Angels and Electrons: A Sub-Suburb Tale

by Paul Hawkins

  *

  From Blaise’s Journal

  When I awoke in the sheriff’s office it was after midnight and it took me a while to remember what I done that evening. After my mania a white-canvas amnesia had devoured my mind, and a law man was yelling at me and I mostly just wanted some water.

  A law man was questioning me - the man’s black suit screamed “federal” although the office we were in obviously belonged to a small-town sheriff.

  “Again,” the man asked. “Why did you do it? Were you looking for a loophole in our national security?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Then let’s look at the video again, Mr. Bohrs, and see what you said.”

  I became aware that I was handcuffed in a wooden chair.

  A night breeze came through the window. It smelled sweet, he thought, like wisteria.

  The federal agent had a TV set up in front of me. He clicked a switch and the TV came to life.

  My own face appeared in the middle of the screen, a recording of the transmission I’d sent out just hours before.

  “Fellow citizens, I’m sorry to interrupt this program but I must act quickly. The sun has set and my sanity’s upon me. This moment of revelation was made possible because I stitched my freedom together across the years in scattered moments of eclipse when I was sane. I’m here to free you from the signals.”

  The video showed me broadcasting from the shack. There was a keyboard at my fingertips and a bank of television screens behind me. There in the sheriff’s office I watched them. They showed the evidence I’d stored across the years to damn the universe.

  One was a video of a man without hope dying, finally, in a shack in summer, despite the pleas of his one and only son to hand the gun to him.

  On another screen was a picture of my father and I taken by the local action news crew one day in August three years ago when I had been able to talk the my father out of his ham radio‑cluttered outpost for the first time. In one hand I was taking a gun from him, and between his other hand and my father’s there was a jewel of light, our fingers having not quite met yet. The dust of dry and untilled acres surrounded us. The old man’s eyes were bewildered, the last remnant of unconscious hopeful love, bequeathed from long-passed youth, all but completely extinguished. My eyes looked scared and tired. The old man had jammed a local radio station with a suicide threat that day. But this was the time I had been able to talk him out of it. The next time he had sent no signal. He had given up sending them out and I had lost the power to persuade him.

  Another screen briefly showed two lovers back to back in bed, before spiraling through and repeating, lightning fast, a montage of things I had recorded with his television diagnostic devices, a blur of still photographs of all things seen and obscene - too often too fast to tell, but now and then dwelling on a particular image that came around in the loop. Husbands yelling at or slapping wives, wives belittling their husbands, men and women drinking to excess, to kill pain, punches, kicks slapping, murders. Porn and porn and porn.“Every signal receiver must also act as a transmitter.” The first prototype of the device had barely fit in a 40 gallon Rubbermaid trash can, but I had perfected and miniaturized them and installed them in my clients’ houses - diagnostic devices for their TV sets, designed to save them hundreds of dollars by instantly pinpointing the source of their problems. Wired into the sets’ own circuitry they could spy to finds traces of the previously thought improbable, invisible gods or demons who set lovers back to back and otherwise acted as catalysts of mistakes and downfalls. And everywhere I looked I smudges or unexpected flashes of light, the worm disguised as angel gaining entrance to the heart only to destroy it. He saw these things. For every drama there was a radiation, and for every radiation an imp.

  The remaining screen showed the night sky from a camera perched on top of my mast antenna to see beyond the distortion of city lights. It showed the heavens cold and wheeling and unanswering and slow, indifferent and mocking patience in contrast to the violence below.

  Seated in that lawman’s office I saw on one screen the image of my younger sister Janet. My older sister Tess had left the misbegotten farm house as soon as she could, but Janet, the responsible one - she stayed behind. But then she did the thing to rebel against herself because her self would not rebel against her father, and she ended up pregnant, and it was her father’s indifference to her pregnancy that injured her the most. And she resolved to leave.

  “No, stay here please,” I had said. “For me. If you are here then maybe I can get myself back together. Then Maria might come back.”

  “She won’t come back.”

  “Well then stay here for me - for a little while.”

  And so she did - but only for a little while.

  Once I’d learned that Janet was pregnant Jude boasted to anyone and everyone who could hear that he’d personally hunt down and kill the man, and that made me suspect him. I pounded his face into the ground until he told me himself, but Janet said to let him go. She knew he wouldn’t come to their house anymore. And he didn’t, and she didn’t want to see him anyway, that gave Jude the catalyst he needed to get himself away from that depressing place and resolved to go back to school. But he didn’t leave. He just disappeared from sight. I heard he’d enrolled again at the community college, but he was still around town. He was hanging around for whatever – for Janet? – maybe to see if they might get together after all, after the child came.

  Janet became reclusive, hiding in her room; I knew she was having secret conversations on the phone with Tess. She was planning to leave. But occasionally she would come out into the front room looking swollen and bodily weary and our eyes would brush and I’d try to say something but she’d interrupt:

  “Get out, Blaise. This place will kill you.”

  “But Dad…”

  “He’s dead already.”

  I would deny it but without much vigor and she knew she was right but she’d change the subject.

  “Blaise, I need some ice cream, Rocky Road,” or simply, “Blaise - beef jerky. Teriyaki.”

  But one time her expression looked odd so I approached and sat.

  “You understand what this is all about, don’t you?” she asked, resting one hand on her stomach. “This is all a joke,” she said.

  “Looks real.”

  “Not just that.”

  “Then what?”

  “These last few years. He won’t pull out of it and we are only killing ourselves. Tess is coming to pick me up tomorrow. Leave with us.”

  “Dad needs me here.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “I won’t.”

  She said nothing; there was a strange expression on her face. For one instant it was completely unfurrowed and unlined, balanced with an illusion of translucence that gave warm light to her chestnut-brown eyes, and she looked off at something I couldn’t see.

  “Maybe you won’t die. Maybe there’s a plan for everything.”

  Then she looked at me again. It made me uncomfortable to see her like a muse. It was worse than seeing her in her underwear.

  “Run and get me a Butterfinger.”

  I leapt at the chance to run to the convenience store to get it for her, but when I got back Janet was gone. She had departed with Tess. The tire tracks were still fresh in the dirt.

  My father did not get over the loss of Janet. He blamed himself; he retreated further into his shack, secluding himself for hours in the heat of summer, scouring the signals for reassurance until the day he wouldn’t come out.

  A crowd had gathered when he barricaded himself in there the second time. When I approached the shack the old man moved into view and stood in the door with a gun to his head. His eyes were hollow and he moved mechanically. I said something and the old man at first began to move toward his son but then he fell.

  I held my hand out and my father almost took his son’s hand but then did not. For one brief moment a jewel of light shone between our two han
ds. If even today a hawk were to sweep and scour the unbreakable plain he might spot it, even now, the lighted jewel extended one last time between my hand and my father’s. Maybe he was passing something along. But then the old man recoiled as if stung by a snake, his mouth silently moving as if trying to knit noun and verb together one final time, to speak some preposterous myth that would join motive with motion and give his life meaning, if even to just drag him across one more minute. But then he jumped up like a mad man and raced back into the shack, and then I heard a shot.

  The news crews asked me how I felt. I felt nothing.

  I retreated into my silver Airstream for a blur of months or years - an indefinable time. Maria never came back. Tess and Janet never came back. And then one day, a book fell open in front of me.