Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale
Page 19
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One night they decided they were ready to talk to the dead, and it was then that Blaise began to realize he still cared a little about good and evil after all. They invited him to the inaugural attempt. There were a lot of keen-faced slightly predatory German-looking youth there. When Blaise came into the room they applauded him but he did not like it. For one thing they were vegetarians and lately he had been really hungry all the time and low blood sugar. They had a special chair for him to sit in, in front of lots of dials, and an honorary switch to throw.
Their leader, a blonde wolfish young man, recounted how Blaise’s dad had almost discovered the secret. There are two things out there left to hear - the totality of everything - that is the music of the spheres, the song of heavens, the event horizon of being changing to becoming; and the Void.
The Void is the sound of nothing, the sound of the universe when you take all the other sounds of life and motion away. Technically it is the sound of the dead, but the dead don’t talk.
They used an empty monstrance as the antenna. It was a relic of Boheme. They nailed it crooked to the roof of the mansion, and then they hooked it with a wire that they ran down to the machine.
They asked Blaise to throw the honorary switch.
“Throw your own damn switch,” he said. “I need a steak and a pizza.”
The leader looked a little shocked but then he laughed, and the rest of them laughed, too, at their pet eccentric, and so the leader threw the switch himself. Immediately the lights in the room dimmed and then some strobe light came on and Eurotrash music began thumping. The young man put on headphones from the device and shook Blaise’s hand.
“Thank you, Blaise. It was better that I did this myself.”
He sat down to strain to listen. Everyone else thumped to the music in their odd emotionless marionette-like dances. Blaise looked around for his girl but she was not there, so he walked off to the bait shop and took a foot-long sandwich from the refrigerator case then sat out in his lawnchair and stared at the dinosaur he’d set up to glow, ate his food and drank a few beers. He only went back to his Airstream after that and would sit on its aluminum steps and throw scraps to Bess and stare at the mansion and wonder what its fate was and feel like, somehow, he was doomed to engineer it.
A few days later one of the acolytes ran over to his farm to whisper that the leader claimed to have heard a dry empty voice funneled down through that empty monstrance.
“I’ll bite – what did it say?”
"Make the world clean."
"Make the world clean."
So Blaise decided he had tolerated them enough and it was time to kick the lot of them out. He wandered over to find that they recorded whispers and set them to bad synthesizer music and planned how they could make the world clean. Some of them knew a little about botulism and gases. Other planned to popularize suicide parties as a new social trend. That idea particular piqued them because it had a performance art aspect to it. They planned one for Blaise and for the astronaut - it would be glorious, they said, part technology and part art and part futuristic statement. They said it laughing, but a German laughs when he is always kind of serious.
Something snapped in him. He decided not to kick them out right away but to play out their line like a fish. One day when they all were still hungover and asleep, Blaise pried the monstrance from the roof. He buried it on some acres that Bess guarded. They had to use a wire hanger for an antenna after that, and it didn’t attract the same quality of demons.
“I’m getting rid of them this week,” Blaise told Dale at the filling station the next day.
“Now you’re talking! Good old Blaise again!”
Blaise smiled at him. He decided that had to be exorcised more violently or they would just crop up again, somewhere else. He felt guilty like maybe he had inspired them. He had to put that thought to rest. He also had a streak inside him that warmed to making the world clean.
Blaise got the astronaut out of there one day – just plain walked him out the front door. Blaise contacted a relative of his and drove him to the bus station. Away from the TVs and out in the car and with clean air blowing in, the man fell suddenly into a different mood. He looked at Blaise for a moment with clear eyes. He made Blaise pull over and get him a hamburger and a pop. After consuming those he sat back in the passenger seat and looked years younger. He leaned over and talked.
“Did I ever tell you that one time, up there on the Moon, we saw something we didn’t understand, part shadow and part shimmer, and that now and then ever since I’ve felt like something followed me back from home the void?”
Blaise felt my hands grip the steering wheel, as if something was trying to make him suddenly steer the car into a tree and kill them both.
“Are you bullshitting me?”
“Look, I don't know anymore. The other guy won't talk about it. He got elected to Congress and only says what his advisers tell him and one thing they tell him is not to talk to crackpots, so he is all fake smiles now. But me, I went kind of nuts. There are three seconds of audio from NASA where I talk about a bogey. I saw something and I felt a chill. These damn German have that three seconds of audio here, of course, looped and set to techno pop. I hate techno pop.”
Blaise agreed. He drove him to the bus station, and there was his sister waiting for him, to escort him back home to be amongst his family, and once he got on the bus the last Blaise saw of him was his face looking out the window, some liberation seeming to have come upon him because he looked at peace.