Radiomen (9 page)

As we rode along, something changed inside me as well: the feeling of disappointment I’d been so easily able to identify turned black and ugly and boiled itself back into an angry state. That didn’t really surprise me; I was pretty good at turning an uncomfortable feeling I couldn’t do anything about into one that I could. Disappointment was depressing and hard to get rid of; anger could be directed outward, at somebody. It could be wielded. It could be used.

There was a half-hour ride ahead of me on the elevated tracks before the train descended into its subterranean tunnel, which meant that I was able to get a cell phone signal. I was alone in the train car, though I don’t think the company of other people would have stopped me from pulling my cell phone from my shoulder bag and dialing Jack Shepherd. I needed somebody to be mad at and since I’d already taken my shot at Ravenette, I decided that the next person on my list was Jack.

I didn’t expect him to pick up the phone himself, since I assumed that the number I found in my cell phone—the number he’d called me from, twice—was his studio. I thought he’d have a secretary or a producer or whomever they had at radio shows to screen for inappropriate callers and calm down crazy people. But after just a few rings, there was Jack, saying hello in his deep-toned radio voice.

“It’s Laurie Perzin,” I said, and then I hurried on before he could even acknowledge me. “Why didn’t you tell me that your girlfriend was a member of the Blue Awareness?”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on. Don’t pretend you don’t know. Ravenette.”

“Wow,” Jack said. “You’re kidding. Well, for the record, I barely know the woman. And I certainly had no idea that she was Aware.”

I didn’t want to listen to him; I just wanted to keep on telling him why I was upset. “She set me up. She wanted me to come to her place so she could give me a recruitment pitch. Apparently, my engrams are out of whack. I need a lot of treatments with that idiotic Blue Box thing because my neural tissues are withering away even as we speak.” Listening to myself repeat this stuff only made it sound even more like lunacy. “You wanted me to go see her—don’t tell me you’re not involved in this.”

“I’m going to have to tell you that because it’s true. But I also have to say ‘wow’ again. She seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to try to recruit you—if that’s what she was up to. I mean, I’m sure you’re a fascinating person and all that . . .”

I cut him off quickly. “What’s the Wild Blue Yonder?” I demanded.

Suddenly, there was silence on the other end of the phone. The train was now rolling through a long strip of marshland. On the far horizon, I could make out the lights of the control tower of Kennedy airport again, but outside the train windows there was nothing but tall grass and cattails.

“She told you about that?” Jack asked, finally.

I barely registered his actual words, but the sound of his voice set me off again. “And that stupid Blue Box. I told her I have one at home and that when I was a kid, I used to zap my stuffed animals with it. The whole thing is idiotic.”

“She told you about the Wild Blue Yonder and you told her you had a Blue Box.”

“Yeah?” I said, tuning him in again. “So?”

“So a couple of things. Let’s start with I’m pretty shocked that she mentioned the Wild Blue Yonder to you. Awares are usually very secretive about that.”

“So you
do
know about this.”

“I know about the Blue Awareness,” Jack said. “Over the years, I’ve had some people on the show who left the Awareness, and they’ve talked about the various levels you have to reach in order to find out about the different principles that guide their beliefs. As I understand it, you have to be pretty high up to be introduced to the Wild Blue Yonder. Ravenette must be . . . what? Fourth Level? Third? Did she tell you?”

“Second,” I said grudgingly, annoyed with myself for ratcheting down my emotions to a state where I felt reasonable enough to answer this question.

“Huh. That’s pretty impressive. None of the people I interviewed had actually risen high enough in the group to know a whole lot about the Wild Blue Yonder, but I’ve . . . well, I’ve found other people to ask. And of course, you can find all sorts of information about it on the Internet—on sites devoted to debunking the Awareness. But most of the information seems to be wrong.” Then, unexpectedly, he started to chuckle. “Boy, Ravenette must have been really pissed off when you told her that you had a Blue Box. Nobody is supposed to have access to one of those things except trained Awareness scanners or very high-level Awares.”

“I told her it was a toy. She reacted like I’d said something sacrilegious.”

Jack suddenly stopped laughing. “You did,” he said in a voice that now had an undertone of a warning in it. “To people who are Aware, their beliefs are a religion. And they’re very serious about that. Maybe more than you realize.” Again, he fell silent. I was still feeling combative, but there was something about his silence, this time, that made me keep my own.

Finally, Jack said, “Can I ask you a question? Where on earth did you
get
a Blue Box?”

“Avi built one—well, something like it—out of Haverkit parts. I got it after he died.”

“I thought so,” Jack said.

“What do you mean, you thought so?
You knew
about the box? I mean, that Avi built one? How?” Just then, the train shuddered to a halt and the doors opened. A few passengers stepped into the car, which made me look out the window to see where we were. We had passed through the strip of marshland and were back on the section of the train’s busier route. “Shit,” I said, before Jack had a chance to answer me. “We’re going to be in the tunnel in a few minutes.”

“You’re on the train?” When I said yes, Jack had a suggestion for how we could continue the conversation. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you come by here? We’d have more time to talk. The story’s a little complicated, anyway.”

“Where’s here?” I asked.

“Brooklyn,” Jack told me. “That’s where my studio is.”

He gave me more specific directions, but it would have taken at least another hour—and changing twice, to two different subway lines—to get to his place. As much as I wanted to hear whatever story he had to tell me, I was running out of steam and I just didn’t feel up to any more traipsing around. Eventually, we worked out that I would come to his place at the end of the week. He repeated the directions to his studio, and I wrote them down.

By the time I finally got back to my own neighborhood, the garages were shut and the black market guys had returned. A sealed trailer without any markings but sporting some very serious chains looped through its back doors was parked across the street, waiting for someone with the right key to show up and unlock it. I didn’t even give this set-up a second glance; I just let myself into my building and went inside.

It took me a few moments, but as I walked up the stairs I realized that the building wasn’t freezing anymore; it seemed like the heat was finally back on. The fact that this minor miracle had, indeed, taken place, was confirmed when I reached my apartment and saw my portable space heater sitting outside my door. There was a note taped to it, a white sheet of paper with a child’s drawing of an animal on it, which I assumed was meant to be the dust-colored dog that belonged to the children of my neighbor, Sassouma. The dog had been drawn with a big smile on its pointy face and above its head, in child’s writing, were the words
Thank you.

I carried it inside, took off my jacket, made myself comfortable on the couch and turned on the TV. I started to channel surf, not much caring what was on. I was ready to watch anything mindless. Anything at all.

T
HE NEXT
few days continued to be chilly so I was grateful that the boiler had been repaired and we had heat in the building, even though the landlord kept it turned on only during the minimum number of hours required by the city to make his tenants’ life bearable. Day after day, I slept later than I should have and then tried to get myself ready for work, knowing that I should be rushing around but managing, mostly, to just wander aimlessly from room to room. Finally, I’d bundle myself into my jacket—swearing that next year, I was going to buy myself a heavier coat—and wait for the bus under a sunless sky, feeling gloomy and tired. It was as if my experiences with Ravenette and then in Rockaway—unsettling as they ultimately were—had at least drawn me out of my usual routine, a change I hadn’t known I’d wanted. But now that I was back to my everyday schedule of home, airport, bar, home, a blue mood seemed to have descended, and I couldn’t shake it. On top of that, I found myself eating too much junk food and having bad dreams.

By the end of the week, on the day I was supposed to meet Jack Shepherd at his studio, I didn’t even feel like going. But for once, I had risen when my alarm clock buzzed instead of shutting it off. I showered, made coffee, and after that, all that was left to do was sit around the apartment until it was time to go to work. I was feeling too bored to do that and restless, as well, so before I even thought much about it, I was dressed and out the door. Once again, I made the long trek down Queens Boulevard, got on the subway and began the long ride to Brooklyn.

Jack’s studio was in a distant neighborhood, like mine, where the subway stations were far away from just about anywhere people actually lived. So, once I got out of the train, I had to walk for about fifteen minutes. My route led me through blocks of sagging tenements and grim bodegas into an industrial area that had been built up around the river-front. As I headed west, past warehouses and manufacturing plants, most long abandoned, I could see the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, looking like tall glass sticks poking at the heavy clouds massed above the oily waterway that separated Brooklyn from the lower Hudson Bay. To the north, this old shipping channel led into the East River; to the south, it met the grimy Gowanus Canal, which I imagined was contributing to the rusty smell in the air. Finally, I found the address I was looking for on a narrow street that led down to the river, ending at the skeletal pilings of a collapsed pier.

Above the entranceway of the building I wanted was a sign that said “
Up All Night Productions,”
which was what Jack had told me to look for. He buzzed me in to a cavernous lobby, dim and silent enough to have served as a bank vault. I took the elevator to the top floor, where, at the end of the hallway, I finally found Jack Shepherd’s home base.

When Jack opened the door, I had the feeling that I had seen him somewhere before, but that wasn’t really the case. He just had the familiar look of an old hipster: a little overweight and sporting both a goatee and a black turtleneck. He was, I thought, somewhere in his sixties, a little older than I had guessed, but not all that much.

“So,” he said, “you found your way here.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” I told him, which was true. I liked these out-of-the way neighborhoods better than the glitzy parts of New York; it was like finding old, hidden parts of the city that got left out of the tourist guides. The walk had actually lifted my mood a little. I felt less like I was stuffed full of gripes and complaints.

Jack spent a few minutes showing me around what turned out to be a primarily one-man operation; he said that an assistant sometimes came in at night, but that was about it. The studio he broadcast from was a room with a glass wall; inside was an automated phone deck, a couple of microphones, computers, and a lot of electronic equipment bristling with dials and lights. Jack explained that the show was syndicated to stations across the country, transmitted to them via an online digital feed. There was also an antenna on the roof of the building that provided an over-the-air broadcast. He told me that he actually interviewed many of his guests on a digital phone line that sounded live, but when he did have someone in the studio, he brought them here by car service and sent them home the same way. To get home himself, he didn’t have far to go; he lived on a lower floor in this same building, from which he had been doing his show, he said, for longer than he could remember. Before that, he explained, he had originated the program at a small Midwestern station where he was also the evening drive-time DJ; but late-night talk about ghosts, aliens and the supernatural had proven to be so popular that he’d been able to move to the larger East Coast market and eventually set up his own studio and sell the program nationwide. That, years ago, was what had brought him to New York.

Jack ushered me into his office, where there was a desk, another computer, and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. CDs and DVDs were stacked in piles around the desk, along with a wide variety of magazines and other periodicals, most of them having to do with UFOs, spiritualism, astrology, and other subjects that might offer ideas for his show. I took a seat on a couch in front of one of the bookcases, but before Jack joined me, he offered coffee, sandwiches—maybe snacks? When I said no thanks, he grinned at me.

“You’re holding out for a real drink?”

“Too early,” I told him.

“Not for a beer,” he said.