Static!

by Michael R Collings

  Other than the outsides of the windows, though, the room was as immaculate as the rest of the house. Dead-white refrigerator, dead-white stove, dead-white enameled cupboards tightly—virginally—closed, dead-white linoleum tiles without a mark or scratch. And a television screen in one corner, video camera hanging in the opposite corner.

  By this time, Payne had simply ceased commenting. He leaned against the white Formica® counter and waited for Nick to speak.

  Nick was beyond words.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Come on,” Payne said finally, tugging at Nick’s elbow with a familiarity that Nick—by nature reserved and isolate—found at once surprising and engaging. “One more room to go. The best.”

  The last room should have been the back corner bedroom on the side farthest from Nick’s place. Payne paused before pushing the heavy door open. “Behold....”

  Nick was ready for white walls, vast emptiness.

  The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with dozens of shelves sagging beneath the weight of books, machinery, files, boxes, tapes, with garishly colored plastic sleeves and bright paper dust jackets and glittering metallic knobs and dials vying for attention. After the starkness of the other rooms, it seemed a mad flurry, a frenetic kaleidoscope, a riotously proliferating insanity of shapes and textures and patterns and colors that baffled and offended.

  It was larger than the other rooms, Nick noted slowly, apparently originally intended as the master bedroom.

  They stepped silently into the room. One wall was devoted to equipment: two flat-screens, three DVD consoles, half a dozen recorders and players of various sorts, amplifiers and speakers and knots of wires leading from and to like overgrown vines in a tropical jungle. Nick recognized some of the consoles; others looked strange, alien. But then, he reminded himself, he wasn’t exactly a triple-Ph.D. in electrical engineering and physics.

  In the center of the room—and Nick would have been willing to bet his next month’s salary that it was the mathematically exact center of the room—rested a black high-backed swivel chair, soft and heavily padded, more substantial than any of the other furniture he had seen. The windows opposite the chair were tall and narrow, inset with frosted glass so that they looked like the stained windows in a church where the curtains were pulled back to admit thin, twin shafts of light. This, Nick realized, was where the monster oleander had been growing—and where the silver-blue flickering had come from late at night.

  “The master control room,” Payne stage-whispered.

  “What?” The sound startled Nick. His voice sounded sharp and strained, even to him.

  “The master control room. The MCR. That’s what I call it. I haven’t had time to try much of this stuff yet, but I think that this bank of panels controls all of the screens and cameras in the rest of the house. Plus hidden speakers in every room, with state-of-the-art quadraphonic digital sound. They must be plastered over or something. I haven’t found any yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you can hear perfectly from any spot in any room.”

  Nick nodded mutely.

  “These are records and CDs and VHS cassettes and DVDs,” Payne said after a brief silence, indicating a long cabinet built into one wall. He continued around the room, point to items as he walked. “Tapes...what look like professional journals and books…I think these are her research notes.”

  There was an odd emphasis on her, Nick noted.

  “And this,” Payne said, standing back, “this, as far as I can tell, is her library of probably every movie made in the last seventy years.” He gestured grandly to the wall along the back of the house and the inner wall that had been initially hidden by the open door. Both were covered with small plastic cases neatly lined in rows, small white dots placed precisely in the middle of each exposed edge.

  “What?” Nick was beginning to hate his inability to say anything except that one word.

  “Well,” Payne said, “maybe not every one. But a helluva lot of them. There’s a list over there with a name for each of the numbers on the cases. I checked it out the first night —I couldn’t sleep in that monk’s cell up the hall, especially knowing that was where she had slept...and died.”

  Nick shivered at this, unaccountably and violently.

  Payne seemed unaffected by it, however, as he continued. “So I got up and checked the films out. I looked up some of my favorite films. Every one was there. Every one. And most of the other movies that I’ve ever heard of.”

  “What was she doing with them?”

  “No idea. There’s nothing in her notes that I can understand, and besides most of them are dated seven or eight years ago. It looks like she just spent the last few years collecting cassettes, polishing the hall floor, and going quietly blotto.” He glanced around the room and lowered his voice. “But she was sure as hell brilliant at one time.”

  Nick crossed the room to look at the shelves of equipment more closely. Payne was right about at least one thing. Most of the stuff looked old, well used. It was cared for but lacked the pristine glimmer of newness. Besides, he hadn’t seen anyone carry electronics equipment into the place in the three years he had lived next door. Except for the delivery boy, he hadn’t seen anyone approach the place. He examined the monitors and consoles for labels and brand names but couldn’t see any. Maybe the old lady had hyped up things herself, keeping her hands and mind busy. “The Word Processor of the Gods” and that kind of thing. Idle hands, as his grandmother might have said.

  He reached out to touch the control panel of a DVD unit. Just to touch it, the way someone does when he can’t quite believe that a thing is there, or, perhaps more accurately at the time, the way children do in an antique shop when they’re told not to touch anything but the temptation to run a finger along flashing crystal or polished wood surface is just too great to withstand. Nick didn’t intend to turn the DVD on. Later, he was sure of that. In fact, he wasn’t consciously aware that he was about to make contact with the dark plastic and bright aluminum of the casing.

  But he did. Marginally, briefly.

  As soon as he touched the cool surface, something crackled viciously and a thin arc of electrical blue sparks curled around his fingertips.

  For the instant that the static charge played along his flesh, he felt that time had stopped. And more than that. The blue flickering seemed...more than what it was. It didn’t so much burn—not even the tingling burn/not-burn of electricity—as tug at him, pull at something Nick felt instinctively was essentially him. A memory flashed through his mind of being seventeen and of a painfully persistent tugging, pulling deep inside that stretched across his abdomen from his gut to his groin and that he had suffered in silence for three months before he got up enough courage to overcome his fear of finding out he had terminal cancer or of having to admit to things he had done late at night in the secrecy of his bed and that he, in his ignorance, half-believed had hurt him horribly inside, there in the focus of his manhood. It took him three months to admit his pain to his parents and finally go to the doctor, only to discover that it was just a hydrocele and that all the surgeons would have to do would be to cut him open and pull one of his balls from its scrotal sack and remove the fluids and then shove the ball back inside and sew him up nothing to it, a little soreness for a while, buck up lad—and that had frightened him more than the drawing pain or the threat of cancer or even the fear of discovery. That had threatened the core of his self, his masculinity, his new sense of maleness and sexual potency, even though the operation itself had in fact been more anti-climactic than traumatic.

  But the memory of that pulling sensation, of the feeling that something was tugging at his core, pulling at his sex itself and trying to pry it loose—that memory was startled back into life by the subtle play of blue electricity that crackled around his fingers and seemed intent on sucking whatever was essentially Nick Wheeler through the blunt ends of his fingertips. The light crackled once, twice, then died.

  The memory died as well. The
drawing sensation in his abdomen faded with it.

  But all of this was the matter of an instant, the time it took for him to draw a single breath and release it in a whoosh of sound.

  “Shit!” he yelped, jumping back, wide-eyed and breathing shallowly in counter-rhythm with his accelerated heartbeat. He was not hurt exactly but was so startled that for a minute he was afraid that he might have wet his pants. He shoved his fingers into his mouth and sucked on the tingling tips.

  Payne spun to face Nick. “What...?”

  Nick jerked his fingers out of his mouth, aware of how silly he would feel if Payne saw him standing there like Jordy Verrill trying to suck meteor-shit off his fingers. He grinned—probably a sickly attempt but at least an attempt—and studied his hand. He could not see anything. Not even redness.

  “It shocked me,” he said, gesturing with his head toward the glistening machine. “Nothing much, though. No damage,” he concluded.

  But Payne was already at his side, considerate and solicitous.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said, shaken but recovering. He stared at his fingers. Not even a slight redness. Nothing but lingering heat and tingling that started at the tips and died where they met at the center of his palm. “I’m fine. Just startled.”

  Payne stared at the DVD player, careful not to come in contact with it. “I’ll have to get someone out here to check on that. Can’t have guests barbecued in my own place.” He leaned over the casing and peered into the darkness behind the unit. “Maybe a faulty plug or something. I’m no expert on electricity. I can’t even see a light or anything that shows the thing is plugged in, but I can’t tell unless there’s a red idiot light on the front or something.”

  He was talking out of nervousness as much as anything, it seemed to Nick.

  “It’s okay,” Nick said again. “Don’t worry.”

  Payne faced him and stared at him for a moment. Then he broke out into that infectious grin and nodded toward the open kitchen door just visible through the doorway.

  “Drink?”

  “Sure.”

  Payne steered Nick into the kitchen, sat him down at a white bar stool and pulled a couple of cans from the fridge.

  Payne poured beer into two tall, clear glasses, talking all the while, as if assuring himself and Nick that Nick wasn’t more than just shaken up.

  “Not much current in there, I think. Not enough to do any real damage, for sure. Still feeling okay?”

  “Just tingling,” Nick said absently, rubbing his fingertip along the rough seam of his pants.

  “I’ll have that looked at next week. Don’t know much about it myself, but it shouldn’t take much to get it fixed. The stuff looks like good quality, probably just a short that nobody could have expected. Maybe I didn’t luck into such a good deal after all. You would have thought, to hear my relatives talk, that I had inherited the Taj Mahal.” He slipped into a broken falsetto, apparently intended to suggest the inimitable vocal qualities of an Aunt Matilda or Second-Cousin Harriet. “Two houses in Los Angeles and property downtown, why, you’ll be rich Payne dear, rich and then when us poor relatives come out to visit we can see how the filthy rich live out there in California, only we probably won’t ever be able to afford the trip and you probably won’t want us cluttering up your life once you get to be rich yourself, it’s not as if Aunt Emilia couldn’t have divided things up a little more evenly, after all I used to write to her every Christmas and on her birthday and....”

  Nick tried to listen, but he couldn’t.

  Payne kept talking about his relatives and Pennsylvania and the flight to LA, pausing only to take deep drinks from the cold glass in his hand. Nick’s glass sat untouched on the counter. Payne’s voice surrounded him, higher pitched now, almost whining, but Nick didn’t hear it. All he seemed to hear was the crackle of electricity as it had entered his body—as it had tried to invade him, to pull and tug within him, then suddenly pulled back and died away.

  He heard the crackle again in his imagination, and again, and again, and each time he felt as well the cold wash of night air on his naked body and the prickling of icy blades of grass along the bottom of his naked feet as he crouched in the shadow of a night-black bush months before.

  The crackle had sounded like the squeak of The Greer’s porch swing, creaking and squealing through the silent darkness of dead night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nick didn’t blame Payne for the shock, not really. After all, it could have happened to anyone, at any time. It was probably just a short in a piece of well-used equipment.

  So he thought at the time, at least.

  He did get out of the house pretty quick, though, as soon as he emerged from his trance-like thoughts sufficiently to finish the beer. Payne was still wandering on about people Nick didn’t know, would never know, would never want to know.

  “Hey, uh, thanks, but I gotta go,” Nick said in a brief moment when Payne fell silent.

  Payne looked at him and grinned. Damn, Nick thought, it was such an infectious grin. Every time, just when he was ready to mark the guy off as a nothing—or worse, as someone too odd to want to get to know—out would come that smile and everything would change.

  “Sorry,” Payne said, still smiling but infusing a note of seriousness into his voice. “You know, about the shock and about blithering on. Haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone for a while and you just got drenched in the overflow. Must be homesick, I guess. Or something.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” Nick said. “I understand.” And the funny thing was that he really did understand. Nick was a loner as much by choice as by circumstance, but he still knew just what Payne meant.

  Payne stood and opened the kitchen door into the back yard, inviting a welcome breeze into the still air of the house, as well as a brilliant shaft of light into the dimness. That warmed Nick to him as much as anything else the man had said or done—somehow, Nick didn’t want to re-negotiate the dark internal corridor through the house and then cross that antiseptically sterile living room again.

  They chatted for a minute or two at the back stoop, mostly about what Payne was planning for the yard.

  “I’ll probably paint the garage this month, pretty soon at least, maybe even re-shingle it before the rainy season—it does rain out here, doesn’t it?”

  Nick nodded. “Some.”

  “Yeah,” Payne continued, almost more musing than conversing, “before it rains. Then I want to take down that fence and put up a slump-stone wall. It’s safer and sturdier. And I’ve got to figure out what to do between our houses, whether to let that hedge stay or replace it with something more permanent.”

  He was off and running again, Nick saw.

  “Look, Payne,” he said, aware that he was interrupting but needing to get away and think. “Thanks again for the beer. But I got a pile of freshman papers higher than your fence waiting for me, and if I don’t get to them they may start to mold and then be even worse than they are now. Maybe they’ll spawn and multiply.” Payne apparently remembered enough about school to crack a grin at that one. “Really,” Nick finished, “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Sure,” Payne said. “Sorry. And thanks for the help.”

  “Help?”

  “You know, the roots, the bushes.

  “Yeah. No problem.” The roots. It had only been an hour or so, but Nick felt as if a lifetime had passed since he had leaned his shoulder into the unyielding flesh of the oleanders and pushed, watching Payne’s legs twist as he struggled to slash away the heart of the tree. “I really wish I could stay, but….”

  With that he started away from the door.

  “Nick.”

  He turned.

  Payne stretched out his hand. “Thanks, neighbor.”

  Feeling more than a little foolish, Nick shook Payne’s hand. The hand was strong, the skin of its palm warm and dry. Nick wasn’t used to shaking hands. No one he knew did it much, and he had trouble remembering the last time any
of his acquaintances had actually initiated such a ritual. Usually they held back, keeping to their own spheres and not inviting anyone else in. But Payne pumped up and down once, twice, then relaxed and let Nick’s hand drop..

  “See you around,” Payne said, then disappeared into the house.

  Nick spent the rest of the day laying down, trying unsuccessfully to read, trying equally unsuccessfully to ignore the tingling in his fingers that recurred, dissipated, recurred at odd intervals throughout the long afternoon.

  “Much more of this,” he finally said several hours later, “and I’ll have to see a doctor.” Once he went so far as to pull out his old brown address book and begin looking up his doctor’s emergency number, but the sensation died away before he dialed the telephone and for some reason he decided not to after all.

  By the time he went to bed just before midnight, he had forgotten the tingling; by morning, it was as if he had never received the shock at all.

  * * * * * * *

  The two men didn’t see much of each other over the next week. Payne was busy most of the time, coming and going throughout the day. He was usually dressed in a business suit, so Nick supposed he must be taking care of the legal details relating to The Greer’s estate. The two weren’t unfriendly or anything; whenever Payne saw Nick he would wave and call out a greeting, and vice versa. They simply didn’t have time to get together.

  Nick kept pretty much to himself. The one class he was teaching nights at Camarillo College was approaching end-term, which meant additional sets of examinations and research papers to read, usually during the late evening and early night when the unseasonable heat was more bearable. During the long, hot days, he spent as much. time as he could spare at the beach, away from Tamarind Valley and the heat and the smog.