“I doubt that anything the Blue Awareness does happens without his say-so. And this is how they are, this is what they do. It’s bad enough if you’re just a regular member and turn against them. But if you’re someone like me—someone with a public platform—I guess they view that as a real threat. So I’d say we’re way beyond their issues with you now. Way beyond.”
I looked out the window, into the dusty haze of sunshine that had spread itself across the sky, all the way to the horizon. We were almost alone in the diner now. This was the dead time, the half hour or so before morning rolled over into afternoon when no one was ready to sit down and eat lunch yet, or grab more coffee. One waitress was outside taking a cigarette break; another was sitting at the counter, slowly going through a pile of receipts.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m flying out to LA this afternoon; that’s where Coast-to-Coast has its headquarters. I’ve got a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of programming. I want him to tell me to my face that they’re thinking of dropping my show. It can’t be anything financial because I bring in plenty of ad revenue and as far as I know, they don’t have any trouble selling my commercial slots. But just in case this Blue Star deal does go through, I’ve also got a meeting scheduled with the World Air satellite people. They might be interested in carrying my program,” he said. Suddenly, a kind of lopsided grin appeared on his face. “I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I guess that’s a little weird—given the context. A satellite radio company might just save the day.”
“Well,” I said. “Maybe Avi’s pulling some strings somewhere.”
“A ghost with influence? He’d make a great posthumous guest for the first satellite show.”
I drank some of the coffee that had been brought to me before the lull and started picking at Jack’s plate of cold eggs. “All this is totally crazy,” I said. “I wish there was a way to just . . . I don’t know. Make it all go away.”
“Too late,” Jack said. “You can’t un-know things.”
“Sometimes I wish I could.”
“Yeah, sometimes we all wish that. But maybe it’s better to be . . .”
I couldn’t help myself; I finished his sentence for him. “Better to be what? Aware?”
He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Yes. Aware. But promise me you won’t go over to the other side while I’m away, all right?”
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” I replied.
Jack had driven to the diner but had decided that he didn’t really want to leave his car at one of the public lots at the airport, so he asked me to do him a favor by taking care of it for a few days. I said sure, so he paid the bill and then I rode with him to the airport, where we said good-bye and I took over the wheel. I drove the car along the looping roads that ran around the outskirts of the terminals to a distant spot I knew, near the huge sheds where salt and snowplows were locked up during the warmer months. There was an employee parking lot here, where I was able to leave the car and then catch one of the airline courtesy vans back toward the main area of the airport. I was early for my shift, so I sat around in the back of the bar for a while, near the lockers, reading a book. It was a spy novel and I had been absorbed by it, but suddenly it just couldn’t hold my attention anymore. Compared to my own life, the spy’s problems seemed easily solvable. Make a few well-placed phone calls. Shoot someone. Or else say, I give up. Or maybe, if it seemed like it would work better in certain circumstances, I give in.
TWO DAYS later, I had a rare Saturday off. I woke up feeling restless—something that seemed to be happening to me more and more lately—and wandered around my apartment for a while, picking things up and putting them down somewhere else. I was sort of hungry but sort of not. I thought that if I took the dog out for a while I’d work up an appetite, so I put on his leash and led him out of the building. We wandered up toward Queens Boulevard, where I bought some breakfast concoctions at a McDonald’s and then walked back to my neighborhood.
It was a mild day, but overcast. I didn’t feel like going back inside, so I sat on the stoop, sharing the food I’d bought with my dog. After a while, one of Sassouma’s children—a boy of around fourteen—came out of the building, walking the family’s little dust-colored pet. I said hello to the boy, who solemnly smiled back at me. A moment later, Digitaria turned his head and pointed it upward, seeming to sniff the air above the other dog, which did much the same thing, as if both animals somehow occupied a larger space than their actual size would suggest. Then, without any further interaction between them, Digitaria went back to eating part of a biscuit while the other dog quietly followed his owner away, down the block.
I watched them go and then returned to my own thoughts, which, much like my earlier behavior in my apartment, went from one thing to another without lighting anywhere. The problem was that I still felt like I couldn’t settle down. Eventually, it occurred to me that since I had Jack’s car, maybe Digitaria and I could go for a ride somewhere. Maybe the beach, I decided. My last visit to Rockaway, odd and unhappy as it was, had been months ago—long enough to use my talent for dissembling to pretend it hadn’t happened. Besides, I suddenly had a strong yearning to go back, which I decided meant that my happy memories of summers at the beach were reoccupying their rightful place in my mind, which seemed like a good thing to me. When I was a child, I had liked gray days at the beach almost as much as sunny ones. Days that were slightly gloomy were tailor-made for reading or just sitting on the boardwalk, watching the waves stretch themselves toward the shore and then slowly slide back, as if into a great, gray bowl, pulling shells and pebbles with them. Besides, I had recently read in the newspaper about how, after decades of neglect, urban development was finally coming to Rockaway, though the area targeted for gentrification was much farther up the peninsula from where my family used to spend their summers at the Sunlite Apartments. Two or three miles away from that desolate spot, condo developers were putting up new townhouses, building gated communities that were supposedly going to bring this old working class getaway back to some semblance of its former respectability. Why not go see how that was coming along? At least, it would give me something to do with the restless energy that, so far, had been the animating feature of my day. And because I had the car, the dog could ride along with me. On pet food commercials I’d seen on TV, people were always taking their dogs for walks along the beach. Both the people and the pets seemed to enjoy it; maybe we would, too.
I gave the last bites of my breakfast to Digitaria and then led him to Jack’s car, which I had parked a few blocks away. After I unlocked the passenger-side door, he jumped right in and faced forward, giving every impression that he was familiar with the idea of car rides. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition and tuned the radio to a station that was playing some hard-line rock and roll.
“We’re going to the beach,” I said to my dog. “You’re going to get to chase some seagulls.” At the sound of my voice, Digitaria turned to me, but then quickly went back to looking out the window. “So here we go,” I said, as I eased the car out of its parking spot and headed toward Woodhaven Boulevard, which I could follow to Cross Bay Boulevard and out across the causeways and bridges that led to Rockaway.
It was a drive of about forty-five minutes. The last part of the trip took us across a toll bridge that grabbed onto the peninsula right in the middle, on the bay side. Turning left would lead me to the streets where I had spent my summers. Turning right took me in an unfamiliar direction, up toward the northern end of the peninsula which, even years ago, had always been the more affluent area.
At the termination of the bridge, I took the unfamiliar turn to the right. At first, as I drove along, I saw what I expected: a few surf shops, some bars and restaurants, the usual street scene of a seaside town. But then, finally—as if the photos I had seen in the newspaper had sprung into life—I found myself driving past block after block of newly erected townhouses painted the color of foam, decorated with trim work in sandy hues. Some of the buildings were shingled like a glossy magazine’s vision of coastal cottages, some bristled with balconies and faux widow’s walks. It certainly didn’t look like the ruined neighborhood I had encountered last winter, nor did it in any way resemble the Rockaway I remembered from childhood. This was something new, something created to fit a new reality, new people, new money. I felt like a complete stranger here, completely out of place.