by Paul Hawkins
Chapter 3: The Breakdown
From Blaise's Journal: My Father
Rosalind does not know my father well enough to give him a fair representation. In all things I must correct that. Perhaps she means well but she does not know the era and the forces and the circumstances that made him, or made me, or would have made use of both of us to do what they wanted, if we had allowed it.
She does not understand the era or its temptations or potentialities. She does not see the interstices of math and technology and angels. Good grief, she has one of the last dial-up internet connections in the country.
My dad was a scientist of sorts - an engineer anyway, but with a fertile mind. He understood every nuance of electricity, of radiometry, and he appreciated the great achievements made through their application. After the war he went into the Air Force and he helped build and maintain the communication and the navigation systems for planes and then for rockets. He knew how to make machines triangulate their positions from the North Star without ever having to talk to a human soul. He knew how to make machine talk to machine.
Dad went nuts. He actually figured out how to hack a satellite. No one knew about it - NASA or the NSA or whoever must've thought it just went buggy, but he was using it, in his last days, to scour for any sign, anything. No matter how much he widened his scope, he got nothing.
Twenty years ago he ended his life in a shack out back, locked in with the best grey-cased vintage electronic equipment a mad man could cobble together, trying to find the signals that would tell him his life was not shit and he wasn't alone.
My mother (his second wife) had died. My older brother, Ben, had died. My older sister Tess had left town with a bass player - again. My younger sister, Janet - the only sensible person in the family – had her own misfortune and left, but not before telling my dad she might have stayed if he had stopped his foolishness.
So when he died he left it all to me - the dirt farm in the sticks and his arcane radio technology that nobody could understand. The stench of death was over all of it - the farm and the shack and what was inside it. Grey walls covered in dials and knobs with no labels and no indication of what they could do. He left it to me.
I did not give a shit about any of it until my own life went to hell, and I was swallowed up by loneliness itself, and I found out it was a genetic thing, that gaping vortex of black just behind the cerebral cortex of the more Germanic males in my family, the void, the desire to be loved more than love can offer, the hatred and the hurt at wanting to be loved too much, the longing that overplays itself and inevitably leads to being left alone. I found all of that. And then I re-found his shack. And then I began to finally understand what was inside.
Jude says I should have gone to see a psychiatrist - the pill-prescribing kind, not the talking kind. Words are no good he said, just pills. He is on a bunch of pills himself. He wants to teach water color painting for adults at the night college, for Pete's sake. How could any man be calm enough for that? He won't admit how many kinds of prescription drugs he takes. I will look through his medicine cabinet next chance I get.
After my life went to hell I found my father's books, his notes, educated myself on electronics from scratch, followed through the thick grey 1930's and 1940's tomes on the oscillations of the atom, the cycles of the particles and waves, the ways of the diode and tube and later the transistor, the mysteries uncovered by Telsa that really crazy kooks bartered in, but in more secret books than respectable men actually claimed to peruse, in public anyway, like a secret handshake with the unknown.
After I fell into my depression and I taught myself all this, I once more visited his old TV repair partner Don in his hell hot inner city house. I worked with Don to finally wrest the last secrets from him, though he suspected that had been my sole goal all the time, but he was old and in ill health and needed help, and his own son Don Jr. (Laredo) had abandoned him. Laredo was worthless. He knew I had buddied up with his old man and learned all his secrets, and then he wanted to get those secrets from me. But I was not about to give them. I had been Don Sr.'s only company in his old age and when he died it was me, and not Laredo, to whom he left his books and his tools and his secrets - that is, the secret he and my dad claimed to have discovered, the one that drove my father nuts and that made Don caution me “never invite something in you can’t kick out.”
And then I returned to the shack, and I lived in there for months. And finally I understood it. I flipped the switch, and I began to hear, and in hearing, began to realize what to do.
We have very few real choices of our own. The voices that are bodiless give us terrible choices as to what to do. All real choices are terrible choices.
I made four mistakes, in the following order: I lost my girl; I did not save my dad from his despair; I jammed the frequencies of those who fill the airwaves with garbage; I got out only to fall in with a man who wanted to use my skills to talk to the devil. At first I helped him but then I burned him down. And now, finally, I am out of jail again, and I am at peace, but I am also waiting for the end of the world. And while I was in prison I figured out how to cause it - the end of the world, that is - should I want to.
Jude says I should find something better to do than end the world, and my sister Janet agrees. And so I think I am going to look for a bride in the Philippines. A buddy of mine since high school joined the navy years ago and, when he retired, settled in those islands, and he says I should join him and that the gals there are not all crazy yet like American girls. He says I can teach English or fix radios or cars or wash machines or something and hug on pretty girls. That sounds good to me.
Look, I have done a lot of bad things and I'm sorry, and I have no one to blame but myself. I listened to the voices and I am fairly sure I am not the better for it. I now wrestle to be lonely again or be saved.
Jude says he has a pill for this but I wave him off. He needs a tacklebox to organize the pills he takes.