Ghost Radio
Page 22
“Easy! I don’t want to hurt you,” Joaquin yelled.
“Kill him, Dash. Kill him!” the woman screamed.
Actually, Dash could barely get up off the floor.
“Out of my house!” he yelled, not too convincingly.
Joaquin picked the knife up off the floor, brandishing it.
“Easy, I’m not going to do anything to you. I just want to ask you something.”
The woman threw everything within reach at him. He evaded the onslaught with varying degrees of success, until finally he leaned down and pressed the point of the knife blade against Dash’s neck.
“Stop it, or I’ll cut Dash’s fucking head off!”
The woman froze. Dash moaned something along the lines of, “No, please, don’t.”
“I didn’t come here to hurt anybody, I’m just looking for my stuff. I lived here a long time ago, and I left everything behind.”
He looked around the living room, pointing out different items:
“Those bookcases, that table, those paintings, the graffiti on that wall, they were all mine. All I want are some souvenirs, things that wouldn’t have any value to you.”
What exactly was he looking for? He had no idea.
When he saw that he had their full attention, he lowered the knife and helped Dash to his feet.
“I’ll be out of here soon. Please, just let me look for my stuff.”
“Yeah, it’s him, Lizzy,” Dash said to the woman.
“I already recognized him,” she answered.
“What are you talking about?” asked Joaquin. Were they fans of Ghost Radio?
“There’s a box of photos and crap. We kept it in case someone came around looking for it. You’re in most of the photos. I recognized you right away. Well, right after I realized you weren’t a murdering psychopath.”
“That’s what I want.”
“Let me go get it,” Lizzy said.
“Sorry for barging in like this. But I just really needed that stuff back.”
“We thought you were from the city. They’ve come by a few times to try and evict us.”
The woman presented him with a shoe box crammed full of photos, papers, envelopes, and various other objects.
It wouldn’t be long before daybreak.
Joaquin took out a fistful of old, fading Polaroids. Gabriel’s memories, the testimonies to his experiences and adventures, were being inexorably erased. Among the dusty papers was an envelope that looked recent. He took it out of the box. It was addressed to him; he recognized Gabriel’s handwriting.
“That’s the only thing that’s new,” Dash said.
“Yeah, your friend brought it a few days ago.”
“What friend?”
“That guy,” he said, pointing out one of the photos that Gabriel had taken of himself.
“What did he do?”
“I found him sitting outside on the sidewalk. He told me the same thing as you, that he’d lived here and left a lot of stuff behind. I thought he’d want it all back, so I told him that when we got here the place was empty. But he starting listing all the shit we’d inherited from you guys. Then he reassured me there was nothing to worry about, that I could keep it. But he asked me to give you this envelope, along with everything else in that box, whenever you showed up.”
Joaquin took Gabriel’s latest appearance in stride. His capacity for surprise had vanished. Under the curious gaze of Dash and Lizzy, he emptied the contents of the envelope out onto the table.
He smiled at the items arrayed before him. A blast from the past: photos, diagrams, and notes, all relating to Gabriel’s last day on earth. He gazed for a time at the floor plan of the radio station, remembering the day Gabriel first showed it to him. His eyes wide and clear, speaking of becoming pirate-radio legends.
But then his smile faded. One item on the table didn’t make sense. A photo. He picked it up slowly, his fingers trembling, and an eerie chill coursing through his body.
No, he told himself, this is impossible. It just can’t be.
His hands were paralyzed. The photo slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his knees buckled. He grasped a chair to keep from falling.
In the photo, Joaquin and Gabriel stood arm in arm, smiling. And on Joaquin’s right slouched a very serious-looking Alondra.
chapter 48
CALL 1288, MONDAY, 2:13 A.M. LUCY’S APPLE
“What’s your name?” asked Joaquin.
“Nell.”
“And where are you calling from, Nell?”
“San Francisco.”
“Well, let’s hear your story.”
“I heard this story from a couple of ladies talking at a bus stop and I told it to my friends from school. It kind of became an obsession with some of the girls. So people used to say that I was the one who started the whole thing.”
“Started what?”
The story I heard was that you could find out who you’re going to end up marrying by eating a green apple with a long stem in front of a mirror at midnight. I don’t know how many of my friends tried it, because they would never admit it if they did. The most important thing was that no matter what happens, you can’t turn around. Anyways, one night I was with my cousin Lucy. As always, we were obsessing about boys. “Boy crazy,” my mom calls it.
Lucy really, really wanted to know who she was going to marry. She was really hung up on it. You know, whether she’d find the right guy, if anyone would ever love her, and all that stuff. Even if she would have a fancy wedding. She hardly ever talked about anything else. She got a green apple and waited till midnight, when her mom and dad and brothers were asleep, then she went into the bathroom with it. She stood in front of the mirror, thought real hard about who she was gonna marry, and started eating. She chewed on the apple for a long time till she finished it off, never taking her eyes off the mirror. She told me that she was beginning to see a guy in the mirror, when she felt something behind her, like a shuffling or something. She’d locked the door, so she knew no one could have come in. Now, like I said, there’s one big rule for this game: You must never turn away from the mirror and look behind you, no matter what. If you turn around, the man you were supposed to marry will die.
You’ll live out your life alone. A spinster. An old maid. Lucy was terrified of that. But she couldn’t stop herself. The sound was scary. And it wasn’t going away. She turned. What she saw…she said it was like a dark figure, like an “out-of-focus person” or something. It freaked her out.
She screamed, and when her parents broke down the door, they found her all by herself. She told them she’d been sitting on the toilet, dozed off, and had a nightmare. She didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. When she got to school the next day, there was a lot of commotion. All of the kids were whispering to each other. And all the teachers were totally serious. She asked what was going on, and her best friend told her that one of the boys in class 4D, Mark Spencer, had dropped dead the night before. Out of the blue. He wasn’t sick or anything. They found him in his bed, dead, with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The doctors couldn’t figure out what killed him. When his parents came to clean out his locker, they found a picture of Lucy. It turned out he had a crush on her, and he was still trying to work up the courage to ask her out.
chapter 49
MEMORIES OF COLETT
The moment I saw the photograph, my mind was flooded with memories of the girl we met that day in the desert.
I remembered Colett.
I remembered entering the radio station with her.
I remembered the mastiff almost biting off my nose.
I remembered my horror of the dogs eating Gabriel while the rescue workers tried to resuscitate me.
Gabriel’s photo released a hemorrhage of visions, memories, and conflicting feelings. Forgotten for so long. But the images looked real. They looked familiar. More than that, they felt real. They felt like the truth. And not much had in the
last few days.
They awoke in me something that had lain dormant for years, like breaking a spell, like waking up after a century of sleep. I was altered, changed, transformed. Nothing would ever be the same again.
But this photo of Colett wasn’t a photo of Colett. It was Alondra.
Under different circumstances, in another time, another world, I would have dismissed it as a fake. Just Photoshop nonsense. But I was beyond reason and logic. This was certainty. I had to accept it.
I couldn’t move. The walls breathed, audibly and hypnotically, like a giant cat purring itself to sleep.
The past surrounded me: objects intimate and familiar. A sofa retaining the shape of my body, shelves that once held my favorite books, tables with rings from long-forgotten cups of coffee and glasses of tequila. Under my shock and fear rested another feeling: A feeling of beckoning. The past seemed a blink away; I could relax into it, fall back and let the decades evaporate.
Oh, how I wanted to do this. Just let the present slip away. Forget my life, my relationships, my job. Forget the Internet, cell phones, DVDs, TiVo, American Idol, and the War on Terror. Forget all the pain and joy. Just let it all spiral off into the ether, chasing lost radio signals in the heavens. It felt so close, so possible.
But this sensation vanished when I noticed Dash and Lizzy watching me, mesmerized.
“Hey, I don’t wanna be rude. But you’ve got your box now, and we’re exhausted.”
“Yeah, I gotta go,” I said. “I’m flying home in the morning.”
But I still couldn’t move.
My desire to return to the past melted away, disappeared, the inexplicable urgency transformed into doubt. Since the chat I’d had on the air with the man who’d reminded me of Gabriel, I had wavered between fear and curiosity, between skepticism and the desire to experience for myself what dozens of people confessed to me on the show every day. Before, of course, I believed ghosts only existed in people’s imaginations. This made them no less real. But it dissociated them from haunted mansions, prisons, dark alleys, or any kind of physical space. I knew that Gabriel, or his ghost, or whatever had appeared to me, had always existed in my head, a kind of superego always watching over my shoulder, judging my every decision, my every weakness. Talking to him was just another way of engaging in an internal dialogue. Another way of thinking.
All of that I could almost accept. Almost.
But this Colett/Alondra photo was different.
Could Alondra and Colett really be the same person? I remembered the first time I met Alondra at that party in Mexico City; I replayed, in my mind, the natural way she approached me, talked to me about that ridiculous zombie comic, how we went out to eat and took the first faltering steps toward love. I tried to determine if anything about that night offered a sign. If any of her words or gestures revealed the clue, allowing all of the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place.
My tattoo, she’d been quite intrigued by my tattoo. I rolled up my sleeve and looked at it, hoping it might offer me a message.
But it didn’t. Maybe it couldn’t.
Gabriel’s voice echoed in my ears, speaking of memories living in the darkest corners of the mind.
For you, memories are internal, they’re personal, they’re fragile.
He was right. They were fragile. Fragile as rice paper.
Finally, I stumbled toward the door. All of this had left me punchy. When was the last time I ate? Slept?
“You all right, man?” said Dash.
“Yeah, I just need some rest.”
When I stepped through the door, dawn was breaking.
Driving to the airport, I imagined confronting Alondra. What would I say? Would I accuse her of lying to me all these years? Would I yell that she was part of a conspiracy against me? Would I force her, by any means necessary, to confess the details of this cruel deception? Or maybe it would be better to get the truth out of her gently, by tricking her somehow. Perhaps I could try talking to her sincerely, explain what I’d discovered, show her the proof, and try to figure out from her reaction whether she was part of this bizarre comedy of errors or whether she was, like me, a victim of something inexplicable.
Then again, maybe the best option was to destroy the photograph, and convince myself that everything I’d experienced had been a sort of delirium brought on by exhaustion and stress. I liked that alternative. But I couldn’t shake the knowledge that the point of this entire trip had been to get me to discover this picture. I felt almost as if my actions over the past few weeks had been meticulously programmed and narrated like some kind of show, as if I’d been obliviously following a script in which my every step, decision, and word had already been written down. I replayed everything in my head over and over as I drove, and no matter how many times I told myself I was just being an idiot, I always reached the same conclusion.
I couldn’t pay attention to the road. I kept crossing the lane dividers, sometimes going too fast, sometimes too slow. My eyes kept going back to the box of photographs and souvenirs on the seat next to me. I really didn’t want to look at the photo again, but I knew I had to. I had to be sure; I couldn’t go on without confirming what I’d seen. Colett was clear in my mind, walking toward the station, sitting down at the console, eating tacos next to me, picking up the flower I’d drawn.
But there was nothing consistent about my memories; the characters shifted, the locations differed, the words changed, never repeating the same way twice. My erratic driving didn’t improve over the course of the trip. Other drivers swerved to avoid me, or honked in anger. Finally, the airport appeared on the horizon like an oasis.
As I approached I passed the café I’d seen when I first arrived in Houston. It was just past dawn, but there was still a small crowd gathered around a radio, listening intently. No one moved; the whole thing was like a tableau. This time, I slowed down and rolled down my window. I only needed to hear a few words; it was tuned to Ghost Radio. I rolled up my window as fast as I could, accelerating toward the airport and my flight home.
Hordes of people crowded the terminal, mostly businessmen, dragging small suitcases while talking on cell phones or thumbing BlackBerrys. I got a seat on the next flight. I had almost an hour to kill, but I really wanted to kill the voice that wouldn’t stop chattering in my head. I bought a small suitcase to hold my box of recovered memories. I was tempted to deep-six the whole thing, to throw it in the trash, or just leave the package at the gate. But I couldn’t help imagining the bomb squad, enveloped in their clumsy, cushioned space suits and surrounded by a gaggle of dogs and robots, paralyzing the entire airport while they destroyed the suitcase of souvenirs and reviewed the security tapes in search of the terrorist who’d left it there.
It made no sense to try to get any rest; every time I started to relax, my internal monologue exploded with conjectures and proposals, denunciations and accusations. My head was spinning. I entered the only café open, sat down at the bar, and ordered some orange juice.
While I waited for the server—a good-looking young woman with dark hair, maybe Hispanic—I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Watt’s number. I didn’t feel up to talking to Alondra quite yet, but I wanted to make sure nothing had happened to her in the last few hours, that the mere existence of the photo in my suitcase hadn’t somehow vaporized her, changed her into J. Cortez or Dash or who-knows-what.
“Hello?”
He sounded muffled. I’d forgotten it was so early in the morning.
“Watt, it’s me.”
“Who?”
My heart clenched. Was this another strange waking dream, one in which I didn’t exist?
“It’s me. Joaquin.”
“Oh, Joaquin. Hi.” He yawned. “What’s going on? Alondra said you were out of town.”
“Sorry to bother you so early, Watt. Just wondered if you talked to her since last night.”
“To Alondra? You guys have a fight or something?”
“No, I just had a bad feeling.”
“All right, all right, I’m sorry.”
He would get over it; in the long term, he had a high tolerance for my eccentricities. I was more worried about myself at the moment. Suddenly a thought struck me.
“Hey, Watt, you know about radio waves, right? I was talking to”—I paused for a moment, unsure how to proceed—“someone. I was talking to someone I ran into here, and he had a theory about our broadcasts. That somehow they could reach beyond our world, into, well, I know it sounds crazy, but into the spirit world. The afterlife.”
He perked up a bit at this, sounding more alert, if no less grumpy.
“There’s still a lot we don’t know about electromagnetism, Joaquin.”
Gradually, I’d been realizing how strange it was, hearing Watt’s voice from hundreds of miles away. Almost as if Watt himself were being distilled into the very waves we were discussing and sent through the air, through the ether, through space, through time. It wasn’t such an absurd concept, but it hit me with the force of a jackhammer. The air around me, I realized suddenly, was full of voices. Every person who was on the phone in the airport. Every TV newscaster, every traffic report, every security guard with a walkie-talkie. What were these waves taking from us? I sat in front of a mike, sending my voice out across the country five hours a day—what were they taking from me?
“When you’re talking about waves that don’t need air or water as a medium, signals that can move through empty space, signals of pure energy, well, who knows where they can go? If we wait long enough, four or five years, aliens in the next star system could be listening to Ghost Radio. Hell, knowing our show, some of them might even be callers.”