~XVIII~

It was a rain-washed afternoon, blustery and dark. I felt chilled even though I was wearing a jacket, so I asked Jack to turn on the heat in the car as we inched along the Belt Parkway, headed out toward the Rockaway Peninsula. Digitaria was sitting in the back seat along with the Haverkit repeater, assembled from the parts that Jack had managed to acquire. It was wrapped in an old quilt meant to protect it during what I was beginning to think of as a ride to nowhere, because that was where we seemed to be going: nowhere fast.

The traffic was horrendous; there were multiple accidents and endless congestion caused by rubbernecking drivers trying to get a look at the smashed vehicles and trails of shattered glass. We had hoped to be out at the beach before dark but that wasn’t going to happen now; we were in the decline of the season, when the days seemed to close themselves out with a grim immediacy that brooked no negotiation with the light of afternoon. The fall horizon was already serving up the night’s cold slice of moon.

The only benefit I saw to the fact that we were way behind the schedule we had set for ourselves was that we might not meet up with Raymond. We were almost an hour past the time that Jack said he had told him we would be waiting outside the Sunlite Apartments. Jack had tried Raymond’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail so I was hoping that by now, he had just given up on us and gone home.

The closer we got to Rockaway, the more uneasy I became. I couldn’t sort out which thing was bothering me the most: the combustion that might result from Jack and Raymond meeting outside of the controlled environment of Jack’s studio or Raymond’s office, or the idea that a shadow man might really show himself to me on the grounds of a deserted building where I used to live. Or maybe it was the fact that I could hear my dog panting feverishly in the seat behind me. If there had been enough room, I knew he would have been pacing back and forth.

Finally, not far ahead, I saw the sign that said, “To the Rockaways.” Once we made it down the off-ramp, the traffic cleared up and there were no more delays. We followed a road that led through a series of small communities built on the canals that fed into the bays whose waters washed in and out of the ocean with the tides. Then it was over one last bridge, and we were—I was—back in Rockaway, heading down the peninsula to the vacant lots and broken sidewalks that were now the domain of the Sunlite Apartments.

As we went deeper and deeper into this desolate area, Jack kept asking me if I was sure I knew where we were going. I simply said, Yes, I am. Keep driving. Occasionally, we passed an old summer bungalow, half collapsed into a street that had been taken over by beach sand. It was too dark, now, to make out the deserted boardwalk just a few blocks away and the sea beyond, but even with the car windows closed, I could smell the salt tang in the air, or imagined I could. Deep water, seaweed, fish, sharks, the bones of whales. I could conjure up pictures for myself of what was out there, past what I could see.

Finally, we came to the right block. I told Jack to turn and we slowly drove along what remained of the blacktop, between the rows of thin, blackened trees that had grown up in this sandy soil. And then there it was: the squat brick building with its crumbling wedding cake fretwork, its missing doors and broken windows.

“Here?” Jack said. He sounded incredulous, but I couldn’t imagine what else he was expecting. I had told him the building was long abandoned, the neighborhood a ruin.

Out of habit, he was careful to parallel park at the edge of the blacktop, as if some municipal authority might still be concerned with the observance of local traffic rules. When he finally turned off the motor, I got out of the car, and my dog quickly followed me. He stood close by my side, his ears twitching as he looked up at what remained of the Sunlite Apartments.

“That’s right,” I said to him. “You remember, don’t you? You were here once before.”

Jack, walking up behind me, heard what I said and asked, “What are you talking about? Why would you have brought him here before?”

I was going to explain about my excursion to the beach last spring—in his car, as a matter of fact—when he had gone out to California, and about how Digitaria had run away from me and found his way to this same spot, but before I even started speaking, something distracted me.

“Look,” I said to Jack, pointing down the street, where I suddenly saw the blindingly bright headlights of a huge Suburban with blacked-out windows sweeping toward us. The vehicle pulled up behind Jack’s and the driver cut the motor. When the headlights finally dimmed, I noticed that there was another vehicle easing itself into line behind the Suburban. It was a blue van.

“Not good,” I whispered to Jack.

“Relax,” he replied. “It will be fine.” But I was not reassured.

We watched as the back door of the Suburban swung open and Raymond Gilmartin stepped out. As if he had come to keep a business appointment, he was wearing a dark suit and tie, just as he had been the last time I saw him. As he carefully smoothed out his clothes, another familiar figure exited the vehicle: Ravenette, dressed in some sort of faux hippie-chic dress that seemed to have been sewn together out of black scarves. They both, I thought, had the look about them of people harboring a deadly intent they did not want you to know about—not just yet.

I waited to see who would come out of the blue van, but no one did. It stayed tucked in its spot, behind the Suburban, with its lights off. It reminded me of the trucks parked in the alleyways in my neighborhood. The blue van looked like it was hiding.

“You’re late,” Raymond said, frowning. “We’ve been driving around, looking for a place to get coffee.”

“Miles,” Ravenette said, waving her hand as if to dismiss the blight around her as a personal affront. “We had to drive for miles.”

“Nice to see you, too,” I said to her.

We spent a moment glaring at each other and then I turned to Raymond. My intention was to be a bit more civil to him, but he didn’t give me the chance. He drank the dregs from a paper coffee cup and then tossed it on the ground.

“So now that we’re all here, let’s get on with this, shall we?” Raymond said. “I understand you have some sort of ritual you intend to carry out.”

He had addressed that last remark to me, in a tone so cold, so distant, that it made me feel pretty bad about him. Bad in a lot of ways, including the fact that he, too, apparently intended to behave like a jackass. It was disappointing. I wanted to think better of him but now, there seemed to be no reason to think much about him at all.

“There is no ritual,” I told him. “I’m just going to try something. Actually, I got the idea from Ravenette.”

She turned to Raymond and spit out a declaration of anger. “I told you that was what she would say.”

“Never mind,” Raymond replied.

Right after that, I thought I saw her make some sort of motion toward the blue van, but Raymond caught her arm and stopped her. This worried me and I wanted to make Jack aware of what she’d done, but he had already gone back to the car to get the repeater. When he returned in just a minute or so, he had removed the blanket, so it looked like he was carrying a big radio tuner—a squat black box bristling with wires and dials.

He put it in my arms and then stepped back, as if the thing might pose a danger to anyone around it. “Okay,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

It was dark now, fully nighttime. The rainy wind had blown itself out but inky clouds had placed themselves between us and the stars. The only illumination came from down the block. The one remaining streetlight in this whole area burned with a dim insistence as if sheer will, not electricity, was keeping it on.

Did I really have a plan? No. Just a feeling, just a guess about what to do. I walked across a path of rubble toward the wide, empty darkness where the front door of the Sunlite Apartments used to be, with my dog following me almost step for step. The building stood before me in two realities: the crumbling brick structure that I could see now, and the memory of what it had been in those summer days. I played on the wedding-cake balcony outside the rooms where the adults cooked dinner, dealt out a hand of cards and listened to one of Avi’s radios spin out the sentimental ballads that were popular in those years.

I put the repeater down in front of the doorway and waited. I waited for what seemed like a long time. Nothing happened. I was wondering if I was going to have to try to climb the rickety fire escape, when I suddenly heard Raymond’s voice coming from behind me.

“Well?” he said impatiently. “Is that it?”

I looked down at the dog, who was staring intently into the empty doorway. I was still thinking that something might happen when the dog suddenly turned around and began to growl. The sound ended in the kind of high-pitched yipping that I remembered from that last time we had been in the vicinity of a certain blue van.

And indeed, as I turned, I saw the side panels of the van slide open and two men emerge. They were young, trim, wearing jeans and hoodies. I tried to picture them in yellow goggles but quickly realized that it didn’t matter whether these were the men I had encountered before or not. They were generic people, Blue Awares, Raymond’s followers. They would do whatever he wanted them to do and I knew that whatever he wanted them to do right now was not going to be anything good.

Jack was standing near Raymond and Ravenette, but looking toward me. He didn’t see the two Awares until they walked right up to him. They had some sort of small, bulky objects in their hands; for a moment, I had the wild—though maybe not crazy—thought that they were holding guns. But no, that’s not what they were: I had watched enough episodes of cop shows on TV to recognize a Taser when I saw one in real life.

I watched as Jack finally realized what was happening. I was not totally surprised by his reaction. He laughed.

“Really?” he said to Raymond. “Who do you want to take prisoner? Me or the alien?”

“There is no alien,” Raymond said. “No radioman. Ravenette tried to tell Ms. Perzin that. You’re both in need of serious help. Counseling. We’re going to try to give it to you.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Jack said. “You couldn’t kidnap a dog, so now you’re going to try to kidnap human beings?”

Raymond shrugged. “The event you’re referring to wasn’t authorized. This, however, most certainly is. However, it’s hardly a kidnapping. It’s an intervention. I am convinced that your hatred for the Blue Awareness is evidence of deep-seated engram damage. The problems and disappointments you’ve had in your life have become like a cancer affecting your mind, your ability to think clearly and to reason. We’re going to help you overcome all that. I told you about our retreat center upstate and everyone who listens to your show heard you say that you’d consider going. Well, now you are. It’s a wonderful facility; we have wonderful, caring Blue Box counselors . . .”

“Who also do wonderful things with sleep deprivation, hallucinogens and other nifty therapies, right? I’ve heard all about what goes on at your retreat centers,” Jack said.

“Everything the counselors do will be designed to help you. You’ll be able to change your outlook, the whole trajectory of your life.”

“Listen to me,” Jack said. He sounded firm, even reasonable, but the look on his face was beginning to rearrange itself into one of alarm. “I can’t just disappear. It doesn’t matter what I said on the radio. People will look for me.”

The answer to this statement came from Ravenette. “You’re going to send everyone an e-mail,” she told Jack. “Something witty and persuasive. That’s exactly the kind of person you think you are, right? Well, we’ll do you a favor. We’ll help you keep that fantasy going for a while. And that blog they have you writing on World Air’s website? Every week, you’ll post an update on your progress.”

“This is crazy,” Jack said. “Don’t either of you realize that?”

“What about you, Laurie?” Ravenette said to me. “Do you think this is crazy? Because basically, that’s what I think is wrong with you, too, and we’re going to help you get better. Heal you.”

“And you think no one will miss her, either?” Jack interjected.

“The vice president of the company that owns Endless Weekend is Aware,” Raymond said. “He understands how important it is that Ms. Perzin go through counseling with us. Ravenette really does feel that your friend is in imminent danger of having a breakdown.”

I was listening to all this with the same sense of duality I had about the Sunlite Apartments. I understood what Raymond and Ravenette were saying they were going to do but there was also a part of me that found it impossible to accept that it was actually going to happen. Not because they couldn’t do what they said but because I couldn’t really believe that they wanted to. Because if they did, it meant that they believed in what they said they did—really believed—and that seemed unimaginable to me.

And so—at the wrong time, in the wrong place—I had an insight about myself: there was a part of me that actually envied Raymond Gilmartin. Which was why I had been so willing to cut him some slack, empathize with him when all the evidence that I should do nothing of the sort was overwhelming. The fact that he believed in something, had some sort of deep faith, was a feat impossible for me to achieve. And I felt the lack of that, felt it over my lifetime, felt it enduringly, achingly. In that respect, even Ravenette was better off than I was. It was an awful revelation. I couldn’t accept the reality of someone else’s faith in anything beyond themselves because I didn’t have any myself. Perhaps that’s why I had finally allowed myself to believe in the radioman’s existence, to be willing to grant the possibility that he might actually be waiting for me in the Sunlite Apartments—because I wanted him to be.

But I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on these thoughts. No matter what I did or did not believe, I had to face the fact that Raymond and his followers intended to herd Jack and me into the van and drive us off into some sort of blue oblivion. And there was no way that I could see to get away from them. The men standing beside Raymond and Ravenette were blocking the path to Jack’s car; we’d never be able to get to it before they got us. And trying to run away wasn’t an option either; where was there to run, in the middle of all this desolation?

I was still desperately going through a mental list of escape routes and coming up with nothing useful when, suddenly, I became aware that my dog had fallen silent. The insistent growling and yipping that he’d kept up since the two Awares had exited the van had stopped. And he had turned away from all of us now, pointing himself toward the ruined boardwalk and the sea beyond. He kept staring in that direction as the crescent moon pulled itself out from behind the ragged, night-colored clouds, allowing me to see the ramp leading down from the boardwalk to the street. At first, it looked like just some bare boards lit by the moon’s weak light. Then, a moment later, that empty space was no longer empty at all.

Dogs were coming down the ramp. Dozens and dozens of dogs. And they were coming from the other direction as well, running up the street toward the Sunlite Apartments. Dogs were also coming through the vacant lots, picking their way between the brambles and the trees. Dogs seemed to be coming from everywhere. Silently, soundlessly, they began to converge in front of the building until there was a line of dogs—hundreds of dogs, small ones, huge ones, and everything in-between—packed tightly together, forming a barrier between me and the other people standing in the broken street in front of the Sunlite Apartments.

It was an astonishing sight. Amazing. And as I tried to understand what I was seeing, I began to pick out a few familiar figures in this giant pack of dogs. Or at least I thought they were familiar; perhaps I was just mistaking one dog for another. But I really did think I saw Sassouma’s dust-colored Dogon dog among the pack. And Buddy, the dog who had visited me in the mausoleum where Avi was interred. And Dax, the dog from the airport. A particular bulldog stood quite near me, and I had a feeling that he would have answered to the name Samson. Near him stood the golden-red pharaoh hound. And though I did not see her, I was sure that somewhere in the pack was another dog whose name I knew: Zvezdochka.

Of all of us, it was Raymond who finally spoke. “How did you do this?” he asked me. His voice had softened; his whole demeanor had changed. Now, he seemed more like the man who had once said to me, I have been waiting all my life.

“I didn’t,” I told him.

“Maybe he did,” Jack said.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jack raised his hand and pointed toward the door of the Sunlite Apartments.

I turned back around so that I was facing the darkness that filled the empty doorway of the ruined building. But now, a piece of that darkness seemed to have detached itself and began moving toward me. The darkness had a humanoid shape, so that it was like watching a shadow walk by itself.

And then, when it was about twenty feet away from me, it stopped. It was hard to see, hard to be sure that what I was seeing was actually there because it—the shadow—seemed blurred around the edges, as if, at any moment, it might lose whatever substance it had and be absorbed back into the night. It had no face, no features, no real structure to its arms or legs or torso. It was just a thin shade that barely stood out from the darkness draped all around. I knew who this was and so, though I should have been, I was not afraid.

I pointed to the repeater, which sat on the ground nearby. “That’s it,” I said to the being that I knew as the radioman. “The Haverkit. That’s what you wanted.”

Suddenly, from behind me, I heard a soft click followed by a momentary flash of light. Someone had a camera and was trying to take a photo.

The radioman’s reaction was swift. Though I saw no mouth that could have produced a sound, somehow, from somewhere inside itself, the figure before me emitted a long, loud, angry hiss.

And then it strode forward, moving faster than I could have imagined possible. It was still hissing and now, as if I were the individual responsible for the camera flash—the one it was angry at—it was coming straight at me.

Can a shadow hit you? Kill you? Drag you into the netherworld? I barely had time to think before it was just a step away from me.

And then, suddenly, my dog stepped between us. He was facing the radioman and his spiral-curled tail was wagging slowly. Digitaria was offering a greeting to someone he knew. Someone he remembered.

Immediately, the radioman stopped moving forward. The edges of his shadow-shape seemed to waver so that it became even harder to see him. But he was there, right in front of me. I knew it. I could feel it. So I did the only thing I could think of; I also offered a gesture of greeting, one I had tried before—though last time, in Ravenette’s loft, I had left it to the dog to calm the radioman by himself. This time, I shared the effort. I bent down and patted the top of my dog’s head.

And then, the flat, gray figure of the radioman became more distinct. Slowly, he bent forward as well, reached out his hand and began to pet Digitaria. Our hands brushed, and as they did, I felt the slightest quiver, as if the space in which we touched had become charged.

Quickly, the radioman withdrew his hand. He pulled himself up to his full height, which was about the same as mine, and stood in front of me, like a cut-out figure composed of night and darkness. He was completely still, completely silent.

And then I saw him. It was for just a moment, but I really saw him in the way that the rabbi had described what he had seen, only more completely. Suddenly, gone was the humanoid shadow that Howard Gilmartin had described, that I remembered. Instead, just as if a switch had been turned on, positioned before me was a kind of thin, flexible stalk of bluish-white light with a round nimbus at the top—a head, perhaps, if the bright, vertical stalk was a body. Inside the nimbus were three round, black spots: eyes and a mouth, maybe, if such a being was in need of those.

The stalk seemed to sway from side to side for another moment, just long enough, I realized, to make sure that I really registered what I was seeing. Like the rabbi, I was being given a gift. The flat, human-shaped shadow was how this being hid himself. What he was allowing me to see was how he looked without that protection.

But in the space of a breath, the light disappeared. The darkness rearranged itself into the shadow that lived inside my memory.

I thought that was it, that the most extraordinary moment of this extraordinary experience was over. But I was wrong. It wasn’t—not quite yet.

As the shadow once again took shape, the radioman lifted his hand and extended one long, gray, human-seeming finger, which he raised to his lips—or where his lips would have been if what was once again his flat, gray face had features. It was a gesture I well remembered, and of all the ways I could have reacted, the one I would never have expected from myself is exactly what I did. I laughed. And I laughed because I knew how he meant it: not as a warning to stay silent but as a kind of joke between, well, not old friends, but at least two individuals who had passed this way before.

And then, in an instant, moving so swiftly that all I really saw was a blur, the radioman snatched up the repeater and strode back through the doorway of the Sunlite Apartments. He was gone.

As soon as his figure had disappeared into the empty doorway, the dogs began to disperse as well. As quickly as they had come, they left, running down the street, through the vacant lots. Some of them went back up the ramp toward the boardwalk and for a brief minute or so, I could see them, framed against the night sky, heading off to wherever they had come from.

And then we were alone again, the human beings who had witnessed what had just transpired: Jack, Raymond, Ravenette, the two Awares, and me. And one last dog; the one who stayed behind when the others left. Digitaria.

I saw, now, that there were actually two people who had cameras: Jack and Raymond. They both looked poised to take pictures, but it seemed that since the radioman had lunged at me, neither of them had made a move. They both appeared to be frozen in place.

But that changed in an instant. Jack looked at the camera he was holding and, as if he suddenly remembered what it was, mumbled something about getting a picture and ran past me, into the building. Raymond ran after him.

Ravenette stood with the two Awares. Her mouth was open and she seemed, temporarily, to have forgotten how to speak. The young men with her were still clutching their Tasers, but made no move to use them as I moved past them and began to walk away. The dog padded after me as we headed down the street. I didn’t want to wait for Jack and Raymond to return from what I knew would be their fruitless hunt for a photograph of the radioman. Perhaps they needed proof that what they had just seen had actually happened but I didn’t need anything like that. For now, I just wanted to get away. I didn’t want to talk about anything. I didn’t want to hear or make apologies or explanations. And I didn’t want to find out what anyone planned to do next. I didn’t care.

It was a long walk from the beach to the town, which appeared to be closed up for the night. The pizza parlors, dollar stores and bodegas were all locked. Most were hidden behind security gates. This was not a safe place to be; I knew that, but I also knew that I was in no danger. Nothing bad was going to happen to me tonight.

And I knew what I would see next: a black car gliding down the empty street. And that was exactly what happened; a cruising gypsy cab appeared from around the corner of a side street. I flagged him down and climbed into the back seat with my dog—and for once, I had the car to myself. There were no other passengers aboard.

The driver asked me where I was going. I told him and he named a reasonable price, so I said fine, sat back and closed my eyes. I didn’t open them again until I felt the car slow down when we were pulling up to my building.

As I got out of the car, followed by the dog, I saw my neighbor, Sassouma, heading down the block, heading home from her job. I said hello, and we walked upstairs together.

To get to my apartment, I had to pass hers. As she said good night to me, she unlocked her door and I could see inside, to the small living room, where one of her young sons was sitting on the couch with the family’s dust-colored Dogon dog.

“Bad boy. You should be in bed,” Sassouma scolded her son, though her tone was more fond than angry.

The boy said nothing to his mother, but I saw his gaze wander toward Digitaria. At the same time, he pulled his dog toward him and began, gently, to pet it.

I said good night and unlocked my own door. Once inside, I saw the light blinking on my answering machine and I knew it was Jack. I would call him back eventually, but not just then because I still didn’t want to talk. I had powered off my cell phone somewhere on the ride back from Rockaway so I left it turned off and took the further step of unplugging my landline. As I carried out this small task, my dog padded off to the bedroom. I followed after him and watched as he jumped up and arranged himself in his usual place at the foot of the bed. But instead of sitting there, eyes open, nose pointed at the door, he curled up and almost immediately went to sleep.

I left him there and went back to the living room, carrying my laptop. I had no intention, yet, of going to sleep myself. Instead, I started trolling the Internet. There were a number of sites I wanted to visit.

I spent the next couple of hours going back and forth from one site to another, dozing sometimes, but mostly just sitting, just waiting. Eventually, around dawn, I found the first sign of what I was looking for on the site of a university in Australia with an array of radio telescopes that systematically analyzed the radio waves emitted by celestial objects. This was one of the places that Avi had received a QSL card from. Using the photocopies Jack had given me, I had been able to make a list of every one of them. Years ago, long before there even was an Internet, someone at the university had been a distance-listening partner of Avi’s and had corresponded with him by postcard. Now, I only had to wait a few hours to find out what they had heard on the other side of the world. Several times a day, the university posted a log of signals it picked up from the array, along with a summary to aid amateur astronomers and students, and scrolling through the notes, I read that an anomalous signal had been picked up from a French satellite as it passed over the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t a routine telemetry signal from the satellite to its terrestrial base but, rather, seemed to be originating from an Earthbound source. What made it particularly unusual—what flagged it as something very different from any kind of stray signal being accidentally picked up by the satellite—was that its origin was deliberately masked so as to be untraceable. It was clear, however, that the signal was specifically aimed in such a way as to use the satellite as a booster to send it farther out into space. Confirmation of the signal was requested from other listening stations and additional review was recommended.

I knew immediately the radioman was back on duty. He had gotten the Haverkit repeater hooked up and put his network back online. The ghost signals—the alien prayers that had been silent for so long—were being sent out again, toward the stars.

There was a hyperlink embedded in the log notes about the strange signal. I clicked on it and the media player on my laptop automatically opened itself up and prepared to play the file. The program had a screen feature set to create a sort of psychedelic display timed to the beat of whatever music it was playing, but since the file it was retrieving was not music, it seemed to hesitate, briefly, before it pushed out a handful of colored pulses. I watched them slowly blossom and disappear as the audio finally kicked in.

And there it was: the faint, echoing heartbeat of my old friend Sputnik. I knew that it wasn’t really Sputnik’s telemetry signal I was listening to but the pulses that were carrying the radiomen’s message. Perhaps their signal contained a code or perhaps that was what their language really sounded like. I was sure that I would never know, but it didn’t matter to me. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I knew what they meant: that they were still searching for whoever—or whatever—had created them. And though it wasn’t a concern of theirs, what they were seeking was the creator of human beings, too, as well as all the other beings that likely shared the vast universe with us.

At some point in the morning, I must have dozed off, because when I woke up, Digitaria was beside me. I took him out for his walk and then went back to the couch and resumed listening to the signal.

In the early afternoon, I turned my cell phone back on and, almost immediately, it rang. Of course, it was Jack.

He didn’t even say hello. The first words out of his mouth were, “Have you heard it?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing exactly what he meant. “I heard it.”

“Amateur radio networks all over the world are picking it up and so are the big observatories with radio telescopes. Actually, I should say, picking them up. It’s not just whispering at the Watering Hole; there are more than a dozen ghost signals on different frequency bands. It’s like the whole radio spectrum has lit up.”

“So it’s big news.”

“It will be for a while,” Jack agreed. “But since I’m assuming—just like before—that nobody will be able to figure out what the source of the signals is or what they mean, eventually most everyone will decide that they’re some sort of anomaly and go on to other things. That will leave the usual suspects—the alien hunters and conspiracy guys—to come on my show and tell me all about what they think is going on.”

“And you’re not going to tell them that you know the truth?”

“I didn’t even get a photo, Laurie.”

“No. I didn’t think you would.”

“So what am I going to do? Tell them that I built a repeater out of old Haverkit parts so I could give it to a shadow who wants to find God? I can’t do that. I’d sound crazy—and I’m supposed to be the cool head, the objective host who gives the unexplainable phenomena crowd a place to come and work up a sweat.”

I made a mental note of what Jack had just said: he’d called the radioman a shadow—no mention of the bright, slim being that had revealed itself behind the shape of darkness. Evidently, only I had seen the radioman in his real form. I knew Jack well enough by now to be sure that if he’d even glimpsed anything other than the shadow, he would have been dissecting the experience, going over and over it with me. Then was I going to tell him what I had seen? Maybe, but not now. That was a conversation for another day, another time.

“What about Raymond?” I asked.

“Well, we didn’t exactly kiss and make up but we went our separate ways without incident, as they say. We both lived to fight another day.” Then Jack laughed. “The Blue Boxes are going to be working overtime to soothe the angry engrams that he and that vampire queen are going to be dealing with while they try to fit your radioman and his behavior into Blue Awareness.”

“Ravenette is a psychic, not a vampire.” How odd, I thought. I actually felt a little protective of her. Almost fond, as if she were already fading into the background of how my thoughts were arranging themselves around the events of last night.

“I stand corrected. I got my alternative lifestyles mixed up.”

“You know what, Jack?” I said. “I actually have to get ready to go to work.”

“Can’t you call in sick or something? You must be exhausted. Have you even slept?”

“Not much, but I feel fine. I really do.”

After adding a promise to Jack that I’d call him later—or maybe tomorrow—I got off the phone, took a shower, and went through my usual routine of having something to eat, getting myself dressed, and taking the dog for a walk. After I brought him back to the apartment, before I left again, I gave him a pat on the head.

Standing at the bus stop a few minutes later, I saw the moon high up in a corner of the afternoon sky. Planes from the airport where I was headed were pulling themselves up into that same late autumn sky, headed out over the ocean. Down the block on the road between the garages and the bay, I could see my bus come lumbering toward me. Everything was the same as it always was, except that it was not.

And what was not, was me. I was different now than I had been yesterday, different when I got home last night than when I had left. And the difference was irrefutable. I felt the way I thought I must have felt when I was a child, crouching beside Avi on the fire escape, watching him tune around the dial on his radio. I felt energized, awake, alert—and deeply curious, although there were some things I already understood. I suppose it had taken last night to make them clear to me, but they were certainly clear now.

I knew, for example, what Avi had wanted, probably all the years of his life. Avi, who had never traveled more than a few miles from home, wanted his radios to connect him to distant places. And my friend Jack, so consumed with revenge lately, really just wanted to go on listening to people tell him stories about things going bump in the night. Dr. Carpenter wanted everything that he considered nonsense having to do with strange dogs and ancient visitors to stop being any concern of his. Raymond Gilmartin simply wanted to be right, and Ravenette wanted him to be, too. The rabbi who owned the bulldog wanted enlightenment. And the radioman simply wanted to do his job.

And me? What did I want? I could answer that question in the few moments it took me to climb onto the bus, take my seat, and let it carry me to work under the pale light of the afternoon moon.

What did I want? Maybe to believe what I had denied for longer than I could remember: that life could be something other than just a series of days and weeks and years to get through. Slog through, with my head down and eyes averted. Instead, it could actually be interesting, rich with possibilities. It could even be mysterious. Very mysterious. It could keep me up all night, thinking. Wondering. Listening. It could make me want to keep tuning around the universal dial, trying to find out what I might hear. What I might encounter.

What did I want? There was no doubt about that now.

What did I want? I wanted more.