Radiomen (17 page)

But then something occurred to me. Jack was already out the door, so I hurried after him and caught him on the stairs.

“You left something out of the story,” I said to him.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You didn’t tell me what they looked like. The visitors.”

I waited to hear what I thought was inevitable: the words
shadow, faceless, flat
, but Jack had no such description to offer. He said, “As far as I know, the Dogon never passed on a description. But they do seem to have some sort of collective memory of what they sounded like. Mostly, they hissed.”

I paused before responding. Jack remained on the stairs, waiting.

“That’s was Gilmartin’s description too, wasn’t it?” I said finally.

Jack shrugged. “I’m just telling you what’s been told to me.”

He raised his hand, signaling a brief wave good-bye, and then continued on his way.

I went back to my apartment and got the dog. He trotted along beside me amiably enough, so I took him for a walk to the nearest bodega and bought a few cans of dog food. I hadn’t asked what he ate—though as I thought about that on the way back home, I realized that I probably would have gotten the same nonanswer as I did about the dog’s name.

In my apartment, I put some water in a bowl and scooped some of the canned food into a dish. The dog walked over to the dish and immediately started eating, so I left him in the kitchen while I went to the bathroom to begin getting ready for work. A little while later, when I stepped out of the shower, the dog was sitting on the bath mat, waiting for me.

I patted him on the head, dried myself off, and went into the bedroom to get dressed. He followed me and sat patiently while I pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt. Then he followed me out to the living room, where I gathered up my jacket.

I had started to feel anxious again and very tired. I really shouldn’t have gone to work, but if they were going to get another bartender out to the airport, I would have had to call in hours ago, and I hadn’t thought of it, so I felt responsible for showing up.
Why?
I asked myself. It wasn’t like anybody who signed my checks—people at the corporate headquarters in Cleveland—would ever feel responsible about me. But I decided that it was going to help me to stick to my usual routine, and so I unlocked my massive new deadbolt and started out the door.

But before I left, I stopped to give the dog another pat on the head. “Digitaria,” I said, “guard the house.”

His eyes seemed to glitter even more brightly. He really was a small dog, thin and narrow. But as I looked down at him, with his wedge-shaped head tilted slightly to the side as if he were listening, processing my directive, I had a definite feeling that if anyone so much as tried to get back into my apartment tonight, he would eat them alive.

~IX~

W
hen I finally got home from work around two
A.M.
on that first night I had the dog, I was surprised to find him sitting just about where I had left him, facing the front door. I told myself that of course he hadn’t simply been waiting there all night; probably he had heard me at the door and the sound of my key in the lock had brought him back to what he seemed to regard as his post. Later, when I went to bed, the dog jumped in as well, settling himself at my feet. Since my two small rooms were set up like a railroad flat, you could see through the bedroom doorway straight through to the front door of the apartment and the dog had positioned himself so that he was pointed right at that door. He kept his attention focused there as sharply as if he were looking at it through a nightscope. I found this very comforting. I hadn’t expected to be able to sleep very well, and I didn’t, but each time I woke up, the fact that the dog was there was reassuring enough to allow me to drift off again.

So I got used to him, but more than that, I quickly grew fond of him. I’d never had a dog before but even so, I was pretty sure that as dogs go, this one was unusual. For example, he rarely made a sound. And though I had bought him some dog toys—rawhide bones and a ball—he didn’t seem much interested in playing. He liked walks, the longer the better, and he liked to be let off his leash to run around at the edge of the marshland near my bus stop where he could chase seagulls, but that seemed to be enough activity for him. All he seemed to want other than his daily exercise was to sit next to me, or to lean against my feet—in other words, to be where I was. And every night when I came home from work, I found him sitting at the front door, waiting for me. And he continued to sleep at the edge of the bed—or at least, I assumed he slept sometimes. Those times when, for whatever reason, I woke up in the middle of the night, Digitaria always seemed to be awake, too. And he was hypervigilant. Any noise in the hallway, even Sassouma and her family or other neighbors passing by, sent him running to the front door. He didn’t bark but simply stood at alert, staring at the door until whatever sounds had disturbed him finally subsided. And then he’d march back to bed and curl up in exactly the same position he’d been in before, but with his eyes open, glittering in the darkness.

During the next few weeks, Jack checked in with me once in a while to be sure that nothing else had happened, but each time he called I was able to tell him that nothing had. That was both good and bad; good, because it meant no more threatening letters and not even a hint of anyone trying to get back into my apartment for any reason. Not that—at the time, anyway—I thought there was anything left that could be of any value to anyone in the Blue Awareness. Bad, because the police were clearly not going to do anything about the break-in. I called once and was told they had indeed talked to a representative of the Blue Awareness, who said my claim that they were responsible for the theft of my property was not only absurd, it was also an egregious example of the religious persecution that they were often subject to. It was pretty clear to me that as far as the NYPD was concerned, that was the end of that.

I missed listening to the radio so, eventually, I bought another one, but even though it had world-band capability, it was still a poor substitute for what I’d lost. Avi’s radio had been a kind of magical portal for me, able to pull in distant stations and mysterious broadcasts in foreign languages from the far-flung outposts of the world. Low-watt stations boosted by the Kennelly-Heaviside layer of the ionosphere, booming shortwave frequencies sailing over the curve of the Earth—picking up these broadcasts was something that was exciting to me, as I guess it must have been to Avi. I couldn’t exactly explain it, but even if I didn’t understand most of what was being said, when it was late at night and I was tuning in a station drifting in from Siberia or the Seychelles, I felt like I was listening to strangers whispering their secrets, which made them not really strangers anymore. And I liked listening to the marine-band chatter of ships approaching the New York harbor or waiting in the deep-water channels outside the Jersey ports. Hearing the clipped, stentorian tones of the news readers on the London-based BBC or the cheery discussion programs on the Voice of America—which anybody with a decent world-band set like the one I’d bought or even a backyard antenna could pick up—wasn’t quite the same thing.

One night, it occurred to me that maybe I could find some interesting stations on the Internet. There was certainly a lot of online music from all over the world that could be accessed, but though I listened for a while, I couldn’t develop any real enthusiasm for what I was doing. Maybe it was because there was no challenge to locating or hearing these stations—click a hyperlink, open a media player and you were instantly connected to clear channels emanating from Prague or Gdansk—and there was no surprise at what you could or could not tune in on a given night. Listening to online music didn’t depend on how the troposphere was feeling from one hour to the next or on seasonal temperatures or the reflective qualities of the cloud layer above the Sargasso Sea. And you rarely heard the sound of a human voice unless it was some robotic tone repeating the station’s call letters.

But there was a different kind of voice I found on the web that did interest me. In fact, I developed a kind of obsession with it for a while because it was like listening to the greeting of an old friend. Actually,
friends
would be more accurate because, as Jack had once told me, Sputnik—the original satellite and all its successors—was online.

The sound of the satellites’ telemetry signals had been digitized and posted on various websites. I first found them by accident, on a website devoted to the history of both Russian and American satellite launches, but once I did, night after night when I came home from work, I clicked open the files and listened in. All the recordings sounded pretty much alike, but of course, my favorite was Sputnik 10, which was the satellite that had once had little Zvezdochka aboard. Zvezdochka, who got home safely. Night after night, I sat in my living room, with my own dog leaning against my leg, listening to the scratchy, metallic
ping, ping, ping
of Sputnik’s telemetry signal, faint but steady as a distant heartbeat. There was something about the sound that I found comforting.

The telemetry recordings were on my mind one night at work a couple of weeks after I got the dog. I was pouring beer for an order that had been placed by the waitress I was working with that night and, at the same time, wondering what other kind of interesting historical recordings I could find online, when my attention was diverted by some kind of commotion outside the bar. It was always pretty dark in The Endless Weekend, but quite bright outside in the wide walkway between the bar and a row of fast-food restaurants across the way. Looking out into the square of lighted space that was my view of the outside area, I saw a crowd of photographers walking backward. The corridor pulsed with the lightning-like flash of their cameras, and then the swarm of men and women quickly passed out of my line of sight. A few moments later, behind a phalanx of bodyguards, the object of their attention came into sight: a slight man, dark-haired and intense-looking, wearing a suit that looked as sharp-edged as a razor. Surprisingly, he stopped in front of the bar and then, even more surprisingly, turned and headed in.

The waitress was still standing near me, waiting for her order, and when she saw who was about to enter the bar, her eyes widened and she took a step back, as if she wasn’t worthy of being in the presence of the man who was, apparently, about to become our customer. “Ted Merrill,” she breathed. “I don’t believe it.”

But indeed, it was Ted Merrill, mega movie star, who was now entering The Endless Weekend, accompanied by his entourage. He took a seat at the bar—near the end, where I was standing—while his three bodyguards and a few other assorted members of his party arranged themselves at a nearby table. As they did, the scrum of photographers returned and positioned themselves outside the bar where they continued to snap pictures.

I placed two mugs of draft on the waitress’s tray and practically had to push her away from the bar to go serve the pair of businessmen who were her customers, though they, too, were staring goggle-eyed at our unexpected visitor. In contrast to the star-struck trance that everyone else seemed to be in, I was feeling a little weird about the appearance of Ted Merrill in my particularly unremarkable workplace. There was absolutely no reason I could think of for him to have stopped for a drink in this specific bar—except for the fact that I knew him to be a prominent member of the Blue Awareness. In fact, he was probably their most visible and vocal spokesman. I had seen him talking about it often enough on the TV gossip shows.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world,
indeed. What was he doing here?

I walked the few steps over to him and asked what he’d like, while the waitress scurried back to take the drinks order from his group at the table. He showed me the grin that was always referred to as “Ted Merrill’s famous smile”—and in person, I had to admit it was dazzling—and then asked for a complicated cocktail. It took me a few minutes to mix it up, and while I was adding crushed ice, I heard him ask one of his bodyguards for a pen.

When I brought him the drink, I saw that he was doodling something on one of our napkins, which had a printed border meant to look like confetti. He tasted the drink, pronounced it delicious, and smiled at me again.

“I hope I’m not causing you too much trouble,” he said, gesturing toward the photographers. “At least they know enough to stay outside.”

“We’re happy to serve you,” I said.

“Well, I’m happy to be served,” he replied. He leaned forward a little, just enough to suggest that he was about to tell me something meant only for my ears. Because I was on my guard, I registered this move as a trick, one meant to imply an immediate intimacy between the great movie star and the lowly bartender. “I was in the mood for just this,” he said, taking a sip of the jewel-colored drink I had prepared for him. “I’m having a late dinner with some very sober-minded people and I thought I needed something wonderful first. Something edgy and beautiful. And prepared just right.”

If he was trying to make conversation, he was actually doing a poor job of it. I thought he sounded false, even silly, though I guessed that the glittery chatter was another ploy—this one intended to disarm me in some way.

“Then I hope it’s just what you needed,” I said, playing along.

“Oh, it is,” he told me. “But it’s just one thing. One thing out of many.”

Now what did that mean? I wondered. Because I had a strong feeling that it meant something, that every word Ted Merrill had said to me since he sat down at the bar was freighted with subtext. All I could do was wait for him to decide when, and if, he was going to make himself any clearer.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to wait long at all. The next thing he said was, “There are a lot of different things people need. Special things, sometimes. Don’t you agree, Laurie?”

Was I really surprised that he knew my name? Not really, though it did give me a chill. And when he lit up the megawatt smile again, it seemed decidedly menacing. I had the sudden thought that if I had my dog with me I could have told him to take a bite out of Ted Merrill’s leg. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would have conveyed the message, but I was sure that Digitaria would have received it, and just the thought of my little shadow-colored pet digging his incisors into Ted Merrill’s shins emboldened me.