Radiomen (4 page)

“What do you mean?”

“You know, the fire escape. Ravenette told you that the figure she saw was pointing to the fire escape. What’s out there?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Okay. I guess I have to frame the question exactly right to get you to answer me. So here goes:
Who
is out there?”

“Just me,” I told Jack Shepherd. “Me.”

Of course, I was lying again.

~III~

W
ho is out there?

Well, I thought, as I clicked off the phone and concluded my conversation with Jack after managing to tell him nothing more than I’d already said, maybe I wasn’t totally lying when I said,
Just me,
because the honesty of my answer depended on whether or not what happened to me on the fire escape was or was not a dream. Maybe Jack Shepherd wanted to suggest that it was a screen memory—a term I had never heard before—but I wasn’t even going to waste a minute considering that as a possibility. I’d simply had a strange dream, and I couldn’t remember a time when I thought it was anything else. Still, that didn’t stop me from staying up for another hour or two, trying to remember everything I could about that night. Most of my childhood only came back to me in bits and pieces—it was not a happy time and I don’t seem to have much of it tucked away in memory—but the night I met the radioman was an exception. I remembered almost everything about it.

When I was young, there were four adults who formed the core of my family: my mother and father, my Uncle Avi, and my grandmother, the mother of my father and uncle. My grandmother, who lived with my parents, was an immigrant from Ukraine. My father was a factory worker and my mother a housewife. Avi, the college boy-turned-professor was the only one who had not only pursued an education but also had an avocation—his fascination with radios and satellites—that seemed both highly technical and beyond comprehension to his relatives. Because of these things, he was considered to be an eccentric and something of a genius. Perhaps he was both or neither; I have no real idea.

One important thing I do know about Avi was that his teaching salary, small as it may have been, made an important contribution to maintaining the one annual tradition that everyone in my family valued: spending our summer vacation in Rockaway. Once a year, Avi drove our belongings out to the beach in his car, where the adults shared the cost of renting a few rooms in a boarding house called the Sunlite Apartments. It was an old, run-down brick building with white fretwork around the outside balconies, an effect that made me think of a collapsing wedding cake. Inside, there was a warren of tiny apartments with shared bathrooms at the end of each hallway. Even pooling their resources, being able to afford a few weeks at the beach was a stretch for my family, but Avi contributed to the cost of the rent by doing repairs. Among a building full of factory workers on vacation, most of them in the garment trade, and most refugees or the children of refugees from Eastern Europe, my uncle Avi—Professor Perzin, as our neighbors called him—was the only one who knew how to repair the boiler or patch the ancient wiring in the building that was always causing someone’s hot plate to overheat or make the dim hall lights sound like they were sizzling. There were a few tenants who lived in the building all year, and the landlord would sometimes pay Avi to drive out to Rockaway in the winter when it was necessary to have something fixed.

Avi was the only person in the family who
could
drive, or who had ever owned a car. He was fond of Impalas, long-nosed cars with bench seats in the front. One unseasonably cold March night when I was six, he stuck me in the front seat of the latest Impala, a gold-colored vehicle that, to me, looked as big as a boat, then loaded a homemade radio receiver in the back and drove us out to Rockaway. On the way, he said he had two purposes: first, to fix a blown fuse that had knocked out the electricity for the winter residents of the Sunlite Apartments; but once he got that done, he promised me that he and I were going to be able to use the radio to listen to Sputnik 10, the newest entry in the Sputnik series. This one had just launched and would be passing over the east coast of the United States that night. The space race between the USSR and the USA was in full swing, and though we were catching up—the United States had actually sent a satellite named Explorer I into orbit just a few months after the first Sputnik was launched in 1957—the Soviets kept sending up more Sputniks, like a relentless, endlessly replenishable army of night fliers. Each time one returned to Earth, another was launched, outward bound into space. In school, our teachers were still using the launch of Sputnik as a goad to spur us on to paying more attention to our lessons and growing up to become smart people who could beat the Soviets at their own game. I don’t think I was particularly impressed by this argument—nothing anyone ever said in school energized me very much—but I was interested in the idea that you could listen to Sputnik’s successors, Soviet and American, on the radio. I had the idea that I might actually hear them speak.

In hindsight, I could guess, now, that there was yet another reason we went to Rockaway that night: my mother was often in a lot of pain and welcomed any excuse she could find to get me out of the house so I wouldn’t have to see how sick she was. And as usual, Avi was my babysitter. He didn’t seem to mind and I was excited by the idea of going on an unplanned trip, into the night. Why not? I was a kid. Any change in the daily routine was interesting.

In any event, once Avi and I got to Rockaway, I was struck by how different the community was in the winter: the streets were deserted, the rows of bungalows and boarding houses mostly shuttered for the season. And the cold seemed more biting because the sand swept around my feet by eddies of wind felt as sharp as the scrape of a whisk broom.

Avi parked in front of the building, which also looked very different to me; its wedding-cake cheeriness had vanished, as if I had only imagined how welcoming the Sunlite Apartments seemed in the summer. Now, most of the windows were dark and the building itself had a squat, grim appearance. I thought it looked a little frightening.

In the basement, Avi pretty quickly got the fuse fixed and the lights back. Then he led me up the stairs to the top floor, to the one small room he occupied during our summer getaway. The only apartment he had the key to, it faced the backyard and had no balcony, but there was a fire escape right outside. Once we were inside, he opened the window, lifted me onto the rusty metal flooring of the fire escape and climbed out after me, carrying the radio equipment in an old milk crate. The cold, clear air out by the ocean, he explained, was a good place for radio reception, and like thousands of other shortwave radio operators around the globe, we were going to tune into the new Sputnik’s telemetry broadcast frequency, which had been published in all the amateur radio enthusiasts’ magazines.

As much as I understood of what he was saying, there was something else about this particular Sputnik that was on my mind that night—my uncle also told me that it had a dog aboard and I was wondering if it was scared.

Out on the fire escape, Avi told me to sit down, to be careful and not to move around too much so I wouldn’t accidentally slip between the railings and fall the five stories down to the yard. I was so bundled up in corduroy pants, a sweater, a jacket, a knit hat and mittens that I could barely move anyway, so I did exactly as I was instructed.

I remember that the sky looked really close to me that night and it was easy to identify the animals and hunters and dipping cups made out of stars. I kept imagining that I could see one of the stars moving slowly across the sky, guessing that it might be Sputnik 10, but Avi told me it was unlikely that we would actually be able to pick out the dim, reflected luminescence of the satellite.

After a while, Avi got his radio receiver assembled and attached the pyramid antenna, affixing it in what seemed to me like an upside-down fashion, with the narrow end fitting into the radio and the wide mouth open to the sky. He twisted the antenna this way and that as he listened to what sounded to me like nothing more than static coming out of the receiver’s speaker. And then, all of a sudden, Avi said, very softly, “Listen, Laurie. There it is.”

I really had expected to hear a faint, tinny voice—syllables spoken, perhaps, with the inflection of a robot. Or perhaps the barking of a dog. Instead, what I heard coming out of the radio receiver was a tinny, echoing beep.

I probably would have been a little disturbed by the eeriness of the sound except for the fact that Avi seemed so enthralled by it. To him, I guess, the metallic pinging
was
the equivalent of
Greetings, Earthlings,
and he was thrilled to have been able to tune into this salutation from outer space. We listened for a few minutes and then, all of a sudden, the radio went silent.

Frowning, Avi started fiddling with the tuning dial, trying to find the satellite signal again. I remember hearing voices coming out of the radio; someone was chattering in a language I didn’t recognize, and that was followed by music and more voices as Avi continued to turn the dial—but the heartbeat-like beeping sound we had been listening to remained elusive.

Finally, Avi glanced up toward the roof. There was a set of metal stairs that led up to the roofline, but they were rusty and doubtful looking. There was even one spot where a bolt was missing, allowing one or two of the ladder-like rungs to wrench themselves away from the brick wall. Avi frowned again, and then said, “Laurie, I have to go fix something.”

He explained that he had to go up to the roof for a few minutes, but he didn’t want me to try to climb the rickety steps with him. I guess he was equally concerned about leaving me alone five floors above the ground because he took off his belt, pulled it through one of the loops on my pants, then worked it around the railing and fastened it, so that I was now, effectively, belted to the fire escape. Once again, he told me to stay still and started to climb toward the roof.

So there I was, all alone, with the night sky clamped down on the earth like a star-filled hat and some tinny, foreign music playing on the radio. At that point, I did start to get a little scared, overcome with the kind of thoughts that made sense to a six-year-old: What if Avi didn’t come back? What if I got stuck on the fire escape forever? What if it got colder and colder and I started to freeze? And what if Sputnik 10—now lurking silently somewhere above my head—was more dangerous than its predecessors and started to do something evil like shoot bullets down at defenseless children who were sitting on fire escapes when they probably should have been home in bed?

Of course, Avi returned very shortly and the radio was once again broadcasting what had now become a familiar electronic pinging sound. We listened for a while longer and then Avi packed up the equipment. Soon, we were back in the Impala, heading home.

And that would have been that, except for the fact that almost immediately afterward—beginning while I dozed during the car ride home—I had a dream that in the weeks and months that followed, even years, repeated itself over and over again. In the dream, just after Avi climbed the ladder to the roof, someone else climbed up from what I thought was the floor below, or maybe even from the yard. Someone? What else should I call him? He—it—was a flat, gray figure, featureless, dim, hard for me to see. And yet, I
could
see him; I was sure of that. I watched as he came up the fire escape stairs and then walked over to the radio. But first, he turned toward me and raised his hand so I would pay attention as he extended one finger and brought it close to the oval shadow that was his face, a gesture that I understood as clearly as if he had spoken.
Shhh,
he was saying.
Don’t speak.

And so I didn’t. I watched as he knelt down and made some adjustments to the upside-down pyramid antenna and then turned one of the dials. I understood those actions, too, because they were just what Avi had done: he was adjusting the radio’s reception and tuning in a specific frequency.

Then, when it appeared that he was satisfied with his work, he knelt down and put his head close to the radio’s speaker. The foreign voices and the music were gone now and I could once again hear the metallic pinging of the satellite, but it sounded somewhat different—a little fainter, maybe; each ping just a little farther apart. A moment later, just as quickly as he had bent down, the radioman, as he had now become in my mind, stood up and without making any other sign of recognition that I was still there, turned and disappeared back down the fire escape stairs.

Only it occurred to me, now, as I lay on the couch, that maybe I had the sequence of events wrong. I didn’t like that idea because of its implications, but what if the dream about the radioman hadn’t come to me
after
we drove home from Rockaway but rather, while I was still tied to the fire escape by Avi’s belt? Meaning, what if it really happened in the few minutes that I was alone, under the stars, with the radio? Could I have fallen asleep so quickly, and awakened when Avi came back?

That possibility alone wasn’t disturbing; what was, was the alternative: that it wasn’t a dream. At the edges of the scene—the shadowy figure disappearing down the stairs—I was sometimes able to identify additional shreds of recollection, bits of conversation with Avi during which he, too, knelt down to listen closely to the radio’s speaker and then asked me if I had moved the antenna or touched the dial. If those bits of memory were real and not something I had added in over the years, then either the dream extended further than I had allowed myself to remember or the conversation had actually taken place. And if it had taken place . . . well, then maybe Jack Shepherd was onto something. But that was too much to think about, too new an idea to add into a scenario that I was comfortable with. At least, comfortable enough so that at the moment, I simply didn’t want to think about it anymore.

I was always making resolutions not to stay up all night after I got home from work, and I decided now to try to enforce some self-discipline on that score and go to bed. My intentions were good but didn’t quite pan out. I did get myself as far as the bedroom but that’s where my laptop was, so I found myself turning it on and carrying it over to the bed. I sat down, opened a browser and looked up the Sputnik launches. I quickly came across a list of them all and the information for number ten noted that it had made one orbit of Earth and carried a wooden dummy representing a person and a real, live dog, just as Avi had told me. Interestingly, the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who was soon to become the first human being to journey into space, had been the one who named the dog and the name he gave her—Zvezdochka—meant “little star.” But had she survived her flight? I remembered, again, how as a six-year-old, I had wondered if the dog in the satellite was frightened. Scrolling down the web page, I saw that there was a grainy, black-and-white image that had been transmitted from the satellite during flight: it was Zvezdochka, looking, I thought, wide-eyed and curious as the capsule that held her flew through the stars.