Radiomen (25 page)

It was a balmy evening. I walked down the block and crossed at the corner, heading to where Jack had parked the car, but it was gone. I thought, for a moment, that I had made a mistake but then reminded myself that we had parked near a fire hydrant, and Jack had said something about needing to make sure that he was far enough away not to be in danger of getting a ticket. Well, there, right in front of me, was the fire hydrant but the car now occupying the spot we had taken was not Jack’s, and he himself was nowhere in sight.

I hung around for a few minutes, unable—or maybe simply unwilling—to accept what had happened, but finally, I had no choice. Apparently, Jack was so angry that he had driven away and left me behind. It was a particularly unkind and thoughtless thing to do because I had the dog, which limited my travel options. He wasn’t allowed on the subway or on a bus, which meant I had to take a taxi. That was going to cost a fortune if I had to flag down the yellow taxis that cruised up and down Manhattan. However, there might be one other possibility; but to see if my hunch was right, I had to get out of this high-rent neighborhood.

So I started walking uptown, leading the dog. I was a little worried about him, concerned that he’d be tired since he was still pretty banged up, but he seemed to be doing fine as he trotted beside me, swiveling his head now and then to take in some new sight or odor. It took about fifteen minutes, but eventually, the blocks began to get a little less tidy, the buildings less grandiose, and there was more street life around, more people, music, restaurants.

It was amid the noise and traffic—more or less hidden in plain sight—that I found what I was looking for. With few exceptions, the unspoken rule in New York was that gypsy drivers and dollar vans kept to the outer boroughs and weren’t supposed to operate in the heart of the city, But they were always around; you just had to know how to identify them, and I did. Here, at the edges of an edgy neighborhood, I spotted a black car with a certain hard-bitten look about it slipping, like a black ghost, in and out of the stream of traffic. I flagged it down and climbed in beside another passenger who didn’t even glance at me or the dog as he jumped in after me, fitting himself into a space between my legs and the door. We soon crossed the bridge over the East River and began driving through the back-door neighborhoods of Queens, dropping off the other passengers and picking up new ones. Apparently, as seemed to be my luck lately, my stop was going to be last. I expected the dog to fall asleep, lulled by the movement of the car, but he didn’t. He stayed awake all through the long drive, alert and watchful. Once in a while he would lift his head to look up at me and I could see his eyes glittering in the dark.

~XIII~

I
waited until the next day and then called Jack to straighten things out. He didn’t answer so I left a message, and then another one in the late afternoon before I went to work. When he still hadn’t called back the day after that, I decided that I wasn’t going to chase after him. If he wanted to hold on to what was obviously some huge grudge against me for not following him, then so be it. We weren’t teenagers who had to test each other’s loyalty. If he decided to get back in touch, I’d talk to him. If not, well, a chapter in my life seemed to have closed when I left the Blue Awareness headquarters and if Jack Shepherd was part of that chapter, I didn’t think there was much I could do. I didn’t leave any more phone messages. The summer days went on.

Toward the end of July, every day seemed to grow warmer than the one before. Temperatures, the TV news reported, were soaring to record highs. When I walked the dog in the morning, by the fence near the bay, I took to carrying a bottle of water with me. Digitaria never seemed to mind the heat but I did, and often found myself trying to cool off by splashing water on my face. Later in the day, waiting for the bus under the hot city sky was an endlessly uncomfortable experience. I kept the small air conditioner in my bedroom running on a timer so that when I returned at night, at least one room in the house was habitable. Once I did get home, I would change into shorts and a tee shirt and then take the dog out again. It was actually quite awhile before I could leave the house at night without worrying about being outside with him in the dark, but finally, my anxiety began to subside. Time passed and there were no more incidents. I traveled back and forth to my job through the hot, pale days, walked the dog beneath a harvest moon that rotated through its phases, disappeared, and then showed up again, looking like a thin, bright scimitar hanging low on the horizon. Amazingly, it would soon be fall.

Every morning I woke up expecting to feel fine—after all, except for the fact that I now owned a strange little dog, my life was pretty much back to exactly how it had been before I had called in to Jack’s radio show. But I didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t quite identify it, but some part of me felt empty. Somewhere deep inside myself there was something I wanted, but I couldn’t say what it was. Now, during the day, my thoughts were often foggy. At night, my dreams became unsettled, though I could never remember what they were about. I would wake up and see the dog at the end of the bed, sleepless, as he always seemed to be in the darkest hours of the night, and listen to him breathe. It was like listening to a shadow breathe. A little gray ghost.

On a Sunday when I didn’t have to work, I took the dog out in the morning intending to walk no farther than we usually did. It was already hot, and I wanted to get back into the air conditioning as soon as I could. But despite what I thought were my own firm intentions, at the point where I normally would have pulled on the dog’s leash to turn him around and head back home, I found that I had changed my mind and instead, continued on, heading toward a neighborhood about half a mile away.

For quite a while now, an old church around here had been undergoing renovations. The last time I had gone shopping at a nearby supermarket, I had noticed that the ever-present scaffolding around the church had finally been taken down and a sign outside proclaimed that there would be a number of celebratory events to mark the conclusion of the building’s restoration. This particular Sunday, there was going to be a blessing of the animals and, though I wasn’t aware that I had consciously thought of it before, I realized that I now had a particular destination in mind. I was on my way to have my little Dogon dog blessed by a priest.

A Catholic church was about the last place I thought that I belonged, so I felt more than a little bit uncomfortable as I lined up on the sidewalk outside the church behind a couple of dozen other people, including families with children who also had brought their pets to be blessed. Many had dogs on leashes, but some were holding cats or birds in cages, or a variety of small animals such as hamsters and gerbils. A few people had even brought lizards and snakes.

I couldn’t remember what the church had looked like before, but it had emerged from its scaffolding with a surface of dark, rough stone scoured so clean that it seemed freshly quarried. Topped by a small bell tower, the building seemed to belong to some bare western landscape, not this busy urban neighborhood, with its mix of ethnic-food shops and brick-faced apartment complexes.

Around noon, the church doors opened and people began to file in with their pets. I could hear music playing inside and the soft, pleasant sound of murmuring voices.

The line moved slowly, so it took about twenty minutes for me to make my way past the front door. My first reaction was to be relieved that it was cool inside. It was also pleasantly dim in the candlelit interior, where an orderly procession of people and animals—myself and Digitaria included—was making its way down the center aisle of the church toward a priest, flanked by several servers, who was quietly blessing each animal presented to him.

When it was our turn, I found myself facing the priest, a gentle looking man of middle age, wearing some sort of white vestment that bore an elaborate cross stitched on its front panel in maroon and gold thread. Despite the smile he gave me, I was still feeling very out of place and not quite sure what I was doing here. Maybe it was just another symptom of the vague anxiety that had gripped me lately that I thought it would be a good idea to have the dog blessed. Or maybe I was just developing a belief in some kind of otherworldly magic, even religion. Even if it was not my own.

Just as the priest seemed ready to bend down in order to lay his hands on my dog and deliver the blessing, he unexpectedly paused for a moment and addressed me—something I hadn’t noticed him doing with any other pair of pets and owners.

“Isn’t that an African dog?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, startled that he recognized this.

“When I was younger, I spent some time in Mali,” he explained. “I was in the Peace Corps. We visited the Dogon tribal area once, and I saw dogs like that. I thought they tried not to let anyone outside their own people have one.”

“You’re right,” I said. “He is a Dogon dog.” And lest the priest think I had somehow acquired him in some nefarious way, I added, “He was given to me. By a professor at Columbia,” I added, as if that certainly put matters on the up and up.

“Well, my friend,” the priest said, looking down at my dog, “you’ve come a long way. Peace be with you.”

And then he murmured a prayer. He almost seemed to be speaking privately to the dog, who closed his eyes when the priest touched him. I couldn’t hear all of what the priest recited, but I did catch these lines:
Bless this animal. May it carry out the function it has been given, and may it aid us to think of You, its Creator.

“Thank you, Father,” I said, adding the title less because it was respectful to do so, but because—like too many things in my life, probably—I was taking my cue from what I’d learned from watching television. On TV, priests were almost always addressed as Father.

We left the church then and I led the dog back outside, into the heat of midday, where we began the long walk home.

In my apartment, I flopped down on the bed in my one air-conditioned room and turned on the small TV I kept on a dresser. The dog took up his usual place at the foot of the bed and quickly went to sleep. He did a lot of napping during the day; it was at night when he was most wakeful.

I started watching some cops-and-robbers movie, but soon found that I couldn’t concentrate. The episode with the priest was bothering me; not in a bad way—I was quite touched by the care he’d taken in blessing the dog—but in the sense that it seemed unusual. What were the chances that in some small church in a nondescript neighborhood in the far end of Queens, I would happen upon an individual—a priest, no less—who could not only identify my dog’s origins but knew exactly which African people he was connected to? There was that question to consider, not to mention that I found myself, over and over again, thinking about the words in the blessing that the priest had bestowed, about the dog carrying out its function and, in doing so, helping to bring to mind its creator. As I went back to making what turned out to be another unsuccessful effort to follow the plot of the movie, I found myself, time and time again, looking over at the sleeping dog. His function? His creator? I was pretty sure that no one else who had been at the blessing of the animals earlier—no owner of a hamster or a pug or a parakeet—was wondering about those things as much as me.

E
VERY DAY
for the rest of the week, I woke up with an idea in my head and each day, the thought of following through on it became more insistent. It wasn’t like the idea had formed a logical conclusion of some well-thought-out plan of action; not at all. I just had a feeling that there were things I needed to find out, and very few ways to do so other than the one that had occurred to me, seemingly out of, well . . . the wild blue yonder. However, I had still done nothing when a small event took place that made me think, okay, here’s karma at work and karma, when it walks through your front door, probably should not be ignored.

Actually, it was my neighbor, Sassouma, who came into my apartment. It was around lunchtime on a weekday, and she needed help with some forms that her children’s school required before classes started up again in a week or so. I filled out the paperwork for her—mostly proof that the kids had received various inoculations and booster shots—but just before she left, I asked her for her cousin-in-law’s telephone number. She gave it to me without question, which I assumed meant that it would be all right to call him. At least, all right with her.

Dr. Carpenter did not seem particularly happy to hear from me when I reached him. Apparently, Sassouma had given me his home number, and he said he was too busy to talk. However, he said he would be at the university during the week because he was preparing for the fall semester, and he could spare me some time, if I insisted. No, I said, trying to be nice, I wasn’t insisting at all; I was just hoping he could answer some questions I had. When he asked me about what, I answered, simply, that I wanted to talk to him about the dog.

He said that he’d told me everything there was to know about the dog, but I was kind of relentless in my wheedling, so much so that he finally agreed that we could meet. He told me to come up to the Columbia campus on Morningside Heights around one o’clock the following day, which meant that afterward I would have enough time to get back on the subway to Queens and catch the AirTrain that would take me to work. He told me where I would find him, which building, which room, and then, quite unceremoniously, hung up.