Radiomen (3 page)

When the bus finally came, I found my usual seat in the back and settled in. A while later, as I was nearing my stop, I became aware of a little jingly tune, muffled but clearly audible, that was coming from my shoulder bag. It took a few seconds for me to register what it was, and then I thought.
My phone? Really?
Who could possibly be calling at this hour of the night?

I pulled out the phone and said hello. In response, a man spoke to me. “Is this Laurie Perzin?” he asked.

“Who are you?” I demanded. I wasn’t going to identify myself until I knew who was on the other end of the line.

“This is Jack Shepherd,” he said. His voice had an impatient, ironic edge to it. And even at this late hour, he sounded full of energy.

Suddenly, the name and the voice fit together. Now, I knew who I was talking to. “Oh,” I said. “
Up All Night
.” That was the radio show I had called into last night. Jack Shepherd was the host of the program. I was going to ask him how he’d gotten my number, but then I remembered that when I’d initially dialed into the show, a taped message asked me to leave my contact information while I waited to speak to the guest on the radio. I assumed it was to call back in case someone in the call-in queue was disconnected. So that was the answer to that question—but a much more important one was why he was phoning me at all.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I thought you and I could have a chat,” Jack Shepherd said.

“A chat? It’s after one in the morning.”

“Yeah, well, I thought since you were a listener you were probably also a night bird. I mean you called in around this time, so I thought it would be okay to call you. Besides, I had a guest cancel on me, so the first hour of the show tonight is a taped segment, which means I’m not on live for a while and to be honest with you, I’m kind of bored. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself when it occurred to me that the perfect thing would be to call you up. And I’m right about the night bird thing, aren’t I? You don’t sound like I woke you up.”

“You know what?” I told Jack Shepherd. “I’m on a bus right now and it’s not the best place to talk. I should be home in a little while. I’ll call you back then.”

I didn’t give him a chance to try to persuade me to stay on the line—I just clicked off the phone. I couldn’t imagine what Jack Shepherd wanted to talk to me about, but the first thing that came to mind was that he was trying to pull some kind of a scam. Someone I had never met was calling me in the middle of the night, sounding just a little too familiar, I thought, a little too chatty; that seemed pretty suspicious to me, no matter who he was. And who
was
he, anyway? Some guy filling up the overnight hours by talking to every weirdo with a theory about how the government was concealing the truth about alien abductions or a method for decoding the secret messages hidden in the geometry of the Great Pyramid. I might call him back and I might not, but I wanted to think about it first.

When I got home, I opened another bottle of wine. This one had a laughing frog on the label. (What can I say? I just pulled these things out of the discount bin; I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about who made them.) Outside my window, I heard a truck pull up across the street. Its air brakes heaved a long sigh and then the street was quiet again, except for the occasional thud of a crate hitting the sidewalk. The smugglers were at it again.

I let the truck’s arrival distract me for a while, but once the noise outside settled down, I started thinking about whether or not I should return Jack Shepherd’s call. His number was in my phone, so all I had to do was hit a button or two. But I was still hesitant. What if my first instinct was right and he was trying to trick me in some way, tell me I wasn’t on the air when I really was and then involve me in some kind of embarrassing conversation? I had just about convinced myself that must have been his motive when my phone rang. I knew, even without looking at the number, that it was him again. I didn’t want to answer the phone but it’s very hard for me to just let a phone ring without picking it up. It sounds too much like it’s yelling at me.

I said hello and Jack immediately started talking. “Okay, so you didn’t call me back. Or maybe you were going to and I’m just jumping the gun.”

“You’re right,” I told him. “I wasn’t going to call.”

“Well then,” Jack said, “you would have missed out on some interesting information. That is, if you’re Avi Perzin’s niece.”

I listened to a kind of faint crackling in the phone—more background noise generated by the universe, I imagined—pinging from cell tower to cell tower across the river of night. On the other end of the connection, Jack Shepherd was listening to me breathe.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes. And yes, Avi was my uncle. How did you know him?”

“I had him on my show a couple of times. That was a lot of years ago—a lot—but he was an interesting guy. He made an impression.”

“Avi was on your show?”

I couldn’t think of why that would be. The last time I had seen Avi, I was still a child and I remembered him as a tall, lanky man, awkward and shy. The only member of my family that I knew of who had any kind of higher education, he had spent his life teaching science at a community college in the Bronx. When I was young, I was with him a lot of the time because my mother had been diagnosed with lupus soon after I was born, and with my father away all day working, Avi, who seemed to spend as much time at home studying and grading papers as he did teaching, often ended up as my caretaker. We all lived in the same apartment building in the Bronx, so at least a few times a week, my mother would send me up a couple of flights of stairs to Avi’s apartment. It was there, on wet afternoons and cold evenings with the heat banging in the radiators, that Avi told me about things like the properties of the ionosphere and about how radio and television waves could drift out into space and keep on going for an unimaginably long time (so that I envisioned people on other planets being able to watch episodes of my favorite cartoons if they could just reel them in with the right antenna).

My mother died when I was around eight and then my father had a falling out with Avi, who was my father’s younger brother. A cousin later told me that as far as she knew, the argument was about nothing much and mostly one-sided—my father was just angry at everyone after my mother passed away. My father remarried not long afterward to a jealous woman who didn’t want him to reconcile with his brother, and so prevented that from happening. We soon moved to New Jersey, which I hated; I was lonely and angry myself after I lost my mother, and the dreary, down-market landscape of the suburb we lived in made me feel like I was spending my days pacing a cage I had to escape. I had little contact with my uncle after that, though I did know that he had never married, never moved from the Bronx or changed teaching jobs, and died of cancer in his forties. There was nothing in this biography that I thought would suggest he’d be a suitable guest for a radio show devoted to strange occurrences and unexplained phenomena, but I was wrong. It turned out there was a lot I didn’t know about Avi.

“I used to invite him on pretty regularly,” Jack continued. “And once or twice he mentioned you—I mean, he mentioned that he had a niece named Laurie. When you called in last night, I thought I remembered that—after all, how many Laurie Perzins can there be?—so I went through my files. I don’t have the tapes from shows I did that long ago, but I still have my notes, and I realized I was right. One of the last times Avi was on my show, he talked about you. Well, not on the air—but afterward. He talked to me.”

That would probably have been when I was a teenager and already long gone from Avi’s life, so I was still puzzled. And, though I didn’t want to give this guy Jack Shepherd the impression that I was all that interested in what he was saying, the truth was that I was very curious. “Why?” I asked. “Do you remember what he said about me?”

There was a pause before Jack Shepherd answered. I got the feeling he was constructing the right way to answer me. Finally he said, “Yes, actually. I do.”

But that’s all he said. He was going to make me work for the answer—or at least pretend that’s what I was doing. “Okay,” I said. “You got me. What did he tell you?”

“He said that once, when you were a child, you told him you’d had a kind of close encounter. With someone you called the radioman.”

Instantly, I was aware of all kinds of internal alarms going off. I framed my response cautiously. “That’s interesting. Do you know what he meant?”

“You mean
who
, don’t you? And my guess would be he was referring to the same guy who came through to Ravenette last night. The psychic I had on—that’s her name, in case you didn’t catch it.”

“Maybe what she’s psychic about is people’s dreams, because that’s the only place I ever saw . . . that thing. Him. The radioman. I must have told Avi about it.” I didn’t remember doing that—in fact, I didn’t remember ever telling anyone about the shadowy figure but it was possible. Anything was possible, right?

“Well, you were a little kid,” Jack continued, mildly enough. “I guess it was easy to convince yourself that you had a dream. Sometimes, though, dreams can be like screen memories. You know, images, pictures, that screen out things you might not want to think happened to you in real life. Like an alien encounter.”

The idea seemed ridiculous to me. “Please,” I replied. “What are you suggesting? That I met ET? He wasn’t anything like that.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Fine. Definitely no cute guy with a glowing finger. But that still leaves me wondering about something. Why did you call him the radioman?”

I didn’t answer this question, preferring to ask one of my own. “Why was Avi on your show? You still haven’t explained that to me.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I have no idea. If you want to tell me, fine. If not, I’m hanging up.”

“You’re kind of cranky, aren’t you?” Jack said.

“I’m tired,” I told him. “I’ve been working all night.”

I realized that, despite my resolve to be careful, the conversation had taken on a bantering tone that wasn’t exactly unfriendly. Maybe I just couldn’t help myself; working in a bar, you get used to talking to people you just met as if you’d known them for years. But Jack Shepherd seemed to have adopted a similar attitude. Perhaps because he’d known Avi, he thought he knew me. But nobody really knew me. If I had a mantra, that was it. Nobody knew me.

“Night’s the best time to work,” Jack said. “It sharpens the focus, don’t you think?” The focus on
what
, he didn’t say. But he did, finally, start to talk about Avi. “So,” he began. “Avi Perzin. You know he was interested in tracking satellites, right? Well, it seems that at some point, he went to a conference of amateur radio guys—hams, mostly, but also satellite trackers—and he heard someone give a presentation about a strange phenomenon that seemed related to satellite launches. Apparently, from the time that the Soviets launched the first Sputnik, people who were tracking satellites could hear the telemetry signal that the orbiters broadcast on the frequency that was given out to the public—the Soviets, in particular, always liked to do that; they especially liked amateur radio operators to track their launches because that provided independent verification of their feat—but they also could hear another, faint pinging on a different frequency. At least, the ones who were playing around with what amounts to homegrown radio astronomy, like your uncle. You do know he was doing that, right?”

I remembered the hollow, pyramid-shaped antenna, the hiss of celestial radiation. “I guess so,” I admitted.

“Well, when these amateur astronomers monitored the Watering Hole, that’s where they’d hear this ghost signal, which is what they started calling it. Whenever a satellite was pinging on its advertised frequency, there would almost always be what Avi liked to call ‘whispering at the Watering Hole’ as well.”

“What’s the Watering Hole?”

“Remember
Star Trek
? Maybe a better term would be a hailing frequency. Literally, it’s the frequency band on the radio dial between eighteen and twenty-one centimeters, which are the wavelengths of hydrogen and the hydroxyl radical—wait, don’t tell me: that’s more than you want to know, right? So let me put it this way: both of those are essential elements of water, and water, most scientists think, is not only necessary for life on Earth but for any kind of extraterrestrial life as well—if it exists. So for radio astronomers, that’s always a critical frequency to monitor for any signals that extraterrestrials might be beaming our way to let us know they’re out there. The idea is that those frequencies would be known to any living beings, so it’s a starting point where everyone could gather and say hello.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If people expected to hear an alien signal in that frequency range and suddenly, they did, wouldn’t everyone have gone crazy? I mean,
contact,
right?”

“Right—except the signals were going the wrong way. They weren’t coming
from
space, they were outbound, from Earth going
into
space. Unfortunately, nobody could ever pinpoint where, exactly, they were being broadcast from or figure out what their real connection was to orbiting satellites. Eventually, they became just one more weird, unexplained phenomenon. Some people thought they weren’t anything more than a sophisticated hoax. In any event, no one has heard any ghost signals for years now. But they were still being picked up by satellite trackers when your uncle was alive, and he was always fascinated by them. He never let it go. Mostly, because of what had happened to you.”

“You mean because I told him about my dream?”

“That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, right?”

I let Jack’s sarcasm just roll on by, along with his remark. “So you had Avi on your show to talk about these ghost signals?”

“He was obsessed with them. I assumed that’s why he never moved, never changed jobs—he wasn’t really interested in anything else but pursuing the truth about those signals. You can still hear them on the Internet—did you know that? You can hear Sputnik’s original telemetry signal and a recording of its ghost, along with most of the satellites that were launched afterward, as well, both by the Soviets and the United States.” Suddenly, Jack took the conversation in another direction. “So tell me,” he said, “what’s out there? On the fire escape.”