? Maybe there are different races of aliens that have visited, or are visiting our planet. In light of all those possibilities, where do you think that leaves the Blue Awareness and its followers?”

“I couldn’t begin to speculate about any of that, Mr. Shepherd,” the rabbi said. “All I can do is refer you to Shakespeare. As the bard said, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

I could almost hear Jack grinding his teeth in frustration. He was doing everything he could to stir up controversy, but instead, he was getting poetry.

And he got something else too: the sound of a dog barking.

This time, it was Jack who reacted with laughter, though it sounded forced. “I guess you can tell we have another guest in the studio tonight,” he said, addressing his audience. “Rabbi Friedman brought his dog with him. What’s his name, Rabbi?”

“We call him Sammy, but officially, his name is Samson. Samson the bulldog,” the rabbi said. “And he’s usually very quiet. My apologies.”

“No need,” Jack said. “We’ve got open phone lines here. We welcome all opinions—human and otherwise.”

Both Sammy’s interruption and Jack’s comment may have been unplanned, but they provided an opportunity to end the segment on a light note. Jack said good-bye to his guest and then the same spooky, synthesizer-generated music that had signaled the end of Raymond Gilmartin’s appearance on Up All Night began to play.

I turned off the radio and, almost immediately, my cell phone rang. Of course it was Jack, who said the next half hour of his show was a taped segment, so he had time to talk. “What did you think?” he asked.

“He seems like a very nice man,” I said. “The rabbi.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jack said impatiently.

“I know.”

“So?”

I sighed, loud enough so that Jack could hear me. I wanted him to. “So? You want me to tell you that you proved Howard Gilmartin was a phony. Maybe you did—a little—and maybe you didn’t, but we both know what you really wanted is to get some sort of rise out of Raymond by mocking his father—but I don’t know why. What are you doing, Jack? Daring Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater to Rockaway? It’s not enough just to ask him, if you’re still so dead set on doing that?”

“I did ask him. And he did say yes.”

I was so taken aback by this response that it more or less shut me up. I did give more than a passing thought to arguing with Jack about how counterproductive his behavior seemed to me, but I knew it was an argument I would never win because Jack was clearly getting a great deal of satisfaction out of whatever game he thought he was playing with Raymond. We ended up just having a long, complicated conversation about when we could make the drive out to Rockaway. When was Jack free, when was I, what days had Raymond said he would be available? The whole exchange seemed unreal to me, like we were planning some innocuous shopping excursion or a trip to the movies. We settled on the following Sunday afternoon, just a few days away.

Later, at home, when I finally got myself to bed, I was prepared for a restless night, but it was Digitaria who seemed unable to settle down. He kept jumping out of bed and then getting back in again. I thought he was thirsty, or hungry, but he wasn’t making any detours to the kitchen where his water bowl and food dish were; instead, he kept padding back and forth between the bedroom and the front door.

There was no way I could pretend not to understand what was going on. Though all I wanted was to plunge back into the depths of a dreamless sleep and not think about the reasons for his restlessness—there were too many of them, all disturbing—it was clear to me that my dog was on high alert.