Radiomen (29 page)

She shook her head. “No, no, no, no, no. Not the antenna. It’s the wrong thing. He says to tell you that’s the wrong thing.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking about all the chaos that had been caused by the search for what a shadow was now telling me was
the wrong thing.
“Then I don’t understand what the
right
thing is. Does he mean the radio?”

Impatiently, Ravenette shook her head. “No, no, no, no, no,” she said again, sounding even more irritable. “He wasn’t even supposed to be listening to the radio. He just wanted to hear the signal. When you saw him on the fire escape—he wasn’t supposed to be doing that. That’s why he was telling you to be quiet . . .”

“Not because he was worried about my uncle seeing him.”

“No. Because he wasn’t supposed to leave his post.”

“His post?”

“His job, his job!”

Sometimes Ravenette was speaking in her own voice and sometimes it was inflected with a strange, high-pitched tone that grated on the ear. It was unnerving, but I couldn’t let that distract me.

“What’s his job?” I asked.

I didn’t get a direct answer. Not yet. Instead, Ravenette spit out an angry question. “Why did Avi take it away?”

“I’m sorry,” I said helplessly. “I still don’t know what
it
is.”

Again, no answer. “He says he doesn’t want to talk to you. You’re just . . . all he can find. At least, I think that’s what he’s saying.”

“All he can find?” I took a guess at what he meant. “He’s been looking for Avi, is that it? Well, Avi’s dead. Does he understand what that means?”

Ravenette was silent for a moment. When she spoke again she said, “He does but . . . time is different where he is. Maybe death is, too.”

“Then channel Avi for him and tell him to leave me alone.” I stood up, as if to leave, and Ravenette hissed again. “That’s not going to work with me,” I said.

I knew that I was taking a chance by being so confrontational, but I didn’t think I had anything to lose. I needed answers and so far, I hadn’t gotten them by being nice. At least, relatively so.

To my relief, the tactic quickly seemed to work. “Wait,” Ravenette said, holding up her hand as a sort of stop signal. I didn’t think she was even aware that she was doing this; the gesture seemed forced, mechanical. “He says to remember that it was you who contacted him.”

“I called into a radio show,” I replied. “I was half drunk.”

Ravenette—or the radioman she was speaking for—paid no attention to me. “He is very angry,” she said, pronouncing each word with grim deliberateness, as if there was any possibility that this particular communiqué hadn’t gotten through to me yet. And then, after a pause, she spoke again, this time sounding puzzled. And she was speaking for herself. She said, “Laurie? He sounds . . . desperate, too.”

“Desperate? And he thinks I can help him?”

“Yes, you,” she said, snapping back into the strange state in which she seemed to be only partly in control of herself. “He repeats that he needs the Haverkit. 3689D. 3689D,” she said suddenly, seeming, now, to be slipping more deeply into the grip of her alien counterpart. I finally sat back down as she closed her eyes once more and cocked her head to the side in the same way that Digitaria often did. “These numbers must be important. 3689D. 3689D. He keeps saying them over and over again.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She held up her hand again; this time, she wanted me to stop speaking because there was more she had to tell me. “He’s showing me a vast network of . . . energy waves? Maybe radio waves? I’m not sure what it is. But there are stations all across the galaxies. Many galaxies? Millions? Here and . . .
there
. This universe and others.
Theirs
, he says. And others.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure of the words, exactly. But he has a job to do; he has to remain at his post. It’s just a small part of the grid but still . . . still . . . his part of the network isn’t functioning. He can’t broadcast without the Haverkit. He can’t send out the signal. He hasn’t sent a signal in years. Our years. So much time has been wasted! Why did Avi remove 3689D? Why why why why why?” The strange screeching sound had once again inserted itself into Ravenette’s voice. It was very difficult to listen to and it was becoming more and more insistent. “Give it back,” the alien voice said over and over again. “3689D. 3689D.”

“Ravenette,” I said, trying to summon her back from the trancelike state she had fallen into. When she didn’t respond, I spoke louder, and then louder still, calling out her name. Finally, I reached out and shook her. She blinked, and seemed to focus on me.

“What is he talking about?” I asked her. “What kind of signal is he supposed to be sending out? Do you understand what he means?”

She nodded. “They’re sending out a message.”

I had a moment where all the monster movies of my childhood flickered across my memory and I thought of huge robots stomping out of flying saucers, alien insects invading the Earth. Faceless, soulless beings with ray guns lurking in the gas clouds just beyond the edges of our solar system, waiting for the signal that it was time to start the attack.

“What kind of message?” I made myself ask.

“It’s hard to believe.”

“Just tell me. What are they broadcasting?”

“Prayers,” she said incredulously. “Encoded in a signal that’s sent out into . . . the infinite. He says they send it through the Watering Hole, whatever that means. Laurie, Laurie. They’re sending out prayers.”

“Prayers?” I couldn’t quite believe what she was saying. “
Prayers?
You mean like . . . to God?”

Ravenette seemed to be listening to whatever she was being told.

“Yes. To God.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

Slowly, she shook her head. “He can’t answer that. He doesn’t know.”

“Because he’s just the radioman,” I said, mostly to myself. But someone else had heard me.

“Yes,” Ravenette responded. “That’s all. He’s just doing his job. He’s been doing it for . . . for . . .” She stopped speaking and then finally, started again. “There is no word to describe for how long.” Her eyes opened wide, as if she were trying to see out from somewhere deep inside herself, and then closed again. A moment later, in the alien-inflected voice that I found so disturbing, she began droning “3689D, 3689D,” until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I grabbed her arm and shook her again. “Ravenette,” I said. “Ravenette.”

The response I got was that vicious hiss, even louder and more ferocious sounding than before. It stopped abruptly and Ravenette seemed to recoil, as if she had been shoved backward. After a moment, her body posture changed, her features seemed to change, to become less rigid, and she expelled a long breath. “He’s gone,” she said. “He won’t talk to you anymore. It’s like . . . like he slammed a door. And he won’t open it again.”

“What door?”

“The door between us.”

“What does
that
mean?”

The only image I could create out of what Ravenette had said was literal—like the door to Avi’s room being slammed shut. Or at least, the version of Avi’s room where the radioman seemed to be waiting. Waiting for someone to give him back whatever it was that could be identified by the numbers 3689D.

Ravenette didn’t answer. Instead, she suddenly sprang to her feet. Now, she was the one who was agitated. She started wandering around the room, moving in and out of the circle of light. “Is
this
who they are?” she said. “Is
this
who we are supposed to strive to become? Howard Gilmartin promised that when we met them again, they’d be higher beings than us, better than us, and instead, they turn out to be these . . . these creatures?” She continued to pace, and as she did, she continued to voice her apparently deepening despair. “They don’t care about us. They’re completely indifferent to our existence.”

“They?”

“There are others,” she said vaguely. “They’re not with him. I mean, they’re not here. Not exactly. I told you that.” Her voice trailed off. She seemed unable to find a way to add any further description.

“But the room you described to me. It still exists. At least, the building it’s in still exists. Is he there?”

“I don’t know,” Ravenette said. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. And what difference does it make? Nothing he said makes any sense. What is all this . . . this idiocy about prayers?”

Like a wheel turning, I could almost see her trying to think her way back through everything that had just happened in order to return to where she had started, which was in a place that definitely had nothing to do with prayers. From what I knew about the theology of the Blue Awareness—if it could even be called a theology—the concept of a universal creator would have been an anathema. After all, the goal of becoming “Aware” was to expand your consciousness in a way that would eventually allow you to evolve to the same exalted level of mind as the alien beings who were our true ancestors. Why would you pray to them when your aim was to
become
them?

Suddenly, she stopped her pacing and whipped around to face me. “This is all your fault,” she said. “I don’t know how you tricked Raymond into thinking that you could be trusted, because you’re sick. You’re damaged, deranged. I told you when we first met: this . . . this gray
thing
is a creation of your own perverted mind. It’s an engram, a manifestation of the pain and anger inside you that keeps you chained down to a miserably low level of consciousness. That’s what I made contact with—not a living entity but some kind of projection of your own neuroses. Someone needs to lock you up for about a year with a Blue Box and a trained Aware to help you rid yourself of this insanity.
You’re
the one who wants there to be some great big fat God off in the ether somewhere, waiting to receive prayers he might or might not answer a billion years from now. My guess is probably not, because there is no such thing. There is no God, Laurie, there is only mind. Only consciousness. The way to the infinite is through becoming Aware, rising through the levels of consciousness to the higher planes. Once we achieve that, we will deserve to join the beings who left us here. To join with them, to understand their minds and therefore, the true nature of the universe.”

“Ravenette. I didn’t say there was a God.
He
did.”

“I don’t believe that. It’s you—all this is coming from you. There’s no other explanation.”

After making this declaration, Ravenette began screaming at me to leave, to get out of the loft. She was working herself into a rage, repeating to me over and over again that my mind was perverted, my spirit too dangerous for her to be around for another second. I was just rising to my feet when she suddenly lunged at me as if to literally push me toward the door.

But she had forgotten about the dog. Lying at my feet, he had seemed to be fast asleep, but in the moment that Ravenette came toward me, he jumped up and positioned himself between us. Then he began to howl, producing the same threatening, high-pitched yipping that I remembered from the time that we had been confronted by the men in the blue van. It was worse than a growl, more frightening because the sound seemed to enter your body and make your blood sizzle. And, I realized, it now carried with it an even more familiar marker: the same high-frequency tone that had distorted Ravenette’s voice when she was speaking for the radioman. Or, as she had now decided, when she was speaking for my supposedly dangerous engram.

The dog stopped Ravenette from advancing toward me, but she continued to demand that I leave. There was no point in staying, anyway, no point in trying to talk to her any further. I took hold of the dog’s leash and tried to lead him away, but it took all my strength to get him to move. He bared his teeth and continued to howl at Ravenette until I finally managed to pull him into the elevator.

He calmed down when we were back on the street, but then he started panting and couldn’t seem to stop. I hadn’t even yet started to process everything that had just happened but my first thought was that I’d better get Digitaria some water before he keeled over. It was about two thirty in the morning now—but two thirty in the morning in New York—so there were still plenty of places open. There were half a dozen people hanging around outside a bar down the block and across the street, a brightly lit minimart had its door wide open.

I was about to step off the curb and head toward the store when I felt someone brush past me. I turned around and saw the same girl in the short silver skirt that I had encountered earlier. She had an odd look on her face. When I’d seen her before, I’d thought she seemed dreamy, but now . . . her eyes seemed vacant, her features slack. I thought she probably wanted to pet the dog again but I wasn’t in the mood for that right now, so I moved away from her. Turning back in the direction of the minimart, I once again went to step off the curb but somehow—and seemingly, impossibly—there was the girl again, standing right in front of me.

“Excuse me,” I said, as I went to walk around her. But as I did, her eyes grew bright and her body seemed to stiffen. My dog had an immediate, but completely unexpected reaction to the change in her body language: he stopped panting and began to wag his tail.

The girl in the silver skirt, however, paid no attention to him. She stepped in front of me again and pushed her face close to mine. Then, opening her mouth wider than seemed humanly possible, she let out a long, high-pitched hiss.

~XVI~

S
o listen, sister, do damaged, perverted engrams generally manifest themselves in other people? Do they hiss at you when you’re walking down the street?
I so much wanted to go back up to Ravenette’s loft, grab her by the throat and start screaming at her myself that I almost turned around and rang every intercom button on the door until someone let me in. But what would be the point of getting into a debate with her? The reality of the only world she would accept was the one described by the beliefs of the Blue Awareness, so arguing with her would have been a waste of time. Besides, what would I be arguing for? The existence of an alien being in some parallel universe who had seemingly lost some piece of equipment that he needed to send prayers out into infinity? It sounded crazy even to me, but I was at the point—far past it, really—when I had no choice but to accept that it was so. Perhaps more than anything, it was the way the dog was reacting that made it impossible for me to come up with any other explanation. On some level, somewhere deeply encoded in the flesh and chemicals of which he was made, he was recognizing the presence of another being, a consciousness that was familiar to him. And that consciousness had communicated its purpose, or at least, what it perceived its purpose to be. That much seemed clear.