Free Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman

bottom rungs of even this meager life you’re living.”
    So now we had come full circle, and were back to the place where Ravenette was going to unblock my psyche and free my soul to find its true path through life, blah, blah, blah. Listening to all this was making me angry; I felt like I was being played. “Look,” I said, “I think all this Blue Awareness stuff is fake. Fake and crazy and I don’t want to hear anymore about it, okay? Enough.”
    “You don’t even want to try the Blue Box?” Ravenette said, sounding suddenly sly. “If you went to a session at a Center, I’m sure they explained how helpful it can be in neutralizing engrams. It’s a long process, but generally people seem to feel better—less depressed, for example—even after one session.” Now she rose and walked over to a nearby cabinet, from which she removed something shaped like a shoebox and covered with muslin wrapping. From the way she held it, I could tell that it was heavy in her hands.
    She returned to the couch, put the object on the table in front of her and removed the wrapping. What I saw looked, indeed, like a blue metal box with a voltage meter on it. Attached to it by wires were two metal canisters, small enough to grip with your hands. At the Introduction to Awareness meeting I’d gone to years ago, they had presented a slide show that included pictures of a Blue Box and a description of how it worked: you gripped the metal canisters while discussing the circumstances of how your “engram” had evolved—or how you thought it had. During the discussion, the Blue Box directed a tiny electrical current through the wires, supposedly allowing the Aware to measure changes in your body’s electrical resistance. According to the doctrine of Blue Awareness, the resistance corresponds to the “mental mass and energy” of a person’s mind while they sort through the problems caused by their engram. Seeing the box and listening to this explanation had made me laugh; it was also the point at which I’d walked out of the meeting.
    “The process involved in using the Blue Box is called scanning,” Ravenette told me. “Usually, we only conduct scans at an Awareness Center, under the most strictly supervised conditions. But at my level, I’m allowed special privileges. We can try it out now, if you like.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told Ravenette. “I used to play with one of those when I was a kid.”
    She looked shocked. “That’s impossible,” she told me.
    “Well, I don’t think so, because I have one at home.”
    At least, I thought I did. I had moved around a lot, but the gadget I was thinking of had been with belongings I’d kept in my father’s house until he passed away, which was around the time I moved back to New York and retrieved my things. The device was another artifact of my Uncle Avi’s life. When he died, there was no one but my father—no other relative or close friend—to go through whatever possessions he left behind. I was a teenager then, and I had gone to Avi’s apartment with my father, who was feeling a great deal of remorse about his estrangement from his younger brother. They had reconciled when Avi had gone into the hospital to be treated for liver cancer, but the disease had run its course quickly and the two brothers had very little time left to spend together.
    The day my father and I spent cleaning out Avi’s place after he died was very sad. The apartment—the same one Avi had always occupied, in the same Bronx tenement where I had lived with my parents—was now pretty shabby. It consisted of just a few dim rooms with very little furniture but lots of books, papers, and a closet full of radios, parts of radios, and all kinds of equipment related to radios: antennas, coils of wire, transistors, vacuum tubes, soldering irons and anything else that might be used in building a radio receiver. Also stuck in with all this stuff was a black, shoebox-shaped device that I remembered