Radiomen (31 page)

“Well,” he replied, “he sort of was.”

Jack asked me to give him a minute and left the room but was soon back, carrying a brown accordion folder. I thought I remembered seeing it months ago when he had told me about the ghost signals, but it turned out that this was a different folder. And it held some very different material.

As he sat back down at the desk and started taking papers out of the folder, he said, “So, I have to tell you that when I did the original research about the ghost signals, I also used the Freedom of Information Act to get whatever I could on Avi, too. I had to know if there was anything . . . well, off about him.”

I realized that he thought I might have been upset by the fact that he had been digging into Avi’s life, but I wasn’t. At this point, I just wanted to hear the rest of the story:
what
was Avi broadcasting? And why?

“Was there anything strange about what he was doing?” I asked.

“No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”

I looked down at the papers he was pulling out of the folder. They were color photocopies of documents that looked vaguely familiar to me. I had a feeling that I had seen them before, but I couldn’t remember where, or when.

“It turns out that Avi was a member of a Distance Listening Club,” Jack said. “You never heard him mention anything like that?”

“No,” I said. I started leafing through the dozens of documents that Jack had now laid out on his desk and realized that they were copies of what looked like postcards from foreign destinations—some familiar, like Paris and Moscow, but others from places with odd names like Tannu Tuva, or breathtakingly distant, like a town in Tasmania. There was also one from what appeared to be a weather station in Antarctica. Some were in English, some in languages I couldn’t recognize, let alone read.

Suddenly, something focused in my mind; a clouded memory became clear. “I
do
remember these,” I said. “Avi kept these—the originals—in an album that he used to let me look at. All he ever said was that people had sent them to him.”

“People did send them to him,” Jack told me. “They’re what’s called QSL cards. In radio lingo, that’s a code meaning, ‘I confirm receipt of your transmission.’ If you were a DX-er, which is what distance listening guys were called, you’d send a signal on the short or medium wave band to another DX-er in some distant location, and then the two of you would exchange these QSL cards to confirm that you’d received each other’s broadcast. Some of the cards were very colorful, some had pictures, some were just plain, typed confirmations. From the 1950s up until about the time he died, Avi was apparently a very active member of a Distance Listening Club that had members all over New York. And that’s probably why he maintained a repeater out at Rockaway Beach. It may not even have been his, but it’s also likely that he shared it with everyone else in range. Repeaters are often used by large networks of amateur radio types.”

Interesting as all that was, it still didn’t explain why copies of Avi’s QSL cards had turned up in some government file. I asked Jack about that and he explained, “It was the Cold War era. A lot of these cards are from countries behind the Iron Curtain. Maybe some federal agency kept records of correspondence that went back and forth between the United States and countries they thought of as problematic.”

“Antarctica?” I said, holding up the copy of the QSL card from the weather station, which included a series of call signs and a drawing of a penguin with a big smile on his face. The happy bird was wearing a striped scarf around his neck and on his head, a set of oversized headphones.

Jack shrugged. “It was just the job of some guy at a government desk to intercept these things and make copies. He probably didn’t even know where Antarctica was.”

“Can I have these?” I asked Jack.

“If you really want them, sure.”

I did want them. I was feeling a little nostalgic about these lost-and-now-found postcards, but looking at the penguin again, I was still a little puzzled.

“I can’t really imagine that anybody needed to worry about Avi. I doubt that he was sending secret messages to the Communists. Or to penguins.”

“No, of course not,” Jack said. “And I think they actually gave up on worrying about him pretty quickly. But maybe somebody else heard him and decided to piggyback on his repeater. Remember the story I told you about Howard Gilmartin’s encounter with the gray man on the radar tower during World War II? What if he—and your radioman, and however many others there are—well, what if they were stationed here?” Jack’s voice had a note of incredulity in it even as he confirmed, for himself, that he had come up with the right terminology. “Yes, I guess they’re stationed here. So what if these guys were always trying to find some way to boost their signal? I guess at one point they were trying to use radar towers—where one of them ran into Gilmartin, senior—but eventually it turned out that, of all things, the Haverkit repeater in Rockaway worked best. Maybe because of the thin, cold air out at the beach. Maybe the fact that it was always kept in good working order. Maybe the moon, the tides, and good luck. And maybe,” Jack said, speaking more slowly now, as if he were thinking through every word, “they’d been trying for a very, very long time to find just the right place to link up their network to get the maximum distance out of their signals. Maybe one of the places they tried was in Mali, a couple of centuries ago.”

I finished his thought for him. “When one of them left behind a dog.”

“I guess that could be.”

“And the signals they were trying to send out . . .”

“Were the ghost signals. The prayers. They wanted to send them as far out into space as they could.”

“Where there are more repeaters to send them even farther. Or—just like Ravenette said—a vast network of energy waves.”

We both fell silent for a moment as we considered the fact that perhaps we had just stumbled upon the solution to the mystery that had plagued Avi, but in which he had also, however unwittingly, apparently played a role. On many levels, this scenario was difficult for me to accept.

“I don’t know,” I said to Jack. “It seems a little primitive, doesn’t it? I mean, they’re using radio waves and a repeater built from a kit you could order from the back of a catalogue? Shouldn’t they be using interstellar wormhole-piercing light rays or something like that?”

“You’re asking me?” Jack said. “I haven’t got the slightest idea
what
they should be using. But I guess radio makes sense. That’s more or less what astronomers have always expected to hear if another civilization ever decided to make contact, for example. Radio is an easy technology to discover. And if you keep boosting radio waves with a repeater, then they can probably travel through space for an infinite distance, for an infinite amount of time.”

I picked up another one of the photocopies and examined it, and as I did, I had the sensation, real or imagined, of feeling a little light go on in some tiny compartment in a cabinet in the storeroom of my memory. The picture of the card I held in my hand showed a jolly-looking, bearded leprechaun in a green jacket, wearing pointy green shoes, with a big grin on his face. The only unusual thing about the otherwise familiar depiction of this particular creature of folklore was, like the smiling penguin, that he was wearing a pair of oversize headphones that covered his ears. Above his head, in bright green letters, were written the words, “Hello from the Emerald Isle.” Looking at this fellow, I felt like I was gazing at the face of a long-lost friend, because I remembered him. This had been one of my favorite postcards in Avi’s album. For the longest time, I had no idea that the Emerald Isle referred to Ireland. I thought it was a special place you could visit where bright green gems would wash up on the beach like seashells.

“What do you think happened to the repeater?” I asked Jack.

“Who knows? If it was up on the roof of . . . what was that place called where you used to go?”

“The Sunlite Apartments.”

“Right. So maybe if it was on the roof of the Sunlite Apartments, Avi did take it down at some point—maybe to repair it. Or maybe, after your mother died and your family stopped going out to Rockaway, he just relocated it and let someone else in the DX club maintain it. Or it was destroyed in a storm and no one replaced it. All we really know, I guess, is that it isn’t where it’s supposed to be anymore. At least, where it works for your radioman.”

All this time, Jack had been standing next to me, watching as I paged through the photocopies of the QSL cards. Suddenly, he lowered himself into a chair and said, simply, “Wow.”

“What?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I guess it just hit me,” he said. “I talk about this stuff all the time on the radio. Aliens, alternate universes, you name it. But that’s just . . . talk. This is real, isn’t it?”

“Tell me it isn’t,” I said, “and I’ll try to believe you.”

“I can’t,” Jack replied, “because I’ve got this picture in my head now. I think your friend is a member of another distance listening club. Only in his club, the members’ idea of distance is . . . well, a lot farther than ours. And there’s something else.” Jack pointed at the computer where the image of the Haverkit repeater was still displayed; a black rectangle with silvery metal mountings hovering in cyberspace. “This is a D model, 3689
D
,” he said, emphasizing the letter that ended the model number.” That means
duplex.
A duplex repeater uses two radio frequencies. The designated output frequency retransmits a signal, but there’s also a frequency dedicated to recognizing an incoming signal. In other words, it seems like your radioman and his—well, what should we call them? Friends? Colleagues? Fellow workers? Whoever they are, they seem to be hoping for an answer.”

That was about the first thing either of us had said this morning that actually didn’t seem so peculiar to me. “I guess that’s what everyone expects when they pray.”

A sort of faraway look came over Jack’s face, like he was trying to find a clear line of sight from a distant spot where he really had to focus in order to see what was ahead. Finally, he said, “You want to give it back to him. The repeater.”

“If I don’t, he’ll never leave me alone.”

“And you have an idea of how we would make this hand-off?”

“I think so. I think you just gave it to me. You said, ‘maybe for something to exist where the radioman is, it also has to exist here.’ Well, what if the opposite is also true? He’s in a room that exists wherever he is but I know where that room exists here. The building where we stayed in Rockaway is still standing. So . . .”

Jack nodded, understanding what I meant. We had both already accepted so many bizarre ideas as possibilities—even facts—that I didn’t really have to explain this one any further. “Okay,” he said and turned back to the computer. He started jumping around different websites again, going from auction sites to online electronics stores to message boards filled with technical information about radio parts. He spent some time scrolling through these and then announced, “I can’t find a duplex Haverkit repeater anywhere. But I have another idea. Maybe I could build one. I mean, they were kits; they were meant for people to put together themselves. I think I can buy most of the parts and probably even an old schematic.”

“You really think you can?”

“I should be able to. I told you a long time ago, Laurie—I’m a radioman myself.”

It only took Jack about fifteen minutes to find a blueprint for building the repeater on a site that archived Haverkit manuals, and he soon became absorbed in looking for the parts. Some components he was able to find, some he left messages about in chat rooms for radio buffs, asking if he could substitute one thing he couldn’t locate for another that he could. I sat beside him for a while, watching him as he went about his online search, but then I decided to go home. I hadn’t had much sleep; I was tired and I was supposed to work that evening so I wanted to go back to my apartment and try to nap for a while.

We said good-bye, clearly back on our old, steady footing. Jack said he’d be in touch and I headed out, meaning to start off on the long walk to the subway. But maybe just out of mental exhaustion, or maybe something else—who knows?—I found myself wandering in the opposite direction, toward the waterfront, which was just a few blocks away. Here, the landscape was dominated by huge cranes meant to lift containers on and off the barges that floated them in from the huge ships anchored somewhere off in deeper water, though few were still in operation. Rust was creeping up the steel feet of these monster-like structures; rot had pulled down whole sections of the nearby piers that stretched into the water of the oily shipping channel.

I sat down at the edge of a dock supported by moss-covered pilings. Mindlessly, I looked off toward the towers of Manhattan, standing like a cluster of shadowy obelisks against a backdrop of vast white sky. It was a cool day, neither summer nor fall, with no wind, no clouds, and seemingly, no sun, just that sheet-colored sky, stretching from horizon to horizon above the calm, colorless water.

Suddenly, without even having to turn around, I knew there was a presence standing behind me. Not a person, but a presence. And I knew what it was.

I didn’t move, but waited for it to show itself. After a few moments, I heard it move. I expected it to come face me, but instead, it sat down beside me and leaned against me in a familiar way.

For a little while longer, I kept my gaze fixed on the black obelisks across the water. When I finally turned my head, I saw that sitting next to me was a reddish gold-colored dog with a narrow muzzle and a narrower body. It had thin ears that stood up straight from the back of its tapered skull and a long tail that curved at the end like a whip. I had watched the occasional dog show on television so I thought I knew what kind of dog this was: a pharaoh hound. Hardly the kind of dog that would be wandering by itself around a deserted Brooklyn dockyard. Hardly a stray—but then, I didn’t for a moment try to convince myself that it was.

The dog leaned against me even harder. I nodded to acknowledge his presence, which I decided to accept as a kind of peace offering, and said, “I am going to try to help him. But you might tell him to be a little nicer to me.”