Ghost Radio

by Leopoldo Gout

  “Keep your eyes peeled. Maybe we’ll find it.”

  They reached the building. Joaquin went up the stairs, slowly, carefully—looking at each step, hoping he’d find the phone there. No luck. He realized that in the last few minutes his priorities had changed; he wasn’t as worried anymore about the call that had so deeply disturbed him earlier. Now his cell phone was the pressing concern. Its absence hurt…physically. He reached the seventh floor and went down the hallway, followed by Barry. Joaquin kept his eye on the ground, still hoping his precious phone would appear.

  The door of apartment 713 was open, which seemed to worry Barry since he hesitated and gave Joaquin a look. Then his face twisted into a strange grimace and he gestured for Joaquin to enter first, as if he were afraid to walk in on another intruder. Joaquin entered slowly. His eyes scanned the floor nervously. He really wanted to find his cell. Amid the mess he saw red stains and puddles of red liquid. He remembered the ketchup he saw in the headdress, but this was something different. Then he heard Barry scream out.

  “No! Murderer!”

  Joaquin’s eyes leaped to the center of the room, where he saw the pastor’s body lying behind the table, bathed in blood. His dirty bathrobe lay open. Dozens—no, hundreds—of stab wounds decorated the torso, and his jaw hung limp, half torn from his face.

  Barry picked up a blood-covered knife and brandished it at Joaquin.

  “Stay away from me, you son of a bitch, you…murderer!”

  “What are you talking about? You were with me when we left. And he was alive!”

  “Don’t come any closer, or you’ll end up worse than him.”

  Joaquin’s first instinct was to run. It wouldn’t be easy to convince the cops that he’d only beaten the preacher up, especially when he’d had the knife, apparently the murder weapon, in his hands before the fight. Barry picked up the telephone and raised an index finger over the buttons, but his hands shook, he couldn’t seem to find the right numbers.

  “Use you brain, Barry. He was alive when we left. And we’ve been in sight of each other ever since.”

  “Shut up, you motherfucker, you murderer! You were beating the shit out of him when I got here. They’re gonna lock you up and throw away the key,” Barry said.

  Running away was no solution. It wouldn’t take long to catch him; any competent detective would follow the leads and find him. Joaquin’s life hung by a narrow thread: a narrow thread with blond hair and a wild look in his eyes. What could he do? Either he waited for the cops to arrive, with everything that implied, or he ran away and hoped to prove his innocence later on. He had to decide fast.

  As he glanced around desperately, he realized that the strange objects in the room had been rearranged. It’s not that he recalled exactly where the small idols, papers, and pieces of fruit had been positioned. But the general impression those items exuded was different. Someone had moved them. It was like reading a paragraph after the word order had changed; it may convey the same idea, but the tone has shifted.

  “Barry, listen to me. We were fighting and he was winning. Even when you distracted him, I could barely force him to the ground. I didn’t do this. When you came in he was alive. Someone who got here after us did this. Maybe they took advantage of the open door.”

  Barry didn’t respond. He continued dialing numbers on the telephone and hanging up, as if he were trying to crack a secret code.

  How hard can it be to dial 911? Joaquin thought.

  “It’s not working! The telephone is busted and there are just voices and noises on the line,” Barry said.

  Abruptly, he dropped the phone and ran out of the apartment yelling:

  “Help, the pastor’s dead! The pastor’s been killed!”

  The thought of being lynched by a bloodthirsty crowd demanding justice should have frightened Joaquin, but he assumed a fatalistic attitude. He picked the phone up off the floor, cleaned off one of the chairs in the apartment, and sat down to wait. This all felt so abstract. A body splayed out on the floor. The strange objects littering the room. And this crazed, blond-haired boy screaming in the hallway.

  “This is your life on Ghost Radio,” Joaquin said to himself.

  He looked down at the phone. Maybe he should call Alondra. But what would he say? The situation was confusing enough to him; to Alondra, it would sound like absolute madness. But still he thought he should call her, given the way he’d left the apartment. Who knew how long all of this would take?

  He hit the talk button, but instead of a dial tone, he heard murmuring, a dry vibration that reminded him of distant voices merged into a single buzzing drone.

  Barry ran back in, breathless and pale once again. He gave Joaquin a distressed look.

  “There’s no one here…no one.”

  “What do you mean, no one?”

  “Either they’re gone or someone took them away.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Take a look. See for yourself.”

  Indeed, the building seemed abandoned. Minutes earlier, Joaquin had seen people in the hallways, heard children’s voices, radios and TVs blaring, noticed the mingled smells of food and detergent. Now…nothing. Instead, there was a strange, surreal calm.

  “Where’d everybody go?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Is there an assembly, a residents’ meeting? A parade that everyone went to?” Joaquin suggested, realizing how ridiculous it sounded.

  The tableau suggested only one thing: a catastrophe. It was like the void great tragedies leave in their wake. The kind of mass exodus caused by earthquakes, wars, or full-scale alien invasions.

  “The pastor is dead, and the whole building is empty.”

  Joaquin didn’t have a reply. Barry had phrased his statement as if there were a connection between both events.

  “I gotta call the cops,” Barry said.

  He left the apartment, looking around him perplexedly. He knocked on every door; he yelled; he called out to the neighbors. Joaquin followed him, silently. What more could he do?

  When they reached the street, the scene was the same: total silence. Not a single person was in sight outside or in the stores. Not one car was in motion.

  “The neutron bomb,” Joaquin said, half alarmed, half fascinated by the prospect.

  “Huh?” said Barry, looking more and more frightened. He turned in a panicked three-sixty, searching for signs of life behind the shop windows and inside parked cars.

  “A bomb that destroys only living beings, while leaving nonorganic objects intact.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

  After what seemed like a very long silence, Barry said, “‘Neutron bomb to kill the poor,’ like in the Dead Kennedys song.”

  “‘It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done,’” Joaquin quoted.

  They walked a few more blocks and Barry went into a cafeteria. Not a cat, a cockroach, or even a shadow. The tables were set. Some of the food on the plates still felt warm. There was no sign that people had fled, no traces of chaos or violence. It looked like they had simply vanished…evaporated. It reminded him of an episode of The Twilight Zone.

  “It’s like when the pastor died, the whole world died with him,” Barry said.

  “Barry, why do you keep connecting the pastor’s death to all this,” Joaquin said with a vague gesture toward his surroundings.

  “It all was foretold in his visions: the deserted cities, the sandstorms, people lifting themselves up off the earth and embarking on a cosmic journey.”

  “The Christian rapture?”

  “The pastor’s visions,” Barry said adamantly.

  Joaquin hunted for words. None came.

  “The dream disappears when the dreamer stops dreaming,” Barry said distantly.

  Joaquin decided he would go back home and leave Barry with his fantasies and his cadaver. This was all too weird—and he still didn’t
know who’d made the phone call. But right now that was the least of his worries. He started walking, quickly, back toward his car.

  “Where are you going?” Barry shouted after him.

  Joaquin just walked, not turning, not answering.

  “Come back here! You can’t leave me like this!”

  Barry kept on shouting, but didn’t try to stop him. It wasn’t until he reached his car that Joaquin realized how much all of this had affected him. His hands trembled, and he broke out in a cold sweat. It took him more than a minute to insert the key in the ignition, and even longer to put it in gear. Then he drove away as fast as he could.

  He cruised down silent streets, fearful and dazed. Instead of noon, it looked more like dawn. Joaquin desperately searched for signs of life. He felt the car sliding through the streets as if they were coated with ice. It floated, zigzagging, drifting aimlessly. He replayed the fight with the preacher in his head, he felt the blows again, but each time, the outcome differed. He imagined snatching the knife off the floor and plunging it into the pastor again and again. He watched a shadow slide into the apartment and throw itself on the pastor, jagged claws cutting him to pieces. He saw the pastor stab himself with tears rolling down his cheeks. He saw eyeballs considering him from every drain in the apartment. The death of J. Cortez had unleashed something expansive and uncontainable, something Joaquin barely understood.

  “What happens to the characters in a dream after the dreamer wakes up?” he asked himself.

  Ridiculous thoughts, right? But maybe they held some meaning. Maybe they were the clue. All of this was too much for him. A wave of anger ran through his body.

  He honked the horn over and over again, pushing the gas pedal to the floor, slamming the dashboard with his fists, screaming as loud as he could. Several times, he reached into his pocket for his cell. He had a strange sensation that he carried a phantom cell phone; he imagined it was like the ache that amputees feel in their missing limbs.

  He went the wrong way down one-way streets; he put the car in reverse; he drove on sidewalks; he jammed on the brakes over and over again. He let his disorientation take over, until he was completely lost. He couldn’t remember how he had gotten here. None of the street signs looked familiar. Where was he? How would he get home? For all he knew, he might be in another city.

  Desperate, he stopped the car in the middle of the street, beat his forehead on the steering wheel, and howled:

  “What the fuck!”

  Then a car behind Joaquin honked its horn. The spell was broken. The city had reawakened. Everything moved again. There were people walking here and there, entering shops, eating and talking.

  The car radio came on with a strident burst of static, the noise beginning as a cacophony of voices until it resolved itself into a dialogue: two men arguing about the war.

  “Where’d everybody go?” he said to himself. He slowly accelerated, overwhelmed by the uproar filling his ears.

  He was relieved, but a nagging undercurrent of doubt lingered in his thoughts. What happened today? What really happened? Had he actually seen a dead body? Were the pastor and Barry real? The only thing he knew for sure was that his cell phone was still missing. He drove down streets and avenues that were familiar once again. Soon he was back in front of his apartment.

  He glanced at his watch: 8:00 A.M. How was that possible? It was later than that when he’d gone out.

  The moment took over. Joaquin sat in the car and wept.

  chapter 41

  RETURN TO THE PAST

  Alondra awoke to the sound of someone trying to force the door open. She knew Joaquin hadn’t come home that night, and she assumed it was just him, blind drunk. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but it wasn’t unheard of either. She stood up, barely able to keep her eyes open; covered only by a T-shirt a couple sizes too small and some underwear, she walked barefoot toward the door. Before she got there, it swung open and Joaquin stumbled in. He was sweaty and disheveled.

  “Alondra, you’ve got to listen. I know what I’m going to say sounds crazy, but something completely incomprehensible just happened to me.”

  “I’d imagine it must have for you to show up at this hour. Go take a shower and get some sleep. We’ll talk later.”

  Alondra wasn’t fond of surprises, and she was even less fond of hysterics. Maybe it was her Irish blood—she tended to dismiss people who gesticulated wildly or raised their voices to say things that didn’t seem particularly urgent. She had an especially strong aversion to excited men who acted like their enthusiasm and heightened emotions made what they said more important. She wanted to hear whatever Joaquin had to say, but he’d have to calm down in order for her to take him seriously.

  “No, you don’t get it. We’ve got to talk,” he said.

  “Now? Is it absolutely necessary?” she said, pushing her hair off her face with the back of her hand.

  “I went over to the place where that call came from.”

  “What call?”

  “You don’t remember? The call that woke us up.”

  “What are you talking about? You just woke me up.”

  “I know it’s eight o’clock. I’m not sure what’s happening, but I got a weird phone call at eight, got the address from the caller ID by Googling. It was a priest or preacher or shaman or who knows what the hell he was; I got into a fistfight with him, and then Barry arrived and I had to chase him, and when we came back, he was dead.”

  “Who was dead?”

  “The preacher. He’d been stabbed and Barry thought I did it.”

  “And who’s Barry?”

  “He’s the preacher’s assistant, disciple, friend, lover…how should I know?”

  “Let’s start over.”

  “Look, something really bizarre happened to me, and the strangest part of all is that now it seems like nothing happened.”

  “Come again?”

  “You don’t remember? Us having coffee earlier? You went to take a shower. And then I left.”

  “It was probably yesterday.”

  “No, it wasn’t yesterday, it was today. If it never happened, then when did I leave?”

  “You didn’t come home after the show.”

  “So where did I go?”

  “Joaquin, pull yourself together. I don’t know where you went. I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “I slept here, right next to you. The phone rang at eight in the morning and woke me up.”

  “I can say with absolute certainty that it didn’t happen like that at all.”

  “This has got to have something to do with the waking nightmares I’ve been having. It’s like my brain is being used by someone else; as if someone were hacking into my head. It’s a downward spiral: the experiences are getting longer, more intense, more mesmerizing.”

  “Brain hacking?”

  “That’s what it feels like. I can’t think of another metaphor that would explain it better. What’s happening to me goes beyond simply hallucinating. It’s like living in a parallel universe.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Astral projection and out-of-body experiences?”

  “I don’t know what they are, but I can assure you they’ve been neither pleasant nor illuminating. I feel like I’m losing the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.”

  “They sound like bad trips—are they flashbacks from when you were doing ’shrooms or acid? Did you do something heavier?”

  “No, I never did those drugs, and they can’t be flashbacks, this is different. It’s like they’re coming from outside me, not inside.”

  “That’s exactly what a flashback feels like.”

  “They aren’t flashbacks.”

  “Then what’s happening to you? Because I’m afraid that if these hallucinations aren’t drug induced, the only other option is that you’re suffering from acute psychosis.” There was a certain condescension in her tone.

  “I know there’s no rational explanation for this, b
ut I’m being sucked into the stories told by some of the callers. I mean, literally, all of a sudden their voices start dragging me in and my surroundings change. Just like that, I leave the radio station and become an unwilling participant in their terrifying episodes.”

  “You’re taking your work at Ghost Radio too seriously. You’re also taking your empathy with listeners to an extreme,” she answered, still not really believing what Joaquin was saying.

  “This goes beyond imagining what people tell us on the phone.”

  “Well, since you’re not going to let me go back to sleep, let’s have a cup of coffee.”

  “Another one?”

  “No, the first one. Believe me, I know with complete certainty when I’ve had my first cup of coffee for the day.”

  They walked into the dining room. Alondra sat down, rubbing her eyes. Joaquin made a beeline for the coffeemaker. It wasn’t warm, and he prepared two espressos. They drank the coffee in silence. As he met Alondra’s gaze, he felt a little ridiculous for having burst in the way he had. The preacher’s body and the paralyzed city seemed remote, like something he’d seen in a movie. As soon as he sat down and relaxed, though, he felt the pain from his injuries. He ran into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. The blow to his face had left a mark, and he had several bruises on his ribs. He went back to Alondra, but didn’t say anything. The apartment was more luminous than he had ever seen it. Everything glowed, like photos in Architectural Digest. The noise from the street grew louder, but he barely noticed.

  “Your coffee,” Alondra said.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s getting cold, and you hate cold coffee. Or has that changed?”

  “No. That already happened.”

  “Okay, we’re going to continue this debate.”

  “No, forget it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You remember I mentioned I’d been having a recurring dream about Toltecs?” Joaquin asked.

  “Yes, and I also remember asking you how you could be so sure they were Toltecs, and not Olmecs or Nahuatls. Were there signs that said ‘You are now in Toltec territory’?”