Radiomen (36 page)

I was still desperately going through a mental list of escape routes and coming up with nothing useful when, suddenly, I became aware that my dog had fallen silent. The insistent growling and yipping that he’d kept up since the two Awares had exited the van had stopped. And he had turned away from all of us now, pointing himself toward the ruined boardwalk and the sea beyond. He kept staring in that direction as the crescent moon pulled itself out from behind the ragged, night-colored clouds, allowing me to see the ramp leading down from the boardwalk to the street. At first, it looked like just some bare boards lit by the moon’s weak light. Then, a moment later, that empty space was no longer empty at all.

Dogs were coming down the ramp. Dozens and dozens of dogs. And they were coming from the other direction as well, running up the street toward the Sunlite Apartments. Dogs were also coming through the vacant lots, picking their way between the brambles and the trees. Dogs seemed to be coming from everywhere. Silently, soundlessly, they began to converge in front of the building until there was a line of dogs—hundreds of dogs, small ones, huge ones, and everything in-between—packed tightly together, forming a barrier between me and the other people standing in the broken street in front of the Sunlite Apartments.

It was an astonishing sight. Amazing. And as I tried to understand what I was seeing, I began to pick out a few familiar figures in this giant pack of dogs. Or at least I thought they were familiar; perhaps I was just mistaking one dog for another. But I really did think I saw Sassouma’s dust-colored Dogon dog among the pack. And Buddy, the dog who had visited me in the mausoleum where Avi was interred. And Dax, the dog from the airport. A particular bulldog stood quite near me, and I had a feeling that he would have answered to the name Samson. Near him stood the golden-red pharaoh hound. And though I did not see her, I was sure that somewhere in the pack was another dog whose name I knew: Zvezdochka.

Of all of us, it was Raymond who finally spoke. “How did you do this?” he asked me. His voice had softened; his whole demeanor had changed. Now, he seemed more like the man who had once said to me,
I have been waiting all my life.

“I didn’t,” I told him.

“Maybe he did,” Jack said.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jack raised his hand and pointed toward the door of the Sunlite Apartments.

I turned back around so that I was facing the darkness that filled the empty doorway of the ruined building. But now, a piece of that darkness seemed to have detached itself and began moving toward me. The darkness had a humanoid shape, so that it was like watching a shadow walk by itself.

And then, when it was about twenty feet away from me, it stopped. It was hard to see, hard to be sure that what I was seeing was actually there because it—the shadow—seemed blurred around the edges, as if, at any moment, it might lose whatever substance it had and be absorbed back into the night. It had no face, no features, no real structure to its arms or legs or torso. It was just a thin shade that barely stood out from the darkness draped all around. I knew who this was and so, though I should have been, I was not afraid.

I pointed to the repeater, which sat on the ground nearby. “That’s it,” I said to the being that I knew as the radioman. “The Haverkit. That’s what you wanted.”

Suddenly, from behind me, I heard a soft click followed by a momentary flash of light. Someone had a camera and was trying to take a photo.

The radioman’s reaction was swift. Though I saw no mouth that could have produced a sound, somehow, from somewhere inside itself, the figure before me emitted a long, loud, angry hiss.

And then it strode forward, moving faster than I could have imagined possible. It was still hissing and now, as if I were the individual responsible for the camera flash—the one it was angry at—it was coming straight at me.

Can a shadow hit you? Kill you? Drag you into the netherworld? I barely had time to think before it was just a step away from me.

And then, suddenly, my dog stepped between us. He was facing the radioman and his spiral-curled tail was wagging slowly. Digitaria was offering a greeting to someone he knew. Someone he remembered.

Immediately, the radioman stopped moving forward. The edges of his shadow-shape seemed to waver so that it became even harder to see him. But he was there, right in front of me. I knew it. I could feel it. So I did the only thing I could think of; I also offered a gesture of greeting, one I had tried before—though last time, in Ravenette’s loft, I had left it to the dog to calm the radioman by himself. This time, I shared the effort. I bent down and patted the top of my dog’s head.

And then, the flat, gray figure of the radioman became more distinct. Slowly, he bent forward as well, reached out his hand and began to pet Digitaria. Our hands brushed, and as they did, I felt the slightest quiver, as if the space in which we touched had become charged.

Quickly, the radioman withdrew his hand. He pulled himself up to his full height, which was about the same as mine, and stood in front of me, like a cut-out figure composed of night and darkness. He was completely still, completely silent.

And then I saw him. It was for just a moment, but I really
saw
him in the way that the rabbi had described what he had seen, only more completely. Suddenly, gone was the humanoid shadow that Howard Gilmartin had described, that I remembered. Instead, just as if a switch had been turned on, positioned before me was a kind of thin, flexible stalk of bluish-white light with a round nimbus at the top—a head, perhaps, if the bright, vertical stalk was a body. Inside the nimbus were three round, black spots: eyes and a mouth, maybe, if such a being was in need of those.

The stalk seemed to sway from side to side for another moment, just long enough, I realized, to make sure that I really registered what I was seeing. Like the rabbi, I was being given a gift. The flat, human-shaped shadow was how this being hid himself. What he was allowing me to see was how he looked without that protection.

But in the space of a breath, the light disappeared. The darkness rearranged itself into the shadow that lived inside my memory.

I thought that was it, that the most extraordinary moment of this extraordinary experience was over. But I was wrong. It wasn’t—not quite yet.

As the shadow once again took shape, the radioman lifted his hand and extended one long, gray, human-seeming finger, which he raised to his lips—or where his lips would have been if what was once again his flat, gray face had features. It was a gesture I well remembered, and of all the ways I could have reacted, the one I would never have expected from myself is exactly what I did. I laughed. And I laughed because I knew how he meant it: not as a warning to stay silent but as a kind of joke between, well, not old friends, but at least two individuals who had passed this way before.

And then, in an instant, moving so swiftly that all I really saw was a blur, the radioman snatched up the repeater and strode back through the doorway of the Sunlite Apartments. He was gone.

As soon as his figure had disappeared into the empty doorway, the dogs began to disperse as well. As quickly as they had come, they left, running down the street, through the vacant lots. Some of them went back up the ramp toward the boardwalk and for a brief minute or so, I could see them, framed against the night sky, heading off to wherever they had come from.

And then we were alone again, the human beings who had witnessed what had just transpired: Jack, Raymond, Ravenette, the two Awares, and me. And one last dog; the one who stayed behind when the others left. Digitaria.

I saw, now, that there were actually two people who had cameras: Jack and Raymond. They both looked poised to take pictures, but it seemed that since the radioman had lunged at me, neither of them had made a move. They both appeared to be frozen in place.

But that changed in an instant. Jack looked at the camera he was holding and, as if he suddenly remembered what it was, mumbled something about getting a picture and ran past me, into the building. Raymond ran after him.

Ravenette stood with the two Awares. Her mouth was open and she seemed, temporarily, to have forgotten how to speak. The young men with her were still clutching their Tasers, but made no move to use them as I moved past them and began to walk away. The dog padded after me as we headed down the street. I didn’t want to wait for Jack and Raymond to return from what I knew would be their fruitless hunt for a photograph of the radioman. Perhaps they needed proof that what they had just seen had actually happened but I didn’t need anything like that. For now, I just wanted to get away. I didn’t want to talk about anything. I didn’t want to hear or make apologies or explanations. And I didn’t want to find out what anyone planned to do next. I didn’t care.

It was a long walk from the beach to the town, which appeared to be closed up for the night. The pizza parlors, dollar stores and bodegas were all locked. Most were hidden behind security gates. This was not a safe place to be; I knew that, but I also knew that I was in no danger. Nothing bad was going to happen to me tonight.

And I knew what I would see next: a black car gliding down the empty street. And that was exactly what happened; a cruising gypsy cab appeared from around the corner of a side street. I flagged him down and climbed into the back seat with my dog—and for once, I had the car to myself. There were no other passengers aboard.

The driver asked me where I was going. I told him and he named a reasonable price, so I said fine, sat back and closed my eyes. I didn’t open them again until I felt the car slow down when we were pulling up to my building.

As I got out of the car, followed by the dog, I saw my neighbor, Sassouma, heading down the block, heading home from her job. I said hello, and we walked upstairs together.

To get to my apartment, I had to pass hers. As she said good night to me, she unlocked her door and I could see inside, to the small living room, where one of her young sons was sitting on the couch with the family’s dust-colored Dogon dog.

“Bad boy. You should be in bed,” Sassouma scolded her son, though her tone was more fond than angry.

The boy said nothing to his mother, but I saw his gaze wander toward Digitaria. At the same time, he pulled his dog toward him and began, gently, to pet it.

I said good night and unlocked my own door. Once inside, I saw the light blinking on my answering machine and I knew it was Jack. I would call him back eventually, but not just then because I still didn’t want to talk. I had powered off my cell phone somewhere on the ride back from Rockaway so I left it turned off and took the further step of unplugging my landline. As I carried out this small task, my dog padded off to the bedroom. I followed after him and watched as he jumped up and arranged himself in his usual place at the foot of the bed. But instead of sitting there, eyes open, nose pointed at the door, he curled up and almost immediately went to sleep.

I left him there and went back to the living room, carrying my laptop. I had no intention, yet, of going to sleep myself. Instead, I started trolling the Internet. There were a number of sites I wanted to visit.

I spent the next couple of hours going back and forth from one site to another, dozing sometimes, but mostly just sitting, just waiting. Eventually, around dawn, I found the first sign of what I was looking for on the site of a university in Australia with an array of radio telescopes that systematically analyzed the radio waves emitted by celestial objects. This was one of the places that Avi had received a QSL card from. Using the photocopies Jack had given me, I had been able to make a list of every one of them. Years ago, long before there even was an Internet, someone at the university had been a distance-listening partner of Avi’s and had corresponded with him by postcard. Now, I only had to wait a few hours to find out what they had heard on the other side of the world. Several times a day, the university posted a log of signals it picked up from the array, along with a summary to aid amateur astronomers and students, and scrolling through the notes, I read that an anomalous signal had been picked up from a French satellite as it passed over the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t a routine telemetry signal from the satellite to its terrestrial base but, rather, seemed to be originating from an Earthbound source. What made it particularly unusual—what flagged it as something very different from any kind of stray signal being accidentally picked up by the satellite—was that its origin was deliberately masked so as to be untraceable. It was clear, however, that the signal was specifically aimed in such a way as to use the satellite as a booster to send it farther out into space. Confirmation of the signal was requested from other listening stations and additional review was recommended.

I knew immediately the radioman was back on duty. He had gotten the Haverkit repeater hooked up and put his network back online. The ghost signals—the alien prayers that had been silent for so long—were being sent out again, toward the stars.

There was a hyperlink embedded in the log notes about the strange signal. I clicked on it and the media player on my laptop automatically opened itself up and prepared to play the file. The program had a screen feature set to create a sort of psychedelic display timed to the beat of whatever music it was playing, but since the file it was retrieving was not music, it seemed to hesitate, briefly, before it pushed out a handful of colored pulses. I watched them slowly blossom and disappear as the audio finally kicked in.

And there it was: the faint, echoing heartbeat of my old friend Sputnik. I knew that it wasn’t really Sputnik’s telemetry signal I was listening to but the pulses that were carrying the radiomen’s message. Perhaps their signal contained a code or perhaps that was what their language really sounded like. I was sure that I would never know, but it didn’t matter to me. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but I knew what they meant: that they were still searching for whoever—or whatever—had created them. And though it wasn’t a concern of theirs, what they were seeking was the creator of human beings, too, as well as all the other beings that likely shared the vast universe with us.