Radiomen (34 page)

“Well . . . wow. What can I say? That’s a pretty strange encounter you’re describing,” Jack said.

“It would certainly seem to be, wouldn’t it? But . . . well, whenever I tell this story, it still doesn’t feel that way to me. I mean, when I think back.”

“Do you tell it a lot?”

“Oh yes. I’m very open about it. As I said, it’s a very important experience for me. Anyway, I know I should have felt that something truly bizarre was happening, but I didn’t, you see. The . . . person? I always call him a person though I suppose he wasn’t. Well, I sympathized with him because it was like I could feel some of what he was feeling. I mean, I got the sense that he had a job to do, just like me, and he was trying to do it. And, also like me, he was far from home and he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get back.”

“Do you think that’s why he was crying?” Jack asked.

“Oh, no. That wasn’t the reason. He was crying because we were in the presence of God.”

Jack made a noise in his throat that came through the radio as a kind of gulp. I was surprised that he sounded surprised; I assumed he knew what his guests were going to talk about, so he should have been familiar with the story the rabbi was telling. But maybe he hadn’t heard all these details. Maybe he had been thrown off guard.

He soon recovered enough to ask another question. “Is that what you thought, too?”

“No. But I guess I had started praying so fervently that the other radioman believed I was in touch with some sense of God that he wasn’t. That he couldn’t find.”

“You knew he was some kind of radioman.”

“Oh yes. That was his job. He was setting up some kind of radio network. I know how odd it sounds, but that’s what he was doing. His . . . people, I guess you’d call them—well, his people are broadcasting prayers. All through the universe. They’re hoping that someday, in some way, God will reply. You know, find a way to let them know He hears them. That He’s . . . somewhere. And He’s listening. That’s what all religious people want, in one way or another. At least, in my very humble opinion, that’s what I think people want, people who are devout. Or perhaps even people who aren’t.”

“How did you know what he was doing?’ Jack asked. “Your . . . visitor.”

“I think he told me,” the rabbi said. “When he was holding my hand. Somehow, he told me. There were no words but . . . I knew. I understood.”

I was riveted by this conversation. So much so that I found I had wandered far beyond the bounds of the usual route I followed when I was walking the dog. I was near a deserted canal that ran behind the auto repair shops, a polluted scar that remained from the time when small barges were part of the commercial traffic in this area. The struts of a broken crane leaned over the water, looking like a monster getting ready to dip a long, rusted finger into a poison well. This was probably not the greatest place to linger, but I didn’t care. I sat down on an empty oil drum and listened as the rabbi continued to describe what had happened to him that long-ago night. Digitaria seemed to simply accept that we were stopping in this unexpected place for a while and made himself comfortable on the ground, keeping close enough to me so that I could feel the weight of his body against my leg.

Jack seemed to have recovered from his surprise about the turn the story had taken and he zeroed in on the narrative, the step-by-step details that the rabbi was recounting. “And then?” Jack coaxed. “What happened after you realized that the radioman was crying?”

“That’s really it, all of it, to tell you the truth. Except that, after a while, I felt this sense of pressure on my hand—almost like the person was squeezing it.”

“He was hurting you,” Jack interjected.

“No, no, not at all,” the rabbi replied. “It was just like when you’re holding someone’s hand and you squeeze it, just before you say good-bye. It’s just an extra gesture of contact, of touch between two . . . well, persons. People. So when he did that—my visitor—I just instinctively looked down and saw that what I thought was a hand wasn’t really that at all. What I mean is, I
felt
like my hand was intertwined with another but no—laying across my palm was a band of light. Moveable, incandescent light. Whitish, bluish, sort of.” The rabbi chuckled softly. “I guess I’m having a hard time explaining myself.”

“You’re doing fine,” Jack assured him, but he sounded a little confused himself.

“He let me see him,” the rabbi continued. “At least part of him; the part I was touching. That was what he really looked like, I think. Light. Not filmy or diffuse but . . . well, flexible. Flexible light.” The rabbi chuckled again. “That’s as close as I can get to a description.”

“You never saw his face?”

“No,” the rabbi said. “Nothing more than what I’ve told you. He let me see just that part of him. Another gesture, I guess.”

The rabbi continued. “A couple of nights after this, Howard and I were down in the crew’s quarters. His bunk was across from mine and for once, all the other bunks around us were empty, which was unusual. On a ship like that, you’re almost never alone. So maybe it was just that it was quiet and that we weren’t on alert or anything that started us talking. And I just blurted it out . . . about the radioman. About how I’d felt him next to me in the chapel, and he was crying. Howard started questioning me then. He wanted to know exactly what the radioman looked like. I did the best I could to describe him—you know, my impression of a flat, gray shape sitting beside me—and then Howard said he had something to tell me. He said he thought he’d seen the same figure up on the radars maybe a month or so prior. His radioman, though, had acted very differently than mine. He had made some sort of awful noise—it sounded threatening, Howard said—and made it very clear that Howard was not to come near him.”

“Did you ever tell Howard what else you saw? That you actually got a glimpse of what the radioman
really
looked like?”

“But I didn’t—not for sure. I just saw that band of light.”

“Even that? You didn’t tell Howard?”

“What would have been the point? Howard’s experience was so much different than mine; his was angry, confrontational. I didn’t want to make it seem like I had been given a gift that had been withheld from him.”

The rabbi sounded philosophical, which didn’t suit Jack’s style of questioning, so he tried to find a way to elicit a more definitive answer. “Given your different experiences, do you think that you and Howard actually met the same, uh, person?”

“I don’t know,” the rabbi responded. “And I don’t know that it matters, really.”

“But they—or he, if it was the same radioman—acted so differently.”

“Well, we all act differently, don’t we, at different times? I mean, even the most confident, aggressive person can have a moment of vulnerability. Especially if you’re around someone who you think will be sympathetic.”

“And you were.”

“I guess you could say that. But you could also say that what happened to me was a turning point, so if I gave the radioman a moment of comfort, what he gave me was . . . well, a purpose to my life. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what happened. After the war, I tried different things, different jobs, but I was very unhappy. Eventually, I realized that what I wanted was to feel what the radioman
thought
I felt that night, in the chapel. I wanted to feel the presence of God. And so . . . well, eventually, I enrolled in a Jewish theological seminary and became a rabbi.”

“Who has stood in the presence of God?”

The rabbi’s gentle laugh seemed to soften the bluntness of Jack’s question. “We all do that, whether we know it or not. Let’s just say I have been trying to be deserving of that awareness.”

“To coin a phrase?”

The rabbi laughed again. “No, no, it certainly wasn’t me who had anything to do with Howard coming up with that name. The Blue Awareness.” I could almost picture Rabbi Friedman shaking his head in amusement. “Well, I suppose it’s
what
we’re trying to become aware of that matters in the end.”

Jack went on questioning him. “Did you and Howard Gilmartin keep in touch after the war?”

“No,” the rabbi replied. “As a matter of fact, after the night we talked about the radioman, he barely spoke to me again. The fact that we’d had such different experiences seemed to drive a wedge between us—at least from his point of view. I think he was already trying to, well, let’s say
process
what had happened to him.” Another chuckle punctuated that last part of the story and the rabbi said, “You can tell I’ve had some psychology training, right? Well, the point is that I imagine he was already thinking quite differently than I was about what had happened to us both.”

“Do you think he was jealous of you?”

“For having some lost soul cry on my shoulder? I hope not.”

Since that line of questioning wasn’t producing the kind of fireworks that Jack was clearly attempting to ignite, he tried another angle. “Let’s focus in on Howard Gilmartin a little more specifically, on what you know about him from personal experience. Am I right about the fact that there was no desert, no secret radar installation, no black ops outpost called the Wild Blue Yonder? I want to remind our audience that those are the experiences that Gilmartin said led him to create the Blue Awareness. Rabbi? What do you have to say about all that?”

“Actually, those were stories Howard wrote after the war. I read some of them. They weren’t bad.”

“But that’s what they were, right? Just stories? His real encounter with the radioman was on your ship, up on the radars, and it scared him. Just about scared the life out of him, I’d say. And on top of that, he wasn’t given any secret knowledge, he wasn’t entrusted with any supposedly lost information about the origins of human beings.”

“Do you mean, did he ever tell me anything like that? No,” the rabbi admitted, but he sounded reluctant to endorse even this implied suggestion that Howard Gilmartin was an outright liar. He obviously didn’t give any credit to Gilmartin’s ideas but it just didn’t seem to be in his nature to directly criticize his old comrade in arms, either.

“I have one last question,” Jack said, though this turned out to be more of a barrage than a single query. “Tell me, honestly, do you think the being that you met in the chapel was real? In other words, do you think there are aliens on Earth? Here, on this planet, right now? Do you think they’re abducting people—you know, I’m sure, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who claim to have had abduction experiences. Do you think others are encountering the same beings you and Howard did, or is something else at work here? Maybe there are different races of aliens that have visited, or are visiting our planet. In light of all those possibilities, where do you think that leaves the Blue Awareness and its followers?”

“I couldn’t begin to speculate about any of that, Mr. Shepherd,” the rabbi said. “All I can do is refer you to Shakespeare. As the bard said, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ ”

I could almost hear Jack grinding his teeth in frustration. He was doing everything he could to stir up controversy, but instead, he was getting poetry.

And he got something else too: the sound of a dog barking.

This time, it was Jack who reacted with laughter, though it sounded forced. “I guess you can tell we have another guest in the studio tonight,” he said, addressing his audience. “Rabbi Friedman brought his dog with him. What’s his name, Rabbi?”

“We call him Sammy, but officially, his name is Samson. Samson the bulldog,” the rabbi said. “And he’s usually very quiet. My apologies.”

“No need,” Jack said. “We’ve got open phone lines here. We welcome all opinions—human and otherwise.”

Both Sammy’s interruption and Jack’s comment may have been unplanned, but they provided an opportunity to end the segment on a light note. Jack said good-bye to his guest and then the same spooky, synthesizer-generated music that had signaled the end of Raymond Gilmartin’s appearance on
Up All Night
began to play.

I turned off the radio and, almost immediately, my cell phone rang. Of course it was Jack, who said the next half hour of his show was a taped segment, so he had time to talk. “What did you think?” he asked.

“He seems like a very nice man,” I said. “The rabbi.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jack said impatiently.

“I know.”

“So?”

I sighed, loud enough so that Jack could hear me. I wanted him to. “So? You want me to tell you that you proved Howard Gilmartin was a phony. Maybe you did—a little—and maybe you didn’t, but we both know what you really wanted is to get some sort of rise out of Raymond by mocking his father—but I don’t know
why.
What are you doing, Jack? Daring Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater to Rockaway? It’s not enough just to ask him, if you’re still so dead set on doing that?”

“I did ask him. And he did say yes.”

I was so taken aback by this response that it more or less shut me up. I did give more than a passing thought to arguing with Jack about how counterproductive his behavior seemed to me, but I knew it was an argument I would never win because Jack was clearly getting a great deal of satisfaction out of whatever game he thought he was playing with Raymond. We ended up just having a long, complicated conversation about when we could make the drive out to Rockaway. When was Jack free, when was I, what days had Raymond said he would be available? The whole exchange seemed unreal to me, like we were planning some innocuous shopping excursion or a trip to the movies. We settled on the following Sunday afternoon, just a few days away.

Later, at home, when I finally got myself to bed, I was prepared for a restless night, but it was Digitaria who seemed unable to settle down. He kept jumping out of bed and then getting back in again. I thought he was thirsty, or hungry, but he wasn’t making any detours to the kitchen where his water bowl and food dish were; instead, he kept padding back and forth between the bedroom and the front door.

There was no way I could pretend not to understand what was going on. Though all I wanted was to plunge back into the depths of a dreamless sleep and not think about the reasons for his restlessness—there were too many of them, all disturbing—it was clear to me that my dog was on high alert.