I thought of asking the psychic if she knew anything about that, but I figured she wouldn’t. And since I wasn’t giving her anything to help her connect me either to the room she had described or the strange figure in it, the psychic quickly cut me off. “I’m afraid that’s all we have time for,” she said. “I have to take another caller. Thanks for tuning in, Laurie. Bye now.”

“Bye,” I said, and clicked off my phone. I sat on the couch for a while after that, without the energy to get up. Finally, I did, steadying myself on my feet and then directing myself to the bedroom, where I pulled off my clothes, got under the blankets and fell quickly asleep. That was the way—that night, at least—I managed not to spend even a minute considering the psychic’s question. Did I know who the shadowy figure was? Well, maybe. Maybe he was the radioman, which was the only way I had ever described him to myself. And maybe I even knew where he was, since I was pretty sure that I recognized the room that the psychic had described: it was Avi’s, his cot-in-the-kitchen of a small railroad flat my family used to rent in a summer boarding house in Rockaway Beach, a peninsula that stuck out into the Atlantic Ocean at the end of Queens. But I hadn’t been there for—what? Almost forty years? Since I was a young child. So what was the radioman doing there now—if now had any meaning in this peculiar vision, sitting on Avi’s bed? As far as I knew, I had only met him once. And even then, it was only in a dream.

~II~

The next day, I slept even later than I usually did. When I finally got up in the early afternoon, I badly wanted coffee. I was still barely conscious when I dragged myself into the kitchen and poured water into the coffeemaker. I waited for it to brew, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just listening to the noise of the day banging away outside.

Luckily, since I worked nights and slept during the hours when most of the rest of the city was at work, my bedroom was in the back of the building I lived in so it was relatively quiet. But my living room faced a busy street lined with body shops, car parts wholesalers and other automotive repair services. Some of them also carried on some kind of black-market operations that involved lots of hurried loading and unloading of big trucks late at night. (They were smuggling cigarettes from the Midwest Indian reservations, one of my neighbors said; another thought electronics were involved.) Occasionally, coming home from work on the last late-night bus to make the run from Kennedy airport, where I did my bartending, to where I lived at the far end of Queens, I’d have to walk around a Diamond Reo or a Peterbilt with a forty-foot trailer parked right up on the sidewalk, close to the buildings, with only its running lights on and its engine idling. If a giant truck that took up half the block could be inconspicuous, that seemed to be the intent; like you wouldn’t notice it, or shouldn’t, if it snuggled up to the iron gates drawn across the entrance to a row of garages. Sometimes I’d see a couple of men loading or unloading boxes from the back of one of these trucks. They went about their business efficiently, without making too much of a racket—I had to admit that. The morning was another story.

Six days a week, from early in the morning until around seven in the evening, the noise that penetrated into my front room was pretty impressive, even with the windows closed tight. The neighborhood I lived in was often referred to as automobile alley because the car repair businesses lined the streets for about ten blocks in every direction except south, where the grassy inlets and salt marshes of Jamaica Bay jutted up against the boundary shores of the borough. My building, an old brick high-rise with a couple of dozen apartments, had the look of a relic from better days that had been marooned here, all by itself, when sometime in the past the neighborhood was gradually taken over by the men and machines who fix smashed cars. But its location was exactly what kept the place affordable for me. I had thought of moving from time to time, but where would I go that would be any better for what I could manage to pay?

When I finally had enough caffeine to wake me up—halfway, anyway—I wandered into the living room and sat down on the couch. I meant to turn on the TV and watch the news on one of the cable channels, but that’s when the previous night decided to come back to me. I had help in the way of some visual props: facing me on the coffee table was the near-empty bottle of wine I had decided to relax with when I came home from work and, of course, the radio, a big, clunky black box that while missing its exotic pyramid antenna still had a utilitarian directional antenna attached. I liked to fiddle around with the radio in the same sort of way I liked to surf the web—I’d just tune up and down the various bands to see what I could find. I enjoyed listening to people talk out there in the dark—the ham broadcasters relaying gossip to each other, boats anchored in the shipping channels, pilots guiding their planes home to the airport where I worked or to the smaller landing strips out on Long Island and in New Jersey. Once in a while, I tuned into the atomic clock, installed on a military base in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Ceaselessly, second by second, it declared the exact time in a stern, robotic voice that, late at night, could easily be mistaken for the voice of doom. I could also pick up international programs, and one of my favorites, when I could find it, was an American expat living in Chile who read e-mails and letters from people who had picked up his broadcast. He said hello, they said hello back. I’d sent the guy a postcard, once, that I’d bought at the airport—a picture of the Statue of Liberty photographed on a sunny day—and waited for two weeks afterward for him to say hello to me. When he finally did, it seemed like an accomplishment, like I’d made a connection or closed a circle.

I actually had listened a number of times to the program I’d tuned into last night. For a while, the big topic up for discussion on the show had been the increased sightings of UFOs that had coincided with 9/11, and the theory that the terrorist attacks had alarmed “the aliens”—people on the radio talked about aliens like it was a given that we were being visited by other-worldly beings on a regular basis—to the point where they might be considering some form of direct intervention in the affairs of our quarrelsome little planet. But many months had already passed, and since nothing like that had happened (that we knew of, anyway, as the occasional caller liked to point out), the discussion had turned to other looming dangers and esoteric mysteries, like a ghost hunter who had described his experiences with the angry dead and various self-described “out-world” archaeologists who discussed the Sphinx-like formation that formed the supposed “face” on Mars. But I had never actually called in when they opened the phone lines for questions. I still couldn’t figure out what had possessed me to phone in last night—boredom, maybe, or the effects of the wine. But whatever, I certainly hadn’t expected anything like what I got: a stranger’s voice describing a room I hadn’t been in for decades and a shadow that I had met in a dream. It was bizarre. Inexplicable. As was the fact that the shadow was pointing to the fire escape—as if I needed to be reminded about what had happened out there—that is, what had happened in my dream. I had never forgotten it but I also hadn’t thought about it in what seemed like eons, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in thinking about it now. And if there was anything I was really good at, it was finding ways to avoid what I didn’t want to think about. That’s what the radio was for, and my computer, and the TV. Besides, there were a couple of things I had to do before I left for work in the late afternoon, like go to the supermarket, which was a long hike from my building. So, I decided that buying groceries was more important than dwelling on my late-night encounters with weirdness in radio land. I got dressed, plopped a baseball cap on my head, and headed out the door.