Radiomen (10 page)

He disappeared somewhere and came back shortly with two bottles of some microbrew with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on the label. I noticed that he also had a brown accordion folder with him, bulging with papers. He didn’t say anything about that to me as he settled himself into a chair.

During his short absence, I’d picked up one of the magazines, which featured a story about poltergeists. It was still in my lap when he handed me the beer and it prompted me to begin our conversation by saying, “So, ghosts and ghoulies. What got you involved in all that?”

He shrugged. “Like I said, I was a DJ for a lot of years. A lot. There were a couple of different jobs before that—nothing really important except for four years I did in the army. Straight out of high school. I was a ham—an amateur radio enthusiast—from the time I was a kid, so they sent me to the Signal Corps. I was assigned to the radio shack on a base in Germany and I guess that’s when it started; sometimes the pilots would see odd things when they were flying. Occasionally, I’d pick up some chatter about some weird thing they’d seen or picked up on radar, but when they landed, if you asked them about it, they’d clam up. As far as the Signal Corps was concerned, there were no UFOs or anything like that, so making a report about seeing anything unusual—unless there was a possibility that it had some military importance—was seriously discouraged.
I
wasn’t discouraged, though. I was fascinated. But so was someone else,” Jack continued. “Do you know who Howard Gilmartin is?”

“Sure,” I said. I took a sip of my beer and decided it wasn’t all that great. Or maybe it was and I just wasn’t used to the taste; at the bar, we never stocked microbrews, just the standard labels, so the few times when I was out somewhere and had a beer, I tended to buy what I served. Jack must have seen my reaction, so he offered to get me something else. I said no, but he insisted.

“Let me get my hosting duties over with,” he said, “and then I’ll tell you the Blue Awareness version of the creation story.”

“Which will get us to the Wild Blue Yonder?” I asked, reminding him what I really wanted to know.

“Eventually,” he said.

He put the brown folder down on the floor and left the room again, returning with a can of Miller Lite.

“Better?” he asked, as he handed it to me.

“Better,” I told him.

He settled back into his chair and then he began to explain.

Jack told me that Howard Gilmartin had also been what he called a radioman, though he had served in the navy, in World War II, years before Jack’s time. Gilmartin—much like Avi—had been a dedicated amateur radio operator when he was a boy. Probably because of that skill, when he was drafted into the service he, too, had been assigned to a radio shack, but his post was on a carrier that fought its battles in the South Pacific. On this ship, it was the custom to name different areas where the crew worked: they ate in the Pineapple Lounge and showered in the Tiki Hut. But the sailors who manned the radios and radars had a different idea about what to call the place where they spent their days and nights; because their main job was to track airplanes, both their own and the enemy’s, they had dubbed their workspace The Wild Blue Yonder.

Jack continued his story. Radar, he said, was still a relatively new technology at the beginning of the war, when Gilmartin had been drafted, but on the carrier he became fascinated by it and was training to become an operator. One night, someone told him to climb the tower where the radar was positioned to clean off some debris, and that’s when he saw what he thought was another crewman standing on a platform under the radar array. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, exactly the kind of figure that lived in my dreams—or my memory—the same one that Ravenette had described to me. Flat, gray, featureless. Standing on the platform next to the radars. Gilmartin froze, momentarily unable to believe what he was seeing, but as he watched, the shadow figure leaned against one of the radar dishes and pushed it, slightly changing its position. Apparently, without even thinking about what he was doing, Gilmartin moved toward the figure which, finally noticing him, turned toward him and emitted a sound that Gilmartin later described as somewhere between a growl and a high-pitched hiss. Painful to listen to and clearly unfriendly. Dangerously, aggressively unfriendly. The sound somehow emanated from within the shadowy figure that had no face, no eyes or nose or mouth, snaking outward like radio static carried on the damp night air. Shocked, Gilmartin climbed down the tower and ran into the radio shack.

Maybe he was going to tell the other crew members what he saw, maybe not. But when he entered the shack, the other technicians were already dealing with a mystery of their own: the radars were registering strange signals, too faint and on the wrong frequencies to indicate that they were pinging off any real, physical target. Possibly they were echoes or some malfunction of the equipment. They were about to send Gilmartin back up the towers when they suddenly faded away. Having had a few minutes to think about how his fellow crew members would have reacted to him confessing that he had encountered some kind of alien being readjusting the positioning of their radars—and that might be the cause of the weird signals they were receiving—Gilmartin decided to keep quiet. That was the only time in his entire life that Gilmartin ever saw the shadow figure or personally encountered the phenomenon of what later came to be called ghost signals.

“Does any of this sound familiar?” Jack prodded. Well, of course it did. When I admitted as much, Jack said, “So do you want to go on trying to convince me that your friend on the fire escape was a dream?”

My reaction was to try to make light of the idea. “At least he must have liked me better because he didn’t hiss at me.”

That made Jack laugh. “Yes, I’m sure he liked you better. Even an alien could tell that Howard Gilmartin was an asshole from the get-go.”

“You know,” I said to Jack, “I went to a Blue Awareness introduction session when I was . . . well, back in the hippie days, in San Francisco. They explained how Howard Gilmartin had founded the Blue Awareness but they never mentioned anything like the story you just told me.”

“No, of course not,” he agreed. “Because that would make Gilmartin sound like a coward. Instead, when he got out of the service and started writing, he turned the story around. In his version, the alien—whom he describes as looking like a shadow—is hostile to him at first, but Gilmartin is able to create a rapport with him. Apparently, somehow the alien senses that Gilmartin is not your everyday human: he’s a superior being. Smarter, stronger, a highly advanced version of your everyday homo sapiens. Anyway, over the course of the next few days, the shadowy alien returns again and again to Gilmartin’s radar station and has a lot of long conversations with him—only in the stories, the radar installation is somewhere in a remote desert area of the southwest instead of on a navy ship and the Gilmartin character is the lone operator stationed at this post, where he works for a secret government agency. Eventually, he quits because the higher ups at the agency don’t believe him when he reports his particular close encounter with this strange being, or the information that his visitor revealed to him, which is that humans are actually the descendents of an ancient alien race who deliberately placed us on this planet long ago. It seems that over the course of time, we lost our collective memory about our real origins. Somewhere in our recent history, however, the aliens began returning to remind a small, select group of individuals that we have just taken on these shell bodies to accommodate the conditions of living on Earth. As the stories progress, the Gilmartin character learns more and more about the plans that the aliens have for these special humans: they are the ones destined to become the first people to be made ‘aware’ that they are the aliens’ seed and that they have to reclaim their true nature, which is, more or less, to join the master race of beings who run the universe. That’s where the Blue Box comes in. It’s a device that the alien gives the Gilmartin character to help him and the people who will follow the movement he establishes to develop their consciousness, rid themselves of their human nature and remember their alien identities.”

“That doesn’t sound at all like why Ravenette wanted to hook me up to that thing,” I told Jack. “Just the opposite, really; she was trying very hard to convince me that the shadow on the fire escape was nothing more than a damaged engram, or something like that. She wasn’t exactly inviting me to join the ranks of the exalted.”

“Well, sure,” Jack replied. “Because the way she must see things, a non-Aware can’t possibly have had an encounter with a member of the alien race. Gilmartin’s son, Raymond, is running the organization now and he’s the one who took his father’s ideas—and his lousy science fiction stories—and turned them into what he says is a religion. And from what I understand, one of their sacred tenets is that no one—no one—other than Howard ever actually saw or spoke to the alien. With the possible exception of you, of course. Am I right?”

I didn’t respond one way or the other, but Jack didn’t seem to care. “What Awares aspire to by studying the principles of Blue Awareness,” he continued, “is to eventually achieve a true understanding of the Wild Blue Yonder which, as far as I can make out, symbolizes for them all the knowledge that the alien supposedly shared with Howard Gilmartin. When they reach that goal, they will finally get to meet their alien creators once again. I can’t imagine it would sit well with a Second Level Aware like Ravenette that she hasn’t reached nirvana yet, but somehow you have—and you don’t even seem to take it seriously. I suppose she wanted to hook you up to that box and get you to tell her why the radioman was so interested in you. You, specifically.”

“I never said he was,” I pointed out to Jack. “She did.”

“And I’m telling you that she wasn’t happy about it.”

“What about the ghost signals?” I asked. “Are they part of Blue Awareness theology?”

“That’s part of what’s revealed when you’re ready to face the Wild Blue Yonder which, of course, only happens after you’ve been thoroughly worked over by the Blue Box and cleansed of all your bad engrams. Which is where an interesting connection between Howard Gilmartin and Avi Perzin comes in. Your Avi Perzin.”

That was a surprising development. More than surprising—bizarre, I thought. Bad enough that I had stumbled into an involvement, however tenuous, with the Blue Awareness; what were the odds that before me, Avi had, too? Apparently, I was about to find out.

“Just like in his stories,” said Jack, “in real life, Howard Gilmartin felt that he was the only person who took the ghost signals seriously enough—except, of course, for Avi. At some point after he’d begun writing his tall tales, Howard read an article about the ghost signals that your uncle wrote for some scientific journal. I gather there was some contact between them—letters went back and forth for a while. And it seems that somewhere along the line, the two of them met in person. Howard must have shown Avi the Blue Box, or maybe just some early prototype. Either way, that turned out to be a very bad idea, at least for Howard, because whatever your uncle believed about ghost signals and aliens, in his heart of hearts, he was a scientist. And he immediately recognized the Blue Box for what it really is: a simple Wheatstone Bridge, a device for measuring electrical resistance dressed up as a kind of lie detector for the soul. As a matter of fact, in 1969, the FDA sued the Blue Awareness for, essentially, practicing medicine without a license by claiming that they could actually cure a variety of afflictions by subjecting members to Blue Box sessions designed to cleanse their spirits of disabling thoughts and ideas. Avi was one of the scientists who provided the FDA with a brief to support their claims. But he did more than that: he actually built a Wheatstone Bridge and demonstrated that it had no healing properties whatsoever. That’s the primary reason that now, Awares have to be careful to say that they use the Box only for ‘counseling.’ ”

“And?” I said, because there was something in his voice when he mentioned Avi that made it clear to me there was an
and
coming. Maybe not unless I prodded him, but it was definitely there.

“Well, okay,” Jack said. “I did make you come all this way so I might as well get to the rest of it, since I feel a little responsible. Maybe a little more than that, because I pushed so hard for you to go see Ravenette. Maybe she would have just let it go, the coincidence of seeing the radioman when she tuned into you, or whatever the hell it is she does—but telling her you had a Blue Box was probably going too far. Laurie,” Jack said, leaning forward and adding a clearly discernible emphasis to his words, “these people can be vindictive. Dangerous. They are also not averse to using violence. People have been beaten up. A reporter who wrote an exposé a couple of years ago received mail tainted with anthrax. I’m telling you all this because I want you to be careful. Please.”

I had read about some of these incidents, but it was very hard to think of them as having any real relevance for me. “You’re serious?”

“I am. I just don’t like that she even mentioned the Wild Blue Yonder to you. That’s in the vicinity of saying ‘if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.’ ”

“Okay,” I said. “So that sounds really crazy.” And then something else occurred to me—something even worse. “You aren’t implying that the Blue Awareness killed Avi, are you? Because he died of cancer. I don’t think there’s any question about that.”

“They may think they were responsible. It would fit in with Howard Gilmartin’s ideas that the body can be destroyed because the mind’s ability to defend itself against destructive forces from within and without can be severely compromised by diseased engrams. That’s how the Blue Awareness views most illnesses, both physical and mental—as manifestations of damaged engrams. Some of the Awares also think they can
cause
illness—maybe even kill a person—by deliberately misusing a Blue Box. You hook it up to someone you want to harm and reverse the energy flow or something like that. That’s more secret lore from the Wild Blue Yonder, though it seems Raymond—Gilmartin’s son—may have been the one who added that particular tenet to Awareness doctrine. He’s even more—well, shall we say, extreme?—than his father ever was. So do I really have to tell you that there’s no end to what true believers like that are capable of? I think we can agree that someone who’s reached the Second Level of Awareness is the definition of a true believer. I’ll take the responsibility for bringing you two together but I don’t want to be responsible for you getting hurt.”