Static!

by Michael R Collings

  He went to the bathroom, took care of his most immediate problem, then wandered into the kitchen, started to pull out juice and eggs, and glanced at the clock over the sink. There was a note stuck to it with scotch tape. He suddenly remembered writing the note, remembered putting it up there, remembered why, and remembered that this Friday he hadn’t planned on sleeping late. He shoved everything back into the refrigerator.

  “Shit,” he hissed as he strode back into the bedroom and threw on clothes...not the usual cut-offs and T-shirt, but slacks, a poly-press shirt, clean socks, oxfords that still bore the remnants of their last polishing. By 10:25 he was out the front door to meet Perry Oppenshaw at UCLA.

  Perry was visiting again, half for pleasure, half for business. He hoped to do some research at the University Research Library and to touch bases with his family before returning on Sunday to his teaching job in Missouri.

  Nick had planned to meet Perry at noon in the walkways beneath the URL. He pulled into the only empty space in the only parking lot his sticker allowed him to enter—at least there was a parking space, he thought. Usually he had to drive around for ten or fifteen minutes before one opened up. He angled the car in, crawled out and locked it, and dashed across campus toward the URL. Panting, he leaned against the concrete supports and looked around. He had only seconds to spare before he saw Perry climbing the steps from the visitors lot.

  “Hey,” he yelled, waving and pulling himself away from the cool concrete.

  “Hey, yourself,” Payne answered as they slapped each other on the shoulder and grinned. As Nick has expected, Perry was full of news about his job, his students, his life in Missouri. They talked over lunch, kept talking in whispers that threatened to become too loud for Perry’s temporary and cramped carrel on the fifth floor of the library, and found themselves still talking at dinner in Tiny Nay1or’s Drive-In in Westwood and then on the way back to the campus. Perry finally decided to break up the visit about 10:00.

  “Early morning tomorrow,” he said half apologetically.

  ‘Come on out with me to Tamarind,” Nick said as they stood next to Perry’s Honda in the UCLA parking lot. The rest of the lot was almost deserted, only a few cars here and there to remind them of the crush of student life Perry at least had moved beyond. “I’ve got plenty of room. There’s an extra bed just crying out to be used.”

  “Naw,” Perry said. “I’ve already got a room at the Howard Johnson®’s by the beach in Santa Monica. Greatest view in the world. Chock full of chicks. Anyway,” he continued, more serious now, “I don’t want to lose any time getting to the URL in the morning. After all, this visit has already cost me more than half a day’s work among the dusty tomes.”

  Nick looked guilty, and Perry grinned at his discomfiture. “No problem, Nick. I’ve got a lot done, really, but I better stay out here.” The irrepressible grin broadened lasciviously as Perry ostentatiously checked his wristwatch. “And there’s still time to get lucky.”

  Nick nodded and grinned back.

  They said their good-byes in the parking lot, and Nick left.

  He stopped about halfway home for a cola at a 7-Eleven®—something to keep him awake—and cursed himself for maybe the hundredth time for renting so far out. Of course, usually the only time he felt like that was when he stayed out too late, when he was tired and still had half an hour on the freeways to get back to Tamarind Valley. But when the feeling struck, it usually struck hard.

  By the time he got home, it was almost midnight. The Greer’s place was dark. No silvery light slipped out any unwatched windows to escape into the blackness. Nick slept well that night. No dreams, no nightmares.

  He must have been more tired than he thought, because either he didn’t hear the alarm when it blasted as usual at six or he forgot to set it when he retrieved it from the baseboard and returned it to the night stand near his bed. He had fully intended to get up early and attack the stack of papers, half still waiting like a silently guilty conscience on the edge of the cluttered desk, the other half spread on the floor and held down by the bulk of the King novel. But when he finally rolled over and squinted at the clock, it said 10:30. For a few moments he just lay there staring incredulously at the thin black hands, the second sweep humming industriously across the plastic face. He wondered how it could be so late, why he had slept so late, why he didn’t feel terribly guilty about sleeping late, and why he was unaccountably fully awake.

  Sometimes something out there in the waking world wakes you. It might be disguised as part of a dream, even a forgotten dream, but you know that there was something. The knowledge makes the transition from dream to reality difficult, at times even frightening. For an instant, you exist simultaneously, impossibly, in both worlds. And are not sure which you truly belong to.

  This morning, something had disturbed Nick.

  He sat straight up, breathing shallowly and harshly. He waited a moment, pulled in a lung-full of warm air, then leaned back on his elbows. An unusual sound filtered through the open window, a sound that was at once frustratingly familiar and oddly out-of-place, strange. He got up, stumbled over the clothes still piled where he had dropped them on the floor the night before, and looked out the window.

  Or tried to. The bright daylight blinded him. He squinted against the painful light. For a moment, the light stabbed like a knife slipping into his brain and twisting sadistically back and forth, then his eyes adjusted and allowed him to focus.

  Someone was out there.

  A man, presumably Payne Gunnison, was working on The Greer’s front lawn. On his front lawn, Nick emended, although he was not surprised that he still thought of the place as hers. The man had found an old hand mower, at least as old as the dinosaur Nick occasionally pushed across his own lawn. It had probably been hidden in the piles of rusting tools and moldering papers Nick assumed filled the garage that leaned against the back fence like an old tired warrior, sagging at the ridgeline, its side door canting from a single hinge. As far as Nick knew, that garage had never been entered in the whole time he had lived next door. But now, he noted, the door hung smartly from two shiny new hinges, and an unknown man was wheeling an old mower around the yard.

  Perhaps Nick should have noticed more about the man at first, but what grabbed his attention was the yard itself. The Greer never seemed to care about the upkeep of her own place, although she had insisted through Mr. Brown that Nick’s rental be at least marginally neat, with a monthly trim of the scrap of yard and an occasional pruning of the shrubs that shaded the sides and back. Though she had never communicated anything directly, he got the impression that The Greer would have insisted on his hiring a gardener had he become so lax as to let the yard go entirely to ruin.

  But she apparently had no such qualms about her own place. The shrubs hung straggly and overgrown against the paint peeling in long strips from the ancient siding—in some places, the curled paint was as ragged and long and tenuous as eucalyptus bark. The lawn was heavily cankered, with random dead patches as brown as LA smog interspersed among an uneven dusty green.

  Occasionally a neighbor boy, who seemed to be one of the few living souls in the area below the age of incipient senility, would trundle his family mower down the street, past the four intervening houses, and chop away at the excess, never quite finishing the job. The result always looked like a kid’s attempt at cutting his own hair, shaggy in the wrong places, with weeds spilling over the cracked sidewalk like out-of-control sideburns. The kid’s parents must have told him to do it, or maybe they paid him to, because he never knocked on The Greer’s door afterward, never walked away stuffing a couple of tattered bills into a back pocket. He just killed the motor and trundled the mower back-up the street, its metal grass guard clattering irritatingly on the rough asphalt. He did a good enough job to keep anyone from calling the fire department about weed abatement or having the place declared a public nuisance, but he never put more effort into the job than a superficial once-over required. Even after he fini
shed, the place looked shaggy.

  But now this man, this stranger, was mowing with all the diligence of a homeowner about to put his place on the market. He was catching edges that hadn’t been touched in years, exposing patches of sidewalk black with mildew and studded with snails and pill-bugs curled against the sudden light, and generally disrupting a myriad of other insects that had lived generations of safe, protected lives beneath the fringes of The Greer’s lawn. He manhandled the machine back and forth under branches that had escaped from the discipline of being hedges to approach full-fledged jungle status. He had already trimmed the most egregious growth away from the split wooden pillars supporting the porch roof, piling the casualties like corpses neatly along the side of the house. From Nick’s perspective, the yard looked like that famous long-distance shot of the Civil War dead in Gone with the Wind, the South’s glorious dead in this case being represented by slaughtered oleanders and firethorns.

  The man had apparently been hard at work since yesterday afternoon, or at least some time after Nick had left for UCLA, since no one could have done so much in only a few hours. Nick had only roused enough to hear the mower a few moments before—that was the something that had awakened him.

  The yard was trimmed, the shrubs neat, the lawn manicured, even the sidewalks swept, everything more like it should have been in true-blue suburban America, as if Greensward were an archetypally Fifties street straight out of Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best.

  Except that there was something wrong with it all. Something so wrong that for a couple of minutes Nick didn’t even consciously notice what his new landlord looked like. He was captured, trapped, by the eerie sense that....

  That The Greer’s house was naked.

  It was as if an old recluse, an octogenarian dowager wearing an ankle-length paisley dress and an age-stained bit of jet-beaded lace clasped tightly at her withered throat by a cameo-brooch, had been caught on the public streets by a street-gang and stripped, her sagging flesh and wrinkled skin exposed to ridicule. She could try in vain to hide herself with hands deformed by years of arthritis and pain, tears streaming from eyes too dim, too milky white with cataracts to see her attackers clearly. She could try…but her feeble attempts would only accentuate the horror of her nakedness.

  At least that was what Nick imagined when he saw the man whacking away at knee-high grass, pushing the mower into dark secret places where no one—no man—should ever intrude. It was like he was stripping the house, raping the house.

  As soon as Nick’s mind defined the image, he laughed. The ravaged dowager vanished, and all Nick saw through his window was a tall young man his own age, dressed in sneakers and cut-offs, cleaning up a yard scarred by years of neglect. And the place was, after all, just an old house, more ravaged by time than many, but that was not so unusual. One couldn’t expect an old woman, especially a crippled old woman, to climb onto the roof and replace broken shingles, or to straighten a lopsided shutter on the forlorn attic window that made the place look like it had a single eye in its forehead, forever squinting, winking evilly at him when he walked by.

  “Enough,” Nick said sternly to no one in particular. If every time he started thinking about what Gunnison was doing he began to fantasize that he was living next to Hill House, or the Overlook, or the House Next Door, or the House Beyond the Hill, then he had better get himself put away somewhere.

  The thought made him smile.

  Anyway, he decided after looking at it objectively for a few minutes, the house certainly did look better this way. The building had some interesting lines in the front design. At one time the place must have been professionally landscaped—the remaining growth attested to that in spite of its exuberance and wildness. Probably twenty or thirty years ago this was one of the neighborhood’s showplaces. With a little water to green up the brown spots, maybe a dash of sulfur, and a little more judicious trimming, the place could be presentable. And one certainly couldn’t complain about a new owner wanting to make the best of his property.

  His property, Nick thought in a conscious attempt at reminding himself of the fundamental change in things. His property, not hers.

  Nick shook his head, turned away from the window, and headed to the bathroom. A few moments later, he was in the kitchen for a quick breakfast of juice and toast. Nick was not much for breakfast usually, but he did enjoy sitting at the table and watching the sun ripple through the hibiscus leaves that framed the window and spread into a solid bank punctuated with reds, yellows, pinks, and whites along the far side of his driveway, or listening to the birds or the breeze playing through the branches. Sometimes he read and time disappeared and he came out of his self-created trance about lunchtime…once in a while it would last until dinner. But this time, he didn’t have that chance.

  He was just treating himself to a helping of Knott’s Berry Farm® raspberry jam on whole-wheat toast when the doorbell rang. Still munching, trying to lick away a blob of jam that had dribbled at the corner of his mouth, he padded through the living room and was reaching for the doorknob when he realized that he hadn’t bothered yet to put on any clothes. His mind registered the fact, but too slowly, too late to do anything about his hand, which was already turning the knob and pulling the door open.

  He stepped sideways behind the heavy wood-paneled door and peeped out, toast balanced precariously in one hand, raspberry jam still probably smudging his cheek. He decided later that he much have looked like a cross between a street urchin and the way The Greer looked when he had delivered the rent.

  At first he couldn’t see much. The caller was in shadow with the sun bright behind him. When Nick’s eyes adjusted, he was startled, mostly because up close, the man from next door, who could be no one except The Greer’s nephew Payne Gunnison, looked so normal. Nick was expecting—well, almost anything out of whatever weird film or novel you wanted to name.

  Instead he found himself looking at a pleasant young man, perhaps twenty-five, with curly brown hair, deep-set eyes, and a bright smile. He was flushed from working; Nick could see trails of sweat along his ribs. He was still wearing only tennis shoes and running shorts but somehow that didn’t seem inappropriate. He seemed quintessentially the outside type, the California sun-and-fun type, only there was something in the way he had been working that morning, and the way he stood there, half expectant, poised to move, that told Nick there was more to him than just that.

  And as Nick had already learned, he was fundamentally wrong anyway—the man wasn’t from California The letter from Brown had said something about Gunnison coming from back East. Nick had never been east of the Rockies himself; for all he knew, the man might as well be from Mars.

  I must look like an idiot, Nick. thought, staring out from behind the door like a crazy, sloppy old woman afraid to confront the world outside. Like The Greer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The stranger shifted his weight from one foot to the other, then cleared his throat.

  “Mr. Wheeler? Nick Wheeler?”

  “Yeah. Uh, yes. I’m Nick Wheeler.”

  “I’m Payne Gunnison. Just moved in next door.” He could have continued and said that he was the new landlord, that he owned the bedroom Nick slept in and the kitchen he sat in to eat his toast and drink his juice. Gunnison could have been a real shit about things—and, whether justifiably or not, Nick fully expected him to.

  Instead he was just a normal guy, sweaty from manhandling a obsolescent mower that should have been retired years ago.

  Nick’s thought processes finally caught up with himself, and with his visitor.

  “Hey, sorry for being so slow,” Nick said. “Just got up.”

  “I didn’t wake you with the mower, I hope. I waited until I thought it was late enough.”

  “No,” Nick lied. “It was just time for me to get up. Lots to do today.”

  Gunnison stood silently for a long moment. Nick started to extend a hand and stopped just before his toast and jam dropped to the floor; then
started to invite him in, and remembered for the second time that he was naked, so finally he just stood there too.

  After a bit, Gunnison laughed, a light, refreshing sound against the already oppressive heat of the Southern California morning, then began again.

  “I know it’s pretty early and you don’t know me. But I’ve got this little problem and yours is the only name I know in this town—in this half of the country, in fact. Except for some lawyer downtown, and I don’t think he would be interested. I just got in the night before last.”

  “I know, I saw you.”

  Gunnison looked at Nick, rather oddly Nick thought. But then Nick’s comment had itself been odd; he realized belatedly that, in some sense, he had just pleaded guilty to being nosey before he had been accused.

  “Anyway,” Gunnison continued, his face bright again and open, “I’ve run into a snag with the yard and need a little more muscle. Could you come over and give me a hand?”

  That was it. He needed something. And yet there wasn’t any hint in his voice of a hey-I-own-this-place-help-out-or-get-out­ tone. Just one neighbor asking another for a hand.

  “Sure,” Nick heard himself answering. “Give me a minute to dress and I’ll be right over.”

  “Okay.”

  Gunnison waved and was gone.

  Nick closed the door, ran to the bedroom, and pulled on jeans and sneakers, tugging his favorite T-shirt (with “Reality is a Crutch for People Who Can’t Handle Science Fiction!” printed in red on the beige cotton—courtesy of Change of Hobbit in Santa Monica) over his head.

  Gunnison was around the side of his house, on the far side, hacking away at a huge oleander. Severed branches lay neatly stacked against the wall. Gunnison had already trenched around the roots and was trying to dig the thing out.