Authors: Leopoldo Gout
Ghost Radio (24 page)
“What's your name?”
asked Joaquin.
“Nell.”
“And where are you calling from, Nell?”
“San Francisco.”
“Well, let's hear your story.”
“I heard this story from a couple of ladies talking at a bus stop and I told it to my friends from school. It kind of became an obsession with some of the girls. So people used to say that I was the one who started the whole thing.”
“Started what?”
The story I heard was that you could find out who you're going to end up marrying by eating a green apple with a long stem in front of a mirror at midnight. I don't know how many of my friends tried it, because they would never admit it if they did. The most important thing was that no matter what happens, you can't turn around. Anyways, one night I was with my cousin Lucy. As always, we were obsessing about boys. “Boy crazy,” my mom calls it.
Lucy really, really wanted to know who she was going to marry. She was really hung up on it. You know, whether she'd find the right guy, if anyone would ever love her, and all that stuff. Even if she would have a fancy wedding. She hardly ever talked about anything else. She got a green apple and waited till midnight, when her mom and dad and brothers were asleep, then she went into the bathroom with it. She stood in front of the mirror,
thought real hard about who she was gonna marry, and started eating. She chewed on the apple for a long time till she finished it off, never taking her eyes off the mirror. She told me that she was beginning to see a guy in the mirror, when she felt something behind her, like a shuffling or something. She'd locked the door, so she knew no one could have come in. Now, like I said, there's one big rule for this game: You must never turn away from the mirror and look behind you, no matter what. If you turn around, the man you were supposed to marry will die.
You'll live out your life alone. A spinster. An old maid. Lucy was terrified of that. But she couldn't stop herself. The sound was scary. And it wasn't going away. She turned. What she sawâ¦she said it was like a dark figure, like an “out-of-focus person” or something. It freaked her out.
She screamed, and when her parents broke down the door, they found her all by herself. She told them she'd been sitting on the toilet, dozed off, and had a nightmare. She didn't sleep for the rest of the night. When she got to school the next day, there was a lot of commotion. All of the kids were whispering to each other. And all the teachers were totally serious. She asked what was going on, and her best friend told her that one of the boys in class 4D, Mark Spencer, had dropped dead the night before. Out of the blue. He wasn't sick or anything. They found him in his bed, dead, with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. The doctors couldn't figure out what killed him. When his parents came to clean out his locker, they found a picture of Lucy. It turned out he had a crush on her, and he was still trying to work up the courage to ask her out.
The moment I saw
the photograph, my mind was flooded with memories of the girl we met that day in the desert.
I remembered Colett.
I remembered entering the radio station with her.
I remembered the mastiff almost biting off my nose.
I remembered my horror of the dogs eating Gabriel while the rescue workers tried to resuscitate me.
Gabriel's photo released a hemorrhage of visions, memories, and conflicting feelings. Forgotten for so long. But the images looked real. They looked familiar. More than that, they felt real. They felt like the truth. And not much had in the last few days.
They awoke in me something that had lain dormant for years, like breaking a spell, like waking up after a century of sleep. I was altered, changed, transformed. Nothing would ever be the same again.
But this photo of Colett wasn't a photo of Colett. It was Alondra.
Under different circumstances, in another time, another world, I would have dismissed it as a fake. Just Photoshop nonsense. But I was beyond reason and logic. This was certainty. I had to accept it.
I couldn't move. The walls breathed, audibly and hypnotically, like a giant cat purring itself to sleep.
The past surrounded me: objects intimate and familiar. A sofa retaining the shape of my body, shelves that once held my favorite books, tables with rings from long-forgotten cups of coffee and glasses of tequila. Under my shock and fear rested another feeling: A feeling of beckoning.
The past seemed a blink away; I could relax into it, fall back and let the decades evaporate.
Oh, how I wanted to do this. Just let the present slip away. Forget my life, my relationships, my job. Forget the Internet, cell phones, DVDs, TiVo,
American Idol,
and the War on Terror. Forget all the pain and joy. Just let it all spiral off into the ether, chasing lost radio signals in the heavens. It felt so close, so possible.
But this sensation vanished when I noticed Dash and Lizzy watching me, mesmerized.
“Hey, I don't wanna be rude. But you've got your box now, and we're exhausted.”
“Yeah, I gotta go,” I said. “I'm flying home in the morning.”
But I still couldn't move.
My desire to return to the past melted away, disappeared, the inexplicable urgency transformed into doubt. Since the chat I'd had on the air with the man who'd reminded me of Gabriel, I had wavered between fear and curiosity, between skepticism and the desire to experience for myself what dozens of people confessed to me on the show every day. Before, of course, I believed ghosts only existed in people's imaginations. This made them no less real. But it dissociated them from haunted mansions, prisons, dark alleys, or any kind of physical space. I knew that Gabriel, or his ghost, or whatever had appeared to me, had always existed in my head, a kind of superego always watching over my shoulder, judging my every decision, my every weakness. Talking to him was just another way of engaging in an internal dialogue. Another way of thinking.
All of that I could almost accept. Almost.
But this Colett/Alondra photo was different.
Could Alondra and Colett really be the same person? I remembered the first time I met Alondra at that party in Mexico City; I replayed, in my mind, the natural way she approached me, talked to me about that ridiculous zombie comic, how we went out to eat and took the first faltering steps toward love. I tried to determine if anything about that night
offered a sign. If any of her words or gestures revealed the clue, allowing all of the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place.
My tattoo, she'd been quite intrigued by my tattoo. I rolled up my sleeve and looked at it, hoping it might offer me a message.
But it didn't. Maybe it couldn't.
Gabriel's voice echoed in my ears, speaking of memories living in the darkest corners of the mind.
For you, memories are internal, they're personal, they're fragile.
He was right. They were fragile. Fragile as rice paper.
Finally, I stumbled toward the door. All of this had left me punchy. When was the last time I ate? Slept?
“You all right, man?” said Dash.
“Yeah, I just need some rest.”
When I stepped through the door, dawn was breaking.
Driving to the airport, I imagined confronting Alondra. What would I say? Would I accuse her of lying to me all these years? Would I yell that she was part of a conspiracy against me? Would I force her, by any means necessary, to confess the details of this cruel deception? Or maybe it would be better to get the truth out of her gently, by tricking her somehow. Perhaps I could try talking to her sincerely, explain what I'd discovered, show her the proof, and try to figure out from her reaction whether she was part of this bizarre comedy of errors or whether she was, like me, a victim of something inexplicable.
Then again, maybe the best option was to destroy the photograph, and convince myself that everything I'd experienced had been a sort of delirium brought on by exhaustion and stress. I liked that alternative. But I couldn't shake the knowledge that the point of this entire trip had been to get me to discover this picture. I felt almost as if my actions over the past few weeks had been meticulously programmed and narrated like some kind of show, as if I'd been obliviously following a script in which my every step, decision, and word had already been written down. I replayed everything in my head over and over as I drove, and no matter
how many times I told myself I was just being an idiot, I always reached the same conclusion.
I couldn't pay attention to the road. I kept crossing the lane dividers, sometimes going too fast, sometimes too slow. My eyes kept going back to the box of photographs and souvenirs on the seat next to me. I really didn't want to look at the photo again, but I knew I had to. I had to be sure; I couldn't go on without confirming what I'd seen. Colett was clear in my mind, walking toward the station, sitting down at the console, eating tacos next to me, picking up the flower I'd drawn.
But there was nothing consistent about my memories; the characters shifted, the locations differed, the words changed, never repeating the same way twice. My erratic driving didn't improve over the course of the trip. Other drivers swerved to avoid me, or honked in anger. Finally, the airport appeared on the horizon like an oasis.
As I approached I passed the café I'd seen when I first arrived in Houston. It was just past dawn, but there was still a small crowd gathered around a radio, listening intently. No one moved; the whole thing was like a tableau. This time, I slowed down and rolled down my window. I only needed to hear a few words; it was tuned to
Ghost Radio
. I rolled up my window as fast as I could, accelerating toward the airport and my flight home.
Hordes of people crowded the terminal, mostly businessmen, dragging small suitcases while talking on cell phones or thumbing BlackBerrys. I got a seat on the next flight. I had almost an hour to kill, but I really wanted to kill the voice that wouldn't stop chattering in my head. I bought a small suitcase to hold my box of recovered memories. I was tempted to deep-six the whole thing, to throw it in the trash, or just leave the package at the gate. But I couldn't help imagining the bomb squad, enveloped in their clumsy, cushioned space suits and surrounded by a gaggle of dogs and robots, paralyzing the entire airport while they destroyed the suitcase of souvenirs and reviewed the security tapes in search of the terrorist who'd left it there.
It made no sense to try to get any rest; every time I started to relax, my internal monologue exploded with conjectures and proposals, denunciations and accusations. My head was spinning. I entered the only café open, sat down at the bar, and ordered some orange juice.
While I waited for the serverâa good-looking young woman with dark hair, maybe HispanicâI pulled out my cell phone and dialed Watt's number. I didn't feel up to talking to Alondra quite yet, but I wanted to make sure nothing had happened to her in the last few hours, that the mere existence of the photo in my suitcase hadn't somehow vaporized her, changed her into J. Cortez or Dash or who-knows-what.
“Hello?”
He sounded muffled. I'd forgotten it was so early in the morning.
“Watt, it's me.”
“Who?”
My heart clenched. Was this another strange waking dream, one in which I didn't exist?
“It's me. Joaquin.”
“Oh, Joaquin. Hi.” He yawned. “What's going on? Alondra said you were out of town.”
“Sorry to bother you so early, Watt. Just wondered if you talked to her since last night.”
“To Alondra? You guys have a fight or something?”
“No, I just had a bad feeling.”
His voice got a little edgier. He was obviously irritated. “You're calling me before seven on my day off because of a bad feeling? Are you losing it, Joaquin? No, I haven't had a chance to talk to her. I'm sure she's fine. Did I mention it's before seven?”
“All right, all right, I'm sorry.”
He would get over it; in the long term, he had a high tolerance for my eccentricities. I was more worried about myself at the moment. Suddenly a thought struck me.
“Hey, Watt, you know about radio waves, right? I was talking to”âI paused for a moment, unsure how to proceedâ“someone. I was talking
to someone I ran into here, and he had a theory about our broadcasts. That somehow they could reach beyond our world, into, well, I know it sounds crazy, but into the spirit world. The afterlife.”
He perked up a bit at this, sounding more alert, if no less grumpy.
“There's still a lot we don't know about electromagnetism, Joaquin.”
Gradually, I'd been realizing how strange it was, hearing Watt's voice from hundreds of miles away. Almost as if Watt himself were being distilled into the very waves we were discussing and sent through the air, through the ether, through space, through time. It wasn't such an absurd concept, but it hit me with the force of a jackhammer. The air around me, I realized suddenly, was full of voices. Every person who was on the phone in the airport. Every TV newscaster, every traffic report, every security guard with a walkie-talkie. What were these waves taking from us? I sat in front of a mike, sending my voice out across the country five hours a dayâwhat were they taking from
me
?
“When you're talking about waves that don't need air or water as a medium, signals that can move through empty space, signals of pure energy, well, who knows where they can go? If we wait long enough, four or five years, aliens in the next star system could be listening to
Ghost Radio.
Hell, knowing our show, some of them might even be callers.”
I couldn't help but smile, although I still felt queasy.
“You're right about that. Look, I'm sorry I bothered you. I'll be back in a few hours. Do me a favor and check up on Alondra when you get a chance.”
“Sure. Just don't think too hard about this stuff, Joaquin. Who cares where our signal goes? We're worried about you.”
He hung up.
The waitress came back with my juice; I tried for a while to start up a conversation with her, but she seemed too overworked and tired to even feign interest. I could tell my small talk annoyed her, but I couldn't stop. I felt like I'd just done speed and been rendered indifferent to my surroundings. It was obvious that this minimum-wage employee didn't need this, as she satisfied the demands of a half-dozen executives ordering cof
fee, sandwiches, croissants, and yogurts without detaching themselves from their cell phones.
I started talking about the inane security measures that only complicated travel and didn't make anyone safer, pointing out, like a cliché machine, the incompetence of the baggage checkers. No one paid any attention to my ranting. The server turned on a radio behind the counter and cranked up the volume. The words died in my mouth as I recognized the voices. It was
Ghost Radio.
“That's me,” I told the waitress when she passed.
“Who?” she asked, pushing her hair from her face with the back of her hand.
“The guy on that show,
Ghost Radio
.”
The woman remained expressionless.
“The program you're listening to. I work there.”
“Oh yeah? And what do you do?” the employee asked, with fatigued curiosity.
“I'm JoaquinâI'm the host.”
“I've never heard that name and I've been listening for years,” she said, and moved off.
It might have been a way to demonstrate her indifference, or to put an arrogant patron in his placeâno doubt she'd run into loads of themâor maybe she was telling the truth. I listened to the voices on the radio, but I could only identify Alondra. There was a male voice that could have been mine, but I couldn't hear it clearly. When the young woman passed by again, I insisted:
“You're telling me you don't know Joaquin, from
Ghost Radio
? Really?”
“What do you want me to say? Okay, fine. I know Joaquin from
Ghost Radio,
” she answered irritably.
She brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand again and went off to serve more decaf and plastic-wrapped food. Eventually, she returned to the counter. I couldn't contain myself.
“Excuse me, but it's just that I'm Joaquin. That's me. I'm the guy who created the show.”
“You mean Gabriel,” the woman said, staring straight at me. “Gabriel is the host of
Ghost Radio.
He's called Gabriel, not Joaquin.”
The floor seemed to fall out from under me.
The waitress moved off to feed more hungry, sleepy executives. As she stepped away, I recognized the voice on the radioâit was mine. I
was
sure. She was talking nonsense. It was a program from a few months ago; a night when a caller claimed he'd trapped
chupacabras
. Watt had laughed so hard, he pulled a muscle in his abdomen. I really wanted to debate with the waitress, tell her she was wrong, that there was no Gabriel on the show, and that if she had access to my nightmares, she should do me a favor and go fuck herself. But she'd already disappeared behind a door marked
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.