Once more, my dog tilted his head, this time, perhaps, to acknowledge his own name.

“Do you think that’s where they came from?” Gilmartin suddenly said to me. “I mean, where they entered our universe? From someplace near Sirius?”

“I don’t know,” I said, surprised by the question. “I don’t even know that they’re real.”

“But you’ve seen them. Or at least, one of them.”

I heard something in his voice that I struggled to describe to myself—longing, maybe. Or envy. Perhaps, I thought, this was the real reason he had wanted me to meet. And I thought something else, as well. That however I might characterize these feelings, they were what had kept me here even as Jack had stormed off. I thought that Raymond Gilmartin was strange and definitely dangerous and yet, somewhere within myself, I had identified an unexpected sense of sympathy for him. On some visceral level, I understood him, or at least, something about him, because as much as we were different, there was something we had in common: we had both been left a legacy that was rooted in the experiences of another person. He had his father, I had Avi. Gilmartin had embraced his inheritance, even enlarged and expanded it, while I had dismissed mine—forgotten it, almost completely—until it had come back to me. Or been given back to me. Certainly not in a way I would have chosen—robbery, assault. The Blue Awareness had a decidedly peculiar way of making friends—but at the moment, I found myself in a forgiving mood. Maybe it was because I understood the feeling of being haunted by things you didn’t understand while pretending that you weren’t haunted at all, that you were in control, sure of yourself and unassailable in your beliefs and all the decisions you had made about your life and its direction.

“The radiomen,” Gilmartin said, perhaps unconsciously using Jack’s description to prod me, since I had fallen silent, lost in my thoughts. “You saw them.”

“As you said, just one. Maybe.”

“They left us unfinished,” Gilmartin said. His voice, now, was as soft as a murmur. “There is some process, some . . . metamorphosis we are supposed to go through to reunite with them. We come close . . . all the work we do here is leading us closer to them. I’m sure of it. But there’s something missing, something else. Something that we still have to reach for. Search for.”

“Did you think that I knew what that was? Because I don’t. Believe me, I don’t.”

“Nobody seems to,” Gilmartin said sadly. Then I saw him glance over at Digitaria again. And again I felt, from this man, an almost palpable sense of longing.

“He’s just a dog,” I said, answering a question that had not been asked of me, but I knew what it was, all the same. “Nobody’s ever come looking for him—except those men last night.”

“I don’t think you have to worry that anything like that will ever happen again,” Gilmartin said.

“All right,” I told him. “I’m going to accept that. From you.”

“But if someone . . . someone else did come looking for him? Or anything like that? I mean, if you had any idea that he . . . they . . .” Raymond shook his head, as if he simply couldn’t speak anymore. His sudden silence added to my increasingly keen awareness of how strange a conversation this really had become. Neither of us was saying anything directly, but each knew exactly what the other meant.

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

Raymond Gilmartin closed his eyes for a moment. When he found his voice again, he said, in a whisper, “I have been waiting all my life.”

What else could there be to add to that? I sat quietly in my chair until he opened his eyes again and then said good night. Digitaria reacted as I stood up, planting himself solidly on his legs and waiting for the next signal about where we were going. I tugged on his leash and led him out the door.

The cheerful young woman who had so quickly turned into a dour functionary was nowhere to be seen, but I was able to find my own way out. Instead of taking the elevator, I led the dog down a wide, winding flight of carpeted stairs. On the ground floor, I found myself back in the reception area where we had started, a brightly lit and high-ceilinged hall where presumably the grand family who had once lived here greeted their guests. But now, except for a different young woman sitting on an ornate bench in front of an even more ornate mirror with a gilded frame, it was deserted. The young woman smiled when she saw me, then rose to punch in some numbers on a keypad next to the front door and let me out into the street.

It was a balmy evening. I walked down the block and crossed at the corner, heading to where Jack had parked the car, but it was gone. I thought, for a moment, that I had made a mistake but then reminded myself that we had parked near a fire hydrant, and Jack had said something about needing to make sure that he was far enough away not to be in danger of getting a ticket. Well, there, right in front of me, was the fire hydrant but the car now occupying the spot we had taken was not Jack’s, and he himself was nowhere in sight.

I hung around for a few minutes, unable—or maybe simply unwilling—to accept what had happened, but finally, I had no choice. Apparently, Jack was so angry that he had driven away and left me behind. It was a particularly unkind and thoughtless thing to do because I had the dog, which limited my travel options. He wasn’t allowed on the subway or on a bus, which meant I had to take a taxi. That was going to cost a fortune if I had to flag down the yellow taxis that cruised up and down Manhattan. However, there might be one other possibility; but to see if my hunch was right, I had to get out of this high-rent neighborhood.

So I started walking uptown, leading the dog. I was a little worried about him, concerned that he’d be tired since he was still pretty banged up, but he seemed to be doing fine as he trotted beside me, swiveling his head now and then to take in some new sight or odor. It took about fifteen minutes, but eventually, the blocks began to get a little less tidy, the buildings less grandiose, and there was more street life around, more people, music, restaurants.

It was amid the noise and traffic—more or less hidden in plain sight—that I found what I was looking for. With few exceptions, the unspoken rule in New York was that gypsy drivers and dollar vans kept to the outer boroughs and weren’t supposed to operate in the heart of the city, But they were always around; you just had to know how to identify them, and I did. Here, at the edges of an edgy neighborhood, I spotted a black car with a certain hard-bitten look about it slipping, like a black ghost, in and out of the stream of traffic. I flagged it down and climbed in beside another passenger who didn’t even glance at me or the dog as he jumped in after me, fitting himself into a space between my legs and the door. We soon crossed the bridge over the East River and began driving through the back-door neighborhoods of Queens, dropping off the other passengers and picking up new ones. Apparently, as seemed to be my luck lately, my stop was going to be last. I expected the dog to fall asleep, lulled by the movement of the car, but he didn’t. He stayed awake all through the long drive, alert and watchful. Once in a while he would lift his head to look up at me and I could see his eyes glittering in the dark.

~XIII~

I waited until the next day and then called Jack to straighten things out. He didn’t answer so I left a message, and then another one in the late afternoon before I went to work. When he still hadn’t called back the day after that, I decided that I wasn’t going to chase after him. If he wanted to hold on to what was obviously some huge grudge against me for not following him, then so be it. We weren’t teenagers who had to test each other’s loyalty. If he decided to get back in touch, I’d talk to him. If not, well, a chapter in my life seemed to have closed when I left the Blue Awareness headquarters and if Jack Shepherd was part of that chapter, I didn’t think there was much I could do. I didn’t leave any more phone messages. The summer days went on.