Electric Elizabeth: A Novel

by Vincent C. Martinez

  The emergency radio popped and buzzed. I reached over and turned up the volume.

  "I'm going to find her," I said.

  Claire nodded and whispered, "Okay."

  ***

  Throughout the house, I tuned radios to quiet frequencies, I turned up telephone ringers, I kept the television tuned to static and hum bars, I left the computer on, the word processor open, the front porch light on.

  I sat in the studio as the days went from yellow mornings to pale afternoons to purple twilights and black nights. I watched the road out front, the cemetery out back, the street that snaked up to The Heights. I limped around the yard with the emergency radio in my hand, cranking the battery to full capacity, aiming the fully extended antenna at random points until I heard ear-splitting crashes, and I'd stand in place, arms outstretched, volume turned high. I'd listen for her voice, her laugh. Sometimes there'd only be oceans of static, rising and falling like tides. Sometimes, the white noise would become silent, the speaker would hum, and she'd float over the frequency and into my ears.

  "Where are you, Darling? Please find me."

  ***

  I held the disc in my hands and stood in the doorway. The morning sky was becoming heavy with gray clouds, and the air smelled of late winter rain. I shivered from the cold as Claire stood on the porch in her gray barn coat.

  "Would you like to come in?" I asked.

  "No thanks," Claire said. "I—I'm getting back to the Banner."

  "How're things there?"

  "Busy. We're trying to cover your section as best we can," she said. "You left those two essays, and we ran those."

  "I didn't finish the series," I said.

  "We know, but we're running out of material."

  "I have other essays. Quite a few. Up on the computer. I'll need to write the third essay, but I only have notes."

  "We could sure use anything that you think'll work," Claire said. "Some asked us if you're going to write about, you know, Liz." Claire glanced at the disc in my hands.

  "Haven't thought about it," I said.

  "Okay, that's . . . fine." We stood in silence before Claire backed away and asked, "Do you need anything, Milt? You've only been at home for the past couple weeks. You need food or a ride anywhere?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Well . . . you call us if you do, all right?"

  "Sure," I said, turning the disc in my hands. "Sure." I stepped back inside, closed the door, and walked past the hallway mirror on my way to the living room, not noticing that I'd been wearing the same clothes for an entire week.

  ***

  I watched the disc repeatedly, the color security camera footage clear and sharp. I watched Liz and I walk to the front of Leed's, watched us stop, watched Liz turn away, then turn to me and back away. Watched her lift her hand and reach out to me, watched me reach out to her, watched the bright flash that blinded the camera and shook the camera mount and threw me through the front window, glass falling like hail. Watched my body roll over glass shards, my hair and skin smoking.

  Watched the space where Liz had stood remain empty.

  I replayed the footage again, slowed it when Liz turned, stopped it when she held up her hand. I walked over to the television and touched the video image of her hand with mine, static crackling under my fingertips. I sat on the floor, running my hand over her image, whispering her name. I moved my hand away, lifting dust from the screen. I pulled off my shirt and ran it over the screen, clearing the dust from her final image before I stopped and examined her hand.

  Her palm faced outwards, not parallel to the ground to reach out to me.

  Perpendicular, as if she was trying to stop me.

  ***

  My bedside telephone rang that night, and my heart leapt from the sudden shock. I rolled over and lifted the handset to my ear.

  The line buzzed and purred. There was electromechanical thumping, regular and steady, and then there was Liz's soft voice: "Darling, find me."

  "Liz?" I whispered. The thumping sounded again, and the line fell quiet. "Liz?"

  I don't remember how many times I spoke her name into the mouthpiece, but I eventually hung up and dialed the number the telephone company had given me to start a trace. Afterwards, I hung up and lay in bed, holding Liz's pillow to my face, breathing in the scent of her shampoo and perfume until dawn arrived, its deep red light painting every wall and corner.

  I got up and walked to the computer in the study, leaving the bed sheets twisted and falling to the dusty floor. I sat in the chair that Liz had once filled during her late night sessions— her nose in a book, her pens scribbling madly in the margins—awakened the computer from sleep mode, and searched the networks for information about radio signals, electrical signals, electromagnetic fields, antennas, telephones, and lightning.

  Chapter Fifteen

  One of the first things I learned was that Slinkys made good antennas, and I remembered I still had one stuffed in a box deep in the darkness of the basement. I found it wedged between old bath towels next to the water heater, and I found the toolbox just behind it. I grabbed both and hauled them up the creaking basement steps.

  Dad had an old soldering kit with a functioning iron and a roll of aging solder. I sat at the kitchen table that day, radios and televisions on in every room, filling the house with white noise, and practiced touching the filler to the iron, cleaning the iron tip, joining small circuits into workable meringue-like connections. At times, the iron would slip and singe my thumb and middle finger or would roll onto the table and burn holes through the cloth, but I continued touching tip to filler, filler to practice wire, wiping the tip on the cleaning pad, completing connection after connection, stopping only when the house lights flickered or when Liz danced over the channels. And when she stopped, I returned to the iron.

  The emergency radio had a socket in the back into which an external antenna could be plugged, and in the radio's box was a small plastic packet with two small external antenna leads. I pulled one out, connected the Slinky to it then soldered them together. I strung the Slinky on the wall over the living room loveseat, secured it into place with heavy staples, and stretched one end of it down to the end table beside the loveseat. I inserted the end into the back of the radio, turned the crank until it was fully charged, and turned it on.

  The speaker came alive with static and muted splashovers from nearby stations. I turned the dial to find a quiet spot, and her voice phased into shape. A whisper, a giggle, an echoing "Darling?" bouncing in the ether.

  I sat on the loveseat, leaned close to the radio, and held the speaker against my ear as she called to me repeatedly, telling me to find her. I spoke into the speaker, asked it questions, asked it to speak to me, but her voice would fade in and out, always saying the same thing like a repeating beacon.

  All night I turned the radio crank, and I sat in the darkened living room, leaving only to find and eat whatever food was in the refrigerator, leaving the plates in the sink or on the table. As I began to doze at midnight, I concluded a small hand-crank emergency radio wouldn't be of much help. I needed a real radio, real antennas, real tools to locate, fix, and find her. Real tools to bring her back to me.

  ***

  Claire hunched over the steering wheel of her too-large silver sport utility vehicle and shot quick glances at me. "You're not eating, are you?" she said as the vehicle bounced over a pothole in Gemini Street. The homes flew past in a drab-colored blur, taking on a foreign quality that always happens when you take in details passively.

  "I'm eating," I said, looking in the passenger-side mirror. I'd only slipped on a pair of worn black jeans and an old blue Coxton College sweatshirt before calling Claire to see if she could give me a quick ride somewhere. My face was pale, my hair washed but uncombed, my eyes red and sunken. In my thin gray coat I had a pocket filled with folded paper from information I'd pulled off various computer networks: radio models, types, price range
s. I'd found one and called ahead to Blackbridge Radio and Electronics to see if they had one or one like it in stock.

  Claire shifted her glance from me to the road ahead, then back to me. "You feeling okay, physically?"

  "I can walk better. My head hurts, my back hurts."

  "And why're we going to the radio shop, or should I not ask?"

  "I need to get something.

  "I gather that. Wouldn't happen to be a big shortwave or ham radio, would it?" When I glanced at her, she nodded. "We kind of figured that."

  "'We'?"

  "Me and Bent. When he heard about what you told me, he knew right off the bat what you were going to do. Weird. He said you were probably stringing the house with wires right now."

  I turned away to watch the street blur again.

  "You are, aren't you? Jesus, Milt." The vehicle rumbled over snow-loosed pavement and road seams. "Any more phone calls?" she asked.

  "I get them every day. Six, seven times a day. I call the trace number, but haven't heard anything from the police so far."

  "The voice . . . still saying the same thing?"

  "Over and over."

  "This sounds wrong, Milt. Wrong as in someone's up to something. Bent even says you need to stop now. He's worried you'll get sucked into this and never come out."

  "I didn't know he was an expert on these things," I said.

  "He says you'll buy radios and antennas and you'll get lost in your own little obsessive world."

  "If he's worried I won't have time to write for him," I said, "he doesn't have to. I'm finishing up new pieces for him. I have several pieces that only need some editing. I'll send them when they're done."

  "I don't think he's worried about that," Claire said as we stopped at an intersection. "It's like he's been detailing every little thing that's going to happen to you next, saying it over and over. And when he starts talking about it, well. . . ."

  "Well what?"

  Claire sighed. "It's like he gets lost in his own little world." She turned the vehicle onto Crow Street and parked across the street from the electronics store. She turned off the engine, and I stared at Leed's Clothing Store a couple of buildings down the street. I opened the door, stepped onto the sidewalk, and limped to Leed's, Claire following at a distance.

  Springwear lined the windows, light jackets and shirts. Inside, a sign announced thirty percent off winter clothing, and dark figures moved about until one noticed me and pointed. The figures stopped, watching me stand on the sidewalk. The new thick glass reflected my pale face and the street behind me. Claire stood close to the curb, watching with sad eyes.

  The spot where Liz had stood was bare, gray concrete. No sign of scorch marks, no gouges, no scrapes, only thin weathered cracks and silica sparkling in the morning sun like earth-bound stars. No marks to show where she'd been or to show where she held out a hand to me and mouthed something before everything became white.

  ***

  I dropped the box on the kitchen table and cut it open with a steak knife. Claire offered to carry in the large bag holding the cable and wire spools, and she pulled out a chair and carefully laid the bag on it. As I pulled out packing materials and tossed them onto the floor, Claire looked around at the plates in the sink and on the table, the soldering iron and solder wire pushed to one side of the table, the snips of wiring on the floor, the pad next to the telephone marked with the times of each telephone call, the countertop AM/FM radio hissing static on an open channel, then back at me.

  "How do you know what channel to turn to?" she asked. "You know, to hear her."

  "I don't," I said. "She just comes through. Like she knows what frequency the radio's on or what channel the TV's tuned to, or when the computer's on. Just turn it to a quiet frequency and eventually she comes through, or she calls."

  "When does she speak?"

  "All day, all night. I can't find a pattern." Claire walked around the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.

  "Milt, there's almost nothing in here," she said.

  "I've got food in the cupboards," I said, pulling the large, black radio out of the box. I placed it on the table and ran my hand over its sleek surface, its gray digital keypads, and digital waterfall readout. As I examined the various antenna sockets in the back, Claire made her way through the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards.

  "I don't think a couple of boxes of rice and a few cans of soup are going to hold you over, Milt."

  "I'll be fine," I said, thinking for a few seconds. "I'll need to put it in the study. Maybe I can run the antenna to the roof easier from there."

  "You're going on the roof," she said. "In winter."

  "Not today."

  The countertop radio squealed and cut the air with blasts of static. Claire jumped, placed her right hand over her chest.

  "Holy hell, Milt. You have the volume turned up all the way?"

  "Probably just random—" I began to say before stopping and listening as the frequency fell silent. Out of the silence, Liz's voice whirled like mist carried on breeze, slight, almost indiscernible from the fading background noise. I walked from the table to the countertop radio. Liz whispered words I couldn't understand, laughed softly then spoke: "Darling. Find me. . . ."

  Claire and I leaned into the radio, and I reached over and pulled it closer as Liz repeated Find me, the voice soft and whispery. I stared at the radio while Claire fumbled around in her pockets. She pulled out her cell phone, activated the voice memo feature, and held it up to the speaker. On the cell phone's screen, the voice registered as peaks and troughs on a sine wave display, every word spiking high, every silence dropping low. We listened to the voice, watched the display, Liz's voice filling the room.

  "My God," Claire whispered.

  "She speaks only when she wants to," I said. "She's always been that way."

  ***

  After Claire had left with her cell phone in her hand, I took the new radio up to the study and realized there wouldn't be enough room on the desk for both it and the computer. I stood in the center of the room, listening to the steady Blackbridge breeze blow against the side of the house, listening to the heater kick on with a buzz and a thump. I stared at Liz's bookcase lined with her textbooks and decided to move the bookcase next to the desk and place the radio on a lower shelf.

  I pulled at a few of the books and bent down to place them in a corner, but nerve shock radiated down my right leg, and I dropped them in a disordered pile. I bent down to stack them neatly, and picked up a book titled Quantum Optics. I opened it, wanting to run my hands over her neat block writing, feel the indentation of pen in paper.

  Instead, I saw the book's entire inside cover covered with ink-drawn clouds. Blue clouds. Black clouds. Thin cirrus, high-piled nimbus. Some quick sketched, some carefully crosshatched and shaded. I turned the page.

  Clouds.

  Turned the page.

  Clouds.

  Every space was cluttered with drawings of clouds. Page after page, chapter after chapter. No text, no notes, no formulas or silly doodles, only clouds. I picked up a book titled Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics and opened it.

  Clouds. Every page, every available space strewn with ink and pencil cloudscape.

  I opened every book on the floor, pulled every book off the bookcase, opened it, placed it on the floor. After thirty minutes, I stood again at the center of the room surrounded by open textbooks, all filled with hundreds of clouds.

  ***

  I counted the seconds as the kitchen clock struck nine in the morning, and I picked up the telephone and dialed. The night had been quiet except for soft moans from the cemetery, but I'd not slept more than two hours. I'd spent the night at the center of Liz's cloudscape, flipping through books again and again, and I'd sat at the desk looking down at the blotter she'd filled with clouds.

  The line clicked. "Hello?" His voice sounded rougher, but I was happy to hear
it again.

  "Mr. Bradbury?" I said.

  "Yes?" he said, almost shouting.

  "This is Milton Conroy," I said, pointing to myself as if he could see me. "I was—"

  "Hello, Milton, how are you? he boomed."

  "I'm—I'm okay."

  He took a deep breath. "I heard about your wife. My God, struck down out of nowhere—"

  "It's been . . . difficult."

  "I can imagine, Milton. I was sorry to hear the news. If there's anything you need."

  I cleared my throat. "There is one thing. I . . . I hate to ask, but I didn't know who could help me. So, could you, you know, help me on one little thing?"

  "Of course," he said.

  "It may not be completely legal."

  "I'm not robbing a liquor store for you, Milton."

  I smiled. "No, no," I said, shaking my head. I told him about Liz's single graduate semester, how she consistently said she was too busy to return calls, how she never mentioned research jobs or even mentioned much about her classes. I told him about the books in the study, the clouds on the blotter, the clouds on the floor. "I need to know what she was taking last semester. I can't get access to her academic records just now, but if you could just take a look—"

  "I have a few favors to call in in the registrar's office," he said. "Give me her student number, and I'll run it through."

  "Thank you."

  "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "I don't know what to think, Mr. Bradbury. I don't know if she was having a breakdown or she was just hiding something all along."

  "You think suicide? But I heard it was lightning."

  "I guess," I said—not mentioning her voice in the telephone, on the radio, through the wires—"I guess I just need to know what she was really doing."

  ***

  When I hung up, I ran my hands over my face, the unshaved hair scraping against my palms, then ran them through my hair, felt the oily strands flow thickly between my fingers. I sat at the kitchen table, packing materials strewn all over the floor, wire and solder beads and burns all over the tablecloth, dishes peeking above the sink top. The countertop radio hissed, and the refrigerator rattled as sunlight burst through the kitchen window and reflected off dust that swirled like falling snow.