Radiomen (5 page)

But again I wondered, had she survived? I read farther and finally found what I was looking for: a few sentences that described how, at the conclusion of the flight,
the satellite was recovered successfully with the dog, alive and well, inside.

I wasn’t sure why, but I felt a real sense of relief that Zvezdochka’s travels through the starry void had ended not only without any harm coming to her, but probably with a well-deserved pat on the head from Yuri Gagarin, as well. I felt comforted by that. I felt like, for a while, it would be okay to let go of the things that were bothering me. To lie down and go to sleep.

B
UT WHEN
I woke up late in the morning, the question Jack had asked me was still on my mind:
Who is out there?
My answer hadn’t changed—it remained,
Just me
—and the best way to leave it at that was to let the question fade away, much as the dream had until Jack Shepherd brought it up again. So, I decided to get myself out of bed and go through my usual routine—coffee, shower, cable news, and then off to work—as a way of putting some distance between myself and any possible strange, stray thoughts that might have been provoked by my conversation with Jack. But as soon as I threw off my blanket, I realized that it was freezing in my apartment. And I didn’t hear steam banging in the radiators as it usually did in the morning, which meant that there was no heat in the building, and not for the first time this winter.

I bundled myself into a pair of jeans and a sweater, threw on a coat and went out into the hall to knock on my neighbor’s door. I wanted to be sure that the problem wasn’t just in my apartment before I started making phone calls to try to get the heat turned back on.

My neighbors were nice people, though I was never sure how many of them there were. The core group was a mother and father—he drove a taxi, she worked in a convenience store—and a whole bunch of small children. There was also an ever-changing cast of relatives and friends who came and went and, I assumed, also lived in the apartment from time to time. They were Africans, though I had never quite sorted out which country, exactly, they were from. I knew that some of them—the parents, certainly, and probably some number of the relatives—were illegal, and because of that, they would never complain about anything that went wrong in the building. But as soon as the mother opened the door, it was clear that they, too, had no heat because she was also wearing her coat, and the baby she held in her arms was wrapped in a heavy blanket.

“No heat again?” I asked.

The mother shook her head. From where I stood in the hall, I had a view of the kitchen, and I could see two small children, each wearing layers of sweaters, sitting on the floor near the stove, which was the only source of warmth in the apartment. With them was a dog, a small, thin creature the color of dust that I had occasionally seen being walked by one or another inhabitant of the apartment.

“I’m going to call the landlord,” I said.

“No, no, no,” my neighbor said. “We wait. Wait.”

“If we wait, no one will do anything,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll call. I’ll complain.”

“No, no,” she said again, looking frightened.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “I promise.” I pointed at the baby in her arms. “Baby will get sick,” I said, and then gestured at the children. “Too cold for everybody.”

I felt bad about the way I was communicating with her—I thought I sounded like a condescending idiot, but I didn’t think she spoke much English, and I was doing the best I could. When I went back to my apartment, I pulled a small space heater out of my closet, which I had bought last winter when we didn’t have heat for nearly a week, turned it on so I could warm up a bit and started my telephone campaign.
Avi
, I thought as I started dialing,
instead of how to listen to satellites, why didn’t you teach me something useful, like how to fix a furnace?

I didn’t really know anyone else in the building, though I thought many of the other tenants also were undocumented, so I might be the only one in the whole place who would register a complaint about the lack of heat. Which is exactly what the landlord’s wife told me when I got her on the phone, as if accusing me of lying about the fact that the temperature in the building had fallen to a level I described to her as arctic. She said she’d tell her husband “when he got home,” which could have meant a few hours or even a few days. He wasn’t a very pleasant man and he always did everything he could to delay any needed repairs. So, my next call was to the city’s heat emergency hotline, where I demanded some help. I told the woman I was speaking to that I had complained about this problem numerous times before, and if she would just look up the record for my building, she would see how often we went without heat. That hardly seemed to diminish the windy sigh of boredom in her voice, but I knew from experience that once I called, someone from the city eventually would show up to make repairs if the landlord didn’t do it himself.

I started toward the bathroom to take a shower and then I remembered that of course, if there was no heat, there would be no hot water. I was already angry about how cold it was in my apartment, and the realization that I couldn’t even take a shower made me furious—and then it made me want to cry. I knew that my reaction was all out of proportion to the actual situation, but being without the basic creature comforts like heat and hot water always rattled me. I think it made me feel like I was responsible, somehow—like I wasn’t able to do the one really important thing I had been in charge of from the time my mother died: taking care of myself. Maybe I didn’t do it all that well and maybe, even when I did, things tended to hover right around the barely managing level, but it mattered to me that at least I kept myself housed and fed and strong enough to deal with whatever came my way. The fact that I had to heat up water on the stove in order to wash myself and walk around my few small rooms wrapped in my winter coat seemed like evidence that I was failing at something very fundamental about maintaining the quality of my life, and I didn’t like it.

I left the house as soon as I could. I’d be early for work but at least it would be comfortably warm in the airline terminal, and I could just sit around for a while, watching the planes take off until it was time to start my shift. I was halfway down the block, heading for the bus stop as I picked my way through the smashed-up cars parked all over the street, waiting for service at the repair shops, when a thought occurred to me—a small idea with a little bit of light around it that managed to float up through my anger. I hesitated for a moment, but then turned around and went back to my apartment.

I found two long extension cords, plugged them into each other, and then into my little heater, which I carried next door. I knocked on my neighbor’s door again—what was her name? Sassouma, I thought, or something like that—and again, when she answered, she had the baby in her arms.

“Here,” I said, offering her the heater. She shook her head, but I persisted. We had lived next door to each other for years and she had, occasionally, asked me for little bits of help, like reading something that came in the mail or filling out school forms, so I knew she wasn’t worried that I might want to extract money from her or something like that in return for the use of the heater. I had already figured out that what would concern her would be the cost of the extra electricity. These little electric heaters were helpful, but they were energy vampires, and when you’re on the kind of budget that people in this building no doubt lived on—myself included, though I was probably better off than most of my neighbors—things like that mattered a lot. “I’m going to work,” I said. “I don’t need it. And look.” I pointed to the extension cord, which was snaking out of my apartment, under my locked door. “My electricity,” I said. “I’ll make the landlord pay me back.” That, of course, was never going to happen, but Sassouma seemed to think I had it in me to work this miracle, and she finally took the heater from me, saying
thank you, thank you.

I thought that doing something nice for someone else—something that would burnish my karma and make me feel like I really
was
managing well enough to be able to be generous to my neighbor—would make me feel better, and it did, but for just a little while. By the time I got to work, my unhappy mood had returned.

I bought a newspaper and a sandwich, and then settled myself into a seat near a gate that wasn’t currently in use. Nearby, nervous people were waiting for an outbound flight to Los Angeles. Even months after the terrorist attacks, a feeling of dread always seemed to hang over the airport, unless, of course, you were in The Endless Weekend, where as far as we were concerned,
It
had never happened, so I deliberately sat facing away from the anxious passengers, looking out the glass walls of the terminal. Spring was late in coming this year, and the afternoon was still dull and wintry. I watched the big planes taxi out on the runways and lift off into the hard sky, turning as they climbed over Jamaica Bay, headed either out over the ocean or inland, toward the far coast.

It did help a little to be warm, and then, when I started my shift at the bar, to be busy. Some nights everyone seemed to be drinking beer, and some nights I seemed to be on continuous cocktail duty. For whatever reason, this turned out to be a Jack Daniel’s night, which meant fewer quiet drinkers and contemplative travelers and many more raucous guys hooting and hollering at the TV screens. One of the cable channels was showing the rebroadcast of a British soccer game, and even that had its loud fans. As flights were announced and customers came and went, I just kept refilling the shot glasses. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I was surprised by how quickly the night went; when the manager showed up to cash out my register and help me close up, I hadn’t yet even glanced at a clock.

But the night’s frantic pace caught up with me once I was on the bus, and I felt exhausted. I dozed more deeply than usual as we traveled along the Grand Central Parkway and then turned onto the deserted residential streets, coming fully awake only when the bus driver called out, “Hey, bartender! Isn’t this your stop?”

I was still feeling a little blurry when I unlocked the front door of my building, but then the cold hit me. I had completely forgotten about the heat problem, but now it seemed to be icier inside than outdoors. At least there was a hand-lettered sign taped near the mailboxes explaining that the boiler needed parts and would be fixed by the day after tomorrow. I didn’t know if the landlord had left it or workmen from the city, but either way, it was a good-news, bad-news situation for me because, while at least I knew that someone was working on the problem, my electric heater, as I saw when I went upstairs, was still in my neighbors’ apartment. It was too late at night to ask for it back and besides, my supposedly rising stock of karma would surely plummet somewhere below zero if I did that. So, I went inside, kept my coat on, and tried to get my mind off how cold I was by watching TV.

A couple hundred cable channels—more?—and there was still nothing on that I seemed to be able to pay attention to. I didn’t feel like listening to Jack Shepherd tonight, or fooling around with the radio, so I picked up my laptop and wandered around the Internet for a while. Eventually, even that began to bore me. Maybe being cold was making me restless and unable to concentrate. Finally, I decided to go through my mail, which was piled on my coffee table; at least I could sort through the bills I had to pay and start on that chore. But almost the first thing I came across was a letter—or what looked like an actual letter, addressed to me in someone’s handwriting. I didn’t recognize the writing and there was no return address. That was peculiar enough, but the envelope, too, was unusual: it was a deep sapphire blue, a rich hue that didn’t look like anything you’d find in a greeting card store, for example, or anywhere else that I could think of.

Maybe because of that, I had a kind of creepy feeling about this strange piece of mail, but when I finally opened it, what was inside seemed pretty mundane: it was a flier, printed on blue paper the same rich color as the envelope, offering a “Free Psychic Reading by Ravenette, World-Renowned Psychic.” At the bottom, in the same handwriting as was on the envelope, the world-renowned psychic had penned me a decidedly melodramatic note—
Dear Laurie: I hope you’ll come to see me. Live on the radio wasn’t the best place for me to tell you all that I see.

When the phone rang about twenty minutes later, I had a feeling I knew who was going to be on the line, and I was right.

“Laurie?” Jack Shepherd said. “Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”

“Are you ever really
on
the radio?” I asked him. “Or are all your shows taped repeats so you can spend your time on the phone with me?”

“Hey,” he said. “I’m just calling to say hello. I kind of enjoyed our chat last night. It was interesting.”

“Maybe for you.”

“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “You’re annoyed with me. I have to tell you though, I’m not sure why.”