Noise

by Darin Bradley

  We dropped classes to lighten our homework. We couldn’t drop out altogether. We were taking financial aid, and without it, we’d have to work too much. We wouldn’t have time for the Book.

  We bought books secondhand, so there would be no record of purchase. Things like FM 21–76, Department of the Army Field Manual: Survival, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Survival Bible. I still had copies of The Official Boy Scout Handbook and Unintended Consequences. It had been five years since I earned my Eagle Scout Award. I was the youngest in the troop to ever do so.

  We weren’t far from the house, a duplex with only one livable half. We lived in the annex, tacked onto the old place in the 1950s, but we stockpiled things in the old half, the 1890 half: some books, a picture of Thoreau, a fifty-pound bag of salt we’d taken from L. D. Pizza, where we were delivery drivers.

  We only had to make one turn, then onto Broadway Avenue, the civil artery that wormed past the road to the university on one side and to the square on the other. But we had to shoot one car to make it. One of the people we stacked in the parking lot, before we moved to the pharmacy, had been carrying a snub-nosed .38. Unloaded. Ammunition in its pockets.

  People were driving in whatever direction they wanted, particularly college guys in lifted pickups and sports cars. They were smashing what they could reach with aluminum bats, standing upright through the T-tops of their Camaros or kneeling on the wheel wells in the beds of their buddies’ pickups. People were stopping and swerving and smashing things.

  We had an open lane—only needed to go ten blocks—but someone was scared in front of us. Weaving between lanes, avoiding bottles, hoping to be ignored. There weren’t other immediate threats around us then, but we couldn’t take the chance. A lot could happen in ten blocks.

  I pulled the .38 from my pack, loaded it, and rolled down my window. I looked at Levi and waited.

  He watched the road, waiting. Eventually, he turned and stared at me.

  “Remove it,” he said.

  I nodded. Refixed my mask. I fired one shot at the old Buick in front of us, which was nearly driving on the median, trying to avoid abandoned cars in the other lane.

  For such a small gun, the explosion made my ears ring. My head rushed with blood, and the recoil jammed my elbow against the window frame. I wasn’t ready for it.

  The Buick’s rear window iced over instantly. Clouded, webbed, a tiny hurricane eye just off center. The driver moved fully onto the median, rocking the car, and veered onto the correct side of the road. We’d been driving on the wrong one.

  One of our early exercises had been the erection of a training dummy. We used scrap wood and parachute cord and a set of pulleys we got from the Army/Navy Surplus Store next to Meyer’s. We’d take turns, puppeting the dummy for each other. We’d swing it in all different directions, at different heights, between the giant sycamores in our front yard. Twenty feet away, cars raced down the road. We lived directly off Broadway, our yard elevated some ten or twelve feet. We could hear the bell tower on campus; we could see the spire on the old courthouse downtown.

  The boards we used for the dummy’s arms splintered easily, but we didn’t care. We kept at it, lacerating our own arms on the things’s shards, keeping track of our progress by the disappearance of our wounds.

  Adam gunned his truck up our driveway, throwing gravel like gunshots, tiny, popping bombards that clacked against the siding. Of our place and the neighbor’s. Jo’s place was an above-and-below two-unit behind the small parking lot in the back, curtained, in places, by all the bamboo growing against the fence.

  We could see the cat, even in the dark, as we skidded past our porch. It wasn’t one we recognized, and it dangled, hanged from the throat, from a length of our parachute cord. Cars raced and braked out on Broadway. People flashed in and out of sight on the sidewalks, streetlit threats running different places.

  I looked away from the cat. I was still wearing the shirt around my face.

  We unloaded the truck. Our cats, Fluff and Edmund, were safe inside, under my bed.

  I stared at them.

  Jo didn’t answer her door.

  She was a vegetarian, and she invited us over sometimes for tasteless spelt pasta or to smoke a bowl. She wasn’t old enough to buy beer, so we’d bring it. We’d sit on her balcony and get drunk and talk. We would stare down the driveway, watching the cars pass in artificial river-motion. Everyone going somewhere else, underground, along the asphalt water. There was an IOOF cemetery down the road, below the road, where indigents lived in crypts like naiads in the riverbed, waiting for the current to deliver something useful they could drag down.

  We would get drunk and talk. We would make sure to say things like “Kierkegaard,” “chic,” and “not just sex, but something spiritual, too.” She hadn’t liked Adam’s punk, and I’d been slow to realize she was a lesbian.

  “Keep a watch,” I told Levi. We’d pulled the shirts from our faces. He turned and looked out over the balcony rail.

  I knocked again.

  “Jo,” I said, not too loudly, “it’s us.”

  I saw the pulse, darkness inside against darkness out. The peephole shutter-blink that anyone could always see. No matter what was going on outside.

  “It’s us, Joely. It’s all right.”

  She opened the door, an inch—the length of chain still protecting it.

  “It’s us.”

  “Is it just you?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone was walking around your place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re saying—”

  “What, on the news?”

  “Yeah, they’re saying that—”

  “Fuck the news.”

  “It’s time to go,” Levi said.

  “We’re going, Jo.”

  “You fuckers,” she said, closing the door. She slid the chain free and opened the door. “This is really happening. All your … shit.”

  “Where’s your pack?” I asked. She had a bandanna tied onto her head, a college-girl bonnet-looking thing. She was wearing cargo fatigues and a tank top, which is what she usually wore.

  “Did you pack a pack?” Levi asked.

  “We told you—”

  “I’ve got the fucking pack,” she said, turning into her dark apartment. “Jesus, what are we going—”

  “Don’t panic, Jo.”

  “We have a Plan.”

  THE BOOK:

  “TWO”

  SEC. “I,” SUBSEC. “A” (“PLACE”)

  (cont’d)

  (v) The strengths, weaknesses, and needs of your Place will, in time, reauthor your Narrative of self and align your existential concerns. (vi) Your Group will develop a new cultural discourse (a new culture altogether), and it is this new discursive entity—this interactive phantasm—that will orient your cognitive development into the new era. (vii) Naming your Place imbues it with cognitive force. (viii) Naming your Place alters it from inert territory to a raison d’être. (ix) It is advised that you name your Place prior to the Event, which will enhance the motivation to reach it, should you encounter difficulty executing your Event Exit Strategy.

  [3] (i) Do not share the location of your Place with Outsiders, pre-Event or post.

  I.B.

  “GROUP”

  [1] (i) Establish your Group before the Event. (ii) A Group offers the obvious advantage of collaborative survival, in that Members of a shared ideology and motivation become, very quickly, one social organism implied by their Place. (iii) Discuss the Group, the Place, and the Event often. (iv) In this regard, by the time the Group inhabits the Place, it will already imply a history, which is an essential component of your Narrative.

  [2] (i) Your Group must first include Members who can contribute. (ii) While it may be argued that physically noncontributive members can accentuate your emotional state, including them will be a calculated risk, for as your Narrative develops, this accentuation may weaken, depending on the success or Failure
of your Place. (iii) Further, physically noncontributive members consume resources and create new theaters of concern.

  [3] (i) However, physical contributions can include such areas as entertainment, social cohesion, and Narrative development. (ii) This means that Members may be considered contributive if their skill sets include musical talent, brewing or distillation, esoteric horticulture, storycraft, or other such knowledges and skills. (iii) These contributions imply equipment that the Group must acquire and transport. (iv) Such transportation is a risk, but it is a delayed investment that will later enhance your Narrative and strengthen Place-Narrative.

  [4] (i) Despite these possibilities, no Group can sustain Secondary Members (the aforementioned) without adequate Primary Membership (those who can endure physical labor and who can and will fight). (ii) Secondary Members do not mature into Primary Membership until the Group Arrives at the Place and establishes its first Day. (iii) For this reason, your Group should focus primarily on Members who can effect a successful Event Exit Strategy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  where will we go?” Jo asked. She was standing at our front window, peering out between two finger-lifted blinds.

  “West,” I said, cinching a strap on a duct-taped duffel.

  “What’s out west?”

  “A Place,” Levi answered.

  Jo turned around. “What? Fuck you. Tell me where.”

  I stopped. “You don’t understand. It’s a Place. It’s our Place.”

  She lit a cigarette. We didn’t like it when she smoked inside.

  “This commando shit has got to stop,” she said. “A place, a place—this is ‘a place.’”

  “No—” Levi started.

  “Adam—”

  “Levi,” I corrected her.

  “What?”

  I rolled the duffel aside. She was standing up; I was kneeling, a now taskless arm draped across my knee. We looked chivalric. I’d played knights, in mine and Adam’s D&D games, who knelt like this.

  “Jo,” I said, “this is not a Place. Adam is Levi; I am Hiram. We have to be because this won’t be easy. That”—I pointed at the window—“will kill us. You can’t be yourself in all this because it won’t work.”

  “Everything has changed,” Levi said.

  She looked from one to the other of us. Scared.

  “We will survive,” Levi said. “We’ll keep you alive. We like you, Jo.”

  “We’ll start everything new.”

  “What?” she said, covering her unease with a drag from her cigarette. “So you’re going to, like, start a tribe, and I’m the one who will bear your warrior sons, or something like that?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  I looked at Levi. “Give it to her.”

  He shuffled off to the laundry room. There was a maintenance door in there, which we used to get to the 1890 half.

  She sat down. “What the hell?”

  She was starting to panic.

  … Do not panic….

  “It’s okay.”

  “What about the police? This is like, just like, a hurricane or a disaster or something. You guys need to calm down—this will be over in a few days.”

  “There aren’t enough police,” I said.

  We bounced a little, on the floor, as Levi walked back in. The pier-and-beam foundation had spots, like funny bones, that answered steps in one place with bounces in another.

  He handed her the Book.

  “The police have families, too. Friends. They won’t be police much longer.”

  She looked at Section “One.”

  “And the National Guard is mostly overseas. If they come back, there’ll be too much for them.”

  “This has been coming, Jo. You’ve watched Salvage.”

  She looked up. “With you guys. Smoking pot. A Friday night in Slade. That’s just … underground art or something.”

  A car roared past outside, full of screaming somebodies.

  I stood up and motioned to Levi, to the gear.

  “We’ll give you an hour, Jo. Read.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “We won’t make you come, but you should. Cities are the most unsafe.”

  Levi slung a duffel over his shoulder and headed for the laundry room. I turned on our little black-and-white TV. A fuzzed, diagonal portrait straightened itself, jammed. Which was, in turn, jammed. I listened for a second to the fugue. To the noise. I couldn’t make out even one uninterrupted message. Pictures flashed and jarred. Someone was shooting something live on a hand-mod—I could see people running. The lights were off on Reunion Tower.

  It didn’t matter. We had Salvaged what we needed.

  Jo had her head in her hands, the Book in her lap.

  “You’ll need a new name,” I told her softly. “You’ll need to be new.”

  “All right,” Jo said, half an hour later. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  We were sitting cross-legged in the living room. Levi was manning the black-and-white, searching the frequencies for something useful. I had turned on the big digital in the corner, but muted it. They were talking about the bankruptcy declaration. About the Emergency Farm Bill. The ticker on the bottom of the display scrolled only one message.

  Remain indoors. Follow law enforcement instructions.

  Over and over, like a Salvage ’cast. An ouroboric ribbon noosing the talking heads.

  “When can we come back?” Jo asked.

  “We don’t know,” I said. “We’re not planning on coming back.”

  “What if we can?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what.”

  “Which Place is better.”

  She picked at the carpet. “You have food?”

  “We have everything.”

  “Medicine?”

  “Jo—”

  “Do you have fucking tampons?”

  “We’ll get some.”

  “We have everything.”

  “All right.”

  “Okay?”

  “All right.”

  Jo was lying on her back, staring at our ceiling. We had dozens of things to stare at in the living room. We’d made it into a sort of geek-boy clubhouse, a throwback to classic movies we watched when we were little, when we were younger: The Goonies, The Explorers, Hook, Conan the Barbarian. We had a dress form. A fishing net. An emptied barrel-of-monkeys hanging hook-armed everywhere. We had a vintage lava lamp.

  But Jo stared at the ceiling.

  We were waiting for the Lull.

  “What kind of a new name?” Jo asked.

  Levi looked over his shoulder. First at me, then Jo.

  “Any kind,” I said. “Something new. To you.”

  “Did you two write the Book?” she asked.

  Something squealed on the black-and-white. Levi went back to tuning it.

  “Some of it.”

  She propped herself on an elbow. “Who wrote the rest?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “From Slade?”

  “Some. The Book is different for everyone—people have collected different things, from different places. Some things come through Salvage.”

  “Which would be different everywhere,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you come up with your names?”

  “You want me to help you pick one?”

  She lay back. “Yes.”

  “Mary.”

  “Why ‘Mary’?”

  I watched Levi scribble a note.

  “You can do anything with that name,” I told her.

  She folded her hands over her belly—the tank top had exposed it, her dimpled navel gasping. “Why not ‘Eve,’ then? It was first.”

  “Fine. Eve.”

  “No,” she said.

  Remain indoors.

  “Mary.”

  • • •

  “What are we waiting for?” she asked.

  One of our cats had come out from under the bed—the calico we ca
lled Fluff. I was scratching her head, staring at the digital. There was some problem near Louisiana. The Republic of Texas guys were prepared for this. They were going Gestapo out in the pines, which was bad. East Texas still had racial problems. Nothing I needed to note in the log.

  “The Lull,” Levi answered.

  “Which is?”

  “A lull,” I said, laughing a little.

  Mary slapped the back of my head.

  “You are such an ass.”

  “We’ll go right before the Lull,” Levi said, reaching for another of her cigarettes. She’d been sharing them with him. I watched.

  “Why before?”

  Levi took his hand away from the tuning knob, slowly, as if he’d just set a fuse, or a trap. The screen dithered between two broadcasts. One looked just like the feed I had on digital, but the ticker had been modded to scroll Eliot’s “The Waste Land” instead of civil instructions. The other was a still room-shot of two students reading to each other in turns, one from Machiavelli’s The Prince, one from a tourism guide to New York.

  “Found it,” Levi said.

  “You found it?”

  “Found what?”

  “It’s a tourist guide this time. Barely fucking heard it.”

  “Found what?”

  “Shut up a minute, Mary. Are you far enough between?”

  Levi still held his hands in the air, hovering over the black-and-white as if summoning it to levitate. As if he might wave the broadcast away if he moved.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Seem to be.”

  “Between?”

  “Broadcasts,” I told her. “To find Fat Chance, you have to find New York. It’s always set up with some local ’caster, somebody different each time. Always somehow New York. You have to be between frequencies, between whoever’s been chosen and the next schmuck.”