Lost Signals (12 page)

The wind blows the dead fly around on its string. Your ring finger is white from lack of circulation, so you unwrap the leash from your skin, waiting for the blood flow to return and paint the white knuckle back to red. You’re amazed at how strong her hair was.

The strange thing is, when you think back to it, you could have sworn you were outside, sitting with crossed legs and crossed arms under a tree when your mother walked up and put those headphones over your ears. The cord couldn’t have reached that far, could it
 
?

You hide in the bathroom awhile. It’s true that the bathroom is the last place where the remains of a relationship will linger. Is it all those half-empty bottles and soaps—or is it just hairs around the toilet
 
?

You’re no scientist. And even though you still have at least one toy stethoscope, you’re not that kind of doctor.

***

00:02:00:07—“End Credits and Ironic Theme Music.”

The next day you finally take out the trash. Not a second too late, either. You can see a box of sweet-and-sour chicken moving down there on its own, and suddenly that mysterious fly isn’t such a miracle any more because you can see at least three more green-eyed buzz bombs bouncing around in the bag with their snouts dipping in and out of a month of your scraps. Your grandpa used to say that tiny fish would appear in a mud puddle if it sat undisturbed long enough. Not true. He was lying. Those were mosquitoes all along.

You recite your favorite line from
Titus Andronicus
, the movie adaptation of the Shakespeare play everybody hates
 
:

“‘What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife
 
?’ ‘At that that I have killed, my lord, a fly.’ ‘Out on thee, murderer
 
! Thou killst my heart.’”

You know how they say the bathroom is the last place your girlfriend exists
 
? You were wrong. You meant the garbage. You take out the bag, then keep walking past the dumpster to throw your headphones into the river before you change your mind. It’s one of those rivers that looks good from a distance. Then you’re standing next to it and you catch a smell of what’s been dumped in there for years. Wasn’t this the river that caught on fire because of the pollution
 
? You’d think your toilet would have ignited from all the cigarettes she flicked in it. Is this the river where that little boy swore he saw the shark
 
?

The headphones bob along, riding the brown waves, then something under the water takes a couple bites and finally pulls them down forever. There’s a girl standing next to you when you turn around.

“You know what you looked like to me just then
 
?” she asks. “You looked like the last scene of a movie. The part where the sheriff throws away his badge.”

“Hold out your hand,” you tell her, not expecting her to do it. And when she uncurls her fingers for you, you expect something to fly away.

“What’s your name
 
?”

“Maggie. But I go by ‘Shell,’ short for ‘Michelle,’ my middle name.”

“Of course you do. I’m not calling you that.”

“Then don’t.”

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I
 
?”

“I live in your building.”

“Have you ever had problems with your wiring
 
?”

“No.” She laughs. “Have you
 
?”

“All the time.”

“You look like you do. You should get a surge protector. Seriously. I have three of them.”

You stare for seven . . . eight . . . nine seconds. Then you write your phone number in her hand. Just for laughs you scribble a fly underneath it.

“Sorry, I like drawing flies.”

“I know. They’re easy to make. Like a smiley face. You know why everyone draws smiley faces
 
? Because there are less than five lines you need before you can recognize it.”

“I believe it.”

You hear the buzzing sound again, and you know what it is before she even pulls it out. She smiles an apology and presses the phone deep into her face, quickly walking away before she starts talking.

You walk off in the opposite direction to give her some privacy. You think of your phone number and the fly you drew on her skin, and you cup your hand around your ear like a seashell. Even years later, when you’re both miles away and her head and her hand are the only things visible above the waves smacking your face and filling your nostrils, you still keep your hand over your ear, and you can still hear every word of her conversation like she’s swimming right next to you. Until you pull her under.

The top of
the hill is a house, beneath the moon, part of the stars. A figure walks up—a man, in a heavy canvas coat and a sagging hat. Closer to him is his wet breath and beyond the sprinkled lights. He is getting close to the door and as he does, we look around frantically—if this is it, if we are going to leave everything outside when we go in, this is all we get to leave.

Darkness. Glow. Implied ground. Not enough.

“Beal
 
! Beal
 
! Listen up
 
!”

Low light. Just soft flame on cupped boards and dim sea shapes. On a bench made of split logs sits a hollow headstone. A radio with a yellow heart polished to life by a fist on a wide wheel.

“Pardon, Beal
 
! Pardon
 
! Sit.”

Beal turns to drop the door back.

“There was another.”

The round man at the dial jerks. Beal shows his face. The other shows his.

Beal has tiny black eyes that sit not on his face but at the outside corners of it. They can’t be seeing a resolved image. His nostrils are tall and thin and sit a hair apart. It looks like he breathes through neat wounds inflicted by a fork. His mouth is pink and alone and is pursed like cherub. It is a baby’s mouth. Baby lips.

“I said another, Cuddy.”

Cuddy has turned back to the dial. Beal’s head, small at the front and heavy back from the crown, is trembling and shivering. It is not possible to look at Cuddy for long with Beal’s face hanging in the room.

“So
 
?”

Cuddy contracts. Large ball into not as large, in a single convulsion.

“So
 
! So
 
! So
 
!”

Beal’s head is a jungle bird, bouncing and presenting itself, repeating, shrieking the word
so
.

Cuddy absorbs this then expands again.

“You know what I mean. It happens. I’m tired of freaking out.”

Beal’s eyelids roll in, making mean slits. His yelling has made blood surface around his lips. The lips are not fully finished, it seems, and all of this tissue is probably being used too vigorously, too soon. Beal breathes in sharply, drawing skin into his nostrils revealing it as slough. He holds the breath and releases it out through some improbable exit under his thin hair.

“I’m not freaking out.”

Cuddy’s body puddles a bit as he calms.

“Good. It doesn’t change anything.”

“No. Doesn’t
explain
anything.”

Cuddy taps the yellow dial.

“Nope. Doesn’t.”

Beal has stopped trembling and his face is gelling. It is slightly different now, his features lower.

“I’ll get it.”

Beal waits for Cuddy to say ‘Ok’ or something.

“Ok
 
?”

Cuddy raises a hand.

“Shhhh. What
 
? Yes. Ok. Sure.”

Beal leaves the small single-roomed building through its only door.

Cuddy pools toward the dial, his upper body focusing on the face. He reaches over and pulls a tin chain leading up to a hanging bulb and it snuffs. The only light now comes from the dial and it is expanding up Cuddy’s face and we are forced to look.

A buzz from the machine. A crunching voice.

“ . . . this is about human beings. Victims. Survivors. We can champion this or that later. But right now, my god, we are devastated . . . ”
1

Cuddy squeals and convulses. He leans back, revealing a squat three-legged chair beneath him. Turns out that’s the source of the squeal. He has inadvertently nudged the dial and lost the transmission. The chair squawks.

“Beal
 
! Beal
 
! Pardon
 
! Beal
 
! Pardon
 
!”

Cuddy rubs his hands on his knees and his head sinks.

“Oh Beal.”

Cuddy sits like this for a while, flopped inward and wheezing lightly. In time he reaches up and taps the dial but the machine is dead. The sound of a spring within him. Cuddy pushes upward. It is clear he is unable to walk.
2

“Beal
 
!”

The noise again.
3
Higher in tone and stretched out.

“Beal. Beal. Beal.”

It’s a despairing voice that doesn’t stop. It trails off into a upset drone.

“Beal.”

Cuddy leans into the radio to steady himself. He is concentrating, afraid of falling. Cuddy settles eventually his upper back flating like a squeeze box. The yellow light on the radio fades from neglect and the room sinks into tar.

***

“Cod
 
! Cod
 
! Coddy
 
!”

Beal is mispornouncing Cuddy’s name. The light bulb lights up, Beal’s face is different again.
4
He has obviously been trying to push his features up to where they began but has only managed to drive his eyes beneath his skin. They roll and quiver like submerged hatchlings. His nostrils are broader now and no longer symmetrical, and each is pulling at the air.

“Cod
 
! Cod
 
! That smell
 
! Cod
 
! What is that
 
?
 
!”

One of Beal’s feet rests on the back of a shirtless man.
5
The relative size of things is revealed. Beal and Cuddy are very nearly giants, at least twice the size of a person. The ceiling of the cabin is probably four metres high. The man is facedown, dead or unconscious. Cuddy is crying.

“I had it on. I heard something.”

Beal is gagging as he sweeps the man up and drapes him like a gown across his arm.

“What’s that smell
 
? Cod
 
! It’s fuckin’ awful.”

Beal glares at Cod, tears smashed across the face we were forced to see not 45 minutes ago.

“Did you hear me
 
? I heard something on this.”

Cuddy slams his hand against the radio.

“ . . . not an injection or a cream. Tell your doctor if these feelings develop . . . ”

Beal and Coddy freeze.

“ . . . one of many questions investigators are asking right now . . . ”

Coddy shakes his head slowly.

“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.”

Beal holds the man under his chin and extends his arms,

“Well, I can’t believe what I’m smelling
 
!”

“ . . . they had a son together so there’s a lot to learn about what she knew in the days leading up to . . . ”

“I had to shit
 
! What am I supposed to do
 
?”

The man drops from Beal’s throat into his hands.

“Oh yeah. I’m sorry, Cod.”

“
Oh, yeah. I’m sooooooo sorry, Cod.”

“ . . . this was well-planned. He was ready to die. This isn’t the act of someone totally insane . . . ”

Beal’s eyes sink even further beneath his face in an inobvious sign of contrition.
6
Cuddy listens to the radio as Beal uses the man to clean his backside.

“ . . . and that of course prompts more questions from around the country and that’s a big reason they said what they said and why they said it in such a powerful way . . . ”

The lights in the valley are visible through the hillside, burnt earlier this year by a wildfire. It’s a small city whose name is known around the world. From films and stories that find in it a handy setting. Stories spread through piracy mostly. Stolen by anyone from anywhere.
A River Runs Through It. The Bridges of Madison County. BASEketball. Basket Case. Basquiat.

1
All of the radio comes out at once. a single wavelength excised from the line. On it was suffering and calliope and dancing and colours. a bent copper tube with a cold hollow core. This is what we can’t do. This, what I’ve done. Take a single length of wave out. It is a thing along which it happens, but lifted up or dropped down, pinched clean at either end it is nothing more than a whistle, a dull tunnel within which shatters the foreign lengths. None of them transmitted and all of them chaotic. And so I have you here, what I said was copper but not sure, and I am sad that what I have done is so outside of anything I could say about it that it envies the strangest of things—the impression of sight on a pillow—the effect of daylight savings on the magnetic field of an object lost at the back of a sock drawer. It does, however, give us permission to enumerate events that fall short of any register.