Ghost Radio (21 page)

“Right. Since you called, I've been thinking about that program you mentioned. I think I know what you were talking about. I might have something, man.”

He opened a file cabinet and searched through thousands of dusty papers. What seemed like an eternity passed. Joaquin felt the beginnings of desperation.

“Well, here it is,” Winkler said suddenly, holding up a yellowed card with worn and soiled edges.

Joaquin couldn't believe it. It was too good to be true—his first positive news in a long time. Maybe he wasn't crazy, and he wasn't sinking into an absurd nightmare. Finally, with this record, his memories would be vindicated. He would call Prew and Stevens immediately just to show them that he wasn't lying or insane.

“Do you have any broadcasts in your archives?”

“Yes, I have something in the audio library. But you know, in order to support an effort like this one, I depend on donations.”

“How much do you want, Winkler?”

“It's not that I'm charging you. My archive is available to everyone—but you can appreciate the expense that all this represents.”

“I understand. Tell me, how much should I ‘donate'?” Joaquin was ready to give whatever was necessary as long as he could listen to one of the tapes of that program.

“Two hundred fifty dollars,” Winkler blurted out apparently at random.

Joaquin took out all the money he had in his wallet.

“I have one hundred fifty here and I can write out a check for another one hundred.”

“Normally I don't accept checks,” said Winkler, “but this time I'll make an exception.”

Winkler searched through the moldy depths of what he called his “file” and some ten minutes later came back with an audiotape. He inserted it into an old Nagra tape recorder, fast-forwarding and rewinding until he finally managed to get a sound out of it. Not even three seconds had gone by when Joaquin recognized the voices.

“No, stop. You're mistaken, this isn't the program I'm looking for.”

“This is
Ghost Radio
.”

“Yes, I know. This is my program, that's my voice. That's me. What I'm looking for is a similar program, but one that was broadcast in the eighties.”

“Look, man, this was taped more than twenty years ago. See?” Winkler said, pointing to the box the tape had come in. Written on it was “Ghost Radio, Sept. 13, 1983.”

“That's impossible. It has to be a mistake. Maybe the box is mislabeled. This tape must have been made a few months ago.”

Winkler looked at him blankly, as if he were speaking a strange language.

“It's been at least ten years since I stopped taping in this format.”

“Then there has to be a mix-up. This is my program,
Ghost Radio
. Don't you hear my voice? And obviously I couldn't have done a program twenty years ago.”

“I don't understand. You host a show called
Ghost Radio,
and this is a tape of that show with your voice, but it isn't the one you're looking for?”

“No, what I want is a similar program that was on the air twenty years ago. It was the one that inspired mine.”

“Okay, whatever. This is the
Ghost Radio
that was transmitted in the eighties.” He had a small box filled with tapes marked with the program's name and air dates.

Joaquin randomly grabbed another tape and replaced the first one; Winkler didn't interfere. He pressed the play button and, again, heard his own and Alondra's voices. In fact, he thought he recognized the broadcast.

“This is recent too.”

Winkler looked at the box and checked the quality of the tape.

“Maybe, if you consider twenty years to be recent.”

“Twenty years is nothing,” said Joaquin, while he tried another tape.

The results were no different. He tried others; each one was the same.

“Okay, I think I've satisfied your curiosity,” said Winkler finally.

“No! Now I'm more confused than ever! I need to figure out what's happening.”

“Nothing's happening, man. You asked me for this show, here it is. There's no confusion.”

“What's happening is that this place is a chaotic, confusing mess. Look around! It's impossible to imagine that you can keep any kind of order here. Stevens warned me about this.”

“Stevens is an idiot; my archive is in perfect order. I don't give a shit if you don't believe me, but these recordings really are
Ghost Radio
from 1983.”

Joaquin regretted blowing up. This was the worst possible time to lose his temper, but now he couldn't restrain himself.

“Well, as I see it, there are only two options. Either you don't know where your own asshole is, or you're trying to make me think that I'm crazy.”

Suddenly Winkler pointed to the tape still playing.

“Listen to that,” he said.

Joaquin listened. It was newsbreak. The anchor spoke of the publication of the
Hitler Diaries
. No mention of them being forgeries. And then an ad came on for
Return of the Jedi
's “world premiere.”

“Wait, wait,” he said. “You put that stuff in there, didn't you? You're doing this to fuck with me, right? Who put you up to this? What is this about?”

“All right, I've had enough, man,” said Winkler. “Get out of here or I'm gonna have to take you out one piece at a time. I thought I'd seen my share of paranoid conspiracy theorists, but I've never seen anybody like you.” By now he was shouting. “Get out!” He turned to grab a bat that was leaning against the wall.

As Winkler turned, Joaquin slipped one of the tapes into his pocket. He knew that the conversation was over and he couldn't leave without some kind of evidence. If he was going to risk his life, he figured he should do it for something that was worthwhile.

“It's not paranoia. Don't you get it? It's impossible for that recording to be twenty years old and have my voice and my girlfriend's voice on it.”

“Get out. I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't care.”

Joaquin had no doubt that the bat would be used on him if he continued arguing, so he backed slowly toward the door, keeping his eyes on the angry archivist.

“Excuse me. I'm sorry. But this matter has really affected me. My
life
depends on finding this show.”

“Of course it does. You probably received your orders from aliens who want to invade Earth too. Get the hell out of here.”

Joaquin reached the door, and opened it carefully. He walked out into the sunlight, which was still bright even though it was nearly evening. Winkler loudly slammed the door behind him.

Joaquin had the proof that something strange was happening to reality in his pocket. However, he still hoped to find a rational explanation. Was it possible that Winkler had confused the tapes? But what about
the newsbreak? How had that gotten there? Bleed-over from an earlier recording? Even Joaquin found that unlikely.

He climbed into his car and shut the door behind him. He leaned back and closed his eyes. He needed to shut out the world. He needed a moment when nothing strange was happening. He opened his eyes and night had fallen—a dark night. Joaquin closed his eyes again, this time in terror. When he opened them, the afternoon sunlight shone once more. He examined his reflection, his eyes, in the rearview mirror. In an almost childlike way, he considered covering his face again to see what would happen. He gazed at the palms of his hands for a few seconds, and touched them to his face. He closed his eyes, remaining like that for a moment. He opened his eyes, and again, the car was surrounded by blackness. He finally lost all composure. He fell apart. Up to now, he'd been confident that everything, somehow, would start to make sense. He thought that these strange events would eventually be reduced to a few curious anecdotes, forgotten along with many other unexplained, but relatively minor, occurrences.

Joaquin stopped
at the first motel he came across. A no-frills place without a name. The clientele appeared to be mainly seedy couples who slithered cautiously through the shadows from their cars to the rooms and back.

Joaquin was in no condition to look for anything more sophisticated; he just needed sleep and refuge from all of the bizarre things that were happening to him. At first, he'd wanted to go home. There was no reason to stay in Houston. His trip had been a fiasco. He considered calling Alondra, but what would he tell her? After what had happened that day, he didn't want to think about how their conversation would go. Still, he had an intense urge to dial her number, to hear a voice that would bring him back to normal and remind him of his everyday life. A voice that would make him feel like no matter what, he could always go back home again.

He didn't call.

Home seemed like such a vague destination. Almost an abstraction.

Since Prew's call, Joaquin hadn't rested for a moment: The muscles in his back and legs were giant knots. He fell back onto the bed without removing the polyester coverlet. He'd heard those stories about semen stains and bacteria on the quilts in motels, but right now he didn't care. Even Ebola seemed innocuous compared to the threat hanging over his head. Words floated through his mind like specters: psychosis; schizophrenia; manic depression; temporal-lobe epilepsy, Alzheimer's. There's something really wrong with me, he thought. There was no other ex
planation for what was happening: a neurological short circuit, a faulty connection, or a progressive, degenerative brain disease. The notion terrified him, but the alternative was even worse. He considered the stories he listened to every day about grotesque accidents, sensational crimes, and inexplicable apparitions. Worse than those horrors, he thought, was the absence of stories, the disappearance of memories, a silence of the imagination. Was he headed there? Headed into that abyss?

A crushing anxiety overcame him: a horrible sinking feeling, as if he and this lonely motel room were slipping into the asphyxiating depths of an abandoned mine shaft. The moment this thought popped into his head, a spasm, like an electric shock, ran from his back into his hands. He remained frozen, afraid that even the tiniest shift of his eyes would change his surroundings, and he would really find himself at the bottom of a mine shaft.

The telephone rang, breaking Joaquin's paralysis. He raised his head and looked over at it. He hoped it was Alondra, calling to find out when he was coming back, to ask him how everything was going, and to tell him that everything would be okay. But everything wasn't okay.

It hadn't been okay for a long, long time.

He tentatively reached for the phone, as if there were snakes, ready to strike, hidden in the mattress, and picked up the receiver, glancing at the caller ID in hopes that the small screen would offer him some assurance.

Instead, the digital readout only made him uneasy. It just displayed a single name:
Joaquin
.

“I'm probably not the best person to be calling me right now,” he said to himself.

He considered letting the voice mail pick it up. Confronting a recording would be less intimidating than answering the phone and exposing himself to who knows what. For some reason, though, he did answer.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Joaquin. On vacation?” said the strange voice that had become familiar to him.

There was no one Joaquin wanted to hear from less than this individual, the mysterious crank responsible for everything that was happening to him.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Why not let me ask the questions: who are you…now?”

“The same guy I've always been.”

“The same guy who was hosting a radio show two decades ago?”

Joaquin remained silent. How did the caller know about the tapes?

“You know that's not what's going on here. Your world is falling apart.”

“You're the one behind all this weird stuff. How'd you get my phone?” Suddenly a twisted theory clicked into place and he blurted out, “You killed the shaman!” He shook his head, amazed this hadn't occurred to him before. It made perfect sense.

“That's a very serious charge, especially coming from the man who beat up the deceased just before he was murdered.”

“Are you following me?”

“Can you even be sure he's really dead?”

Just then, there was a knock on the door. Joaquin jumped up, dropping the receiver. For a moment he was disoriented. The room seemed huge. What was wrong with his eyes? He couldn't see the door, the window, the television. He stood up, recovered the telephone, found the door, and shouted:

“Who is it?”

“Sir, you left your credit card at the front desk.”

Joaquin opened up his wallet, tensely looking through it for his card. It wasn't possible that he had forgotten it. He never lost things like credit cards or cell phones. He gripped the receiver tightly in his right hand as he let the cards and money slip through the fingers of his left. He scanned the floor, looking at all that plastic and green paper arrayed like a broken fan. It wasn't there. Frightened of what he would find, he opened the door to reveal a bellboy holding the card in his hand. When he looked up, he saw J. Cortez, the shaman, staring him straight in the eye. The faded
bellboy uniform barely fit him. The pants were too short, and the jacket was stretched tightly around his belly.

The receiver hung loosely from his hand, but Joaquin could still hear the laughter booming on the other end.

“You! What are you doing here?” Joaquin asked, trying to shake his head free of its confusion.

“You ought to be more careful. It's dangerous to leave these lying around,” Cortez said, handing him the card.

“What happened to your wounds? To Barry?” Joaquin blurted out, even though he knew it was useless to expect answers.

“Everything's fine. As for Barry, I'm afraid he's still wandering around. Poor lad.” There was a gleam in his eye as he said it.

“What's going on?”

“What do you mean?” Cortez asked, cocking his head.

The voice on the telephone chimed in: “Give the poor man a tip and stop bothering him with stupid questions.”

Joaquin took a long look at J. Cortez or Cuahtémoc, or whoever this man who'd been dead a few days ago really was. The man smiled, holding his right hand palm up in what seemed like a mocking gesture. Joaquin picked a bill up off the floor and dropped it in the outstretched hand. His smile widening into a grin, the pseudo-shaman-bellboy-pastor left.

“What was that all about?” Joaquin said into the receiver.

“I wanted you to see the kind of quality service your motel offers.”

“I'm hanging up now.”

“And honesty, let's not forget that. Honesty.”

“Good-bye.”

“You won't hang up. You're too curious about what's happening to you.”

“At this point, I don't know if I want to understand anything. You can keep my phone.”

“Thanks. I will. Considering all the stuff of mine you've kept, it's the least you can do.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I'm talking about. Your career as an impostor.”

“What are you saying?”

“I want you to ask yourself a question. Is this what you survived for?”

“I don't understand.”

But Joaquin knew, deep down he had known from the start who was on the other end of the line; now he no longer doubted it. He was talking to a dead man, someone he'd seen on a slab in the morgue. The voice was his, the cynicism, the black humor. But where was the generosity, the friendship? Only deep resentment remained.

“You understand only too well. With you, someone's always got to die: your parents, Gabriel, Cortez, whoever. Soon it will be Alondra's turn, and after that, who knows? Anyone who gets too close. For you, no sacrifice is good enough. And all for what?”

“The only one who's gonna die is you, you son of a bitch.”

“What made you become this complacent, arrogant coward who has to hide behind a microphone to relate to the world, Joaquin? This scaredy-cat who abandoned music out of fear?”

“I don't have to give you any explanations. I don't even have to talk to you.”

“You're wrong. You owe me that much, and more.” The voice was like an explosion, like a roar emerging from the receiver and spreading in all directions, filling the entire room, bouncing off every surface. It seemed to delineate the shapes in the room like the signals of a ghostly sonar. Joaquin turned around slowly. He knew he was no longer alone. When he saw Gabriel, he dropped the phone and fell back heavily onto the bed.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“That's my question: What are
you
doing here?” answered Gabriel. His voice was colored with anger.

“What kind of question is that?” Joaquin wanted to say Gabriel's name, but he couldn't form the syllables. After years of hosting a radio show, he had never felt so verbally impotent.

“You know exactly what I mean. You've wasted your life.”

“Even if that were true, why should you give a fuck?”

“Because I trusted you. I trusted you desperately, hoping you would do what I couldn't.”

“Is that what this is all about? You're frustrated that I haven't done what you wanted to do with your life?” Little by little, Joaquin found himself recovering from his shock at being confronted by a ghost.

“What we both wanted to do.”

“How do you figure that?”

“After I was gone, you should have continued on the path. Instead, you abandoned everything that you were passionate about, that gave your life meaning. How long were you planning on wasting your life this way?”

Joaquin couldn't find the words to defend himself; his eloquence had truly evaporated, his arguments ripped to shreds before they even left his mouth. He felt vertigo and an acute pain in his temple.

“You're really interested in the existence of those who are no longer with us? I'll tell you all about it. Come on, let's go for a drive. I'm guessing you're not too busy.” His sarcastic tone was eerily familiar.

Gabriel left the room and Joaquin followed him to the door without protest, resigned to his fate, whatever it might be.

“Let's take your car. I want to go back to the city we grew up in.”

Thoughts danced through Joaquin's head: Any minute he will vanish. I'll wake up cold, sweaty, and alone. He recalled what Alondra had told him about lucid dreams and the techniques he used to know. You could tell if you were in a dream, the theory went, by looking at your right hand. Okay, he told himself. Look at your right hand.

Slowly, he felt his arm lifting. His fingertips tingled. Then his right hand came into view palm up.

Now what? he wondered.

In dreams, you can never turn out the lights,
he recalled Alondra saying.

He flipped the light switch off. The light stayed on. Joaquin flipped
the switch on and off several times. The room remained intensely lit. He smiled. Gabriel stepped back in and caught him playing with the lights.

“If it makes you feel better to think that this is just a dream, that's fine. But let's go.”

“If it isn't a dream, how do you explain this?” Joaquin said, flipping the switch once more.

The lights went out.

“Don't forget that in dreams, nothing is permanent. Everything is in flux; solids are liquids, their identities interchangeable,” Gabriel said, walking toward the parking lot.

Then, in an instant, they were in the car.
In dreams
,
everything is in flux.

“Where are we going?” Joaquin asked as he started the car.

“Just drive.”

As they pulled out of the parking lot, Joaquin asked the question that had plagued him since Gabriel's reappearance.

“How'd you come back?”

“You brought me back. I was on the other side of what some of us like to call the
fourth wall
.”

“Isn't that a theatrical term?”

“Yes. Imagine we're separated by a pane of glass. You're on one side, we're on the other.”

“So you're always watching us through the glass.”

“Not really. It's different on the other side. I spent a long time not even knowing what I was. I just felt a need. A need to find something. A need to settle scores. On this side, we aren't aware of the boundaries that you feel. We feel you all the time, even when we don't know what that means, but only a few of us can interact with your side. Only the special ones. And I'm one of the special ones. I searched you out and found you, the only way I knew how. Through sound. Through radio. Oh, and a little light show you may remember. I've had the privilege of listening to you and your callers blather on about your fantasies regarding our uni
verse. I cannot imagine what they did in our world before the invention of radio. Marconi, we love you.”

“You listen to the radio?”

“It's incredible how nothing changes around here,” Gabriel said.

Joaquin was about to reply that he thought exactly the opposite, when he realized where they were. He was driving on the same highway where, decades before, he and Gabriel had met in their fatal, and fateful, head-on collision.

“We're here,” Joaquin muttered.

“We're always here.”

Joaquin pulled the car to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. They climbed out of the car, thick waves of traffic speeding past them. Somehow it shifted to midday. The sun beat down, bright, clear, anonymous. This time, he accepted the change easily, watching the flow of traffic, enjoying the dance of sunlight on metal. “Have you seen them?” he asked. He knew Gabriel would understand he meant their parents.

“They're still here. Perhaps the biggest difference between us is how we remember, how we experience our memories. Memory is something that resides in a dark corner of the mind; it's invoked in different ways to catch glimpses of the past. Random images from your life are engraved in your mind, but over time, those traces keep changing, they are modified, distorted. For you, memories are internal, they're personal, they're fragile. They whirl about your mind like dust devils, forming one moment, disappearing the next. It's different here. Memories are all around us, as radiant or sordid as the day they were made, and always accessible. And real. Very, very real. You keep them locked in a dark drawer, we—the special ones of the other side—can visit them daily.”