Radiomen (33 page)

By the time he got to this point in the conversation, I was climbing the stairs back to my apartment. Once inside, I unclipped the dog’s leash and as he sat beside me, I listened to Raymond describe, in his own words, how one ascended to the Wild Blue Yonder.

He repeated what I already knew, but put it in a way that I had not heard before. He said that humanity was stuck in a low level of evolution. That an alien race—ancient, brilliant, god-like in their knowledge and abilities—had seeded the universe with beings meant to develop, over time, into equally god-like creatures, capable of straddling the many dimensions of time and space and becoming equal partners with their creators. But we humans had forgotten this history, had lost our way and rejected our destiny because we had become too enamored of the corporeal world, of material pleasures and what Raymond called “idiotic pastimes,” such as sports, climbing the corporate ladder, and dieting—he was particularly opposed to diet fads because, as he explained, if you spent enough time having your engrams analyzed and “cleansed” by Blue Box sessions, your body would always remain fit and healthy.

But he reserved his harshest criticism for what he called “the stupidest pastime of all,” which was religion—at least any religion based on a belief system other than the tenets of the Blue Awareness. As Raymond spoke, his voice remained smooth as oil, but I heard something else in it: the visual image came to me of little fires burning around the edges.

“The mistake people make,” Raymond said, “and they have made it for centuries, is in thinking that something we call ‘God’ exists outside ourselves. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the universal awareness we seek through religion—through begging for the intervention of some kind of Big Daddy who exists apart from us—is what keeps us in the dark. It’s what keeps us ignorant. The elders—the beings who brought us here—already have all the knowledge, all the understanding needed to be truly alive, to truly understand the nature of consciousness and the forces of infinity. This is what they seeded within us. Now, they are simply waiting for us to evolve, to become their partners in roaming the universe. In understanding and even transforming it. They are waiting for us,” Raymond repeated emphatically. “But we’ve forgotten that. Instead of growing into the infinite, we’ve grown more deaf, dumb and blind with every generation.”

Then there was silence. It was an unnerving experience to just sit and listen to the dead air settling like dust in my earphones. But I knew that Jack was deliberately creating silence—the one thing you never hear on the radio—because he wanted to make everyone uneasy, Raymond and his listeners alike.

Finally, Jack responded to Raymond by posing a set of questions that he had clearly been leading up to throughout the interview. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked. “I mean, totally wrong? What if the aliens—given that they really are here, that they even exist—aren’t interested in us at all? Never were? Never had anything whatsoever to do with the presence of human beings on Earth? What if they don’t care if we live or die? Evolve or disappear? If that’s the case, what’s the point of the Blue Awareness? Wouldn’t you just have to . . . well, give up? Disband?”

Jack had sworn not to mention what I’d told him and while technically, he hadn’t, I felt he was skirting the edges of his promise to me. And while I had no way of knowing whether Ravenette had revealed the same information to Raymond, I had a feeling that Jack and Raymond were now interacting on two levels: they were conducting a conversation meant for the consumption of their radio audience, but they also were having a deeper, more personal argument. I could imagine them, now, speaking to each other through clenched teeth.

“That’s ridiculous,” Raymond said.

“Why?” Jack asked. “For about forty years, I’ve been talking to all kinds of people—scholars, archaeologists, writers, historians, even men and women who’ve had abduction experiences—and it seems that our concept of alien life interacting with ours always hinges on them meaning us well, trying to teach us things we don’t understand, or else doing us harm. Sticking probes down our throats—or elsewhere.” Jack chuckled at his own innuendo, and then went on. “But I’m just wondering, what if they’re as confused as we are about . . . what it all means? You know? Why we are here? Who put us here? Who put
them
on whatever planet—in whatever dimension of time and space—they come from? In other words, who do you think they pray to?”

“There is no need to pray to anyone,” Raymond said, sounding cool again. Calm and collected. “What we need is to develop the universal spirit within ourselves. To nurture it while driving out the painful memories and internalized messages that prevent us from evolving toward the infinite.”

“In other words,” said Jack, “we’re supposed to be performing spiritual surgery on ourselves.”

Raymond seemed to like this analogy. “In a way, yes,” he replied. “That is what you can accomplish with the Blue Box, if you dedicate yourself to it. In fact,” he said, “I have an invitation for you. If you can spare some time—let’s say a week or so—we have a retreat upstate where you could work with a trained Blue Box counselor. I’m sure it would do you a great deal of good—and change your mind about us. About the Awareness.”

Jack chuckled again. “Maybe I will take you up on that offer,” he said. “In the meantime, I think we’re coming to the end of this segment, so let me thank you, Raymond Gilmartin, for visiting us at
Up All Night
.”

Raymond replied with a string of muttered niceties I knew he didn’t mean, and then some spooky, space-age kind of music came on. A few moments later, Jack was back on the air, announcing that his next guest was an expert on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. I wasn’t interested, so I turned off the radio.

I puttered around my apartment for a while, folding laundry that had been waiting to be put away and doing other minor chores. As I worked, I allowed myself to feel some relief at the fact that whatever remained of my privacy still seemed to be intact—at least, I hadn’t heard my name mentioned on the show—when the sound of my telephone ringing jolted me out of what ended up being a very temporary sense of calm.

“I’m finished,” I heard Jack say as soon as I picked up the receiver.

“What?” I didn’t understand what he meant.

“The repeater,” he said. “I’m finished. I didn’t get a chance to call you before the show went on the air.”

I hadn’t expected to hear this. I think I had been telling myself that it would be many more weeks—even months—before Jack finished constructing the repeater. More time to stay in a sort of in-between zone where nothing had to happen.

“I thought you were calling about Raymond.”

“The segment is over,” Jack said.

“I know,” I told him. “I heard you.”

“Well, I’m glad, because I have an idea.”

I carried the phone into the kitchen and drank some orange juice from the carton. The dog, of course, followed me. I put the juice away and patted him on the head.

“Laurie. Are you still there?” Jack asked impatiently. “I have another guest on in a few minutes.” “I’m here, I’m here. What’s your idea?”

“I want to ask Raymond to come with us when we take the repeater out to Rockaway.”

“This thought just came to you tonight?”

“I’ve been mulling it over for a while, but tonight just kind of clinched it for me. Raymond Gilmartin is so sure of himself—and he’s so deluded. Showing him the radioman would just blow him out of the water.”

“That’s not the point of what we’re doing. And even if we actually see the radioman—if he comes to get the repeater—that may just reinforce Raymond’s belief that he’s some sort of emissary from our . . . what? Our ancestors? Creators?”

“I don’t think so. Raymond Gilmartin is such a narcissist—among other things—that he’ll expect your friend . . .”

“He’s not my friend.” How many times had I said this to Jack?

“He will expect your
shadow
to shake his hand and tell him to keep up the good work. Or at least give him some sign of recognition. After all, he’s made it
his
life’s work to try to emulate these beings.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a little vindictive?”

“That’s because my engrams are in serious need of repair. You heard Raymond.”

I walked back to the bedroom with the dog still at my heels. Outside, in the street, a car went by, and I could see the reflected glow of the headlights moving in bright bars across my living room ceiling.

“You know,” I said to Jack, “this may not work. Nothing may happen.”

There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone, but a different kind of silence than the dead air on the radio. This void pulsed with questions. Finally, Jack asked one. “Do you really think that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “There’s still a lot of room in this story for it all to be some kind of fantasy.”

“Whose?”

“Mine. Yours. Ravenette’s. Raymond’s. The list goes on.”

“I’m going to invite him, Laurie.”

“It’s a mistake,” I told him. But he had already hung up the phone.

W
E DIDN
’
T
do anything right away. Partly because I was working a lot—one of the other bartenders had quit without notice, and I ended up working a week straight, with no time off—and partly, I think, because Jack was having a fine time continuing his campaign against the Blue Awareness and wasn’t ready yet to hold out a flag of truce, even a fake one. Almost every night on his show, one of the guests was either an ex-Aware or someone who had produced some kind of exposé—a book, a documentary—about the Blue Awareness. What he was doing made me uneasy so I stopped listening to Jack’s program and I told him so. He didn’t try very hard to change my mind about that.

But one night, when I was at work, the waitress I was working the shift with answered the phone near the bar. She said a few words that I couldn’t hear because of the constant babbling of the televisions, and then held out the receiver to motion that the call was for me. I shook my head—I was too busy with customers, at the moment, to go to the phone—so she wrote down a message for me and then went back to her tables.

A few minutes later, I read the message, which the waitress had scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I wasn’t surprised that it was from Jack, since I couldn’t imagine who else would call me here. It seemed that he wanted me to listen to the show later, specifically, the segment that began at one thirty.

So a few hours later, I was back in my own neighborhood, walking Digitaria while I once again listened to the
Up All Night
show through my set of earphones. I planned to give Jack maybe five minutes; if he had on another troubled ex-Aware, I still wasn’t interested. My focus right now was not on the Blue Awareness and how they screwed people over on the path to the Wild Blue Yonder, where all would be revealed—or not. I had other things on my mind.

And tonight, apparently, so did Jack’s guest. When I tuned in the station, I heard the tail end of a question Jack was asking—something, I thought, about Howard Gilmartin—and then I heard him address his guest as Rabbi Friedman. The next thing I heard was a man’s voice that sounded a bit frail, but genial. He said, “Well, yes. I knew Howard. We were very friendly, in fact—at least back then. We served together on a carrier in the South Pacific. That was quite awhile ago.”

“Almost sixty years,” Jack agreed.

“True. But my memory is still pretty good.” This assessment was accompanied by a laugh that was full of self-amusement.

“I understand something unusual happened to you, on your ship.”

“Yes, I guess you could say it was
very
unusual. It changed my life, as a matter of fact.” Again, the rabbi laughed. The sound was soft, soothing, like he was telling a joke about himself, a joke he liked to repeat and hoped that everyone listening to him would appreciate.

A few moments later, he continued with his story. “I was the Morse Code operator, so I worked in the radio shack with Howard. We were in the South Pacific, in the thick of the war, so as you can imagine, it was a very tense time. We saw a lot of fighting—a lot. I wasn’t particularly religious in those days, but there was a nondenominational chapel on the ship that I used to go to once in a while. I had been to Hebrew school, you see, and I still remembered how to pray in Hebrew, so sometimes I did. That helped a little.”

“Helped?” Jack broke in.

“Well, I was scared, you see. Sometimes I wasn’t so much, but sometimes I was. And when I was, I went to the chapel and prayed. One night . . . oh, I guess I got lost in what I was doing—just thinking more than praying, actually—but after a while, I thought I felt someone sitting beside me. I turned, but I didn’t see anyone. So I went back to my prayers but then the feeling returned. The feeling that someone was with me. This time, I didn’t exactly turn to look, but I kind of glanced to the side and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something. Someone. The silhouette of a man . . . well, of a person, anyway, but flat and gray. No real face, no features, but . . . a living being. Well,
that
was certainly something I should have been scared of, but somehow I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. I felt that the best thing to do was just to go back to my prayers. And so I did. I started praying pretty seriously. And as I did, I felt the shadow person slip his hand in mine. And then he began to cry. I mean, I couldn’t see him crying or hear him or anything like that, but I knew that’s what he was doing.”