Radiomen (14 page)

I explained that I was looking for a particular grave, but wasn’t sure exactly where it was located. “Avram Perzin.” I said. “He’s buried in a family plot, with his parents, Muriel and Louis Perzin.”

The woman told me she’d have to consult the cemetery’s records. She disappeared again, back down the hallway, but returned in just a few minutes. Picking up one of the maps on the counter, she unfolded it and showed me that it depicted how the major areas of the cemetery were laid out.

“Is your car parked outside?” she asked, with a pen poised above the map.

“I came on the bus,” I told her.

She frowned, as if I had presented her with a problem she wasn’t used to dealing with. “Then you’re going to have a long walk,” she warned me, but lowered the pen to the map and made a mark. Turning the map around to face me, she said, “Avram Perzin is interred in the Jerusalem Memorial Mausoleum. You follow this path—Monument Avenue—all the way past these burial society sections and then make a left when you reach King David Avenue. Go down the hill and that’s where you’ll find the mausoleum.”

I found this information perplexing. “A mausoleum? You mean like . . . a crypt?” I didn’t know how else to explain what I was thinking of, though even to me, it sounded like I was describing the location of a scene from a bad horror movie.

The coiffed head turned from side to side indicating a very clear
no.
“It’s a beautiful space. There are niches for cremated remains. Avram Perzin is here,” she said, pulling out another map that showed a grid divided into rows and rows of small squares. She made a mark on a square that was a few rows down from the top.

“You’re sure?”

“Oh, yes,” she told me.

Well, maybe this was just another one of Avi’s eccentricities. There was something to be said, I supposed, for choosing to spend eternity inside where it was warm instead of outside, in all kinds of weather.

It occurred to me that I was thinking about the cemetery as a kind of hotel instead of the resting place for the dead when the woman who was helping me got my attention again. She made another mark on the map and said, “Muriel and Louis Perzin are buried on the other side of the cemetery,” she told me. “In one of the memorial garden areas.”

Though I didn’t think I’d spend the time to hike over to another part of the cemetery today to visit my grandparents’ graves, I thanked her and then left the quiet building, heading out on the path that she had indicated. It was actually a narrow, unpaved road, just wide enough for one car to drive down, and it led me through a landscape that was nearly silent, except for the occasional bird call or a gust of wind carrying with it the sound of the metallic growl of traffic on the distant highway. I proceeded down the path under a brisk sky that threw down more long shadows than shafts of sunlight, making the fields of graves marked by uneven headstones look lumpy and ungroomed.

I finally found the mausoleum, a tall structure of sand-colored marble fronted by monumental glass doors. Once inside, I had the momentary sense that I was in some stark marble temple that had been transported to New Jersey and reconstructed here to stand and brood in stoic silence through the centuries ahead. But of course, as soon as I remembered to consult my map and find my way down the marble halls, it was clear that the walls around me contained burial niches and the carved words on each niche were not ancient injunctions but the names of the deceased.

When I came to the south wall, I located Avi’s name just where it had been marked on my map of grid lines and squares. There was a bench in the middle of the floor, and once I sat down, I was aware that there was some faint, somber music being piped in from speakers hidden somewhere in the ceiling. That was okay; in fact, it helped a little bit—it made me feel just a little less like I was in some distant outpost of the vast cemetery, all alone but for the remains of the departed. Except, of course, that’s exactly where I was.

And with Avi. So now that I was here I had to ask myself, why? Really, why? Maybe the reason was simply that I was feeling guilty. I had probably thought more about Avi in the past few weeks than I had in years, and he deserved better than that from me, didn’t he? He had loved me, he had been kind to me, and more than that, he had made time for me when nobody else had, or could. Maybe I had come here to honor his memory, to assure him, or some vestige of him—whatever atoms or essence of his spirit might still be hanging around—that he wasn’t forgotten.

Or maybe it was something else. Sitting in the quiet, marble hall, staring at the rows of marble boxes, I forced myself to do a little personal inventory and had to admit that what I really wanted was for time and space to collaborate on a magic trick that would allow Avi to appear before me for a few moments—as a ghost or hallucination; either one would have been just fine with me—and explain to me what was going on. All this craziness about radiomen and aliens and mysterious broadcast signals. Cult leaders sending me threatening messages. Blue letters, blue paint, what was I supposed to do about all these things? All that they represented? And I had another question, too: what kind of a normal person had problems like this in their life? Probably no one—which wasn’t all that surprising.
Normal
was something I had to admit I simply was not, at least by the general definition I would have applied to most other people I knew. And whose fault was it—maybe, besides mine—that I was not
normal?
Well, who else could I assign some of the blame for that to but Avi? After all, it was Avi who, night after night, tuned in the mysterious sounds of distant places and let me listen, who pointed to the infinite sky and said, more or less,
Who knows what goes on out there
? I had always thought that the source of my dissatisfaction with the life that I had been brought up to lead—finish school, get a job, start a family—had something to do with the loose, rootless wandering tribe of hippies I had attached myself to at a young age, and to the era itself, when revolution was in the wind, change was coming and who cared what the past had been because tomorrow was going to be different, new, with new rules or maybe no rules at all. But maybe that wasn’t the problem with me, or not all of the problem. Maybe it was the fact that, intentionally or not, Avi had led me to believe that there was something really, really interesting going on somewhere just beyond the edges of what our eyes could see and that we should look for it, whatever it was, if we could. But I had no idea how to do that without him. I hadn’t known when I was a kid and I certainly didn’t think I was any better prepared now.

So, great. These were the conclusions I came to while sitting with the dead. I couldn’t see any way that they were going to help me and I began to regret the fact that I had traveled so far for what seemed like such poor reasons. All I seemed to have accomplished was to remind myself of my own shortcomings. I could have saved myself a long trip by doing the same thing at home.

But just as I was about to leave, I heard a sound at the other end of the corridor, which branched off into another hallway that led to the mausoleum entrance. At first, I thought it was just footsteps echoing on the marble floor, but I soon realized that what I was hearing had a sharper edge than a footfall would have made: the sound brought to mind something clicking against the cold stone. And whatever was making that sound was heading straight for me.

I turned my head in the direction of the clicking sound and waited as it drew nearer. I couldn’t imagine what it could be.

And then, suddenly, at the far end of the hall, I saw a thin brown dog, not much taller than the bench I was sitting on. It regarded me with a look of intense concentration, pausing for a moment before it advanced down the corridor. Now I knew that what I had heard was the sound of the nails on the dog’s paws tapping against the stone floor.

As the dog drew nearer, I found myself riveted by its purposeful demeanor; it didn’t seem lost, or out of place though surely, it had to be both. The dog continued to advance in my direction, but then paused once again to stare at me, tilting its narrow head sideways, as if it were considering some question that needed an answer before it continued forward.

At last, as if it had made a decision, the dog walked up to me, stood still for just a moment, and then seated itself beside me. Finally, and completely unexpectedly, it leaned itself against my leg. Now, it was facing in the same direction I was, looking toward the marble wall of burial niches. Tentatively, I put my hand on its head and gave it a sort of pat. The dog seemed relaxed but alert. His body was so close to mine that I could feel the slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

I felt like I had crossed over into some sort of dream state. This morning, I was wandering around my apartment, not knowing what to do with myself and now, just a few hours later, I was sitting in a mausoleum, petting a strange dog who seemed to have a better sense of purpose than I did myself. Jack Shepherd suddenly came to mind and I thought,
Well, I should call and tell him about this. A dog has come to visit Avi
. Because that was what I was beginning to think. It didn’t make much sense, but that was what occurred to me. I was here, working through a bunch of complex feelings about Avi, and about my own life. The dog, on the other hand, just seemed to be a visitor, some kind of quiet, neutral force that signaled the welcome end of my experiment in soul searching. And while he was here, to also stop for a moment and say hello to Avi.

Was that true? Well, really, what difference did it make? At the moment it was what I decided was true, and so I felt better. I sat on the marble bench awhile longer with the dog leaning against my leg. Eventually, I decided it was probably time to go. The bus back to the city came only once an hour and I thought I’d better try to make the next one.

But what to do about the dog? When I got up, he followed me like a thin, brown shadow as I headed down the marble corridors toward the glass doors. Before I went outside though, concerned that the dog might run away, I thought of calling the cemetery office to see if anyone knew who the animal might belong to. If not, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. If he was a stray, I didn’t think I could just leave him here to fend for himself. On the other hand, I couldn’t exactly buy him an extra bus ticket and offer him a ride to the nearest shelter. Or take him home. I actually considered doing that for a few moments. After all, his unexpected appearance in the mausoleum seemed like a sort of sign of something—either that or the beginning of a bad joke:
a dog walks into a cemetery . . .
Whatever it was, I didn’t think I could just take off without doing something.

My problem was solved for me when I saw a young couple, trailed by two small, worried-looking children, walking through the field of graves on the other side of the gravel path that led to the mausoleum. Even through the glass doors, I could hear them calling, “Buddy! Buddy!”

I led the dog outside and waved my hand in the air, calling out to the family. The father heard me and turned in my direction. A moment later, they were all heading down a grassy slope that angled toward the path, picking their way between the gravesites as they hurried toward me.

The first to reach me was the father, who quickly bent down and put a collar and leash around the dog’s neck. Then, as the rest of his family caught up with him he explained that they were on their way to visit relatives in Pennsylvania and had stopped along the way to put some flowers on his mother’s grave. They had left the dog in the car with the window only slightly cracked so he could get some air, and none of them could imagine how he had both slipped his collar and managed to escape from the car. As I accepted everybody’s thanks for returning their beloved Buddy to them, I didn’t mention the even stranger problem of how the dog had managed to get into the mausoleum. Those were pretty heavy glass doors and they didn’t open automatically; you had to pull them open in order to enter. Buddy, it seems, had acquired either one of two skills: the ability to open doors or to pass through them, like a ghost. I would have given money either way.

With some final thanks, the family started to walk away. But Buddy, it seemed, wasn’t ready to go. He turned around to face me and then sat down on the ground, stubbornly refusing to move. Dad tugged on the leash, but the dog wouldn’t budge. He just kept looking at me, as if we hadn’t yet finished whatever business he had come to carry out.

So, since the situation was becoming a little embarrassing—I didn’t want the family to think I somehow
wanted
the dog to refuse their efforts to get him to come with them—I walked over to the dog and once again gave him a pat on the head.

“Go on,” I said to him. “It’s okay. I get it.”

Get
what
? I had no real idea of what I meant but it somehow seemed like the right thing to say. And apparently, the dog thought so too because he immediately stood up, turned around, and let himself be led away. One of the kids turned back once to wave at me, but the dog just kept on trotting briskly along in the other direction. His business with me was finished and now he was ready to continue on his way.

~VIII~

I
kept meaning to call Jack and tell him about the dog, but I never quite got around to it. I was pretty much over being angry with him and was, in fact, a little embarrassed about how I’d behaved. I always did seem to overreact when I thought someone was trying to manipulate me, or finesse me into doing something—a holdover, I suppose, from my younger days when the worst thing you could do was cooperate with authority. Well, Jack Shepherd didn’t have any authority over me—I knew that, of course—and it really wasn’t his fault that I had gotten involved with Ravenette and the Blue Awareness. It was my own. Jack had encouraged me to see her, but I’d made the decision to do that all by myself. I was the one who had allowed myself to delve into things I knew nothing about: lost ideas, old mysteries, strange dreams. No one had forced me to do that. At some point, I was going to have to call Jack and apologize for placing the blame on him for everything that had happened. After all, he had even given me the documents I needed for the attorney, and I hadn’t exactly been Miss Lovely during that conversation, either.