The Radio Magician and Other Stories (6 page)

LIGHT OF A THOUSAND SUNS

Without beginning, middle or end, of infinite power,

of infinite arms, whose eyes are the moon and sun,

I see thee, whose face is flaming fire,

Burning this whole universe with Thy radiance.

-from the Bhagavad Gita

T
rellis noticed the trailer parked at the edge of the Lynwood Mall’s parking lot, but he didn’t think much about it. He hadn’t been sleeping well. Troublesome dreams he couldn’t recall. In fact, the idea that maybe the trailer had been there for a couple of days tickled the back of his mind until he dismissed it in the morning’s hassles. Penney’s had started their big ½ off sale, making traffic in the lot heavy and crowd control a nightmare, so Trellis didn’t spend much time watching the monitors. First, a tiny woman who must have been at least ninety-five tried to muscle a thirty-two inch Radio Shack plasma screen television into her minivan and sprained her neck. Waiting for the paramedics to get there, he held her hand. “I’m not really hurt, dears,” she kept insisting as they strapped her to a backboard.

Then he spent a half hour helping two high school boys change a flat. After that, a woman so overweight the backs of her arms shifted from side to side when she walked stuffed four hundred dollars worth of stretch slacks and extra-extra large blouses into a baby carriage before strolling out of Foley’s. He knew she was a shoplifter the second she came into view of the south exit camera. The bad ones kept their heads down and tried not to look like they were in a hurry. He sprinted to the exit and confronted her before she left the sidewalk. Of course, she swore she knew nothing about the clothes until he started pulling out one item after another.

“They’re for my baby girl,” she mumbled over and over when Trellis sat beside her as the policeman processed her for arrest. Trellis felt sad. “This isn’t the end of the world. You’ll grow from this.” Catching shoplifters bothered him. He liked it better when he could give tokens to a forlorn five-year-old wandering in the arcade where his mom put him while she shopped. He liked to jiggle the tokens in his pocket when he walked, knowing he would give them away later. Trellis liked watching people buy gifts, and he liked families smiling as they talked to each other, packages in hand.

Trellis didn’t look at the trailer again until night had fallen and the mall closed. An old Airstream, a beat up silver bar of soap on wheels, sat at the parking lot’s edge, hitched to an even older red pickup with busted running boards. A lone figure walked into the streetlight’s illumination, knocked on the door, then disappeared within.

After finishing his rounds, making sure the gates pulled down in front of the stores were latched and the kiosks covered, he checked the parking lot monitors for the last time. No movement from the trailer and no lights within. He signed out for the evening before handing his keys to the night man, a retired car salesman with an extensive collection of dirty jokes.

“How’d it go today?” A long mustard stain marked the night guy’s left sleeve.

“Another day, another dollar.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” The night guy settled into the office chair in front of the monitors. Dim lights showed empty halls, the central fountain no longer spouting, quiet loading docks, and a half dozen views of the parking lot. A sheet of wind-pushed newspaper slid across one screen. “How long you going to keep working both day shifts?”

Trellis shrugged. “Until they get somebody new. I don’t mind. Sleep’s overrated anyway. I get bad dreams sometimes.” He winked. “I’ll check that trailer on the way out,” he said, looking toward the image.

The hallways smelled of linoleum polish and warm chocolate. Trellis twirled his car keys on one finger as he left the building and walked to his car.

It wasn’t until he was ready to pull out of the mall that he noticed the trailer parked by the exit, and he remembered that he said he would check it. He thought it was funny he’d almost forgotten.

Peeling bumper stickers decorated the trailer’s back: FRODO FAILED! THE GOVERNMENT HAS THE RING, and FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE F***ING FOR CHASTITY. He chuckled at the last one. It struck him as cute when people substituted asterisks for a curse word, as if that made one not think of the word. A decal of a mushroom cloud under a red circle and slash covered one of the dark rear windows.

As he turned onto the street, still laughing, he realized that he hadn’t actually gotten out of his car to check the trailer. Isn’t that odd? he thought.

At home he watched Fox News for an hour. Tucked between a story about a celebrity scandal, and another chronicling which starlets were pregnant, was a brief piece about a pair of Middle Eastern countries with atomic ambitions. The commentator pointed out that forty-four countries operated nuclear power plants, all capable of producing weapon-grade nuclear material. What did a couple more or less matter?

That night, the dream Trellis remembered was of F***ING FOR CHASTITY while a television in the background moaned out an emergency signal. “Seek shelter now,” a voice called out. SEEK . . . SHELTER . . . NOW. Trellis slid around in his dream bed, never quite able to hold the starlet, and he couldn’t tell if what he heard close by was his breathing or the shrill call of air raid sirens, and all the time a light so bright he couldn’t close his eyes against it burned in the room. In the dream, the flare beat into his head, and his heart flapped like wings against his ribs. How can I catch her under the light of a thousand suns?

It was a most unsatisfying erotic dream.

Trellis found the night guy filling out his records in the security room. The dawn’s golden gleam caught the top of the silver trailer. Wonder how long that’s been there? Trellis thought before remembering he’d seen the Airstream the night before. He checked his watch: 6:30. On the interior monitors, the morning cleaning crews worked the mall floors and buffed the display windows, readying for the 9:00 start of business. A motorized flatbed dolly loaded with boxes for restocking moved from store to store, but Trellis, munching his morning donut, concentrated on the trailer where three people stood in line at the door. It opened, letting one in, and the two remaining stood with their arms crossed against the morning cold. Another person coming from the bus stop walked the length of the parking lot, vanishing at the edge of one screen to appear at the edge of the next. He joined the two. They nodded to each other the way strangers do.

“People can’t camp out at the mall. Did you call the cops on that trailer?” Trellis asked the night guy.

“What trailer?”

“West parking lot, next to the highway.”

The night guy put his flashlight in his locker. He looked puzzled. “I thought about it. I’m pretty sure I did.”

“Call it in?”

“No, think about it. Are you positive it was here earlier?”

“Yeah, all day yesterday.”

“If it’s still parked at closing, we can report it.” Then he told Trellis a ten minute long joke about a skinny blonde, her fat boyfriend and a wheelbarrow filled with wet cement.

Trellis glanced at the monitor before heading on his rounds. “Did you notice that trailer?” A strong sense of déjà vu swept over him.

“What trailer?”

While Trellis tested his walkie-talkie’s batteries and read the morning’s routine, thoughts about the trailer flitted away.

Later, when Trellis stopped at Pretzel Palace for a mid-morning snack, he found himself thinking about a mushroom cloud under a red circle and slash. He finished the pretzel before rushing back to the video surveillance room. No cars were parked next to the trailer, but four people stood outside the door. He headed for the west exit, keeping the trailer’s slippery image in his head, pretty sure that if he stopped thinking about it for a moment, it would squirt off like a minnow.

Acetone smells from the nail salon distracted him, but he ignored them long enough to make it to the doors, and by then he could see the silver shape at the parking lot’s edge.

“What are you folks doing out here?” Trellis asked as he approached.

“Waiting our turn,” said a house-wifey woman in a tie-dye blouse and fringed jeans first in line. Sleep circles so dark that she might as well have a pair of black eyes marked her complexion.

Without a tinge of irony, the man behind her said, “Saving humanity.” He wore an “I Served” Marine Corps patch on a flight jacket. His face too was haggard.

Behind them, beyond the sidewalk, traffic zipped by, thirty minutes short of rush hour.

“Do you mind if I go in?” he asked. The people in line creeped him out. Their postures were odd, a strained mix of nervousness and resignation. He imagined inmates on death row if they had to form a line for executions.

“No rush,” said Marine Corps patch.

Trellis knocked on the door. The woman who answered stepped onto the metal stair protruding from the trailer’s side. A piece of black yarn tied her gray hair into a ponytail. She blinked against the sunlight. “We’re going as fast as we can,” she said.

“Um, sorry. I’m not with them. Mall security.”

“Oh.” She turned to the inside. “Mall security.”

“Invite him in.”

A powerful wave of incense surrounded Trellis as he mounted the stair, and it took a second for his eyes to adjust. A woman who could have been the twin to the one at the door sat at a short and narrow table on the opposite side of the trailer. Beyond her, a small sink, a spice rack, and a drainer holding three plates and three cups were tucked under the cabinets. A curtain hung from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, hiding the rest. The ceiling pressed close enough to Trellis’s head that he had to duck. No one else was in the trailer that he could see.

“Sorry to bother you ladies. It’s just that you have been in the parking lot for a while, and it doesn’t look like you’re shopping.” He sat on a chair bolted to the wall next to the door.

The lady who had let him in sat next to the other. If they weren’t twins, they had to be sisters. “No, we’re not.”

“We’re not doing anything illegal,” said the other. She looked at her sister. “At least nothing immoral.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Trellis said. “But what are you doing?”

A man wearing a hooded sweatshirt, the hood up over his head, pushed aside the curtain. In one hand he held a fat white candle, in the other, a long black-bladed knife. “What’s the holdup? We’re on a schedule.”

“Mall security,” said the woman next to the curtain.

The man in the sweatshirt glowered at Trellis. “Send the next one in.” He closed the curtain with an impatient tug.

The woman closest to Trellis rose. “Excuse me.” She squeezed past him and opened the door. “Next.”

The tie-dyed housewife shuddered. “Okay.” Trellis caught a glimpse of the man behind her before she climbed the stair. He put his hand on her shoulder. “God bless you,” he said.

“He will.” She stood just inside as if afraid of fully entering.

“How did you find us?” asked the ponytailed women next to the curtain.

The tie-dyed woman rubbed her eyes. “I Googled ‘ban the bomb’ and followed the links. It was a lot of links.”

“We get many that way. It’s not too late to go back. You can still change your mind.”

The woman closed her eyes tight before taking a ragged breath. “No, this is the right time. It’s a good time in my life.”

Trellis looked at the three of them, a strange tableau of women talking without making sense. Also, the hooded figure with a knife unnerved him. Trellis put his hand on his walkie talkie, but wasn’t sure that a better strategy would be to bolt for the door. None of them were paying attention to him. He’d never listened to a conversation that felt so charged with subtext.

“You know it works?” said the tie-dyed woman “It absolutely works?”

“Yes,” said both of the other women.

“I’m in.” She took a deep breath, let it out, and then breathed again before walking to the curtain and through. The ponytailed woman closest to the curtain followed her.

“What in the hell is going on here?” said Trellis, perched on the edge of his seat. His voice raised an octave by the end of the question, and his pulse drummed.

The woman eyed him impassively. Finally, she said, “This isn’t a good way to start. We haven’t been introduced yet. My name is Jennifer.” She put out her hand.

Trellis took her fingers in his own. She had a firm and pleasant handshake. “My sister’s name is Chastity.”

“Trellis,” he said, then flinched, recalling his dream. “Chastity?”

“My parents named the younger children after the virtues. My other sisters are Hope and Patience.” She paused as if thinking over the practice of naming children. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-four,” he said without thinking. How much space was in the trailer beyond the curtain? By his figuring, there could hardly be room for three people on the other side. Whatever they were doing in there, they weren’t making any sounds.

“Do you remember nuclear fire drills?” She rested an elbow on the table and the side of her face in her hand.

“What does this have to do with you and whatever you and those people outside are doing?” His chest constricted, as if his skin had shrunk a couple of sizes, compressing his lungs.

“I do,” she said. “I remember ‘duck and cover.’ I remember radiation shelters in the basements of public buildings. You’re old enough. Do you remember too?”

She sounded so reasonable and matter of fact. Trellis concentrated on slowing his breathing. For a second he thought he’d just felt coronary twinges, his fate from eating most of his meals in Café Court for the last fifteen years, rotating from one fast food outlet to the next. He was on his feet all day, but he’d noticed the bulge of belly that hung over his belt more and more lately, and his mantra, “I’m big boned,” carried less conviction each time he said it. Yes, maybe it was a coronary.

Not that a heart attack was any more comforting than being in a trailer talking to two strange women and a man with a knife.

Trellis felt as if the mall were a thousand miles away, that the trailer existed in an alien landscape. He returned to a familiar script, but it sounded ridiculous to say it. “Ma’am, you can’t sit a trailer in a public parking lot overnight. There’s zoning to consider.”