We're Here, page 10
“Could be a coincidence,” I said.
Fell pushed the tape in, pressed play. After our third trip through “The Passenger,” rewinding the tape yet again, they looked over and saw the tears streaming down my face.
“It’s such a sad song,” I said. “So lonesome.”
“Sort of,” Fell said. “But it’s also about finding someone who shares your loneliness. Who negates it. Cancels it out. Listen: Get into the car. We’ll be the passenger. Two people, one thing. Plural singular.”
“Plural singular,” I said.
I’m sorry, I started to say, a hundred times, and told myself I would, soon, in just a second, until Fell looked over and said: “Hey. Can I come over? I don’t feel like mixing it up with my mother tonight.”
And that was the first time I ever saw fear on Fell’s face.
My parents were almost certainly baffled by my new friend, but their inability to identify whether Fell was a boy or a girl meant they couldn’t decide for sure if they were a sexual menace, so they couldn’t object to Fell coming upstairs with me.
Three songs into the Graveyard Shift, Fell asked, “Can I spend the night?”
I laughed.
“I’m serious.”
“Your mom wouldn’t mind?”
“Probably she’d barely notice,” Fell said. “And even if she did, it’d be like number nine on the list of things she’d want to scream at me about the next time she saw me.”
“Fine by me,” I said, and went downstairs to ask Mom and Dad.
Big smile. Confident posture. Think this through. “Cool if Fell spends the night here?” And then, without thinking about it, because if I’d spent a single nanosecond on it I would have known better, stopped myself, I added: “She already called her mom, and she said it was okay.”
They smiled, relieved. They’d both been sitting there stewing, wondering whether what was happening upstairs needed to be policed. Whether a sex-crazed-menace male was upstairs seducing their daughter. But no. I’d said she. This was just some harmless, tomboyish girl.
“Yes of course,” Mom said, but I couldn’t hear her, just went by the smile, the nod, and I thanked her and turned to go, nausea making the room spin and the blood pound in my ears.
I felt sick. Somehow naming Fell like that was worse than a lie. Worse than an insult. It was a negation of who Fell was.
Cowardice. Betrayal. What was it, in me, that made me so afraid? That had stopped me from taking Fell’s hand? That made me frightened of other people seeing what they were, what we were? Something so small that could somehow make me so miserable.
I was afraid that Fell might have heard, but Ms. Jackson was playing when I got back to my room, and Fell was on the floor beside the speaker, so that our hero’s raspy voice drowned out every shred of weakness and horror that the world held in store for us.
We lay on the bare wooden floor like that for the next two hours. The window was open. Freezing wind made every song sweeter. Wood smoke seeped into our clothes. Our hands held tight.
Six minutes before midnight, approaching the end of the Graveyard Shift, it came again. The sizzle; the static; the chugging machine noise that slowly took the shape of a human voice. We caught it mid-sentence, like the intervening twenty-four hours hadn’t happened, like it blinked and was now carrying on the same conversation.
“—out there. I don’t know if this is the right...place. Time. If you’re out there. If it’s too late. If it’s too early.”
“Definitely definitely from the future,” Fell whispered.
“You’re so stupid,” I said, giggling, so drunk on Fell that what they said no longer seemed so absurd.
“Or what you need to hear. What I should say. What I shouldn’t.”
The voice flanged on the final sentence, dropping several octaves, sounding demonic, mechanical. Slowing down. The t sound on the last word went on and on. The static in the background slowed down too, so that I could hear that it wasn’t static at all, but rather many separate sounds resolving into sonic chaos. An endless line of melodic sequences playing simultaneously.
The voice flanged back, and said one word before subsiding into the ether again:
“—worthwhile—”
Control of the radio waves was relinquished. The final chords of “Blue Moon” resurfaced.
“There’s our star man again,” Ms. Jackson said with a chuckle. Evidently she’d had time to rethink her Air Force pilot theory. “Still lost, still lonely. I wonder—who do you think he’s looking for? Call me with your wildest outer space invader theories.”
“Want to call?” Fell whispered.
“No,” I said, too fast, too frightened. “My parents are right across the hall. We’d wake them.”
Fell shrugged. The gesture was such strange perfection. Their whole being was expressed in it. The confidence and the charm and the fearlessness and the power to roll with absolutely anything that came along.
I grabbed Fell’s hand. Prayed that some of what they were would seep into me.
Fell touched my mousy hair. Sang softly: “Is there life on Mars?”
“We’ll find out,” I said. “Right? Machines will solve all our problems?”
At school, two days later, during lunch, I marched myself to the library and enrolled in computer classes.
“Shit,” Fell said, pointing out the window, driving us home through snowy blue twilight.
Massive green Air Force trucks lined a long stretch of Route 9. Flatbeds where giant satellite dishes stood. Racks of cylindrical transformers. Men pacing back and forth with machines in their hands. None of it had been there the day before.
“What the hell?” I said.
“They’re hunting for the voice in the night too,” Fell said.
“Because it’s part of a terrorist cell and knew about a plane crash before it happened.”
“Or because it’s using bafflingly complex technology that could only have come from the future,” Fell said.
Then they switched on the radio, shrieked at what they found there. Sang-screamed: “Maybe I’m just like my mother, she’s never satisfied.”
“Why do we scream at each other?” I said, and then we launched into the chorus with one wobbly crooked magnificent voice.
My first view of Fell’s house was also my first view of Fell’s mother. She sat on the front porch wearing several scarves, smoking.
“Fuck,” Fell said. “Fuck me, times ten thousand. I thought for sure she’d still be at work.”
“We can go,” I said. I’d been excited to see the house, for that insight into who Fell was and what had helped make them, but now panic was pulling hard at my hair. Fell’s fear of the woman was contagious.
“No,” Fell said. “If I act like she can’t hurt me, sooner or later she really won’t be able to.”
She laughed when she saw me. “Of course it’s a girl.”
“Mrs. Tanzillo, I’m Laurie,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
My good manners threw her off. She shook my hand with a raised eyebrow, like she was waiting to see what kind of trick I was trying to pull. I smelled alcohol. Old, baked-in alcohol, the kind that seeps from the pores of aging drunks. Which I guess she was.
“Don’t you two turn my home into a den of obscenity,” she called after us, as we headed in.
Fell let the door slam, and then exhaled: “God, she is such an asshole.”
The house was sadder than I’d been expecting. Smaller; smellier; heaped with strange piles. Newspapers, flattened plastic bags, ancient water-stained unopened envelopes. A litter box, badly in need of emptying, and then probably burning. My parents were poor, but not poor like this.
“You’re shaking,” I said, and pulled Fell into a hug.
They stiffened. Wriggled free. “Not here.”
“Of course,” I said. “Sorry.”
The TV was on. Squabbling among the former Soviet states. A bad divorce, except with sixteen partners instead of two, and with thermonuclear warheads instead of children. I watched it, because looking around the room—or looking at Fell looking at me—made me nauseous. A talking head grinned, said: “It’s naïve to think our children will get to grow up without the threat of nuclear war. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle.”
Fell talked fast, the shaking audible in every word. “This was a terrible idea. I felt good about us, like, it wouldn’t matter what this place looked like or what you thought of it, because you know I’m not this, it’s just the place where I am until I can be somewhere else, but now, I’m not so sure, I think I should probably take you home.”
So Fell wasn’t fearless. Wasn’t superhuman.
So it was in Fell too. Whatever was in me. Something so small, that could chain down someone so magnificent.
Of course I should have put up more of a fight. Said how it didn’t matter. But I hated seeing Fell like this. If Fell was afraid, what hope was there for me? Fell, who welcomed every awful thing the world had to show us. Fell was my only hope, but not this Fell. So I shrugged and said, “whatever you want,” feeling awful about it already, and we turned around and went right back outside, and Mrs. Tanzillo thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and we didn’t talk the whole ride home.
“That is what it sounds like when doves cry,” Ms. Jackson said, as the spiraling keyboard riff faded out, as the drum machine loop wound down.
I’d called the song in. I wondered if Fell was listening, if they knew what it meant. How hard it had been for me to dial that number. How bare the floor beside me was. How cold. How much my chest hurt.
“This extended block of uninterrupted songs is brought to you by Friendly Honda,” she said. “They’re not on Route Nine. Let’s stick with Prince, shall we? Dig a little deeper. A B-side. ‘Erotic City.’” Her laugh here was raw and throaty, barely a laugh at all, closer to a grumble of remembered pleasure. Some erotic city she’d taken someone to, ages ago.
The song started. A keyboard and a bass doing dirty, dirty things together. Strutting, strolling. Becoming one thing, one lewd gorgeous sound that made me shiver.
I imagined Fell listening. Our minds entwined inside the song. An intimacy unencumbered by flawed bodies, troubled minds, or the fear of what could go wrong when we put them together. Small voices inside our heads that made us miserable.
What a magnificent thing we would be. If Fell ever spoke to me again. If we could make whatever our weird thing was work.
Just when things were getting good, as Prince was shifting to the chorus, the static sizzle:
“There are a million ways I could have done this. But anything else, something more straightforward, well, I thought it might just blow your minds. Cause panic. Do the opposite thing, from what I wanted to accomplish.”
Prince and the star man struggled for dominance, dirty talk giving way to flanged static only to steal back center stage. I only heard one more intelligible phrase before the intruder cut out altogether, even though I stayed up until three in the morning to see if they’d return:
“—know it’s all worthwhile—”
“I want to find her,” Fell said, the next day, when I walked out the front door and there they were, sitting on my front steps.
I hid my shock, my happiness. My shame. My guilt. “Find who?”
“The voice in the night. The one Ms. Jackson keeps calling the star man.”
I sat down. “You think it’s a she?”
Fell shrugged. I had been imagining the voice belonged to a male, but now that I thought about it I heard how sexless it was, how mechanical. Could be anything, in the ear of the beholder.
Cold wind swung tree branches against the side of my house, sounding like someone awful knocking at the door. I could not unhunch my shoulders. The magnitude of my awfulness was such that I didn’t know where to start. What to apologize for first.
“How would we even begin to do something like that?” I asked instead.
Fell picked up something I hadn’t seen before. The size of three record album sleeves laid out in a row. Four horizontal lines of thin metal, with a single vertical line down the middle.
“A directional antenna,” they said. “It picks up radio signals, but it’s sensitive to the direction of the origin signal. Point it directly at the source and you get a strong signal; point it away and you’ll get a faint one. Plug it into this receiver”—Fell held up a hefty army-green box—“and we can take measurements in multiple directions until we find the right one.”
They talked like everything was fine, but their face was so tight that I knew nothing was.
“Where did you get that?” I asked, making my voice laugh. “And how do you know how to use it?”
“I told you, machines are kind of my thing.”
“So, wait, we just turn it around until we find the signal, and then go in that direction?”
“Not necessarily,” Fell said. “It tells direction, but not distance. So the signal could be three miles away, or three thousand, depending on how strong it is. With just one measurement, we could be driving into the wilderness for days.” Fell produced a map from the inner workings of the complex blazer they wore. “So the best way to do it is to take a measurement from one place, draw a line on the map that corresponds precisely to the signal, and then go to another location and take another measurement, and draw another precise line on the map—”
“And the point where they meet is the probable location!” I said, excited.
“It’s called triangulation,” Fell said.
“Amazing. But for real. How do you know all this?”
“My uncle, he learned this from my grandfather, who did it in the war. Transmitter hunting is kind of a nerd game, for amateur radio operators. They call it foxtailing.”
“Your uncle as in your mother’s brother?”
Fell nodded. And there it was, the subject I’d been trying to avoid.
“He was the closest thing to a dad that I had,” Fell said. “We used to have so much fun together. Didn’t give a shit about sports or any of that standard dude shit. He was into weird shit like directional antennas and science fiction. Then he met this girl, and moved to Omaha with her. Fucking Omaha. I’m sorry about the other day, at my mom’s. I acted like an idiot.”
“You acted like an idiot? Don’t be dumb, Fell—that was all me. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I didn’t know how to react when I saw how upset you were. I should have stayed. I wanted to stay.”
Fell grabbed my hand. I had so much more to say, and I imagine so did Fell, but we did not need a word of it.
Mom might be watching out the window, I thought, but did not let go of Fell’s hand.
“What if the source of the signal is moving?”
Fell nodded. “I thought about that. I don’t have a good solution. We just have to hope that’s not the case, or we’ll be triangulating bullshit.”
“It’s not the end of the world, if we end up standing in some empty field together.”
We drove to the top of Mount Merino, to take our first measurement. And then we waited. Kept the car running, blasting the Graveyard Shift from shitty speakers. Across the street was a guardrail, and then a sheer drop to the river beneath us. The train tracks alongside it. We lay on the hood and looked at stars.
“You won’t run out of gas like this?”
“The average car can idle for ninety-two hours—that’s just under four days—on a full tank of gas, which is what we have,” Fell said. “The battery will die long before we run out of gas.”
I marveled at the intricacies of Fell’s mechanical knowledge, but I had some knowledge of my own to share. I told Fell about my computer classes, and how, yeah, computers were incredible, they could do anything. Fell was as impressed as I’d hoped they’d be, but they kept asking me questions about the hardware that I couldn’t answer. All I knew was software. Fell looked at programming the way I looked at machines: probably fascinating, but way over my head.
Fell told me about transistors, and how processing power was increasing exponentially; had been for decades. How eventually computers would be able to store as much information and process as many simultaneous operations as swiftly as a human brain. Then Fell showed me how to work the antenna, read the receiver, detect signal strength. We practiced on other radio stations, penciled lines on the map.
Then three hours passed. We were way past my curfew, and the star man hadn’t shown.
“Fuck it,” Fell said, at the end of Ms. Jackson’s program. “Star person stood us up. We should go for a long drive. Charge the battery backup.”
“Okay,” I said, just assuming Fell was right and that was how those worked.
“Your parents won’t mind?”
“Nah,” I said, although they absolutely would, if they caught me sneaking back in, and there was a very good chance that they would because I am extremely clumsy, but that was the future and I didn’t care about that, I only cared about the here and the now with Fell in Fell’s car on this freezing night on this weird planet in this mediocre galaxy.
The radio show after Graveyard Shift was significantly less awesome, but we had to stick with it. Who knew whether star person would stumble onto any other stations. I had my portable radio and my headphones, so that I could periodically coast back and forth across the radio dial in search of our elusive visitor, but somehow I knew that this would be fruitless. For whatever reason, the signal was pegged to this specific station.
The new DJ talked too much between songs, and he had the voice of a gym teacher. The opening notes of “Where Is My Mind” came on and we both started screaming, but this asshole kept rambling on about a concert in Albany coming up next weekend, and he only stopped when the singer started singing.
“Goddamn him,” Fell said, and then—static—then—
“—that’s why I’m doing this, I guess. To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now. And the one you embrace will be the one you end up with.”
As soon as the voice began, Fell raised the antenna, held it out like a pistol. Turned slowly. We watched the receiver respond to the signal’s varying strength, and hastily drew a bold thick line on the map when we found it. Cheered. Watched our breath billow.
