One morning, though, Jack phoned me so early—early for me, anyway—that he woke me up, and asked if we could have a late breakfast. I had to be at work in the afternoon so I wasn’t eager to travel all the way to the Village and then navigate my way by subway back to Queens to catch the AirTrain out to Kennedy, but Jack suggested something else. He wanted to meet at a diner off the Grand Central Parkway. I knew the place because it was near the strip mall where Victor Haberman had his office. On my bus ride to work every day, I still passed my very-much-ex-attorney’s office (I had received a registered letter from him, copied to the Blue Awareness’s attorneys and about half the senior administrative managers of the group listed on their website officially resigning from my “case”) and knew that it had taken weeks for him to clean up the mess that had been left by the blue paint that had been smeared all over his windows, door, and even the sidewalk.

An hour later, I caught the bus heading toward the airport, but got off before my usual stop, right across the street from the diner. It was a hazy morning, the weather almost summery, but this was hardly a spot to appreciate the mild season. Stuck on the edge of the parkway, between Flushing Meadow Park, with its shallow ponds and rusty barbeque pits, and the seemingly mile-high rows of balconied co-ops squeezed together on the boulevard stretching toward the city, the diner had the feel of a place sitting uneasily on a temporary foundation. Everybody inside seemed anxious, gulping down coffee and singed toast in the rush to get from one place to another. This was just a stop on the road when you were in-between destinations and ready to hurry on.

Jack was sitting at a booth near a window that presented a view of the traffic speeding past on the parkway and in the distance, planes lifting themselves off the tarmac at Kennedy and angling upward into the sky. He had a plate of eggs in front of him that he wasn’t eating, and an empty coffee cup.

When I sat down across from him, Jack offered me a quick greeting and then, almost immediately, started explaining why he’d wanted to meet. Something had happened.

“The company that syndicates my show is called Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks,” Jack began. “I knew they’d been working on a merger or a sale for a year now; a number of media conglomerates seemed interested, and as far as I was concerned, it would just mean a change in the name on my contract. But two days ago, I got a call from a friend on the corporate side who told me there’s a new bidder and they’re offering a ton of money. Make that a ton-and-a-half. So you know who suddenly wants to buy the Coast-to-Coast Radio Networks?”

I sighed. “The Blue something, right?”

“Blue Star Communications,” Jack told me. “Both the president of the company and the chairman of the board are Awares. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Blue Star’s single condition for going forward with the purchase of Coast-to-Coast is that, once the deal is done, they drop my show. Meaning, kick me off the air.”

“So now you’re going to suffer because of me.”

“Laurie,” Jack said, “we can go back and forth about who dragged who into this mess, but one thing I know is that this part of it is all my own doing. I’ve gone out of my way to make them angry.”

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. “Because I won’t give them a radio antenna I don’t even have, they’d go to these lengths to . . . what? I don’t even understand what the point is of going after you.”

“Ravenette warned us they would.”

“I haven’t forgotten that. It still seems pretty extreme.”

Jack gave me a wry look. “I take it you haven’t been listening to the show. I told you, I haven’t exactly been trying to placate them. I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately, and they’ve been pretty outspoken about the trials and tribulations of being a member of the Blue Awareness if you’re not high up the ladder. Or in favor with someone who is. Most of the people who’ve talked to me on the air have spent their life savings, or went deeply into debt, to pay for what the group calls Awareness training—all that Blue Box stuff, and more—and then were harassed nearly to the breaking point when they finally left. I guess Raymond Gilmartin isn’t too happy about my having them on the show where they can spill the blue beans, so to speak.”

“Do you think Raymond himself is after you?”

“I doubt that anything the Blue Awareness does happens without his say-so. And this is how they are, this is what they do. It’s bad enough if you’re just a regular member and turn against them. But if you’re someone like me—someone with a public platform—I guess they view that as a real threat. So I’d say we’re way beyond their issues with you now. Way beyond.”

I looked out the window, into the dusty haze of sunshine that had spread itself across the sky, all the way to the horizon. We were almost alone in the diner now. This was the dead time, the half hour or so before morning rolled over into afternoon when no one was ready to sit down and eat lunch yet, or grab more coffee. One waitress was outside taking a cigarette break; another was sitting at the counter, slowly going through a pile of receipts.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m flying out to LA this afternoon; that’s where Coast-to-Coast has its headquarters. I’ve got a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of programming. I want him to tell me to my face that they’re thinking of dropping my show. It can’t be anything financial because I bring in plenty of ad revenue and as far as I know, they don’t have any trouble selling my commercial slots. But just in case this Blue Star deal does go through, I’ve also got a meeting scheduled with the World Air satellite people. They might be interested in carrying my program,” he said. Suddenly, a kind of lopsided grin appeared on his face. “I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I guess that’s a little weird—given the context. A satellite radio company might just save the day.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe Avi’s pulling some strings somewhere.”

“A ghost with influence? He’d make a great posthumous guest for the first satellite show.”

I drank some of the coffee that had been brought to me before the lull and started picking at Jack’s plate of cold eggs. “All this is totally crazy,” I said. “I wish there was a way to just . . . I don’t know. Make it all go away.”

“Too late,” Jack said. “You can’t un-know things.”

“Sometimes I wish I could.”

“Yeah, sometimes we all wish that. But maybe it’s better to be . . .”

I couldn’t help myself; I finished his sentence for him. “Better to be what? Aware?”

He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. Aware. But promise me you won’t go over to the other side while I’m away, all right?”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I replied.

Jack had driven to the diner but had decided that he didn’t really want to leave his car at one of the public lots at the airport, so he asked me to do him a favor by taking care of it for a few days. I said sure, so he paid the bill and then I rode with him to the airport, where we said good-bye and I took over the wheel. I drove the car along the looping roads that ran around the outskirts of the terminals to a distant spot I knew, near the huge sheds where salt and snowplows were locked up during the warmer months. There was an employee parking lot here, where I was able to leave the car and then catch one of the airline courtesy vans back toward the main area of the airport. I was early for my shift, so I sat around in the back of the bar for a while, near the lockers, reading a book. It was a spy novel and I had been absorbed by it, but suddenly it just couldn’t hold my attention anymore. Compared to my own life, the spy’s problems seemed easily solvable. Make a few well-placed phone calls. Shoot someone. Or else say, I give up. Or maybe, if it seemed like it would work better in certain circumstances, I give in.