Radiomen (6 page)

“That Ravenette person,” I responded. “The so-called psychic. Did you give her my phone number or anything like that?”

I hadn’t been asked to leave my home address on the tape when I’d called into the radio show, but even I knew that on the web, once you had some information about an individual, even just their name and phone number, it was pretty easy to ferret out everything else about them that you wanted to know.

“No,” he told me. “Why are you asking?”

“Because she sent me a flier and I’m wondering how she got my address.”

“She’s a psychic.”

“Very funny.” My impulse, at that moment, was to do something dramatic, like tear up the flier—and do it close enough to the phone so that Jack could hear me—but I didn’t. I just folded it up and put it back into the envelope it came in. “She’s just trying to drum up business,” I said, having decided that the “free” reading would somehow undoubtedly end up costing me tons of money.

“I don’t know if that’s all there is to it. She did ask for your number,” he admitted, “but I didn’t give it to her. Cross my heart.” He almost seemed to be playing the injured party, but that didn’t last long. Just a few moments later, he reverted right back to the personality I had gotten acquainted with in our last phone call: the guy with a lot of questions to ask. “To be honest with you, even though she sort of cut you off when you were on the air, later she did seem like she really wanted to talk to you some more. Like there was something specific she wanted to tell you—or maybe ask you. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

He was baiting me, and I knew it. “I thought we went through all this last night. There is no more.” I hoped I sounded definitive.

“Okay, fine. But
if
you do decide to see her and
if
there is something else to the story, something you’d like to share, maybe you’ll come on my show?”

“Something else like what?”

Now, on the other end of the phone, there was only silence, but in that silence, I imagined that I could hear Jack Shepherd thinking, calculating. Ravenette, apparently, wasn’t the only one who had something she wanted to tell me—so did he. He was just trying to figure out how long I would stay on the line and listen.

“Well,” he said, “when we talked the other night, you didn’t really give me a chance to chat with you about what Avi told me. What he told me about you, I mean—you and the radioman. But I’ve never forgotten it, because it was so strange.”

Jack paused for a moment waiting for a reaction from me, but I didn’t intend to give him one. I said nothing. I just listened. Finally, he continued.

“Avi said there was a night he had you with him when he drove out to Rockaway, to the building where you used to spend the summers. He fixed some electrical problem and then took you out onto the fire escape to listen to a satellite broadcast, but then he had to leave you alone for a few minutes. He said he used his belt to secure you to the railing so you’d be safe and when he returned, you were right where he’d left you and you couldn’t have reached the radio. But when he went back to it, he noticed that the frequency had been changed from the point on the dial where he remembered leaving it. Now, it was tuned to the Watering Hole. Someone had not only changed the frequency, they had turned the horn of plenty in the right direction to pick up signals on that band.”

Jack paused there for a moment. I stayed on the line, but I still wasn’t saying anything, so he kept talking.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? When Avi left you, the radio was receiving . . . I think he said a music station from Finland. He had lost the Sputnik telemetry signal and had been tuning around to try to get it back. But then he left—just briefly, he said. Very briefly. When he came back, it was tuned to the Watering Hole frequency, and on that frequency, it was picking up some sort of sound—similar to the ping of the telemetry signal, but not exactly the same. That was the first time Avi ever heard the ghost signal for himself. He said you told him that a man who looked like a shadow—you called him the radioman—had ‘changed the station.’ ”

I finally found my voice again. “Avi must have gotten mixed up,” I said.

“Your uncle didn’t seem to me like the kind of person who got mixed up about anything,” Jack replied.

That sounded like a challenge and it made me angry. “So is
that
the ploy? Is that what this is all about? I’ll bet you arranged with your friend Ravenette to get me to come see her so she can tell me more made-up stuff that will convince me to come on your show and talk about my childhood visit from a little green man. Are you that desperate for people to talk about crazy things?”

“First of all, I’ve never even met the woman before; she’s just someone with a lot of celebrity clients and a reputation for being good at what she does, so she filled up some air time for me. Second, I don’t ever, knowingly, put anyone on my show who’s making up a story and I don’t participate in hoaxes of any kind.”

“Okay, fine. I’m still not going to see her.”

“So don’t go,” Jack said. “Don’t find out what really happened.”

“As if she could tell me.”

“Apparently she
did
tell you,” Jack said. “At least part of the story, anyway. Think about that, will you?”

I was getting really pissed off now. Who
was
this man to be meddling in my life like this? Or at least trying to, because that’s what it felt like. I was about to hang up when it occurred to me that he’d said one thing—
one—
that I was interested in and if he felt free to ask me all sorts of questions, then I had one for him.

“What’s the horn of plenty?” I asked. I had never heard Avi use that terminology.

“It’s an antenna. It looks sort of like a metal cone, or maybe a better way to describe it is that it resembles a cornucopia—a horn of plenty. It’s the kind of antenna that an amateur would need to tune into the Watering Hole. Back in the sixties, they used to be huge; no one had built one small enough to transport from place to place that actually worked. Your uncle Avi was the first.”

So he meant what I had thought of as the upside-down pyramid antenna. Great. I had a new piece of knowledge. And now, as far as I was concerned, case closed.

“That’s it?” Jack said. “That’s the only thing you’re curious about?” He sounded exasperated. “You’re really not interested in anything else?”

“Not if we’re going to have this same conversation every night, no.”

“All right then,” Jack said. “Fine. I have to get back on the air anyway.”

We hung up on each other—I think we were competing for who could do that first, but it’s hard to tell when you’re on a cell phone, since there’s no receiver to slam down—and then I turned the TV back on, but still couldn’t seem to follow the story line of any show I happened upon. I read for a while, but couldn’t concentrate on that either. Finally, I tried to get to sleep, but it was so damn cold in my apartment that even wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, I was too uncomfortable to doze off. I got out of bed, went into the kitchen and turned on the stove, staring into the glass door of the old, grimy Hotpoint as if it were a fireplace. At least it warmed me up a little.

It was now about three
A.M.
I remembered reading somewhere that this was the hour when the majority of people who otherwise seem perfectly healthy tend to drop dead. Fantastic. This is what I was thinking about in the middle of the night, in my cold apartment, with the sound of some giant truck motor outside making my windows rattle. Maybe I could think about that, instead? What might they be smuggling tonight? Tires? DVDs? Fake designer handbags?

But smuggled goods didn’t seem very interesting at that moment, because I had suddenly started thinking about that sapphire blue flier again. When was it that I had called into Jack’s show—just a night or two ago? How, then, had Ravenette managed to get that piece of mail to me so quickly? Unless the postal service had suddenly become efficient and reliable—which maybe it was in some residential neighborhoods of the city but certainly not here, in automobile alley where the mailman seemed to only stop by when he was in the mood—it was surprising that I had gotten her communiqué in anything less than a week. But why was that even bothering me? I wasn’t sure, but it was.

Still wrapped in a blanket I had carried with me from my bed, I padded out to the living room and found the flier and the envelope it had come in still sitting on my coffee table. I picked up the envelope and realized that it did not have a stamp on it. Earlier, though it had obviously registered in the back of my mind, I must have initially overlooked this oddity because I had been so taken by the fact that the mail was hand addressed. What that had to mean was that Ravenette, or someone she had sent to my building, had not only gone to the trouble of hand delivering this flier, they had somehow opened my mailbox and put it inside. I didn’t even know how long it had been waiting for me, since I never bothered to collect my mail on any regular basis. For all I knew, she—or some minion with a set of lockpicks—could have crept over here later on the same night I spoke to her on the radio to leave me this seemingly innocuous flier. But why? Why was it so important to her?

It was certainly possible that she was just trying to bilk me out of some money by sucking me into becoming a repeat client for her supposedly psychic readings—I knew how that went; I’d seen psychic scams exposed enough times on TV—but okay, fine, I could sort of allow some grudging admiration for being creative about that, even if Jack Shepherd was somehow involved. What I couldn’t get over, though, was all the trouble she, they—whoever—were going to in order to entice me to schedule a psychic reading,
if
that was really what this was about. If Ravenette had my address, then she also had my phone number; she could just as easily have called, or sent the flier through the mail like anyone else would have. This complicated business of hand delivering her message, of breaking into my mailbox—because that’s what had to have happened—was meant to be some kind of message to me beyond the invitation in the flier, but what? Was I supposed to feel that I was being stalked? Or courted? The whole thing was bizarre.

Of course, there was also the fact that she knew about the radioman. It did seem possible, now, that Jack had told her Avi’s story, but on the other hand, there was no way they could have known that I was going to call into the radio show that night and have been prepared to repeat the story to me. Jack’s joke aside, I didn’t care if she really
was
a psychic—the idea that she could predict a random telephone call was ridiculous. So the more I thought about all these events, the stranger they all seemed.

I was never going to do anything because I was prodded to. Push me one way and I’d be sure to go another, so Jack Shepherd could call me a dozen times and he would never get me to do anything he seemed to be angling for. I would not revisit the circumstances surrounding my dream or make an appointment to hear what else Ravenette “saw” for me just so I could satisfy his curiosity. But as I sat by the stove, wrapped in my blanket, I began to focus less on Jack and more on the fact that Ravenette not only had described the radioman to me, she told me he was pointing to the fire escape. She didn’t know any of the details of the story, but she was close enough to make it very difficult for me to simply dismiss what she had told me as some sort of fluke, a random guess that she happened to have gotten right.

One by one, like nails being pulled from a great, dark wall, dawn was beginning to remove the stars from the sky. I was still really cold, but tired enough that I felt like I could finally fall asleep. I didn’t head right off to bed, though—not yet. I sat by the stove for a while longer, still trying to think things through.

Strange, strange, strange.
No matter how many ways I tried to examine the stream of events that led from Jack to Ravenette to the invitation proffered by the blue flier and then added in what I now knew to be Avi’s belief that my dream was real, then
strange
was the only description I could come up with. (Maybe breaking into my mailbox was also a little threatening, but my well-developed ability to ignore things I didn’t want to worry about helped me lock that idea away for the time being.) To my surprise, I wasn’t as repelled by all of this as I probably should have been. In fact, I felt a sort of compulsion to see what was going to happen next—if I
let
anything happen. I could, for example, simply throw away the blue flier. Or, I could wait a few hours and call Ravenette. Not because Jack said I should but because, simply, left to make my own decision, I was beginning to think that maybe I wanted to.
That
was an interesting development, one I attributed to the fact that whatever it was inside me that for so long now had opted for playing it safe—every day in every way—was granting me a one-time pass. Or perhaps I was just being contrarian, which was a character flaw I was secretly proud of. Another explanation I could offer myself was even simpler: I didn’t have to go to work later, and it was clearly going to be another cold day in my apartment. I wondered if, in her place, Ravenette had heat.

~IV~

I
did manage to sleep for a few hours, and when I got up in the middle of the morning, I called Ravenette without even giving myself a chance to reconsider my decision. She sounded pleased to hear from me and told me I could come to her place in the afternoon. She gave me an address in Manhattan, and we chatted amiably for a moment or two about which subway line I should take and where I had to change from one train to another.

It was still cold in my apartment, but I did hear faint banging coming from somewhere downstairs, so it seemed like someone was indeed trying to fix the boiler. My neighbor, Sassouma, knocked on my door later in the morning, cradling the baby in one arm and carrying the heater in the other. She also had her purse and a diaper bag, so it looked like she was going to work at the convenience store and taking the baby with her, but I knew there were always other people in the apartment, including her other children, who would be home after school. I told her to keep the heater until we were sure the radiators would be working again. “I’m going out anyway,” I told her. “No problem, no problem.”