As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway

  “Now, this is where we get a step away from the science, but just a step.” He was locked in on me; his eyes never left mine as he talked, in a measured, soft voice. It was hypnotic. “Now, follow me,” he said. “There are waves. There are frequencies. Light and sound exist along a spectrum, with only a small percentage of the light and sound within ranges we can see and hear. We have to use special instruments to see light or hear sounds out of those ranges. The periodic table is another spectrum, with elements arranged in a certain order, from hydrogen, with a single proton, to lawrencium, with one hundred and three protons. At that end of the spectrum, the one with lots of protons, are elements that could not be seen until recently, and some of those elements can only be observed for a very short time under laboratory conditions. There are also atomic particles we know exist today that they couldn’t see twenty years ago, and that they never imagined existed a hundred years ago.

  “All of these things are true. There are aspects of our fundamental universe that we can experience for only very brief periods of time, under very special circumstances, or see with special instruments. No one would deny it. So why can’t this be true for ourselves? Why can’t our energy simply change to a different frequency, a different wave along the spectrum? Why can’t we continue to exist in a space in the physical world that can’t yet be seen or measured, or that can only be experienced in brief moments and under special circumstances, but is there all the time? If you look at an airplane propeller when the engine is off, you can see the blades of the propeller perfectly fine, but when the engines turn on, the propeller disappears. There are plenty of things that exist in this world that we can’t see, that we can’t hear. There are entire worlds around us that we never encounter. Why is it so hard to believe that this could be true for ourselves?

  “Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Well, it barely makes sense to me. Was I ranting?”

  “A little.”

  “I’ll stop, then,” he said, and folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes. He leaned back in his seat, and before long his head was rolling back and forth with the motion of the train. I watched his body sag and slack into sleep. I imagined his girlfriend sitting on the couch, falling asleep the same way, with a cigarette in her hand. I couldn’t see how you could fall asleep with a burning match in your hand. There wasn’t enough time, and it would burn you awake, I thought. If she had done it on purpose, dropped the match on the couch with Mr. Devon asleep upstairs, it seemed like a difficult, painful way to kill yourself.

  I used to think about the different ways I could do it: asphyxiation, gunshot, overdose, poison, hanging, jumping from a tall building (I’d probably have to get to Hilliker for that), cutting my wrists, drowning. There were a lot of easier ways than fire. I thought that people might think differently about me after I had killed myself, that they would wish they’d been nicer to me. And then I would think that if I killed myself they would be glad they hadn’t been friends with me; after all, who wants to be friends with somebody who’s going to kill himself? They wouldn’t feel sorry for me at all; they would make fun of me and even humiliate me after I was gone. I hadn’t thought about it for a long time, since before Anna, except for once in January, when she brought it up.

  “Do you think it’s a sin to kill yourself ?” she said.

  “You’re the one with the Bible in your room,” I said. “You tell me.”

  “I don’t think the Bible says anything about it.”

  “How about ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

  “But then look at all the killing in the Bible. And a lot of it God has something to do with. He’s killing people all the time. He even kills his own son.”

  I started to say something, but she cut me off.

  “And if you want to get technical, while you could claim that God murdered his son, you could also say that Jesus committed suicide.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  “Well, Jesus knew what was going to happen to him, and he let it happen. He could have stopped Judas, or simply gone away, or done something. This is a guy who performed miracles, right? He walked on water, turned water into wine, fed the multitudes. But he did nothing. He knew he was going to be killed and he let them kill him. It’s not that different from a guy who walks into traffic or lies down on the railroad tracks.”

  “I think you could say that being a martyr is not the same as lying down on the tracks. It’s more like being a soldier in combat, on a mission.”

  “I think they call those ‘suicide missions,’” she said. “That’s the name. You can call it being a martyr, but it’s just a different name for the same thing. He ended his life, instead of allowing life to take its natural course.”

  “But that was his natural course,” I said. “That was his whole reason for being born.” I stopped. She was looking at me, her blue eyes shining happily in the warm light of the basement, encouraging me, getting a kick out of what I was saying. “This is why you’re never supposed to discuss religion with anyone,” I said. “You always end up splitting hairs or getting into issues that can never be resolved, like angels-on-the-heads-of-pins-type stuff. You wouldn’t think they would make it so complicated, with so many loopholes and contradictions.”

  “It’s not very clear, is it? The Bible is full of contradictions and ambiguities and mysteries. That’s why I like it. That’s probably why it’s still around and still read at all. People want to try and figure it out, and there’s room for everyone to interpret it the way they see fit. If it was all crystal clear, if it all made sense all the time, nobody would care. It would be boring.”

  She was ready to move on, but we hadn’t even started.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “For the sake of the discussion, if suicide is not a sin, then what?”

  “Then what do you do?” she said.

  “What do I do? I don’t do anything.”

  “Why not? You don’t think this is a horrible world with horrible events and horrible people?”

  “I guess. I don’t really know, though. I haven’t seen any of the world.”

  “But you know about it. Don’t weasel out of it. You know what goes on in the world. Is it a place you would want to bring a child into?”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Well, you’re a child. So what are you doing here?”

  “If I had my choice, I guess I wouldn’t have been born, but now that I’m here, I might as well see how it all turns out.”

  “So you wouldn’t take the easy way out?”

  “Not this second. No. I mean, it’s something you can do anytime, so why not wait?”

  “Then you’ll always be waiting.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “You’re so practical,” she said. “It’s what I like about you. Really.”

  “Your turn,” I said.

  “My turn?”

  “Yeah. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Sometimes I think I could end it all, but it takes a lot of strength, or courage, because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Frank O’Hara said that he wished he had the strength to kill himself, but if he had that kind of strength he probably wouldn’t need to.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was run over by a dune buggy on the beach at Fire Island. I wonder, if he had known he was going to die young anyway, whether that would have changed anything.”

  “Like what?”

  “If you knew a car was going to run you over, would you end your life yourself, on your own terms, or wait for the car?”

  “I’m not sure it matters.”

  “I’m not sure either,” she said. “I guess that’s why you don’t know. Unless you have cancer or some other terminal illness, it’s a mystery. So you might as well stick around to see how it turns out, instead of jumping to the last page and spoiling it.”

  That’s the part I sift through. Those are
the words I roll over and try to examine again and again. Like so much of what Anna said, or what I remember, there are a number of perspectives and aspects. She was rarely definite. Things were never black and white. She was opinionated about everything, but she could also argue both sides of almost any subject with seemingly equal conviction. “Convince me,” she would say. I couldn’t even convince myself.

  She was a mystery. Did she want it spoiled?

  Mr. Devon’s head jerked forward and he looked at me, his eyes wide open. “Do you think she’ll call me?”

  “Who?”

  “That girl,” he said. He rubbed his palms up and down his face and looked around the train. “I mean about my photographs.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Did you take any pictures today?”

  He reached down and held his camera as if noticing it for the first time. “No,” he said. “I wear it to try and remember to take more pictures, but I never seem to take them.” He slipped the strap over his head and handed the camera to me. “Here,” he said, “take my picture.” I held it to my eye and he suddenly shouted, “No.” I still had it to my eye when he rose unsteadily from his seat and grabbed it from me. “I said no.”

  He sat back down and held the camera to his own eye and took my picture. There was no flash. “That should be all right,” he said. “I think it’s bright enough in here.” He then carefully placed the strap over his head and let the camera again rest in front of him. “I should have had you be the team photographer this year. That was dumb of me. And next year you’ll be playing. You will be playing, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I could help the team more taking pictures.”

  “We’ll see. A year can make a big difference.” He leaned his head back against the seat, and in a few minutes his mouth slackened and dropped open.

  Mr. Devon didn’t awaken until we were pulling into the station. He was back to his old self. We walked out to his truck. “Let’s hope it starts,” he said. It started all right, but the heat still didn’t work. We both shivered as he drove, laughing at the sound of our teeth chattering and the white clouds of breath filling the cab. “If you have a match, use it,” he told me. “Light something on fire, anything—a book, the seat, my coat, anything. Have you ever been this cold?”

  “Maybe you should try math,” I said. He didn’t seem to think that was funny. We drove the rest of the way to my house in silence.

  “It probably wasn’t worth it, was it?” Mr. Devon said.

  “No, it was. I had a good time. Thanks for inviting me and everything.”

  “I thought there would be some other people from school there. People you’d know. I guess it’s a long ways to go.”

  “It’s really not that far,” I said.

  “The exhibit’s going on for another week.”

  “I’ll spread the word,” I said.

  “Just leave out the part about the bar,” he said. “It was a good time, though, right?”

  “It was.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I turned on the shortwave for the first time since Anna had been gone, and listened to the same strange voices sending the same incomprehensible messages to someone or no one that Anna and I used to listen to. When a broadcast would end or fade, I would move up or down to another frequency, just killing time.

  I stumbled across a weak broadcast of a woman’s voice reciting a long list of numbers. The voice was almost buried in static, sounding distant and faint, but I recognized it. She might as well have been shouting in my ear. It was Anna’s voice. It sounded just like her. I sat up in bed and moved the radio around, holding it to one side, over my head, out in front of me, trying to get better reception, a clearer signal. It improved only slightly. I could make out only some of the numbers. “One, nineteen . . . nineteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty-three.” And then it was done. There was nothing more, only static. It was about twenty minutes after eleven. I frantically got out of bed and turned on the light. I wrote down the time and the frequency and the numbers I could remember. I didn’t even know whether I had gotten the order right, but I scribbled everything down as fast as I could, as close as I could remember.

  The next day I received an e-mail identifying the frequency I had listened to the night before and “2310 est.” It was from a Yahoo! account. I sent a reply, “Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?” but received nothing in return.

  I started listening that night at nine, but there was nothing on the radio at that frequency except static. At eleven-ten, I heard the same person, sounding just like Anna, reciting the following message: “Count. Nineteen, fifteen, thirteen, five, twenty, eight, nine, fourteen, seven.” Pause. “One, nineteen.” Pause. “Nineteen, nine, thirteen, sixteen, twelve, five.” Pause. “One, nineteen.” Pause. “Nineteen, fourteen, fifteen, twenty-three.” The message repeated a few times and then stopped.

  An e-mail from the same Yahoo! account was in my mailbox the next day. “What does it mean?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” I replied. “Who is sending this?”

  I listened to the same numbers the next two nights, and became even more certain that it was Anna’s voice. The broadcasts were exactly the same, as if they were a recording. I received no other e-mails.

  I began to think less about the broadcasts and more about the numbers. What did they mean? I wrote them down on a piece of paper and studied them. Nothing. I studied them again. Nothing. Then I wrote them down in five groups, separating the numbers where there were pauses in the broadcast. The first group contained nine numbers, the second two, the third six, the fourth two, and the final group had four numbers. The second and fourth groups were identical, one and nineteen. Nineteen was in every group. What did nineteen mean? What did it represent? I looked at the numbers again, and then at my transcript of the broadcast. It had started with the word “count.” I wrote the alphabet on a separate piece of paper and put a numeral 1 under A, 2 under B, and so on. The nineteenth letter was S. The second and fourth groups spelled “as.” The rest came easily. The numbers worked out. “Something as simple as snow,” was the message. Anna had sent the code.

  I had to find out where the broadcast was coming from. I went online and researched how to track down a shortwave broadcast but there wasn’t much information, and what I could find was too technical for me. I needed help—the only person I could think of to ask for help was Mr. Cayne. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have another option. I called him and asked if I could come over for help with a problem.

  “I’ve been listening to a strange message on the shortwave,” I told him when I went over. “This might seem crazy, but it sounds like Anna.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “A string of numbers.”

  “Anastasia saying a string of numbers?”

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “But it sounds like Anna. I mean, I’m almost positive it’s her. I want you to help me find out where the broadcast is coming from.”

  He looked at me straight in the eye. It always frightened me a little when he did this, looked at me dead-on with those bald eyes of his. “What do you think the numbers mean?”

  “I don’t know. But if we can find out where the message is coming from and who is broadcasting it, we might be able to figure it out.”

  “I don’t think that will help.”

  “How can you say that?”

  He was silent for a long moment, then said, “Because I’ve been broadcasting that message.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. I was hoping that someone could help me figure it out. I found it on Anastasia’s computer. She had recorded it a few days before she . . . before she left,” he said. “I listened to it and thought I could get some help with it.”

  “So you sent the e-mails too?”

  “I sent it to all her friends. Everyone on her contacts list, everyone I could think of, everyone she might have known. I thought people might help more readily if th
ey didn’t know that it was me behind it.”

  “Did anyone help?”

  “No. I have to find out what it means.”

  “I know what it means,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t.”

  “I know. But I think I do. The message was for me.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you, Mr. Cayne.”

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t. It wasn’t really a message. It’s just the beginning, a signal. It was a phrase we agreed on to start a message, a secret that only the two of us would know. In case we ever got separated. I can’t tell anyone what it means.”

  “What do you mean, in case you ever got separated?”

  I told him about how Anna wanted to make the code, the way Houdini had done with his wife. “It was just a contingency,” I said, “but then there’s this.” I handed him Anna’s obituary, the one I had received in the mail. He read it and then read it again. “Did you write this?” he said.

  “Someone sent it to me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe Anna.”

  “No,” he said, very sharply. “She didn’t send this.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  He studied me for a moment, then replied carefully. “There are things in here that Anna wouldn’t know.”

  “What things?” Mr. Cayne didn’t answer; he just looked at the paper. “Did you have another daughter who ran away?” I said.

  “One has nothing to do with the other,” he said.

  “I thought she was an only child.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “I thought so, but now I’m not so sure. What else is true in there?”

  He handed the sheet of paper back to me. “This won’t help anyone. You should just forget about it.”

  “Maybe we should take it to the police.”