“Don’t touch me!” Van Raye yelled, shaking us away, touching his cheek and smearing the blood.
I pulled a moist towelette I happened to have in my coat pocket and handed it to him.
“What is the matter with you people?” Van Raye said. “That could give me brain damage! Then where would we be? You ass! I’d punch you back if I weren’t a pacifist.” He took off his gloves and with hands trembling tore open the towelette.
Dubourg had scooped his case back under his arm. “I couldn’t help it. It was like I was possessed.”
Holding the towelette to his eye, Van Raye shouted to the woman, “Can you make one work?”
She turned toward a field of dish antennas of different sizes across the roof and said, “What we have here is an anthropological display of the decades of technology.” She pointed to the group of bigger dishes, “The eighties, and the nineties,” she said and pointed to a smaller farm of gray dishes, “and the aughts. But here: C band, steel. Nine meters, but its azimuth is rusted over. I can see when the star will drift through the field of view. Maybe we can make small adjustments.” She tilted on her heels and looked at it, holding her hood on her head, then back to him, “Yes, we could do it if we had the software to make the amplifier work.”
“We’ll get the software!” Van Raye said. “Somehow.”
She shrugged her shoulders. She wiped her hands. I saw the woman’s tongue come out of her mouth and spit out the worthless cigarette, and it bounced along the roof and into the sky. “If we can get the software . . .” she said. “Ifs and ifs and ifs!” Her hood finally fell. She had that punk, fuck-you haircut but there was something else. I’d been in a hospital for over a month and had seen people in their worst states—sick, underweight, broken bodies, heads shaved and scars across their craniums—but I recognized Ruth Christmas was beautiful. Unlike all the sick hospital patients, I didn’t have to reimagine her with hair, didn’t have to take away the dark circles from her eyes nor try to magic-erase twenty years or try to put her in healthier times to understand that simple fact: she was beautiful.
Elizabeth stood by herself in the wind, her arms wrapping her shoulders, those sunglasses on in this weather, and trying to look into the gray horizon.
The alcohol in the towelette had decreased the viscosity of Van Raye’s blood, and it ran down his chin. A bit had frozen on his collar. It wasn’t much of a cut, but it was just one of those places of the body that bleeds greedily, and I had time to notice the wind had let up some.
The genius suddenly spun and squatted with her hands on her knees. It was as though she’d discovered ants crawling around her ankles, but wrenches spilled out of the pockets of her jacket, and she made a horrible sound and projected a tan vomit that splattered between her feet.
Van Raye said, “Don’t worry, she’s just pregnant.” He put the useless towelette to his nose and tilted his head back, the bloody end of it lifting in the breeze, but he seemed to suddenly remember something and said, “Relax, it’s not mine, people.”
Ruth Christmas, squatting and spitting, stuck her hand up and hung Van Raye a bird without looking at him.
Elizabeth turned and went toward the door but stopped.
He pointed his bent glasses at Ursula, and said, “And your Ben’s daughter that Sandeep is always talking about, aren’t you?”
Clear snot hung from one of Ursula’s nostril and she touched it with the back of her glove.
“Are you going to hit me too?” he said to her.
She pulled a bottle of antacids out of the pocket of Dubourg’s coat she was wearing and looked at the label as if the answer was there. “I’ll wait until you can feel it!” she said and tossed the bottle through the wind to Ruth Christmas. Van Raye flinched as it passed in front of his face.
The genius caught the bottle and threw them back to Ursula. “I’ve got nausea, not heartburn.”
Van Raye squinted at Ursula, then burst out one laugh—“Ha!”
He smiled and turned toward everyone. “We’re all family here, so I might as well tell you.” He paused for effect. “You know what I was looking for, right? I’ve found another planet! With life!” He held his hands up in victory, glasses in one hand, bloody towelette in the other.
Elizabeth said from the doorframe behind us, “It hasn’t been confirmed yet.” She had pulled down her scarf to say it, and she turned and went inside, shutting the door behind her.
Dubourg tried to help the puking genius up, but she shrugged him away.
I touched Charles’s elbow and yelled, “Do you have a dog?”
He leaned back to see me better. “A dog?”
“Yes! Dog!”
He held out his hand as if to stop me from advancing, and he shut the bad eye to focus. “You did the dog to me, didn’t you?” He stabbed a finger at me. “YOU DID THE DOG TO ME!”
“What?”
The woman snapped the hood back over her head and stepped over to a pipe to try to let steam warm her bare feet.
“Let’s get out of this!” Ursula said.
As Ruth Christmas walked by him, she pointed a finger at Charles to emphasize when she said, “We don’t have the software.”
He ignored her, holding the towelette to his eye. “What kind of swimming facility does this place have?”
“I want to talk about the dog,” I said.
“You can come swim and talk.”
My cousins walked by me.
“Why do I have to follow you?” I said. “This is my hotel.”
Van Raye ignored me, seemed to notice the bent glasses in his hand. “Watch this,” he said, “it never ends well.” He tried to bend the glasses back, but of course they snapped. “Fantastic,” he said, “just fantastic.”
The snow drifts went by us, obscuring the roof-scape, and when I turned, Van Raye was going toward the door, a piece of his eyeglasses in each hand, the bloody towelette tumbleweeding past me and in two leaps going over the edge of the roof. Just before I pulled the door shut, I glanced at the black dish antenna they wanted to use for something, frozen like a net cast against the sky.
CHAPTER 32
No matter what hotel we were staying in, Charles had to go swimming. Most of my childhood talks with him took place sitting side by side in lounges as he dripped dry, his dark glasses on, fresh drink in hand, me sneaking glimpses of the Möbius strip tattoo on his right shoulder blade.
That day of the snowstorm was no exception. Everyone but Elizabeth went down to the small indoor lap pool because that was where he said he’d be. He immediately turned the gas heater on high. Even when I was hanging the CLOSED sign on the door, I admired Elizabeth for being able to stay away from him. Here the rest of us were already doing anything Charles wanted, ready to see what he said next.
Ursula and Dubourg sat and ate cheeseburgers, while Charles unbuttoned his shirt, immodestly dropping his pants to reveal plain, vertical gray-striped boxer shorts. I caught a glimpse of the Möbius strip tattoo on his shoulder and remembered the noise of the tattoo gun tattering as he stoically explained the characteristics of this geometric shape, which went right into an essay I read months later about how painkillers block the opioid receptors in the brain to prevent pain. He didn’t mention his son attended the tattooing.
That memory must have been fifteen years old, but Charles swimming in the pool was in exactly the same shape—pale, boney, skinny. He hopped into the shallow end of the pool, his eyeglasses repaired with a bundle of white surgical tape. When he got used to the water, he began catching us up on his story, including the drive with Ruth across the country.
Ruth worked on a laptop beside a giant leather radio, an antique thing that played a salsa station. Without taking her eyes off the laptop, she turned her head sideways to take large bites of her burger, and Charles told us about first hearing the sound on the Big Dish antenna.
Ursula went into the utility room and changed into a black sports bra and red tennis shorts and got into the water. Van Raye reached the
pool’s edge, took a sip of his whiskey, pushed his mended glasses on top of his head, and gingerly placed the baggie of ice to his darkening eye. The Möbius strip tattoo on his shoulder had certainly faded over the years, and when a cold drop of condensation hit my hand, I realized maybe I hadn’t actually been with Charles when the tattooing was done. Had I only read his essay, “My Non-Orientable Surface,” and internalized it?
“Are you going to write about what is happening now?” I interrupted him.
“This is the most important discovery ever made.”
I tried to study the details of the room as he might—the way the ceramic tile in the old gas heater glowed orange. Condensation dimpled on the ceiling like contact lenses about to turn into rain, and as Dubourg walked down the steps into the water, his green cargo shorts filled with air then burped. I was the underweight guy in the red tracksuit.
I said to Charles, “Why did you say I did the dog to you? What does that mean?”
“There’s no dog,” Van Raye said, and I could tell that he and Ruth glanced at each other. “We had a problem in our neighborhood with a stray. I made a bad association.”
“What kind of dog was it?”
“Just a stray and the humane society took care of it.”
“Can you call the humane society?” I asked him. “Just to make sure this dog is there?”
“Why would I do that? I have no way of telling them what I’m looking for.”
“The person, the hacker, contacted me, said to look after a dog.”
Charles stopped in the pool below me, crossed his arms over each other on the side, stared up at me with that bluing eye. “Don’t you find it rather convenient that these supposed conversations you are having disappear before you can show them to anyone?”
“How do you know that?”
Dubourg sat on the top step, his hair slicked back, glasses off, making him look younger, and he stared into the cup of coffee on his knee. “We only want to help you,” Dubourg mumbled to me.
“Seriously, you’ve been here four hours, you slug him, and now you get together and talk about me?”
The only thing Dubourg did was straighten out his leg and take a tiny bottle of energy drink from his shorts pocket.
Charles said, “There is a reason you think God is contacting you.”
The seal on Dubourg’s energy bottle cracked.
“Dammit, I never really said it was God, but it did say it wasn’t from, you know, here.”
Dubourg poured the energy drink into his cold coffee and swirled it with his finger.
“Somehow you’ve internalized what I have discovered and processed it,” Charles said, “now it is manifesting itself into this thing you believe you see on your phone. We can help. Ruth is a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
One of Charles’s loose white hairs had gotten stuck in the hornet’s nest of white tape that mended his glasses, and that single hair swirled from his head like a thought that couldn’t break free.
The door shook in its frame and we all turned to see the silhouette of Elizabeth through the translucent glass inserting her keycard. The tumblers spun in the lock and the door opened. She was dressed in a hotel robe and slippers, book under her arm as if she were going to the beach.
“Elizabeth! Welcome to the grotto!” Van Raye said as if he owned the place.
“What, have you got the heater on?” Elizabeth said.
Ruth glanced at Elizabeth—from her slippers up to her hair, Elizabeth dressed exactly like Ruth was, in the hotel robe with GA on it.
Elizabeth made her way toward the table. She picked up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, studied it, and then considered everyone in the room and pointedly asked to Ursula, “May I?”
Ursula nodded.
Elizabeth poured two fingers’ worth, and I got up using my cane and got her covered plate from the room-service tray for her.
“I was just discussing some work I need to do,” Van Raye said.
Elizabeth sat in the lounge beside mine, straightened the sash, kicked the slippers off, and crossed her ankles as I set her plate on the table beside her. She thanked me with a glance. She rested her book on her chest, a local library copy of Get Happy, a Judy Garland biography.
“I know there are procedures to follow after a discovery of this magnitude,” Elizabeth said, “so why aren’t you following them?”
“Wait a minute before you jump to protocol,” he said and then nodded to Ruth.
Ruth narrowed her eyes and turned the old radio around so she could see the dials. The rear panel had been folded down and revealed glass tubes with glowing points of light inside them, and the air was filled with ions of electricity and the oniony smell of the cheeseburgers. Ruth pulled a long wire from the back of the radio and stretched it to a metal fire sprinkler that had the placard warning DO NOT HANG FROM SPRINKLER. She opened the alligator clip on the wire’s end and connected it to the fire sprinkler, the wire drooping back to the radio, salsa still playing strong. Ruth sat and punched a button with her finger, and a different static came on. She tuned through intermingling voices and electronic noise.
“Listen to what this radio is picking up now,” Van Raye said in a stage whisper, and she slowed her tuning, let it stop on music and then human voices—Japanese, then Spanish, more music and a preacher proclaiming, “This is a time when you don’t want to be messing with Abraham’s seed . . .”
Charles said, “Hear all of what is being broadcasted tonight. Think also of all the electronic sounds playing together at once in all the atmosphere, the cacophony.” He waved his hands in the air. “Remember that, okay? That’s our planet’s Big Murmur.”
Ruth kept tuning. She stopped on a humming vibration. Inside the noise was a cadenced electronic twap-twap-twap and a sound like an airplane propeller increasing pitch. Ruth sat back and crossed her arms behind her head.
“That’s it?” Dubourg said.
“That’s the planet?” Elizabeth said.
“Yes,” Van Raye said.
Elizabeth turned her head to listen.
“We can hear it over a radio?” Ursula said. “That’s impossible.”
“Shortwave,” Van Raye said. “The space station is receiving the signal and amplifying it and then rebroadcasting it to Earth where receivers at different relay stations rebroadcast it over the planet via shortwave. Atmospheric skip does its magic.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s hidden in the white noise of the shortwave lengths. The rebroadcast is of no scientific value, has only the telemetry of the space station’s broadcast. We aren’t listening directly to the planet. It’s like looking at an art book photograph of Van Gogh’s Irises instead of the real painting. I wanted everyone to hear it. Everything will change after I make this public, but before then, I need a place to stay so I can compose and send a message and we have an antenna here that can do it.”
“You’re sending a message?” Ursula said.
“The message wouldn’t have to be a large amount of data. Ruth has checked and confirmed that the star, the planet, will track through the beamwidth of that dish on the roof. I’ll send one little tiny message blurb.”
“My God, the ego,” Ursula said.
“You’re not supposed to be doing this, are you?” Dubourg said.
“It’s not morally wrong,” Charles said.
“I think it is,” Dubourg said.
“I think I deserve to send my own message. It won’t matter in the grand scheme of things.”
“They,” Ruth said, “whoever is on the other end of this noise, they probably won’t even pay attention to it.”
“But, so, why shouldn’t I do it?” he said.
“This will be the longest ego trip in history,” Ruth said. “Even after you’re long dead, your ego trip will be carrying on in outer space.”
Ruth began explaining how she used the space station’s computer to prove that this was not a random pattern of noise. She added, “It’s just going to make
for a better chapter in the book.”
“That’s not totally why I’m doing it,” he said.
I used my cane to stand and think: Charles is going to send his own message because it makes a better story for a book. He, Van Raye, would be the rogue who sent his own brief message to the planet before he would tell the world what he’d done. Would he even tell the world what the message was or would it be a better story to leave it a mystery? I stood beneath the fire sprinkler and stared at the alligator clip biting the metal pipe. I took it off and the airplane sound stopped, leaving only the hum of white background noise. “Sorry,” I said to everyone. I replaced the alligator clip and the noise came back on the radio. The radio was connected to the pipe, and the hotel plumbing was an antenna seining the atmosphere of those broadcasts Ruth had dialed through, broadcasts as ethereal as snowflakes. The noise flowed by and if you missed it, you missed it, like time flowing by. I also understood that Charles needed the hotel.
I said to him, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”
“I don’t understand the significance of that question,” he said.
“Of course you’re going to write about this,” I said. “You’ll have to name the hotel, right? Will you talk about the antenna on the roof, or that Dubourg punched you?”
“Certainly the important facts will have to be recorded for history.”
“It’s called the Grand Aerodrome Hotel, by the way,” I said. “You can get the antenna to work, right?”
“We’ll need some equipment,” he said.
“How much will this cost?” Elizabeth said.
Ruth said, “The dish is the right size but it’s a fixed-azimuth mount. We’ll have to wait for the star to drift into the field of view. If we finish rigging and the programming, and if—a big if—we can find the software for the gain amplifier, we would have one chance in March.”
“March?” Elizabeth said. “We’re not going to be here. This hotel will be closed by then.”
“Elizabeth, this is of great importance,” Charles said.
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