Radiomen (26 page)

I rose at a relatively early hour the next day, walked the dog, got myself ready for work later in the afternoon and then headed for the subway. As usual when I was trying to get almost anywhere in the city, I had to change trains in the middle of my trip, but finally arrived at a stop near one of the entrances to the imposing complex of university buildings just after twelve thirty.

It was a warm, lazy day on campus. Columbia seemed like a city unto itself, with vast paved walkways leading to pillared libraries and lecture halls that look like the ancients might have hewn them out of giant blocks of stone. It was a somewhat intimidating atmosphere for me, but my feeling of being an uneducated slouch was somewhat mitigated by the fact that there were not a lot of students around. It was the week before Labor Day and probably, most people were off trying to enjoy their last few days of vacation before the academic year officially got underway. I, on the other hand, was scheduled to work all through the holiday. I wasn’t going to have a day off until the middle of next week.

The building I was looking for felt like it was a mile away from where I had exited the subway. When I finally found it, I had to show identification to a security guard and let him peer into my shoulder bag before he directed me to an elevator that carried me up a few floors and let me out in a wide, quiet hallway where the warm air was infused with the paradoxical scent of both summer and school.

I expected to find Dr. Carpenter in an office but, instead, the room number he’d given me turned out to be a classroom, though one much larger than any I’d known in my aborted high school career. There must have been a hundred empty chairs scattered haphazardly around the room, some with those flat, plank-like arms for resting a notebook on. They looked abandoned, like they’d been unused for a hundred years. Tall windows, the kind that have to be opened with poles, let some light into the otherwise dim room. The floor was worn wood planking; the blackboard at the front of the classroom was blank.

Dr. Carpenter was sitting at a desk in front of the blackboard, leafing through a book and making notes on a yellow pad. He did not take any notice of me when I walked in.

I seated myself in one of the chairs nearest to his desk and waited politely for him to acknowledge me. Finally, he looked up.

“So, Ms. Perzin. You managed to find me.” He made it sound like he wasn’t exactly pleased that I had.

“It’s a big place. I had no idea.”

He closed his notebook and sat back in his chair. “Well,” he said, “now that you’re here, what is it that I can do for you?”

I didn’t reply right away, reacting, first, to how different he somehow seemed to me than when he had been in my apartment. The change I sensed was subtle but, at least to me, unmistakable. His demeanor was still decidedly off-putting, but he was less stiff, less formal than I remembered. Annoyed to have to give me some of his time, perhaps, but not adding the extra effort of presenting himself in the role he had played when he was in the presence of Sassouma: the wise family elder, called upon to carry out some official task.

“Why did you give me that dog?” I asked. All during my ride on the subway, I had tried to figure out how to begin this conversation, and I had arrived at the gate of the university still not sure what I would say. But the words that had just come out of my mouth now seemed as good as any. At least, they seemed like a start.

“I thought that was clear. It was a favor to my cousin’s wife, who is fond of you.”

“I understand that. But I’m wondering if maybe something else is involved.”

“Like what?” Dr. Carpenter asked, sounding irritable.

“I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”

“Is it that you don’t want the dog? If so, I’ll take him back. They’re not easy to breed, so each one is valuable.”

“No, I don’t want to give him back,” I protested, alarmed by the way Dr. Carpenter had chosen to interpret what I was saying. “He’s my dog,” I insisted, knowing that I now sounded childish and stubborn, but Dr. Carpenter’s inhospitable attitude was bringing that out in me. “You said so.”

“It was Sassouma who said that, if I recall.”

“But you brought him to me.”

“I did. As you have pointed out. So I am still waiting to hear what it is you want.”

“Is there something . . . some significance about the dog that I don’t understand? That maybe you didn’t exactly tell me?”

Dr. Carpenter narrowed his eyes. “And why do you think that?” he asked.

“It’s what Raymond Gilmartin thinks,” I said. “He told me that he tried to get you to give him a Dogon dog.”

“I see.” The voice in which Dr. Carpenter now spoke to me was still controlled, but perhaps even more icy. “I had no idea that you knew Raymond.”

“I met him. Recently.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Dr. Carpenter replied, and then said nothing more.

Outside, it was a sunny summer day, but here, in this dim room, my vision seemed limited. Though he was sitting just a few feet away from me, Dr. Carpenter almost seemed to be fading from my view and I thought I probably looked the same way to him—like I was on the other side of some great divide, an indistinct figure, hard to focus on, hard to see. Turning away, I glanced toward the windows, which were like bright panes of light framing the boundaries of a different world than the one I inhabited here, in this moment, in the shadowy classroom of Dr. Carpenter.

Finally, he spoke again. “So,” he said, “are you going to tell me, or do I have to guess? You’re here on behalf of Raymond Gilmartin, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.” But maybe, in a way, that was true. I had to be honest with myself; something had happened to me when I’d stayed on with Gilmartin, in his office, after Jack had stormed out. It was as if I had caught something from him, some sickness or desire, some obsession that had progressed beyond the empathy I’d felt in his presence. Some need to know about the radiomen. It was part of me, now, the same way it was part of him. And like him, I found myself looking for anything there was to know about them, through any means possible, no matter how oblique.

“Then I’ll ask you again. What is it you want?”

The response that came to mind—at least, the way to frame it—was more Raymond’s than mine, but I proceeded with it nonetheless. “I want to show you something,” I said to Dr. Carpenter.

I stood up then, walked over to his desk and picked up the yellow pad he had been making notes on. I tore out a sheet and using the same pen he’d been writing with, sketched the pictograph that was carved on the rock Raymond Gilmartin had shown me. I pushed the drawing toward Dr. Carpenter and then returned to my chair.

I gave him a moment to study my drawing and then said, “Raymond showed me a stone with that picture on it. He said you knew what it was.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“There’s a dog in the drawing. It looks like my dog, I think. So I’m wondering, what’s the connection between my dog and this picture?”

Dr. Carpenter’s reaction was to utter a harsh, derisive laugh. “To
this
drawing? What an idea. Despite what you may think—or what anyone has told you—your dog does not even have a direct connection to Africa. It was born in my house, which is in Montclair. You know where that is?”

“New Jersey.”

“The Garden State. Hardly exotic.” But then his attitude seemed to change again. He looked down at the drawing and then back at me. All traces of laughter were now gone. “I know what you’re really asking me,” he said. He pointed to my rendition of the shadowy figure standing beside the dog and the human figure. “It’s what everyone wants who has seen these pictures. You want to know if these beings exist. But I have no idea. My field of expertise, as I told you when we met, is French literature. It most certainly is
not
extraterrestrials.” Dr. Carpenter set his face in an attitude of extreme irritation. “But perhaps you don’t believe me. Perhaps you think I’m one of those magical Africans who turns up in Hollywood movies to explain to the white explorers where the lost treasure caves are and what the secret symbols mean that they’ve found on some long-lost map?”

Now he wasn’t the only one in the room who was irritated. “Look,” I said, “I don’t think you’re particularly magical—you’re not even very nice—and as for me, I don’t really want to explore anything. I was just living my life and all of a sudden it was invaded by these Blue Awareness people . . . they were the ones who robbed my apartment the night before you were there. It was probably Raymond who sent them. So much for your theory that I’m here to do his bidding, right? Later, they even tried to steal the dog. Raymond swears that wasn’t his idea, but still . . .”

“I’m not surprised,” Dr. Carpenter said, cutting me off. He shifted in his chair, leaning forward a bit and, for the first time since we’d begun this conversation, he sounded animated. “Raymond Gilmartin is an impossible person. Once—once!—I gave an interview about Dogon culture to a student who wrote for one of the university’s publications. Unfortunately for me, Gilmartin is an alumnus and read the article. Since then he has given me no peace.” Leaning forward in his chair, speaking with intensity, he said, “Let me tell you something, Ms. Perzin. I know all about him.” He briefly tapped the crude drawing I had made, touching the shape I had used to represent the nonhuman figure and then quickly withdrawing his hand. “He thinks that it’s possible to become like them. To know what they know. That’s Gilmartin’s dream, isn’t it? Well, good luck to him. He has never considered the fact that perhaps—even if they exist—they know nothing.

“Raymond Gilmartin,” he continued, “has a rock with some scrapings on it that someone sold his father, telling him it was a great treasure. It isn’t. In Mali, in the Dogon lands, there are many such pictographs on rocks, on cave walls, on cliff sides. But this is hardly unique, I think. In every corner of the world there are legacies of such images left by ancient societies. Jackal-headed beings, men with the bodies of lions, mermaids, giants, centaurs. Does anyone today think that creatures like that exist? Or ever did?”

“If that’s true—if the pictographs are just so much graffiti to the Dogon—then why wouldn’t you let Raymond have one of your dogs? He probably would have paid any amount of money you’d asked for.”

I kept pushing this point because I just couldn’t give up on the idea that there had to be something important hidden within Dr. Carpenter’s refusal to permit Raymond Gilmartin to even purchase a dog that had been given to me for free. But Dr. Carpenter wouldn’t concede that this was so. In fact, he seemed to take the suggestion as an affront.

“Because I didn’t like him, Ms. Perzin. And I have no interest in promoting his fantasies.”

Dr. Carpenter turned to look toward the window, where a block of dusty summer sunlight seemed to sit on the sill like a package someone had forgotten to bring inside. When he faced me again, the professor seemed almost weary. He let out a sigh—something I probably wasn’t meant to hear—and said, “The men from the stars and the dog who stayed with a little boy. In Mali, in the Dogon lands, it’s become the national myth and look what it has led to,” he said, shaking his head. “Crazy people become fixated on the animals. And for the rest of us, for the Dogon, even if we leave Mali behind, we don’t seem to be able to live without these damn dogs. It’s as if we feel compelled to have them.”

These damn dogs
. That small outburst seemed almost amusing to me, and I was grateful for it. At last, something in this conversation didn’t seem like armed combat. But the moment passed quickly and almost immediately Dr. Carpenter’s forbidding persona reassembled itself. “Well?” he said testily. “Is there anything else or may I be permitted to go back to my work?”

I didn’t think that I deserved to be treated so dismissively. So perhaps I was just being stubborn, but I wasn’t ready yet just to get up and walk away. Besides, I had something more to tell him.

“I took the dog to be blessed by a priest,” I said. “It was actually kind of an accident. But maybe that’s the point. I happened to walk into a church in the middle of Queens and found the one priest—I bet you, the
one
priest in the entire city—who had been to Mali, to the Dogon lands, and could recognize that I had a Dogon dog.”

“Well, that’s what they say, isn’t it? God moves in mysterious ways.”

“Who brought up God?” I demanded, feeling just as prickly as Dr. Carpenter sounded. But then I remembered—the priest did. He had referred to the Creator in his blessing. And that was what had been on my mind all along, what had compelled me and brought me here.
Bless this animal. May it carry out the function it has been given, and may it aid us to think of You, its Creator.
I was about to repeat these words to Dr. Carpenter when he spoke first.

He said, “You aren’t a believer?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

Dr. Carpenter made a small gesture toward my drawing although this time, he didn’t even deign to touch it. “Then you have something in common with your friends here. In all the pictographs I have ever seen that relate to this myth—and I have seen hundreds—there is no depiction of a deity. None. So if you have come to me seeking some sort of spiritual guidance, then I really do have nothing to offer you.”

“I came here,” I repeated once more, as firmly as I could, “to ask you about the dog.”

“Then asked and answered,” Dr. Carpenter said. “He is a pet.”

That was it; that was clearly all Dr. Carpenter had to say. He returned to reading his book and would not look up from it. I knew that I could sit there for the rest of the afternoon, but he wasn’t going to engage with me anymore. It was time for me to leave.

And so I said good-bye and walked out of the room. I retraced my steps down the hallway and took the elevator back to the lobby. The classroom upstairs had been warm, but not uncomfortable; downstairs, however, it was sweltering. The security guard, sitting in front of a huge, rattling fan, once again checked my ID before letting me leave the building. I was glad to get outside, where there was something of a breeze.