Radiomen (27 page)

It was a long way back to the subway, but I was still going to be early for work. I bought a newspaper and read it as I first waited on the platform for the subway, then rode out to Queens where I transferred to the monorail that took me out to the airport.

I had an hour to kill before I had to get into my pseudo-hipster outfit and turn myself into the cheerful bartender welcoming the traveling public to The Endless Weekend. I had finished the paper, so I sat by one of the gates for a while, watching airplanes lifting themselves up into the sky.

All the while, of course—even when I had pretended to myself that I was deeply absorbed in every column inch of news, gossip and opinion in the paper I had read so assiduously—I was going over and over the conversation I’d had with Dr. Carpenter. I tried to replay it in my mind but it was already slipping away, as conversations tend to, even the most intense. But while I could not repeat to myself every word we’d spoken, every exchange, the general sense of what Dr. Carpenter had to say to me remained strong. He had clearly told me that in essence, he had nothing of any importance to share with me—or that he wished to share—except that Raymond Gilmartin was deluded and I was chasing a myth.

Well, maybe. I might even have let myself be convinced of all that except for one particular point that nagged at me. Even if I accepted that everything Dr. Carpenter said was correct, particularly about the insignificance of the picture that I had reproduced for him, he had misled me about something. Maybe deliberately, maybe not. Or perhaps the fault was mine and I had just misunderstood his implication. I thought he had meant that because there was no god of any kind represented in any of the pictographs to be found in the Dogon lands—or on the stone that Raymond had shown me—then it was likely that the shadowy beings did not believe that one existed. But it wasn’t the visitors from the stars who had recorded the encounter by scratching pictures on rocks and cliff walls; it was the Dogon people. Dr. Carpenter had said so himself. And since they could barely communicate with their visitors, how did they know
what
the people who had pointed out the Dog Star to them actually believed in? Other, of course, than a need for the companionship of dogs.

~XIV~

W
as it a mistake to have gone to see Dr. Carpenter? Maybe, I concluded as I thought about it over the next few days, because I didn’t feel any better after visiting him. In fact, I felt worse. He had been cynical and unpleasant and left me with the impression that he thought my questions were stupid. Delusional. But since even his dismissive attitude had not chased them from my mind, the only result was that now I felt even more confused. And I felt that the way forward—wherever I was headed—had become even murkier.

I became depressed, edgy, far out of my comfort zone, which was to know exactly what I was doing day after day, and why, and where I was supposed to be. I did not, for example, think of myself as the kind of person to ask for the blessings of priests. I did not entertain the ideas of New Age crazies, which—until I had met him, and maybe still—was exactly what I considered Raymond Gilmartin to be. I did not wonder about the function of dogs or their relationship to a creator. And since I was now doing all these things, I began wondering about myself. Though I was capable of holding two ideas in my mind at the same time—for example, that the world was exactly what it appeared to be while, at the same time, maybe there were inexplicable things going on beyond the human line of sight—the balance seemed to be shifting, and I was concerned about which way it was going. Granted, I had been flirting with a lot of strange ideas these past months, but now I was afraid there was the potential that they might take over my life. I was fighting it, but you never knew. And if they did gain more than just the foothold they currently had, what would become of me? Would I wake up one morning and decide that joining the Blue Awareness suddenly made sense? Or maybe I would become religious, or dedicate myself to some alien-hunting group. In other words, little by little, I was beginning to lose trust in myself, in the inner control I had learned to depend on to keep me going. Maybe I lived at the margins of the economy and sometimes struggled to keep my head above water, but so far, I had managed. It had taken me long enough, but I had created some stability for myself. What would happen if I put all that at risk? It did occur to me that maybe I already had.

To some degree, I could distract myself from these thoughts at work—the baseball playoffs were underway and since the Yankees had made it to the postseason, pennant fever was cranked up to an eleven out of ten at The Endless Weekend—but once I got on the bus to head home, everything came back to me. On those long, late-night rides, I did a lot of deep breathing and hummed the great
Om
to try to center myself, but since I didn’t know where that center was, I was mostly unsuccessful. At home, I ate too much and watched infomercials, pretending to myself that nut choppers and oxygen-infused cleaning solutions would make my life better. And then I went to sleep, to the world of haunted dreams.

I dreamt about the dog, Zvezdochka, the little star orbiting Earth. I dreamt about Buddy, the dog who had come to me in the mausoleum. I dreamt about the dog scratched into a rock, standing between a human and something that was not a human being. In my dreams, all these dogs visited me—even Zvezdochka, safely landed on Earth and stepping out of her capsule—and I would pat them on the head, greeting each in turn. And then I would wake to see my own dog, my sleepless shadow, positioned at the edge of the bed. Many nights now, when I woke, I saw that, instead of watching the door, Digitaria was watching me.

I began making mistakes at work, which had never happened to me before. I mixed the wrong drinks, I rang up the wrong prices, I gave the wrong change. This scared me, maybe more than anything else, because no matter what had ever happened to me in my life, I had always been able to put those things aside when I was at work and concentrate on what I had to do. Deeply rattled by the fact that I seemed to have lost my ability to leave myself behind when I was at work and act the part of the carefree bartender, I began to make a conscious, concerted effort to focus on every order I got, every transaction I had to process. And I thought I was making some headway until I had an encounter with yet another dog.

It was at the end of my shift. Most of the TVs in the bar were tuned to the sports wrap-up programs and I had announced last call. I started wiping down the bar and stacking glasses in the back. The shops on the other side of the concourse were also closing, pulling down their security gates. The woman who ran the luggage store opposite the bar waved to me as she headed down the concourse toward the exits at the front of the airport.

A few minutes after her figure vanished from view, I suddenly saw something run past the front entrance of The Endless Weekend. Looking out from the dark bar into the overly bright light that bathed the corridor outside could be disorienting, so at first I thought I had been mistaken. But then, whatever it was flashed by again, going in the opposite direction. My mind was having some trouble processing what my eyes had apparently seen, maybe because I couldn’t quite believe it, but when the streaking image—something gray and lean—ran past again, what had just been a vague impression sharpened into unmistakable clarity. A dog was running back and forth outside the bar.

I didn’t have to think about what to do next; my response was automatic. I stepped out from behind the cash register where I was checking receipts and walked into the concourse. At this late hour, with so few people around, the sharp, artificial light made everything in sight—the areas around the arrival and departure boards that no one was looking at, the rows of empty seats by the unmanned boarding gates—seem even more deserted. And unreal.

In the brief time it had taken me to cross from the darkness of the bar into the bright corridor, I had decided that what I’d seen must have been a police dog that had gotten away from its handler and was running around the airport. It didn’t matter to me that this explanation made no sense because these dogs never did things like that—unless, of course, one of them was chasing a criminal, and if that was the case, then probably I should have gone back into the bar, pulled down our security gate and told the waitress and our last few customers to hide under a table. But instead, I simply stood in the corridor, under the bright fluorescent light, and waited. I didn’t see the dog just yet, but I had a feeling he would come back.

And soon, he did. I looked down the long corridor, toward the area where the screening machines were, and saw nothing—not even the personnel who should have been manning the equipment, no matter how late at night it was. But when I looked the other way, in the direction of the departure gates, I suddenly saw the dog, sitting on his haunches, in a carpeted area under a row of blank television screens.

As if he had simply been waiting for me to notice him, he now stood up and started walking toward me. When he was close enough for me to get a better look at him, I could see that he looked like a small greyhound, a dog as narrow as a bone.

It took him less than a minute to pad down the length of the bright, empty hallway, where not a security guard, not a member of the overnight cleaning crew, not even one wandering traveler seemed to be in sight. The dog came right to me and sat down again. Then he raised his head to look at me with dark, glittery eyes.

I didn’t want him to be there. I didn’t want to think about why he was. And most of all, at that moment, I didn’t want to touch him. But then, how can you not pet a dog that walks right up to you and looks you in the eye?

So I patted him on the head. “Hello,” I said. But what I was thinking was,
Who sent you?

Just then, the waitress I was working with that night, a young woman named Kim, walked out of the bar and stood beside me. She had a blonde ponytail and a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist—the perfect Endless Weekend girl.

Gesturing at the dog, she said, “Where did he come from?”

I think it was at the same moment that we both noticed the dog was wearing a collar. Kim bent down to look at the tags hanging from the collar, but as she did, the dog whipped his head around to face her and growled.

“Whoa,” she said, stepping back. “Maybe there’s something wrong with him. We should call security.”

But I knew there was nothing wrong with the dog. The problem was that the wrong person had approached him. “Let me see if I can find who he belongs to,” I said to Kim.

Then I crouched down to get a look at his identification tag. With me, the dog didn’t seem to object. I read the information etched onto the little bone-shaped tag attached to his collar and learned that his name was Dax and he belonged to someone named Kelly Branigan.

Was that a man or a woman? Human or alien?
Stop that,
I told myself firmly.
Just start looking.

“Would you hold the fort for a few minutes?” I said to Kim, and then began walking down the corridor, toward the departure gates. I glanced back at the dog just once, and he immediately started to follow me.

I continued heading down the row of gates near the bar; none of the boards behind the desk had departures listed except one at the far end of the terminal, which showed a flight leaving for LA at six
A.M.
A young man, with long hair and lots of rings on his fingers, was asleep on a bench near the gate, his head resting on a backpack. Beside him was a dog kennel, with its wire door pushed open.

I reached out to shake the young man awake, and as I did, the dog darted past me and slipped back into his kennel. I thought immediately of a dog in a capsule, as if Zvezdochka had decided to appear before me in another form.

“What?” the young man said, opening his eyes. He looked at me and then glanced over at the sign above the gate. I saw the confusion on his face turn to relief. “Wow. I got scared there for a moment. Thought they’d called my flight.” He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, and had a friendly smile.

“You’ve got a couple of hours,” I told him.

“Yeah, I guess. They canceled the red eye and booked me on the morning flight. They said I could crash here until boarding time. Is that still okay?”

“If nobody’s telling you to move, I guess so,” I said, “but I’m not with the airlines. I’m the bartender from The Endless Weekend. Your dog paid me a visit.”

“My dog?” he said, sitting up. “Dax?” He looked over at the kennel, where the dog had stretched himself out on his side and appeared to be quite comfortable. Reaching over to touch the open latch, the young man looked totally flummoxed. “Hey boy,” he said, “how did you do that?” The dog yawned and turned over.

“Well, I guess he’s not talking. Did you bring him back?”

“Yes,” I said. “When they come to get the kennel, maybe you should make sure somebody ties that latch closed with a rope or something.”

“Thanks. I will. And thanks so much for looking after him. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d gotten lost.”

“Well, I have a dog,” I said, invoking what I supposed was the universal empathy of one dog owner for another.

I watched as the young man locked the kennel and checked the latch to make sure it was secure. Then he lifted the backpack off the bench and placed it so that it leaned against the kennel door.

“That thing weighs at least thirty pounds,” he said. “Hopefully, that’ll do the trick until morning.”

The dog now appeared to be sound asleep. He was even softly snoring.

“What kind of dog do you have?” the young man asked me.

“A Dogon dog,” I replied. “Do you know what that is?”

“Never heard of them,” my new acquaintance said cheerfully.

“Well, mine looks a little like yours.”

“Huh. That’s interesting. Mine came from a shelter. He’s just a mutt. But he’s a great traveling companion. Over the past couple of years we’ve been all over together. Europe, Canada, South America. We’re on our way back from Spain now, heading home for a while.”