Radiomen (24 page)

As was apparently his habit, Gilmartin didn’t reply to questions until—and if—he felt like it. So, instead of answering what I’d asked, he had a question of his own. “Can I pet him?”

This was an even stranger question, I thought. I wasn’t sure if it was a tacit admission that last night did involve the Blue Awareness, and Gilmartin was well aware that the dog could be aggressive, or if he was simply—in his own weird way—being polite by asking permission.

“All right,” I said. Then I looked down at my dog. “Be nice,” I told him.

Gilmartin got up from the couch and approached the dog slowly. Then, bending down, he gently touched the dog’s head. He patted Digitaria a couple of times, while the dog mostly ignored him.

“What’s his name?” Gilmartin asked me.

“Digitaria,” I told him.

For the first time, Gilmartin almost smiled. “Is it really?” he said. “That’s extremely interesting. Extremely.” He stood up and started walking toward the bookcase. “I want to show you something,” he said.

He reached for an object that was on a high shelf and carefully carried it back to us. Handing it to me, he said, “Look at this. It’s very old.”

What he had given me was a rock—a heavy, solid object with a smooth black surface. I saw that it had a carving on one side, and held it so that Jack, who pulled his chair closer to mine, could see it, too.

Holding it in my hand, I had no doubt that the rock was old, just as Gilmartin suggested, or perhaps even ancient; it just had that feeling about it. So did the pictograph that had been carved on its surface. The carving was simple, but that somehow made it appear even more powerful. Under a diagram of dots and lines that I couldn’t identify, three beings stood together, The first seemed to be a human, rendered as a kind of genderless line drawing. The second was also humanlike in that it appeared to have arms, legs and a head, but it was hard to identify where the boundaries of the figure stopped and plain rock surface began because this being was made up of tiny lines, like scrapes, so that it appeared to be more of a blur than a solid shape. Between these two figures stood the third being, a small dog, thin and compact, with an angular head shaped like an anvil and a tightly curled tail.

As soon as I focused on the figure of the dog, what had happened last night suddenly made a different kind of sense to me. Digitaria wasn’t meant to be traded for anything—not even the horn of plenty antenna. He was important all by himself. “This is why you wanted my dog,” I said to Gilmartin as I pointed to the little dog scratched into the rock.

“I told you, I never even suggested to anyone that they try to take your dog from you,” Gilmartin replied.

“Really? Then let me get this straight. Breaking into someone’s apartment to steal stuff is okay. But stealing a dog is off-limits?”

“Even the detective who got in touch with us earlier today thought that accusation was reaching a bit. I believe they might actually be under the impression that, with all these complaints you’ve been making, it’s you who’s harassing us.”

So, great. Now I knew that while the police report I had filed last night had resulted in some kind of action, once again, the outcome was going to be that absolutely nothing was going to happen.

“So now what do I have to do, Raymond? Worry that every time I take the dog for a walk some fanatic is going to try to snatch him from me?”

“I can’t imagine why you think that,” Gilmartin responded, pronouncing each word carefully. “The only thing I can tell you is that sometimes, people become overzealous in their desire to fulfill another person’s wishes. But, at least hypothetically, one can explain to those people that they have gone a bit too far.”

That, I gathered, was meant to reinforce what he had said earlier, that trying to take my dog from me had nothing, specifically, to do with the Blue Awareness. Maybe the men involved were Awares but they were acting outside the boundaries of Blue Awareness teachings, or any direct instructions from their leader. I wondered if Gilmartin thought this would make me feel better about what happened—or at least, somehow better about him.

“How did you even know I had the dog?” I asked, as a very creepy thought formed itself in my mind. “Have you been watching me?”

“No one has been watching you,” Gilmartin replied. “I am, however, sometimes in contact with Dr. Carpenter. He told me that he had given you the dog. He knows I want one and it seemed to please him to tell me that, while he won’t give or even sell me a Dogon dog, he had just handed one over to you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. I really was completely puzzled. “What does Dr. Carpenter have to do with all this?”

Gilmartin held out his hand to receive the stone back from me. He gave it a thoughtful glance and then looked back at me. “In Mali,” he said, “where the Dogon live, this carving would be a national treasure. My father bought it years ago, before there were laws about the purchase and export of cultural heritage items. I hear there is only one other like it, and that’s in the national museum. I’ve offered to make an exchange with Dr. Carpenter: this sacred object for a Dogon dog.”

I understood this explanation to mean that Raymond was further underscoring how civilized he was. Even when he did want to trade for something he desired he was open about it, transparent. Well, I was willing to accept that idea—but only up to a point. I could imagine that Dr. Carpenter was in a different category than me; he was a person to be respected, someone with a position, a professional reputation. Who was I? A bartender. Dr. Carpenter could make trouble for Raymond Gilmartin. I, apparently, couldn’t even get a New York City cop to take me seriously.

Now Raymond continued with his litany of complaints against Dr. Carpenter. “No matter how much I offer him—relics, money—he refuses me. He just doesn’t like me. I suppose it’s because we think very differently about . . . well, many things.”

Jack, who had been mercifully quiet for a while, now jumped back into the conversation. “Well, who
would
think like you?” he demanded. Then, turning to me, he said, “Have you figured out what our friend Raymond here is doing? He’s collecting touchstones—or trying to. The radio, the antenna, even your dog. I’ll bet he believes that if he can get his hands on the objects that influenced his father’s writings he can get closer to . . . well, to be honest, I’m not sure what he wants to do.” Addressing Gilmartin again he said, “Are you trying to bring them back? The boys from the Wild Blue Yonder? You believe the visitors who came to the Dogon are the same beings that Laurie calls the radiomen. The beings your father described as looking like shadows—like that figure carved on the rock. The ones who made the same kind of sound your father described. They hissed at the Dogon—and your dad. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Without even waiting for Gilmartin to reply, Jack went on, spitting out his words. “So what do you do? Sit here and rub your hands over the rock hoping to summon them? Or do you and Ravenette hook yourselves up to Blue Boxes and try to channel them? Wait,” Jack said, with a sarcastic little cackle, “I’ve got another guess: you were going to use Avi Perzin’s old radio and antenna to broadcast a message telling them you’ve found their lost dog.”

“You know what?” Gilmartin said. “I think I’ve had enough of you now. You spend so much time trying to defame us, you’ve lost your own way.”

“My
way?”
Jack sputtered. “Who are you to bring up anything like that? I’ve already told you; my
way
is to go to work every night and talk to people. Yours is to try to stop that.”

“So you say,” Gilmartin replied. “At the moment, however, you happen to be right. I do want you to stop talking. In fact, I want you to get out of my office.”

Suddenly the door opened. I had no idea how Gilmartin had signaled for her, but the cheery young woman who had led us to Gilmartin’s office was now standing in the entrance, looking much more officious. Her smile was gone and her posture was stiff.

Jack stood up, but he wasn’t about to leave just yet. “Sure you don’t want to duke this out on my show? Come on,” he said. “Mano a mano.” Then he directed a sardonic smile at Gilmartin. “You did know I still have a show, didn’t you? I start in a couple of weeks on World Air. Unless you’re planning to buy all the communications satellites, too—though come to think of it, maybe that would be better for you than a dog. They’d be like Blue Boxes, circling Earth. You could set them to send signals that would have everyone’s engrams running wild. Think of the power you’d have.”

“Good night,” Gilmartin said quietly. And then he looked at me as if, anticipating the next thing Jack was going to say, he wanted to see every phase of my reaction.

“Let’s go, Laurie,” Jack said. It sounded like an order.

It was actually the dog who turned his head first, reacting, I guess, to the sound of my name. That gave me an extra moment to think about my response. All the while, I was very conscious of Raymond Gilmartin, and how intensely he was looking at me.

“Not yet,” I finally said to Jack. “I’ll meet you at the car in a little while.”

I saw the color rise to his face. He hadn’t expected me to refuse to follow him and, clearly, that was adding to his anger. Without saying another word, he stalked out of the room. The young woman followed after him, closing the door behind her. Now I was alone with Raymond Gilmartin.

He made no comment about Jack, but finally broke his stare. Once more, he looked down at the rock. Touching a fingertip to the diagram above the heads of the carved figures he said, “Do you recognize this? It’s the constellation Canis Major.”

He was right. I recognized the Great Dog who hunts with Orion, since I had seen the constellation so many times, at night, waiting for the bus to take me home from work.

“And here’s Sirius,” he said, pointing to the largest dot in the diagram. “The Dog Star. You can’t see it, but there’s another tiny pinprick next to Sirius. That’s its companion star, Digitaria.”

Once more, my dog tilted his head, this time, perhaps, to acknowledge his own name.

“Do you think that’s where they came from?” Gilmartin suddenly said to me. “I mean, where they entered our universe? From someplace near Sirius?”

“I don’t know,” I said, surprised by the question. “I don’t even know that they’re real.”

“But you’ve seen them. Or at least, one of them.”

I heard something in his voice that I struggled to describe to myself—longing, maybe. Or envy. Perhaps, I thought, this was the real reason he had wanted me to meet. And I thought something else, as well. That however I might characterize these feelings, they were what had kept me here even as Jack had stormed off. I thought that Raymond Gilmartin was strange and definitely dangerous and yet, somewhere within myself, I had identified an unexpected sense of sympathy for him. On some visceral level, I understood him, or at least, something about him, because as much as we were different, there was something we had in common: we had both been left a legacy that was rooted in the experiences of another person. He had his father, I had Avi. Gilmartin had embraced his inheritance, even enlarged and expanded it, while I had dismissed mine—forgotten it, almost completely—until it had come back to me. Or been given back to me. Certainly not in a way I would have chosen—robbery, assault. The Blue Awareness had a decidedly peculiar way of making friends—but at the moment, I found myself in a forgiving mood. Maybe it was because I understood the feeling of being haunted by things you didn’t understand while pretending that you weren’t haunted at all, that you were in control, sure of yourself and unassailable in your beliefs and all the decisions you had made about your life and its direction.

“The radiomen,” Gilmartin said, perhaps unconsciously using Jack’s description to prod me, since I had fallen silent, lost in my thoughts. “You saw them.”

“As you said, just one. Maybe.”

“They left us unfinished,” Gilmartin said. His voice, now, was as soft as a murmur. “There is some process, some . . . metamorphosis we are supposed to go through to reunite with them. We come close . . . all the work we do here is leading us closer to them. I’m sure of it. But there’s something missing, something else. Something that we still have to reach for. Search for.”

“Did you think that
I
knew what that was? Because I don’t. Believe me, I don’t.”

“Nobody seems to,” Gilmartin said sadly. Then I saw him glance over at Digitaria again. And again I felt, from this man, an almost palpable sense of longing.

“He’s just a dog,” I said, answering a question that had not been asked of me, but I knew what it was, all the same. “Nobody’s ever come looking for him—except those men last night.”

“I don’t think you have to worry that anything like that will ever happen again,” Gilmartin said.

“All right,” I told him. “I’m going to accept that. From you.”

“But if someone . . . someone
else
did come looking for him? Or anything like that? I mean, if you had any idea that he . . .
they
. . .” Raymond shook his head, as if he simply couldn’t speak anymore. His sudden silence added to my increasingly keen awareness of how strange a conversation this really had become. Neither of us was saying anything directly, but each knew exactly what the other meant.

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

Raymond Gilmartin closed his eyes for a moment. When he found his voice again, he said, in a whisper, “I have been waiting all my life.”

What else could there be to add to that? I sat quietly in my chair until he opened his eyes again and then said good night. Digitaria reacted as I stood up, planting himself solidly on his legs and waiting for the next signal about where we were going. I tugged on his leash and led him out the door.

The cheerful young woman who had so quickly turned into a dour functionary was nowhere to be seen, but I was able to find my own way out. Instead of taking the elevator, I led the dog down a wide, winding flight of carpeted stairs. On the ground floor, I found myself back in the reception area where we had started, a brightly lit and high-ceilinged hall where presumably the grand family who had once lived here greeted their guests. But now, except for a different young woman sitting on an ornate bench in front of an even more ornate mirror with a gilded frame, it was deserted. The young woman smiled when she saw me, then rose to punch in some numbers on a keypad next to the front door and let me out into the street.