Radiomen (7 page)

I left my apartment earlier than I would have if I were going to work, and decided to walk to the subway. It was a long way—maybe fifteen blocks down a stretch of Queens Boulevard, which was as wide and nearly featureless as a highway. There were six lanes of traffic here, all crowded with speeding cars headed toward the city—a distant mirage of gray skyscrapers huddled under a gray sky—or outward bound for the suburbs of Long Island. The few built-up areas that I did pass included the occasional rooms-by-the-hour motel and a used car lot or two sandwiched between old, brick apartment buildings that looked weary and blank-faced as their windows stared into the steady March wind. It was a cheerless walk, but the exercise warmed me up. I felt like my bones had been frozen and were finally beginning to thaw out.

By comparison, the subway ride was relatively short; it took me maybe half an hour to arrive at a stop that let me off near the edge of Chinatown, in a neighborhood that was transitioning from factory buildings and fire-trap tenements that had been partitioned into tiny rooms for immigrant workers into million-dollar-plus loft spaces for the monied hipsters moving down from Soho to take over the blocks around Canal Street. When I found the address Ravenette had given me, it was in one of these repurposed buildings. The structure resembled a pile of dark concrete whose colonnaded façade had been stripped bare and refurbished to emanate a steampunk look that someone must have felt represented the aesthetic of early twentieth-century manufacturing even better than the name of the long-departed box-making firm still chiseled above the entranceway.

I rode the elevator—an iron cage that was another remnant of the past, though the ceiling was now crisscrossed with thin tubes of neon lighting that changed color as you rose from floor to floor—which let me out directly into Ravenette’s loft. If I had expected anything like a gypsy-themed parlor featuring tasseled shawls and tufted chairs, I was apparently in the wrong place. The loft gleamed. An expanse of polished wood the color of honey swept off into a living area that featured low couches attended by small side tables made of what looked like highly polished steel. Here, on one of the couches, perched Ravenette, who rose to greet me.

Just like the loft, she was not what I expected. At least she
was
a brunette (I mean, “Ravenette”—come on), but she was also movie-star pretty: tall, thin, green-eyed and with the look of someone who is carefully sculpted, from the perfect tangle of long hair that brushed her arms to the pale pearl tones of the french manicure on the hand she extended to me as she ushered me into the living area. One thing about this woman that was not evident to me, however, was her age; she could have been thirty-five or fifty. It was impossible to tell.

Ravenette offered me coffee, and when I said no thanks, she went to a cabinet, brought out a bottle of white wine, and poured two glasses. I took a few sips—it was a lot better than anything we served at The Endless Weekend—and waited for her to lead into the reading she had promised me. Drinks were always nice, but they weren’t what I was here for.

Finally, she settled herself on a chair that matched the color of the couches, a kind of sea-foam hue that served to heighten the intense green of her eyes. She leaned back, placed her arms on the wide arms of the chair, and fixed me with a steady stare. I kept on waiting for her to say something.

When at last she did, her voice featured a different tone than I had heard from her before, and her whole attitude seemed to have shifted; now, she was serious, almost stern. I began to suspect that the genial personality who had been trotted out to appear on the Jack Shepherd show had been put away in a trunk somewhere, like a costume, and now the real Ravenette had taken over. This person did not exude cheeriness, or invite questions. This one spoke in a commanding voice, and she had some unpleasant things to say.

“All right,” she began. “Now I’m going to tell you what you need to know. First of all, you’re lucky—very lucky that you and I met because you need help and I can give it to you, but only if you understand that this
thing
you see in your mind, which transferred itself to me, to my mind when you were on the telephone, isn’t what you think. This shadow that seems animated and alive is not in that state, not at all. It is, in fact, what is known as an engram. It is a false memory, an encapsulation of pain and loss that you have chosen to represent in this way. And it has been with you so long that it has actually caused a change in your neural tissue, which accounts for its persistence. In other words, the cells of your brain have altered themselves to accommodate this false memory, which is harming you. It has harmed you all the days of your life since it first formed. You have to kill it, get rid of it, or you will never progress. You will be stuck in your current state and no advancement of your presence on Earth and no progress for your spirit beyond this realm will be possible.”

“What?” That was all I could think to say to this astonishing declaration. “What?”

I really was stunned. My presence on Earth? My spirit? Please. Those were code words that led into New Age territory, and I’d been through all that, explored just about all the alternative belief systems that had been popular at the tail end of the hippie years when I was young enough to be interested. But I wasn’t interested anymore. I had sat in enough communal halls, meeting house basements and crash pads to have heard more than I ever wanted to about the care and feeding of my spirit, aka, my soul. And I had heard it from more gurus, protogurus and their followers than even I could remember. That was certainly not what had drawn me here—to listen to a lecture about how to ensure my progress in the great, mystic beyond. Conversations about that kind of thing were vastly unsatisfying because they led nowhere, unless you could will yourself into the mindless acceptance of what always ended up being the equivalent of some fanatic’s drug dream, and I could not. Did not want to.

I suddenly felt very foolish. I had been drawn into the orbit of what I was just about ready to bet was some cult follower who used whatever real psychic ability she had (and
that
was still debatable) as bait. I was sure that was the case; in fact, some parts of the litany she was intoning sounded familiar, and not in a good way.

“Did you hear me, Laurie?” Ravenette said, leaning forward. “The engram must be neutralized.”

Engram
. That was it—that was a word, a concept I had heard somewhere before. Thinking about this, I didn’t respond to Ravenette but she wasn’t bothered by my silence; she just kept on talking, and her intensity only seemed to increase.

“Your spirit is imprisoned by this engram and it must be freed. There is only one way that can be done. We can help you do it.”

“We?” I said. She suddenly had my full attention. “Who are
we
?”

But I didn’t really need her to answer. The image of the sapphire blue paper floated through my mind and I knew the answer for myself.

“The Blue Awareness,” I said.

“Yes,” Ravenette responded. She seemed pleased that I had identified her as a member of this group.

“No thanks,” I said. I placed my wineglass on her steel table and stood up to leave.

“You haven’t heard me out,” Ravenette complained. “I have so much more to tell you.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” I said. “But the Blue Awareness is just not my thing.”

“How do you know?”

“I ran into you guys when I was a kid. I was living in the Haight and someone brought me to a Blue Awareness Center. Absolutely not for me.”

“Maybe you were too young to understand what we’re really about. We can help you.”

“I don’t think so. But I will give you this, I’m impressed. A psychic recruiter—that’s pretty good. Still—no thanks. I’ll just get going.”

I was trying to seem offhanded about getting myself out of Ravenette’s loft, but I was actually a bit alarmed. When I was maybe nineteen, I had sat through an “Introduction to Awareness” session that one of my friends had taken me to at an Awareness Center in downtown San Francisco and I vividly remembered their fondness for blue banners, brochures printed on blue paper, even blue clothes—though judging by Ravenette’s fashionable black pencil skirt and satiny silver blouse, perhaps they had eased up on that particular rule of the road. I also remembered that even back in those years, the Blue Awareness had seemed a little crazy to me—which was really saying something, because, at the time, I had not been exactly the most stable person myself. If I remembered the general outlines of their ideas correctly, they believed that we, the human race, had forgotten our true nature. We thought we were just higher-order animals that had evolved from lower forms, but that wasn’t the case. We were, in fact, descendants of an alien race who had traveled to this planet for purposes that were only revealed to those who had attained the highest levels of Awareness. You had to pay increasingly escalating fees as you progressed through the levels, and as you did, you were also granted access to the different centers and retreats they had established around the country. If all this sounded like the basis of a science fiction story rather than the spiritual movement that the Blue Awareness claimed to be, there was a reason for that: the group had been founded by a man named Howard Gilmartin, who was a not-very-successful author of science fiction tales before he became the revered mentor of the Blue Awareness devotees. When I had first encountered them, they already had a substantial number of followers, but in the ensuing decades, the movement had become popular abroad and total membership had risen into the millions, or so they said. I came across articles about them from time to time, or saw some movie star talk about them on TV, since the Blue Awareness had become the religion du jour with celebrities. But there also had been a number of exposés written about the group, accusing it of being a well-funded cult that practiced and promoted violence against anyone who left them. They also, apparently, refused to admit that Howard Gilmartin had died some fifteen years ago, though his son, Raymond, was recognized as the titular head of the Blue Awareness. I had thought they were creepy at the “Introduction” meeting and had never gone back; after this session with Ravenette, I thought they were even more creepy.

I turned to walk back to the elevator, but as I did, Ravenette said, “I’m at the Second Level of Awareness. If you know anything about the movement, you know that’s a rare achievement.”

I actually knew nothing about how the Blue Awareness divided up the levels of esoteric knowledge they supposedly imparted to their followers, but I could imagine that if First Level was the be-all and end-all of Awareness, then being Second Level was probably a big deal.

“Well, I’m sure you’re very proud of yourself,” I said. “But I’m still leaving.”

“Why did you come at all?”

I decided I’d reply with Jack Shepherd’s quip. “You’re the psychic,” I said. “You tell me.”

That didn’t go over very well. Ravenette narrowed her green eyes and said, “You have no idea what you’re dealing with. You’ve stepped into the Wild Blue Yonder and you don’t even know it.”

“You’re right about one thing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She continued as if she hadn’t even heard me. “No one can be exposed to the knowledge in the Wild Blue Yonder without the proper preparation. But at some point in your life, you were somehow exposed to elements of that knowledge and it was too much for your spirit to deal with—which explains why you created the engram. That shadow man. And it’s blocked your path, it’s kept you stuck at the bottom rungs of even this meager life you’re living.”

So now we had come full circle, and were back to the place where Ravenette was going to unblock my psyche and free my soul to find its true path through life, blah, blah, blah. Listening to all this was making me angry; I felt like I was being played. “Look,” I said, “I think all this Blue Awareness stuff is fake. Fake and crazy and I don’t want to hear anymore about it, okay? Enough.”

“You don’t even want to try the Blue Box?” Ravenette said, sounding suddenly sly. “If you went to a session at a Center, I’m sure they explained how helpful it can be in neutralizing engrams. It’s a long process, but generally people seem to feel better—less depressed, for example—even after one session.” Now she rose and walked over to a nearby cabinet, from which she removed something shaped like a shoebox and covered with muslin wrapping. From the way she held it, I could tell that it was heavy in her hands.

She returned to the couch, put the object on the table in front of her and removed the wrapping. What I saw looked, indeed, like a blue metal box with a voltage meter on it. Attached to it by wires were two metal canisters, small enough to grip with your hands. At the Introduction to Awareness meeting I’d gone to years ago, they had presented a slide show that included pictures of a Blue Box and a description of how it worked: you gripped the metal canisters while discussing the circumstances of how your “engram” had evolved—or how you thought it had. During the discussion, the Blue Box directed a tiny electrical current through the wires, supposedly allowing the Aware to measure changes in your body’s electrical resistance. According to the doctrine of Blue Awareness, the resistance corresponds to the “mental mass and energy” of a person’s mind while they sort through the problems caused by their engram. Seeing the box and listening to this explanation had made me laugh; it was also the point at which I’d walked out of the meeting.

“The process involved in using the Blue Box is called scanning,” Ravenette told me. “Usually, we only conduct scans at an Awareness Center, under the most strictly supervised conditions. But at my level, I’m allowed special privileges. We can try it out now, if you like.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told Ravenette. “I used to play with one of those when I was a kid.”

She looked shocked. “That’s impossible,” she told me.

“Well, I don’t think so, because I have one at home.”

At least, I thought I did. I had moved around a lot, but the gadget I was thinking of had been with belongings I’d kept in my father’s house until he passed away, which was around the time I moved back to New York and retrieved my things. The device was another artifact of my Uncle Avi’s life. When he died, there was no one but my father—no other relative or close friend—to go through whatever possessions he left behind. I was a teenager then, and I had gone to Avi’s apartment with my father, who was feeling a great deal of remorse about his estrangement from his younger brother. They had reconciled when Avi had gone into the hospital to be treated for liver cancer, but the disease had run its course quickly and the two brothers had very little time left to spend together.