As we arranged ourselves in the chairs and the dog settled himself against my leg, I had a moment to study the leader of the Blue Awareness. He was, I thought, in his midforties, somewhere near my age. He was thin, blade-like in his movements, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a serious demeanor. He was dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, with a matching tie. He struck me immediately as a man without humor, an individual who exuded a sense of great calm when in reality, inside himself he could not rest. I had been feeling so edgy myself lately that perhaps I was simply identifying someone who was in the same state—although certainly, he had a great deal to do with my uneasiness, while I couldn’t imagine that I had any influence on his.

He poured us all a glass of water and then sat back against the couch. “I appreciate your coming here,” he said to me. And then he added, “I see you’ve brought a friend.”

“You know Jack Shepherd,” I told him.

“Do I?”

“Sure you do,” Jack said, with mock cheerfulness. “I’m the guy whose life you’re trying so hard to ruin.”

Gilmartin frowned. “Why would I do that?”

“I have a radio show, Up All Night. At least I did, until your company bought out my distributor. Anyway, I’ve had a lot of ex-Awares on lately and they’ve been telling on you.”

“I can’t imagine what there is to tell,” Gilmartin said. His voice was measured, calm.

Jack wagged his finger at Gilmartin. “Oh, come on now. You people do some pretty crazy stuff. You rough up members who try to leave; sometimes, I hear, you kidnap them and keep them locked up in some reeducation camp out in New Mexico. You encourage Awares to separate from even close family who won’t join your group. You send members’ children to special schools where you teach them that everything every normal school teaches is false doctrine and only Awares know the truth about the world, which is that we’re all asleep, we believe in false prophets, the only real one being your father, Howard, who is . . . what? What is it that you people say about him? Oh yes, he’s sailing around the world solo, writing a new book, expanding on Awareness Doctrine even though he would be way over one hundred years old now. He must be one hale and hearty guy. And he’s due back soon, I hear, along with the aliens who are our true ancestors, the shadow men from beyond our universe . . .”

Gilmartin waved his hand, as if he were bored. “That’s enough, don’t you think? You don’t know anything about us. Or about me or my father. In any case,” he continued, “I don’t remember inviting you. So perhaps you might temper your behavior just a bit.”

I actually agreed with him. Jack’s outburst had taken me completely by surprise. I knew he was angry at Gilmartin, but it had never occurred to me that he would behave like this. Maybe it should have, but it didn’t. If anything, I had expected him to be the voice of reason here, the grown-up, but that wasn’t how things were going. And this wasn’t at all how I wanted the meeting to begin.

But Jack stayed on the same track. After Gilmartin’s admonition, he seemed to rear back, as if he had been struck. “Listen, you jerk . . .”

“What is it you want?” I asked Gilmartin, deliberately interrupting Jack. If this meeting devolved into some kind of name-calling fiesta, I wasn’t going to learn anything I needed to know in order to get my life back to some semblance of what it had been before all this craziness started. “You’ve got my radio and the box my uncle built,” I reminded him. “Let’s just not pretend that you don’t. The horn of plenty antenna is long gone as far as I know, so I couldn’t give it to you even if I had it. There’s nothing else that connects us, so why do you keep after me? I mean, you had a pair of goons try to take my dog away from me last night. What were you going to do? Try to trade him back to me for the antenna? I told Ravenette that I don’t have it. You’re going to have to believe me because it’s the truth.”

“I would never have told anyone to do anything that would harm that dog,” Gilmartin said.

“Oh really? Two men in ski goggles came out of a van and tried to grab him.”

“That had nothing to do with me.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. There were a few things I could do at this point: get angry, like Jack; burst into tears, which part of me felt like doing; or keep going round and round with accusations and denials. None of these was a useful path to follow; none would get me any relief. So I tried something else, I tried, simply, to be human.

“Mr. Gilmartin,” I began . . .

“Raymond.”

“Okay, Raymond—just tell me how to make all this stop. How we can arrange things so you go your way and I go mine. I can’t live my life waiting for the next crazy thing to happen.”

“No, of course not,” Gilmartin said. He took a sip of water and then leaned forward. “And so you see, there is something that connects us—because we believe, as you so clearly do, that no one’s life should be chaotic and unpredictable. Once we understand our true nature and devote ourselves to getting closer to it, everything improves. Our work, our relationships . . .”

“I guess my true nature is to be a pain in the ass,” Jack said, unable to keep quiet any longer. Then he pointed at me. “And don’t think this one is a pushover, either. Still waters run deep and all that.”

I was actually beginning to find Jack annoying, and to feel that he was working against me. I knew he probably couldn’t help himself for behaving the way he was and it was probably my own lack of empathy that hadn’t permitted me—perhaps until this moment—to really understand the depth of his fury. Perhaps there were other factors at work, too, but he was still reeling from being forced off the air. It didn’t matter that he had a deal in place to relocate his show; he had been bested by people he didn’t like—and didn’t respect—and because of that, he couldn’t contain his anger.

Jack’s remark, however, had no effect on Gilmartin. He simply ignored him and continued to address himself only to me. His next comment, though, involved the other member of our little visitors group. “Your dog,” he said. “He is interesting looking. A little darker colored than they usually are. Am I right? I mean, he is a Dogon dog, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I replied. I was surprised that he had identified Digitaria’s origins. “How did you know?”

As was apparently his habit, Gilmartin didn’t reply to questions until—and if—he felt like it. So, instead of answering what I’d asked, he had a question of his own. “Can I pet him?”

This was an even stranger question, I thought. I wasn’t sure if it was a tacit admission that last night did involve the Blue Awareness, and Gilmartin was well aware that the dog could be aggressive, or if he was simply—in his own weird way—being polite by asking permission.

“All right,” I said. Then I looked down at my dog. “Be nice,” I told him.

Gilmartin got up from the couch and approached the dog slowly. Then, bending down, he gently touched the dog’s head. He patted Digitaria a couple of times, while the dog mostly ignored him.

“What’s his name?” Gilmartin asked me.

“Digitaria,” I told him.

For the first time, Gilmartin almost smiled. “Is it really?” he said. “That’s extremely interesting. Extremely.” He stood up and started walking toward the bookcase. “I want to show you something,” he said.

He reached for an object that was on a high shelf and carefully carried it back to us. Handing it to me, he said, “Look at this. It’s very old.”

What he had given me was a rock—a heavy, solid object with a smooth black surface. I saw that it had a carving on one side, and held it so that Jack, who pulled his chair closer to mine, could see it, too.

Holding it in my hand, I had no doubt that the rock was old, just as Gilmartin suggested, or perhaps even ancient; it just had that feeling about it. So did the pictograph that had been carved on its surface. The carving was simple, but that somehow made it appear even more powerful. Under a diagram of dots and lines that I couldn’t identify, three beings stood together, The first seemed to be a human, rendered as a kind of genderless line drawing. The second was also humanlike in that it appeared to have arms, legs and a head, but it was hard to identify where the boundaries of the figure stopped and plain rock surface began because this being was made up of tiny lines, like scrapes, so that it appeared to be more of a blur than a solid shape. Between these two figures stood the third being, a small dog, thin and compact, with an angular head shaped like an anvil and a tightly curled tail.