by Welke, Ian
A default IM chime rings. My IM window pops open.
Marie? Has she ever IM’d with me before? Let alone on my new account.
Marie: You there?
Annie: Yeah. Missed you at work today.
Annie: Don’t open any links!
Marie: I know. People are sending very many links to me. Are you getting very many spams?
Annie: Yeah. It seems like they’ve hacked accounts on every site.
Marie: It is strange this. Strange how so much can be corrupted at once. You know what will cheer you? Check this pic out!
Annie: No thks. I don’t really want to dl anything right now.
The icon Marie sends looks just like the symbol from the dream. I stare at it for several seconds, before shutting down my IM client.
This can’t be happening.
I shut my eyes tight. If I squeeze my eyes tight enough, when I open them again, will it all be different? Will I wake up from this nightmare? The icon still displays on my monitor. I grab my cell phone, go into the work contacts folder, and text Marie.
Annie: I think your IM account has been hacked.
My landline rings. My mom’s number displays in the caller ID.
“Mom,” I answer, “if you’re online, don’t click on any links. There’s something nasty going around.”
The line buzzes. “Honey.
“Mom?”
More buzzing. “Yes, dear.”
“I…” I pause. “I think we have a bad line. Can I call you back?”
There’s no answer except for more buzzing.
“Mom?”
“Can you say something else?”
The line clicks and goes dead. I dial the number back. It goes straight to voicemail. I wait a second, try again, but her voicemail comes up again. I try her cell phone and get the same result. I try calling both of her phones with my cell phone, thinking I’ll leave the landline open, but this too goes straight to voicemail. A list of problems that could be affecting my mom’s speech goes through my head.
You’re not a doctor and it’s probably nothing to worry about.
I pace the kitchen floor telling myself to wait five minutes and call back. I watch the clock on the microwave.
She’ll call. She’ll call.
When the phone doesn’t ring after five minutes, I try both lines, but I still get voicemail. I’m about to give up and go over there, when I get through on her landline.
“Mom?”
A long buzz follows a series of clicks. “I’m not here, dear.”
“How are you answering your home phone if you’re not home?” More panic races through my head as I worry about the way that she’s speaking.
Dementia? A stroke? The cancer’s back. It’s metastasized and spread to her brain.
Tears well in my eyes. I tell myself not to panic until I know what there is to panic about, but it’s not working. I’m so tired, and it’s getting worse and worse. If I could just sleep, maybe it would all make sense, but I need to know that my mother is all right if I stand any chance at sleeping.
I grab my purse and keys and run out the door.
The air outside is still warm from the Santa Anas, but a shiver runs down my back and the hair on my arms stands on end. The lights in the parking lot are out. I look up at the light poles and I can’t make sense of what I see. It’s dark and I’ve had no sleep. I tell myself that I can’t rely on my senses. It looks like there are shapes in the dark. Things that look three or four times the size of people seem to swoop above me in the blackness. I close my eyes and look again, but see nothing. It’s like my brain has rejected the image. I can’t process it. There’s still something there in the black, but I can’t make it out.
Sleep deprivation. Just get going and pay attention to the damned road.
As I get into the car, I can’t help but feel that I’m being watched. I look to the sky once more. I don’t see swooping shapes, but the sky is darker than I’ve ever seen it before. I close the car door, unable to shake the feeling that the sky itself is staring at me.
~
My boss’s face moves toward me. It’s blurred and too bright, like an overexposed black and white photo. It takes me a moment to recognize where I am. I’m staring up from the couch in his office. The ceiling sways behind him. Bile stings the back of my throat. I’d run to the bathroom, but I don’t think the ground will stay steady long enough for me to make it. Pete’s face swirls in the spinning room. The holes in the acoustical ceiling tiles make a hypnotic spiral. Pete’s lips move, but the sound isn’t synched up right. “Annieee,” it buzzes.
“What are you doing?” my own voice asks. A hand grabs my shoulder. I look back and see my own face behind me, grinning like a lunatic. Drool drips from my bottom lip.
I shake myself into focus, almost skidding out of my lane, overcorrecting the steering wheel before I’m actually awake.
Even though the air outside will likely wreak havoc on my sinuses, I roll the window all the way down. I turn up the radio, but I can’t find a station, just static. The CD player doesn’t work any better. It plays the first ten seconds of track one, dies, and switches on its own to the buzzing static of the radio. I hit the CD button again, but it does the same thing. I turn it off and lean my face out the window, letting the warm air blast me in the face. The meridian flashes by like a film missing frames, my headlights strobing ahead. I force my attention on the road.
“Annieeee,” Pete’s voice buzzes, startling me again. My arms shake as I steady the wheel.
Streetlights flicker as I drive past the endless series of strip malls that dot Orange County.
The Santa Anas have disrupted everything. In a few days, they’ll set half the parks and scrub brush on fire, the winds will die back down, and things will return to screwed up normal.
What if the wind is the problem? What if it’s the wind that’s making me not sleep? What if it’s making everyone crazy?
I try, but I can’t remember when the winds started blowing.
I make the right hand turn into my mother’s cul-de-sac. My mom’s house, the house I grew up in, is in the middle of the turnabout. It’s a suburban neighborhood full of post-war tract homes, all of the homes were initially built in the same two or three bedroom patterns. Most have since had additions of a second story or a master bedroom and bath. A few have added two bedrooms on top, but otherwise they fit the same floor-plan.
My mother had added on to our house when I was in high school. Contractors built a master bedroom and another smaller bedroom on the second story, along with extra closet space. My mom has always been supportive of me as an artist. She had the idea that after college, if I wanted to come back and live in the house, I could use one of the downstairs bedrooms as an art studio.
When I think about it, I wonder why I rejected the idea. Is independence worth the job I work?
Stubbornness bordering on stupidity.
If I’d gone with her plan, I might have been home tonight. I might have been able to call an ambulance in time.
I put the thought out of my head. Again, I’m jumping to the worst case scenario, and losing focus on what I’m doing. What I need to do is find out what the situation is. As I focus, it hits me how quiet the neighborhood is. When I grew up here there was always a family yelling or a television on too loud. There are no sounds, apart from my car door as I get out in my mother’s driveway. There are no lights coming from the homes.
There are only a handful of cars parked on the street and all of the driveways are empty including my mother’s.
Again, I tell myself not to jump to conclusions. Not everyone’s like my mom. Some people probably park in their garages. Not all of their garages are full of boxes of their daug
hter’s artwork from childhood to adulthood.
I ring the doorbell. There’s no response.
Don’t panic.
I look at my phone to get the time. The display comes up strange. At first the interface looks fragmented, like the screen has been dropped and shattered. I run my finger over it to make sure it’s not broken, but as I do this, it reboots itself. When it comes back on, there’s a prompt to download an app. The icon displayed is the same symbol that was on the man’s hat in my dream. I shut off the phone and stuff it back into my purse.
I put the key to the door and open it.
“Mom?”
My call is met with silence. I switch on lights in the living room, kitchen, and the downstairs bedrooms. My teddy bear I had when I was little sits on the pillow in my old bedroom. Nothing is out of place. My mother has always kept the house clean. She even picks up so that the cleaning lady who comes in once a week won’t think she’s a bad housekeeper.
I look up toward the second floor and call, “Mom?” again before climbing the stairs. At the top of the stairs I try her name, both her original Dutch name “Roosje” and the Americanized “Rosie,” but there’s no answer to either.
My mother’s bedroom is empty, the bed made. I check the walk-in closet. All of my mother’s clothes and shoes seem to be in place. Wherever she’s gone, she hasn’t packed to leave. Then a horrible thought; she’s dead in the bathroom.
I lunge to open the door to the master bathroom. It’s empty.
Her car’s gone. She’s driven somewhere. At least I can manage that much logic.
I go back downstairs and into my old bedroom. “I don’t suppose you know where she went?”
If my old bear knows, he’s not saying.
When I moved into my first apartment my mother had been reluctant to change anything in my bedroom. The furniture remained the same. The only changes she made were to take down my posters, making more wall space for my artwork. Three of them are inked sketches I had drawn while I was home on break from Santa Cruz. Background sketches for a fantasy setting, they were deliberately unsettling and meant to be nightmarish. I had thought my mom would hate them, but instead she had them framed, and she hung them next to two paintings I’d done in middle school. Those two had always been Mom’s favorites. Every so often a sentimental mood would take her and she’d sit me down and tell me how proud she was of me. She always pointed to those paintings when she told me she was proud.
I pick the bear off the bed, staring into its eyes like it might have an answer, before setting it back down. I walk past the guest bedroom, cross the hall, and flick on the light in the bedroom my mom uses as an office. The walls of the room are also adorned with my art. All of these pictures are from my younger years. Some are in crayon. Even my earliest pictures were darker than the other kids. My elementary school teachers thought there was something wrong with me. The other kids moved on to drawing Santa Claus, but I kept drawing Halloween ghosts and Jack-o-lanterns.
I sit down at my mom’s desk, the same desk she sat at when she helped me with my homework in high school. I pick up the picture my mom keeps of me, a photo from when we drove together up to Santa Cruz. My first dorm room is in the background. Setting the picture frame back down I press the power button on Mom’s computer. The computer takes a moment to boot, but when it does the desktop background is the symbol from my dream. I switch it off, stand up, and step back from the desk, holding my head and squeezing my eyes shut tight.
The floor feels like it might shoot out from under my legs. It sways left and right. The pain in my head is overwhelming. I fall forward, catching myself on the door jam, and stagger hunched over to the bathroom. This brings back memories of having the flu when I was a child. These same steps. I fall to my knees in front of the toilet, gagging and vomiting.
When I’ve finished, I lean against the wall. It feels cool against my forehead. It takes time, but the pain in my head subsides to a dull ache. I run cold water and splash some on my face determined to get it together and think straight.
Your mother is okay. You’re freaking out over nothing.
Back in the kitchen, I open the drawer beneath the telephone, pulling out my mother’s address book. I flip it open, take the phone out of its cradle, and call my aunt.
The phone rings three times before I realize how late it is. Someone picks up. “Aunt Margaret? This is Annie. I’m sorry to call so late, but I’m worried about my mom.”
The voice on the other end is garbled, but sounds like she says, “Hello.”
“I’m at my mother’s house. I was wondering if you’ve heard from her. If you’ve heard from your sister, Roosje.”
A burst of static is followed by a lengthy pause. “Isn’t she there?”
“No. I was hoping you might know where I can find her. I need to talk to her.”
There’s another long pause. “I’m sure she’s all right. I will call you…” Pause. “… On your cell phone if I learn anything.” The phone clicks ending the call.
I flip through the phone book. My mom’s best friend passed away last year, not long after Mom finished her treatments. I had to take Mom to the poor woman’s funeral. I’ll never forget the fear in Mom’s eyes, knowing how close she had come to death herself, mixed in with the sadness at losing her friend. That certain knowledge that all her friends would go away.
I find a number for Mom’s next best friend, Valerie. I can’t remember if Valerie is still alive. It’s too late to call anyway.
Back in my old bedroom, I sit down on the bed. Holding my old bear, I sit and wait until morning for Mom to come home. But she never comes.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Let me guess, missing persons?” The policeman at the front desk pulls a clipboard off a stack and hands it to me. “Go ahead and fill this out.” He nods at the other people behind me. They’re standing or kneeling while filling out paperwork on similar looking clipboards. There are nine grim-looking adults crammed into a space that’s meant for three or four. Two kids slalom around their legs. The kids’ mother, a middle-aged Pacific Islander, shushes them, and goes back to her missing person’s form.
“I thought I needed to wait twenty-four hours before you’d take the report,” I say.
“Everybody thinks that. That’s just how it is in the movies.” He picks up the phone. The console is lit up, red lights flashing for all the lines. Shrill rings of phones from the offices down the hall echo and don’t stop ringing, layering echo upon ring upon echo.
I step to my right and back away to the let an elderly Asian woman behind me get to the front desk. The line behind her extends out the door.
“I’m sorry. We’re understaffed. The computers are down. There are a lot of people out sick, and we’re getting a lot of calls,” the officer says into the phone.
I try to shoot him a sympathetic look. I can relate.
One of the two kids clips my knee, and I have to catch my balance. Their mother doesn’t seem to notice, though she starts writing faster. Her pen sounds like it’s meant to signal someone in Morse Code.
I fill in the first box on the form, my mother’s name.
The kids laugh. The youngest lets out a high pitched shriek.
Sounds like someone’s torturing a porpoise.
The murmurs of people talking and coughing and the phones ringing in the station and cell phones’ ringtones merge.
Abuela? Grandmother?
I understand little from what I overhear from the Hispanic couple across from me. I pick out “Phones. Chatter. Zumbido Hombre.” Sounds continue to overlap. The same default ringtone plays on several cell phones at once, separated by starting just a half a beat off on each phone. More sounds pile on to the heap. Bells, chimes, beeps for incoming text and email, kids, phones again. The amalgam of noise rises in a buzzing hum. I wince, trying to squeeze the sound out of my head.
The hum just grows. Opening my eyes, I search for the source of the buzzing. I swear that there’s the droning sound
the albino man made in my dream looped into the hum. When I shut my eyes again, I can feel him standing behind me, his teeth clenched shut, but speaking in that same droning buzz. A voice says something I can’t quite pick out. It’s like he’s standing in the next room, whispering to me through the air vents.
The other people take no notice of the clashing sounds, and if they hear the droning whisper of the albino man, they don’t react to it.
Probably best not to ask the people in the police station if they’re hearing the voices in my head. Need to get some damned sleep. Probably should keep any theories that this all has something to do with that virus to myself as well.
I fill in the second box on the form. Shit. I’ve marked the wrong damn box. My old learning disability, my eyes skip lines, comes when I’m not concentrating. I try to focus on putting everything in the correct boxes. I try to ignore the strangeness growing all around me. The skin on my forehead and cheeks flushes, hot like seared meat. The lights flicker in the fluorescent rods above me.
Enough of this. Fill out the form before your head explodes.
I get it done as fast as I can. I scan it once, trying to make sure I’ve got everything in the right places, but the words and boxes blur together. I turn it in to the man at the desk. He’s on the phone with another call. The red lights of the on-hold calls cast the counter in a hellish hue.
As I turn to leave, the room sways around me. Sweating and struggling just to stay upright, I make my way past the line waiting for their missing person’s forms and stagger out of the doors into the hot, dusty, windswept streets.
~
It’s a struggle to keep my eyes open and pay attention to the road, but I make it home.
Ought to check the fender for blood and hair, driving this tired.
I lean on the fender, steadying myself, before I stumble the rest of the way to my apartment. I step inside and steady myself with my back against the door.
My bed looks inviting, but I can’t bring myself to start the insomnia clock watch cycle again. I go to the couch instead, use the television for additional light, and switch on my laptop. Uncertain of which websites are safe, I check the news sites. Most of the web is affected. People have taken down their sites. Almost all the sites I see are one front page of text, an under construction page “pending security upgrades.”