Ghost Radio Page 9

  “Well, thanks for sharing your story on the air, although I don’t really know how to handle a case like this. Are you going to turn yourself in to the police?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “You murdered your uncle.”

  “I didn’t murder anybody. He fell by accident.”

  “Well, you covered him with cement.”

  “He wasn’t dead at the time.”

  “I know, but the cement killed him. How do I know you’re not pulling my leg?”

  “That’s your problem,” said the man. I imagined the taste of tequila and blood in his mouth as he hung up.

  This definitely wasn’t the kind of response I’d expected from the public when I decided to read Poe on the air. I never thought it would turn my audience into “radio witnesses” to a crime.

  “But while we’re researching that, keep those calls coming,” I said.

  The calls didn’t stop. At first, we only got a few each night, but it quickly became a deluge. Thousands of people wanted to talk about their experiences or put in their two cents about the stories of other callers. Soon I couldn’t keep up with all the calls pouring in. This piqued the interest of the radio station; first, they assigned me a permanent sound engineer (up to that point, I’d worked with whoever was on the clock), and then they started adding assistants to take calls and attend to the growing needs of the program. Most remarkable of all, I gained the respect of my colleagues and bosses. My placid oasis of calm, the pitch-black ocean of tranquillity where I had floated aimlessly, became a frenetic anthill of activity. There were still dead hours, and slow days, but Ghost Radio, as we started calling the program, consistently registered the best ratings in both its genre and its time slot. Calls flooded in from across the nation and other parts of the world; Latinos residing in the United States bombarded me night after night with their stories, but soon they were also calling in from as far away as Australia and Namibia. My bosses were happy, and so was I. I wouldn’t have changed a thing, but change came anyway…with a vengeance.

  chapter 24

  A PECULIAR EXCHANGE

  The new show with InterMedia was certainly different from those early days. The office was nicer, the coffee was better, and the paychecks substantially larger. But one thing was the same: the callers. They were the same mix of bizarre, sincere, and ridiculous.

  Joaquin liked this mixture. His fears about being in America slowly disappeared. But they would return one night when a peculiar caller lit up line two.

  “We’re here with a caller who won’t give his name,” said Joaquin, pushing the button for line two. “Go ahead, anonymous friend, you’re on the air.”

  The silence seemed endless.

  Usually in situations like this, Joaquin would jump in, yelling: “Caller, are you there?” If the caller didn’t respond instantly, he’d be cut off. This time, though, Joaquin sat quietly. He didn’t rush the caller and didn’t check to see if the line was still active.

  “Dead air!” hissed Watt.

  Joaquin didn’t respond. Alondra opened her mouth to say something. Joaquin signaled her to wait.

  Silence.

  The seconds passed.

  Tick…tick…tick…

  A raspy voice resonated through the speakers.

  “Joaquin. I’m glad we can speak to each other again.”

  “Speak again?”

  “We’re old friends.”

  “I usually recognize my friends.”

  “I saw death.”

  “Tell us what happened.”

  “Just what I told you. I saw death. Nothing happened to me; I wasn’t pulled from death’s grip; I didn’t lose my will to live. I simply saw death’s face, its poisonous snout squealing a few inches from my own.”

  “Like Alien 3?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “The first Alien film?” Joaquin said, suppressing a laugh.

  “You’ve seen him too, Joaquin. He remembers you.”

  Joaquin was intrigued.

  “And how do you explain this apparition?” asked Alondra.

  “Let’s just say at this point I wouldn’t consider it to be a solitary apparition, but rather a recurring event.”

  “So you see death often?” asked Joaquin.

  “Often.”

  Joaquin felt a chill run down his spine. This call was making him very uncomfortable. It wasn’t the usual. It demanded attention. He looked at Watt, who had stopped eating and was motionless, staring at the monitor. Like a cat thinking it’s heard a mouse.

  “I am something special. Unlike anyone you’ve ever talked to before. I am Ghost Radio’s beginning and end, its alpha and omega. I am a transformed and transfigured being, waiting for you in the night.”

  Joaquin’s arms felt numb. He wanted to stretch or maybe stand up, but he could barely move. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a change in the shadow that the table cast on the wall. It looked different, as if it were illuminated by another source of light. For a moment it seemed to transform into…a tombstone. He blinked, and it was the table again. But now he was aware of the shadows playing tricks with his peripheral vision. Before his eyes, matter transformed into shadow and shadow into matter.

  Meanwhile, the anonymous caller continued.

  “It’s a privilege to be in this position: between life and death…heaven and hell.”

  “Purgatory,” said Alondra.

  “No, sweetheart, that’s a bedtime story for religious freaks. From where I am, I can make phone calls, watch TV, eat junk food.”

  “Some would say that’s the best of both worlds,” remarked Alondra.

  “And the worst, of course,” added the voice.

  Joaquin saw a cadaverous face: flesh hanging from bone, muscles exposed. He winced.

  “Try to imagine an animal is eating you alive, chewing on your head. You’re conscious. You feel its fangs dig into your scalp, feel strips of flesh pulled from your skull. For the past ten years, I’ve lived with that sensation.”

  Joaquin was startled. His palms were sweaty. He glanced around, half expecting to find somebody watching him.

  “Now, are you interested in listening to me, Joaquin?” asked the caller.

  “Completely,” he answered. “But I think you’re lying.”

  “Just think what it would feel like to burn in an ocean of fire forever, to be cooked alive for eternity, suffering every instant as if it were the first moment you felt the flames touch your skin, without the slightest possibility of growing accustomed to the pain.”

  Before the voice had finished speaking, Joaquin saw the shadows in the studio become a window looking out on an infernal landscape, one worthy of a famous illustration by Gustav Doré for the Divine Comedy that had given him childhood nightmares. He couldn’t understand what was happening. Blinking nervously, he looked around trying to gauge whether he was the only one tormented by these images. A sense of anguish overwhelmed him—he had never seen or felt anything like this. It was true that after his parents’ deaths, extremely vivid nightmares had caused him years of sleepless nights. But he had overcome these long ago. One day he decided that he wouldn’t be afraid again, that he wouldn’t allow it, that instead he would respond coldly to everything. The worst thing that could happen to him already had, and so he unshouldered his emotional burden.

  At that moment, however, flanked by his girlfriend, Alondra, and his friend Watt, the old fear returned.

  “Did you hear my question?” Joaquin asked, trying to regain his composure.

  “What do you think I’m lying about?”

  “I don’t think you can watch TV, I don’t think you can eat junk food, I think you’re lucky to even make this call.”

  The caller was silent. But this time Watt didn’t warn Joaquin about dead air. Finally, the caller spoke.

  “What do you think of this fairy tale? Once upon a time, there was a young man, barely past childhood, who lived in a perfect world of privilege, a world where his
sexual awakening was experienced with the most beautiful girls, where he only needed to wish for something and it would come true, and where everything indicated that his talent and intellect would take him to the top of whatever mountain he chose to climb. Then his universe fell apart; he was left abandoned and alone in a world of shadows and danger, at the mercy of criminals and depraved minds. The young man, no longer a child, was transformed into a swan, saving him from that bleak world.”

  “A swan, huh? Like in Andersen’s story ‘The Wild Swans.’” Joaquin recollected it vaguely.

  “Exactly.”

  “Why don’t you just cut off this asshole,” whispered Alondra in his ear. She was covering the microphone, but it was obvious she would have preferred to scream it out on the air.

  Joaquin shook his head.

  “For our listeners who don’t know it, this is yet another children’s tale, so of course it’s macabre, sadistic, and sordid. As it should be.

  “In this one, the king’s eleven impeccable and well-behaved sons were the victims of their evil stepmother’s jealousy. She forced the king to expel them from the palace. It was through some strange magic that they were transformed into swans,” explained Joaquin.

  “That’s right, the swan is a symbol of the ethereal state of salvation. What appears to be a horrible punishment is, in fact, redemption.

  “At night, the swans once again took on human form. In the end, their only sister made the sacrifice of sewing linen nightshirts for them, woven from nettles taken from a cemetery. When the swans were draped with these nightshirts, the spell was broken and her brothers were set free. I don’t care what it is; I find this story sinister, a sad tale of injustice with an absurd moral.”

  Watt and Alondra were making frantic signals, drawing their index fingers across their necks as if slashing their throats. Alondra slipped him a piece of paper:

  “You have to cut him off. Now!”

  Joaquin again gestured for them to leave him alone.

  “Well, my friend Joaquin, since you’re having some sort of rebellion among your staff, I’m going to let you go for now. But before I leave, let me just say this: Joaquin, we’ll talk soon. Best wishes.”

  And then everything fell silent.

  Once again, they had dead air.

  Joaquin shivered just as he had that night, months earlier, when he received the same message flashed in Morse code by a helicopter. But strangely, he also tripped back to another night. A night of destiny.

  chapter 25

  A NIGHT AT THE STATION

  A massive electrical storm was brewing. The sky turned from gray to mustard yellow, and the smell of ozone filled the air.

  Joaquin knew the plan was hasty and premature. But he couldn’t turn back. Gabriel wouldn’t let him. He didn’t even want to, because he’d never seen Gabriel so excited about one of their projects. Deathmuertoz Live from Radio Mexico was the makeshift title they’d given the concert, performance, and media intervention. They’d crossed the border like illegal aliens in reverse, from the United States into Mexico, the notion being that the trip itself was part of the show—everything had to be a transgression. They carried a few instruments, and bags filled with the paraphernalia they planned to use during their jam session.

  On the Mexican side, three fans awaited them: Colett, Feliciano, and Martin, who had faithfully followed their music over the past year. They originally proposed the concert and offered to help with logistics. Gabriel took Polaroids along way: new pages for his visual diary. Each flash reminded Joaquin of the night before: a raid on a convenience store, sliding packs of Polaroid film into his oversize coat, Gabriel played lookout.

  The border crossing was no big deal, other than the intermittent rain. According to the plan, they rendezvoused with Colett, Feliciano, and Martin at a gas station along the highway. The rain had stopped. But the blacktop was slick, and water collected in the potholes.

  Martin sat in the driver’s seat of an old Volkswagen van. Feliciano paced in front. And Colett leaned seductively on the hood; her dyed black hair still damp from the recent rain. They greeted Joaquin and Gabriel warmly. But Joaquin sensed a reticence in Colett. Behind her smiling eyes lurked a wariness that he found alluring.

  A few months ago, Colett and her friends helped set up an illegal feed of an Armenian punk concert broadcast from a jail in Ankara. Martin worked at the university-owned radio station, but its employees had gone on strike two years before, and the conflict was still unresolved. Gabriel and Joaquin had given him the impression that they knew how to operate the station’s equipment. In reality, they didn’t have a clue.

  Martin told them what to expect once they got in.

  “The station’s operational, but it’s been abandoned for some time,” he said, showing them a diagram that explained how to broadcast a signal. He gave them some more drawings of electric circuits, pointing out that all of it ought to be ready to go. “You shouldn’t have any trouble getting the ball rolling.”

  He’d originally said he would come along, but there had been a change of plans. It would be better, he said now, if he kept an eye on the guards at the gate and picked the others up when they were done.

  Feliciano expressed concern. They hadn’t had enough time to prepare. It was going to be risky and complicated to air the concert that night.

  “It’d really suck if we didn’t do this because we’re afraid.”

  “We’ve been working the grapevine for two weeks, letting everyone know the jam session’s tonight. So it’s gonna be tonight,” said Gabriel, who was taking Polaroids of everyone. “And besides, nothing seems more perfect than playing on a night like this.”

  Joaquin didn’t say much. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Colett. He lost himself in her dark, bitter eyes and juicy lips. She spoke with a strange accent. There was something familiar about her that he couldn’t quite place. Although she smiled provocatively at him from time to time, on the whole she seemed somewhat detached.

  They decided to go for tacos and wrap up any unfinished business. Over dinner, Gabriel explained that taking over the station would be a great leap forward in their career. They’d burn CDs of the concert and package them with a booklet of all his Polaroids.

  “We want stations taken over everywhere: a full-scale rebellion, giving radio back to the people. Away from the corporate suits and their bean-counting Top 40 shit.”

  Joaquin agreed with the concept, but he was surprised to hear Gabriel trying to talk like a militant. It sounded artificial. He realized that much of it was aimed at Colett. This was flirting, Gabriel style.

  After finishing their tacos, Feliciano, Martin, and Colett went over their part of the plan: Feliciano would drive them to the station, where they’d scale the outer fence. Martin would take care of security, and Colett, who knew the station well, would accompany them inside and act as their engineer.

  “You know how to use a soundboard and all that?” Joaquin asked her.

  “Yeah, I worked at a station in Boston for a summer. I learned a few things,” she said as she brushed her hair from her face with the back of her hand.

  Joaquin vowed not to leave Mexico until he got to know her more intimately.

  “That’ll do. It’s gonna be perfect,” Gabriel said, taking another photo of her.

  Yup, Gabriel liked her too. He was certain. If Joaquin wanted to nip in ahead of him, he’d have to act fast.

  Near the end of their meal, a drunk approached them, selling flowers.

  “For the little lady,” he said with a drunken grin.

  Gabriel took one, tossing him a dollar; his eyes never left Colett.

  “In Aztec society, flowers were an offering reserved for goddesses,” Gabriel said, handing her the flower.

  Joaquin rolled his eyes.

  Colett wasn’t impressed. She questioned the accuracy of Gabriel’s statement.

  “Aztecs offered flowers to their goddesses? I don’t think so.”

  An argument ensued. Gab
riel was a good debater, but Colett parried every thrust. She knew her stuff, and Gabriel’s bluffs withered.

  During this exchange, Joaquin sketched a rose on a napkin. He paid careful attention to the stem; halfway down, it morphed into electric cable, ending in a two-pronged plug.

  He offered the finished drawing to Colett.

  “In modern society, drawings of flowers are given by broke guys trying to impress superhot girls,” Joaquin said, mocking Gabriel’s tone.

  “That’s a fact I can’t dispute,” Colett said, taking the drawing.

  She studied it, furrowing her brow. Joaquin thought it made her even cuter.

  “Very cool. Would make a nice tat,” she said, offering the highest of Goth compliments.

  She folded the napkin and slid it into the back pocket of her alluringly tight jeans. They left the restaurant. Gabriel’s rose lay forgotten on the table. Round one to Joaquin.

  They split up as planned. There was so much electricity loose in the desert that Joaquin’s hair stuck to the van’s interior. They got out of the VW. There wasn’t anyone guarding the station. Joaquin jumped the fence first. Colett followed, leaping like a dancer: a dancer in combat boots. Gabriel went over last. They heard barking.

  “Martin said there weren’t any dogs,” Joaquin said.

  “That’s because there aren’t any,” replied Colett.

  “Something’s coming this way, and it’s barking,” Gabriel said.

  “Okay, maybe there are dogs,” Colett said.

  As she spoke, two enormous mastiffs leaped out from around a corner, barking and drooling. The group took off running. Joaquin felt an odd sense of joy in this moment. Gabriel sprinting ahead of him, the sound of combat boots on gravel behind him. And the growl of dogs farther back.