Static!

by Michael R Collings

  “But I saw it,” Nick insisted. The sparks, the flames, the smell. “I remember everything. And the….”

  He hesitated, unable to force himself to mention the phantom Greer he had glimpsed thought he had glimpsed for that single awful moment. “And that kid was so rude,” he continued finally, “swearing and cursing all the time. Shit, Payne, he even threatened to stab me with a screwdriver! I couldn’t just imagine something like that!”

  “He what?” The words were the right ones, but the tone was not. Payne was laughing at him. Well, maybe not laughing, but certainly not taking him absolutely seriously.

  Nick’s face assumed a little-boy stubbornness and his lips squeezed tightly closed, as if they had made a decision on their own: If nobody believes me I won’t say anything at all. So there!

  “Come on,” Payne said. “Don’t be like that. Think it through logically. You’ve been sick, really sick, and you still felt pretty punk. And someone comes out, someone whose business depends on how well he deals with people. And you claim that he was abusive and profane and physically assaulted you.”

  “No,” Nick interrupted, trying to put things back into the right perspective. But it was so hard. “He only….”

  “Physically threatened you, then. How long do you think Tasco would stay in business if he did that to his customers? Just once, and the word would get out. Then where would he be?”

  “But it wasn’t Tasco. It was this kid, Ric was his name, I think.”

  Nick heard the little-boy whine in his voice and hated it. It was as if his mother had caught him in the cookie jar—wrong image (his mind broke in) she didn’t have a cookie jar, try again with another simile, one that works this time—as if his mother had caught him snitching the last of the chocolate chips hiding in the crumpled plastic package and was scolding him. Payne’s voice had that old woman’s I know better than you young man and you’d better listen to me carefully before you get into more trouble timbre that Nick hated, too.

  “Okay, so it wasn’t Tasco himself,” Payne continued. “It was one of his employees, though, and you can bet that he would take any complaints seriously, especially from me, considering how much business I’ve given him over the....

  “Come on, Nick, you can’t really believe what you are saying. There’s nothing here. No smoke, no burned insulation, no ashes. Nothing. Isn’t it easier to believe that you saw something that wasn’t here, that you were more feverish than you realized and imagined a problem that just didn’t exist.”

  Payne’s voice was calm. His words were reasonable. Nick tried to hold on to what he knew—believed—were his memories, but he couldn’t do it, not as strongly as before. He walked to the shelf and ran a finger over the wall, even flicked a fingertip against the exposed copper wiring, half expecting to feel the nip of a shock. Nothing. The wall was smooth and white. The wires were dead.

  He didn’t want to accept Payne’s explanation, but unfortunately it did make sense. More sense than his own story did now. Maybe he did remember the kid as being more abrasive than he really was. Maybe he just held the screwdriver oddly and Nick thought he was being threatened. Maybe the phantom-figure had been only that, a phantom stirred up by sickness and dizziness and overwrought nerves. Maybe.... Maybe.

  “See you tomorrow,” Nick said abruptly. “Sorry if I worried you. I’m...I better get on home.”

  He dug into his pocket.

  “The repairman left this for you. The pick-up receipt for the set.”

  He held out a neatly folded paper. Payne took it and read it.

  “This proves that I’m right, doesn’t it. Look, everything is in order, down to the serial number. Neat and orderly and precise, even if the handwriting is messy. It doesn’t look like the work of someone who tells long-standing paying customers to fuck off.”

  Nick shivered. The last words sounded terrible coming from Payne—too harsh, too coldly obscene for him. For an instant, Nick felt as if he were going to vomit again, then the moment passed and he just felt tired, exhausted, drained.

  “Okay, I guess you’re right.” There it was, the admission of defeat, just like his mother was always able to wring from him even when it was an admission that he would have sold his soul to keep from her she always knew how to get it out. “Sorry.” He wasn’t sure what he was sorry about, but he was definitely sorry.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” Payne said broadly. “No problem. You just get home and take care of yourself. Get some rest.”

  He walked Nick to the back door and held the screen open for him, like Nick was a cripple or a little kid whose arms were too puny to put enough pressure against the door to keep it open.

  “And thanks for keeping an eye out,” Payne called as Nick crossed through the hedge into his own yard.

  Nick didn’t answer. He waved one hand half-heartedly, as if to say yeah don’t mention it anytime boss, and disappeared into his own house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Payne stepped back inside. He was more worried than he had let on. He was almost angry and not sure quite what to believe. He had never known Nick to lie. He wasn’t himself sure about the theory that Nick’s illness had led him to some sort of hallucination, but there was nothing to suggest anything else.

  He returned to the control room and examined the wall. There was no evidence that it had been painted over, no streaks to suggest that it had been washed down. He picked up one of the lead wires. The plastic sheathing was untouched, with a feathering of dust along one surface that implied that it had lain undisturbed in one position for quite a while. Not a hint of scorching or fire. The copper wire inside was still bent in a half circle, as if it had fit around an electronic lead and had been removed when someone unscrewed the lead; the wire had not even been pulled loose.

  He passed his hand over the shelf, but even before he did, he could see the slight discoloration where the set had sat for so many years without being moved.

  No evidence at all of anything wrong.

  But Payne frowned anyway. Something was not right. Maybe he should call Tasco and check it out. He went into the kitchen and was reaching for the wall phone when two things happened simultaneously.

  First, he remembered that it was after nine o’clock; surely Tasco’s would be closed by this time, and leaving a message on the answer machine did not seem like the best approach. If Nick was right and the guy working there—what was the name, Ric?—was unreliable, then there was a chance that he would get to the tape first, maybe he got there early and unlocked or something, and he could easily erase it. Payne’s hand hesitated, not six inches from the receiver.

  And at the same instant, the phone rang.

  His hand pulled back, the only physical indication of how startled he was. For a second he considered not answering, then he pulled the receiver off the wall hook.

  “Gunnison.”

  “Payne, is that you?”

  “Cathy? Sure it’s me. Who else would it be?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know. It’s just been so long since we talked, and every time I’ve tried to call for the past few days the phone has rung once or twice and then gone dead. I thought maybe you were having trouble with the lines.”

  Payne frowned again. “No, no trouble. That is, I don’t know of any trouble.”

  Actually, now that she had brought the subject up, he became aware of a high-pitched buzz in the earpiece. He held the phone an inch or so away. That helped.

  “I’ve been...out of town for a while. Up to San Francisco to check on some property there.”

  “I wondered. I thought maybe you decided not to see me anymore.”

  “No,” he said with a laugh. “Nothing like that. Just business. Boring business.”

  There was a brief moment of silence from both ends of the line. The circuit was still buzzing, Payne noticed.

  “Well—” Cathy said.

  “Say—” Payne began at the same moment.

  They both laughed, but the sounds echoed hollowly
through the telephone.

  “Go on,” Cathy said.

  “No,” Payne said, “Ladies first.”

  “Well, I was wondering if you wanted to come over tonight. You know, drinks, a little music. My roommate’s out of town again.” There was an unspoken invitation in her words: And we can be alone here, for as long as we want.

  “Thanks, but I’m awfully tired right now. Just got home, not more than half an hour ago.”

  There was another silence.

  “But maybe tomorrow,” he added hurriedly.

  “Yeah, tomorrow. Here? I can fix dinner and everything.”

  This time the pause was barely long enough to be noticeable but it was there nevertheless.

  “I’m not sure...okay, tomorrow.”

  She waited for a second, then, “Payne? Are you still there?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I thought the line went dead again. I couldn’t hear anything at all.”

  “There is some interference tonight. Your voice is crackling. Look, I’ll call you in the morning and set things up for tomorrow night. And I’ll have the phone company come out and check the line. Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Over the static, her voice sounded unsure, fragmented.

  “Gotta go now. See you tomorrow.” He waited for a sound that might have been Cathy saying something like “see you later” and then he hung up.

  He thought about calling the telephone company and reporting a problem with the line, then decided that the call had to wait a minute. His bladder was full from the trip and he felt suddenly that if he didn’t empty it he would burst.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he went right into his bedroom. He hadn’t been lying when he said that he was tired. He was more than that, he was exhausted. He couldn’t remember ever being so bone-tired before. All he wanted to do was drop down on the bed and watch something mindless and entertaining and drift off to sleep.

  He pulled off his wrinkled suit coat and tie and shirt and stepped out of his pants, letting them drop to the floor. He fully intended to hang the suit on the back of a chair and let most of the worst wrinkles pull out. But he didn’t. Instead he put on an old pair of jeans that had shrunk until they were tighter than he liked, and a T-shirt that his high-school girlfriend had given him on his eighteenth birthday. It was at least two sizes too small but he had kept it for sentimental reasons, folded neatly and tucked in the back of his sock drawer. He pulled it over his head. The material stretched across his chest, cinched around his arms.

  It felt right.

  Outside, the night air was so warm that the T-shirt was enough. He didn’t bring a jacket. He started the car and backed out of the driveway and headed down Greensward to the junction with Kennedy Avenue and then turned right—south—and followed Kennedy through the business center of Tamarind Valley and onto the freeway heading south. By the time he noticed where he was, he had left the freeway and followed one of the main arteries—he didn’t know which one—eastward, toward the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. He was almost directly beneath the HOLLYWOOD sign and could see it glowing against the blackness of the hillsides.

  At the first intersection he turned right, onto a street ablaze with lights and store fronts. It was busy. Even though it was past ten o’clock, some of the places were wide open and doing business. He saw a couple of restaurants, half a dozen bars. Motels with glaring neon lights sat interspersed among them. Vaguely he wondered where he was. He crooked his neck and looked out through the side passenger window to see if he could spot a street sign at the next intersection.

  There was a sign on a steel post—white letters on a blue background and easily readable in the garish light coming from around the painted-over windows of an all-night bookstore on the corner, but he didn’t read the letters.

  Instead, he stared at the woman.

  She had white spiky hair, not blonde but white, dead-fish white that accentuated her make-up—black mascara so dark that it made her eyes look like empty wells into nothingness, lipstick so dark that it looked black, might even have been black where she opened her lips to smile at him and licked them with a flickering tongue. Her dress was short and slit almost to the thigh. The top was tight and short as well. From where he sat in his car, he could see enough of her breasts that his breath caught. She leaned toward him and smiled again.

  The light changed from red to green and he floored the accelerator and the car shot out into the intersection, barely missing a low-slung sporty model that had tried to make the yellow from the other street and was still halfway in Payne’s lane. He swerved around it and lifted his foot to slow the car. Fortunately there was little traffic and the incident had caused no more than the turning of a couple of heads. The guy in the sports car hadn’t even noticed, probably.

  Payne checked in his rear-view mirror.

  She was still at the corner, her hand raised toward him, one finger protruding stiffly upward.

  The next light was red when he got there. He stopped, staring straight ahead, his foot poised over the accelerator and ready to go. He would turn here, onto a darkened residential street that would lead back to the freeway and from there back to Tamarind Valley—eventually—and he would go to bed and get some rest and be ready for work tomorrow.

  The light flickered to green.

  He pulled straight ahead, passing more of the same kinds of businesses, all open, all brightly lit with flickering red or yellow or orange lights, all brightly painted in garish colors. There were fewer bars, more bookstores and arcades with ADULT spelled out in flashing lights. More women standing on corners and by doors and along curbs.

  He felt his face flushing.

  At the next corner, he stopped again. This time, he looked out the window instead of straight ahead, his curiosity getting the better of him. After all, back home they hadn’t had a real “Red-light District,” just one waitress at the Stop-n-Snak who was rumored to be unusually friendly to men after hours, if you caught her in the right mood and left a big enough tip. Payne didn’t know about that; he had never tried, never felt the need to try.

  So now that the initial shock of surprise was over and he knew where he was and what to expect—this is California, after all, wild California where you can find anything you want—he decided to look things over. Purely out of curiosity.

  He glanced through the window on the passenger side.

  A man stared back. A boy, really. His hair was not as spiky or as obviously bleached as the woman’s had been. It was modish and long, blond but more like sun-bleaching than bottle bleaching. His jeans were tight, with horizontal rips at both knees, smooth enough at the edges to let everyone know that they were there to be stylish not because the jeans were old. He wore no shirt, just a dark denim vest that hung open to reveal his chest, tanned and lean and gleaming in the light as if he were sweating from hours of hard work. He smiled and stepped forward, hips thrust forward provocatively. He was about to rest one hand on the car door.

  The light was still red—how long are the lights around here don’t they know that people might need to get somewhere shit why doesn’t it change—and the man’s hand was only inches away when Payne jerked the car to the right and spun around the corner, missing the man by only inches but he was safe and the street was dark and lined with trees and apartment buildings with shades down or no lights at all and the night air whistling through his open window cooled his face and he gradually slowed down and shifted his hips in the seat to a more comfortable position and stretched his legs out to relax them.

  He must have pulled too hard on the wheel, too, because his hand hurt, from the knuckles through to the palm, like a spike had been driven through the central web of nerves. He pulled over.

  In the rear-view mirror he could not even see a glimmer of lights from the street, whatever one it had been. There must be a hill between it and where he was parked. He breathed heavily and deeply, massaging his hand until the shard of pain disappeared and he could
move the fingers easily again, grip the wheel and angle out into the lane and move toward the freeway again.

  Pulling into the westbound lane, he drove on into the night.

  He was almost at the Kennedy exit before he felt totally calm again. He signaled and made the transition from the fast inside lane to the center lane, then again to the outside lane, just in time to glide smoothly into the exit lane without braking or touching the accelerator.

  He slowed gradually, timing his progress so that the red light at the base of the freeway exit flicked to green just as he arrived and he could pull out across two lanes of Kennedy and head east without even pausing.

  He was okay.

  He was in control again.

  Halfway between the freeway and Greensward, he decided to stop for something to drink. His throat was dry and tight, and he knew that he didn’t have anything at home. A soda would be right.

  He cruised slowly until he saw the red and green sign that identified an all-night 7-Eleven®, probably the only place open between the freeway and his place. He turned into the parking lot, stopping in the empty slot right in front of the doors.

  The place was empty. The only person there was the guy behind the counter, youngish, about Payne’s age. A surfer-type from the looks of it, working nights so he would have his days free to spend at the beach. Payne walked through the store to the back and followed the line of glass doors until he found the sodas. He pulled out a single can with his right hand. The metal was so cold that it hurt against his palm, reminding him of the stab of pain earlier. He shifted the can to the other hand. It was less sensitive, and the can didn’t seem as icy. As an afterthought, he grabbed a six pack as well, careful to hold it by the plastic handle.

  He walked slowly back to the checkout stand.

  The man watched him. Payne could feel eyes boring into him as he approached the counter. He wished suddenly and feverishly that he hadn’t worn that pair of jeans, that T-shirt. He felt naked and exposed.