The Great Big One

by J. C. Geiger

  “It’s June-uary,” Griff said. “You know. Just before Ju-lie. And Fog-ust.”

  In the distance, a low buzzing.

  “Look,” Thomas said. He plucked a blade of reed grass. With the tip, he traced Leo’s hand-drawn elevation lines. “Your brother spent a lot of time on this.”

  Louder. A vehicle. The group perked up.

  Spawn Drive Peak was on the way to nowhere. No one should be here. The engine swelled and a truck overtook the curve—a hard black edge around the corner. Jonesy’s truck.

  “No way,” Griff said.

  It slowed. Pulled into the lot.

  tickticktticktick

  “Is that Jonesy and Slim?” Thomas asked. “What are they doing here?”

  “Make out?” Charity said. “Or suicide?”

  Jonesy gunned the engine. Whipped the truck around in a quick screeching loop. Low-frequency bass rattled the windows. He gave a quick patter of honks, a signature tire-chirp, and lurched back onto the road toward town.

  “Was that a secret message?” Charity said.

  “The tire chirp is Morse code for I’m an asshole,” Griff said.

  “I don’t know how they found us,” Thomas said. “Maybe they’re reminding us about the meeting.”

  “I could never see another pickup truck,” Charity said. “I’d be fine.”

  Thomas divided up the tapes. A stack for him, a stack for Griff, a stack for Charity.

  “Listen to everything,” Thomas said. “Take notes. We reconvene in two days. Let’s go over everything we know.”

  They stopped abruptly at the sound of the alarm. The 1000T. Warbling, distant.

  oooooooeeeeeebadadadadadada

  “We’d better go,” Griff said, rolling up the map. Wind snatched at the corners.

  “Why?” Charity asked. “Nuclear strike? Tsunami?”

  “City Council meeting,” Griff said.

  “And you’re going?”

  “We have to,” Griff said. “They’re voting on the lighthouse.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  THE CITY COUNCIL MEETING SMELLED LIKE STALE CIGARETTES, gasoline, and low-tide mud. His hometown smell. A little fishy. Griff liked it. There were dockworkers, a crew from the cannery, the downtown shop owners, lumber workers, and a handful of teachers. Jonesy and Slim sat up front. Griff and Thomas stayed near the back beside a bulletin board with tear-off advertisements for house sitters, potential roommates, ads for gutter repair, Ron’s Surf Shack, Burrito Chuck, a poster of an anthropomorphized paper document with cartoon legs, eyes, and gloved hands wagging its finger and saying: Remember Information Is Key to Good Decision Making.

  The first presentation, from a University of Oregon research fellow, was about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s improvements in navigation systems since the early 1900s. The second presentation, from the Lost Coast Preppers, featured Dunbar and the beefcake Regional Prepper Director Tom Schaloob. They described the advanced tectonic and nuclear submarine monitoring techniques and air-raid alerts that would be available should the lighthouse be dismantled and repurposed. The third presentation was in support of maintaining the lighthouse as a cultural treasure, led by volunteer librarian Mrs. Ciota and retired language arts teacher Mr. Locke, speaking on behalf of the Clade City Culture Keepers. They discussed the poetic importance of Sense of Place and aesthetic beauty in the built environment.

  “Not looking good for the lighthouse,” Thomas whispered.

  Griff watched the crowd, pressure growing behind his eyes.

  Someone, he thought. Say something.

  Had anyone in the crowd heard the Band’s song on K-NOW? What music could capture their hearts? The surfers, dockworkers, lumberjacks. It couldn’t all just be talk toads and Rack Rock and commercials for sleep-number beds. They, too, must dance in their kitchens. Sing in their showers. Surely these people must ache and lie in bed and cry listening to something.

  After the debate, Griff’s father managed to defer the vote on the lighthouse. The crowd was not with him. As the meeting dispersed, the murmur of voices hummed like an alert turned down low:

  brrrradadadadbreeeeeee

  His town had become afraid.

  Griff had played one brave song. The screaming yellow Thunderbolt had been broadcasting almost a year. It had its own Specific Absorption Rate. Leeching into their cells, blood, and bones. Sowing its message, steady as the tide.

  FORTY

  AFTER THE MEETING, GRIFF VISITED HIS PIANO.

  Are you still playing?

  He opened the French doors and the room exhaled a stale breath. Pages on the stand waved a limp hello. The room smelled like a vacuum bag that needed changing.

  Every piece of music on the stand was written for four hands. Griff touched the laced cord on his wrist. He could not play with it on. He could not take it off.

  The bench had been still for months.

  Grooves in the carpet recalled the struggle. Small, square dents where Griff preferred the bench. Ahead of them, the brass-capped legs where Leo liked them. Like notches on a belt, Leo Position or Griff Position. No in-between.

  The bench remained in Leo Position.

  Griff sat down. Stared at the keys. On the music stand, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Right where they’d put it. The score had been left on his part, andante.

  Griff held his fingers out.

  He knew it well enough, but then what? The page turns inevitably ended with the scherzo. The terrifying final act—Italian for “the joke”—which upended the themes introduced in the overture and sped them up, twisting them in startling ways.

  How could he do it alone?

  Griff settled his hands on the keys. Cool on his fingertips.

  Movement at the window. His head jerked up.

  His mother stood with her face neatly framed in a pane of glass. A frozen gasp. Crying. She looked caught. Like she shouldn’t be looking. Gone.

  And that was the reason it would never work.

  His mother’s face. Horrified to see him in the dark room.

  Like she’d just seen a ghost.

  FORTY-ONE

  WRONG, THOMAS TEXTED THE NEXT DAY. YOU’RE WRONG. FLAT WRONG. COME OVER.

  Lately, escape from home had been tricky.

  Griff’s living room looked like a freshly exploded tourist trap. His mother was doing a shop reorganization and half the contents of Shoreline Gifts had washed up in their living room. Spinning wire greeting card racks. Books about enlightenment, Buddhism, mindfulness, Jewish rituals, Oregon history. Dead sea horses and sand dollars and sea stars lying in drawers like open caskets. Box of agates.

  “Geez, Mom!” Griff said. “It’s like the beach of the damned in here.”

  “Where are you going? Thomas’s again?” she said. He picked his way through, leaning back to avoid postcards, seeking the door handle—

  “Griff, stop,” his father said.

  Oh no.

  “What, Dad?”

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time over there,” his dad said. “What are you boys doing?”

  “Tutorials,” Griff said. “Earning hours for the Gap.”

  His words spat out ticker-tape robotic. Griff’s postmortem autopilot brain occasionally still took the wheel.

  The I’m Fine Machine. Sometimes it talked all on its own.

  Griff took a step toward the door. His father looked at his phone.

  “By my count, SubWatch has you ahead of schedule. You’ve got all year. We’re concerned about how much time you spend in that basement.”

  Griffin exhaled. His hand curled around the doorknob.

  creak

  “He’s a stoner, Griff,” his mom said.

  Griff stared at his mother. Didn’t know where to start. He let go of the doorknob.

  “It’s true,” his father said. “I’ve heard things.”

  “People respond differently to loss,” Griff said to his dad. “Some people drink.”

  “Some smoke copi
ous amounts of marijuana,” his father said.

  “Copious,” his mother said. “That’s a stoner word. Like myriad.”

  Silence hung in the air.

  His mother turned the rack of greeting cards, all ocean-themed. Birthday cards were footprints in sand, lighthouses, sailboats. Sympathy cards: footprints in sand, lighthouses, sailboats. Like Spawn Drive Peak, small-town greeting cards just had to wear two hats and do more.

  “Stoner or not,” Griff said, “he invented EARS. He does a million other useful projects.”

  “Myriad projects,” his mother said. “Copious projects.”

  His father sighed.

  “Okay,” Griff said. “I’ll be careful. Love you guys!”

  The perfect words for blastoff. Out the door. One more time.

  “It’s not the ocean,” Thomas said. “It’s the desert.”

  He spun his laptop so Griff and Charity could see.

  First shot: A vast, prickly wasteland. Another shot, 30,000 feet up. Undulating mountains fell like crooked shadows over a broad palette of beige. Salt deposits pocked the landscape like sores. The next shot—a road straight to nowhere. It began broad and gray. Narrowed to the width of a thumbtack in the blazing blue horizon.

  “Death Valley,” Thomas said. “Once an ocean, then a lake. Now a desert with the lowest elevation in America at 282 feet below sea level. Same dimensions as Leo’s map. Same topography. It maps with all his notes. As far as I can tell, your brother had the broadcast site narrowed to about 200 square miles.”

  “You think there’s a concert in the middle of Death Valley?” Charity said.

  “No,” Thomas said. “Death Valley has the highest recorded ambient temperature on the planet. It’s not a fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk place. You could fry an egg in midair. Like, the air—as in, the same place your face occupies—is hot enough to cook food. So no, I don’t imagine there is a giant stadium concert happening in Death Valley.”

  “Then how is this theory better than Atlantis?” Griff asked.

  “I didn’t say better,” Thomas said. “I said more accurate. And I never expected the Band to be playing where they broadcast. This thing is on a repeater somewhere. You know, beaming from this satellite dish to that trailer to that chicken shack—but even finding a repeater would be huge. From there we could track it.”

  Griff looked at the map mounted on the pegboard.

  “If Leo got it down to 200 miles,” Griff said, “we can triangulate the signal.”

  “Sure,” Thomas said. “We just need to know when they broadcast next. Last time it took nine months.”

  “Maybe we just drive out there,” Charity said.

  They both looked at her.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “I can tell,” Griff said. Him and Charity in a car—a thrill in the blood, a forgotten feeling, whipped up and stirred inside him.

  “If you two idiots want to drive to Death Valley to fall in mine shafts and get your faces melted off, you can. Godspeed.”

  Thomas’s eyes looked dark and heavy on the undersides. He’d not been sleeping.

  “Can we analyze the recording?” Griff asked.

  “There are no more clues in the tape we’ve got. We need more material,” Thomas said. “How far have you gotten in your stacks?”

  “I’ve listened to four,” Griff said. It had been agony. Song fishing was thrilling with some measure of control, but a tape with someone else’s choices—where they chose to linger or tried to penetrate ear-shredding static—was torture. The novelty of listening to Leo’s Sound Expeditions had worn out halfway through the first tape.

  “I’m five in,” Charity said. “Should finish tonight.”

  “And I’m done,” Thomas said. “Got anything yet?”

  They shook their heads.

  “You know what I think is on these tapes?” Thomas said.

  CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

  “Nothing,” Thomas said. “It’s a diversion. A hoax.”

  Charity and Griff stared at him. Thomas whistled. Got down on all fours, whistled again.

  “If there’s nothing on the tapes, why keep them?” Griff asked.

  “Who knows? He’s your crazy brother. He coded his own maps and wrapped them in tamper-proof tape. If he’d gotten a good recording, he would’ve kept it somewhere special.”

  Thomas whistled again, knelt down. Neapolitan came bounding into his hands.

  “Aww,” Charity said.

  “The TOE Box was the most special place,” Griff said.

  “Maybe you didn’t know him as well as you thought,” Thomas said.

  He was being mean. Thomas stroked the rat. Charity walked over. Touched her behind the ears.

  “Anything else you remember him saying, Charity?” Griff asked.

  “Leo knew exactly when they were going to play. He wouldn’t leave me alone about coming that night. I even stayed home sick just to stay away from him.”

  “I remember,” Griff said.

  Her eyes went distant, back to October.

  “Kept saying—I need you to hear this. After the show, he kept texting and texting and I—”

  “It’s okay,” Griff said.

  “I got the texts the morning you went,” Charity said, like she couldn’t stop. “I got them. I read them all, you know? To please come. To get the coat from your house—”

  Griff tried to touch her. Her jaw clamped shut, she shook her head. Wiped her eyes. Stayed still.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said. “Not a word. Didn’t respond—”

  “It’s okay,” Thomas said.

  “No! He’d be alive,” Charity said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that he’d be alive right now if I’d said yes, or if I’d said anything.”

  Loss did this. Hid in plain sight, then pounced.

  “Or if I’d asked him to stop for coffee,” Griff said. “If I’d let him go—”

  He hovered on an edge of a deep, dark plunge and Thomas pulled him back, physically by the shoulder.

  “Stop, Griff,” Thomas said. “Both of you. Not useful. If Leo had a recording, he’d want us to have it.”

  “You’re sure?” Griff asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Griff said. “I’ll look again. Will you two be around tonight?”

  “I’m going to be on lockdown,” Charity said. “But you can throw a pebble at my window. First floor, second to the left.”

  Griff smiled. Did she mean it?

  “Do people actually do that?” Thomas asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to,” she said. She laughed, wiped her eyes.

  “For me go ahead and use the phone,” Thomas said. “Where are you going?”

  “To find the tape.”

  FORTY-TWO

  WHEN GRIFF GOT HOME, THE FRONT DOOR WOULDN’T OPEN. IT snagged on something. He shoved lightly, then pressed his eye to the door crack. One of his mother’s wire card racks stood in the way, bare as a winter tree. He shoved the door slowly. The rack skittered with metal-twig feet, then tipped in slow motion. The crash, like a car accident. It echoed in the house. No response.

  That haunted feeling. Parents gone.

  Lights on. Cards in plastic sleeves swooped out over the floor in a wide arc. An upturned box of agates, glinting like spilled jewels. Another shimmer beneath the kitchen table was green glass. Wine bottle, red liquid. Griff’s hand went to the knife in his pocket. He called out:

  “Mom?”

  Bad move. Not strategic, but the child had gotten ahead of the prepper. He opened the blade on his knife, looked at his father’s security system.

  The light blinked green.

  His training took over. Griff held the knife in a firm fist so it could not be easily taken. He approached the corner to the bedroom hallway, then stepped around in a wide, sweeping fashion, clearing the corridor—empty. The door to his parents’ bedroom was shut.

  Griff walked slowly. Beyond the whir of the bathroom fan, a familiar sound.<
br />
  MuGaMuga. MUGAMuga. BadaddadadadadadMUGAMUGAA.

  Muffled by the door. The sound of discontented whales, moaning and chattering. It triggered recent, foggy memories. Griff pinched the silver blade of his knife, slipped it back into the handle. He’d snapped into the wrong survival response. This was not How to Clear a Home Invasion.

  Teeektateeek. TsktskadadadaDADADADA.

  It was How to Brace for a Fight.

  He went to his room and shut the door. His only vessel. A little drywall submarine. Griff jerked open his desk drawer, pawed through binder clips, jump drives, pens—he couldn’t find the little blue foam earplugs and could feel it, about to hit. Did not have long. He grabbed his best headphones—which song to ruin this time? Tattoo with parents’ voices and make forever unlistenable, and he settled for seventies psychedelia, one of his father’s old recommendations—Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

  Dun dun dad dad da da

  Originally intended as “In the Garden of Eden,” misinterpreted due to the drunken slurring of the vocalist. His father had told him in the basement, one of their old song-fishing days—

  MY GODDAMN FAULT? WHAT ABOUT YOU? THIS WHOLE FUCKING MESS!!!! DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT LEO DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT LEO DON’T YOU TALK TO ME—

  He turned it up. Closed his eyes.

  THIS HOUSE! LOOK AT ME, DAVID, DAVID, LOOK AT ME—

  The I’m Fine Machine whirred to life. Griff went to the computer, blaring music, and examined the facts. He’d done this many times, relocking his door, securing the window, poring over information like Scripture because it was normal for parents to fight. These links had been clicked, tabs open, but it was gospel and prayer to read the lists, the Five Stages of Loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, and the nuanced Kübler-Ross model, which took you from hell to acceptance in a gentle sine wave and—

  Fact: Parents will find it challenging to bring comfort to their surviving children.

  Fact: The Standard Internet Picture of Surviving Child is a boy sitting on a hunk of driftwood on the beach. Like people celebrating birthdays and remembering anniversaries, this boy, too, preferred to be near the ocean with his face buried in his hands. Faceless, the boy is relatable. He could be anyone.