The Great Big One

by J. C. Geiger

  Fact: Surviving Children should expect to be faceless and among driftwood—

  Nothing about whale sounds. Nothing about greeting cards, broken wine bottles, or what happens when you share a bedroom with a dead brother whose bed remains forever tidy. The bed didn’t know anything. Tucked in corners, neatly centered pillow.

  Tidy.

  The word needled him. Tidy bed. Tucked in neat, beddy-bye.

  Griff bolted across the room. He threw Leo’s pillow. Stripped that perfect white line of a sheet backward. Ruined it. Ruined the neatly made bed and the blue-and-white-checkered comforter like wake up! WAKE UP!—he jerked the fitted sheet until elastic crackled and screamed and would never be the same. Good!

  Nothing under the mattress.

  “Where?” he said.

  Across the room, Griff grabbed the black backpack. Reached inside and jerked everything out, dumped it. A candy wrapper—piece of dark chocolate? Great! Griff grabbed it, unfoiled it, shoved it in his mouth. His dead brother’s chocolate. Delicious. He spiked the backpack on the ground. Touchdown!

  A drawer. He jerked it open. Keeping secrets?

  He grabbed the socks out in a giant, pressed-together lump and flung them across the room. Next drawer. Papers, toys, empty, guts spilled all over the floor in the closet, he jerked the shirts from their plastic shoulders and back to the mattress, flipped it over and found nothing underneath, and he kicked the shoes—WAKE UP! Stomped them, kicked them, then tried to squeeze his feet into his favorites, too small now, his feet couldn’t fit in the boots and so he tripped, fell on the carpet. He lay breathing. Pretended he was dead. He could be dead.

  He looked across the wrecked horizon of the room. Good. There.

  Mood-compatible bedroom.

  No tape.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Griff addressed the butcher paper over the mirror.

  He listened. No more whales. Maybe his parents had heard him. Maybe huddled over their own computer monitor, looking at facts about faceless boys and driftwood. Griff pinched his wrist. Another survival response kicked in. This one, from his therapist. He needed to get out and see someone. Maybe Thomas. Maybe he’d throw a pebble at a window.

  Outside, it was raining.

  The floor, a perfect wreckage. He grabbed the black backpack by the top hoop, shook it free. He closed the door. It looked good, shut. Tidy. His parents’ door remained good and shut and quiet. When Griff turned the corner to the living room, he was surprised by his parents’ own wreckage. He laughed. Tipped-over racks, boxes—it had come at last! The famous disaster! A small, unreported quake on the fault line of their family. He went to the wall mirror and began to pull jackets and fleeces from their hooks, looking for a raincoat.

  Griff peeled back through the seasons. His father’s sporty waterproof windbreaker and then his soft shell and his mother’s bright aqua slicker, dropping them, peeling back to winter’s heavier red cycling hard-shell, revealing the first oval mirror his mother had ever covered—

  But the glass was exposed, and Leo stared back at him.

  “Where you going?” Leo asked.

  Griff’s breathing caught. He looked around.

  “I don’t know yet,” he said.

  “Why did you trash our room?” Leo asked.

  “Why did you hide the tape from me?”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” Leo said. “Maybe stop making me the villain for once.”

  Griff removed the bulky blue winter jacket his mother wore and called the Man Coat, the green fleece from November, and in the end the final coat hanging was his father’s camouflage jacket, which Leo had tossed on the kitchen table on Sunday, October 28.

  Which Griff had forgotten.

  He looked at Leo. Leo looked back at him.

  Hand shaking, Griff took the coat from the hook. Closed his eyes. Slipped his hands through the cuffs and snugged it on his body and took a deep, shuddering breath. Tighter than he remembered. It actually fit. He pulled the left cuff over the bulky paracord. When his arms fell to his sides, his elbow rapped something in the jacket’s inner pocket.

  —tok—

  He froze.

  Griff’s fingers traced the outline. Rectangular, sharp corners. He reached inside and pulled out the cassette. He’d meant to bring it that day. Leo’s writing, on the spine:

  THE GREAT BIG ONE

  FORTY-THREE

  ON HIS BIKE.

  The tape. He had the tape.

  Warm, drizzling air condensed in his front lamp. Droplets blazed red in his wake. The smell of wet leaves, and a flooded campfire. The rain pulled wildfire ash from the air, drowned it in the gutters.

  Had Charity meant what she said?

  Griff’s bike jumped the curb at the Simms home. He downed it in the grass and huddled beneath a stand of well-mulched pines. Breathed warmth into his hands. Aside from this lonely trio of trees, their home was landscaped like a prison yard. Bare grass without a lick of shadow. He’d be lucky to find a pebble to throw. The second window over from the front door shone like golden foil.

  That was it.

  Griff took a step from beneath the trees.

  Ms. Simms—what might she do? What if Charity had been kidding? But the trembling in his stomach said GO! He had the tape, a cassette player, and two sets of headphones in his backpack. He took a step. Damp grass tickled his ankles, pants too high. His heart felt swollen.

  This black backpack—way too tight. The straps felt wrong. Too much clattering.

  calackalackalack

  Griff retreated to the pines. Pulled his pant cuffs down. Socks up. He adjusted the packing of the player, the headphones to reduce noise. Zipped the backpack up. Adjusted the straps, moving the plastic cleats over the nylon ribbon, chewing new dents. Had he gotten stronger? Wider in the chest? He’d never had to adjust anything of Leo’s—similar activity levels, identical height measurements, a shared affinity for chocolate. The bite of the cleats in the backpack straps reminded him of what?

  The piano bench. Like the carpet. Little divots. Memory markers.

  What had he done to those straps?

  He’d erased Leo. The straps had remembered the shape of Leo’s body and were not the same size because Leo had stopped growing in October and Griff had not. He sat and pulled at the straps, tried to seat them back in the wear marks, but they slipped again—damn things go back, JUST GO BACK—

  Leo’s coat, Leo’s backpack, Leo’s tape. He’d trashed Leo’s room and was bringing Leo’s tape to the girl Leo had loved and god, he was garbage, grave robber, killer, Griff got back on his bike. He rode and when there were no more houses, he screamed into the rain and found himself on the edge of Marine Drive. He dropped his bike and stood and held the tape in the rain. Stared over the guardrail at the waves.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked.

  He could not play the tape. He could not throw the tape. Could not throw a pebble at a window. He stood until his shivering felt like tremors and the tips of his fingers went white. He rode home, soaking and exhausted. Inside, the wire rack was still toppled, lights still on, wine bottle still there, red droplets on the tile because in a nightmare life nothing healed itself. No one left to reset the pins when the big black ball knocked them down. It all just kept going.

  He went into the ruined bedroom and he found the calendar on the wall.

  He had circled today in red, because he had seen Charity. But he was also a coward who did not deserve a red circle.

  “You failed,” he told himself.

  He raked his damp thumb across the ink and smudged it. Scratched until the paper frayed. God, he missed her.

  He looked back over weeks of no-circle days.

  Boxes stuffed with scratch marks and symbols, meaningless, colorless days.

  A May without circles, an April, March, February—without, without. Like with any weight, you adjusted to carrying loss. Could not appreciate the crushing bulk of it until you remembered how airy life had felt before. The breezy
feeling of a kiss, an autumn dance. He needed to remember. He found the calendar from last year and opened to the final month. No circles in December. Nothing in November.

  Finally in October, a feast of red ink. Study hall. Rehearsals. The day she had taken him to the stars in practice room 5, so many days and so few blank. Just that week, before the show.

  The day she’d missed school, when Leo had come home singing.

  On that day, October 19, a small printed black circle instead of a hand-drawn red one.

  Still holding the calendar, Griff approached the coat on foot, slowly. He removed the tape from the pocket. Opened it. Leo’s notations, always the same. Latitude and longitude markers they’d been unable to decode. But the date was plain.

  October 19.

  Griff went back to the new calendar. Went to the day Charity had found him on the front steps of the library. The first red circle of the year. And behind it, another black circle, white center.

  The night Griff had woken up. The night they’d played the Band for the whole town.

  “Oh my god,” Griff whispered. His mouth went dry.

  He knew what Leo knew.

  The Band would play again on the next full moon.

  FORTY-FOUR

  “READY?” THOMAS ASKED. GRIFF HANDED HIM THE TAPE.

  The three of them sat together in the submarine glow of the ThunderChicken’s green elastic dash. A strange view, up front. Old-school speedometer. Numbers rose with the tall authority of epochs and ages, steering wheel the size of the sun. The mouth of the cassette player held the tape loosely—not yet inside.

  “You sure the Chicken won’t eat it?” Griff said.

  “Tapes aren’t in the Chicken’s diet, man,” Thomas said. “I wouldn’t roll with a tape eater. Once a vehicle has a taste for musical celluloid, it can’t be trusted.”

  Thomas mimed shooting the dashboard.

  “I’m having that cursed feeling again,” Charity said, leaning forward.

  “Curses can be exciting,” Thomas said. “Let’s roll.”

  They drove the long, winding scribble of Marine Drive, barreling north with the windows cracked, past familiar signs, flashing in the headlights. The engine, not chirping tonight. The low hum of adventure.

  “Now,” Griff said.

  Thomas pressed the tape into the player. Windows up. The car crackled.

  “Are you sure it’s not eating the tape?” Griff asked.

  “These speakers,” Thomas muttered. “That’s the only—”

  He turned it up. A voice pounced:

  “No recording. No preserving.”

  Thomas’s hand snapped to STOP.

  “Was that God talking?” Thomas asked.

  “That’s exactly what Leo said.” Charity leaned up from the back. “No recording. No preserving.”

  “That wasn’t Leo,” Thomas said.

  “No,” Griff said.

  Thomas took a long curve and they topped a small hill—mile marker 155, where the road untangled itself from low-hanging switchbacks and rose to a view. Moonlight went liquid on a horizon of cold, silver fire. It looked brand-new. Like the whole world had just been born.

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “It’s time.”

  Griff pressed PLAY. Charity took his hand.

  They descended to the Rat’s Nest in a silence that felt sacred. Shirts rain-soaked from rolled-down windows. Voices hoarse. Three hours roaring up and down Highway 101, bending themselves around hairpin turns. Switchbacks and roller-coaster climbs and the music. Better than they remembered. Roof punching, full-throated howling, and head-bobbing silence. Better than anything had a right to be. THE MUSIC.

  Griff flexed his right hand, creaky from the cold. His left, warm from Charity’s grip.

  She smiled at him in the blue light of the basement.

  “Water,” Thomas said. Raw voice. They could hear him glugging from a bottle like a cartoon character. He sang out:

  “Time for some anallllllyyysis!”

  He did not come back.

  “Hug me, please,” Charity said.

  Her hair brushed his cheek. The fresh silence whistled in his ears, rang little bells. Her body against his.

  Just this, Griff thought. Just this forever.

  FORTY-FIVE

  AFTER GRIFF WALKED CHARITY TO HER CAR, THOMAS DEMANDED he return to the basement.

  Seven missed calls. Texts marked URGENT.

  “Hello?” Griff asked, opening the wooden door. “Rats!”

  He tried to startle them, watching his feet for furry escapees.

  “Finally!” Thomas bellowed.

  “It’s after midnight,” Griff said. He shut the door and moved toward the blue glow of Thomas’s workstation.

  “Who can sleep?” Thomas said. “What took you idiots so long? You were out there for an hour.”

  “Just talking,” he said.

  Curb dancing in a light drizzle. The first time they’d talked in so long. Time slipped. Gotta go, should go, circled and echoed meaningless and maybe they’d been talking ten minutes, or maybe the sun was about to come up. But Thomas just kept calling. And calling.

  “Talking,” Thomas snorted. “At a time like this.”

  Thomas sat ensconced in mission control. Three curved monitors, piled-up speakers, stacked sound decks, and his trusty board. Laptops on a table behind him.

  “How many computers do you have?”

  “Three things to share with you” Thomas said, ignoring him. “First, look at this.”

  He nudged the computer screens awake. On each of the five screens, a separate musical search engine.

  “You found the Band?”

  An anxious twist in Griff’s throat. Was the mystery solved?

  “No,” Thomas said. “Much better than that. I didn’t find anything.”

  Thomas played the tape, a great guitar riff—a moment of exceptional vocal clarity—

  —sun drenched you and me too, you know the moon’s our oldest friend away we go—

  He went from engine to engine, pressing GO and START and SEEK. Verdicts came quickly. NO RESULTS. PLEASE TRY AGAIN. NO INITIAL MATCHES.

  “Wow,” Griff said.

  “These programs use a time-frequency spectrogram,” Thomas said. “Like a musical fingerprint. Between them, we have access to over twenty million songs, and these don’t match any of them.”

  “Why is that good?”

  “Because it’s on purpose,” Thomas said. He rewound the tape, ejected it, and carefully moved it to the deck near his sound board and monitor.

  “They don’t exist, on purpose. Listen. Discovery two.”

  The voice:

  “NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING.”

  On the analog decibel dial, golden needles did sharp, arcing leaps. On another monitor, horizontal lines like old video game life meters stretched green to yellow to red. Thomas ran it back. Again and again.

  “NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING. NO RECORDING. NO PRESERVING.”

  “Great,” Griff said. “We’re cursed. Nightmares for everyone. What am I looking at?”

  “The levels,” Thomas said. “Aren’t you seeing this? Right when the band starts?”

  There was a shift. Golden needles pulled back, the life meters stopped pinging into red.

  “It’s not as loud?”

  “Don’t just look at the decibels, you student.”

  Thomas grabbed Griff’s chin, turned his head toward a display he hadn’t noticed, a digital sound board with sixteen additional monitors—PAN, EQ, BASS, AUX, abbreviations Griff did not know or understand, but the next time the audio shifted between DJ and music, he noticed the change. Colored bars jerked in new configurations. A sudden leap in the levels. A whole different organism.

  “See,” Thomas said. “He’s got his own setup. The DJ. He’s not necessarily in the same place as the band.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It means they know what they’re doing. It’s interesting,” Thomas said. “Mostly because—
well.” He stopped. “I really brought you down here for revelation number three.”

  He was staring at Griff. Unsteady energy rippled through Thomas. A shaky look, like he was biting down on an electric toothbrush. Griff was just beginning to sense the enormity of this, a slow-building atomic reaction—

  “What is it?”

  Thomas fast-forwarded the tape, watching a digital counter. Glanced down at his gridded notebook. He stood and tapped the counter backward.

  “This tape is full of clues, Griff,” Thomas said. “Leo knew that.”

  He grabbed Griff’s shoulders. Bounced on him like a human pogo stick.

  “Ready?” Thomas said. “Ready?”

  “Yes, get off me.”

  Griff swatted him and Thomas went back to the board. Hovered his finger over the PLAY button. Licked his lips.

  “Everything we need, in five seconds,” Thomas said.

  He pressed PLAY. A guitar solo tore through the room, wild and dreamy, and the roaring crowd cut off with click.

  “Hear it?” Thomas said.

  “Guitar?”

  “Listen again. That sound in the back.”

  Thomas got on the board. Suppressed guitar. Muddied the crowd. He played the tape back in slow motion. A sound became distinct. Like a slowly torn sheet of paper.

  “Airplane?”

  “Jet,” Thomas said. He swiveled to another computer. Played the sound again. This time, clean. No background noise.

  “The same jet,” Griffin said.

  “Yes,” Thomas said. “Exactly the same jet. That, my friend, is the sound of an MQ-4C Triton, flying across the desert.”

  “And.”

  “According to what I can dig up—the MQ Triton is currently being tested near Nevada’s western border. And it wasn’t invented until last year.”

  “So—”

  “Griff,” Thomas said. “The show is happening live.”

  “In the middle of Death Valley.”

  “And it’s happening again,” Thomas said. He crossed the room at a gallop, drummed his hands on the pegboard. Tore off one great sheet. Another. The old calendar. With a thick black Sharpie, he mocked up a new calendar, looked at his phone, drew a giant black circle in July.