Radiomen (8 page)

The day my father and I spent cleaning out Avi’s place after he died was very sad. The apartment—the same one Avi had always occupied, in the same Bronx tenement where I had lived with my parents—was now pretty shabby. It consisted of just a few dim rooms with very little furniture but lots of books, papers, and a closet full of radios, parts of radios, and all kinds of equipment related to radios: antennas, coils of wire, transistors, vacuum tubes, soldering irons and anything else that might be used in building a radio receiver. Also stuck in with all this stuff was a black, shoebox-shaped device that I remembered from my childhood. If you plugged it into an outlet and held onto the canisters attached to it by coils of wire, it made your hands tingle. I used to play with it when Avi was babysitting me. He was always telling me to be careful with it, but even as a small child, I had the impression that it was something like the joke-shop buzzer some kid in my class had—when he concealed it in his palm and shook hands with you, it gave you a mild jolt. As far as I could see, the only difference among the device in Avi’s apartment, the Blue Box depicted on the long-ago slide show I’d seen at the Introduction to Awareness meeting, and now, the one Ravenette was holding, was the color and the fact that Avi’s was made out of Haverkit parts—the name was clearly stamped on the outside casing—just like his radio. In the apartment, I had asked my father if I could have one of Avi’s radios—the same receiver he had brought with him to Rockaway to listen to satellites—which was on a table in the living room, not stuffed in the closet with the other equipment. It was the era when FM stations were just beginning to switch over to broadcasting rock music and all I had was a small transistor radio; I thought that with Avi’s receiver, I could not only get better reception, but maybe listen to stations from other cities, too. Maybe I was being insensitive, thinking of the radio as a boon to my ability to groove to the Beatles and the Stones instead of mourning Avi, but I don’t think I was feeling much of anything in those days, except sorry for myself. I was already a wild kid, depressed and angry, cutting school whenever I could and sneaking out at night to hang out with my friends and get high. In any event, my father said that I could take the radio, so I put it in a carton and, on a whim, took the joke-shop box with me, too. Maybe at the time it seemed like some kind of memento of my childhood, but not then—and certainly not now—did I even entertain the idea that it had the power to do anything other than let you feel the sensation of a tiny electric current traveling along your fingers.

“I don’t believe you,” Ravenette said. “You can’t possibly have a Blue Box.”

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not,” I told her. Then I smiled as widely as I could. “But I really do have one.”

“You must have stolen it somehow,” Ravenette asserted, sounding furious.

“I didn’t,” I told her, “but you can think what you like.” I wasn’t in the mood to tell her anything personal about myself, which meant I certainly wasn’t going to mention Avi and how I had acquired my version of a Blue Box. At the same time, I couldn’t resist the impulse to piss her off just a little bit, since it made me feel like I was getting back at her for tricking me into coming here, so I added, “It’s just a toy.”

“That,” she told me, “is an insulting thing to say. And very stupid.”

There seemed to be an ominous ring to that last remark, but I decided not to engage her any further. Who knew what an enraged psychic cult member might say to me next. Or do. There was nothing in it for me to hang around and find out, so I finally did turn around and walk out. I rang for the elevator, which luckily came almost immediately, but just after I stepped in and turned around, I saw that Ravenette had hurried after me so that she could slam the elevator door shut in my face. She glared at me through the iron grillwork as the ornate cage began to descend.

Shortly, I was back on the sidewalk, feeling like I was trudging along the grim, gray edge of a lost afternoon. The anger toward Ravenette that had energized me when I was in her loft was leeching away again and I felt . . . what?
Hollow
was as close as I could get to describing my state. I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me since I thought I had given as good as I’d gotten in terms of arguing with Ravenette over that damn box, but I didn’t feel like I’d achieved anything. In fact, I felt exactly the opposite: like I had lost something, but I had no idea what.

I kept walking for a while until I came to a subway. I went down to the platform and, looking around, realized that my surroundings seemed familiar. The slab walls were cracked and grimy, letters were missing from the tile plaques that spelled out the name of the stop, and filthy water, leaking from eternally broken pipes, was pooled around the train tracks. But even though the station had probably not looked quite so dismal when I’d last been here, I knew exactly where I was. By random chance, I had found myself in one of the older stations that served as a hub for several different subway lines—a place where I had waited with my parents to change from one train to another when we were on our way to Rockaway. The routine, for our family, was that Avi drove to Rockaway in his Impala with my grandmother in the seat beside him and the rest of the family’s belongings packed into the trunk, with the overflow stashed in the back seat. My parents and I met them after riding the subway, specifically the A train, for the longest distance possible to cover, point to point, on the entire system: from the northwest Bronx to the end of the Rockaway Peninsula.

I was still feeling edgy and out of sorts. I didn’t really want to spend the rest of what felt like an endless afternoon sitting around in my cold apartment, but I didn’t have anyplace else in mind to go, so I left my next move to fate. If the E train arrived first, the line I needed to take to get home, then that was where I was going. But if the A train did, I was going to get on it and ride, once again, to the end of the line.

No train at all came for quite a while. But finally, leaning over the edge of the platform, I saw a pair of bright yellow headlights appear in the tunnel. As they came closer, I could hear the screech of steel wheels against the steel track and feel the great, sighing wind that precedes a train as it pulls into the station. As the first car finally emerged from the darkness, I saw the round, illuminated circle above the conductor’s cab framing the letter “A.”

I got on and found a seat in a middle car. It was a long ride out to Rockaway; about an hour and a half as the train plowed along, first crossing under the East River into Brooklyn and then making what seemed like every stop in the borough before heading into Queens. Eventually, the train emerged from underground and became an elevated line, traveling along tracks that ran above old immigrant neighborhoods where you could peer into the windows of apartment buildings as your car rushed past someone’s kitchen, someone else’s empty living room looking bleak and lonely in the middle hours of a gray afternoon.

When the train left Queens, it made a hairpin turn around a bend in the track, and began heading toward Rockaway. After a while, it crossed over a trestle bridge that spanned Jamaica Bay, where I could see, in the distance, planes coming and going from the airport where, on most any other day, I would be just about arriving for work. Once it traversed the bay, passing by a line of ruined bungalows built on a crumbling pier, the train turned east to follow the shoreline of the narrow peninsula. Now, outside the window, I could see the Atlantic Ocean. The water was the dull color of graphite, and when the doors opened at the first station near the beach, I could hear the waves; there was not much surf today, so the ocean sounded like it was mumbling to itself as it rolled a few choppy breakers toward the shore.

I couldn’t even count how many years it had been since I’d set foot in this place. Though I had heard about how badly the area had declined, decimated by changing times, I was still not prepared for what I saw as the train rolled on. My parents’ working-class generation had been grateful to be able to afford a few weeks in a boarding house by the shore, but when the children of that time—most of them anyway, not counting me—grew up into monied professionals, they were off to the Caribbean or the Hamptons for their summer fun; some gritty peninsula at the end of Queens was not exactly high on their list of vacation spots. There had been an effort at what was termed “urban renewal” sometime in the 1970s, but that had only resulted in most of the summer bungalows and boarding houses being torn down before the city ran out of money and its planners walked away, having built nothing and leaving behind mile after mile of empty lots, some with the remnants of building foundations looking like jagged concrete teeth rising out of the sandy soil.

I got off the train at the stop where we had always disembarked, Edgemere Avenue, and found myself on a deserted platform in what felt like the middle of nowhere. The late afternoon sky was like a lead ceiling; the wind off the ocean stung my face and hands with tiny seeds of salt. I went down the stairs, listening to my footsteps clanging on each metal step. There was no one in the booth near the turnstiles, no one in the street below.

In fact, there was hardly any street at all. What I remembered as a broad sidewalk fronting a strip of stores—a dry goods emporium that sold hats and hair bands and bathing suits; a drugstore with a lunch counter; a small grocery—was now just an array of cracked concrete blocks bordering a vast, weedy lot. The intersecting street ran straight toward the boardwalk and the beach. It used to be crowded with bungalows on one side and multistory boarding houses on the other, but now, all I could see was a kind of flat, sandy plain that had been taken over by tall brown cattails and strewn with broken glass. In some places, clumps of trees had taken root so that what used to be a block of bungalows instead looked like a small forest. It occurred to me that this deserted area was not exactly the safest place to be, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. After a few moments of looking around and trying to acclimate myself, I started walking up the street toward the boardwalk.

I walked the length of one block and then another. On either side of me were dense stands of trees, denuded by winter and blackened by damp. Even if spring suddenly forced itself past the cold weather that seemed, this year, to be refusing to give in to the seasonal rotation of the planet, it appeared that these bare branches, buffeted as they were by the wet salt wind blowing off the ocean, were going to have a hard time coming to life. Still looking around, I kept on walking, trying to judge, from memory, exactly where our old boarding house would have stood.

And then, to my great surprise, there it was: the Sunlite Apartments. At first I was almost willing to believe that what I was seeing was really just a projection of my memory. Maybe I just
wanted
it to be there and so it was, ready to fade away in the blink of an eye. But I blinked, and it was still there, partially hidden beyond the blackened trees. The slate pavers that used to form a walkway leading from the sidewalk to the building’s front door were long gone but the structure itself, a brick box, five stories high, trimmed with faded wedding-cake fretwork around its broken balconies, still seemed to be at least partially intact. From what I had seen so far, it was the only building for a mile in each direction that was still standing.

So. Now I was here, in an abandoned neighborhood, on a gray afternoon, with the invisible sun drowning in the ocean as the hour raced toward evening and the wind blew sand down the empty street. But why was I here, what did I want? I felt like I had been on automatic pilot ever since I’d left Ravenette’s loft, drawn to this place by some feeling, some huge, gaping hole that had suddenly opened up inside me that I thought I could fill by coming here. But why? The best I could do was trace my lemming-like journey to this abandoned building to the sense that something was waiting for me here and I, in turn, for it.
Him.
Him. Was that what I expected? What I had wanted Ravenette to reconnect me with—the shadow on the fire escape that, for my entire life, I had been claiming was just a dream? Well if so, why did I think I’d find him here, in this shell of a building, this old ruin where Avi once took me to listen to the raspy beep that was the sound of satellites signaling their ground stations? That was something like forty years ago. What a ridiculous idea it was to think that even a shadow man might be found in the same spot where, decades ago, he had listened to the radio with a child.

But thinking that I was being an idiot didn’t deter me from taking a few steps into the trees to try to approach the building. There was a tangle of roots and broken branches underfoot and my way was partially barred by a dense growth of brambles. I got just close enough to look toward the back of the building and see that the fire escape was still there—rotted, rusted, missing many of its steps, but still attached to the building. Gazing upward, I could see the part of the fire escape where I had sat, waiting for Avi to return. In his place had come a shade, a stranger, who had raised his finger to make me hush while he tuned in . . . something. Ghost signals whistling in the universal darkness, perhaps—that is, if Jack Shepherd was to be believed.

I stood there for a while, looking up at the fire escape, waiting for something to happen. To see something that, of course, it was impossible to see again. But still I kept looking until I knew that there was no point anymore. It would be evening soon, and too dark, too cold, too lonely to hang around here any longer.

And so I turned back, heading for the train. But finally, I could at least do something that I had been unable to do for most of the afternoon—give a name to what was bothering me. As I walked quickly down the deserted street, listening to the fading sound of wind and waves, I knew what I was feeling. I knew exactly. I had seen nothing; nothing had happened. And because of that—precisely, unquestionably because of that—I was disappointed.

~V~

A
s the train rattled back along the trestle bridge that crossed the bay, I could see a few thin streaks of gold along the horizon where the sun was displaying the rays of light it had been barred from presenting all day because of the heavy cloud cover. These remnants were gone in a few minutes and the sky began changing itself into its nighttime regalia, complete with blurry stars and a crescent moon.