Joaquin turned the dial on his ham radio, letting his fingers rub against the worn edge.
He was trolling the six-meter band. The magic band. Not transmitting, just listening. Looking for some conversation, a good “rag chew” as the hams called it, that might distract him, and help him forget his worries about the coming week.
It was called “the magic band” because of its unique ability, under the right circumstances, to transmit and receive messages over very long distances with short antennas and low power. For this reason, the band attracted a wide range of aficionados. From high school students looking to get the most out of a cheap rig, to the kind of techies who casually tossed around phrases like “sporadic E propagation” and “F2 layer refraction.”
Tonight it didn’t feel very magical. Pedestrian was more like it. The conversations were limp and surprisingly sparse.
But somewhere around 50.24 megahertz, just past some Morse-code warning of thunderstorms off the Catalina coast, he caught a burst of static that intrigued him.
Years ago, Gabriel had taught him about the majesty of white noise: the monoliths of structure hidden in the chaos.
And this burst was chunky with structure.
He cocked his head toward the speaker, taking it in. It came alive in his mind. He imagined hanging over it, watching it roil beneath him like an angry sea. Then the roiling sea solidified, becoming jagged rocks and mountains. And then it was just sound again. But with a purpose, accreting toward a common goal. Sound seeking personification.
The room receded as he leaned closer to the speaker.
The sound seemed to tease him: its lattices of structure briefly weaving together, only to slide apart seconds later. And what the static became, in those short moments of cohesion, sent shivers down his spine.
It was a voice.
It was very clearly a voice.
He tried to convince himself he was hearing bleed-over from another signal. But this wasn’t mixed in with the static. It was a voice constructed from the static.
He caught several phonemes, and the click of a consonant or two; but he couldn’t stitch them together. He couldn’t make out words.
He leaned closer, concentrating.
Slowly, from the rise and fall in intonation, he realized he was hearing the same sentence repeated over and over again. But he still couldn’t make out even a single syllable.
He bent even closer, his ear inches from the speaker.
His brow furrowed and his muscles tensed as he searched for the meaning. It was almost there. He felt it roll gradually toward him, like a slow-moving ball.
Almost…
There was nothing else
in the world, just him and these sounds.
Almost…
Nothing but this struggle.
Almost…
The first word was on the brink of unveiling itself when he felt a presence in the room with him; something brushed his shoulder. He whipped around ready to strike, only to see the familiar, laughing face of his girlfriend, Alondra.
“I love this: the host of the ‘scariest show on Mexican radio’ is frightened by a tap on the shoulder.”
“Very funny,” Joaquin said, still somewhat shaken.
“You’re a bit like a cartoon character when you’re frightened.”
“You’re in ‘tease mode’ tonight, I see.”
“A furry animal, I think. Cartoon rabbit maybe.”
“And it’s not over yet.”
“No, a cartoon mouse! Big eyes, little whiskers twitching.”
Joaquin forced a chuckle, and as his senses returned, he shot Alondra a sly grin.
“Bet you were one of those girls who got a bit weak-kneed over cartoon animals.”
“Maybe,” Alondra said, her eyes going wide and looking very much like a cartoon herself.
“Let’s test the theory.”
He pulled her close and looked deep into her big brown eyes.
“But you don’t seem like a furry animal anymore.”
“That’s the thing about us furry animals. In the daytime we’re all hijinks and songs, but at night we get serious. And I mean very serious.”
“Now, that’s a theory I’d like to test,” Alondra said, pulling him toward the bedroom.
An hour and a half later,
Joaquin lay on his side looking at Alondra’s lean naked body beside him. It glistened with a thin layer of postcoital sweat. She snuggled close to him, looking into his eyes.
“You worried about the trip?”
“Not really.”
“Your big play for ‘crossover’ appeal?”
“You know it’s not about that.”
“I know. Still in ‘tease mode,’ I guess.”
Joaquin smiled and pulled her closer.
“Thinking about Gabriel?”
Joaquin nodded. He hadn’t realized it until Alondra asked the question. But Gabriel had been in his thoughts a lot recently. Maybe it was the trip back to Texas; maybe it was just the time of year. Whatever the reason, Gabriel had felt especially close these last few days.
“Thought so. You had that look.”
Joaquin decided not to ask her what she meant by that. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Joaquin shook his head.
Of course, he really did want to talk about it. He wanted to talk about Gabriel and the voice on the radio tonight, and the countless other things that had been coursing through his mind since he first learned he’d be heading stateside. But he couldn’t do it right now, maybe not ever.
“You know I’m always here for you. Anytime you want.”
“I’d rather just try to get some sleep; emphasis on ‘try.’”
Joaquin leaned over to shut off the light, still holding Alondra against his chest. As he lay back down, Alondra let out a contented sigh. Within minutes, her breathing deepened and he knew she was fast asleep.
Sleep didn’t come as easily for Joaquin. His thoughts returned to the voice. He tried to convince himself it was some kind of illusion, brought on by anxiety about the week ahead. But he knew that wasn’t the case. He knew this was the first sign that his trip would provide him an answer to the mystery that had plagued him for almost eighteen years. As he drifted off to sleep, thoughts of the voice and the trip receded, and he found himself remembering a recent caller to his radio show.
CHAPTER 2
CALL 2344, THURSDAY, 12:23 A.M.
I had to call you tonight. Well…I had to call someone…someone who might understand my story. Everyone thinks I’m crazy. But I’m not, I swear. Though I think if I don’t find someone who believes me, I may truly go mad.
It all started when my marriage went on the skids.
You know how the closer you get to someone, the farther away they often seem? That’s the way it was with my husband. He shut a door inside himself, and threw away the key. Every conversation became an argument. Every question, an accusation. Eventually, he even recoiled from my touch.
One night it got really bad. We said the kind of stuff you should never say to another human being. Evil stuff. Stuff that hurt right down to the bone.
I knew we couldn’t go on this way. So I grabbed my children, Mateo and Josephina, and ran from the house. And I mean ran, pulling the children behind me like rag dolls. They screamed, they cried; but I just had to move, to feel the rush of wind against my face. Nothing had felt this good in months.
After a few blocks, my head cleared and the insanity of my actions kicked in. Where was I going? What would I do?
Before I could even begin to answer these questions, I saw a woman waving at us from down the block. It was Lorenza, a friend from my job. She rushed up to us, concerned.
I tried to explain what had happened. I don’t think I made much sense. But she nodded compassionately, placed an arm around my shoulder, and led me and the children back to her house.
She put Josephina and Mateo to bed in her spare room, fixed me a cup of tea, and I had a good long cry. She understood where I was coming from. She had a lousy marriage too. And although I’d never met her husband, he sounded an awful lot like mine: the same distance, the same coldness, the same…well…everything.
After talking with Lorenza, I realized I couldn’t go back. My marriage had been over for years. It had just taken me a long time to realize it. But I still had nowhere to go, and no way to get there.
Again, Lorenza came to the rescue.
She told me that her parents owned a small house on the outskirts of town. They rented it out to earn some extra income. But it wasn’t occupied at the time, and Lorenza told me that the children and I could stay there as long as we wanted.
It wasn’t much of a place, she said, but it would give us a roof over our heads while I planned our next move.
She asked if I wanted to go. I nodded. The longer I stayed, the greater the chance my husband might show up looking for me.
So we grabbed the children, bundled them into the car, and drove off into the night.
We drove for hours. The house was not on the outskirts of town at all, but in a sleepy desert community some two hundred miles away. At that point I didn’t care. The motion of the car relaxed me, and the desert air smelled wonderful.
At around 2 A.M., Lorenza
turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. We continued on for about a mile, and then parked in a clearing. I pulled the kids out of the car, and looked around. The moon was almost full, and it illuminated everything around me. I spotted a cactus or two, and the vague shape of distant mountains, but no house.
I turned back to Lorenza, only to find that she and the car had vanished. Even the gravel road we’d been driving down only scant seconds before was nowhere to be seen.
Worst of all…my children were gone.
I called their names loudly, frantically, into the moonlit night. But the only response was the wind whipping across the desert, and the distant, plaintive call of a coyote.
Finally, not knowing what else to do, I started walking. I walked and I walked, each step more laborious than the last.
As dawn approached, I reached the highway. After several minutes, a car picked me up, and drove me to a nearby bus station. Once inside, I found a pay phone and called my husband.
I was shocked when Lorenza answered the phone. I asked her if Josephina and Mateo were all right. She told me they were, but was curious about why I wanted to know.
I told her that I had the right to know the whereabouts of my own children.
“Your children?” Lorenza said. “Josephina and Mateo are my children.”
I can’t remember what I said next. I screamed, I wept, I sounded like a madwoman.
Finally, Lorenza put a man on the phone. A man she called “her husband.” I recognized the voice immediately. It was my husband.
He spoke to me calmly, sounding as distant as ever.
CHAPTER 3
THE PAST ENCROACHES
“Get into the cab, we’re going to miss our flight,” Alondra said insistently.
Joaquin wanted to comply. The car was only inches away. He could be inside it in seconds. But he couldn’t move.
It was the car: a 1990 Ford Taurus. Color: metallic green.
Fleetingly, he wondered why a taxi service would use such an old car. But this thought was quickly pushed aside by a crush of memories about a car just like this, and a trip so long ago.
He could smell the upholstery, see the back of his father’s neck, and feel the ground bumping beneath him. The memory was so vivid it almost hurt. He could even remember how the volume knob felt on his beat-up Sony Walkman.
“Joaquin, c’mon!”
Joaquin took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. ...
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