Radiomen (15 page)

These were my thoughts on my way home from work a few days after my visit to the cemetery. I was feeling a little lighter, a little less mired in my own craziness. I seemed to have let some of my darker thoughts depart from me along with the thin brown dog who had walked away. I was looking forward to getting home, plopping myself on the couch and watching a movie or maybe a late-night reality show. I was in the mood for a program about supermodel talent wars or something else on that sort of high intellectual plane.

But that was not to be. When I walked up the stairs of my building and got to my landing, I was shocked to see that my door was open. It was just slightly ajar, but even that was frightening because I never left the apartment without locking up. As I pushed the door open, my hand was trembling. Badly.

Inside, the scene that confronted me looked as unreal as a movie set. The apartment was in shambles. Everything I owned seemed to have been strewn around. Closets and drawers were open and their contents dumped on the floor; even the cabinets in my seldom-used kitchen had been raided and the few pots and pans I owned had been swept from the shelves. It was a scary scene—very scary, and maybe that was the real intent of the invasion because it was quickly apparent that nothing seemed to have actually been taken; even my laptop and television, the only objects that might have had some street value, were still here. I continued to think that nothing had actually been stolen until I walked into the bedroom and saw that my father’s valise, which had been in the closet, was now sitting open on my bed. The old family photo albums it held along with some personal mementos, like my sixth grade autograph book and a stuffed cat with glass eyes that my mother had given me, were still inside. But the Wheatstone Bridge—the erstwhile Blue Box—was gone. As soon as I saw that the valise had been searched, I knew it would be. The only surprise was that the searchers hadn’t left some sort of calling card behind: another smear of blue paint, maybe, or a blue handprint on the wall.

I pulled out my cell phone and, without thinking, dialed Jack’s number. I got a recording at the main number of the studio but the day I’d visited him he’d given me his personal cell phone number in case I got lost, so I hung up and dialed again. I got voice mail on his cell, too, but I left a message—and once I clicked off the line again, I couldn’t even remember what I’d said. I just remained standing in the middle of the room for a while, feeling like I needed to work at focusing my eyes in some way—make them
see
better—as if that would help to make the situation real, because it didn’t seem like it was. The mess around me, the violation of my privacy, seemed bizarre, impossible. And yet it had happened. I found myself running to the door to lock it, as if that could keep me safe, but it was already clear the lock could do no such thing. And it wouldn’t turn, anyway; it hadn’t just been picked—it had been broken.

I was trying to shove my couch up against the door when my phone rang. It was Jack, calling back. I quickly told him what happened, including the backstory about the letter from the Blue Awareness attorneys and the blue paint splashed across Victor Haberman’s storefront office. I think I was beginning to babble about the cemetery and the dog, when Jack finally cut me off.

“Laurie,” he said. “Calm down, calm down. First of all, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I mean, they were gone when I got home.”

“You didn’t know that,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t have walked into the apartment alone.”

“I didn’t think . . . I wasn’t thinking.”

“Well, thank God they
were
gone. Have you called the police?”

“No. Should I?”

“Of course you should. You’ve been robbed.”

“They’ll never believe what happened. Who did this.”

“It’s New York,” Jack said. “They’ve heard crazier stories.” Behind him, I heard some kind of New Age music playing that I recognized as the intro to his show when it returned after a break for the news. “I’ve got to go back on the air,” he said. “But I’m coming over there as soon as the show’s over. And call a locksmith,” he said just before he hung up.

I did both. I called the police and then went online to find a locksmith with a twenty-four-hour emergency service. They all arrived about the same time—three young men with wary faces: two in blue uniforms, and one in jeans and a leather jacket over a tee shirt decorated with grinning skulls.

While the grinning skulls replaced my lock with a more secure deadbolt, the two policemen listened to my story—the same one I’d told Jack, only I went back even farther to include my telephone call to the radio show and all that had followed. As Jack had said, they’d probably heard even stranger stories, or else were just very well trained not to react to anything they were told with even the slightest sign of surprise, because neither of them even raised an eyebrow when I told them that the Blue Awareness had to be responsible for the break-in. Then, in the middle of trying to explain just what, exactly, had been stolen, since neither of the policemen had ever heard of a Blue Box, let alone a Wheatstone Bridge, I happened to glance over at a shelf in my living room that I hadn’t looked at before and saw a big, empty space between two piles of books.

“My radio,” I said. “They took my radio, too.”

That really shook me. As upset as I was about the loss of the device I still thought of as a kind of electrical toy, the theft of the radio was even worse because it represented a much more direct and visceral connection to my childhood. I remembered how many times I had listened to it with Avi, how many times it had burped out strange, tinny beeps and hisses that were the voices of satellites—to me, the voices of the stars. And maybe it was because the image of the thin brown dog in the cemetery was still so much with me that I suddenly thought of another dog—Zvezdochka—orbiting Earth in her space capsule so many years ago. It was the telemetry signal of Sputnik 10, the satellite with the dog aboard, that Avi and I had been listening to on the fire escape of the Sunlite Apartments on the night that presented me with the radioman. The loss of the radio made me feel as if little Zvezdochka had just spun off into the cold wilderness of infinity, never to come back.
That’s not what happened,
I told myself.
Stop it, stop it, stop it. You’re making it worse.

So I forced myself to focus on my voice, on what it was saying to the young policemen with blank, carefully composed faces. I told them about the radio—that it was actually more like a ham receiver built from Haverkit parts. Then I had to explain what a Haverkit was, since it was something they had never heard of.

Finally, everyone left. I put the new key to my new lock on my key ring and then started to clean up my apartment. Nothing was broken—the intruders had been oddly careful about that—but it seemed like every single thing in the place had been taken from its rightful place and tossed somewhere else. Maybe I didn’t own a lot, but the disarray still looked monumental to me. I picked a random corner of the living room to start with and mechanically began to put things away.

I was so deep in some automatic pilot state that when the buzzer near my door went off, announcing that there was someone downstairs, I almost jumped out of my skin. I went to the intercom and asked who it was, expecting anything from alien invaders to more policemen, but it was Jack. I had completely forgotten that he had told me he was coming over when he finished his show.

I buzzed him in. Realizing that I had completely lost track of time, I glanced at my watch and saw that it was three
A.M.
—Jack’s program actually had another hour to go. He must have put on a tape for the last segment and rushed all the way from Brooklyn to my end of Queens.

I let him into the apartment and he took a quick look around. “Jesus,” he said. “They really ransacked the place.”

“I’ve been trying to straighten up,” I replied. “But I don’t think I’ve made much progress. I keep finding myself wandering around holding things I thought I’d put away.”

“Yeah, well. This is a pretty shocking thing to come home to,” Jack said. “It’s going to take awhile.”

Awhile for what? Until I felt less like I was going off the rails? Because that was how I felt right now. Really, really shaky.

“They took the radio,” I heard myself say to Jack.

“What radio?” he asked.

I realized that I had never told him I had Avi’s Haverkit receiver. “My uncle’s,” I said. “The Haverkit receiver he always used.”

“The one from the night on the fire escape? You still have that?”

I nodded. “I did. But I’ll probably never get it back.”

“No,” Jack agreed sympathetically. “The cops will send someone to the Blue Awareness headquarters in Manhattan but they won’t get anywhere. No one ever does, with them.”

“Monsters,” I said, feeling a surge of deep rage.

“They can be,” Jack replied. “But at least they’re gone for tonight and I doubt they’ll be back.” He looked around the room then and noticed that my couch was still near the door. “I see you were setting up the barricades,” he said. “How about if I stay here tonight? Would that make you feel better?”

It made me feel a little ashamed, actually—I was not used to needing anybody’s help to get through even the worst situations. But since he had offered, I realized that yes, it would help a lot if there was someone else in the apartment overnight besides me. It would be daylight in just a few hours but still . . . I didn’t think I was quite ready to tackle the monsters by myself if they came back, even though Jack was right—it was unlikely.

We pushed the couch back where it belonged. I gave Jack some sheets to cover it, and a blanket. Then he took off his shoes, stretched himself out and said good night. I think he was asleep in a few minutes. I lay down in my bedroom and didn’t expect to be able to sleep at all, but I did. Not restfully, though; for the rest of the night, I was fighting blue meanies in my dreams or running away from faceless robbers without finding anyplace to hide.

I finally got up around nine. In the living room, I saw Jack stirring as well. I made coffee and toast while Jack got up and washed.

As we ate breakfast, he said, “Are you going to be all right?”

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

“You’re supposed to do whatever will help you let go of this.”

“That’s the problem; I don’t know what that is. Half of me wants to call the lock guy back, tell him to put half a dozen bars on the door and just sit in here and hide, but the other half wants to go punch somebody in the nose.”

“Like who?” Jack asked.

“I could start with Ravenette. It’s about time someone gave her a black eye.”

“Should I apologize about all that again?” Jack asked. “I still feel responsible.”

“It’s my fault as much as yours. I didn’t have to tell her about the Blue Box. It’s just that she seemed so . . . arrogant. I hate people like that.”

That made Jack laugh. “I bet there are a few other categories you could add to that list.”

“Yeah, probably,” I agreed. “I’m not exactly a big fan of people. Most people, anyway.”

“We seem to be getting along,” Jack pointed out.

“Well, now we are,” I agreed.

We lingered over our coffee for a while. An hour later, as Jack was finally getting ready to leave, my doorbell chimed.

I froze. My mind ran a warp-speed checklist of who could possibly be ringing my doorbell without having to be buzzed in downstairs, and I came up with exactly nobody. Jack glanced over at me and seeing what I suppose was a look of abject fear on my face, went into the kitchen, picked up an old iron frying pan—probably the only potential weapon he could find—and went to the door.

He peered through the peephole and then turned back to me with a perplexed look on his face. “It’s a woman in some kind of head scarf,” he told me. “She’s holding a baby. And there’s a man in a suit.”

“Sassouma,” I said, with relief. “It’s my neighbor.”

I didn’t know who the man was, but I told Jack to let them in. Sassouma smiled at me but then settled herself and the baby on my couch. Whatever the purpose of this visit, it was apparently going to be explained to me by the stranger who was with her—who had brought with him yet another unexpected guest, a small, thin dog the color of dust.

For a moment, I thought the dog was Sassouma’s, but then I realized that it was a little larger than the animal I sometimes saw with her children. And this one also had another feature that differentiated it from hers: it had an odd, almost wedge-shaped head. When it looked up at me, which it did immediately upon entering the apartment, it regarded me with dark, glittery eyes. And, it occurred to me, that much like the dog I had encountered in the cemetery—the elusive Buddy—it seemed to be sizing me up.

I finally turned my attention away from the dog, and took a good look at the tall, dark-skinned man of indeterminate age who accompanied my neighbor. There seemed to be quite a contrast between the image he presented, which was all business—the suit, the serious demeanor that almost seemed to precede him into my living room—and the fact that he was holding the leash of a peculiar-looking dog.

Everybody said hello, and the man introduced himself as Dr. Carpenter. I got the feeling that he was not in a good humor. Well, that wasn’t my problem; I had enough things to deal with already.

I asked Dr. Carpenter to sit down, which he did, stiffly, on a kitchen chair that had somehow wandered into the living room during what I was now thinking of as the ransacking of my apartment. Jack and I sat down, too, as did the dog. Sooner or later, someone was going to have to start talking about something, and it was going to have to be Dr. Carpenter, since apparently he and Sassouma had some sort of errand they had come to carry out.

Finally, Dr. Carpenter cleared his throat and began an explanation. “Sassouma asked me to come here,” he said. “You know her English isn’t all that good, so she would like me to speak for her.”

Admittedly, my neighbor and I had only interacted on a sporadic basis—and that was generally when I was doing some small thing to help her out, like lending her the space heater—but when we did, we seemed to be able to communicate well enough. So, I was surprised that she felt she needed some sort of middleman to help her say whatever it was she needed to convey to me. “Is there something wrong?” I asked, since the first thing that came to mind was that somehow the goons who had broken into my place had caused some trouble for her, as well. But that turned out not to be the case.