Radiomen

ELEANOR LERMAN

T
HE
P
ERMANENT
P
RESS
Sag Harbor, NY 11963

Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Lerman

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

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4170 Noyac Road

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lerman, Eleanor—
    Radiomen / Eleanor Lerman.
            pages; cm
    ISBN 978-1-57962-383-8 (hardcover)
    eISBN 978-1-57962-410-1
          1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Cults—Fiction.
    I. Title.

PS3562.E67R33 2015
813'.54—dc23                          2014035886

Printed in the United States of America

~I~

“H
i there. What’s your name?”

“My name is Laurie.”

“Laurie. And something with a P.”

“Perzin.”

“Yes, I knew there was a ‘z’ in there, too. Well, hi, Laurie. Thanks for calling in. Do you have a question you want me to address tonight?”

I didn’t, really, or maybe I did when I started to make the call, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I don’t think I had actually expected to get through to the psychic who was answering questions on this station, way at the end of the radio dial. The show originated from somewhere in the city—some outer-borough outpost, probably not unlike my own neglected neighborhood—but it was syndicated nationwide.

“What’s your question, Laurie?” the psychic asked again.

It was late, I was tired, and I’d drunk half a bottle of wine: something Australian with an animal on the label. Maybe a kangaroo or some kind of bat. In any case, at the moment, I didn’t really have an idea of what was bothering me so I was about to say the first thing that had come to mind, maybe ask some dumb question about work (like there was really anything to ask; I was a bartender and every night at my job was pretty much the same), but the psychic spoke again before I even got a word out.

“Hmm,” she said. “This is kind of strange. Usually, I get a feeling—a strong impression—about some incident or event related to a question I’m asked but . . . well. You haven’t even asked anything yet and I already have something. This really is strange,” she repeated.

“Strange how?” I switched the telephone receiver from one ear to the other as I heard the psychic draw in a breath.

“Well, I’m being presented with an image, so let me tell you what I see. There’s a room in an apartment building. No, more like a boarding house. That’s the sense I’m getting, a boarding house. The room is kind of bare, but there’s a cot in it, a table and chair, a gas ring on a counter next to the sink. And there’s a window on the far wall; I can see through the window that it’s nighttime. The sky is full of stars.”

Then the psychic paused. She seemed to be waiting for some response from me—perhaps a confirmation that I knew the room she was describing. I said nothing.

Finally, she continued. “Okay, then. Here comes the strange part. There’s a . . . a figure, I guess I’d call it. Him. A figure sitting on the cot. I can see him, sort of, but I’m not sure how to describe him to you; he’s . . . hmm. He’s just a kind of shadow. I mean, I only seem to be able to see him in one dimension. He’s gray and flat, featureless. But . . . wait. Wait. He sees me. Yes, I’m sure he sees me. And because he knows I’m watching, he’s . . . he’s putting his index finger up to his lips—I mean, where his lips would be if I could see his face—like the way you do when you’re signaling for someone to be quiet. Now he’s doing something else. I can’t quite see . . . oh yes. Wait. That’s what it is: he’s pointing to the fire escape outside the window. There’s something important out on that fire escape. Hmm,” the psychic said again. “He seems very agitated. I don’t quite know what to make of all this. Do you?”

“It’s pretty weird,” I replied, deflecting her query.

“Do you know who . . . that figure is?” the psychic persisted. She seemed to have forgotten that she was the one who was supposed to be answering questions, not asking them.

“No,” I lied. “I have no idea.”

I imagine that must have frustrated the psychic along with whatever audience was listening to this late-night radio call-in show. It could have been a dozen people or teeming hordes of fans of the supernatural. I had no idea, really, but found myself trying to picture some selection of them: stoked on caffeine or cocaine, lonely or restless or just unable to sleep, listening to this program on some old boom box sitting on a shelf or a silver sliver of metal tucked in their pocket, broadcasting straight into their skulls through a pair of headphones. I possessed neither of those devices; instead, I was listening on a complicated contraption I thought of as a radio since it picked up a wide range of AM, FM and shortwave stations, though it was really something that my uncle had built for a different purpose. It was a Haverkit, a receiver assembled from parts made by a company that was no longer in existence. My uncle, Avi, had used it to listen to the telemetry signals broadcast by satellites—the signals ground controllers use to track an orbiter’s path around the globe—which was a hobby of his. Actually, it was his passion. According to family lore—the little that existed of it, anyway—he had always liked building and fixing radios, an avocation that baffled his parents. He had been a dedicated amateur radio enthusiast from as far back as anyone could remember, earning his amateur radio broadcaster’s license when he was a teenager. But with the launch of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, his focus had honed in on building receivers that could pick up satellite transmissions, which in the early days of satellite launches were primarily broadcasts of information they sent to their ground stations reporting on their position, velocity and temperature. The radio I had was the most sophisticated, and probably the last device that Avi had built. When you attached a special antenna to it—a kind of inverted metal pyramid, hollow inside—you could also listen to the faint hiss of radiation given off by celestial objects such as the moon and stars in the neighborhood of the night sky that was visible to observers on Earth. I hadn’t seen that antenna since I was a child, but I didn’t miss it because I had enough problems listening to the radio without any special attachments. Mainly, it was sometimes difficult to tune because it was so sensitive that it reacted to changes in the ionosphere, which is one of the layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Avi had explained to me why that was: during the day, when sunlight hits the ionosphere, many of the atoms in this layer of the atmosphere lose their electrons and turn into ions, which are not good conductors of radio waves. But when it’s dark, this transformation of atoms into ions is halted and the ionosphere becomes a far better reflector of radio signals. So much so that sometimes they can travel hundreds of miles farther than during the day. Sometimes they can even circle the globe.

I thought of asking the psychic if she knew anything about that, but I figured she wouldn’t. And since I wasn’t giving her anything to help her connect me either to the room she had described or the strange figure in it, the psychic quickly cut me off. “I’m afraid that’s all we have time for,” she said. “I have to take another caller. Thanks for tuning in, Laurie. Bye now.”

“Bye,” I said, and clicked off my phone. I sat on the couch for a while after that, without the energy to get up. Finally, I did, steadying myself on my feet and then directing myself to the bedroom, where I pulled off my clothes, got under the blankets and fell quickly asleep. That was the way—that night, at least—I managed not to spend even a minute considering the psychic’s question. Did I know who the shadowy figure was? Well, maybe. Maybe he was the radioman, which was the only way I had ever described him to myself. And maybe I even knew
where
he was, since I was pretty sure that I recognized the room that the psychic had described: it was Avi’s, his cot-in-the-kitchen of a small railroad flat my family used to rent in a summer boarding house in Rockaway Beach, a peninsula that stuck out into the Atlantic Ocean at the end of Queens. But I hadn’t been there for—what? Almost forty years? Since I was a young child. So what was the radioman doing there now—if
now
had any meaning in this peculiar vision, sitting on Avi’s bed? As far as I knew, I had only met him once. And even then, it was only in a dream.

~II~

T
he next day, I slept even later than I usually did. When I finally got up in the early afternoon, I badly wanted coffee. I was still barely conscious when I dragged myself into the kitchen and poured water into the coffeemaker. I waited for it to brew, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just listening to the noise of the day banging away outside.

Luckily, since I worked nights and slept during the hours when most of the rest of the city was at work, my bedroom was in the back of the building I lived in so it was relatively quiet. But my living room faced a busy street lined with body shops, car parts wholesalers and other automotive repair services. Some of them also carried on some kind of black-market operations that involved lots of hurried loading and unloading of big trucks late at night. (They were smuggling cigarettes from the Midwest Indian reservations, one of my neighbors said; another thought electronics were involved.) Occasionally, coming home from work on the last late-night bus to make the run from Kennedy airport, where I did my bartending, to where I lived at the far end of Queens, I’d have to walk around a Diamond Reo or a Peterbilt with a forty-foot trailer parked right up on the sidewalk, close to the buildings, with only its running lights on and its engine idling. If a giant truck that took up half the block could be inconspicuous, that seemed to be the intent; like you wouldn’t notice it, or shouldn’t, if it snuggled up to the iron gates drawn across the entrance to a row of garages. Sometimes I’d see a couple of men loading or unloading boxes from the back of one of these trucks. They went about their business efficiently, without making too much of a racket—I had to admit that. The morning was another story.

Six days a week, from early in the morning until around seven in the evening, the noise that penetrated into my front room was pretty impressive, even with the windows closed tight. The neighborhood I lived in was often referred to as automobile alley because the car repair businesses lined the streets for about ten blocks in every direction except south, where the grassy inlets and salt marshes of Jamaica Bay jutted up against the boundary shores of the borough. My building, an old brick high-rise with a couple of dozen apartments, had the look of a relic from better days that had been marooned here, all by itself, when sometime in the past the neighborhood was gradually taken over by the men and machines who fix smashed cars. But its location was exactly what kept the place affordable for me. I had thought of moving from time to time, but where would I go that would be any better for what I could manage to pay?

When I finally had enough caffeine to wake me up—halfway, anyway—I wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch. I meant to turn on the TV and watch the news on one of the cable channels, but that’s when the previous night decided to come back to me. I had help in the way of some visual props: facing me on the coffee table was the near-empty bottle of wine I had decided to relax with when I came home from work and, of course, the radio, a big, clunky black box that while missing its exotic pyramid antenna still had a utilitarian directional antenna attached. I liked to fiddle around with the radio in the same sort of way I liked to surf the web—I’d just tune up and down the various bands to see what I could find. I enjoyed listening to people talk out there in the dark—the ham broadcasters relaying gossip to each other, boats anchored in the shipping channels, pilots guiding their planes home to the airport where I worked or to the smaller landing strips out on Long Island and in New Jersey. Once in a while, I tuned into the atomic clock, installed on a military base in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Ceaselessly, second by second, it declared the exact time in a stern, robotic voice that, late at night, could easily be mistaken for the voice of doom. I could also pick up international programs, and one of my favorites, when I could find it, was an American expat living in Chile who read e-mails and letters from people who had picked up his broadcast. He said hello, they said hello back. I’d sent the guy a postcard, once, that I’d bought at the airport—a picture of the Statue of Liberty photographed on a sunny day—and waited for two weeks afterward for him to say hello to me. When he finally did, it seemed like an accomplishment, like I’d made a connection or closed a circle.