Radiomen (13 page)

“I haven’t heard from Ravenette,” I said, and hung up on him.

I half expected that Jack wouldn’t send me the documents until I was more forthcoming about why I wanted them, but he did. Before we locked up for the night, I went into our back office just in case, and found that he’d faxed me twenty-some-odd pages of material pertaining to Avi’s interactions with the FDA about the Blue Boxes. And, there was both a diagram—drawn and labeled in Avi’s handwriting, which I was pleased to see that I still recognized—of the Wheatstone Bridge he had built as well as a photograph of the device. The photo was a copy of a copy, so it was somewhat grainy, but it certainly looked to me like the small, squat black box with the metal canisters attached to it that had spent a good part of its life packed away in my father’s old suitcase.

I took the copies home with me and, on the way to work the next day, dropped them off at Haberman’s office. He wasn’t around, but the bored receptionist managed to will herself to engage in verbal communication long enough to tell me that she would see that her boss got the documents. When he sent off the letter to the lawyers for the Blue Awareness, she added, he’d put a copy in the mail for me, too.

The letter arrived a few days later. I read it and felt satisfied that it sounded formal, serious and final enough to get the attorneys for the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center of the Blue Awareness to leave me alone. I went off to work—I had a Friday to Tuesday shift to do—and managed not to think about Blue anything all through the weekend and on into the next week.

Wednesday morning, I was fast asleep when my phone rang. I felt like I had been ripped from the depths of dreamland and thrown back into daylight. I grabbed for my cell phone, which was on my nightstand, and as soon as I pushed the button to connect to the call, I heard what sounded like a man screaming.

And I was right. The man was Victor Haberman, and he was screaming at me.

“Get over here,” he was yelling into the phone. “Get here right now!”

“Where are you?”

“My office! It’s un-fucking believable.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. Victor Haberman sounded like he was in a state of genuine panic.

“This is your fault!” he shouted. “I’ve called the police!” And then he clicked off the phone.

The police? That didn’t sound good. I got out of bed, splashed my face with water, pulled on some clothes and called the local car service because I didn’t think I had time to wait for a bus. Whatever was going on, I wanted to get to the strip mall quickly. Well, really, I didn’t want to go there at all, but I knew I had to. Haberman had not even given me a clue about what had happened to his office that was freaking him out, but since he was blaming me, it wasn’t hard for me to guess just who was most likely to be involved.

At first, when I arrived at the strip mall, it didn’t seem like anything worthy of causing havoc was going on. That is, until I stepped out of the hired car and started walking toward Haberman’s office. It took a few moments, I think, for my brain to actually register what I was seeing: in the middle of the row of drab storefronts—a nail salon, a Laundromat, a sandwich shop—the plate glass window that fronted Haberman’s office was obscured by wide smears of bright blue paint.

As I approached, Haberman came out the front door and, spotting me immediately, ran up to me and grabbed my arm. His face was red and he still seemed to be just as agitated as he’d sounded on the phone. His breath was ragged. In fact, he sounded like he was panting.

“Look at this!” was about all he could get out as he gestured wildly at the paint-smeared window. I looked again and saw that blue paint had been splattered on the front door, as well.

“Have the police been here yet?” I asked him.

He nodded. “Come and gone,” he choked out. “They said vandalism. Just vandalism. Ha!”

“You don’t think so?” I asked. I was being disingenuous, and I knew it.

“It’s those nuts you had me write to!” he spit out. He was beginning to breathe a little better, but that only seemed to send him back into screaming mode. “Those Blue . . . blue lunatics. It has to be them, right? I mean, blue paint—I get the message. But I had no idea they’d do anything like this. Did you?” he said. Turning to face me directly, his face displayed an accusing glare. “Did you?” he repeated.

Did I? The only honest answer to that was both yes and no. But really, more
no
, because I simply couldn’t have imagined that they would have responded with such vehemence. Despite what I saw as Jack’s attempts to freak me out about what the Blue Awareness might be capable of, his warnings hadn’t sounded real to me. Or maybe I had just assumed that whenever representatives of the Awareness felt moved to retaliate against someone for a perceived transgression, their actions would be confined to their own members. And I’d also thought that in a time when their most prominent spokespeople were athletes and celebrities and they ran ads on television inviting people to come to their introductory sessions to see how open-minded and inclusive they were, their days of acting thuggishly against those who angered them were past. Looking at the paint splattered across the front of the attorney’s place of business, I had to admit that I had been wrong. The celebrities were their public face. What I was seeing here was their real identity. Behind the pretty people and the TV ads with soft voices speaking in comforting tones, there was still violence. And clearly, some sort of unfettered need to assert power over anyone who crossed them.

I hadn’t yet responded to Haberman’s question, so now he interrupted my thoughts by answering it himself. “They’re angry at you, so they’re taking it out on me.”

“But it’s such a bizarre thing to do,” I said. It was, but that was the point, and I got it. What they had done was supposed to seem bizarre. Something like breaking a window would have been frightening, but this was both frightening and strange. I was getting the feeling that they liked strange. And why not? It was the same inclination they’d shown by breaking into my mailbox.
Strangeness
was at the root of Howard Gilmartin’s experience with the radioman; he had transferred that sense of strangeness to his stories and to the religion that had grown out of them. And it still remained.

“I’m finished,” Haberman said to me. “I don’t want to be involved with this anymore. I’m going to give you half your retainer back and send them a formal letter explaining that I’m no longer your attorney. I don’t need this kind of trouble.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“I can give you the names of some other lawyers. I think you need someone—a firm—that’s used to dealing with situations like this.”

“Like what?”

Haberman seemed perplexed by my question. “Like having a crazy religious group out to get you.”

“I don’t know if crazy is really the right word.”

“This doesn’t seem crazy to you?” Haberman said, gesturing at his ruined windows.

“It seems extreme,” I agreed. “That’s how they get what they want. Or keep what they have. Either they seduce you or scare you.” I was thinking of Ravenette and her quicksilver change from my new friend, concerned with my welfare, to an angry foe. “Seducing didn’t work with me so now they’re going to try scaring me.”

“
Try?
” Haberman exclaimed. “Try? This isn’t working?” Again, he waved his hand in the direction of the blue-stained storefront. I found myself wondering if the bored receptionist was still inside, still tapping away at her keyboard, already having lost interest in the incident that had managed to temporarily interrupt what to her probably seemed like just one more endless workday.

“You know what?” I said to him, realizing I was as surprised as he was going to be by my answer. “No. Not really.”

“Then you’re the crazy one,” he said. Angrily, he turned and strode away from me. As I watched him head back toward his office, I saw him pull out his cell phone, punch in a number and quickly start barking at someone else.

I stayed in the parking lot for a few minutes longer, staring at the long, ragged swipes of blue paint. To my eyes, the pattern formed a code I could easily decipher, and what it said was,
Watch out, Laurie. Don’t play with us
. So Haberman was certainly right. I should have been scared. I
wanted
to be scared; that would have been the normal reaction to such a clear threat. But the more I stared at the blue paint splashed across the blank windows, the more I felt something quite opposite from fear. It was as if that one-time pass I had given myself when I got Ravenette’s letter, the chance to take a break from the routine of my very ordinary, very as-basic-as-basic-can-get existence, was unexpectedly being renewed. And with it came wandering back all the wild recklessness I had drummed out of myself over the years in order to get some control of my life; that, too, was now making a case for its right of return.

In other words, while I knew that what I should have been doing was considering whether or not to go talk to the police myself, or at least mulling over the possibility of engaging a new lawyer—or maybe a bodyguard—I was, instead, thinking only one thing. And that was,
Go ahead
.
Bring it on.

~VII~

O
ver the next day or two my feeling of bravura slowly faded, but I remained in an odd mood. I felt neither here nor there, drifty, unsettled. I spent a free afternoon at the movies and then a quiet, cloudy morning wandering around Central Park, remembering long-ago summer days when I would regularly skip school to be one of thousands of kids in rags and rainbow glitter dancing around at a Be-In on the Sheep Meadow. On the way, you used to be able to walk down the cobbled path to the zoo and buy pot or hash as openly as the pretzels and ice cream that vendors were now hawking from food carts. This particular morning, I bought nothing, but after walking around for a while, sat on a bench near the carousel, watching nannies take small children for rides on the painted horses.

My work shifts occupied the next week or so, and tired as I was every night when I got home, I did make myself check my mailbox with some regularity. All I ever found were the usual bills and junk mail; there were no further communications—written or otherwise—from the Blue Awareness or their lawyers.

Then, when my next day off from work came around, I started feeling even more like I was at loose ends. I thought about going to another movie, and even checked the paper to see what was playing nearby. I picked out something I thought I wanted to see, got dressed and was ready to go to a matinee when I decided no, that wasn’t really what I wanted to do at all. In the back of my mind, I’d been thinking about another destination all through the long nights of mixing drinks, opening bottles of beer and catching glimpses of baseball players on the big screens in the bar that were now mostly set to follow the early games of the new season. I knew where I wanted to go. And really, I’d probably wanted to go for a long time. I wanted to go see Avi.

Though I had never been there before, I knew where he was buried. My father had arranged a kind of Egyptian burial for himself; he was interred in a cemetery out on Long Island with both his wives—my mother and stepmother—neatly tucked in beside him. But Avi, according to instructions he’d left in his will, was buried in the same cemetery where his parents were interred, which was in New Jersey. I hadn’t gone to the funeral; it was during my crazy hippie kid period and not only was I committed to the theory that I didn’t love, even
like,
anyone in my family, I certainly didn’t believe in attending some bourgeois ceremony like a funeral. Still, though so many years had passed, I remembered the name of the cemetery and where it was: on US Route 1, near the town of Woodbridge, and I had a good idea of how to get there. That’s one thing about working in an airport bar; if people aren’t discussing sports or flight delays, they’re talking about how to get from one place to another, and they always think that bartenders have the routes and schedules of every method of ground transportation catalogued in some bin in the back of their brains. Eventually, you do end up with a lot more information than you thought you ever needed about trains, car services, cabs and buses, but for once, all this miscellaneous knowledge served my own purposes. I knew there was a bus from the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan that would travel the length of US Route 1 all through the state of New Jersey. I called the bus line and found out that the bus did, indeed, make a stop near the cemetery and it left from the city every hour on the half hour.

I was on the eleven thirty bus. It was turning out to be a cold spring; the days featured changeable weather, skies laddered with clouds and windy gusts that felt like cold breath on the back of your neck. From my window seat, I watched as the bus passed through the Lincoln Tunnel and headed through the swampy outlands that surrounded the interstate roads connecting New Jersey to New York. Occasionally, I’d see a heron wading through an algae-covered pond or a hawk circling above the marshes. Later, as the bus headed deeper into Jersey, the scenery became more commercial: we passed a giant blue-walled Ikea, then endless outlet stores for shoes and carpeting and lawn furniture.

I had asked the bus driver to announce the stop for the cemetery and he did. A few moments later, I was standing alone at the edge of the far lane of a busy highway that swept through a landscape of blank, grassy hills. In the near distance, though, I spotted the entrance to the cemetery: an elaborate stone archway above a tall, wrought iron gate. After reaching the gate and passing through, I walked up a wide pathway toward an office building with smoked glass windows. The building itself was a modest structure, long and low, and fronted by a circular driveway from which a network of small, gravel roads and pathways led out into the vast green fields beyond. The graveyards.

I crossed a flagstone porch and entered the building, finding myself in a kind of hushed visitors’ center. Forest green carpeting and walnut paneling dominated the space, though at its center was a counter, also of dark wood, with maps and pamphlets arranged along the top in small, discreet piles. The room seemed to be empty, but my arrival must have set off some bell in a distant office, because very soon a woman with carefully coiffed hair, wearing a white blouse and a gray skirt, appeared from somewhere down a side hallway to ask if she could help me.