Radiomen (19 page)

It was a mild night, pretty enough, with a sharp slice of moon overhead and the salty smell of deep water riding in on the currents, so I stayed where I was, leaning against the fence as Jack and I finished our conversation.

“I’m sorry, Laurie,” Jack said. “I could have handled that better. I just lost my temper with her.”

“It’s an easy thing to do,” I told him. “I know. Believe me.”

“But I probably just made it worse.”

“Well, I think you just dropped yourself into the blue soup with me. So to speak.”

At least that made him laugh. “What?” he said.

“She likes to make threats. They all do, I guess. What was that she said? Good luck with the show? I don’t exactly think she meant it.”

“No, probably not. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next. If we’re lucky, nothing will. And if we’re not, we’ll deal with it.”

“Maybe I’ll just have to find another fire escape to climb out on and ask whatever shadow is lurking around to intercede. If I can find him.”

“I thought you didn’t believe that,” Jack reminded me.

“You know what? It’s late, I’m tired, I’ve had a weird night and a long ride home. I’m liable to say anything right now.”

“Okay,” Jack said, “Let’s leave it on that note. Good night,” he said.

“ ’Night,” I replied, and clicked off my phone.

I crossed the road and started to walk down my street, past the locked body shops and garages. As usual, a big rig was parked on the block, though someone had made more of an effort than usual to hide it. Beyond the sodium glow of the streetlamps, I could just make out the dimmed-down running lights of the Peterbilt cab nosing out of the end of an alley beside a scrapyard. As I walked by the truck and approached my building, I happened to glance up at my window and thought I saw a pair of twitching ears framed behind the dark square of glass. Since Digitaria was usually positioned by the front door when I came home, I wasn’t surprised that he was waiting for me, but that he had figured out that he could stand up on his hind legs and watch out the window for me was something new. It made him seem anxious, peering out into the night like that. I quickened my step and was in the building, up the stairs, and unlocking my front door just a few moments later, greeting my dog with a pat on the head. In response, he uttered a soft yip.

It was the first time I had ever heard him make a sound. “You can stop worrying now,” I said to him, since I realized that having lingered outside to talk on the phone had made me later than usual in getting home, and perhaps that had disturbed him. Maybe I was attributing to him qualities of mind and heart that he didn’t have—he was, after all, just a dog, not a person watching a late-night clock tick off the time that a friend should be home—but I assumed that all people who owned pets did that. And so I patted him again.

~X~

O
ver the next couple of weeks, I noticed that my dog—and he was definitely my dog now, as bonded to me as I had become to him—seemed to remain in a heightened state of anxiety, or at least alertness. He was eating less and often, in the night, jumped off the bed to pace back and forth between the bedroom and the front door of my apartment. And every night, when I came home from work, I would see him in the window, ears twitching above his wedge-shaped skull, seemingly poised to leap through the glass and come looking for me if I didn’t get home exactly when I was supposed to.

I began to worry about him a bit, so decided it was time to take him for a checkup. When I’d gotten him, I’d been so overwhelmed by everything that had happened—the break-in on the previous night and then the visit from my neighbor and her cousin, the somewhat grim professor of French literature, Dr. Carpenter—that it had never even occurred to me to ask questions like whether or not the dog needed vaccinations or anything like that. So I made an appointment at a nearby veterinary clinic, and brought him in on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when I was off from work. The vet, a Dr. Tyner, who turned out to be a serious young guy with lots of snapshots of his four-legged patients in the waiting room, earnestly shook my hand after an assistant ushered me into an exam room. Then the doctor took a good, long look at my dog and asked his name.

When I told him, he asked me to spell it and then carefully corrected a mistake in how his assistant had entered it on the chart she had started for Digitaria.

“That’s an unusual name,” he said.

I didn’t want to try to explain the whole story—visitors from the interstellar neighborhood of Sirius and the dark star that was its invisible companion star seemed like a bit much for a first visit to a vet’s office—so I just said that it was a Dogon name, and explained that the Dogon were an African tribe.

“That makes sense,” Dr. Tyner said. “He has the look of a pariah dog. He’s narrow, and has that curled tail.”

I probably looked like I was not happy to have my dog called a pariah, and that made Dr. Tyner smile. “It’s not an insult,” he said. “It just means that they’re hardy animals. They live with nomads and tribespeople who follow their herds. When life’s hard for the people, it is for the dogs, too.”

As he spoke to me, Dr. Tyner was examining Digitaria, who he had hoisted up onto an examining table. All the while, the dog kept his eyes focused on me. And I got the message: he was only enduring this going-over for me, because I wanted him to.

“Well,” Dr. Tyner said, “we’ll give him the regular inoculations, but otherwise, he seems fine. In fact, he seems like a particularly hardy fellow. He is a little thin, but that may be natural for him.”

“I think he’s been anxious,” I said. “I mean, he’s been pacing a lot.”

Dr. Tyner gave me an inquisitive look. “Have you maybe been upset about anything lately? Sometimes dogs pick up on how their owners feel and start acting the same way.”

“My apartment was broken into a couple of weeks ago. That’s actually how I got the dog. Someone gave him to me.”

“So he’s a watchdog,” Dr. Tyner said. “Has anything else happened since you got him?”

I thought about Ted Merrill and his big, threatening smile, but didn’t think I could explain that to the vet, either. “No,” I said. “Not at home.”

“So, Digitaria,” Dr. Tyner said to my dog, who was still standing on the metal examining table, “did you hear that? You’ve been doing your job, so you can relax a little. I’ll even tell you something that might help. Most bad people are afraid of dogs, so just the fact that you’re around is a good thing for your friend Laurie.” And then he patted Digitaria on the head.

I left with a receipt for the $125 I had put on my credit card to pay for the exam, but the cost was balanced somewhat by an appreciation for the vet’s good humor about my concern that the dog was acting a little odd. And I liked that Dr. Tyner talked to him the way I had found myself talking to Digitaria almost from the beginning, as if he understood me, which meant it was reasonable to speak to him in pretty much the same way I did everybody else. Never mind that I knew there was a much more logical case to be made that, other than vets, the people who talked to their dogs as if they understood every word probably were mostly old ladies, or else lonely souls and other odd types.

In any case, maybe the dog did understand Dr. Tyner’s reassurances—at least, I decided to believe he did—because Digitaria did seem to calm down after visiting the vet. Though he kept up his nightly vigil at the window when I was due home from work, the pacing back and forth between the bedroom and front door stopped, and he was even eating a little more. Sometimes he even wagged his tail when he saw me opening a can of his food and since generally, he wasn’t much of a tail wagger, I took a kind of silly pleasure in thinking that I was making him happy.

During these few weeks that I later thought of as a brief lull in our lives, an interlude between my visit from Ted Merrill—which I had started thinking of as the Night of the Big Smile—and what came next, Jack and I kept in touch. Whenever we could arrange it, we met in the city for lunch. He liked to eat somewhere in the Village, where we had both lived at different times when we were younger. Afterward, we sometimes went for a walk around the neighborhood, and Jack and I both took turns pointing out to each other where shops or businesses we remembered used to be but weren’t anymore. From the far west side, near the river, where the Socialist Workers Party had had their headquarters and turned out political tracts on mimeograph machines, to radical bookstores and chess clubs and coffee bars, Jack, in particular, seemed to have a geography in his head that had been overlaid by a new grid of streets, new buildings, and a new millennial affluence that had turned old neighborhoods into fashionable quarters, unaffordable to most of their original residents. But he didn’t seem overly nostalgic about any of this, just interested in how time and change fought with memory to establish precedence. Which was more real: the Village he remembered—more gay than straight, more hipster-friendly than home to fashionistas, more hole-in-the-wall than penthouse in the sky; or the one where we often had to make a reservation at some tiny restaurant on Bedford Street or Jane or Great Jones or Little West Twelfth because the rich and famous (or just plain rich) were edging us out of all the places that people like Jack and I used to take for granted as being ours?

One morning, though, Jack phoned me so early—early for me, anyway—that he woke me up, and asked if we could have a late breakfast. I had to be at work in the afternoon so I wasn’t eager to travel all the way to the Village and then navigate my way by subway back to Queens to catch the AirTrain out to Kennedy, but Jack suggested something else. He wanted to meet at a diner off the Grand Central Parkway. I knew the place because it was near the strip mall where Victor Haberman had his office. On my bus ride to work every day, I still passed my very-much-ex-attorney’s office (I had received a registered letter from him, copied to the Blue Awareness’s attorneys and about half the senior administrative managers of the group listed on their website officially resigning from my “case”) and knew that it had taken weeks for him to clean up the mess that had been left by the blue paint that had been smeared all over his windows, door, and even the sidewalk.

An hour later, I caught the bus heading toward the airport, but got off before my usual stop, right across the street from the diner. It was a hazy morning, the weather almost summery, but this was hardly a spot to appreciate the mild season. Stuck on the edge of the parkway, between Flushing Meadow Park, with its shallow ponds and rusty barbeque pits, and the seemingly mile-high rows of balconied co-ops squeezed together on the boulevard stretching toward the city, the diner had the feel of a place sitting uneasily on a temporary foundation. Everybody inside seemed anxious, gulping down coffee and singed toast in the rush to get from one place to another. This was just a stop on the road when you were in-between destinations and ready to hurry on.

Jack was sitting at a booth near a window that presented a view of the traffic speeding past on the parkway and in the distance, planes lifting themselves off the tarmac at Kennedy and angling upward into the sky. He had a plate of eggs in front of him that he wasn’t eating, and an empty coffee cup.

When I sat down across from him, Jack offered me a quick greeting and then, almost immediately, started explaining why he’d wanted to meet. Something had happened.

“The company that syndicates my show is called Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks,” Jack began. “I knew they’d been working on a merger or a sale for a year now; a number of media conglomerates seemed interested, and as far as I was concerned, it would just mean a change in the name on my contract. But two days ago, I got a call from a friend on the corporate side who told me there’s a new bidder and they’re offering a ton of money. Make that a ton-and-a-half. So you know who suddenly wants to buy the Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks?”

I sighed. “The Blue something, right?”

“Blue Star Communications,” Jack told me. “Both the president of the company and the chairman of the board are Awares. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Blue Star’s single condition for going forward with the purchase of Coast-to-Coast is that, once the deal is done, they drop my show. Meaning, kick me off the air.”

“So now you’re going to suffer because of me.”

“Laurie,” Jack said, “we can go back and forth about who dragged who into this mess, but one thing I know is that this part of it is all my own doing. I’ve gone out of my way to make them angry.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “Because I won’t give them a radio antenna I don’t even have, they’d go to these lengths to . . . what? I don’t even understand what the point is of going after you.”

“Ravenette warned us they would.”

“I haven’t forgotten that. It still seems pretty extreme.”

Jack gave me a wry look. “I take it you haven’t been listening to the show. I told you, I haven’t exactly been trying to placate them. I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately, and they’ve been pretty outspoken about the trials and tribulations of being a member of the Blue Awareness if you’re not high up the ladder. Or in favor with someone who is. Most of the people who’ve talked to me on the air have spent their life savings, or went deeply into debt, to pay for what the group calls Awareness training—all that Blue Box stuff, and more—and then were harassed nearly to the breaking point when they finally left. I guess Raymond Gilmartin isn’t too happy about my having them on the show where they can spill the blue beans, so to speak.”

“Do you think Raymond himself is after you?”

“I doubt that anything the Blue Awareness does happens without his say-so. And this is how they are, this is what they do. It’s bad enough if you’re just a regular member and turn against them. But if you’re someone like me—someone with a public platform—I guess they view that as a real threat. So I’d say we’re way beyond their issues with you now. Way beyond.”

I looked out the window, into the dusty haze of sunshine that had spread itself across the sky, all the way to the horizon. We were almost alone in the diner now. This was the dead time, the half hour or so before morning rolled over into afternoon when no one was ready to sit down and eat lunch yet, or grab more coffee. One waitress was outside taking a cigarette break; another was sitting at the counter, slowly going through a pile of receipts.