I let the truck’s arrival distract me for a while, but once the noise outside settled down, I started thinking about whether or not I should return Jack Shepherd’s call. His number was in my phone, so all I had to do was hit a button or two. But I was still hesitant. What if my first instinct was right and he was trying to trick me in some way, tell me I wasn’t on the air when I really was and then involve me in some kind of embarrassing conversation? I had just about convinced myself that must have been his motive when my phone rang. I knew, even without looking at the number, that it was him again. I didn’t want to answer the phone but it’s very hard for me to just let a phone ring without picking it up. It sounds too much like it’s yelling at me.

I said hello and Jack immediately started talking. “Okay, so you didn’t call me back. Or maybe you were going to and I’m just jumping the gun.”

“You’re right,” I told him. “I wasn’t going to call.”

“Well then,” Jack said, “you would have missed out on some interesting information. That is, if you’re Avi Perzin’s niece.”

I listened to a kind of faint crackling in the phone—more background noise generated by the universe, I imagined—pinging from cell tower to cell tower across the river of night. On the other end of the connection, Jack Shepherd was listening to me breathe.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

“Yes. And yes, Avi was my uncle. How did you know him?”

“I had him on my show a couple of times. That was a lot of years ago—a lot—but he was an interesting guy. He made an impression.”

“Avi was on your show?”

I couldn’t think of why that would be. The last time I had seen Avi, I was still a child and I remembered him as a tall, lanky man, awkward and shy. The only member of my family that I knew of who had any kind of higher education, he had spent his life teaching science at a community college in the Bronx. When I was young, I was with him a lot of the time because my mother had been diagnosed with lupus soon after I was born, and with my father away all day working, Avi, who seemed to spend as much time at home studying and grading papers as he did teaching, often ended up as my caretaker. We all lived in the same apartment building in the Bronx, so at least a few times a week, my mother would send me up a couple of flights of stairs to Avi’s apartment. It was there, on wet afternoons and cold evenings with the heat banging in the radiators, that Avi told me about things like the properties of the ionosphere and about how radio and television waves could drift out into space and keep on going for an unimaginably long time (so that I envisioned people on other planets being able to watch episodes of my favorite cartoons if they could just reel them in with the right antenna).

My mother died when I was around eight and then my father had a falling out with Avi, who was my father’s younger brother. A cousin later told me that as far as she knew, the argument was about nothing much and mostly one-sided—my father was just angry at everyone after my mother passed away. My father remarried not long afterward to a jealous woman who didn’t want him to reconcile with his brother, and so prevented that from happening. We soon moved to New Jersey, which I hated; I was lonely and angry myself after I lost my mother, and the dreary, down-market landscape of the suburb we lived in made me feel like I was spending my days pacing a cage I had to escape. I had little contact with my uncle after that, though I did know that he had never married, never moved from the Bronx or changed teaching jobs, and died of cancer in his forties. There was nothing in this biography that I thought would suggest he’d be a suitable guest for a radio show devoted to strange occurrences and unexplained phenomena, but I was wrong. It turned out there was a lot I didn’t know about Avi.

“I used to invite him on pretty regularly,” Jack continued. “And once or twice he mentioned you—I mean, he mentioned that he had a niece named Laurie. When you called in last night, I thought I remembered that—after all, how many Laurie Perzins can there be?—so I went through my files. I don’t have the tapes from shows I did that long ago, but I still have my notes, and I realized I was right. One of the last times Avi was on my show, he talked about you. Well, not on the air—but afterward. He talked to me.”

That would probably have been when I was a teenager and already long gone from Avi’s life, so I was still puzzled. And, though I didn’t want to give this guy Jack Shepherd the impression that I was all that interested in what he was saying, the truth was that I was very curious. “Why?” I asked. “Do you remember what he said about me?”

There was a pause before Jack Shepherd answered. I got the feeling he was constructing the right way to answer me. Finally he said, “Yes, actually. I do.”

But that’s all he said. He was going to make me work for the answer—or at least pretend that’s what I was doing. “Okay,” I said. “You got me. What did he tell you?”

“He said that once, when you were a child, you told him you’d had a kind of close encounter. With someone you called the radioman.”

Instantly, I was aware of all kinds of internal alarms going off. I framed my response cautiously. “That’s interesting. Do you know what he meant?”

“You mean who, don’t you? And my guess would be he was referring to the same guy who came through to Ravenette last night. The psychic I had on—that’s her name, in case you didn’t catch it.”

“Maybe what she’s psychic about is people’s dreams, because that’s the only place I ever saw . . . that thing. Him. The radioman. I must have told Avi about it.” I didn’t remember doing that—in fact, I didn’t remember ever telling anyone about the shadowy figure but it was possible. Anything was possible, right?

“Well, you were a little kid,” Jack continued, mildly enough. “I guess it was easy to convince yourself that you had a dream. Sometimes, though, dreams can be like screen memories. You know, images, pictures, that screen out things you might not want to think happened to you in real life. Like an alien encounter.”

The idea seemed ridiculous to me. “Please,” I replied. “What are you suggesting? That I met ET? He wasn’t anything like that.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Fine. Definitely no cute guy with a glowing finger. But that still leaves me wondering about something. Why did you call him the radioman?”

I didn’t answer this question, preferring to ask one of my own. “Why was Avi on your show? You still haven’t explained that to me.”

“You really don’t know?”

“I have no idea. If you want to tell me, fine. If not, I’m hanging up.”

“You’re kind of cranky, aren’t you?” Jack said.

“I’m tired,” I told him. “I’ve been working all night.”

I realized that, despite my resolve to be careful, the conversation had taken on a bantering tone that wasn’t exactly unfriendly. Maybe I just couldn’t help myself; working in a bar, you get used to talking to people you just met as if you’d known them for years. But Jack Shepherd seemed to have adopted a similar attitude. Perhaps because he’d known Avi, he thought he knew me. But nobody really knew me. If I had a mantra, that was it. Nobody knew me.

“Night’s the best time to work,” Jack said. “It sharpens the focus, don’t you think?” The focus on what, he didn’t say. But he did, finally, start to talk about Avi. “So,” he began. “Avi Perzin. You know he was interested in tracking satellites, right? Well, it seems that at some point, he went to a conference of amateur radio guys—hams, mostly, but also satellite trackers—and he heard someone give a presentation about a strange phenomenon that seemed related to satellite launches. Apparently, from the time that the Soviets launched the first Sputnik, people who were tracking satellites could hear the telemetry signal that the orbiters broadcast on the frequency that was given out to the public—the Soviets, in particular, always liked to do that; they especially liked amateur radio operators to track their launches because that provided independent verification of their feat—but they also could hear another, faint pinging on a different frequency. At least, the ones who were playing around with what amounts to homegrown radio astronomy, like your uncle. You do know he was doing that, right?”