Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  *

  One fateful morning after an all-night PBS marathon of “Man’s Conquest of Space” (it being pledge week) he had overslept and this prompted Bess Truman to ram her piggy head into the side of his silver Airstream to wake him up, and in doing that she dislodged a book from his shelves, and it fell open and he noticed something. It, or something in it, caught some remaining non-self-pitiful wisp of his consciousness and teased a little of himself out of himself. The book was called the Untold Complete History of Electronics, and it had been his father’s.

  The book had fallen open to a page, and there on the page, circled and starred by his father’s spidery scrawl with red ink was a passage that read:

  "Every signal receiver must (however inefficiently) also act as a transmitter.”

  It captured his mind. He picked up the book and looked at it. He read it again and again, first by itself and then in context. Something got caught in the worn-down hooks of his. He actually made a fresh pot of coffee and changed the light bulb over his table so he could read.

  He read well into the morning, and by noon the idea had occurred to Blaise as to what he might do, how he might detect and capture him or them - the imps of the unseen, the agents of fate, the things that take all things from men and bury them but leave them alive in a hole without an answer. He would catch a glimpse of God.

  When he was done with this book Blaise made another pot of coffee and then read another, and then another, and then ten more. Days passed into days and he absorbed all the books’ knowledge with a preternatural alacrity. He began to wake up inside. He opened the windows. He breathed fresh air. He read them while he showered. He read them while he brushed his teeth, he read them while he shaved - and at the end of the week he emerged from his trailer into a bright morning both purposeful and mostly clean.

  He knew what he would do. He had a very clear idea. He went to his old car and it still ran and he drove resolutely from the suburbs back to the old inner city Catholic parish of his childhood and dropped in on his dad’s old electronics partner, Don. It was spring but Don still had his house stoked to the temperature of hell. Blaise walked in and talked to Don for four or five hours in sibilant tones that drowsed the crew-cut old man and extracted every secret that he knew. He then deftly convinced him to let him start up the old electronics repair business.

  Blaise started it and commandeered all of its equipment and ran it well for months. Blaise came back to life. He developed a clientele in the sub-suburbs. He fixed cars, radios, dishwashers, even computers. But mostly, he fixed TVs. Lots of TVs. And after maybe half a year the day arrived when his plan to come to fruition - the reason he had restarted the business in the first place. He had installed diagnostic elements into the TVs to make repairs easier. But all transmitters are also receivers.

  When the day of his plan’s fruition came, he took his morning shower and and over the water's rush heard the phone machine sending out its automated calls: "Hello! This is Don from Don's TV Repair. I'll be by for your three-month check­up and repair today. I appreciate your business - you're like the family I never had! If you're experiencing any specific problems, please describe them at the tone."

  The keys to his plan were the recording devices he had attached to every television he serviced. He meant to catch a glimpse of the unknown interfering in the lives of men, causing dissent in the happiest of homes, turning good fortune into bad and making good men evil.

  In some cases it had been three months since he saw his clients last, in some just two weeks. But because the service was free they bought the premise. And in truth Blaise did good work. "Oh Don," they said, "The TV’s wonderful again!" And although Blaise was not Don, he was pleased; the shirts said “Don,” the van said “Don,” and so he went became Don to them.

  It was a lovely but hot spring day when he went out to retrieve the recordings, the day that ended in him doing what he did. Already his uniform - grey twill slacks, short-sleeved white shirt with "Don" stitched on the pocket in red cursive letters - was beginning to stick to him.

  He would repair the TV’s; he would retrieve his recording devices; he would see if he had captured any evidence of Him or them.

  And that evidence would fit into his even bigger scheme - for over the past several months of his reanimation, a mania had possessed him. He had done more than re-start the family business. In the shadow of his father’s old shack he had built a towered radio, and then a transmitter. At nights he planned the machines to do the things the whispers told him to do, but in daylight he destroyed them because he would not do it. Repairing TV’s was enough.

  But on the 1001st time, when he was clearing out his trailer and randomly discovered an old note from Maria scribbled in a textbook they used to share saying “Meet me - call me! Love you!” - and a doodle of a cat - she doodled cats - he made the decision to do the bigger thing he had been planning.

  His primary radio telescope was constructed of acres of chain link fence, sagging unobtrusively in a gully near the north end of his property. A cable snaked from the antenna to his father’s old shack nearby. At night he would pull the "Don's TV Repair" van right up to the shack and duck inside until the dawn, until the sun shattered all the truant silver signals like a hammer in a glass menagerie.

  Once he connected the arm-thick jumper cables to the nearby substation, the rest was easy. He sent out a massive signal. Not a single household in America got to see the end of “CBS Brave Housewife Theater” that night. They saw him instead, ranting and raving from inside his shack at the rest of the world.