“So you say,” Gilmartin replied. “At the moment, however, you happen to be right. I do want you to stop talking. In fact, I want you to get out of my office.”
Suddenly the door opened. I had no idea how Gilmartin had signaled for her, but the cheery young woman who had led us to Gilmartin’s office was now standing in the entrance, looking much more officious. Her smile was gone and her posture was stiff.
Jack stood up, but he wasn’t about to leave just yet. “Sure you don’t want to duke this out on my show? Come on,” he said. “Mano a mano.” Then he directed a sardonic smile at Gilmartin. “You did know I still have a show, didn’t you? I start in a couple of weeks on World Air. Unless you’re planning to buy all the communications satellites, too—though come to think of it, maybe that would be better for you than a dog. They’d be like Blue Boxes, circling Earth. You could set them to send signals that would have everyone’s engrams running wild. Think of the power you’d have.”
“Good night,” Gilmartin said quietly. And then he looked at me as if, anticipating the next thing Jack was going to say, he wanted to see every phase of my reaction.
“Let’s go, Laurie,” Jack said. It sounded like an order.
It was actually the dog who turned his head first, reacting, I guess, to the sound of my name. That gave me an extra moment to think about my response. All the while, I was very conscious of Raymond Gilmartin, and how intensely he was looking at me.
“Not yet,” I finally said to Jack. “I’ll meet you at the car in a little while.”
I saw the color rise to his face. He hadn’t expected me to refuse to follow him and, clearly, that was adding to his anger. Without saying another word, he stalked out of the room. The young woman followed after him, closing the door behind her. Now I was alone with Raymond Gilmartin.
He made no comment about Jack, but finally broke his stare. Once more, he looked down at the rock. Touching a fingertip to the diagram above the heads of the carved figures he said, “Do you recognize this? It’s the constellation Canis Major.”
He was right. I recognized the Great Dog who hunts with Orion, since I had seen the constellation so many times, at night, waiting for the bus to take me home from work.
“And here’s Sirius,” he said, pointing to the largest dot in the diagram. “The Dog Star. You can’t see it, but there’s another tiny pinprick next to Sirius. That’s its companion star, Digitaria.”
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.