Ghost Radio (17 page)

As he stood up, the preacher kicked him; first in the ribs, then in the gut. This guy's done this before, Joaquin thought as he curled away from another blow. Then age and weight caught up with the pastor. He stopped kicking, and took a short wheezing breath. This might be Joaquin's only chance.

He leaped to his feet and charged, throwing his right shoulder into the pastor's abdomen. The pastor hardly budged, raining a series of blows on Joaquin…mostly to the gut and kidneys. Joaquin reeled.

Where the fuck did this guy learn to fight? he thought. And why is he fighting with me?

These thoughts running through his mind, Joaquin dodged and blocked the blows—looking for a way in. A knee to the balls. A forearm to the throat. Something to stop the pastor in his tracks.

Finally, he found it. Ducking under a hail of fists, Joaquin grabbed the pastor around the waist, tightening his grip. Not what he hoped for. But it did the job.

The pastor wriggled and twisted, trying to break free. No luck. Joaquin held tight, increasing his viselike hold. The smell of the pastor's cheap soap and aftershave wafted into Joaquin's nose, and he wondered how he'd gotten himself into this situation: a mysterious phone call, and less than an hour later, he's wrestling with a reverend of Toltec Christianity.

Life takes some odd turns.

At that thought, the pastor broke free, pushing himself away from Joaquin, clasping his hands together, and bringing them down hard on the top of Joaquin's head.

Joaquin reeled, watching the floor wobble and turn to Jell-O. It looked so inviting: soft, gentle, and welcoming. He wanted to collapse into it.

The door swung open. Joaquin righted himself and glanced toward the door. His blurry vision could just make out a rough shape.

“Maestro, I couldn't find—”

The pastor turned toward the voice, and Joaquin sent a right cross speeding toward his jaw—hoping his hazy vision could be trusted. A sharp crack and a thud as the pastor's body hit the floor told him it could.

“What the fuck?” exclaimed the blur at the door.

Joaquin glanced toward the blur, shaking his head. The shape resolved itself into a blond boy holding packages. Just as the image became clear, the boy dropped the packages and ran off.

“Get back here!” yelled Joaquin.

Pulled by strings that seemed beyond his control, he went after the young man. He remembered what the pastor had called him.

“Barry, hold up. I just want to ask you something.”

But the young man kept on running. He took the stairs, jumping down, sliding, and bouncing hard off the walls. Joaquin followed him at top speed, losing contact with the ground, stumbling and leaping as he went.

On the ground floor, he almost caught up with the young man in the foyer, but Barry made it into the street, expanding his lead. Joaquin wasn't thinking, he was only running, possessed by a force he'd never felt before. His feet seemed to float above the sidewalk; he dodged people as if they were moving in slow motion.

The fresh air and intensity of the pursuit cleared his head. It filled him with energy. It felt almost as if he were playing tag with Barry, whom he knew he'd reach any moment now. Meanwhile, Barry kept bumping into pedestrians, struggling to give Joaquin the slip, until finally on one corner he tripped, lost his balance, and fell to the ground. Joaquin came to a stop over him and stuck out his arm to help him up, but with enough force so he'd understand that there was no escape. Barry's knee was bleeding. When he saw Joaquin leaning over him, he covered his face.

“I just want to ask you a few questions,” Joaquin said, out of breath from the chase.

The speed wasn't working.
The coffee wasn't working. I was a ghoul, plunged into the land of ghosts. Nothing felt real. Maybe it never had.

I did the only thing I could.

“Caller, you're on the air.”

My voice sounded odd, echoing distantly in my headphones.

“They're in the pipes, you know.”

“What?” I asked. The echoing intensified.

“Well, it's one of their hiding places. One of the places you can corner them.”

“Caller, what exactly—”

“I think they're there all the time. But we don't see them. They're too quick for us. Too smart.”

The walls of the studio began to shimmer and bend. It's happening again, I thought.

“You have to be quiet. Patient. I was special ops back in 'Nam. So I can be quiet. And patient. Very quiet. And very patient.”

Silence and patience. I wished I had some of that. The studio walls shifted toward translucence. The only thing that connected me to reality was the sound of the caller's voice.

“Last night I sat on the top rung of a ladder in my kitchen. About six feet from the kitchen sink. But I was high enough that I could see down into it…into the drain. I sat there for hours. ‘Becoming one with the night,' as the top kick in basic used to call it.”

I saw the bottom rung of the ladder in front of me. Splatters of white paint dried to the tread.

“Your body disappears. The limbs, trunk, neck…everything…somewhere else. You're only eyes…looking…waiting.”

I looked up. The caller perched at the top of the ladder. His body impossibly still. It barely seemed three-dimensional: a shadow in black military clothes. I put a foot on the first tread, and pulled myself onto the ladder.

“And there I rested. Still. Eyes on the sink…on the drain…waiting.”

Reaching the top of the ladder, I looked over the caller's left shoulder and down at the drain: a black abyss in a sea of burnished aluminum.

“I was there for hours. But I don't mind it. It reminds me of happier times: steamy nights in the Mekong.”

His breath shallowed beneath me. It was unlike any breathing I'd ever heard. An autonomic function camouflaged by years of practice. Had I not known it was breathing, I might have confused it with a summer breeze, or the flap of a dragonfly's wings.

“Sometime around three, I began to hear something: something struggling to move through the pipes.”

I heard it too. It reminded me of one Gabriel's more bizarre recordings: the amplified sound of two slugs mating. A sound suggesting viscous undulations and the faltering demands of an alien sexuality.

“Then I saw it.”

Something glinted in the drain, catching the pale moonlight that lapped into the kitchen from the window over my right shoulder. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was impossible.

“A single limpid eye stared back at me from the drain.”

The eye darted back and forth, moving from the caller to me. Then it stopped, blinked, and started scanning again.

“There's an intelligence in the eye.”

The caller may have seen intelligence. I didn't. It appeared vaguely
human, but its gaze suggested experiences vast and nameless. No, not intelligence, something much more frightening: knowledge.

“And as quickly as it came, it was gone. I would think that it was a dream or a hallucination had I not seen it so often.”

As the studio began reappearing around me, I heard Alondra's voice.

“Caller,” she said, “you never told us what these things were. Do you know? Do you have any idea?”

“Some think they died out. Or left to return to some forgotten homeland in the stars. But I think it's them, they're in the pipes.”

“Caller, who are they?” Alondra asked again insistently.

“The Toltecs.”

Barry was an optimist,
or at least that's how he saw himself. He was a political science major deeply committed to Latin American causes. He was a tireless seeker of spiritual stimulation.

For a year he lived in a tiny, poverty-stricken community in the Guerrero Mountains. There he caught a brutal stomach infection that had nearly cost him his life; he worked in sugarcane fields in the Dominican Republic, where he experienced the near-slavery conditions of the plantation workers; in Peru, he joined an association of workers and university students in their struggle against a local Ayacucho despot.

However, Barry always tried to take time out from his social crusades to spend the summers at his family's home in the Hamptons. His parents set up a trust fund for him so that he'd have everything he needed during his college years; but now he believed that using any of this money was immoral, and he opted to support himself by other means. He took odd jobs doing construction work; as a salesclerk in a pet shop; as a waiter. His main source of income, though, was “cultural commerce.” Almost every day he stole a dozen books: bestsellers, art books, high-priced first editions, illuminated manuscripts, and other gems that he later auctioned on eBay or sold on Amazon.com. Under his complex system of religious logic, this was an act of justice, reparations for centuries of oppression. Unsurprisingly, Barry led a fairly paranoid existence. He kept an eye out for the authorities, alert to anything suspicious, anything out to end the logic and order of his life.

That was why, when Barry saw Joaquin fighting with the preacher, he assumed that
he
was Joaquin's real target.

Once Joaquin assured him that he wasn't a police officer, bookstore security guard, or library agent, Barry stopped trembling and started to relax.

Looking down at Barry, still catching his breath, Joaquin explained that he'd received a bizarre and especially undesirable phone call from the pastor's telephone.

“Although, like I said, the voice on the telephone definitely wasn't his,” Joaquin concluded.

“Of course it wasn't. The pastor has much more important, vital things to do than make crank calls. But if you know it wasn't him, then how come you two were slugging it out?”

“I don't know; I told him my problem and he said that I'd actually come there to kill him.” Joaquin's voice was colored with sarcasm.

“And is that what you came to do?”

“Please. Do I look like a murderer? I was only trying to defend myself because he attacked me.”

“I know Pastor J. Cortez very well, and he is not an aggressive man.”

“Let's go back there and clear up this whole misunderstanding. Maybe there was an error in the caller ID.”

Joaquin didn't really want to return; he didn't think it was possible to get anywhere with these two. However, he did want to apologize for having imposed so aggressively. Clearly he'd made a mistake. He thought about giving Alondra a quick ring to fill her in on where he was and what had happened, but when he checked his pocket, he realized his cell phone was gone. He'd probably lost it in the fight or during the chase. The cell phone was extremely valuable to him. It went beyond possession and loss. Beyond the fact that he depended on it. This small electronic device was a necessity for him. He really did believe in the microchip.

Suddenly he wasn't sure of his own telephone number, the number at the station, even Alondra's cell phone. He always used his stored numbers and now he felt cut off, handicapped, lost.

“I lost my phone,” he said

“Not surprised, you probably dropped it while you were in ‘hot pursuit.'”

“Keep your eyes peeled. Maybe we'll find it.”

They reached the building. Joaquin went up the stairs, slowly, carefully—looking at each step, hoping he'd find the phone there. No luck. He realized that in the last few minutes his priorities had changed; he wasn't as worried anymore about the call that had so deeply disturbed him earlier. Now his cell phone was the pressing concern. Its absence hurt…physically. He reached the seventh floor and went down the hallway, followed by Barry. Joaquin kept his eye on the ground, still hoping his precious phone would appear.

The door of apartment 713 was open, which seemed to worry Barry since he hesitated and gave Joaquin a look. Then his face twisted into a strange grimace and he gestured for Joaquin to enter first, as if he were afraid to walk in on another intruder. Joaquin entered slowly. His eyes scanned the floor nervously. He really wanted to find his cell. Amid the mess he saw red stains and puddles of red liquid. He remembered the ketchup he saw in the headdress, but this was something different. Then he heard Barry scream out.

“No! Murderer!”

Joaquin's eyes leaped to the center of the room, where he saw the pastor's body lying behind the table, bathed in blood. His dirty bathrobe lay open. Dozens—no, hundreds—of stab wounds decorated the torso, and his jaw hung limp, half torn from his face.

Barry picked up a blood-covered knife and brandished it at Joaquin.

“Stay away from me, you son of a bitch, you…murderer!”

“What are you talking about? You were with me when we left. And he was alive!”

“Don't come any closer, or you'll end up worse than him.”

Joaquin's first instinct was to run. It wouldn't be easy to convince the cops that he'd only beaten the preacher up, especially when he'd had the knife, apparently the murder weapon, in his hands before the fight. Barry
picked up the telephone and raised an index finger over the buttons, but his hands shook, he couldn't seem to find the right numbers.

“Use you brain, Barry. He was alive when we left. And we've been in sight of each other ever since.”

“Shut up, you motherfucker, you murderer! You were beating the shit out of him when I got here. They're gonna lock you up and throw away the key,” Barry said.

Running away was no solution. It wouldn't take long to catch him; any competent detective would follow the leads and find him. Joaquin's life hung by a narrow thread: a narrow thread with blond hair and a wild look in his eyes. What could he do? Either he waited for the cops to arrive, with everything that implied, or he ran away and hoped to prove his innocence later on. He had to decide fast.

As he glanced around desperately, he realized that the strange objects in the room had been rearranged. It's not that he recalled exactly where the small idols, papers, and pieces of fruit had been positioned. But the general impression those items exuded was different. Someone had moved them. It was like reading a paragraph after the word order had changed; it may convey the same idea, but the tone has shifted.

“Barry, listen to me. We were fighting and he was winning. Even when you distracted him, I could barely force him to the ground. I didn't do this. When you came in he was alive. Someone who got here after us did this. Maybe they took advantage of the open door.”

Barry didn't respond. He continued dialing numbers on the telephone and hanging up, as if he were trying to crack a secret code.

How hard can it be to dial 911? Joaquin thought.

“It's not working! The telephone is busted and there are just voices and noises on the line,” Barry said.

Abruptly, he dropped the phone and ran out of the apartment yelling:

“Help, the pastor's dead! The pastor's been killed!”

The thought of being lynched by a bloodthirsty crowd demanding justice should have frightened Joaquin, but he assumed a fatalistic attitude. He picked the phone up off the floor, cleaned off one of the chairs
in the apartment, and sat down to wait. This all felt so abstract. A body splayed out on the floor. The strange objects littering the room. And this crazed, blond-haired boy screaming in the hallway.

“This is your life on
Ghost Radio,
” Joaquin said to himself.

He looked down at the phone. Maybe he should call Alondra. But what would he say? The situation was confusing enough to him; to Alondra, it would sound like absolute madness. But still he thought he should call her, given the way he'd left the apartment. Who knew how long all of this would take?

He hit the talk button, but instead of a dial tone, he heard murmuring, a dry vibration that reminded him of distant voices merged into a single buzzing drone.

Barry ran back in, breathless and pale once again. He gave Joaquin a distressed look.

“There's no one here…no one.”

“What do you mean, no one?”

“Either they're gone or someone took them away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Take a look. See for yourself.”

Indeed, the building seemed abandoned. Minutes earlier, Joaquin had seen people in the hallways, heard children's voices, radios and TVs blaring, noticed the mingled smells of food and detergent. Now…nothing. Instead, there was a strange, surreal calm.

“Where'd everybody go?” he asked.

“I don't know. I've never seen anything like it.”

“Is there an assembly, a residents' meeting? A parade that everyone went to?” Joaquin suggested, realizing how ridiculous it sounded.

The tableau suggested only one thing: a catastrophe. It was like the void great tragedies leave in their wake. The kind of mass exodus caused by earthquakes, wars, or full-scale alien invasions.

“The pastor is dead, and the whole building is empty.”

Joaquin didn't have a reply. Barry had phrased his statement as if there were a connection between both events.

“I gotta call the cops,” Barry said.

He left the apartment, looking around him perplexedly. He knocked on every door; he yelled; he called out to the neighbors. Joaquin followed him, silently. What more could he do?

When they reached the street, the scene was the same: total silence. Not a single person was in sight outside or in the stores. Not one car was in motion.

“The neutron bomb,” Joaquin said, half alarmed, half fascinated by the prospect.

“Huh?” said Barry, looking more and more frightened. He turned in a panicked three-sixty, searching for signs of life behind the shop windows and inside parked cars.

“A bomb that destroys only living beings, while leaving nonorganic objects intact.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

After what seemed like a very long silence, Barry said, “‘Neutron bomb to kill the poor,' like in the Dead Kennedys song.”

“‘It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done,'” Joaquin quoted.

They walked a few more blocks and Barry went into a cafeteria. Not a cat, a cockroach, or even a shadow. The tables were set. Some of the food on the plates still felt warm. There was no sign that people had fled, no traces of chaos or violence. It looked like they had simply vanished…evaporated. It reminded him of an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.

“It's like when the pastor died, the whole world died with him,” Barry said.

“Barry, why do you keep connecting the pastor's death to all this,” Joaquin said with a vague gesture toward his surroundings.

“It all was foretold in his visions: the deserted cities, the sandstorms, people lifting themselves up off the earth and embarking on a cosmic journey.”

“The Christian rapture?”

“The pastor's visions,” Barry said adamantly.

Joaquin hunted for words. None came.

“The dream disappears when the dreamer stops dreaming,” Barry said distantly.

Joaquin decided he would go back home and leave Barry with his fantasies and his cadaver. This was all too weird—and he still didn't know who'd made the phone call. But right now that was the least of his worries. He started walking, quickly, back toward his car.

“Where are you going?” Barry shouted after him.

Joaquin just walked, not turning, not answering.

“Come back here! You can't leave me like this!”

Barry kept on shouting, but didn't try to stop him. It wasn't until he reached his car that Joaquin realized how much all of this had affected him. His hands trembled, and he broke out in a cold sweat. It took him more than a minute to insert the key in the ignition, and even longer to put it in gear. Then he drove away as fast as he could.

He cruised down silent streets, fearful and dazed. Instead of noon, it looked more like dawn. Joaquin desperately searched for signs of life. He felt the car sliding through the streets as if they were coated with ice. It floated, zigzagging, drifting aimlessly. He replayed the fight with the preacher in his head, he felt the blows again, but each time, the outcome differed. He imagined snatching the knife off the floor and plunging it into the pastor again and again. He watched a shadow slide into the apartment and throw itself on the pastor, jagged claws cutting him to pieces. He saw the pastor stab himself with tears rolling down his cheeks. He saw eyeballs considering him from every drain in the apartment. The death of J. Cortez had unleashed something expansive and uncontainable, something Joaquin barely understood.

“What happens to the characters in a dream after the dreamer wakes up?” he asked himself.

Ridiculous thoughts, right? But maybe they held some meaning. Maybe they were the clue. All of this was too much for him. A wave of anger ran through his body.

He honked the horn over and over again, pushing the gas pedal to the floor, slamming the dashboard with his fists, screaming as loud as he could. Several times, he reached into his pocket for his cell. He had a strange sensation that he carried a phantom cell phone; he imagined it was like the ache that amputees feel in their missing limbs.

He went the wrong way down one-way streets; he put the car in reverse; he drove on sidewalks; he jammed on the brakes over and over again. He let his disorientation take over, until he was completely lost. He couldn't remember how he had gotten here. None of the street signs looked familiar. Where was he? How would he get home? For all he knew, he might be in another city.