Kirk Jones

AETHERCHRIST

ADVANCE REVIEW COPY

For my mother, who supported and encouraged me, whether it was when I was terrified of horror stories as a child, mesmerized by horror stories as a teen, or obsessed with writing horror stories as an adult. You’ve seen me through the entire trajectory of my relationship with horror. Here, the relationship takes another turn into the realm of science fiction and psychology, the inner space you’ve also helped guide me through in difficult times.

Introduction

I watch the channel 12 reruns on my disassembled television. On my countertop, sky blue diodes sprout through a mesh of blood and copper wiring. Through a cracked screen, I stare back at myself, wide-eyed, mouth agape. Dead. I turn the channel. The dial revolves like the cylinder of a six-shooter. Each chamber, each channel, is piecemeal prophecy leading to my death on screen. I’ll die soon, but I’m not sure how or when. So, I turn back to channel 2, hoping the TV will eventually bridge the gap between the day I came to Springfield to sell knives and the day I’ll end up sprawled across the pavement in a lifeless heap.

Channel 2

We’re driving down VT-103 in Jim’s two-door coupe. He’s got the heat blasting, so I crack the window. Snow still covers the ground, but it’s starting to recede. That doesn’t mean winter’s going to be gone anytime soon, though.

Jim looks out the driver-side window, takes in the endless stretch of empty pasture. He pulls his shirt over his nose. “They’re spreading that fucking liquid shit again.”

“It’s too early for that,” I say. “That’s just plain old, unprocessed cow shit.” I roll down my window a little more and nose the air. “You’ve lived here your entire life. How are you not used to that smell?”

“Look, you give me a dead skunk at thirty or forty yards. Yeah, it reminds me of smoking dope at the sand pits back in high school. But cow shit? Fuck that.”

I breathe in again. “I kind of like it, when it’s not too strong.”

Jim continues driving with one hand, holding his shirt up. “You would, man. You would.”

We pull off on 131, heading toward Weathersfield.

“Why are you turning here?” I ask.

Jim looks at me. “Dirty thirty!”

“What?”

“Your birthday’s right around the corner. We’re going to loosen up tonight before the big sales rush tomorrow.”

“I need to get checked in. I need a shower.”

“Come on. The whole team is going to be there.”

“Seriously?” I can’t fucking believe this.

“Might as well start off on the right foot. If I make three sales, that’ll be enough to go on a week-long bender. There’s at least one bar in walking distance.”

So much for twelve steps. “Jesus.”

“You have something better planned?”

“I want to check out that analog tower they have up there.”

“Hm he hmm hmm he analog he hmm,” Jim mocks. “Fucking radio tower.” He pulls into the driveway of an old strip of buildings. “We’re middle-aged. We sell knives, or we’d try to if online retailers weren’t soaking up our shtick. We’ve got nothing better to do on a work night. You can check out the radio tower later. I’ll go with you. For now, come on.”

He leads me up to the door and pushes me through the threshold.

“Surprise!”

Jim’s right. Everybody’s here, in this little watering hole that’s part of the world’s shittiest mini-mall. It’s the most unsightly construction I’ve ever seen. White vinyl siding straddling a log cabin ice cream shack straddling a dilapidated bar, aptly titled “The Dance Hole.” Bathrooms? There are no fucking bathrooms. Porta-potties are in the back.

Tom’s the first one to greet me. “We got you, you fucker!”

“You got me, Tom.”

He gets up in my face, drops the smile. “But seriously, don’t fuck with Lana. I’ve been working her for weeks. Tonight’s the night.” He winks at me.

I nod dismissively.

Jim gently pushes me toward our boss, Lana. She’s standing at the bar ordering something, a beer as black as a starless night. It smells like shit and coffee. She puts it to her lips and downs half of it. There’s a brown cream residue on her mustache that she wipes away with her fist. I turn to Jim. He makes a face like he just dropped a tablespoon of cinnamon in his mouth.

Lana misses all of this.

“Happy birthday, Rey,” she says, taking another drink.

“Happy birthday,” I say. “Thanks, I mean.”

She takes another drink. “How do you think we’ll do?”

“My social skills are just about nil, so…”

“So out here, you’ll do fine. You’re a product of the backwoods, right?”

“I suppose.”

“You’ll do fine.” Lana sets her beer down, snaps her fingers for another round. “And if you don’t, remember. Even if sales are down, we’re state funded. They’re not going to shut down their precious outpatient operation when it’s about to go national.”

“They might if they find out we’re here.”

“Why? You’re in for opiates, not alcohol, right?”

I wipe away the beads of water gathering at the base of my glass. “Yeah.”

“You don’t talk much about life before ’hab. I’ve seen the police blotters, but it’d be nice to hear your side of the story someday.”

“I’d rather just forget about it.”

“You have to come clean to get clean, Rey.”

I lift the beer to my lips. It tastes like crushed Tylenol, like something I’d cut blow with. “As long as I’m here, I’m clean. But my sales suck.”

Lana puts her hand on my forearm, strokes my flannel gently. “Sales are irrelevant. The company’s getting state aid for every one of you guys, so don’t sweat it. In the meantime, open up a bit. You’re stuck with us for a while. Might as well make it worth it.” She waits for the bartender to pour her another glass and walks away.

I’m left wondering if there’s any subtext to take away from my conversation with Lana. I want there to be. I want her eyes to tell me something her words don’t. But even if they did, I couldn’t read them. Thousands of signals have passed me by in my life, all blotted out fix by fix.

I tune out the self-loathing static and try to find Jim. I want to go, but he’s hitting on one of the local girls. She has an aged beauty, with smoky eyes. Not the good smoky. The sultry-meth-look-in-the-Walmart-parking-lot smoky. He’ll still nail her. God knows how he manages to lure them in. Somehow his vacant stare and feigned expertise in the new hobby he picks up and drops every other week does the trick.

The bartender is staring me down. I throw a five down on the bar. “Beer, something light.”

“On tap or in a bottle?”

“I’ll take a bottle, thanks.”

He glares at me as he pops the top and slides the beer in my direction.

I lift the bottle to my lips. It smells like skunk, and I’m taken back to the sand pits in high school.

Jim is slow dancing with the local woman while Tom chats up Lana.

I turn to the bartender to make small talk and he walks away.

Happy birthday to me.

* * *

After Jim and I check into the motel, we walk to the analog tower nearby. When we get to the top of the hill, Jim pulls out from under his coat a cheap bottle of champagne. “My private reserve.” He raises his eyebrows and starts peeling the foil off, revealing the plastic cork beneath.

“So, what happened?” I ask.

Jim pops the bottle open and catches the runoff in his mouth. “With what?”

“The girl at the bar?”

“I fucked her in the porta-potty.”

“Seriously?”

He nods, but he’s so full of shit I can’t tell if he’s being honest or not. “She threw up.” He looks at me. “And told me to keep going.”

“Bullshit.”

He passes the bottle to me. “Don’t be hating.”

“I’m not hating.” I take a drink and hand the bottle back to him. “I question your judgment, but I’m not hating.”

“Why don’t you put that B.S. in Psychology to work then, Rey. It’s gotta be good for something. What’s your prognosis, Doc?”

I look up at the massive analog tower, then out at the horizon, where smaller towers flicker in the distance. I watch them strobe twice simultaneously before they start to split into their own rhythm again. That’s kind of what turning thirty feels like, like I’m expected to march to the beat of my own drum after years of following others. It’s not by choice, but by design. I won’t blink back into the pattern with the rest of the human race, either. It all gets slower and dimmer from here.

The radio tower on the far left is the last to catch up as the lights start to blink in a synchronized pattern again. I feel like it’s christening me for the worst third of my life.

At least I’m optimistic that old age will be better.

Jim passes me the bottle and reaches for his zipper. “Hey. I ever show you my dick?”

I take the bottle and drink. Heavily. “Yes. Every time you get drunk.”

“Oh.” He reaches for the bottle. “Want to see it again?”

I sigh. He won’t take no for an answer. “I guess.”

* * *

The next morning, I wake to the taste of stale champagne in my mouth. I don’t get headaches like I used to, which is nice. Hangover now just means I’m too slow to think, which suits me fine. Sometimes I think I drink more for the hangover than I do to get drunk.

I walk over the hill behind our motel, then down Harbor Road looking for house 34. White letters on a black box, just like Lana described. There’s nothing. Not a single fucking house on this road—if you can call them houses—has a number. There are only three places, so I go by process of elimination, starting with the brown mobile home. A water-damaged chipboard addition cradles the front of the house. Doilies hang at the top of the front window. The place looks like some sort of cyclopean insect standing on six concrete block legs. It’s dying a slow death too.

So is the guy that lumbers out of the neighboring garage. A husky follows along beside him. Its hair is so matted and dirty on one side that it’s walking at an angle. One thing’s for sure. This guy doesn’t need any knives. If he does, I don’t want to know what he’s planning to do with them.

“I help you?” he asks.

I hold up my briefcase. “I’m selling knives.”

He pulls a jackknife out of his pocket, opens it, and draws it against the grain of his hair. He brushes away the dead skin. The knife isn’t shaving like it ought to. “Got any sharpeners?”

“Reckon I do.”

“I might be interested in one of those. Taken to whittling again since the television doesn’t work anymore.”

“Those digital antennas don’t work worth a damn, do they?”

He heads for the house. “Haven’t tried ’em. Figure I’ll get more done just not worrying about it. Quit cold turkey. I have a VCR if I get desperate.” He turns at the door. “Come on in.”

The dog doesn’t follow. Too forlorn to deal with matters of territory, she ambles back into the garage. The garage lined with shelf after shelf of small, wooden figures.

“You coming?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

We walk down a dark hallway. The sound of white noise echoes through the walls. “I don’t spend a lot of time inside during the day,” he says. “Just a place to get my head out of the rain.” He pulls out a chair and sits. “Well, let’s see what you’ve got.”

I set the briefcase on the table and open it. “I have a basic sharpening stone.” I hand it off to him. “I have something a little more elaborate here.”

The old man helps himself to the sharpener in my case. “I like this one. How much?”

The white noise, louder now, distracts me. I shake it off. “Twenty-five?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” He gets up and leaves the room. I don’t see him again for what feels like an hour. The hairs stand on the back of my neck like the guy is standing just behind me. When he doesn’t come back, I walk toward the noise. There’s an old black-and-white television on in the living room. You can see the silhouette of a woman slouching in a small… chair? I notice a belt buckle. It’s a bus seat.

“Anything good on?” I joke as I round the corner.

The woman stares into the screen. Spittle snails down her chin from the corner of her mouth. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t even blink. Only the slow, rhythmic heaving of her chest tells me she’s alive.

I turn to the screen ablaze with static. It cuts in and out and there we are: the woman, sitting in her bus seat, and me, standing beside her.

I look around the room for a hidden camera, and the image shorts out, transitioning between pops and electric stutters back to static.

The man throws a plastic grocery bag of pennies on the table. “There’s twenty.”

At this point, I just want to get the fuck out. So, I walk back into the kitchen and take the bag off the table.

“You have a security camera set up in here?” I ask.

“Can’t imagine why I’d need one. She never moves.”

He must be lying.

We walk to the front door.

“Is she okay?” I look back at the house.

He shakes his head. “I shift her every couple of days. She doesn’t talk much. Only to tell me not to change the channel.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “I said my goodbyes years ago. Just after her stroke.”

“Thank you for your time.”

The old man scratches the back of his head. “I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Reymond,” I say. “And you?”

“Wayne.” He pauses. “We don’t get a lot of visitors out this way. Stop by again if you get a chance. It’s nice to interact with the outside world a bit.”

“Will do.”

Fuck that. I think.

Fuck.

That.

* * *

Jim sucks down whatever exotic cocktail with a sexually suggestive name he’s hip to this week, then swishes it around in his mouth and swallows. “How’d you do today?”

“Sold a sharpener,” I say.

Jim smiles coyly. “I got a piece of ass,” he says.

I continue eating. “Big surprise there.”

“So, I come to the first house on my street. I knock on the door, expecting to be turned away. I see this petite figure walking up to the stained-glass window. She peers through a small part of the glass and opens the door. I see only two things: flesh and a panty line.”

“You really need to stop reading those pre-bagged porn mags from the D&L,” I say.

“I’m not shitting you.”

I put my knife down. “I’ve heard enough.”

He cocks his head dismissively, fluffs his mashed potatoes with his fork. “You should call Lana. Tell her you made a sale.”

“One sale isn’t worth calling her.”

“Tom calls every ten minutes.”

“Tom’s a douchebag.”

“He’s probably got her bent over in the Rutland Mall parking lot in front of the Toys “R” Us.”

“What the fuck? Why the Toys “R” Us?”

“Okay, Sears. I don’t know. But I bet he’s fucked her.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, he will if you don’t move on it.”

“She wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

“I’m not sure anyone would give her the time of day, Rey.” He smiles. “Except you.”

“You think you’ll have any luck tomorrow?”

“Should have.” Jim continues playing with his potatoes. “You?”

“Not so sure. These people are backwoods. Like, really fucking backwoods.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“I walked into a mobile home with a chipboard addition. The guy’s wife was comatose on a bus seat screwed into the floorboards, watching static.”

“But you made a sale.”

“Yeah. Still.”

“Look. Don’t worry about it. You’re here to sell knives, not to diagnose the redneck population of northeastern America. Who cares how screwed up they are?”

I take the last bite of my burger and throw a ten on the table. “Guess you’re right.”

Channel 3

The next morning, I have Jim drop me off at the second house on the street.

This place looks a little more inviting. There’s a series of large tents with tables of clothes and other items that lead into a garage. A thick layer of dust coats the clothes. It’s like a year-round yard sale.

I walk inside. The place is lit by television static from three shelves of TVs on both sides of the building. Some of them steadily blare white noise. Others short in and out. An old man sits behind the counter. He stares at a television out of view. “How’s it going?” he asks.

“I’m doing alright. Just looking.”

“You’re the first customer of the season.”

“You get a lot of folks down this way?”

“Not many.” He looks at my briefcase. “Mostly solicitors.”

“You got me,” I say, as I walk to the counter and extend my hand. “My name’s Reymond.”

He shakes my hand. “Bill. I might be able to trade you something, but I don’t have much money. Only change for customers.”

I turn around to see if anything interests me. “All those televisions must put a strain on your breaker.”

“I got a couple kerosene generators if I overload it.”

“I take it you missed the conversion to digital as well.”

He points to a small television behind the counter. An episode of I Love Lucy plays. “I’ve got dish.”

“Why do you leave these on then?”

He stands up. “Every now and then they’ll pick something up. Short emergency broadcasts, people talking. CB transmissions.” He walks over to one of the televisions and starts flicking through the channels. “They don’t say anything important, but I like tapping into these frequencies that aren’t intended for me, or for the general population.”

“You ever see people?”

The man shakes his head. “Not since Canada made the switch to digital. I bet if you had an antenna strong enough… I think there are other countries that still use analog, you know? Most signals don’t go much beyond a hundred miles, though.”

I look at the televisions. They’re all set to channels 2 through 13.

“Those are the ones that pick up something most often, the VHF channels. But this one—” he draws his hand over a television on the second shelf “—I keep this one on UHF. Change the channel every day, hoping to pick something new up.”

I point to one of the televisions that keeps blacking out. “What’s wrong with that one?”

The man walks over to it. “Nothing. Sometimes you have to chase the transmission. The signals shift frequency, so you have to change the channel. Watch.” He turns the dial quickly when the screen blacks out. Each channel in succession is black with one audible utterance. As he turns through six channels in succession, you hear “te-st-tra-ns-miss-ion.” He goes back to channel 7 and starts again: “te-st-tra-ns-miss-ion.”

“It’s been doing that for weeks now,” he says.

“Weird.”

He walks back to the counter. “Not really. We knew the transition to digital was to free up analog airwaves for emergency broadcast. It was no secret. Most people just don’t keep their analog receivers on. Hell, most of the recent televisions just cut to black or blue if they don’t pick up a transmission. These TVs are old enough to where they’ll run the static. Every now and then, you pick up something mildly interesting. And that’s all you can expect to get. Whatever the government’s using analog for, you can guarantee you’re not going to catch any of that.”

I set my briefcase down on the countertop. “My father used to work in television.”

“Oh yeah?” He leans back in his chair. “What’s your last name?”

“Friott.”

“I don’t remember any Friotts where I worked. Was he from around here?”

I nod.

“I worked for public broadcasting back in the early Seventies myself. What’d your dad do?”

“Cable.”

“Ah. That’s why I didn’t know him. Broadcast didn’t get on so well with cable. Economics. You know how it is. At the heart of it, we all wanted the same thing. The towers weren’t capable of expanding the audience without some form of cable. Public broadcasting used telephone. Cable came along and promised to swallow the entire broadcasting industry whole.” He waits for a reaction, so I raise my eyebrows and feign amazement. Anything for a sale. “Wow.”

“Analog’s something I grew up with. You know how people have different preferences when it comes to music? Some like country. Some like rock and roll. I’ve always found myself partial to analog frequency, whether it be static, squeaks, or muffled voices. It all appeals to me.”

This fellow needs to hear some dubstep. That shit’d be right up his alley, I think.

“So, what’re you selling?” he asks.

“Knives.”

“You want a TV?”

“Not particularly.”

“I really don’t have any use for new knives.”

“You could resell them.”

“People come here looking for bargains, usually with a few dollars in their pockets. They couldn’t afford them.”

“I see.” I reach into my pocket. “Can I leave my card?”

“Sure.” His hand shakes uncontrollably as he reaches out to take it. “Why don’t you take one of my flyers on the way out?”

I pull my briefcase off the counter and head for the tents out front, pulling one of the man’s flyers off the table as I go. I wave it at him. “Take care.”

He’s already caught up in the old program behind the counter. “Yeah.” He waves without looking.

* * *

That evening, Jim and I head up to a small restaurant in town for a beer. He opens his laptop and grins as the screen flashes. “I’m telling you. It’s Lana!”

“There’s no way she’d put naked pictures of herself online. She could lose her job.”

“That’s why she doesn’t show her face.” He turns his laptop to me. They look like her legs. The red, form-fitting skirt she has pulled up to reveal her labia… yeah, that could be hers too.

“Shut that down! We’re in a restaurant!”

Jim takes a handful of napkins from the dispenser and wipes them across his forehead. “It’s a bar and grill, Rey.”

I point to a couple seated in the corner with their baby. “Family friendly!”

He closes the laptop. “Do you think it’s her?”

“It could be.”

He hands me a slip of paper soaked with sweat. “Here’s the link, one of my usernames and my password. I only send pictures upon request, and I don’t have my—” he points to his crotch “—measurements. So, you don’t have to worry about deceiving her or anything.”

I take the piece of paper. “Thanks, Jim.” Fucker.

He wipes his forehead on the sleeve of his jacket. “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

“You all right?” I ask.

“I’m fine. Just a small fever. I’m on a detox diet. It’s normal.” He downs the rest of his water. “You going to do it?”

“I might.”

“Think about it like this. If it is her and she goes for it, you can finally iron out that tent in your pants. If it isn’t her, close your eyes, grab her thighs and pretend.”

* * *

When I get back to my room, I log into Jim’s account, or one of his accounts. He has no unread messages, no photos, and no information. The account was created last night. He made it for me. I figure I should get his five bucks worth out of this. While the page is loading, I close my window. A moth rests on the screen. It has been motionless since I got here. I was pretty sure it was dead. I close the window behind it. It sees its own reflection and it flutters wildly, realizing for the first time it is trapped.

On the page, Jim has one woman in his queue. It’s Lana, presumably. So, I go to write her a message:

Lana:

I know this might seem odd, but I’ve been in love with you since we first met…

The confessional approach isn’t going to work. I think I’m in love with this woman, but I can’t acknowledge that now.

I draft and re-draft my letter. Tonight, the Internet is a womb. My thoughts are a mass of tangled DNA waiting to be woven into something meaningful, ejaculate spewing across T2 wiring. The veil of the black type on white backdrop is infected with emotion, so I wrap myself in a semi-porous frame of feigned apathy. I have to pretend I want nothing more than sex, when all I want is for someone to validate me. But every time I open my mouth or stroke the keys, I find I’m stuck inside myself. Finally, some intimation of my desire comes across the screen.

Ms40-34-40:

If you’re interested, I’ll be waiting at the Dance Hole around 8 p.m. three nights from now (Friday). I’ll wear dark blue jeans and a grey dress shirt. You don’t have to confront me unless you’re interested. I’ll sit at the far end of the bar toward the road.

Best,

Big’un69

Big’un69? What a tacky fucking name. Thanks, Jim. She’ll either be expecting a four-hundred-pound farm hand or John Holmes.

I guess I’m no worse off than I was before I started.

Channel 4

You ever have one of those days where things are already wearing you down before you get out of bed, and then everything after that point is shot to hell? It’s been one of those days so far. I woke up to Jim leaving the parking lot an hour early. I ran to the window and tried to wave him down. I know he saw me. Bastard.

To make matters worse, housekeeping didn’t replace my single-use coffee packet from yesterday, and they took the tea. I guess that’s what I get for not leaving a tip.

So now I’m walking down the hill toward Harbor Road with no caffeine in my veins and sweat starting to accumulate on the underarms of my shirt. I’m lagging, knowing already that nobody’s going to buy my shit on this road. Knowing I should have had this road off my quota Monday. Knowing I should have had Jim take me to the far end of the road on my first day so I wouldn’t have to walk a mile to the last house on the street.

Before I even hit pavement, Wayne’s calling to me from his front porch. This is another reason I should have scratched this road the first day. The products we sell are garbage. It’s sad to say, but the only way to be successful is to strike like lightning. Hit fast and never hit the same place twice. Without a vehicle, I’m up shit creek.

“Hey there. Reynold, right?”

Customer’s always right. “Yeah. Wayne?”

He nods. “You mind taking a look at something for me?”

I jog lightly toward his driveway, feign concern. The fucking sharpener is busted. I can feel it. I remind myself to remain calm, to breathe slowly. I’m just the middleman. Good cop to the bad cop corporation. “Problem with the sharpener?”

“She’s working fine.” He overturns a mug on the counter and heads for his coffee pot. “You look like you could use a cup.”

“I’m all right, thanks.”

“Housekeeping shorted you today, didn’t they?”

“They’re that predictable, eh?”

“I think it’s better if you take a look for yourself.” He takes me through the darkened hallway into the living room and points to the television.

I set my briefcase down next to Wayne’s wife, and there I am on the television, setting my briefcase down.

Wayne starts going through the channels. Channel 2: me, two days ago, selling Wayne the sharpener. Channel 3: I’m walking down a corridor of old black-and-white televisions at the garage sale next door. Channel 4: I’m waking up and looking out the window, watching Jim speed away. Channel 5: I’m staring back at myself in real time. Channel 6: static.

I look at Wayne, trying to brush off chills that remind me it’s time to consider waxing the hair cropping up on my shoulders. Then I chastise myself for being vain when I’m housed in some microcosm of A Brave New World. “The whole town is under surveillance?”

“You’re the only one showing up on my TV. I thought you might know something.”

I point to the television. “May I take a look?”

“Sure.”

“Turn it back a channel.”

Wayne dials down and steps away from the television. There we are again. I try to gauge the position of the camera by walking toward the television and away from it again. I look for signs of the screen coming into focus or blurring as I move. The image is crisp the entire time.

I crouch down and walk toward the television set with my finger extended. I play hot and cold with the camera until my finger is resting on the television monitor, dead center. I hold my finger there and turn the television off. “There’s a camera in your TV,” I say. “Must be like a two-way mirror effect or something. Where’d you get it?”

“Next door.”

So, the fucker next door is a voyeur. He’s got the general vicinity rigged. That’s why all of those fucking TVs are on in his garage. He’s watching everybody.

“Have you tried all the channels?”

“Yeah. Only the first few are working.”

I start thinking maybe they’re just mind-fucking me, that maybe Wayne is in on it too. I try to remain calm. “Might be time to get a new TV.”

“You think we should call the police?”

“Naw. I’d watch what you do in front of that TV, though.”

He slaps his wife on the leg. “You hear that, Lori?” He laughs, baring his yellowed teeth. “Don’t let ’em catch you moving or anything.”

His wife stares ahead, eyes unflinching.

I pick up my briefcase and head out for the front door. “I better get back to work.”

“I’ll holler if anything changes,” he tells me.

* * *

As I walk next door to Bill’s, I start thinking that maybe being recorded is just some part of a benign neighborhood watch program. Boredom and collective paranoia can do some interesting things to people. But why would they show me I’m on camera? Just to keep me in line? And what exactly qualifies as “in line” in this neighborhood? If they’ve gone to such great lengths to wire the entire fucking town, they might have some pretty rigid convictions.

Snow flits across the television screens as I enter Bill’s garage. I walk up to one and wait for it to flicker. As soon as it does, I start turning the dial. There’s definitely something being transmitted, but it’s all black on my end. Like he said, what they don’t want you to see, you don’t see.

Bill walks out from behind the counter. “Back so soon?”

I continue eyeing the televisions, trying to find one that won’t be too heavy to carry back to the motel. “I’d like to pick up one of these if I could.”

“They have cable down at the motel, don’t they?”

“You tell me.”

“I’ve never been there. The town’s too small to sneak in for their free breakfast, if they offer one.”

“They don’t.” I keep my eyes fixed on the television screens. “I’m interested in seeing what kinds of signals I can pick up back in Rutland.”

“You’ll probably get a lot of interference from all the cell towers and such.” He walks up to the televisions and glances at the ones on the top shelf. “But I’m not one to turn away a customer. You got any preferences?”

I turn to the shelf behind me. “This all you got?”

“For now, yes.”

“I have a bit of a walk back to the motel. Do you have anything smaller?”

He steps behind the counter. “I always thought these were neat.” He holds up a small television with a four-inch screen. “You ever see one?”

I nod. “I think I have. They’re battery operated?”

“Yeah. It’s a little beat up on the back. My son rigged it so he could play video games in his room, years ago.” He sets the television down and kneels down to rummage through the junk behind the counter. “I think I have a small antenna for it and some batteries.”

“Do you have a large antenna I could hook to it? Nothing giant, just a pair of rabbit ears or something?”

He continues shuffling things around behind the counter. “Should.”

I turn back to the televisions to see if I catch anything. Some of them flicker at times, but only to black.

Finally, Bill comes up for air. He’s got a set of rabbit ears and a few batteries. “I’ll sell you all of this for twenty,” he says.

“You interested in trade?”

He holds up his hand. “I’d prefer cash. Sorry.”

“You can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“I understand. We’re two of a kind. Normally that’d be grounds enough to help you out, but I can’t afford it right now.” He rolls the batteries to the base of the TV and places the rabbit ears beside them. “Is twenty okay?”

I place a bill on the counter. “Sure.”

“If it gives you a hard time, bring it back. I have a few similar models.”

“Sure,” I say, as I head for the door. “Thanks.”

* * *

I set up the TV as soon as I get back to my room. I try, at least. I forgot what a pain in the ass it is to screw the antenna into the back of these things. I’m talking ancient, two-prongs-under-a-Philips-head-screwdriver pain in the ass. Once I finally get everything in place, I set the antenna up and scan through UHF and VHF. There’s nothing. Of course, there are one thousand ways to position the antenna, and all of those positions will yield different results. When I was a child we got a Canadian station for two hours a day, from 4 a.m. until 6 a.m., if we positioned our antenna right. I still wonder how we slipped onto that channel. Whatever it was, I wish I could tap into it now.

Three hours later and no luck, so I take the television apart to see what’s inside. I tug at the side of the frame to see if I can open it while it is on. I try to pry it apart to no avail. I hammer it gently on its side, trying to loosen the casing, then I slam the TV down on the table harder and harder until the case breaks and the glass cracks. A small shard bounces and pirouettes off the edge of the table onto the floor. Blood pools in the palm of my hand. I run the wound under water. It’s not deep enough to warrant stitches.

I stare at the individual parts of the television laid out before me. I keep looking at the tube to see if there’s a camera inside. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to put the television back together. I start to think I should have checked the model on Wayne’s television and switched his out for one of the same model. I wonder if his wife sleeps sitting up on that fucking bus seat all night too. I bet she does. I bet Wayne has to buckle her in overnight.

There’s nothing in the television that appears out of order. Of course, I’m relying on my own expertise here, which is incredibly lacking. And the one person who could help me, I don’t trust. I guess this is when introversion sucks; when you don’t have a Swiss Army knife of acquaintances who can help you with all of the little problems you can’t solve yourself.

After I put the set back together, I turn the television to channel 6. Wayne’s television played me on stations 2 through 6, and I’ve always heard that when you’re lost, your odds of being found are better if you hold still. I figure I’ll get the best results if I keep it on the same channel throughout the night.

I open up my laptop and check my history for the dating site Jim told me about. I dig through my wallet to find the username and password and log in. If all goes well, there’s a chance I’ll have a date this weekend. If all goes really well, it’ll be with the woman of my dreams…

…there’s nothing.

I visit Ms40-34-40’s profile. She hasn’t been on since I sent the letter, which is good. Better than knowing she’s ignoring me, anyway. Sometimes I wish they’d leave that kind of information out of social media. It seems too hurtful knowing that someone is intentionally going out of his or her way not to acknowledge you.

There are only two pictures on the page, all of them focused on Ms40-34-40’s body from the waist down. Lana’s chest is a bit small, so this again makes me think Jim may have been on to something. This could very well be her.

I feel wrong, looking at the pictures, like Lana’s watching me look at these and she’s shaking her head in disapproval. It’s like when I was young and worried that my dead high school teacher was going to catch me masturbating from heaven. Then every dead celebrity I idolized, I had to worry about the same thing until I turned eighteen. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Puff-n-Stuff—were they all watching me rub one out?

Now I just felt guilty fantasizing about the woman I care about, fearing that she somehow knew, or would know by looking me in the eyes. I also felt to a degree like I was cheating myself. Here I was, staring at a well-groomed bush hoping it was the woman I cared about; when I had her number in my contacts on my phone and could call her at any time.

I scroll back and forth between the two pictures. The first shows muscular thighs framing her sex. The second is of a thick mound of dark hair, as black as night. I had a girlfriend, once, who would only date guys with blonde or red hair because she thought black and brown looked “dirty.” I like black and brown because they have the potential to fully conceal, to drape the sex in mystery. I keep the second picture in my mind as I log out and shut down the computer for the night.

I get up and check the parking lot for Jim one last time before I lay down. Looks like I’ll be walking again tomorrow. I wonder if he’s back in Rutland and he’s decided to ask Lana to drive me back on his behalf. I smile at the thought, and then the color in the room shifts. Something’s on the television.

I turn toward it and see myself walking down Harbor Road. It’s an overhead shot, like someone’s in the trees watching me. I walk to the window and draw the curtain closed. Every minute, I fear that someone’s watching me watch myself, gauging my reaction and waiting for the right moment to strike. All of this must be building up to something. I want to lash out, call out whoever is doing this, but I hold it in.

Then I notice that on screen I’m wearing different clothes, the clothes I haven’t ever worn down Harbor Road before. I check my suitcase while glancing back at the television. My clothes for tomorrow, the clothes on the screen, are still there, undisturbed.

Not wearing those fuckers tomorrow.

I want to run. And though I don’t know whether I feel safer inside or out, I feel like staying here is the best option, at least for tonight. I want to look out the window, but I’m afraid someone will be waiting there, waiting for it. I want to stand under a hot shower, but I’m afraid I’ll step out and someone will be there, watching.

I turn the channel again, this time forward to 5. I cringe every time the dial clicks, wanting to see more, but afraid to see too much. This channel is me in real time, so I take a deep breath and turn to 12. On my countertop, sky-blue diodes sprout through a mesh of blood and copper wiring. Through a cracked television screen, I stare back at myself, wide-eyed, mouth agape. Dead. I turn the channel. The dial revolves like the cylinder of a six-shooter. Each chamber, each channel, is piecemeal prophecy leading to my death on screen. I’ll be dead soon, but I’m not sure how. So, I turn back to channel 2, hoping the TV will eventually bridge the gap between the day I came to Springfield to sell knives and the day I’ll end up sprawled across the pavement in a lifeless heap.

It takes me back to the day Jim and I first drove out here. On channel 3, I’m walking through a hallway of black-and-white sets. On channel 4, my television is disassembled on the table. This channel is relaying what I saw when I took the television apart, like a POV. Channel 5 brings me back to where I am now. Every other channel is static and death, so I shut the TV off and try to fall asleep.

Channel 5

I wake up at 3 a.m. to Jim frantically tapping at my window. I eye him through fog and glass for a minute and let him in. He’s breathing heavy. “I need your help,” he whispers.

I try to wipe the sleep from my eyes. “It’s three in the morning!”

“This is important! Get dressed.”

As I throw on my clothes, Jim tears through my luggage. “Bring something to change into once we’re done.” He throws a pile of clothes into my arms and heads for the door.

I toss the clothes onto the bed. “What’s going on? Where have you been all day?”

“Just grab your shit. I’ll explain on the way.”

I ball up the shirt and pants in my arm and lock up. Jim’s waving me toward his vehicle as I double-check the doorknob. He shifts into reverse before I’m fully in the car and rolls out of the parking lot as quietly as possible.

I rub my eyes again. “What the fuck is going on?”

Jim focuses on the road. He runs one hand up and down the side of the steering wheel while the other hand white knuckles it. “It’s bad.”

“Did you get caught screwing some guy’s wife?”

He shakes his head. “No. No.”

“Well, what happened?”

“Just hang on!” He runs his hand through his hair. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

We pull into a driveway encompassed by pines. Jim kills the headlights as soon as we turn in and we follow a dim fluorescent light. I can barely make out a small cabin under the stars before we’re in the garage.

“I met someone,” Jim says as he steps out of the car. “Come on.”

I get out.

“Leave your door open. No noise.” Jim rattles a set of keys at the cabin door and enters, waving me in behind him. When we’re both inside, he closes the door and turns on the flash bulb on his phone. He drags the light across the hardwood floor until it hits the blood-soaked bed in the corner. Before anything else comes into view, it becomes apparent that Jim’s in way over his fucking head. I’m in way over my fucking head. He turns the flashlight on me. “I need you to help me clean it up.”

“It?” I point to the body. “It’s a fucking human being!”

He turns to the body. Light splashes across the corner of the room. “It was an accident!”

The light bobs up and down on the body as Jim talks. The girl’s mouth is wide open. Small, dark clots punctuate her lips and teeth. The light catches a deep black at the back of her throat. Even so, death hasn’t robbed her of her beauty. It’s obvious she was out of Jim’s league. I wonder if he had taken her by force, not being able to cope with rejection. The fact that her hands are cuffed to the bed on both sides helps plant this suspicion in my mind.

Jim starts crying. “I checked the gun before we started. She wanted me to hold it against her head. The clip was empty.”

I back away from the body. “No way. No fucking way.”

“I don’t even own a gun!”

“I know. Calm down,” I tell him. But my inner monologue keeps repeating the obvious. Bad. Fuckingbad. Fuckingbadbadbad.

I look for a place to sit down. Then I realize putting my hands on anything might incriminate me. “I don’t know.”

“I’ve got to do something!” He looks around the room. “There’s a lake at the end of the back yard. We could drop the body there. Or we could burn the place. I think maybe we should burn it.”

“You shouldn’t have brought me here, Jim.”

“I had no choice!”

“Either of the options you mentioned, you could have taken care of it yourself. But you know what? We’re both fucked now. This whole town is under surveillance. The motel we’re staying at, the streets and the houses we’re visiting. Fucking everything is on camera.”

“Bullshit. This place is so Deliverance, most of these people don’t even know what a video camera is probably.”

“I’ve seen it. The folks I tried to sell to, on Harbor Road, they showed me the footage. They’ve got me walking up and down the street. They knew the motel didn’t leave coffee in my room this morning.”

Jim starts patting himself down. “Fuck it. I’m burning the whole place. They won’t have any footage then.” He pulls out his Zippo lighter. “We need fuel.” He heads for the back door. “I think there’s a kerosene tank out here.”

I try to think of a viable solution to this. If the entire town is under surveillance, then they’ll know I’m not responsible for this. But if I help Jim, then I’m guilty of trying to cover his ass. If I turn my back on him, I could be considered guilty by association anyway. If I report him to the local authorities, at least I’d be doing what’s right. Not what I would consider right in this circumstance. But what’s legally right, anyway.

Think, damnit! I don’t actually have to turn him in. All I have to do is appear like I’m turning him in. If I try to subdue him with the gun, if he hasn’t already disposed of it, then let him get away, it’ll look like I made my best effort to stop him.

Jim walks through the back door with a large coffee can filled with kerosene. “This is the only thing I could find to bring it in. It’ll take a few trips.”

“Do you still have the gun?”

“It’s in the trunk.”

“We should throw it in the lake.”

“Door’s unlocked. Grab it,” he says as he douses the body with kerosene and heads back to fill the coffee can again.

I head out to the car and pop the trunk. Jim’s got the gun buried under his spare tire. Stupid fucker did a shit job of cleaning it off. There’s still blood on it… and the clip is empty. If I try to stop him, he’ll call my bluff. I have to find the bullets inside.

I check the nightstand closest to the door. There’s nothing in the drawer except an old issue of Cosmo. There’s nothing on the surface, either, except a lamp. I run my hand across the floor and hit a few small objects. They roll to the other side of the bed. Has to be the bullets. I have to crawl under and scoop them toward me. I manage to get four and load the cylinder as Jim’s walking back through the door. He dumps the kerosene on the floor and it pools out onto my jacket. “Watch it!”

Jim stops. “Sorry, man. I didn’t know you were down there.” He kneels down and lifts the skirt of the bed up. “What are you doing down there?”

“I dropped the gun,” I say.

He picks up one of the stray bullets off the floor. “Looking for these?”

We both stand up on opposite sides of the bed. Jim reaches out. “Give me the gun.”

“I can’t.”

“What’re you going to do with it?” He extends his arm again. “Hand it over.”

Slowly I raise the gun. “I can’t let you do this, Jim.” I flinch, expecting him to jump over the bed.

He rolls his eyes. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“We’re fucked, Jim. They’ve already got us on film.”

“Fuck off with the film bullshit, all right!” He flips open his Zippo, lights it, and tosses it into the kerosene. The far side of the room ignites instantly as he walks around the edge of the bed. “If there were cameras, don’t you think the fucking police would be here by now?”

Before I can lower the gun and tell him he’s right, he’s choking me, trying to get the gun out of my hand. I push his face away with my free hand.

“Give me the gun,” he says through my fingers.

I keep pushing to no avail.

We drop to the floor, and I realize now that if he gets this gun out of my hand, he’s probably not going to let me live. There’s no way he understands what I’m trying to do, that I’m trying to help him. “Stop!” I shout. But he doesn’t listen. With my hand still on the trigger, I fire the first shot into the air. Jim flinches, giving me just enough time to drive the pistol into his arm. I aim to wound, and the gun slips and catches him in the ribs. My ears are still ringing from the first shot, but I know the second bullet hits center mass. Blood seeps into my jacket every time Jim’s heart erratically beats. His eyes are wide, only inches from my face. He’s still squeezing my hand, but not to stop me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. Then I slide out from under him. I stand up, unwilling to leave until he stops convulsing. But the smoke is building, gathering at the ceiling and squeezing through the cracks to get into the open air. It won’t be long before this house erupts and everything inside becomes public to the outside world.

I wipe the gun clean on my shirt and strip down. I do the best hasty rinse down I can afford with the sink water and shake dry as I go to Jim’s car to put on the clothes he told me to bring. Tomorrow’s clothes. The clothes I promised myself I wouldn’t wear. There’s no choice now.

* * *

The sun isn’t over the horizon yet, but it is on its way up as I walk back to the motel. Black clouds of smoke billow through the birches and into the morning sky behind me. I’d like to leave town, but a suspicious hitchhiker leaving town the day the police find two bodies in a house burnt to the ground isn’t the best idea. I look at the gun in my hand and I know that I’m probably going to have to use the other two bullets before I leave. I need to get Wayne’s television, by force if I have to, and I’m going to have to figure out Bill’s role in all of this.

Channel 6

I make my way up the hill behind the motel, up to the analog tower. The sun has yet to obscure the other towers dotting the horizon, letting me know I’m still invisible in the relative darkness. I have only been here a few days, and already my childhood dream of becoming ubiquitous has been replaced by the comfort of knowing I’m inconsequential to the general population.

But on the other side of the hill, I’m reminded that they’re watching me. I wonder how far-reaching their gaze is, and what I’ll have to do to be forgotten. As I walk down the hill to Wayne’s, I notice the lights are off in his house. Only the television flickers from the back window. But his wife is asleep. If what happened tonight was on camera, she hasn’t seen it yet.

When I get into the yard, the old husky lumbers out, whining with every step. She walks up and sniffs my extended hand. I kneel to pet her and notice Wayne sleeping in the garage. I feel the gun in my pants and hope that I won’t have to use it.

The steps up to the front door creak like a son of a bitch. Inside, the sound of white noise intersperses silence, like somebody switching through a series of un-serviced channels. Then two gunshots sound off and I run to the living room to see myself on the television, getting up off the floor of the cabin and standing over Jim’s writhing body. Wayne’s wife stares at the screen in horror, probably the first expression I’ve noticed on her face since I’ve been in this house. Then she turns to me and screams. I’m still not sure if she’s screaming because she recognizes me from the television, or if she’s temporarily lucid. She continues to scream as she looks in my direction, but it’s like she’s looking past me.

The front door slams open and Wayne is thundering down the hallway. “Lori? You all right?”

He comes into the room and finds me kneeling before his wife, my hand around hers. “I heard her as I was coming down the hill,” I say. But he’s not looking at me, either. He’s staring at the television. “What is it?” I ask as I turn to an image of Wayne lying dead on the floor. Then the screen cuts to Wayne’s wife staring down the barrel of the .38. The gun fires and she slumps over in the bus seat.

I shake my head. “That’s impossible,” I say. “I don’t even have a gun.” I turn back to Wayne and his knees are already starting to buckle. I stand to catch him in my arms, but he falls as I rise. He clings to my pants, staring at me. I know I should call nine-one-one, but I freeze.

“Rey,” he rattles out.

“Rey,” his wife repeats, staring blankly ahead at the screen. “Rey killed them. He did it. Rey did it.”

I crouch down in front of her, block the screen. “Shhh,” I say, trying to cover her mouth, but she won’t stop. “Rey killed them,” she repeats, over and over like a fucking parrot.

Wayne is belly up on the floor, just like he was on the television. And I know what’s going to happen next. I’m damned either way. If I don’t shoot her, she’s going to incriminate me. Both Jim and that woman he was with have bullet holes in them and the weapon is missing from the scene of the crime. I could leave her though. I could leave her here to starve, but she might take to screaming again. I can’t risk that.

I look back at the television, almost hoping it’ll give me a glimpse of some alternate future, some possibility that doesn’t involve blowing this woman’s brains out. I flip through the channels. On channel 10 I’m checking the cylinder. It has one bullet left. On channel 11 I’m holding another gun. On channel 12 I’m at the bar. On channel 13 I’m still dead. I turn back to 12 and watch myself at the bar. But the same three or four seconds just plays over and over again. I’m not going to see anything else.

I lose my ability to tune out Wayne’s wife and her voice comes back into focus. “He killed them. Killed Wayne. Killed us.” She points at me, her voice rising in volume. “You killed them. Killed Wayne. Killed us.”

Then the television echoes her voice. She’s watching herself say these words on the screen, and they both get louder and louder.

“Please stop,” I say. “Please?”

Then I watch myself pull out the gun on screen and fire a shot into her head. Her body slides across the faux-leather bus seat as far as the belt allows. I look back, and my gun is extended. I decide to pull the trigger, but I already have. I’m watching myself in real time.

Blood pools out of the hole in her head onto the floor, and I run to the front steps to vomit. The dog cocks its head as I retch onto the gravel driveway. It limps to the pile, sniffs it curiously, and walks away.

The television inside loops the last twenty seconds as I’m recovering, from “Rey killed them” to the gunshot blast. I’m unsteady on my feet, but I stumble back down the hallway to unplug the set and destroy it. It shows me thumbing through some dusty lined paper. Random equations and writing are scrawled on the pages. It flashes rhythmically on the screen.

I turn to channel 13: still dead.

I unplug the television and smash it against the corner of Wayne’s television stand, hoping I’ll find more answers next door.

* * *

The treetops look like spindly, webbed fingers grasping at the receding darkness. At least that’s how I see them. I want to believe they feel the same way I feel when dawn breaks, that sunrise always comes too early, withering the darkness inside us until it is brittle and weak enough to be contained by our fear of prying eyes. But the sun itself hasn’t crept above the mountains yet, and the white light splashed across the concrete in Bill’s garage obscures what little light has managed to work through the bud-and-branch weave on the horizon. The televisions roar, the chorus of empty frequencies obscuring the sound of my movement as I walk in.

I watch the screens flicker asynchronously, revealing faint images. It’s me. I know already it’s me behind the curtain of feedback, but I keep watching. In part, I watch because I want to see what’s going to happen next. In part, I keep watching because I just heard a hammer ease into position through the barrel of a revolver. Judging from the sound, it’s poised to send my cerebellum through my chin. I wait to see myself shitting my pants on the screens, but it’s just me vomiting off the front steps of Wayne’s house.

“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Bill asks from behind me.

I nod slowly.

He circles around me until I see him. He holds the gun with both hands. Braided strands of copper wire jut out of the meat of his forearm. They run down the length of his body and into the neighboring room. “Is that how you override my transmission, through sacrifice?”

“What?”

He places the barrel of the gun under my chin and pushes it up gently. “You’ve been clogging half of the VHF frequency with your shit since you came into town. How are you doing it?”

“You’ve got the entire town under surveillance. Why don’t you tell me?”

“I think you’ve got it backward. I don’t need to watch anybody in this town. Everyone in a hundred-mile radius, they’re all tuned in to me. I’m one with the aether. But you’re fucking with my programming.” He points to the images of me on the televisions. “Those pictures on the television, that’s all your doing. You’re putting that on the airwaves.”

“Nobody even uses analog anymore. Why would I waste my time with it? And why would I incriminate myself by putting this shit on the airwaves?”

Bill draws the gun up to my forehead. “Somehow, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re interfering with my work. If you’re oblivious to what’s happening, you’re worthless to me and I’m going to kill you. If you know what you’re doing and you don’t tell me how, I’m going to kill you.” He looks me over to see if I’m taking him seriously. “I’m willing to accept that you’re confused, but you know something’s going on. So, let’s start with the questions you’ve been asking me and the accusation you made about me watching this entire town.”

I swallow and try to form words. “Wayne’s house. Their TV.” I swallow again, but I’m bone dry and my voice starts to fail me. “I—I was on their television. I checked for cameras, video equipment.”

“Didn’t find anything, did you?”

“No.”

“There are no cameras. You’re the one putting that shit on the airwaves.”

“I don’t have any equipment.”

He points to his head. “It’s up here.” He stares at the television, and a plastic face with sunglasses shakes on one of the screens. “You’re not the first one I’ve run into. Back in the Eighties, I had to follow a transmission all the way to Chicago. Some crazy bastard dressing up like that robot from the soda pop commercials, fucking with local stations. I figured he was the last.” The image of the man transitions to the same masked man, dead in an alleyway. “Got to eliminate the competition.”

“I’ll stop. Whatever it is I’m doing, I’ll stop if you show me how.”

“I know you’ll stop.” Bill stares at another television until I appear on screen. I’m dead, lying in a pool of my own blood, but it’s different than the image I saw on channel 13. I wonder if this is how it happens. Some schizophrenic old man blows my brains out because he’s convinced I’m broadcasting my crimes to the local population. I think of Lana and realize the past few days have taken me so far from anything that happened before I got to the outskirts of Springfield. She’s the one thing I’ve managed to hold on to, and even she’s only an intimation of the friendship we once had. She’s been relegated to a piecemeal body. She’s now isolated images of tits and ass. There’s no composite Lana left in my mind. Like her, everything else has been fragmented as well. Maybe I’m better off dead…

“Please don’t kill me,” I say, but Bill’s not listening anymore. The gun is at his side, and he’s staring at the screens. My life’s flashing before my eyes on thirty-two-inch sets, past, present, and future. On the lower right screen, I lay dead. The next television on the lower right shows me running through the forest. The next shows Bill, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. They all strobe the images of me, interspersed by white noise, maddening white noise that looks like maggots squirming through something fetid and black in fast forward. The empty airwaves are alive, or they’re devouring something alive.

I squint and turn away from the light. “Why are they flashing like that?”

“Morse code,” Bill says, still staring at the televisions.

They continue to flicker, faster now, like someone perpetually scanning channels for something meaningful, or something to drown out meaning altogether.

“I am analog.” He looks at me, then waits for the cycle of flashes to run their course again. “I’m analog.” He focuses on the televisions. “Stop!” he shouts at me.

“I’m not doing anything!”

He points the gun in my direction. “Goddamn you. Stop it!” He turns the gun to his head slowly, as if he’s struggling against himself.

I look up at the television and see him watching himself pull the gun to his head, his eyes wide with terror.

I reach out to pry his fingers away from the gun. It’s no use. His grip is too strong.

“Stop me!” he shouts.

I pull on his arm with all of my strength. “No-no-no-no!” I’m too late. His arm snaps the gun to his temple, and the shot reverberates through the room.

I reach down to follow the steady rhythm of Bill’s flesh as it throbs near his forearm. I’m hopeful for a moment that he’s still alive, but that’s impossible. The copper wire is live, flowing to or from Bill into the back room. It simulates a pulse, but half of Bill’s face is scattered across the televisions behind him.

I follow the wiring into the house. It connects to a myriad of dated editing tools and satellite hardware. Small-screen monitors, dozens of them, record every large antenna for miles.

Not watching the town my ass. I’ve got to find these cameras.

The walls are covered in schizo rhetoric: “I am analog,” and “I am the Aetherchrist.” A pile of composition notebooks, those old fuckers that have covers, which—perhaps not so coincidentally—kind of look like a still frame of television static magnified, are stacked on a small desk in the corner. They’re filled with hand-drawn diagrams: Radio towers resting on top of the entire planet, annual flight patterns for geese, transmission patterns from analog towers, and maps of satellite systems in the United States that could be used to carry analog patterns through digital systems. I flip through several pages until I come to his notes on the body-machine interface. The diagrams show how wiring can be tethered to veins, how shrink tube can be tightened to vein and wire alike. Even the diameters for shrink tube relative to vein size are noted.

The evidence of his experiment—blood-caked surgical equipment, melted shrink tube, small mounds of flesh and lengths of vein—borders the journal.

Motion on one of the monitors draws me away from Bill’s writing. It’s that Max Headroom character, baring his ass and chuckling. On another monitor, Bill mutters inaudibly in a lackluster, self-generated transmission. On another screen, children dance happily, waiting to jump onto a slowly turning merry-go-round. Soldiers marching are eclipsed by waves lapping at the white sands of the Caribbean. An image of Bill on the center monitor looks around the room, presumably at the other monitors. It reminds me of the intro to The Brady Bunch, floating heads beholding other floating heads with wonder.

It’s obvious from the footage that his was a message of peace. Whatever he thought himself capable of—what he called “transmission”—he wanted to use it to better mankind. Maybe, in some small way, he did.

As I continue watching the multi-channel broadcast, all of the screens cut to Bill’s hollow head. I run to the garage door and watch the blood coalesce with motor oil and dirt. The monitors are broadcasting his death. Scratch that. It’s a montage, implying my guilt. In the next shot, I stand over his lifeless body.

I run to his side and pull the cables from his arm, revealing a rainbow mesh of shrink tube and vein. It doesn’t come easy, but I have to make sure the broadcast ends before someone sees anything else, at least that’s what I’m thinking as I tear through his arm to make sure every last stretch of wiring is removed from him.

That’s when I realize that, in some small way, I believe him.

After stripping the wire from his flesh, I run it into the kitchen and set it near the stacked monitors. I pore over the editing controls, looking for a dial. I need to change frequencies. I need to see those antennas again so I can figure out where Bill’s cameras are, if there are any.

I fumble across the control panel, start flicking switches. Monitors shut off and on until I hit what looks like volume control. Half of the monitors shift to new frequencies as I spin the knob. Images phase in and out. They’re all images of me. I’m worried about getting caught with blood on my hands, and that’s exactly what the images portray. It could all be camera work around town. Except, the channel with me and Lana sitting at a table in that shitty bar, the Dancing Hole. That never happened. It’s something I’m hoping will happen soon.

Maybe I am “transmitting” my fantasies to the local televisions.

I close my eyes and try to empty my head. But there’s nothing on the airwaves. Bill’s broadcast has finally died out, so I think about the images I saw on Bill’s monitors, his final broadcast. As I continue turning the knob, grainy intimations of those clear images Bill projected appear. There’s a playground, shot at ground level. The radio tower at the top of the hill, shot from a downward angle. If there was a camera there, it’d be on the tower itself. So that’s where I decide to check first. Once I know for certain there’s nothing left behind to incriminate me, I can get the hell out of here.

Ideally, I’d like to return to Bill’s after checking for surveillance around town. I can’t afford to clean up now, not with potential evidence still lingering out there on the airwaves, or being transmitted via security cameras. If I can tie up any loose ends, then Bill’s death will look like the tail end of a homicide-suicide, which aren’t all that uncommon out here in the sticks.

I pack an old knapsack I found in the kitchen closet with his journals. If the cops pull me over and ask to search the bag, I’m fucked. I can’t leave them behind, though. If Bill was telling the truth, there’s too much valuable information in these books.

I grab a change of clothes out of his dresser and stuff them in the bag as well. There are a few shirts in the closet. I take the neatest one and throw it on, leaving my old shirt in the hamper near the doorway. Getting to the top of the analog tower on the hill should give me a good indication as to how much truth he was telling, and how much value these journals actually have.

Channel 7

Entry #1

The body-machine interface requires a local anesthetic, an assortment of shrink tube, and a network of cable sheathed so each monitor transmits an isolated signal to each frequency within the VHF range. A scalpel is also required, in addition to a tourniquet to reduce bleeding. The blood should serve as a bonding agent through clotting, allowing the body to mesh with the wiring.

The interface augments transmission. That’s one of a few things it does, anyway. Traditionally, the human body is only capable of transmitting a small distance in isolation, but signals increase in power as they are shared collectively among groups. However, today, broadcast has obscured the natural frequencies of the collective unconscious, and until we can return to our natural state, transmitters must rely on the body-machine interface to harness the power of collective transmission.

Because national and community consciousness has been so strongly reinforced by media broadcast, strength of signal is only one variable in breaking down synthetic transmissions. One thing the interface cannot do is give the people what they want. The mind still plays the role of programmer.

The interface will not allow you to selectively transmit. The current engine outlined herein extends human transmission to the average geographical region of an analog antenna, a little over one hundred miles depending on interference from other sources. It does not guarantee that each person within that range will receive a transmitter’s broadcast, nor does it ensure that those who receive it will listen. The audience will construct itself around the transmissions, and will, in turn, begin to transmit the broadcast.

As bonds grow through the collective, the body atrophies and the mind fuses with the collective. As blood becomes one with the aether, so too shall thought become analog.

Bill Stirton

* * *

I’m leaving town. Bill was right. There’s not a single camera. The tower’s empty. Wayne’s house was clean. I couldn’t find anything at the motel. Of course, I could be dealing with some sort of paranoid science-fiction shit, cameras so small you could put them in someone’s eye drops. Watch what they watch. Could be cameras mounted on animals. It’s just as plausible as someone being able to transmit their thoughts across the airwaves. I’ve seen too much in my life to accept a single possibility as the definitive truth. Regardless, I can’t see myself staying to find out what the truth is. If I really am manipulating the airwaves like Bill said, I’ll be able to figure that out no matter where I go. If I’m being watched, like I initially suspected, then I’m going to get caught if I hang around here any longer. So, I head to the dive outside of town to see if Lana’s there.

* * *

I’m so tired. I’m going to have to stop soon. Is it okay to hitch a ride with a suitcase full of kitchen knives and a knapsack filled with psychotic ramblings?

* * *

According to my research so far, one car out of every twelve thinks it is okay to pick up a dirty, middle-aged man with a suitcase and a dusty knapsack.

It’s kids, of course. Or not kids, I guess, but younger-than-me adults.

Fuck. I’m getting old.

One of the girls pokes her head out the window. The only way she could be more ’80s was if she were wearing leg warmers and singing “She Bop.” She’s got a perm wider than her shoulders and teased a foot above her forehead in the front. A cotton pink wristband clings to her right forearm.

“Where you headed?” she asks.

“Weathersfield.”

“We’re going by there.” She sticks her head back in the car. “Are we going by there?”

The girl in the driver’s seat nods.

Cyndi Lauper waves me in. “We’re going by there.”

The guy in the back seat opens the door for me and slides his big ass across the seat, sending plumes of dust through the inside of the car. I almost sneeze, but the smell of unkempt ass crack compels me to breathe through my mouth for a minute. God, I hope that’s not me who smells like that.

Cyndi Lauper turns to us. “That’s my brother, Andy,” she says.

He nods in my direction, never making eye contact.

I wave in response. “Hi.”

Cyndi shakes her head. “He’s shy.” She extends her hand. “My name’s Hanna.”

“Nice to meet you.” Cyndi, I think. I look at the driver.

“That’s Beth. She has a boyfriend.”

“That’s… good to know, I guess.”

Beth slaps Cyndi-Hanna on the knee. “You don’t need to tell him that.”

“Why, you shopping around for a new one?”

They giggle like school girls.

“She’s got a wandering eye. I bet she’d show you her tits if you asked nicely.”

I start to question whether or not I’m even capable of being aroused. Yes. Yes, I am. Once I’m over that hump, the next thing that crosses my mind is the fact that I haven’t showered in days. I don’t want this to go any farther.

“I’m not showing anyone my tits.”

“Well, Andy’s in the car, so I’m not showing him mine.”

“Make him look away.”

Cyndi-Hanna starts to pull up her shirt. “Andy, turn around.”

Andy turns away, expressionless.

I stare intently at her chest, but she never lifts up her shirt. “Ha! You actually thought I’d do it, didn’t you? You pervert!”

Andy turns back to us. He’s laughing.

“Sorry,” I say, wondering what the fuck am I apologizing for.

“It’s okay.” Cyndi-Hanna turns back around in her seat. “We’re just messing with you.”

“Cops,” Beth remarks.

Up ahead, there’s a roadblock. Five, maybe six cars. Three troopers stand in the middle of the road.

“You don’t have any drugs in those bags, do you?” Beth asks.

“I’m clean,” I say, hoping there’s no visible blood on my clothes, hoping like hell they’re not looking for a suspect.

Beth pulls up slowly. “Officer,” she says.

I’m impressed. She plays it incredibly cool. Of course, she probably has nothing to hide.

“Where you folks heading?” he asks.

“Weathersfield,” Hanna answers.

“You’ll have to take the next left then,” the cop says. “We’re cleaning up an accident a few miles down.”

“Everyone okay?” Beth asks.

The cop shakes his head. “There’s a few dead. Some nutbag shot up the electronics section at RX-Mart.”

“Wow,” everyone else in the car utters in unison.

A little behind cue, shaking my head, I say, “Man.”

The cop peers into the vehicle. “You look like you had a rough night,” he says to me.

“That’s an understatement,” I say.

He laughs. “All right, folks. Remember, next left. Follow that road until you hit the first detour sign. They should have it up by now.”

Beth shifts into drive. “Thanks, Officer.”

Cyndi-Hanna looks at Beth, eyes wide. “I wonder who did it.”

“Who knows? Probably some scumbag whose disability didn’t come through or something.” She looks at me in the rearview mirror. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I say. “I work. And last I checked, I’m not disabled.”

Cyndi Lauper takes a breath like she’s about to say something else, then stops and kind of cocks her head like a confused beagle. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Doesn’t he look familiar, Andy?”

Andy shrugs.

“Were you a substitute teacher at our school or something?”

“No. I don’t think I have enough education for that.”

“Were you on TV?”

Fuck. “With my Boy Scout troop, twenty years ago,” I say.

She turns to the front. “Huh.”

Andy is still staring at me. He finally stops when I stare him down. “What’s in the bags?” he asks.

“I’m a salesman,” I say.

“What do you sell?” Beth asks.

“Knives mostly. Kitchenware.”

“So, you’re a salesman, walking around the back roads or rural Vermont with a bag of knives?”

“At the moment,” I say.

“Creepy.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I’m surprised you picked me up, bag or no bag.”

“I didn’t want to. Hanna said you were cute.”

“No. I thought I recognized him!”

“Oh, that’s right. It was Andy who thought you were cute. Didn’t you, Andy?”

“Fuck you,” he mutters in an unusually deep voice. Then he starts laughing again.

Cyndi-Hanna turns to him. “Show him your dick, Andy.”

Christ. Here we go again.

Andy shakes his head.

“Come on, Andy. Don’t be a pussy.”

He shakes his head again. “No way.”

“Beth will turn the rearview so she can’t see it. Come on.”

Beth turns the rearview mirror so she can’t see the crotch of Andy’s pants.

And the fucker starts unzipping.

“I really don’t need to see it,” I say.

Cyndi-Hanna looks at her brother. “Did you do it, you fag?”

Andy zips his pants back up. “No.”

“But you were going to, weren’t you?” Cyndi-Hanna says, turning to Beth. “I told you he was gay.”

“I’ll fucking cut you,” Andy, presumably joking, says, reaching for my suitcase. “Give me one of those knives.” He’s all laughs until the suitcase pops open and my gun falls out. “What the fuck?” He tries to grab the gun.

I pull it out of his hands and close it in the suitcase.

“You didn’t tell us you were packing.”

“Didn’t think it mattered. I’m just trying to get from point A to point B.”

“So, what’s in the other bag?” Cyndi-Hanna asks.

“Just some old notebooks.”

“Can I see?” She unbuckles herself and starts for the knapsack.

I wrestle it away from her. “No.”

“Hold him down, Andy. Let’s see what he’s got.”

I pop open the suitcase and pull out my gun. “Let me out.”

Andy slides to the far side of the back seat. There’s that ass crack smell again. It isn’t me after all, though I still need a shower.

“What the fuck?” Beth swerves to the side of the road. “Get out!”

I keep my gun drawn on them as I snap my suitcase shut. Then I open my door and back out.

Before I can close the door, Beth peels out. Cyndi-Hanna leans out the window to flip me the bird as they drive away. “Asshole!” she shouts.

* * *

So, my research was a bit skewed before. It turns out one car out of every fifty or so will pick up a weathered salesman who is packing weapons in his suitcase.

Needless to say, it was a long walk to the Dance Hole. By the time I get there, night’s closing in enough that the neon lights flicker like stars. You can hear the country music blaring from the roadside.

Fucking country. Corn-fed, brain-starved, tear-in-my-domestic-beer country—’Merica.

I walk in, and my eyes go immediately to the back table where I saw Lana on the thirty-two-inch at Bill’s.

Fucking Tom?

I can’t believe it.

He’s got his eye on me before I can make it out the door. “Hey, buddy.”

I head for the bar. “Tom.”

“Always figured Jim’d be the guy to take the bait.”

“What bait?”

“Come on, Big’un69. We both know why you’re here.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I lay a five down on the table and ask for something, anything on tap. “I’m just here to celebrate my record-high commission.”

“Bullshit. Lana didn’t say anything.”

Good. I’ve got him sidetracked. “She didn’t want to say anything until the orders were processed.” I take a drink and smile. “How’re sales going at the mall, Tom?”

He pours the tar-like stout down his throat effortlessly. His Adam’s apple doesn’t move. He just lets everything slide to home base. I’m not sure if I should be impressed or disgusted by his laziness. “Well enough,” he says.

“Lana call with your figures?”

“Haven’t heard anything yet, not about the sales anyway.”

“That’s surprising.”

“Not really,” he says, pouring the rest of his drink down. “We don’t do much talking when we get together.” Tom lays a five on the counter. “Another, please.”

“Right,” I say, trying to maintain my composure.

“How you think I got those pictures?”

How the fuck did he get those pictures?

“What pictures?”

“Drop the act, Rey. You’re here to see Lana. You almost shit bricks when you saw me sitting in the back instead of her.”

“You have that effect on people in any context.”

“Funny.” He takes his glass and heads to the back table. “Come on.”

“I’ll just stay here if that’s all right.”

He tugs at my sleeve. “Come on. Something tells me you don’t have anywhere to be for a while.”

I grab my beer, catch a segment on the TV about the shootout at RX-Mart. “Be right there.”

A woman sits at the counter trying to shush everyone, but there’s a group of guys in the corner chanting for horse racing, and Vince Gill or some shithead like him is blasting on the radio. Looks like we’re only watching.

Video footage shows a man walking down an aisle of flat-screen televisions. They short in and out as he stands there. He jumps for one of the larger models and hangs from the wall fixture and the television slowly descends. Then he yanks it off the wall and smashes it into a display case filled with mobile phones. Let me reiterate with a bit of context: a two-hundred-pound man tears a fixture, bolted and ready to withstand half a ton or more of pressure, from the wall like he’s taking a towel off a clothesline.

The first employee runs into the picture and he dives at her.

Footage ends.

The reporter rambles from inside the news studio for a moment before the program cuts again to the man, now being dragged out of the building in handcuffs. It takes five men to subdue him. He foams at the mouth and gnashes his teeth. And I swear to God, even though I can’t hear him, he’s shouting “Rey did it! It was Rey!”

The woman trying to quiet everyone down leans forward in her stool and stirs her pink whatever-the-fuck-it-is with a cocktail straw. She turns and smiles at me. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

I get up from my seat. “No.”

Christ. I need another beer.

* * *

Three hours and eight drinks later, I finally muster up the courage to ask Tom about Lana. “So, how long have you two… been together?”

He stops mid drink, sets his cup down. “Just a month or two, but we’re not really together, not in a traditional sense anyway.”

“So, you guys just—”

He pounds his fist against his open hand repeatedly and laughs.

Tom. Fucking Tom of all people. I wouldn’t believe it, except this perfectly characterizes my life. Murphy’s Law may as well be called Rey’s Law. Except with me, not only does everything go wrong, it goes wrong in the most absurd fucking way possible.

Next, he’ll probably ask if I want to see his dick.

And it’ll be huge.

“What’s she like?” I ask, as a knot forms in my stomach. “Like, outside of work?”

“Pretty much the same she is at the office. Always serious. No sense of humor. She’s more of a do than say type of person.”

“What does she say when she does talk?”

“She doesn’t talk about you, man.” He pats me on the back. “Sorry.”

“Does she know you put those pictures online?”

He pours the rest of his beer down his throat. “No.”

“She’s going to be pissed,” I say.

“She won’t find out.”

“What if she goes on the website to register for an account or something?”

“When she’s got me?” He smiles. “Doubt it.”

I still don’t understand how Tom, gnarled-fucking-teeth Tom, exudes such confidence. Everything I’ve ever known about him suggests he just sits back and lets the world happen to him, let’s life happen to him. But here he is, active. Alive. Tom’s nothing like I thought he was.

He’s still an asshole, though.

Tom looks at his watch. “You got a place to crash nearby?”

“No.” I drum on the table with my fingers and mull it over. “Sure. It’s a bit messy, though. You okay to drive?”

He shakes his head. “I was hoping you’d take the wheel.”

I’m fairly drunk, but I’m in better shape than he is. “Sure. Keys.”

He hands them off to me. “Let me get a couple rounds for the road.” He walks up to the bar and slaps a ten down. “Two shots of Jäger!”

The bartender fills two double shots and slides them forward. Tom can barely pick his head up off the table to drink them, but he manages. He opens his maw and pours them into his mouth. And down his face. And down his shirt.

I look at the Big Mouth Billy Bass clock on the wall. Fucker wiggles and sings on the hour. Every hour he sings the same damned song, but the sound is so distorted I can’t tell what it is. He’s wiggling now. It’s 11 p.m., early enough to avoid suspicion after midnight. Early enough to beat the 2 a.m. rush.

Tom’s slouching at the bar, mouth agape. He drools Jäger onto the countertop. People start to watch in disgust. I give them a look that says, “Welcome to my world,” and drag Tom from his seat. “Let’s go, Tom.”

The drive back goes pretty well, save the moments when Tom tries to toe the gas pedal. His head rolls across the seat like a marble in the game Labyrinth, with a five-year-old at the controls. When I stop in Bill’s driveway, Tom’s head gently glides into the dashboard.

“We there?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I step out of the car. “Hang on a minute.”

I open the garage door. Bill’s still there. Good.

I bend down to look under Tom’s car, estimate there’s enough clearance to pull in right over Bill’s body, maybe cover the bloodstain too.

Tom’s puking out the passenger-side window.

I sit down in the driver’s seat and pull us in. “Watch your head, Tom.”

As soon as we stop, I get out and close the garage door.

“Got anything to drink?” Tom asks.

I pull him out of the passenger side and into the kitchen. “Might.”

I set him down in front of the monitors and start rummaging through the cupboards for liquor. After a few minutes, I find Bill’s private stock. Fucking Crème de Cacao.

I open the bottle and hand it to Tom. “Drink up,” I say.

“This all you got?”

I push it at him again. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“S’fine.” He opens the bottle and tips it to his mouth. “Where’m I sleeping?”

“Should be room upstairs. I’ll be right back.”

I head to the car to dig out my bags. By the time I get back, Tom’s out cold.

Good. That’ll make it easier to work on him.

I lay Bill’s journals on the table, open the first to diagrams for the body-machine interface.

I prop Tom against the wall and swab his arm with antiseptic. Once I get a tourniquet cobbled together, I bind his arm above the elbow so I can numb him. He doesn’t wake, but I’m not going to risk it.

I use Bill’s dirty needle to inject Tom with local anesthetic. There are no notes about proper dosage, so I wing it. I give it a few minutes to take effect, rearrange the shrink tube and surgical instruments, and unravel the copper wire.

When the scalpel pierces the flesh of his arm, it reminds me of my sales demonstration. The words echo in my head. “Note the way the blade cuts through meat with ease. You won’t get that smooth action with a serrated knife.”

I cut at right angles to my first incision, and start peeling the skin back to reveal the network of flesh and vein below. The sales pitch monologue in my head continues. “These knives are good for skinning and de-boning.” Cold chills run up my spine. I’m not going to be de-boning anything tonight. I also have to remind myself, as the blood pools to the surface of Tom’s wound, I’m not killing anything tonight.

That becomes my mantra.

I’m not killing anything tonight. I just know that, if Bill was right about transmissions, I need to get somebody else’s thoughts out into the aether. I’m becoming too ubiquitous. People are starting to recognize me, but they’re not sure how. It’ll only be a matter of time before they start associating me with the crimes I’ve committed. My transmissions are inspired by my killing, catalyzed by guilt. There’s no paradise—no children waiting for their turn on the merry-go-round—in my programming. Mine is a broadcast of death, and I hate myself for it.

I’m getting into the minutiae of the process now, cutting through small veins, using shrink tube to fuse vein to copper. Between the intricate work on each vein, I have to blot the wound with an old rag. Tom’s blood runs like water, and I start worrying that he’s losing too much.

Two things could come from this, both of which are fine by me. Either the good Tom transmits will compensate for his pain, for my wrongdoings, or he’ll transmit something far more sinister than me, which will make me feel better about hooking myself up to this machine next.

I try to estimate what my next course of action will be, depending on these two variables:

If the transmissions are good… shit, if the phenomenon of transmission is even real, then I might sedate Tom indefinitely, just so I can be forgotten. But that requires me to stay here. Maybe I can keep him sedated long enough to get out of the area. That could work.

If he turns out to be the asshole I’ve always thought him to be, maybe I’ll kill him. So far, the transmissions on channel 12 always reveal something new to me after somebody dies. But maybe there’s a primitive part of my mind rewarding my conscious mind whenever it decides to kill something. I have to accept the fact that, if I’m the one responsible for these transmissions, then these slice-of-life prophecies on TV are also somehow my doing.

As I connect the last few veins of Tom’s forearm to Bill’s machine, he starts twitching. I can’t tell if he’s coming to or if the electricity from the machine is coursing through him. Then the screens go blank. I’m nostalgic for the high-pitched squeal that follows, that sound that wakes you up at midnight to let you know your favorite station is off the air. It grates at the senses, but to me it means freedom. It means, I hope, my programming has ended.

The monitors erupt with life a few minutes later. It works. The machine actually fucking works. Tom’s still sleeping, but his mind is wild with all sorts of conflicting fantasies. The monitors strip them from one another, isolate them so they make sense. How Bill’s machine manages to do this without interfacing directly with the brain is a mystery to me. Maybe the fucker just got lucky. Judging from the amount of work that went into these diagrams, it’s doubtful.

I watch the screens for Lana, for his memories of her. But there’s nothing. He dreams the dreams of the powerless: spitting in Jim’s food, stirring a thirty-two-ounce soda with his cock and handing it off to an older woman…

Petty as fuck.

I catch something on a screen to the left. Flashes of Lana’s body. Pictures that materialize in a burst of light, then reverse polarity before a camera lowers and Tom’s standing there smiling. Several distorted images of Lana, naked and sprawled out on the floor, reflect in Tom’s teeth. She let him take the pictures.

No. She’s asleep. He took them against her will, or he’s fantasizing about taking them against her will. On the other screens Lana talks with her male subordinates, always one-on-one. The reality’s distorted. She’s flirting with me on one of the monitors. She never flirted with me. Not like that.

His transmission is so shallow.

As I continue watching, the monitors strobe, one by one. The images of Lana talking with me and Jim stay. The rest juxtapose between an image of Tom fucking Lana and an image of me standing over Wayne’s dead body. Those shallow transmissions, maybe they were mine. Maybe I’ve been overriding some of Tom’s broadcast with my own desires and fears.

Change of plans: I decide to wait until Tom comes to, so I can find out.

* * *

Tom wakes up a few hours later, just when his programming starts to get interesting. Images get replaced by moving pictures. He floats seamlessly between familiar scenes: the office, the mall parking lot. In the parking lot, he opens his briefcase to show a woman his kitchen knives. She shakes her head. He stares at her with a blank expression as he stabs her in the face. Then he’s thrusting into Lana on my desk with the same bleak countenance. He looks up at the screens. “What?” He rubs his eyes with his untethered arm. “What are you watching?”

I start pacing. “Could be your dreams, just your subconscious running wild while you’re half asleep. Might be things that have actually happened. Might be my fears. I was hoping you’d tell me.”

He looks at the screen. “I never fucked Lana on your desk, man. I swear.”

“But you’ve thought about it?” I ask.

“I’ve thought about fucking her everywhere.”

“And stabbing your customers in the Rutland mall parking lot?”

He smiles. “There were a few I would’ve liked to take a knife to. Not really, but you know.”

“Yeah.”

Tom tries to move his other arm, notices it doesn’t move as easily as it used to. He looks down at the blood-soaked table. Red courses down the nearest leg onto the floor. “What the fuck? What the fuck, man?”

I look at the monitors. Now that Tom’s awake, there are a lot of low-resolution reruns. “Relax.”

He starts tugging at the tubing, trying to pull it out of his skin.

“Don’t!” I gently draw his hand away from the wiring.

He reaches for the Crème de Cocoa. “I need a drink.”

I grab the bottle first and hand it to him.

He looks up at the screen. “Is this a joke? Did you and Jim alter pictures of me or something?”

“They’re your thoughts. Aren’t they?”

He shakes his head. “Lana put you up to this, didn’t she? She found out about the pictures. I’ll take them down, I swear!”

“Tom. Look at the screens. Tell me which ones are yours.”

He looks at the screens. “I don’t know.”

I brace his head and turn it toward the screens. “Open your eyes and tell me what looks familiar.”

He starts crying. “What did you do to my arm?” he says between sobs. “I think I need to go to a hospital.”

“You’ll be fine. Which of the screens look familiar?”

“I don’t know!”

I push his head into the editing equipment. “All right. Let’s try something different. I want you to think of Lana.”

He can barely keep his head upright. “I’m bleeding out. I need water.”

“Just think of a single image of her for me.”

“Will you get this shit out of me?”

“Sure. Just think of Lana.”

He brings his free arm up and rests his head on it. His sobs begin to diminish. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

The frequencies begin to pick up on Tom’s mental image until all of the monitors carry the same picture. I’m free. As long as he stays on that machine, whatever I’m thinking will stay off the airwaves.

“Don’t stop, Tom.”

I pack up my journals and throw them into the trunk of Tom’s car. I figure I’ve got a few hours before he’s fully functional again. Once he sobers up, he’ll rip those wires out, find Bill, and God knows what. Maybe he’ll think he blacked out. Maybe he’ll blame himself for Bill.

Whatever happens, I figure I have four hours to get out of the one-hundred-mile transmission radius. I’ll start clean.

Tom’s still bleeding heavily when I go back into the kitchen, so I start filling the mop bucket under Bill’s sink with water, thinking maybe I can get him to drink some before I go.

As the bucket fills I hear that all-too-familiar white noise. I run out, leaving the bucket in the sink. Tom’s trying to lift himself off the table top, slipping in the pool of blood accumulating near the control panel. His head sways back and forth across the dials, mopping up the small puddles his arm leaves from exertion. He’s got that same vacuous expression he had in his fantasies.

I run back to the kitchen and grab the bucket. I cup the water with my hands and try to pour it into his mouth. It streams down his cheek, clouding the deep red slowly coating the corner of the room. I cup more into his mouth, hoping it’ll slide down his throat like the ass-black coffee he drinks, but it just runs out of his mouth like all the bullshit he spews about fucking Lana. Still, all things considered, I wouldn’t want to see him die.

I shake his shoulders and try to prop him upright. “Come on, Tom.”

I get him a few feet off the table and he collapses onto the floor. The wiring holds his arm outstretched like a marionette strung to play dead. Finally, flesh gives way to the pull of machine, and his arm drops to the floor, leaving behind a mesh of dreadlocked cable and vein.

My first instinct is to get into the car and go. I look down and notice for the first time that my shirt is covered in blood. I run back upstairs to grab the first rag I can find, then scramble for Tom’s car in the garage. I’m back on the televisions already. Ten channels and I’m dead on every one except 12, where there’s a young, dark-haired woman running a cash register. She’s distorted by the fish-eye lens of a security camera. This is nothing from my memory, nor fantasy. Like the prophetic images depicting my inevitable murders and death, this is coming from somewhere else. There’s a signal somewhere out there overriding mine, someone or something fucking with me.

If their signal is strong enough, I might be able to stay under the radar if I get close to them. So, I grab Bill’s portable and a set of rabbit ears, and set out to follow the signal until I start picking up more.

Channel 8

Entry #12

During the early days of radio in the United States, prior to the time when a license was required to broadcast, radio stations would compete for frequencies. Listeners would be greeted by a cacophony of voice and song. Battles among the small broadcasters boiled down to who had the best and strongest equipment. Since then, licensing requirements have changed the playing field. But the principle that emerged during those early years has always remained: get rid of the competition, by any means necessary.

Bill Stirton

* * *

I stop at a Kwik Mart to pick up another set of AA batteries. These little televisions burn through juice like crazy. When I walk in, I hope I’ve already found my mark. But it’s not the store from channel twelve.

The girl at the counter—Tammi, her nametag reads—is sketched out by me. I can’t blame her. My clothes are disheveled and I haven’t shaved in nearly a week. I’m starting to look suspicious.

Who the fuck am I kidding? I’ve looked suspicious ever since I torched Jim and his partner.

Tammi scans the batteries and glances up at me nervously, trying to avoid eye contact. “Three dollars,” she says, still looking down.

I hand her the money and she slides the batteries across the counter.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” she asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“On YouTube or something, or TV?”

I shake my head, fumble the batteries in my hands. “No.”

She smiles like she’s got me figured out. I’ve seen that smile too many times in the last few days. “Okay.”

I turn to walk toward the door.

She calls out to me. “Have a good one!”

“You too.”

In the car, I stuff the batteries into the television set, let the old ones roll across the parking lot. I start to worry about a kid picking them up and getting chemical burns, but I don’t have time to chase the fuckers down.

I pull out of the parking lot and I’m back on the road. Beside me, a little television with rabbit ears jutting out of the passenger-side window whispers sweet nothings into my ear. The farther west I go, the more scrambled the transmissions become. An image of a dead cat flickers on channel 3 for a few miles in Northern New York. Closer to the state’s capital, someone’s dead set on reproducing CBS programming from 1997. I remember the soaps from summers off with my mother.

Fucking soaps. Mimosa-sipping bitches with inflated self-employment titles. Fucking millionaire interior designer-adulterer-alcoholic with amnesia, and bi-polar disorder fucks.

By the time I get outside of Albany, there’s someone hitching every ten miles. There have been almost one thousand cases of murder and rape as a result of picking up hitchhikers in the United States. I don’t plan on becoming a part of that statistic. But when The Bold and the Beautiful, circa 1997, gives way to a transmission of one of the hitchers I pass, I have to stop.

I pull over at the exit lane where he stands. He picks up his bag and walks toward the car. I look him over, gauge his shadiness quotient. Guy’s got sleek sunglasses, a dark, almost-shaved-to-the-scalp head of hair. He’s wearing one of those thick winter jackets with heavy stitching. It’s a little warm outside for that, so either this guy’s been on the road for a while or he’s covering up his stink. Or blood stains. Shadiness quotient: no higher than mine. Fuck it. I’ll give him a ride.

He steps into the vehicle and picks up my television. The minute he lays his hands on it, the signal dies. He holds it in front of me and stares at me. I take it out of his hands, turn it off, and set it on the backseat.

“Where you headed?” I ask.

“I’ll go as far as you’re willing to take me.”

I pull back onto the interstate, heading south.

He fishes through his pockets for something.

This is it, I think. Time to push that body count over the one thousand mark.

“I haven’t seen you around before.” He pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

“I’m just passing through.”

He waves his pack at me. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Mind if I have one?” I ask. Build rapport. Let him know we’re on common ground.

He hands me one of the mangled cigarettes and digs one out for himself. “Where you from originally?”

“Vermont.”

He lights up. “Hmm.”

“And you?”

He takes a drag and cracks the window.

I wait for a response.

“You’ve got blood on your hands.”

I look down at my hands on the steering wheel. They’re clean.

He takes another drag off his cigarette and flicks ashes out the window. “Death is low frequency, virtually imperceptible. You exude it.”

“I—um. Okay?” I slow down and start to pull over.

“Keep driving.” He gently pokes my ribs with a knife. “Whose signal are you riding?” He jabs me. “No bullshit. Just tell me who you’re following.”

“Some girl keeps popping up on—” I nod at the backseat.

“She close?”

“I don’t know.”

He pulls the knife away from my ribs.

Thank God, I think.

Then he brings it up to my face. “You know what your problem is?”

I shake my head.

He circles my eyes as I drive. “These. You’ll never see the aether with those things rolling around in your sockets.”

“Kind of need those to drive, don’t you think?”

He grabs the back of my head and pushes me into the knife. “You’ll be fine.”

I lurch out of his grasp and turn the steering wheel hard right. My head smashes against the driver-side window as I hit the brakes. I keep my head against the window as I unbuckle myself and start kicking at the maniac in the passenger seat. “Get out!”

Blow after blow, he just sits there, staring at me.

I fumble with my door lock as I continue kicking. Finally, I manage to open the door and step out. I round the back of the car. “Get the fuck out!”

He slides his knife into his pocket and steps out of the car.

“Take care, Rey,” he says. “See you soon.”

I slam his door shut and walk around the back of the vehicle to my seat, locking the doors as soon as I get inside. I glance at him once in the rearview as I pull off. See you soon?

I hope the fuck not.

* * *

Another thirty miles southwest and I finally feel safe enough to take a piss and drag the TV back to the passenger seat. Every now and then, I look down and spin the VHF dial, catching a glimpse of something new, clues to guide me to this woman. I see a modest city skyline with a park in the foreground. It looks like one of those old New England towns that clings tenaciously to its roots. The kind that hides a stubborn fear of change behind the façade of Victorian architecture, brick and mortar. The kind that’d emblazon a scarlet letter across the chest of any woman who gets a divorce if they could. So, I start heading southwest, toward Pennsylvania, using the signal on the television set like a dousing rod.

* * *

After three hundred miles on a single tank of gas, I thank Tom for buying an economy car. Just outside of Western Pennsylvania, the gas light kicks on. I’m miles from anywhere that qualifies as civilized and I don’t see an exit for another twenty minutes. When I finally turn in, I see the small college town from the television set. Trees just blooming in every yard, green grass sprouting up through the yellowed and dead grass from the previous fall. It’s absolutely beautiful… and the first gas station I find is a fucking dive, something plucked out of a Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five video. A ratty-looking guy with a mullet puffs on an e-cigarette near the ice cooler in the front. The door to the public restroom on the side of the building slams open and shut from the wind.

The gas pump creaks to life as I start filling my tank. Rusted numbers scroll up, telling me how much I owe. I haven’t seen a machine like this in ages.

The rat out front heads for the bathroom when he sees me approach the front of the store. Before I even get to the doors, I know. This is the place.

The girl at the counter is playing on her smart phone. She faces me, completely unaware that I’m standing before her.

The distorted fish-eye image on my television made her hard to see back in Vermont. I figured she was the same girl I’d be looking for, but this isn’t the girl that’s swamped the frequencies for me.

“A pack of cigarettes, please,” I say.

She turns to the rack behind her. “Any preference?”

“Lights, I guess.”

She grabs a pack of golds and tosses them across the counter. “That all?”

“I think so.”

She pulls out her phone and thumbs through something. “You’re Reymond, right?”

Before I have a chance to react, she continues. “Yeah. From that show about the killer. What’s it called again?” She starts typing on her phone. “Is it spelled with an A or an E? If I find you online, will you let me take a picture with you?”

I reach for the cigarettes. “I’m, uh, in a hurry.”

She holds up her phone and snaps a picture. “There we go.”

I try to wrestle the phone out of her hands. “You have to delete that.”

She pulls away. “What the fuck?” She presses a few buttons on her phone. “There. It’s deleted.”

“Let me see.”

“Fuck off.”

I lean over the counter. “Let me see it.”

She pulls away. “Get the fuck out or I’m calling the cops.”

I can feel my hand shaking over the gun in my pocket. I quiver with indecision as I think about being incarcerated, living these murders over and over again in my head. It’s almost over, I tell myself. But I know already that finding this girl that’s fucking with my transmission isn’t going to save me. I’m so close to her I can feel it in the air and people still recognize me. Now they’re calling me by name, but they still think my life is just a television program.

I look down at the gun and back at her. She drops her phone. Her eyes churn around the room, catching on the shelves behind me like a hangnail dragging across wool. It’s just as painful for me to watch as it for her to experience, so I end it. The gun in my hand ebbs in short bursts as I unload three rounds into her chest. As soon as it happens, I start replaying it in my head, wondering if it could have been different. Those three rounds continue to reverberate in my head as I run to the car.

In the car, I turn the dial on the battery-operated television to channel 13. I’m still dead. I’m pretty sure at this point that isn’t going to change, so I start dialing backward. Two channels of me laying in a pool of my own blood. Then, around channel 10, I’m shooting the store clerk and getting into my car to watch myself… watching myself. Then the image freezes. I turn to channel 9. On the screen, I’m running through the woods, disoriented and alone.

I turn back to channel 2, to review the last few days of my life again, hoping to get some clue as to how I get from the 7-Eleven parking lot to a pool of blood and a puddle of piss on the concrete, but it’s nothing but this girl I’m looking for. Then I feel the barrel of a gun jab me in the back of my head and the last two weeks of my life flash before my eyes.

I look at the television on the passenger seat, see a girl holding a gun to my head. It’s her.

“I’ve been waiting four years for you to find me. You Bill?” she asks.

“Bill’s dead,” I say.

She seems to ease up a little. “You’re one of them, though.”

“I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re like Bill.”

“He thought I was.”

“You kill him?”

“No. He hooked himself up to some mach—”

* * *

I wake up in the back seat of Tom’s car. My television set is on the floor beside me. This girl drives silently through heavily forested mountains. The road is smooth. She hasn’t taken me onto a back road to dispose of me yet, which is good. But we’re in prime territory for it if she wanted to.

My head throbs when I try to move. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

“Relax,” she says.

I try to move my hands. They’re bound.

Rey’s Law.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“How much you’re willing to talk. How much I can extract from you.” She turns onto a dirt road. This is it, I think. She’s going to do me in.

“Where we headed?”

“I got a place up here.”

It only takes twenty awkward minutes of silence to get to the top of the hill. It’s all fenced off at the top. Thick grass crops the base of a radio tower that dwarves the one I frequented back in Vermont.

She steps out of the car, drags open the fence gate, and drives us in. “You okay to walk?”

I try to sit up. “I think so.”

She opens the back seat for me and watches me carefully as I slide out.

I suddenly realize my gun is missing. “Did you get my gun?”

“Under the passenger seat.” She closes the door behind me. “You first.” She waves me toward the small building near the tower.

I wait for her at the door. “You live here?”

“No.” She unlocks the door and clicks on the lights inside. The far wall is covered with monitors. Two tables are riddled with equipment. It’s just like Bill’s machine, only flashier.

She reaches for a coil of wire below one of the tables. “Sit down.”

“You’re going to hook me up to that thing, aren’t you?”

“I might.”

“Look. I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

“Sit down!” Her gun is drawn again. She keeps it pointed at me while she turns on the monitors. We’re already on the screens. “How long have you been in the area?”

“Just got here today.”

“Do you use some sort of cloaking device or something? Keep your transmissions on a different frequency?”

“I don’t try to do anything, not consciously. It just happens.”

“Somehow you’ve been evading me. I used to pick up Bill’s transmissions all the time, but I don’t know who you are.”

“I think it’s because your signal is stronger than mine.”

She leans down in front of me and starts tying my feet to the chair. “You think, huh?”

“It’s why I came here. People were starting to recognize me.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“There’s this thing called privacy…”

As she finishes the knot on my feet, she asks, “You killed Bill, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It goes with the territory.” She switches through channels on one of the monitors. It juxtaposes between me vomiting off Wayne’s steps and me hooking Tom up to Bill’s machine. “He would have killed you if you hadn’t. I’ve been waiting for him to come after me for a long time, ever since I found out what was happening to me.” She turns for the door. “Hang on.”

A few minutes later, she comes back with something riddled with dials. Looks like someone gutted the inside of a VCR and glued it to a thick, elbow-length glove.

“What is that?”

“This is my interface,” she says, pulling up her sleeve. Her arm is peppered with small tubes protruding from the skin of her forearm. “It’s a lot less messy than the schematics Bill had, don’t you think?”

I look at her arm, the crusted blood that flakes away as she dusts herself off. It’s less messy, sure. But it’s still fucking grotesque.

“How’d you know about Bill’s machine? I mean, before I told you.”

She runs her hand down the side of the monitor cabinet. “I built this machine from the transmissions I received from Bill on an old black-and-white floor model my parents had. My father kept it in our garage, convinced it’d skyrocket in price once it became a rare antique. I’d sneak out at night and record whatever I thought was important.” She opens a drawer and pulls out an old VHS tape, pops it in a player on the second table. It’s Bill’s broadcast. “I fell in love with him.”

I look her up and down. She can’t be much older than me. “He was a bit old for you, don’t you think?”

She kicks on a few more monitors. “His mind. Whatever.” We watch Bill’s work on the screen. “He treated the frequencies like a canvas. His broadcasts were art.”

She turns the tape off. “Then he picked up on me. I started transmitting. Like you, I couldn’t control it. Watching him no longer became about admiring his work. It was about staying alive. Imagine watching someone plan to hunt you down and kill you, watching their ideas unfold.”

“Why didn’t he come after you?”

“I don’t know. One day his broadcast just stopped. I figured he knew I was watching. I thought he was shutting down to get the element of surprise.” She walks to the door, opens it, peers out, and closes it again. “He never came.”

I test the binding on my feet, but try not to be visible. It’s no use. I’m not going anywhere. “If you were close enough to Bill for him to pick up on your signals, why didn’t I see them at first?”

“Once I figured out how to control my… whatever you want to call it, transmissions, I did shut down until I felt Bill again a few days ago.” She holds the gun on me. “Now it’s your turn. Talk.”

I wish she wouldn’t point that gun at me. “I’m a door-to-door salesman. When I went to Bill’s town—it was so fucking weird. Everybody had their television sets on. Nothing but static. Then I started showing up on the channels, just shit I’d been doing around town. Nothing consequential.” Please stop pointing that fucking thing at me, I think.

“Picking up your own transmissions. Ha. You should have learned to have fun with it. Made your own programs or something.”

“I thought somebody was watching me.”

“Then?”

“Then I started seeing shit from my immediate future. Things that hadn’t happened yet. Things I didn’t want to happen.”

“Probably just your fears projected onto the programming.”

“It all came true.”

“Self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“I don’t know.”

She waves her hand in the air. “Moving on.”

“My best friend shot a local woman, brought me to the scene of the murder to help him cover it up. I thought the town was watching us. I figured we were already screwed, so I told him to confess. I ended up shooting him. When that hit the airwaves, I kept killing to clear my tracks.”

“What about Bill?”

“He knew.”

“So, you had to kill him too?”

“Pretty much.”

“So, why’re you hunting me down?” She crosses her arms. “You said something about needing to lay low.”

“Your transmissions were fucking with mine. I figured if I could just live within your range of broadcast, your transmission would overpower mine and I could avoid being recognized.”

“So, you’re not an aether cultist?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She sits down on the edge of the control panel. “That all you got?”

“Yeah.” I notice she’s eyeing the cable on the floor. “You still want to hook me up to that thing, don’t you?”

“Kind of.”

“Why don’t you just ‘shut down’ or whatever. That way, whatever is on the screen will be mine.”

“You could alter the images on purpose, pervert them.”

“I could do that if I was hooked up on the machine as well.”

“Yeah. I suppose,” she concedes. “I just always thought the interface was going to be the silver bullet, solve all my problems. Answer all my questions.” She gets up and drags my chair toward the door.

She steps out into the air. Dirt rattles across the concrete floor and brings with it the first scent of summer. I’m dragged out into it and turned toward the faint light of a nearby valley town.

She heads back inside.

“Wait!”

She pokes her head out from behind the door. “What?”

“What’s your name?”

She leans against the doorway and stares through me, weighing it over in her head. “Aero,” she says. “Wait here.” She slides on the glove, careful to align whatever’s inside of it—presumably threads of wiring—with the tubing on her arm. It snaps into place. “I’ll be right back.”

She steps inside and closes the door. I try to lean back to hear her, and my chair tips into the building, wedging me at a somewhat uncomfortable angle. But I can still see that little town in the valley. The headlights glaze the saturated roadways near an illuminated field. Has to be a high school football field or something. I imagine the headlights are students spiriting away to the dugouts to cop a feel.

No. It’s actually happening. I can feel it, a faint transmission like the one you get when you watch a late-night movie that you know hardly anyone else is up for. You don’t watch the movie for the content. You watch it because you can feel a small population out there like you, riding the airwaves for a sense of connection.

Maybe that’s just me, though, or maybe that’s just transmitters. I suppose it’d be like synesthetes, who never stop to question why they see the world differently. They just assume everyone else sees the world the same way. Imagine how much exists within the human mind that has yet to be discovered because the exceptions to the rule assume they are the rule. It goes beyond synesthetes and transmitters.

Something pops behind the door. “You okay?” I ask.

Another pop. “Aero?”

I shift my weight to get into an upright position, but it’s not happening. “Everything alright?”

Then the tower comes to life. A low drone echoes like the rapid breath of a hummingbird. The hair stands up on my neck. “Aero?”

Then the stadium lights in the valley dim. Car horns blare in short bursts, rhythmic like the radio towers in the distance. The discord soon transitions to a steady beat. The lights, the horns, the hum of the tower behind me, all of it synchronizes.

Then the tower powers down and the stadium lights kick back on. The entire town lights up in successive flashes.

Aero opens the door.

“What the fuck was that?”

She pulls the glove off her arm. “My transmission.”

“It takes an entire town to power?”

“That’s just a byproduct of the process, not the fuel.”

“So, you’ve done this before?”

“Just once.” She crouches down to untie me. “You ready to go?”

I stand up. “Where now?”

* * *

We pull into a small town outside of Pittsburgh. Aero drives under a canopy of trees until we reach a runty apartment building neighboring a tire factory. A cluster of pines on the mountain nearby emulate brush strokes, as street lamps on some distant walkway glow between the boughs.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“You get used to it,” she tells me. “I’m on the second floor.”

We walk in and immediately we’re hit by the scent of seared cumin and chili powder. I suddenly realize it’s been a while since I’ve eaten. Or showered.

Or slept.

She takes me to the door of her apartment. “In you go,” she says. Then everything goes black again.

* * *

A few hours later, I wake up on the floor. “Goddamn it!” This time I don’t try to get up. I know better. One of my hands, the free hand, instinctually goes to the back of my neck. My other hand remains tied behind my back. “What the fuck? Why did you do that again?”

She steps out from the kitchenette. “I wanted to free one of your hands so you could shower yourself.”

“You could have just told me.”

“That would require my trust.”

“Well, beating me over the head isn’t doing much for my trust.”

“I’m not concerned with your trust.”

“But you’re concerned with my hygiene?”

She holds a frying pan over my head and nudges me with her foot. “Get in the shower and I’ll give you some of this.”

* * *

When I get out of the shower, there’s a plate of artichoke hearts and shrimp on the table. The seafood turns my stomach, but I eat it anyway while Aero watches the news. The sound of broken glass and fire—fire that has grown so strong it sounds like a chorus of orchestral bass drums—draws me in. “What’s going on?”

“Riots in Pittsburgh.”

“Should we leave?”

She shakes her head, still mesmerized by the newscast. “We’ll leave in the morning. Where do you want to sleep? Bed, bathtub, or car?”

I try to be a gentleman. “Bathtub?”

She gently turns me around. “Hand,” she says.

I place my hand behind my back.

She takes a short length of nylon rope out of her bag and ties me at the ankles. “Alright. Hop on over to that tub and I’ll help you in.”

“Rope’s a little tight.”

She tightens it further. “Better now?”

“Fine,” I groan.

She smacks me on the ass and laughs. “Hop along.”

So, I hop along to the beat of a masochist’s fantasy until I get to the bathtub. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“Sit down on the edge of the tub, then we’ll spin your legs in and you can lay down.”

“What if I have to go to the bathroom later?”

She pokes her head in before closing the shower curtain all the way. “Then I’ll hose you down in the morning.”

Channel 9

Entry #50

All energy, all matter is information transmitting across an open interface. The human mind is predisposed to segregating multiple frequencies and categorizing them by sense and emotion. But when we attempt to communicate our experiences through transmission, these frequencies merge, resulting in an indecipherable, chaotic mess. The primary function of the body-machine interface is to allow these frequencies to remain separate as one transmits. Thus, what the eyes see, the receiver sees. What the heart feels, the receiver feels. But that was never my intention. It was only a convenient byproduct.

It has always been my hope that someday, I could tap into the undifferentiated frequencies, frequencies which haven’t been filtered through human consciousness. There’s a wealth of naturally-occurring information out there. It’s the key to unraveling the frequency that our universe is composed of, to understanding the aether, becoming one with it.

Bill Stirton

* * *

My bladder wakes me about an hour before Aero comes in. My body wants me to go, and I seriously consider relieving myself right there in the tub. But my head’s closest to the drain, and I’m not too keen on sleeping on a piss pillow. So, I hold it until she arrives.

“I gotta go,” I say.

She closes the curtain and plops down on the toilet.

I curl up into fetal position. “That’s not helping.”

She yawns. “I’ll cut your legs free in a minute.”

“Kind of need my hands too, unless you’re planning on holding it for me.”

She runs into the other room and comes back with a knife. “I’ll hold it for you.” She starts cutting at the tape on my feet.

“Seriously? I don’t think I can go if—”

She flips me over and cuts my hands free. “There.”

I jump out of the tub and relieve myself. It rivals every pleasurable experience I’ve had in my life.

“You could have waited until I left the room,” she says.

I follow her eyes to my terribly average dick. “You could stop staring.”

She starts taking off her clothes. “Sorry,” she says as she turns the shower water on.

I can’t help but keep looking as she lets her panties drop to the floor and steps out of them as if I’m not even in the room. She hops into the shower and suddenly I can’t piss anymore, even though I still have to. “So, am I free to go now?”

“No.”

I nose the shower curtain and peer inside. “I could just leave while you’re in there.”

She scrubs her hair with a small bar of soap. “I hid your car keys.”

“I could walk.”

“You won’t.” She opens the curtain wide and steps out.

She’s right.

“So, where are we going?”

She soaps up her panties and runs them over hot water in the sink. “Ohio. Just a little east of Columbus. There’s another tower there.”

“Why do you need me?”

She wrings the panties dry and puts them on. “I just want to make sure you don’t get in my way and don’t talk to anybody.”

“I won’t say a word.”

She puts on the rest of her clothes. “Still don’t trust you.” She grabs her knife and leaves the room. “If you want a shower, make it quick.”

I do want a shower; a very, very cold shower.

* * *

When I step out of the bathroom, Aero’s laying on the bed, watching my little television.

“Anything interesting?”

“Emergency broadcast, that’s what most of the analog frequencies were reserved for.”

The Emergency Broadcast System screeches, and I’m brought back to my childhood. Back when tornado warnings would steal the airwaves to tell us what the weather had already made clear. I’m not sure why, but I’m reminded of party lines; people driving door-to-door to see who left their phones off the hook.

Strange how something that signifies danger can evoke relatively positive childhood memories.

As in the past, the television informed us of what we already knew: the riots continued in Pittsburgh, and the violence was escalating.

“We better get out of here,” I say.

“We’re almost an hour from the city. Nothing’s going to happen to us here.”

“Why are you so calm about all of this?”

She pushes herself up from the bed. “Because it’s inevitable.”

The sound cuts out on my TV and the “this is not a test” image disappears, replaced by the guy I gave a lift to back in New York.

“What is it?” Aero asks, leaning in.

“Hitchhiker I picked up a while back. I figure he must be a transmitter.”

Aero keeps staring at the screen. “Picked up like on your TV, or actually gave a ride to?”

“I gave him a ride.”

“Where’d you drop him off?”

“About five miles from where I picked him up. New York.”

“He’s close.” She slings her bag over her shoulder and heads for the door. “Let’s go.”

I grab my television and follow her. “That was a quick change of heart.”

She scrambles for her keys and opens the door for me. “Hurry.”

Aero presses her face tight to the hall window before we take the stairs. We get to the exit and she peers through the window cautiously.

“Do you know that guy?”

“If he’s a transmitter, we have to assume he’s dangerous.”

She ducks and runs to the driver-side door, waving me on. She’s got the car in reverse before I’m even seated, so I close the door and buckle up.

Sure as shit, the guy’s waiting at the first bus stop, cleaning his fingernails with the knife he tried to gouge my eyes out with.

Creepy bastard.

* * *

The ride is relatively uneventful until we get into Ohio. The EBS starts to fade, and we’re back on-screen, struggling between the frequencies. She takes up more of the channels than me, but I still flip between channels 12 and 13, hoping to catch a glimpse of my future. Every now and then I see myself dead on channel 13, but the transmission on 12 hasn’t showed me anything new for days.

I slap the television. “Damn it!”

“What’s up?” Aero asks.

“Bad reception, I guess.”

“It’s only going to get worse, once people start waking up.”

I want to ask what she means, but I’m too exhausted to care.

She turns off the interstate and we head into a residential area. “One quick stop before we head to the tower.”

Twenty minutes through a lunch rush of traffic, we hit a ratty apartment building. The elevator’s broken, so we go eight flights up.

When we get to room 83, Aero knocks on the door. A short, shaggy-haired guy opens. He hugs her immediately, pinning her arms at her side. “Hey!”

She smiles, probably for the first time since I’ve met her.

He lets go and looks me up and down. “New friend, eh?” He reaches out to shake my hand. “I’m Reggie.”

“Rey,” I say, grasping his hand firmly.

He turns to Aero. “Where’d you find this one?”

“He found me.”

“Is he?”

She nods.

“Well, come in.” He steps backward into his living room. “You guys like tea?”

“Sure,” I say.

He digs through his cupboard. “What kind you like?”

“Just black is fine.”

He starts shuffling through countless boxes. “I don’t think I have any black. I’ve got peppermint detox, senna leaf.” He looks at me grimly, then throws a box to the side. “You don’t want that.” He continues sorting. “There’s echinacea, lemon-honey…”

Aero walks up to the cupboard and grabs the first bag she sees. “Give him this.”

“Kava? It’s served cold. That alright?”

I nod.

“Sit down, guys.” He grabs another bag. “I’ll make it a double dose. You’ll need it if you’re going to be spending any more time with her.”

Aero sits down next to me on the couch.

“Boyfriend?” I ask.

She glares at me. “He’s my brother.”

He sets the cup of tea down in front of me and sits across from us in a lawn chair. “So, that project we were working on. It’s ready.” He grins from ear to ear. “Want to see it?”

Aero takes my cup, drinks, and hands it off to me. “Sure.”

He rubs his hands together neurotically and runs into the back room. A few minutes later, he comes back to the table with his “project.” It’s covered with glass tubes and thick strands of disheveled cable. “It should fit.”

I take a sip off the kava tea. “Another glove.”

He holds it up proudly. “It’s a transmission gauntlet, plus two! You can call her Samantha if you want.”

“Plus two?”

He sets it on the table. “Not really, but I can’t help but slip a D&D reference in there.” He punches his sister softly in the arm. “For old time’s sake.”

She rolls her eyes. “Can I try it on?”

“Does a Dungeon Master give you a vorpal weapon against an army of headless soldiers?”

She stares at him blankly.

I take another drink off my tea. “Does it?” I ask.

He slaps the table. “Hell yeah, he does!”

She slides the gauntlet onto her arm.

“I tried to make this one a little more comfortable. Remember that cast I took of your arm? You’ll notice this gauntlet is designed specifically for you.” He stands up. “And check this out.” He pushes a button on the side of the gauntlet.

“Reggie is God,” it says in a robotic text-to-voice tone.

He holds his hands out. “It talks!” He pushes the button again.

The machine drones on: “Please press the blue button for tutorial prompt. Have you called Reggie lately?”

“The operating system I used functions with audio prompts. Everything can be done manually by button, or with voice commands.”

“You programmed a tutorial in it?” Aero asks. “What, in case someone else finds it they can pick up where I left off?”

“It’s designed for you, Sis. Someone would have to have pretty spindly arms to get it on, so don’t worry. But you do have to push the blue button to get through the tutorial. It won’t run right otherwise.”

Aero pushes the blue button on the top of the gauntlet. “Welcome to Reggie’s brilliant innovation, the Transmission Gauntlet 2.0.”

Reggie chuckles.

“Seriously?” Aero walks into the back room. “I’ll listen to the tutorial in your room. Jesus, Reggie.”

He waves his thumb in her direction, whispers, “She’s too uptight.”

I set my cup of tea down. “I’ve noticed.”

He sits up and puffs out his chest. “That’s my sister you’re talking about, Bro!” He crouches back down, Igor-like. “Just kidding.”

I look over at the bedroom door, trying to avoid conversation. Reggie’s all right, but I don’t know what to say.

He does.

“So, you two.” He raises his eyebrows. “You know. Getting freaky.” He dry-humps the air.

I look down at my tea. Thank God, I have something to hold onto and look at.

“That’s ok. You don’t have to tell me. I know you’re hitting ’dat,” he says.

Another awkward moment of silence.

“So, what do you do?” he asks.

“I used to be a salesman.”

“Salesman.” He nods approvingly. “Cool. Cool.”

“So, you know about this whole transmission thing?”

“Sure. Wild stuff, isn’t it?”

“Are you a transmitter?”

He swats at the air. “Pffft! Naw. I just help my sister with her little projects.”

“What’s she trying to do?”

“The stuff I work on, it’s all about amplifying signals. She’s got her higher-order reasons for doing what she’s doing, but when it comes right down to it, she’s just trying to connect with people. Just has a different way of going about it than most.”

“I’ve been trying to avoid connecting with people since I figured out what was going on.”

“Sure,” he says. “We all got secrets, right?”

“Mine are pretty terrible.”

“People get so bent out of shape trying to hide what they feel and what they think from prying eyes. I bet if we all opened up, we’d find there are folks out there a lot more fucked up than us. And the ones who are really fucked up, they’re probably the least apologetic, you know?”

“I’ve done some pretty bad things, things that ended up on the airwaves.”

He reaches across the table and slaps me on the shoulder. “You’re all right. I can tell.” He stands up and heads for the counter. “More tea?”

I suddenly realize I’m feeling a bit drowsy. “No thanks.”

He grabs a few bags and pours a cup for himself. “More for me.”

Aero steps out of the bedroom, gauntlet on one arm and the blue button and a mesh of wires in the other. “I’m done with the tutorial.”

“You broke it!” He rips the button out of her hand. “Shit!”

“It still works. I just can’t stand that voice.”

“How’s she going to tell you if something’s wrong?”

“It’s a machine, Reggie, not a ‘she.’ Besides, nothing will go wrong. Your last model didn’t talk, and it always worked fine.”

He looks the wires over carefully. “I bet Rey would have liked the voice.”

Aero takes the gauntlet off and sits down with it.

“Audio backup initiated,” the machine says. “First audio unit hardware missing. Units two to six still operational.”

Aero starts looking the gauntlet over to see where the voice is coming from. “Units two to six?”

Reggie nods. “I wired that bitch like a nerve net. She runs through the whole thing. You can take the voice out of the machine, but you can’t… well, you can’t take the voice out of the machine, anyway, not unless you find all six units.”

“Thanks, Reggie.” Aero stands up. “So, are you coming with us?”

Reggie shakes his head. “This is home for now. Besides,” he pulls back a carpet near the kitchenette and lifts a door in the floorboards. “I’ve renovated since you were last here.”

“It’ll be dangerous,” Aero says. “Pittsburgh is in total disarray.”

Reggie closes the door in the floorboards and kicks the rug back over the opening. “I’ll be fine.”

Aero heads for the door and waves me out. “Let’s go.”

He looks at me. “You going to help her?”

“I really don’t know why she’s got me along for the ride.”

“She’s always got somebody along for the ride.” He looks at Aero. “You heard from Vince, by the way?”

“Who?” I ask.

“Nobody,” she says, eyeing her brother. “Nobody.” She heads for the door. “Come on, Rey.”

Reggie tugs at my shirt before I leave. “Take care of her,” he says.

“I’ll try,” I say, closing the door behind me.

“So, who’s Vince?” I ask as we start down the stairs.

She picks up her pace, trying to run from the question.

I’m laughing. “So?”

“No one to concern yourself with.”

“Is it a boy or a girl? Hard to tell with that name.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Is he an old boyfriend or something?”

She takes another flight of stairs. “No.”

When we get to the car, Aero turns on the radio.

“Is Vince a transmitter?”

She gives up searching for a station and turns the radio off. “Look. It’s best we just drop it, okay?”

“Okay.”

Channel 10

Entry #26

During the Seventies, as broadcast expanded, large blocks of programming were distributed across the entire nation, cementing national consciousness. But the airwaves were never strong enough to make it happen alone. With the advent of cable in the Fifties, the possibility for reaching larger parts of the American population became a reality. VHF and UHF frequencies could have been completely eradicated by the Sixties, but nobody ever questions why our government clung to the method of program delivery almost half a century after it could have been easily made obsolete.

All information, including thoughts and emotions, operate on frequencies parallel to those used in the VHF spectrum. In the Forties, government research concluded that the collective conscious operates between fifty and two hundred twenty MHz.

The reason our leaders kept VHF broadcast around for so long was to squelch the collective conscious and replace it with an orderly, national consciousness. The hope was that replacing our collective communication with VHF broadcast would create the same degree of homogenization that occurred in cities across the entire country. To a large degree, the project was successful. But there are people capable of overwhelming the analog transmissions by thought alone. Some project their thoughts across the analog spectrum, overpowering transmissions. The earliest of these people, post broadcast, were hunted down and executed. Over time, more humane methods of dealing with the problem were devised. One such method was to create a receiver on the military installation at Gakona, Alaska. Its purpose was to absorb the strongest transmissions in VHF frequency, particularly those that might come from bordering countries west of Alaska. But its operational radius was too small. Instead, they settled on using operatives, living receivers who were trained to absorb the transmissions of others. These operatives were scattered throughout the United States. Resulting blackouts were attributed to polar cap absorption of frequencies.

Bill Stirton

* * *

Outside of Coshocton, there’s an analog tower that relays signals from the east coast westward. The US government decommissioned it in the Fifties, but for years it’s pushed a dead signal across the airwaves, drowning out the frequency of human thought. While the airwaves remain blank on most television screens across America, so do the minds. We’re cut off from the rest of our world, from each other.

Aero wants to override it. As we drive, she explains how the gauntlet works. It’s like using an explosion to sap the air of oxygen and put out an oil rig fire. She gets in, projects her transmission across the dead airwaves, and it resets the collective conscious. Everybody’s eyes open, the mind’s eye. Some shit like that.

She doesn’t say much else on our way up to the tower. I spin the dial on my portable television slowly, watching the images flicker and fade. Flicker and fade. I wonder if any of this transmission stuff is real, or if it’s some sort of fucked-up hundredth monkey syndrome bullshit, like everyone is sharing their psychosis across countless miles.

I guess even then, there’d be some truth to transmission.

Aero parks the car in a three-car parking area and steps out. “We have to walk the rest of the way.”

I look up. There are a few paths leading upward, none of which look all that promising.

She reaches into her bag and hands me a water bottle. “We’ve got a few miles before we get there, but we’ll make it before dark.”

Except we’re not there before dark. I stop so many times on the way up, cursing a different part of my body each time. The pain works its way to the top of my body and then works its way back down. There’s never a moment when I’m completely numb.

Aero keeps ahead of me, pacing me. Just when I’m convinced we’re not going to make it, or at least I’m not going to make it, we scale a pile of rocks to the summit. “How the fuck did they get a radio tower up here?” I ask.

Aero takes a drink of her water and sits down to catch her breath. “Used to be a road. It’s nothing but slick rock now.

I set my television down and flip through the channels. “Not much up here, is there?”

She shakes her head. “Not yet, anyway.”

She takes the gauntlet out of her bag and puts it on. “You want to get the door for me?”

I walk over and fumble with the knob. “It’s locked.”

She digs through her bag for her wallet. “You know how to use a card?”

“Sure.” I take it from her and work the door open.

Aero steps in. She, or someone like her, has been here before, a long time ago. You can tell from the myriad of dust-caked machinery inside. “You wait here,” she says.

“What if a bear tries to attack me or something?”

“Then I’ll dispose of your body. What’s left of it, anyway. And if I’m not out in an hour, you can dispose of me.”

“You’ll be fine.” I wait for her to respond. “Right?”

“Probably.” She closes the door.

In the relative silence of the night, without a large town below, evidence of Aero’s work is nil. The tower doesn’t rage or pulse wildly. It emits the same quiet hum it did when we first arrived. It reminds me of my first night outside of Springfield with Jim, except we’re all alone up here. This radio tower strobes in isolation, without any towers on the horizon to accompany it. There’s just a dull ache of loneliness that courses through me, reminding me I’m human. Reminding me I’m past my prime. But this time, it feels right.

I finally lay down against the cool brick and mortar of the maintenance building. I rest the television against my knees and slowly turn the dial. Shadows weave through the white analog. Some days, it reminds me of snow, but today it looks like streams of confetti.

The dial revolves like the chamber of a six-shooter, and suddenly turning from station to station becomes a harmless form of Russian roulette. If I change the channel, I might miss something. If I don’t, I might miss something on one of the other channels. I start to understand why Bill kept them all running simultaneously.

At the same time, while we’re all sitting around waiting for something to happen on the television, the world outside is passing us by. Imagine how many things flicker into and out of existence while we wait for incoming transmissions.

I bore myself to sleep with pseudo intellect and wake up an hour later with EBS blaring on the airwaves.

More fucking riots, this time in Coshocton.

I knock on the maintenance building door behind me. “Aero?”

I knock again. “You okay?”

The gauntlet replies. “System shutdown initiated. Reggie’s so hot.”

Fucking Reggie.

I stand up and slide my Bulk Buyers membership card between the door and its casing. It takes a bit of work, but eventually, I pry the fucker open.

“What the fuck, Aero?”

She responds by cradling her arm and rolling over on the floor.

“Holy shit!” I crouch down and pull the gauntlet off of her stomach. “You okay?”

She sits up slowly. “Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Some kind of feedback.”

I pull her up to her feet.

She leans on the control panel. “Hang on a second. Let me make sure everything went through.”

She flicks a switch and a mosaic of tranquility comes to life on the screen.

“That’s your transmission?”

She nods.

Images coalesce into one another until something colorful and amorphous erupts on the screen. The palette of colors bleeding into one another isn’t as cut and dry as Bill’s transmission, but it evokes a sense of peace just the same.

It’s beautiful.

“I borrowed quite a bit from Bill, conceptually.” She powers down the monitors and steps out.

I pick up the television outside the door. “Did you hear what I said about EBS?”

“No.”

“There’s rioting in the nearby cities. Again.”

“That sucks.”

“You think?”

She pulls the gauntlet off of her arm and puts it in her bag. “What do you want me to say?”

“Every time we do this, there’s a bunch of riots nearby. What’s going on?”

“Every time?” she asks. “This is only the second time you’ve seen this.”

“Still. Don’t you think this is a bit more than coincidence?”

“These people.” She points down the mountain. “Those people down there haven’t felt the collective conscious for half a century. Some of them weren’t even alive when it was suppressed. How did you feel when you first started picking up all this shit?”

“I hated it! I still do! If I could take back everything that happened and just forget about all of this, I would. You think you’re doing them a favor?”

“It’s our natural state of existence. It’s not a matter of preference. They deserve to know. It’s our obligation to liberate them.”

“Yeah. Liberate. Like that hitchhiker who tried to ‘liberate’ me by cutting my fucking eyeballs out. People have different ideas about what freedom is, Aero.”

“Vince tried to cut your eyes out?”

“That’s Vince? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Does it really matter what his name is? All we need to know is that he’s dangerous and we need to avoid him.” She waits a minute to let that sink in, or perhaps to gauge my reaction. “Look. If I don’t do this now, one of the others will. Not all of them have good intentions.”

“People are dying down there because of you!” I pause to catch my breath. “I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“That’s fine.” She walks away.

“Wait!” I run for her, then realize I left my TV next to the maintenance building. Fuck. I run back for it and then catch up with her. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand why this great thing you claim to be doing is having such disastrous effects, and why you think the cost is worth whatever benefit could be offered.”

She keeps walking.

“Tell me!”

She turns to me. “Because I’m sick of being the only one! I’m sick of being alone! I’m sick of everyone I meet who is like me pushing everyone away, just like I used to.

“That’s pretty fucking selfish, don’t you think?”

“So is knowing that ninety-nine percent of the human population is being denied something that was once a part of them and doing nothing about it.” She climbs down the first rock ledge, reaches up to take the television while I crawl down. I hand it down to her. “You’re not going to break it, are you?”

“I’m not going to fucking break it.” She tugs it out of my hands. “You think I’m five or something? Jesus.”

“Sorry.”

She pushes the television back into my arms once I climb down. “Let’s just drop it until we get to the bottom of the peak, all right?”

“All right.”

* * *

We get to the car in the dead of night. Aero’s phone starts chirping incessantly.

She packs her bag in the trunk, ignoring it.

“Aren’t you going to check it?”

“No.”

“I haven’t heard that thing go off since we met. Don’t you think it’s important?”

She reaches into her bag and grabs the phone. “Do you ever stop asking questions?” She looks at the screen. “It’s my brother.” She holds the phone up to her ear. A hushed voice carries through the still night. “Aero. You’ve got to come back for me. I didn’t think things would get this out of control. My neighbor upstairs, I think he just shot his wife. People keep pounding on my door, screaming for help.”

Second unheard message: “I’ll be fine, I think. I’m boxed up in my little panic hole in the floor with noise-canceling headphones. I can still hear the screams, though.” He starts crying.

Third unheard message: “I—I think someone’s in my apartment.”

Fourth unheard message: “Maybe it was nothing. My mind’s probably just playing tricks on me. Man, I wish you’d answer your phone, Sis.”

By the time the fifth message begins, Aero closes her phone. “Let’s go.”

“Into the city?”

“It isn’t that big.”

“There’s a fucking riot!”

She turns over the engine. “I’m not going to leave him there.”

I mull it over in my head: eaten by bears or massacred by a psychotic mob just infused with the collective conscious?

My head screams Bears! Take the fucking bears! as I step into the passenger seat and strap myself in.

Channel 11

Entry #49

There’s no hope for the general population. People have been conditioned to distrust. They’ve, for so long, been oblivious to the inner workings of others, that when the collective consciousness is tapped into again, they’ll mistake the fantasies of others for reality. Dark impulses that strike in the heat of the moment, impulses we’d never truly act on, will be taken by others as long-lived conspiracies. When we think collectively, our thoughts breed fear in others. Maybe it’s better that we leave things as they are, letting the population fuse with the collective conscious slowly, teaching only a few rather than force-feeding the entire country one city at a time.

Bill Stirton

* * *

From outside the city, everything looks normal until you get close enough to notice the canopy of orange light in the sky is dancing. Then we get closer, and there’s a chorus of sirens blaring asynchronously. When we finally make it to the city limits, we watch the mass exodus. People with blankets slumped over their shoulders and little ones at their sides have slowed their pace. Those on their heels walk briskly, still in shock from what they saw within.

We’re where they were soon enough. Barefoot marauders flee across the streets, haste-forged weapons in hand. Someone tops a fence and dives onto another faceless victim, pounding his skull with a baseball bat.

Aero drives faster, trying to weave between the anticipated paths of those at the edge of the road. They all stop to look at us.

I should have stuck with the fucking bears.

We get closer to Aero’s brother, and the pain at the core of the city is self-inflicted instead of man-on-man. Guns line the roadways where folks have dropped dead from suicide. One man sits on a fire hydrant next to a pile of bodies he’s drawn close to himself. Slicing his wrists vertically, he looks at us, eyes welled up with tears. He holds them back as he keeps cutting dutifully, but the way he bites his lower lip says he doesn’t want to die. He’ll bleed out in a matter of minutes, and somehow that’s comforting because he won’t have to be here anymore. But for anyone out there, the lesser of two tragedies is still a fucking tragedy. And it’s heartbreaking to see people being forced to make choices like this, no matter who they are.

Flames inch up many of the buildings as we get into the residential area. I close my eyes and pray to whatever the fuck is out there that Aero’s brother is all right. For a moment, my own comfort becomes secondary to hers. And I mistake the elation of selflessness for a divine sign that all will be well. Then we round the corner to see Reggie’s building engulfed in flames.

Aero pushes the gas pedal to the floor just as a woman swings her bag into the road. It hits the windshield as Aero swerves to miss it, hitting the woman. The front driver-side wheel rolls over her emaciated body with little resistance. Then a persistent grinding accompanies us until we stop in front of the building.

Aero steps out and runs inside. I circle the vehicle to confirm my fear. The woman’s wedged under the car. Her eyes dilate to take in death. The end for her doesn’t come soon enough for me. “I’m sorry,” I say as I pull out my gun. Then I let one of my bullets discharge into her body. The look on her face lapses, replaced by serenity.

Two things hit me at the same time. The first is disappointment, regret for wasting a bullet on an already-dying person. The second is also disappointment, for thinking of a mercy killing as a wasted bullet. Those thoughts trickle down inside me, but there’s no longer a net to store regrets for later. A knot twists in my stomach, telling me I’ve lost myself.

I see Aero through the second-story stairs window and follow her up. I take the steps two at a time until I catch up with her, then barrel past her to the eighth floor. My lungs smolder from the run, but not from the smoke. So far, the fire hasn’t worked its way down in Reggie’s building.

Once again, I pull out my Bulk Buyers membership card, wedge it between the door and jamb and jiggle the knob. Aero catches up and kicks the door in. I fall onto the floor, card still in hand, as she runs to her brother’s hiding spot.

“Reggie!” she shouts. “You okay?” She tries to open the door in the kitchen floor, but it won’t budge. “It’s Aero. Open up!”

I get to my feet and join her. We both tug at the edge of the paneling until the door begins to lift. Aero pulls the cord out from under the paneling and rips the door open. Reggie’s inside, clutching a small gun.

“Thank God,” Aero says as she climbs inside with him.

He rattles softly and turns his head to her. Blood lines his eye sockets, now black and empty.

She falls back and crawls out of the hole.

I pull out my gun and point it at him, ready to lose another round. He slouches and doesn’t move again.

I put my gun away.

Aero’s crying on the floor as smoke billows out from the ceiling. It blackens and begins to bubble like a campfire marshmallow.

“We need to get out of here.”

She shakes her head, whispers a mantra of disbelief. But when she opens her eyes, Reggie’s still dead.

I step down inside the hole in the floor, hold my fingers to his throat. I listen for breathing. Then I pry the gun from his hands and step out. “Aero. We have to go. Now.”

She leans over and runs her hands through her brother’s hair. “Bye, Brubs,” she whispers. Then she closes the door on him.

I follow her to the front door, darting ahead to open it for her, thinking a circumstance like this just might be the last bastion for chivalry. But wouldn’t you know it, instead of thanks, I’m greeted by the black-socketed bastard who tried to gouge my eyes out back in New York. “Hey, guys. Been a while.” He fingers something in his pocket, so I charge him before he can pull it on us… and he uses my momentum to throw me down the first flight of stairs.

I’m clearly not cut out for this shit.

Aero struggles with him at the top of the stairs. He pins her against the railing and then drops to the floor like a ton of bricks. Nut shot.

She runs down the first flight and helps me up. By the time I get to my feet, the fucker’s already on his way down, but we gain ground.

The stairway is starting to fill with smoke. So, we take three steps and jump six. Three more, then jump six more. Three, then six, until it feels like someone’s stabbing at my heels with knives, until stars start dancing around my head.

I look up to see how much distance we’ve put between ourselves and Vince. He’s about two flights up. Three steps… and the fucker drops in front of me.

Aero looks back and then keeps running.

“A little help, please!” I shout.

The only response I get is the diminishing sound of three steps, whack. Three steps, whack.

I try to wrestle my way past him, but he’s too strong. He pins me down on the stairs. “Why do you keep running?”

“The whole cutting out my eyeballs thing. Gotta be honest. Not feeling it.”

He pulls out his jackknife and pops it open. “I’m just trying to help!”

I try to struggle against him one last time. But he’s got me.

Then the sound of flats on stone echoes off the wall until Aero’s standing over us. She holds the gauntlet in both hands over Vince’s head and brings it down. The gauntlet speaks. “Manual prompt not recognized. Reggie’s so hot.”

Aero brings it down over Vince’s head again, breaking his grip. “Manual prompt not recognized. Reggie’s the—”

The gauntlet crashes down on Vince again. “Reggie’s so—”

And again. “Reggie’s just—”

Blood spatters across the staircase as it comes down again. “Reggie’s da bomb.”

Vince collapses on top of me, dropping his knife. I push him off and kick the knife down the last three flights of stairs.

I kneel against the wall, trying to catch my breath.

Aero slides the gauntlet back on. “Come on!”

And we’re back at it: three steps… no way in hell I’m jumping six. Three more… might as well just walk them all. There’s no way that fucker’s getting back up after that beating.

Turn to confirm. Sure as shit, he’s getting back up.

Rey’s Law.

Three steps jump six. Three steps jump six.

Then we’re at the bottom.

We round the corner and there’s a woman in the driver’s seat. She sits up and puts the car in reverse.

I pull my gun. “Don’t fucking move!”

She stops.

I run up to her side of the vehicle and hold the gun to the window. “Get out!”

“Mommy!” Two girls in the back clutch soot-covered stuffed animals.

Aero waits for me to make a move.

I look through the window and see Vince running down the second flight. I wave my gun. “Get in the back.”

The woman gently puts the car in park, leaves the engine idling, and hops in the back with her children.

Aero and I get in and we back out. “You hotwire this?” I ask.

She doesn’t respond.

“Nice work.”

We pull back onto the street, heading in the same direction we came. Vince exits the building and holds himself up in the threshold, staring forward at our car like he can see through those fucking black holes in his head.

* * *

Aero glares at her reflection in the passenger-side window, eyes glazed. I think about trying to comfort her, trying to break the silence, but something about this silence is sacred, necessary.

The woman in the back seat runs her hands through her older daughter’s hair.

“Where are we going?” the girl asks.

The mother continues stroking her hair. “Shhhh.”

“We’re heading west,” I say, looking at Aero to confirm. “Aren’t we?”

She nods.

“You guys have any family in that direction?”

The woman shakes her head.

“You can stay with us until we reach the state border,” Aero says.

The woman looks at her youngest, now sprawled across half of the back seat. She’s fast asleep, too young to know what’s happening. “Thank you.”

The riots have started to die down, though you can still hear a cacophony of violence and police sirens in the distance. It’s like the unrest cycles through the city in waves.

Luckily, we ride a quiet zone out of town.

* * *

We stop outside of Sidney and let the family of three out near a motel.

I lean out the window. “You have money?”

She reaches into her pocket and hands me a fifty.

I fold her fingers over the wadded bill. “For the motel.”

A small Indian man steps out of the main office. “Can I help you?” he asks, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

“We just got out of Coshocton. You got a room for these ladies?”

He turns and heads back into the office. “Come in.”

“Thanks again,” the woman says. She prods her oldest. “Say thank you, honey.”

“Thank you,” she says.

“No problem.” I start to roll up the window. “Don’t go back into the city for a while, okay? Not any city. Just stay out in the country for a while.”

She nods.

I run my hand down Aero’s arm. “You want to see if they have a room for us?”

She clears her throat. “Yeah.”

* * *

When we get into our room, I hit the light switch at the entrance. She flicks it back off and heads straight for the bed. “No lights, please.”

“Okay.” I set our things down on the small table near the mini fridge. “Can I get you anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“You mind if I lay down?”

She slides over to the far edge of the bed.

I lay down beside her. “I’m sorry.”

“I should have made him come with us.”

I roll onto my back, speechless.

“He’s the only one in my family who knew about me, what I did.”

“How’d he find out?”

“He started picking me up on his guitar amplifier.”

“I remember hearing truckers on mine sometimes. Similar frequency, must be.”

“Don’t know. He told my parents I had a crush on this boy at school. I thought he was going through my diary.” She laughs. “I beat the crap out of him.”

“You? Who would have guessed?”

She sniffles. “I’ll kick your ass right now.”

“So, how’d you find out he was picking up your signal?”

“I heard it through the wall one night. I had already been watching Bill’s signals at that point. Didn’t really know I was capable of transmission. Just thought I picked up on things other people couldn’t.”

“You’re lucky.”

“He tried everything to get that amp to shut up. Put tin foil on my head while I was sleeping. Put tin foil on his amp.”

“Anything work?”

“He started playing at his friend’s house. Signal wasn’t that strong back then.”

“You ever wonder if other people hear your thoughts, or see your thoughts?”

“No.” She turns to me. “I know they do, but they don’t know what it is. They just attribute it to dreams or déjà vu.”

“You think those CB conversations I heard on my amp were actually transmissions?”

“Possibly.”

“So why are you keeping me around?”

“Same reason you wanted me around. We scramble one another’s signals. Keeps us off the radar.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Why not?”

“I mean, I have good reason to want to avoid detection, but you’ve done nothing wrong. Plus, the whole scramble theory is shot to hell now that we’ve got that black-eyed bastard following us.” I wait for her to respond.

She runs her fingers across the curtains and looks out the window, saying nothing.

“How many of us do you think are out there?”

She shrugs. “Everyone’s a transmitter, really. Just some of us found a way to work around analog frequencies or overpower them. Or something.”

“How many have you picked up on?”

“Including Bill, maybe five people who transmit strong signals. Then there are a few dead pockets in the country, where somebody or something sucks up the frequency like a sponge. Nothing transmits there. I think there’s a lot more of us in those areas trying to lay low.”

“We should go there.”

“Not until I’m finished.”

“What if one of the others does find us. You think they’d try to kill us?”

“If all goes as I hope, soon everybody’s thoughts will be a part of the frequency. Then you won’t have to worry about shutting off. You’ll be drowned out by all the others.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime…”

“It’ll be over soon,” she says, turning back over.

I turn toward her, put my arm over her waist, and wait for her reaction. Her chest heaves once, and then we’re still.

Channel 12

Entry #18

To track a transmitter, find a point at which their broadcast is weakest. With a little work, you can usually determine the point at which their transmission ends. Low-resolution images will completely fade about a mile outside of a transmitter’s range. Mark this point on a map. To the best of your ability, skirt the threshold of their range. All transmissions are projected in a rough circular pattern. If you can find several points at the edge of a broadcast, you can tell where the transmitter is located.

You can also drive straight through the zone of transmission until you reach the threshold at the opposite end. Mark this point on your map as well. Note the distance between the two points and you can determine the strength of one’s transmission. Place a point in the exact center of the two points. If the transmitter isn’t itinerant, they should be located within a five-mile radius of the center point.

Bill Stirton

* * *

I wake the next morning like I have for the past thirty-two years of my life: leg draped over a pile of pillows and my ass bared to the world. The sun rolls in from the East, catching dust as it wafts through the room. My nose instantly fills with snot.

Fucking love allergies.

As I make my way to the bathroom I pass a note on the table. It’s way too long to be a quick trip to the store or stepping out for the piss-poor continental breakfast. I run to the window: car’s gone.

Back to the letter.

Rey,

You said you want out. Maybe that’s not true after we talked, but I shouldn’t endanger your wellbeing for my own protection. In the end, there’s no way we’d get out of this alive. The only choice we’d have is how we die. Guess that’s true for everybody. At least now you’ll have a chance of staying out of this mess.

If you’re really interested in going off the grid and just living out the rest of your life, my friend Jerry used to live in Saginaw, Michigan. Talk to him. He was at 1245 Williams Road.

Best,

Aero

Saginaw. How the fuck am I supposed to get to Saginaw without a car? It would have been nice if she had asked me if I had a change of heart instead of stealing my car. Tom’s car. Whatever.

I check the nightstand next to my side of the bed. Gun’s still there, so I’ll be able to hold someone up for a vehicle if I need to. My TV’s still on the desk too, and my wallet is still in my pants pocket. I open it.

Money’s gone.

Rey’s Law.

I turn on my TV to see if Aero’s still in range, though I’m not sure why. There’s a part of me aching to pull out of this and head to Saginaw, but I want my money and my car. I want Aero.

* * *

I wait in the parking lot with a television under my arm and a gun tucked in my pants. It’s settled. The first set of keys I hear jingle, I’m taking the vehicle. I don’t give a fuck who or what it is.

Shit. It’s a family of four, and they’re driving an old Yaris. So, I wait, strumming on the TV under my arm. The mother gives me a nervous smile while she gets her kid situated in his car seat, then they’re off.

Half an hour later, a portly, middle-aged man steps out and heads for a bug across the parking lot. A bug? Really? Guess I’ll take what I can get.

I approach the man as he pulls his keys out of his pocket. “Excuse me, sir.”

He looks caught off guard, like a deer in headlights. “Yes?”

“I’m with law enforcement. I’m going to need to commandeer your vehicle.” I hold out my hand to take his keys.

“Do you have ID?” he asks as he opens his car door. He doesn’t even look me in the eye or glance up to make sure I’m not about to attack him.

I pat myself down. “I’m off duty.”

The man sits down, closes his door, and starts his car. “Yeah, right.”

I get ready to pull out my gun, but he’s already speeding down the parking lot.

Must be the shower washed away all of the fear-invoking filth from me. So, I take the passive aggressive route and check the parking lot for unlocked vehicles. When I find one, I check the glove box, under the seat, and above the visor. After six unlocked cars, I find a key tucked in the passenger-side visor of a Honda Civic. I throw my television onto the passenger seat and turn it on. I thumb the dial until I start picking up traces of Aero, then I’m off.

The signal is so faint, I can barely make out her silhouette on screen. She must be miles away, and there’s no way to know for certain that I’m heading in the wrong direction until I’m too far away. So, I drop by the first convenience store I hit and pick up a map of the states so I can head up to Saginaw, thinking maybe that’s where she’ll be heading eventually anyway.

* * *

About three quarters of the way to Saginaw, I lose Aero’s signal. Ten miles outside the city and all signals cease. It’s just me driving to the sound of white noise: the soundtrack to the first twenty-nine years of my life. The relative silence is a bit unsettling, and my mind immediately goes back to Wayne, Bill, Jim, Clerk Text-a-Lot. My transition to transmitter has been christened by a trail of blood, and I’ve barely had time to think about it. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Unlike the other cities Aero and I visited, Saginaw is surprisingly calm. Traffic is crawling when I get into the city limits, but that’s not a problem once I dump the vehicle off in public parking. Eight bucks and I have myself a spot until the following morning. The guy in the tiny booth tells me I have to be back by 8 a.m., otherwise, it’ll be towed. I nod. I’m not coming back.

It takes me a while to get oriented with the city before I get a taxi.

“Where are we going today?”

I open up Aero’s letter. “1245 Williams Road.”

“That’s a bit of a haul.”

I wave a few folded-up twenties. “It’s fine.”

“So, where you from?”

I almost answer honestly but catch myself. “West Coast,” I say. “Northern California.”

“Me too,” he says. “How far north?”

Fuck. “Not too far.”

He eyes me in the rear-view mirror. He knows I’m lying, but he doesn’t care. He wants his money. “You enjoying your stay here so far?”

I stare out the window, trying to appear disengaged. “Yeah.”

He fumbles with the radio dial: nothing but static.

“One of those days,” he says.

“Pardon?”

“Never know if the radio’s going to work.” He continues turning the dial. “Used to be a military base here back in the eighteen hundreds. It was abandoned, allegedly, but the way the radio is around here.” He rolls his eyes and raises his eyebrows. “You know what I’m saying…”

“Yeah. Hard to tell what they’re up to.”

He nods self-assuredly, then clicks the radio off. “Crazy world, man. Crazy world.”

By the time he drops me off, the meter reads sixty dollars, which is just about everything I have left. I hand it to him. “You weren’t kidding about it being a haul,” I say. “Sorry, but sixty’s all I’ve got.”

He unfolds the bills and counts them once, then again. He frowns. “Have a good day, sir.”

I turn on my television as I approach the front steps. Still no signal. I walk up the stairs to the fourth floor and knock on room 4C. Nobody answers. The room is dead silent, but light flickers at the edges of the door frame. “Anybody in there?”

No answer.

“I’m a friend of Aero’s.”

Still nothing.

I try the handle and the door opens. There’s an empty armchair in front of an old floor model television. A generic black-and-white western plays. “Anyone home?” I step in and close the door behind me. “I’m looking for Jerry.”

There’s a small loop antenna on top of the TV. It’s set to channel 8. I set the TV under my arm to 8, but my television is still just white noise. I check the back of the floor-model television, and sure as shit Jerry, or whoever lives here, has found a way to Cobb a cable line to this ancient shit box.

While I’m crouching behind the handiwork of whoever tethered this thing to Comcast, I catch a light strobing at the back of the house.

“Jerry?”

I walk down to a room with six televisions stacked like a pyramid. There’s a fat man sitting in what smells like his own filth at the end of the bed. I put my arm over my nose. “God! Couldn’t you hear me?”

I walk around the edge of the bed to face him.

His fucking eyes look like they’ve been scooped out of the sockets.

“Jesus!” I turn to leave the room and trip over an eight-pound weight on the floor. Yeah, because this guy looks like he’s been lifting while watching static in the fucking dead zone. What the fuck is a weight doing in a room that, judging from the size of the body, was previously filled with cheeseburgers and vats of Crisco?

Once I pull myself up off the floor, I bolt out of the apartment. Jerry’s dead, I think. What the fuck do I do now? My first instinct is to get my car back and get the fuck out of the dead zone in hopes that I find Aero. But she’s long gone by now, and even with Bill’s sixth-grade math tracking methodology, it’d be a long shot.

Then I wonder why I didn’t use that to find Jerry. Who fucking can’t be dead because there’s still a dead zone, I think. So, I decide to track him down Bill-style, “solve for x using the circumference and radius of a circle” style.

* * *

Rey’s Law: One of the neighbors sees me leave Jerry’s old apartment. I close the door calmly behind me and smile at her.

“Everything all right in there?” she asks.

“You ever see a four-hundred-pound man naked?” I ask.

A large man lumbers to the doorway and stands behind her.

Yes. Yes, she has.

Then I’m down the stairs and out the door.

Rey’s Law: There’s a fucking officer standing at the entrance of the building.

“You live here?” he asks.

“Just visiting a friend,” I say.

The cop flips a page on his clipboard. “Which floor?”

“Third.” This lying shit’s getting easy. Killing’s been coming a bit easier too lately.

He pulls out a pen and starts writing. “You hear anything suspicious last night?”

“Just got here a while ago. Look, I really have to leave.”

“Can I get your name?”

“Bill,” I say. “Bill Stirton.”

He extends his hand. “All right. Thanks, Bill.”

Two hours later and… Rey’s fucking Law! There’s another cop at the parking lot, looking over my car. Guy in the little booth is running his gums, probably giving them a description, so I turn around and walk the other way.

You get the point by now: The guy in the booth starts hollering at me. “Hey! This is your car, isn’t it?”

Fuck my life.

I run into the alleyway and keep my eyes open from behind a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes. The cop runs by and it appears my streak of bad luck is over.

I swear to God, if I trip over an eight-pound weight on the way out of here or someone tries to show me their dick, I’m going to fucking lose it.

I keep my gun drawn near the boxes until night. Once it gets dark, I head out to look for a car, hoping the guy in the booth has changed shifts and that the cop is gone.

It’s still the same guy when I get there, but he keeps looking around and walking behind his booth. The faint smell of burnt rubber hits the air. Fucker’s smoking something.

My car’s gone, but the other vehicles are so cramped that it doesn’t take long to find another unlocked door with a key inside. God bless absentminded people who lose their keys… and also leave their doors unlocked in case they lose said keys. Also, fuck those fuckers at OnStar that have made it possible for forgetful people to lock their doors with keys inside. Fuckers.

I’m lucky enough to find a dark Chevrolet Cavalier. I start it up while Smoky the Booth Boy tokes up behind his post. He tucks something in his pocket and pretends he’s on the phone. I pull out of the exit without incident and turn on my little television to find the edge of the dead zone.

* * *

Ten miles outside of the city, I lose all signals. So, I head northwest and after one hundred and thirty miles, there’s no end in sight. Either I’m following this fucker, or he’s pretty powerful. The dead zone ends around Traverse City, near the northernmost tip of the state. I figure Jerry’s got to be somewhere around St. Helen, but I dip in and out of the dead zone until I’m on the west side of Cadillac. If he’s been relatively still the entire time, he’s east of St. Helen, near the Huron-Manistee. At least he’ll be easier to find in a less densely populated area.

I’m tired as hell and desperately need sleep, but I’m afraid I’m going to lose him during the night, so I cut east into the national park. It’s getting close to dawn by the time I get to the pinpoint on my map. Trailers dot the roadway, so I stop at the closest and knock on the door.

“Hello?”

A man peers through the blinds, then opens his door a crack. “You a solicitor?”

“No,” I say. “I’m looking for Jerry. My friend Aero said he might be able to help me. She gave me his old address in Saginaw.”

“This is a pretty small area. I know most of the people around here, but I’ve never met a Jerry. You sure you got the address right?”

“That’s the problem. I only have a road.”

He shakes his head. “You’ve got a lot of searching ahead of you, then.”

“All right. Thanks.” I turn for my car, half hoping that he’ll call me back and say he’s Jerry, that he was just playing it safe, but he says nothing. So, I visit the next house.

* * *

After hitting the places on the main road for a mile, I start for the dirt roads nearby, thinking maybe Jerry’s gone off-grid. I find only posted signs and one guy with a shotgun and a golden retriever, who tells me to get the fuck off his property.

I ask if he’s Jerry.

He tells me he’ll blow a hole in my tire, and next in my head if I don’t leave.

The most frustrating part is that any of these fuckers could be Jerry. I wish I had asked her what he looked like.

In the afternoon, I fill up my tank and sulk in my car. I turn on my television to find that I’m still in the dead zone, which brings me a little comfort.

The television flickers black-to-white static. It pulses like the radio tower Aero fused with. Somebody knocks on my window, motions for me to roll it down.

“What is that?” he asks, pointing to the television.

“One of those old portable TVs.”

He peers in. “Ain’t that something.”

“Found it at a garage sale in—not far from here.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Well—”

“I think you’re picking something up there,” he says. “It’s an S.O.S signal. Morse code.”

“Really?”

“That’s odd,” he says, stepping back.

I back into the road and head in the direction I came, watching the television to see if the signal will get stronger. I turn the dial to channel 2 and back to 13 slowly, and repeat. The S.O.S signal continues on channel 8. I turn through the channels again, looking up from time to time to make sure I’m not too far off the road, then, as I speed up, settle on 8 again. I cross a small bridge, one of the open-top, wooden ones you don’t see that much anymore, and the S.O.S signal dies. I pull over and reach for the dial. A face, blood running from the empty sockets where its eyes should be, screams unintelligibly for a split second on the screen, then disappears. I notice a dirt road on the right, ahead. The mud tracks on the road leading to it are partially dried. There’s a possibility someone’s there, so I pull into drive and turn.

A few miles in, I see a truck, then a small cabin. The truck’s rear tires are flat and the registration on the front window expired several months ago. I notice a shed near the house that I decide to check first.

When I pull back the tarp covering the open door, I know this is Jerry’s place. Gutted television sets lay in disrepair on a box spring. Antennas line the walls of the shed like a hunter’s trophy antlers.

I run to the house.

“Jerry!” I knock. “Jerry, you in there?”

I see a light in the house, flickering the Morse code pattern for S.O.S, so I kick the door open and run inside.

“I got your signal.”

In what appears to be a bedroom, the television continues the S.O.S. signal. A small water heater in the closet spurts across the bed. “Jerry?”

I walk into the next room, and it’s Saginaw all over again. Jerry’s laying against a pyramid of televisions, eyes cut out of his sockets. A modest stream of blood trickles from each eye. Then his head leans forward, and the pyramid of televisions behind him roar to life. The images move so fast I can’t make sense of any of it.

He coughs. “Kill me.”

“Aero said you could help me.” The futility of this statement eludes me until after it leaves my mouth. The guy’s dying. There’s nothing he can do for me.

Like a roulette wheel slowing down, the channels start to close in one repeating images. It’s Aero.

“Where is she?” I ask.

The channels scan slowly through scenery, presumably Aero’s surroundings. Then the images speed up again.

He turns to me and reaches for my waistline, for my gun. He leans forward. A matrix of flesh and steel peels apart from his back, revealing his spine. He opens his mouth to scream. Only a voiceless gasp sputters out. His fingers still snap at my pistol as his head rests between his legs. I pull his hand off my gun and gently lower it to hang beside him.

I take out the gun and put it to the back of his head. “You sure about this?”

Again, that gasp-rattle.

So, I turn my head and pull the trigger.

As soon as he’s gone, the televisions go back to normal. Not dead-zone normal, but me-dead-on-channel-13 normal, with the rest of the frequencies doled out to me and Aero.

Which means I can track her again.

Channel 13

Entry #53

Everything on the planet, material and immaterial, is information waiting to be decoded. Most of the information is irrelevant to us. The information harbored by the swaying of limber treetops in the autumn breeze might lend itself to the measurement of wind patterns. But mankind has moved so far away from reading the world around him. Instead, we devise our own tools, synthetic mechanisms to replace the natural.

What we’ve lost is the ability to understand overlapping codes, mechanisms meshed with other mechanisms. We’ve lost sight of our natural lenses: how to read tufts of grass like we read waves gently lapping at the beach. There are intimations of what once was. Upturned leaves or cows resting in the grass read as a storm. These are different symbols with the same meaning.

At the most basic level, some natural incarnation of binary perhaps, patterns repeat themselves. Different phenomena carry the same meaning. Codes overlap. Science has now linked our genetic makeup to musical scales, positing that our DNA might determine our preference to music due to a song’s similarity to our genetic code. Similarly, our preference to specific locations might be determined by the location’s information construct and the similarity of that construct to our own DNA. Like a soulmate, there may be a soul sound, or soul spot, a string of code for every one of our senses that exactly parallels our genetic encoding. Likewise, for some, there may be a soul frequency that matches our genetic encoding. That frequency is us in the immaterial. We are the frequency manifest. The one lucky enough to share the aether with VHF transmission might be able to transmit to the entire world, a Christ figure of the airwaves.

Bill Stirton

* * *

As I drive south, the transition from spring to summer grows more apparent. Heat lightning cracks the black-glass sky in the distance. My portable television is almost blinding in this darkness, but I keep it turned toward me. On channel 7, Aero tweaks her brother’s gauntlet and attaches it to her arm. The sequence of images on the screen repeats:

Short. Crackle. Blackout.

Attaches it to her arm.

Short. Crackle. Blackout.

Attaches it to her arm. Then she walks off screen.

I turn the dial on the television while looking at the road. Another radio tower crackles on the screen. I can’t tell where it is, but I can feel her this time. I can feel everything, like a faint trickle of water in the back of my mind. Whispers come from the trailers dotting the landscape, a dirge of rural America. To my right, a little boy hides under the front porch, hoping his father is loading his rifle to fire blindly into the empty space behind his house like he does every other night. He imagines the bullets sucked away from his father’s gun, as if by a vacuum. There’s a fear inside him that outweighs the fear he has for his father, a fear for whatever it is his father’s trying to kill in the back yard. He’s too young to realize that his father’s trying to put something to death in his mind, and the drink isn’t taking care of it anymore. It’s buried so deep, not even he can see it.

A few miles down the road, there’s an old woman checking her mailbox. She rehearses the daily trek in her head, waiting out the night so she can drag her feet across the concrete to the roadside, find nothing, walk back in and cry herself to sleep. Her hope is a flickering light about to fade, but she’s too strong to die with it. She wants to die, but doesn’t have anything in the house to make it painless. So, she sits, hoping the repeated disappointment will put her out of her misery.

It goes on and on, not a scrap of happiness out here in the country. I begin to understand the riots. I also understand Jerry’s role. In a way, analog re-imbued our national psyche with some sense of camaraderie. It washed away the depression and all the pain that served as the cornerstone of our country. But there were people who still picked up on our natural frequency. The receivers soaked up all their transmitted dissatisfaction. They were the whitewashed fence covering a nest of dog shit and domestic abuse. They were the black night, extracting bullet-like thoughts from the unstable.

Now that there’s nothing to pull all the despair away from me, I’m starting to think I should have done everything in my power to keep Jerry alive, suffering or not.

The television continues to repeat the same images: tower on channel 4. Aero and the gauntlet on channel 7. I’m still dead on 13, but I don’t care anymore. I haven’t for a long time, really. So, I’m going to die. The grainy, low-res image doesn’t tell me when or how. Could be tomorrow. Could be ten years from now. It’s the same amount of information we’re all confronted with on a daily basis. Death is inevitable. Big fucking deal.

I scan through the channels one more time and then shut it off. Fuck it. I’ll Luke Skywalker it to wherever Aero is. It’s hard to hone in on her, but cutting through all the sadness to a small signal of purpose is manageable.

At least, I hope it is.

* * *

Obi-Wan of the fucking aether tells me to head south, so I keep going until I’m in West Virginia. I turn on the television every few hundred miles to make sure Aero’s still on the airwaves. She is. Either I’m trailing her or her work at the radio towers is improving her signal in the eastern half of the US.

Once I come into the top-half of the territory, I watch the mountains for towers. In the daylight, it’s not so easy to do, but it’ll give me time to get the highly visible towers scratched off my list until I find her.

I stop at a gas station outside of Fairmont and pick up a map. I’ve only been with Aero a few times, but I know she frequents larger towers within one hundred and fifty miles of the cities, so I start to narrow it down to… too much fucking ground to cover. So, I fill up and start where I am.

I take the first peak by midday: nothing there. I switch on the television and switch to channel 4, to see if I’m on the screen. Nothing there either. So, I’m in the wrong place, but I also need sleep. Here’s as good a place as any, I figure.

I wake up at dusk when the TV stops its static lullaby. Channel 4 is crystal clear. Aero’s car is parked near the maintenance building. She’s prying her way in.

I’m too late.

I get up and check the tower, knowing already she’s somewhere else.

I watch the lights stagger across the mountain range that runs from left to right like a staircase. She’s on one of those fucking mountains. I know it.

I flash my headlights and wait for them to show up on-screen. No change on channel 4, so I park the car facing the mountain range opposite me and flash my headlights. Again. Fucking nothing.

I drive the car to the other side of the mountain top and flash my headlights there, and a few seconds later, they flash on screen. Of course, she’s not on the side of the mountain with linear roadways. That’d be too easy. She’s on the opposite end of one hundred acres of bullshit and brambles.

I’m reminded of that joke about the guys walking across the light to escape an asylum, wishing it were possible, knowing I’ll have to find a way around the overgrowth. Preferably by car.

* * *

I follow the small, red beacon from the road. It leaves my sight a few times, dipping down behind the overgrowth. But it never disappears for long. About half an hour later I’m climbing up the hill in my car, thankful that I don’t have to do any more walking.

I round the last corner to the top of the mountain. Aero’s car is parked near the maintenance building. I stop as soon as her car comes into view and step out. Her keys are still in the ignition, but the door to the building is closed.

She’s inside.

I take my trusty Bulk Buyers membership card out, slide it into the door by the knob. Slowly, I edge the card into place, then toggle the knob quickly, popping the door open.

I pant like I ran up the mountain to see her. Her hand’s inches away from the controls.

“Aero!” I breathe heavily. “What the fuck?”

She doesn’t move, doesn’t react physically. “You shouldn’t have come.”

I step inside and close the door behind me. “Why’d you—”

I notice someone else in the room out of the corner of my eye.

“Don’t move.”

It’s the empty-eyed fuck. He’s got a gun. He looks at Aero. “Told you he’d come back.” He thrusts the gun in Aero’s direction. “Keep your arms away from your side.”

“How’d you find me?” Aero asks me.

“Same way I did,” Vince says. “Just followed your signal.” He smiles at me. “Didn’t you?”

I stare at the floor.

“Didn’t you?” he asks again.

“Yeah.”

“It’s so much easier now that Jerry’s dead.”

“You killed him?”

“Not me. Your pal here, what’s his name? Reymond.”

“I—he begged me to. He was suffering.”

“That’s right. It was a mercy killing, which conveniently led you back to Aero.”

“You cut out his eyes!”

Aero dives for Vince. “You bastard!”

He unloads a bullet into her shoulder and steps back to let her drop before him. “It was inevitable.”

Aero leans against the wall. “It wasn’t supposed to happen yet, though.”

“There’s no need to take this slow. People are going to die no matter how you approach it.”

“Our transmissions need to be administered slowly. You can’t just give it to them all at once!”

“Why not?” Vince asks. “Cull the weak. This is the way of the future. We may as well start with a strong cornerstone.”

Aero shakes her head. She’s delirious with pain, but she holds herself together. “You bastard.”

He points his gun at her again. “Give me the gauntlet.”

“Fuck you.”

“Give me the gauntlet or I’ll shoot you both and take it. Your choice.”

She unlatches it from her arm.

I start for her. “Don’t!”

Vince turns his gun on me. “Don’t fucking move.”

Aero takes the gauntlet off and nudges it toward him.

He bends down to take it and I run toward him. Almost instantly, my legs buckle. My mind is static.

“I told you not to move.”

Aero’s voice starts to fade as the static in my head grows thicker. “You’ve got what you want. Leave.”

Then everything goes black.

* * *

I wake later, Aero’s hand in mine. She’s still, but warm to the touch. I try to open my eyes. Everything remains black. I try to squint it off. Still black. I bring my hands to my eyes and find only empty sockets. I’m blind. “Aero!”

I place my hands on the ground and draw them across the floor to find her again. “I can’t see.”

Finally, I find her arm. I shake her as I feel my way up her shoulder, past the gun wound, to her face. I feel for her eyes. They’re still in place. “Thank God.” I shake her more vigorously. “Aero. Get up.”

It suddenly occurs to me, Vince could still be in the room. Watching us. I don’t feel him. Of course, I never did before, either. I had no idea he was with Aero.

“Vince!”

He does not respond.

I feel my way to the door. It is open. “Aero!”

Then something else hits me: I don’t feel her in the room, nor through the aether.

I drop to the floor and reach for her neck. I cup my other hand over her mouth.

There’s only a dying warmth.

Her lips are dry. I knead her face clumsily, plugging her nose to see if she’ll choke. I place a hand over her chest, but there’s no pulse, no beacon of light on the horizon reminding me there’s someone or something else out there. And though there’s a faint echo, a choir of despair whispering in the back of my head, I’m alone again. Blood drips from my sockets, a perverted intimation of grieving.

I step outside and close the door behind me. The wind burns the exposed nerves where my eyes should be and I almost vomit from the pain. I wrap my shirt around my face. The cold is nothing compared to the sinus ache that keeps trying to reassure me my eyes are still there.

In my head, I can almost see the world around me, shrouded in static. The static is the chorus of despair, carrying through the empty spaces around me. I turn to the forest, see the sound of crying children bouncing through electric snowdrifts between rows of black. I walk forward, reaching out for the black forms. It’s not my imagination. The world is an analog map inside my head. My car shines at a frequency so acute that it becomes tangible. White noise trails across the surface as I rub my hands across it.

God help me, I’m going to drive this fucker with no eyes.

I turn over the engine and start slow, watching the black shift in and out of focus as I move through the static. I follow the white noise, almost driving down an embankment where the trees were still young and barely grazing the sky. But I make it to the bottom of the mountain and onto the road.

As I get back on the highway, I hone in on this Vince fucker. I try to cut my desire to rationalize out of my thoughts. It doesn’t matter where he’d go next. There’s no point in playing guessing games with myself now. The only way to him is through the frequency.

His transmission is wide-range, dipping into despair, rising into ambition, obscuring everything. He’s got the gauntlet, so he’ll be visiting a tower. Knowing that doesn’t do me any good in the immediate future, but eventually, I know he’ll overwhelm everyone’s thoughts and if I can’t find him by then, I’ll at least be able to follow his signal.

As I’m thinking of all this, I hear sirens behind me. I’m following a large banner of static straddling two lanes of darkness. God only knows if I’m staying in the lines. Judging from the sound behind me, I’m not.

I pull over to the best of my ability until my car grinds against the guardrails.

More is coming into focus. The visions in my mind border on reverse polarity now, but they’re grainy. The cop walks up to the edge of the window. He shines a light into the driver side window. “License and—Jesus! Are you driving blindfolded, sir?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve had an accident and I need to get to the emergency room.” It’s the quickest excuse I can muster up.

Judging from the way his head slowly bobs up and down, he’s eyeing the blood stains. “You can’t drive in that condition.” He pulls out his portable radio. “I’m going to need an ambulance.” He lowers his hand from his face. “What happened?”

“I fell.”

“Let me take a look,” he says.

I hesitate, then pull the shirt off my eyes. Again, the open air stings.

“What the fuck?” He turns to vomit on the road and I floor it.

And for the rest of the trip, I don’t hear anything behind me.

* * *

The images in my head grow clearer as the night progresses. First, the static subsides, replaced by clear reverse polarity. Then it begins to extend beyond the boundaries of normal sight. A mile behind me, a pack of coyotes tear an injured doe to the ground. The voices I hear begin to manifest as actual people behind the walls of their houses. There’s a town nearby. The outskirts are peppered with derelicts and young kids trying to catch a buzz under the overpasses and in frequented parking areas. Then I’m looking down on myself in my mind’s eye. It’s like flying, but I have to remain focused on the road or else everything I’m seeing will be over. I can’t get swallowed up by the experience.

To my left, something flashes and then expands outward, saturating everything in blinding light. It’s a transmission. This isn’t Bill’s beaches and gulls. This isn’t Aero’s peace directive. This is death. This is a catalyst for the destruction that is already inevitable. This is Vince.

At the next exit, I turn toward the source. The transmission overwhelms my ability to see, so I’m back where I started with fuzzy images at best. Commercial properties, fused with the American psyche, guide me through the transmission. They glow brighter than the images of destruction. McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Pizza Hut are my guiding light through the business district of this little town.

I cut through a Bulk Buy parking lot and onto a dirt road behind the building. There’s an analog tower at the end of this road. It’s white-hot and trembling. I see it overhead before I arrive. Aero’s car is out front.

I pull up next to her vehicle and take my gun out of the glove box. My view of the world around me seems limitless. Then I lose touch with the present and my future starts to unfold before me. Like a quilt, patterns repeat across the tapestry of time. I’m dead on the television set a day ago, a week ago, a month ago… ten minutes from now.

I’m going in, anyway.

The door’s already opened. I kick it wide and storm in. Vince is sitting near the control panel. Somehow, he’s managed to get Aero’s gauntlet on. Blood trails down his arm onto the floor. He looks up.

I point my gun at his head.

It’s unsettling how calm he is. “Go ahead,” he says. He crosses his arms. His entire body is white noise, except the gauntlet. I can barely distinguish between him and the white light in the maintenance room.

“I want answers first.”

“What leverage do you have?”

“Your life.”

He stands up. “I’m not dying here today.” He closes his hand over the end of my gun and pushes it slowly toward the ground. “Neither are you.”

I shoot through his hand. Liquid static splashes against the wall. The bastard bleeds analog.

The tower comes to life.

Vince watches as his hand continues to bleed out. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” He turns his open palm toward me. “You see the same thing I do, don’t you? It’s amazing how much interference those two little orbs in our heads create. It’s one of the reasons the government used analog to channel images, rather than sound. Got to keep the eyes busy, but also keep them complacent. Television causes atrophy of the eyes. It interferes with our ability to transmit what we see around us.” He pulls a knife out of his pocket. “But if you just—” he makes a digging motion with the knife “—pluck them out, you can see so much more. But no more transmissions, not of what you see anyway.” He takes a step toward me with the knife. “We’re invisible for now. Stealth receivers. In time, I’ll transmit an analog incarnation of the entire world through the collective conscious. We’ll all become one with the aether.”

I hold my gun on his head.

“You’re angry?” He takes another step toward me. “Then shoot me.”

The tower pulses as one with him now. He radiates outward until it’s blinding, then he overtakes me. “Kill me!” He pulls me into him.

I finger the trigger of my gun, wonder if it’s true. If this fucker bleeds out on the control panels, is he going to become one with the aether?

I’m already bleeding out. Getting weaker. There’s one bullet left in my cylinder. It’s either me or—

Vince drops to the floor, holding his stomach. I shoot to maim.

He laughs again. “I knew you’d come through for me. Now watch… now watch.”

He stares at his dying body intently like he’s waiting for something to happen. And when it doesn’t, he starts to whimper. “No!” He starts trying to pool his blood back into his wound, cupping it into the wound in his stomach. The white noise is replaced by oil black. Life is leaving him. “I’m one with the aether!” he shouts.

“You actually believe that shit?”

Then a wave of static makes me eat my words. Vince’s body starts pulsing rhythmically to the chorus of despair. He laughs. “I told you!” He plays in his own blood, watching the transmissions of others stream down his hands onto the floor. His wound becomes a swirling kaleidoscope of signals, images of massacres, further rioting, Aero’s dead body…

Mankind is about to reconnect on a cosmic level with the rest of their brethren, and this hate-filled maniac is to be their sacrificial lamb.

Unless I beat him to it.

I drive my heel into Vince’s armpit and tear the gauntlet off his arm. I place my spindly arm inside. Blood courses through the circuitry. The wires within bore deeper into my flesh. I scream. I never knew wearing this fucking thing was so painful.

It’s nothing compared to what comes next, so I brace myself.

I kneel down and pick up Vince’s knife off the floor, drive it into my throat and slice across with what little power remains in me. Liquid analog spurts across the floor, across Vince’s face.

I walk toward the front door, blood preceding my every step. I turn as I reach the threshold. Vince holds my pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger. It’s empty, so he beats it against his temple as I drop to my knees.

The flow of blood from my throat lessens, and everything starts to go dim. The last thing I see is Vince shattering one of the monitors with my gun and driving his head into the glass. But he’s too late. I’m already dead.

I watch all of this from outside of my body. I watch myself die as the world goes black. Then pulses white. Then black. Then white.

Then everything blasts at full volume, like a record held in stasis finally being released to spin again. A blackened globe peppered with lights slowly grows brighter. More and more lights dot the landscape, spilling across the country from east to west. With each one, my vision improves until I see the entire world clearly. I scrutinize the collective for Bill and Aero’s transmissions, project them outward, transmissions of the dead scattered across dead airwaves. Veritable messages in a bottle, tossed into the aether with the hope that the violence in the world will subside.

But my voice is drowned out by the worldwide hymn of chaos.

The rioting continues…

About the Author

Kirk Jones (k3rk Dʒoʊnz): 1. English Director of Nanny McPhee 2. “Sticky Fingaz,” rap artist and actor who played Blade for the television series 3. Canadian who survived a dive over Niagara Falls… only to return and pass upon his second attempt. 4. Boring white author of Uncle Sam’s Carnival of Copulating Inanimals (Eraserhead Press, 2010), Journey to Abortosphere (Rooster Republic, 2014), and Die Empty (Atlatl, 2017) who often gets mistaken for the other, arguably more notable, Kirk Jones fellows. 5. Also not Kirk Byron Jones.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Kirk Jones

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9781937009663 (TPB)

Cover art and jacket design by Mikio Murikami.

Apex Publications

Po Box 24323

Lexington, KY 40524

Visit us at ApexBookCompany.com

35,000 words

Release date planned for May 8th, 2018.

Content

Kirk Jones
AETHERCHRIST
ADVANCE REVIEW COPY

Introduction

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About the Author

Copyright