And began to spin. His feet dancing a mad kuchipudi in the muddy earth, he spun and spun, the men whirling around him. A face began to take form as he spun, a face that formed from the six faces that surrounded him, a face that hovered over a rotating array of decrepit bodies. It was a leering face, a triumphant face, a face of a man—or something a shade different than a man—who had more than a passing familiarity with cruelty. The boy felt his side pucker and pull, and then a gaping absence as the box broke free. Cold rushed into his body through the ragged hole. The box, purple and swollen and gelatinous, fluttered through the air, a winged leech, and the man’s tongue surged from his mouth and grabbed it, pulled it in. The man chewed, his eyes locked on the boy’s eyes. Blood sprayed from the man’s elongated mouth, trickled down from the corners.
The man’s many hands took the boy around the neck and under the chin and under the armpits. They lifted him from the earth, his feet still dancing below him, like the feet of a man being hanged. The man inspected him carefully. The song of the snakes, of warped trumpet blare and thundering drums, stormed the woods, bouncing from leaf to leaf, leaping among the high limbs, rising into the sky, surrounding the man and the boy, and it devolved into whimpers and shrieks and forlorn lamentations as the man began the work of taking the boy apart in order to make from him something altogether new.
She was late bringing Andrew back, again. It was always the same with Sheila. Operating on her own schedule, never minding the interruption of anyone else’s routine. “Self-absorbed,” was the phrase Matt’s attorney had used during the custody hearing—a perfectly applicable description, and with her legal history, enough to make the judge believe she was unfit.
He waited in the car, the air conditioner pouring mildly cool air over his sweating hands. Fifteen minutes turned into thirty, and his anger melted into fear. She’d threatened more than once to take his son from him. Could she have meant that literally, using the two-week summer visitation as cover for flying him across the country ? Was he in a plane already, his blonde hair dyed brown, rolling whatever new name she’d given him around on his lips ? Testing it out, happy for the chance to start over somewhere, without—
Four short horn beeps brought him back to the parking lot of McDonald’s, as her blue Mustang pulled up next to him. She motioned for him to put his window down. She wore rhinestone sunglasses and a satisfied smirk ringed with scarlet lipstick. Matt hadn’t wanted to smack someone so badly in years.
“Sorry we’re late. Traffic was just dreadful,” she said through the open window in that adopted Hollywood starlet accent he’d always hated. Andrew waved from the passenger seat. He looked brown and lean, maybe even taller.
“Most people would have called,” he told her. She shrugged and got out of her car. Andrew hopped out and went around to the trunk.
“Wait ’til you see what Mom gave me !” he exclaimed. He lifted the trunk lid and, with some difficulty, pulled out a large cardboard box. “It’s heavy !”
Matt took the box from him, tucking it under one arm while he grabbed his son’s suitcase with the other hand. The boy was taller. A trick of the light ? He looked Andrew up and down, studying him, measuring him. The high top sneakers and skinny jeans he wore gave an ever bigger illusion of height. New clothes, presented by Mommy Dearest—clothes he wouldn’t be able to wear at his new school, which Sheila would know if she ever bothered to check in with the father of her son. She never bothered to ask about Andrew’s grades, or his friends, or his problems.
“We’ve been listening to people in Russia and China and all over the place,” Andrew said. “Maybe even people in outer space !”
Matt put the box in his trunk as his son and ex-wife hugged their goodbyes. He heard them whispering conspiratorially, but his relief at having his son within arm’s reach kept him from interfering. She was, no doubt, promising something outrageous, something only Mommy could deliver. Sheila couldn’t seem to mail a simple support check every month, but could show up with expensive gifts when it suited her interests.
It wasn’t until the blue Mustang was a small dot in his rear-view mirror that Matt finally relaxed and began to focus on the excited ramblings of his son. He reached into the back seat and squeezed the boy’s knee. “I missed you, kiddo.”
“Missed you too, Dad. And then we walked on the beach and I almost stepped on a jellyfish because they were all over the place and they look like plastic wrap when they’re dead and we made biscuits and listened to the radio some more and then I fell asleep in the hammock. Can I keep the radio in my room, please Dad, please ?” The earnest and nervous look on his son’s face required an immediate response.
Matt replied quickly, without thinking. “Of course. You can keep it . . . wherever you can find room in the mess.” He smiled and settled back in his seat, relaxed and happy once again, as he prepared to share the next three hours participating in his ten-year-old’s dramatic recreation of “how I spent my summer vacation.” It was good to be a dad.
***
“You cleaned it,” Andrew whined. He turned and peered at Matt over the tops of his glasses—one of Sheila’s signature gestures of disapproval, and one Matt hoped the boy wouldn’t have learned this quickly.
“If by cleaning you mean I washed all the dirty laundry, threw out the half-eaten apple cores, and put your socks back into the drawer—in matching sets—then yes, I cleaned your room.”
“Those were science experiments.” Andrew shrugged.
“They were biohazards and now it’s safe to sleep here again. Where do you want this box ? It’s heavy.”
“It’s a radio.” Andrew guided his father over to a rectangular table and single chair. “Put it on the desk, here.”
“A radio ? Feels like a whole stereo system.” Matt set the box on the floor and Andrew ripped off a strip of packing tape. “Didn’t I buy you a radio last year ?”
“Not that kind of radio, Dad. It’s . . . well, it’s just different.” With well-disguised difficulty, he lifted a massive brown suitcase from the box and placed it gently on the desk. He unfastened two clasps on the top and the front panel folded down to reveal a series of dials and knobs flanking a large speaker with a dusty grill. Matt recognized the hardware as similar to the old short wave radio his father had kept in their garage. The model on Andrew’s desk was vintage, but in remarkably good condition. Surely too valuable to give to a child.
“Where did she get this ?” he asked, not expecting the boy to know.
Andrew flipped a switch and a loud burst of static filled the room. He quickly turned two of the dials and the volume dropped. A man’s voice spoke in a slow monotone.
“She got it from her church, at some bake sale,” Andrew said. “And before you get mad—no, I didn’t go to church with her. She said that was part of the bargain.”
Part of the agreement, Matt corrected, mentally. The only issue regarding their son where they’d both agreed : leaving religion out of his life, at least until he could explore the options and decide for himself.
“I just don’t want anyone filling your head with . . . well, you’ll understand later.” Damn Sheila and her 12-step program. She’d been content to be both an atheist and an alcoholic for the last twenty years. Why did she have to change now, in front of their son ?
“I think this guy’s Mexican,” Andrew said, squinting to show he was listening closely, but not to his father.
“Those are numbers,” Matt said, mentally translating the spoken Spanish : 15, 5, 11, 22, 9.
“Yeah, a lot of the stations are like that. Mom says they’re spies and they’re talking in code. It doesn’t make any sense unless you have a key, but I don’t know where you’d put the key in this thing. Maybe in the bottom ?”
“She’s means a key code, not a key for a lock.” Matt smiled. “Like how you’re supposed to tell the alarm people ‘Aunt Ellen can’t come to the phone’ if someone breaks into the house. Only you and me and the alarm peopl
e have the ‘key’—we know what it means, but the bad guys don’t.”
“I’ll bet I can break the code, Dad. Maybe we can do it together. For home school.”
Matt’s smile faded. “We talked about this, kiddo. Until I get enough clients of my own, I have to work at the office. You’ll like your new school. They have a great science program, a huge library, and I think they even have an archery club.” He tried to sound upbeat and reassuring, but the truth was, he was just as nervous about it as his son. “This school—they’re used to smart kids like you. You’ll fit in there, I promise.”
“But Dad, they have this school on the internet where you do all your classes on the computer. I mean, I could do them at the library if you didn’t want me at home with you.” The boy’s eyes were wide, pleading.
Matt sighed. “Andrew, I’d love to be home with you all day, I really would. But I just can’t right now. And you need to be with other kids your age. You need friends.”
“You don’t have any friends, and you’re fine.”
I’m nowhere near fine, Matt wanted to say. I’m a 40-year-old single dad who has no idea how to relate to the only person in the universe who matters. Instead he said, “We can talk about it later. Right now, I’m gonna get dinner started.”
Andrew shrugged and Matt closed the door behind him, the spoken trail of Spanish numbers fading with each step he took away from his son.
***
After yawning repeatedly at the dinner table, Andrew declared himself “absolutely exhausted,” another of Sheila’s famous phrases, and decided to turn in early, foregoing his usual evening video game time. Matt cleaned up the kitchen, did two loads of the boy’s laundry—laundry Sheila certainly could have done at her house rather than simply packing the soiled clothing in plastic grocery sacks in his suitcase,—and finally sat back down at the kitchen table with a cold beer and a house full of quiet.
But it wasn’t completely quiet. He could hear a voice down the hallway—a woman’s voice, talking in a quiet monotone, as if reading from a list. Matt got up and followed the sounds to his son’s room, to the giant radio sitting on the desk, its dial illuminated by a soft yellow light. The volume was low, but loud enough he could make out numbers, in German this time, coming from the metal grill of the speaker. The voice was unaccented, but scratchy and faint, as though the station was imprecisely or incompletely tuned in.
Matt reached out and turned the tuning dial a fraction of an inch. The voice diminished. He turned it the other way and the signal grew stronger, but a tinny overlay obscured the timbre of the voice and distorted it. He spun the dial with his finger and watched as the red needle identifying the station slid sideways to settle around 9000. There was a moment’s pause, and then the radio’s speaker began to vibrate with a low thrumming. The sound recalled one of Matt’s worst career nightmares. It was a sound he could still hear in his ears in times of high stress : the low-pitched groan of steel and concrete fighting to remain stable and upright.
Andrew had not been more than a baby at the time, and Sheila had only just begun to explore the first of her alcohol-influenced affairs. Matt was the lead engineer on a power plant job, designing and overseeing the installation of a federally-mandated smokestack scrubber unit to remove sulfur emissions from the plant’s exhaust. On paper, the scrubber was brilliant—efficient and less expensive than competing designs. In person, it looked like massive scaffolding holding up dozens of shower heads, stick legs with their claws hooked into holes in the walls.
When the unit’s operator threw the switch, before the first mists could even pass through the pipe, a low booming noise tore through the ground, followed in the air by a metallic scream. This unholy duo of sounds preceded a vibration so strong, it made standing upright almost impossible. The noise imprinted in Matt’s mind, in the moment before the operator threw the emergency stop. It was the sound of metal pushed beyond its limits. The sound of a flawed design. The sound of failure.
Matt slammed his fingers over the tuning dial and the sound cut off abruptly. He watched with dismay as the red needle flew unfettered towards the other side of the display. He’d broken it. The noise was gone, but now so was the tension on the tiny wire which controlled the tuning. Andrew would be furious when he found out.
He glanced at the desk surface to see if maybe, just maybe, there was an instruction manual or a troubleshooting guide. But the only papers near the radio were loose-leaf notebook pages covered front to back with lists of numbers. Matt picked up one of the pages and squinted at it, trying to read the pencil marks in the dim glow. The page was titled “16084” and consisted of lines of single-digit numbers. The first sets of numbers were crowded together in clumsy blocks, but by the bottom of the page the spacing was more regular and the repeats more obvious. Andrew’s spy codes. He dropped the sheet of paper back on the desk, and flipped off the radio’s power switch. As the light faded, he leaned down to kiss his son’s cheek, pale as milk in the moonlight and so closely resembling his own that for a moment, Matt saw his ten-year-old self under the blanket, just as lonely and frustrated.
“I’ll make it up to you, kiddo,” he whispered. “I’ll make it right.”
***
When Andrew failed to answer the third call to come to breakfast, Matt yanked the kitchen towel he wore on his shoulder while cooking, rolled it into a whip-shape and yelled, “Anybody not at this table in five seconds is getting a beating.”
“Just one more minute !” came the faint, but clearly annoyed, reply.
“Now, mister ! While your omelet’s still warm.”
He poured a glass of milk for himself, another for his son, and sat down, drumming his fingers on the table. He counted to ten before standing up, throwing down the towel, and walking back to Andrew’s bedroom. Before he could open the door, the boy came flying out and slammed the door shut.
“Morning, Dad. You got pancakes ?” He disappeared into the kitchen and gave a loud groan. “Eggs ? Really ? Is there at least bacon ?”
Matt opened the bedroom door and saw the radio on the desk, powered on and jabbering—a woman’s voice, staccato and unpracticed, imperfectly reading a series of single-digit numbers in English this time. The voice stumbled over some of the numbers and was interrupted briefly by curls of white noise. Even distorted, the voice seemed familiar to him, yet he couldn’t place it.
A new page lay on the desk, this one labeled “9086” and filled with another series of numbers, but with blocks of them outlined in black marker, and a sequence circled and annotated with three stars.
“Don’t you have to go to work today ?” Andrew called from the kitchen. Matt tossed the paper down on the desk and closed the door behind him, still trying to identify the woman’s voice.
“I’m going in later. After I drop you off.”
“I can ride my bike to the Y. I don’t need a ride.”
Andrew had finished the omelet and was in the middle of a blueberry muffin still in its wrapper.
“You’re not going to the Y today. You have an appointment at Highland Prep Academy. You’re getting a tour and meeting your advisor, and then maybe tonight we can do mini-golf.”
Andrew dropped the muffin on the table.
“I don’t want to go to any school today ! It’s still summer ! And you said I could home school !”
“I said we’d talk about it, and I’m not ruling it out for later, but Highland is a great school. And until I can work from home full-time, it’s the best I can do, kiddo.” Matt reached out to pat his son’s shoulder, but the boy pulled away.
“Can’t I just stay here and listen to my radio ? I’ve almost got the code broke !”
Broke. The radio tuner. Shit.
“You’re still playing with that ?”
“I’m not playing with it. It’s educational.”
“I know that, and I didn’t mean . . . Well you know, we should take it in and get it looked at. Antique electronics like that need care.
Maintenance.”
“It works just fine, Dad.”
Matt breathed an imperceptible sigh of relief. His son hadn’t noticed yet.
“What are you listening to ?”
“Numbers.”
“The spy numbers ?”
Andrew frowned. “These are different. It’s a new station I didn’t hear before. I know it’s a message though, because it repeats a lot. I’ve almost got it figured out.”
“You can work on it this evening. You can have all night after dinner and I won’t bother you, I promise.” He tried again to reach his son’s shoulder but Andrew was already slipping past him, closed-mouthed and iron-willed.
Be strong, he told himself. He needs you to be a parent, not a friend. He needs you to be strong.
Sometimes, it was so hard being a dad.
***
“Now that’s a blast from the past !”
The clerk at The Ham Shack didn’t look old enough to have a conscious memory of any “past” before the year 2000, and in Matt’s eyes, the sun-bleached curls and Hawaiian shirt made him look more like a surfer than an electronics wizard. His name tag read “Tyler,” one of the names Sheila had suggested for their son.
“Yeah, I spoke to somebody on the phone about this earlier. About the tuner.” Matt lifted the radio up and placed it on the counter. “I think the wire might be broken.”
Tyler stroked his fingers over the wooden case before unbuckling the clasps. “Yeah, the antique short-wave. Man, this is a beauty,” he said. “I’ve never seen one of these in such good shape. It work ?”
“I guess, other than the tuner. My ex-wife found it for my son, and he’s been playing with it.”
“How old’s the boy ?”
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