Suddenly, without even having to turn around, I knew there was a presence standing behind me. Not a person, but a presence. And I knew what it was.

I didn’t move, but waited for it to show itself. After a few moments, I heard it move. I expected it to come face me, but instead, it sat down beside me and leaned against me in a familiar way.

For a little while longer, I kept my gaze fixed on the black obelisks across the water. When I finally turned my head, I saw that sitting next to me was a reddish gold-colored dog with a narrow muzzle and a narrower body. It had thin ears that stood up straight from the back of its tapered skull and a long tail that curved at the end like a whip. I had watched the occasional dog show on television so I thought I knew what kind of dog this was: a pharaoh hound. Hardly the kind of dog that would be wandering by itself around a deserted Brooklyn dockyard. Hardly a stray—but then, I didn’t for a moment try to convince myself that it was.

The dog leaned against me even harder. I nodded to acknowledge his presence, which I decided to accept as a kind of peace offering, and said, “I am going to try to help him. But you might tell him to be a little nicer to me.”

The dog turned to look straight at me with dark, glittering eyes. Then he stood up, shook himself, and ran off toward the horizon, toward the edge of the white sky.

~XVII~

The days went on. I slept, I got up, I walked my dog, I went to work and then came home and went through the cycle again. I was in a strange state, a kind of suspended animation, in which few sensations seemed to get through to me. Instead of being in the world, I felt like I was walking along a corridor just outside, seeing everything through a kind of filmy curtain. Sometimes, drifting through the motions of work or riding the bus or walking down the street, my mind would clear for a moment and I would be able to focus on what I was involved in and it would occur to me that maybe I had gone crazy. Maybe I was deluded. Maybe I was imagining things. Dogs were bringing me messages? An alien sitting in a room that was not really a room—not in this world, anyway—was waiting for me to give him back the lost component of an interstellar radio network? Beings who were not human were consumed with sending prayers into space in order to speak to God? Maybe instead of wasting my money on rent and food I should ask Jack to watch Digitaria for a while and check myself into some sort of clinic.

But it was actually Jack’s phone calls—he spoke to me now almost every day—that kept me tethered to the strange reality that was now the framework of my life. He was making progress building the repeater, and actually seemed to be enjoying himself, as if he, too, sometimes forgot the real purpose of his task. We talked about that one night, late, when he was off the air, and agreed that it was hard to hold the idea in mind of what we were really doing; the subject came up in the context of a surprising piece of information he wanted to share with me.

“Guess who wants to come on the show?” Jack asked.

“I can’t guess,” I said. “I just got back from work a little while ago. I’m too tired.”

“Raymond Gilmartin.”

That was a surprise—and it certainly got my attention. “Why?” I asked. “The last time you suggested that, he threw you out of his office.”

“You haven’t been listening to my show, have you?”

I hadn’t because once I found out how much it actually cost to buy the special radio you needed to listen to the satellite service, as well as to pay the subscription fee, I decided that I could live without it. I was kind of embarrassed to admit that to Jack, though. So, hemming and hawing, I said, “I’ve been meaning to sign up for the service, but . . .”

“Never mind,” Jack said. Maybe he’d guessed at the reason I wasn’t listening in or maybe he was just being nice—maybe both—because he immediately offered a way to fix what, to him, must have seemed like a problem that needed an immediate solution. “I’ll get you a radio and pay for the service. I should have at least one loyal listener.”

I said thanks and then waited for Jack to circle back to the subject of Raymond Gilmartin, which he did, almost immediately. What he told me was interesting, but I still didn’t think it explained much.

“I’ve been after them—the Blue Awareness—ever since Raymond kicked me out that night,” Jack said. “Well, before, of course, but that just made me . . . oh, let’s say, it made me even more pissed off. So I’ve had lots of ex-Awares on, and they’ve been pretty frank in revealing just about everything they know about the movement. I have to say, they’ve told some very interesting tales about Raymond, in particular. Apparently, he’s revised a lot of the Awareness doctrine to make it more to his liking. Howard Gilmartin was a grandiose, narcissistic paranoid, but the picture I’m getting is more of someone who wanted to play out his fantasies than a man who was deeply invested in having people create a cult around him. It’s Raymond who built a small group of followers into a worldwide movement. I’ve actually had on a number of people who joined the Blue Awareness when Howard was alive and left during Raymond’s tenure as the movement leader. They all say that Raymond is totally inflexible; you can’t disagree with him or question him in any way. For example, did you know he was the one who came up with the idea of engrams and Blue Boxes? He really believes that he has a duty—a mission—to make people adopt his beliefs.”

Though I hadn’t known these specific details, overall, I didn’t think the information was all that surprising. It seemed to go without saying that Raymond was picking and choosing from his father’s ideas then adding in his own to create a religion that suited his own strange view of the world and what lay beyond. But just as obviously, he was doing a very good job of it, because, from what I knew—and despite all the disgruntled followers Jack could find—people seemed to be joining the Blue Awareness in record numbers. So why bother to go on Jack’s show? Why give Jack that satisfaction—and the buzz it might create for his program? What was in it for Raymond?

I asked Jack that question and he said, “To be honest, I don’t care. Though I imagine he thinks he can get the better of me, just like he did last time.”

Oh boy, I found myself thinking. This is some guy thing. Jack Shepherd lost a fight with Raymond Gilmartin and now he wants to get back at him, no matter what.

“You’re not going to mention the repeater, are you?”

“Jesus, no,” Jack said. “Not to Gilmartin. That story is for later.”

Later? What did he mean? “Wait a minute,” I said. “You never even asked me about that. I wanted you to help me—not to talk about . . . well, about anything. Not on your show.” The idea made me panicky. My life was already weird enough without hearing it discussed on the radio. Helping shadow men send prayers out into the distant universe—that didn’t sound like how the ideal Endless Weekend employee should be spending her spare time. If the story got out, I could easily guess how quickly I would get fired.

“I would never mention your name,” Jack said.

“Oh, great. That makes me feel so much better.”

“Stop worrying, Laurie. Everything will be fine.”

“That’s what they say in the movies just before the psycho killers show up.”

Jack sighed. “We’ve got enough going on, don’t you think? Don’t bring up psycho killers.”

After we hung up, I went to sleep, got up the next morning, and the cycle of days began again, though after that phone call with Jack there was one big change in my life, and that involved my dog. Digitaria now seemed to be on edge all the time. For the first time since he’d been with me, I had to restrain him from lunging at people in the street whose look I guess he didn’t like. And at night, keeping his vigil at the edge of the bed, he’d sometimes make that odd yipping sound, but softly, as if he were talking to himself. You totally are crazy, I said to myself the first time I had that thought—Digitaria is talking to himself—and then rolled over and went back to the broken, fitful sleep that now characterized my nights.