“Ravenette. I didn’t say there was a God. He did.”

“I don’t believe that. It’s you—all this is coming from you. There’s no other explanation.”

After making this declaration, Ravenette began screaming at me to leave, to get out of the loft. She was working herself into a rage, repeating to me over and over again that my mind was perverted, my spirit too dangerous for her to be around for another second. I was just rising to my feet when she suddenly lunged at me as if to literally push me toward the door.

But she had forgotten about the dog. Lying at my feet, he had seemed to be fast asleep, but in the moment that Ravenette came toward me, he jumped up and positioned himself between us. Then he began to howl, producing the same threatening, high-pitched yipping that I remembered from the time that we had been confronted by the men in the blue van. It was worse than a growl, more frightening because the sound seemed to enter your body and make your blood sizzle. And, I realized, it now carried with it an even more familiar marker: the same high-frequency tone that had distorted Ravenette’s voice when she was speaking for the radioman. Or, as she had now decided, when she was speaking for my supposedly dangerous engram.

The dog stopped Ravenette from advancing toward me, but she continued to demand that I leave. There was no point in staying, anyway, no point in trying to talk to her any further. I took hold of the dog’s leash and tried to lead him away, but it took all my strength to get him to move. He bared his teeth and continued to howl at Ravenette until I finally managed to pull him into the elevator.

He calmed down when we were back on the street, but then he started panting and couldn’t seem to stop. I hadn’t even yet started to process everything that had just happened but my first thought was that I’d better get Digitaria some water before he keeled over. It was about two thirty in the morning now—but two thirty in the morning in New York—so there were still plenty of places open. There were half a dozen people hanging around outside a bar down the block and across the street, a brightly lit minimart had its door wide open.

I was about to step off the curb and head toward the store when I felt someone brush past me. I turned around and saw the same girl in the short silver skirt that I had encountered earlier. She had an odd look on her face. When I’d seen her before, I’d thought she seemed dreamy, but now . . . her eyes seemed vacant, her features slack. I thought she probably wanted to pet the dog again but I wasn’t in the mood for that right now, so I moved away from her. Turning back in the direction of the minimart, I once again went to step off the curb but somehow—and seemingly, impossibly—there was the girl again, standing right in front of me.

“Excuse me,” I said, as I went to walk around her. But as I did, her eyes grew bright and her body seemed to stiffen. My dog had an immediate, but completely unexpected reaction to the change in her body language: he stopped panting and began to wag his tail.

The girl in the silver skirt, however, paid no attention to him. She stepped in front of me again and pushed her face close to mine. Then, opening her mouth wider than seemed humanly possible, she let out a long, high-pitched hiss.

~XVI~

So listen, sister, do damaged, perverted engrams generally manifest themselves in other people? Do they hiss at you when you’re walking down the street? I so much wanted to go back up to Ravenette’s loft, grab her by the throat and start screaming at her myself that I almost turned around and rang every intercom button on the door until someone let me in. But what would be the point of getting into a debate with her? The reality of the only world she would accept was the one described by the beliefs of the Blue Awareness, so arguing with her would have been a waste of time. Besides, what would I be arguing for? The existence of an alien being in some parallel universe who had seemingly lost some piece of equipment that he needed to send prayers out into infinity? It sounded crazy even to me, but I was at the point—far past it, really—when I had no choice but to accept that it was so. Perhaps more than anything, it was the way the dog was reacting that made it impossible for me to come up with any other explanation. On some level, somewhere deeply encoded in the flesh and chemicals of which he was made, he was recognizing the presence of another being, a consciousness that was familiar to him. And that consciousness had communicated its purpose, or at least, what it perceived its purpose to be. That much seemed clear.

But it was also extremely bizarre. Aliens, prayers, perhaps even the existence—or the search?—for God himself. How was I supposed to incorporate all this into what I understood my life to be? How was I supposed to get on the bus in the afternoon, spend the night in an airport bar mixing up Cosmos and then go home to watch the late night infomercials knowing that behind some sort of screen—some divide between the reality I could see and something else I could not—things were going on that I simply could never comprehend? The tiny glimpse I had been given of that other reality, which could even be one of many, of an infinite number, was just enough to make it impossible for me to use my most powerful survival tool: the ability to compartmentalize, to deny what I did not want to know about. Or else to simply run away, as would have been my instinct when I was younger, because there was no “away” that I could get to. Not only was there no longer a hippie trail to follow (maybe there was still some commune, some network of crash pads somewhere, that welcomed forty-plus-year-olds, but I had no idea how or where to find them), but even if there were, I had a feeling that now, whether I was walking down a rural road in the back of beyond or wandering on a city street, I would hear that high-pitched, sizzling hiss come out of the mouth of a driver passing by in a car or a child on a swing. Or maybe a hawk swooping down from the windy sky. I would hear it until I helped the radioman get what he wanted, even if I had no idea what that might be.

All of this, all these thoughts and images, flashed through my mind as the girl in the silver skirt slowly turned away from me and drifted slowly down the sidewalk, as if nothing had happened. I watched her go for a moment, trying to collect myself. I looked around to see if anyone on the street had reacted to her bizarre behavior, but no one seemed to have paid her, or me, any attention. It was just another latenight scene in the city, another weird interaction that came and went.

After a while, as if I were on automatic pilot, I continued on my way to carry out the interrupted errand that I had set for myself. I crossed the street to the convenience store, where I bought a bottle of water and let the dog lap some out of my cupped hands. Then I took his leash and started walking, looking for a cab.

I thought I might find some gypsy cabs cruising around this neighborhood because it was home to a lot of after-hours clubs, but at this time of night, the drivers working these streets would be looking for high-end fares; I’d never get one to take me home for what I could afford to pay. So instead, I hailed a regular yellow cab and asked him to take me to Queens. I was already in the back seat with the dog next to me when the driver told me forget it, get out, he wasn’t crossing bridges or heading off into the outer boroughs. I knew why—for a metered cab, the trip back would turn out to be a waste; no one would flag him down to get back to Manhattan. But it was also illegal to refuse me and I wasn’t in the mood to play.