Ghost Radio (26 page)

A flight attendant
straightened her skirt, leaned over, and spoke to Joaquin:

“Sir, we've landed.”

All the other passengers had deplaned. She tried again.

“Sir, you have to wake up. We've landed.”

Nothing.

Perhaps he was dead, she thought. It wouldn't be the first time. The idea worried her. She knew what that involved. Police. Paramedics. The endless paperwork. She shook him.

“Wake up! Sir, get up!”

The other flight attendants joined her, concerned looks on their faces.

“He's not responding? Should we call medical services?” one of her colleagues asked.

“I had a bad feeling about this one from the moment he boarded,” she remarked, and then yelled again: “Hey, wake up!”

“Is he breathing?”

One of them put her hand under his nose.

Finally, Joaquin opened his eyes.

 

The drug had had a wonderful effect; he felt rested and ready to face whatever lay ahead. He looked around, slightly dazed. Three flight attendants were considering him with concern. It amused him.

There was a wonderful absence of unexplained apparitions and de
mented hallucinations. His dreams didn't seem to be spreading into his waking life. A good thing.

He fingered the back of the seat in front of him, then his own seat, then his improvised luggage. Its normalcy washed over him in waves of pleasure. He stretched out, grinning even though he knew it was quite possible that his problems were far from over. Joaquin jumped up, grabbed his bag, and got off the plane as fast as he could. A voice in his head told him that he'd reached a turning point. His car was waiting in the parking lot. The familiar smell of the leather seats and the way his hands felt on the wheel were comfortingly familiar. He sped all the way home. Cars advanced down roads, drivers talked on their phones, kids fought in backseats. The sun was bright in the sky. It all made him giddy. So giddy that he almost missed his exit.

He couldn't deny what he'd experienced during his trip. Every strange situation, every encounter, every blow and threat still weighed on him like millstones. If that wasn't reality, then nothing was.

In retrospect, much of the past few days seemed to have come straight from a horror movie, a B movie. Over the years, he'd seen dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of horror films, and it felt like he had the lead role in a fusion of all the different stories, a potpourri of scenes and clichés. As if his memory were playing a disjointed compilation of the film archives that he carried around in his head. The appearances and disappearances, the identity games, the leaps through time and space could all be tied to specific movie moments—not just horror movies, but all the films he'd seen.

Joaquin had pondered the horror of a nonlinear life, a life in limbo. Death was the absence of narrative, and nothing reflected this better than the perversion of personal anecdotes into plotlines borrowed from popular entertainment.

Perhaps he could still turn back the machinery of chaos, the forces that deconstructed reality, by rewriting his story, whatever that might be.

Joaquin was thinking all this over as he reached his building, the pleasant, overprotected chrysalis where he hoped to find Alondra. Alon
dra, the person he most wanted to see and whom he most feared. Everything seemed to hinge on her now. If his reality shifted with her, it was all over. There'd be no going back to an ordinary existence.

On the other hand, if she remained the same person, how would he explain the photo? Just an uncanny resemblance? A coincidence? Would his chaotic, feverish trip to Houston become an interesting story to tell on his program? Too much to hope for, he thought.

He locked the car and headed for the apartment.

For answers.

Joaquin entered
the apartment, moving carefully as if the hardwood floor might suddenly drop out from under him. He gripped the small suitcase tightly in his hand, afraid it would either disappear or pop open, the photos spilling out infecting everything like a virus. Alondra came out of the bedroom and threw her arms around his neck, something she didn't do very often. Neither of them spoke. She held him against her. He felt the tense muscles in her back relaxing. They kissed, forcefully and with pleasure, tinged with desperation. It was several minutes before they could articulate any words. They looked into each other's eyes, feeling each other carefully with their fingertips, as if each were something fragile that could fall apart at a single touch. It was as if Alondra knew what was happening to Joaquin. He didn't have to tell her what had happened or what he was thinking; it was as if she understood the depths of his doubts and fears.

However, something about it frightened him. Was she really Colett? Was she a Toltec pulling him away from the fantastic truth to the crude mechanisms of the everyday? Was she the linchpin, holding him to this reality? Joaquin knew he couldn't answer these questions. He wondered if he could confront her with them. Demand that she answer him. But he was unsure. He had to describe everything as best he could, then ask her, or beg her, to give the mystery some meaning. To confirm his perceptions.

Alondra's welcomes were always affectionate. But this was much more intense. Joaquin had the impression that something was askew. This woman, who never lost her cool, was on the verge of hysteria. He
didn't know how to begin, and an emptiness in his chest kept him from exhaling.

“Everything's going to be all right,” Alondra said, breaking the prolonged silence.

Her words weren't comforting. They were a declaration. A soldier's challenge. But, as her words hung in the air, the phrase became a question.

“What happened?” she asked him.

“So many things happened, things I don't understand.”

“I kept feeling as though you wouldn't come back, that something broke, something we can't fix.”

These words took him by surprise.

“Well, I am back. I'm not really sure about what's going on, or at least what's going on with me, but I know there must be some way to stop it, to set things in reverse.”

“Explain it to me. I'm ready to listen.”

“I feel like reality is collapsing around me. Like the past, present, and future are all tangled up into a kind of Möbius strip.” He didn't even mention the most disturbing phenomena, like Gabriel's appearance or his strange trip through the desert, but being back home made him realize how ridiculous it would sound.

“That doesn't make sense.”

“I know, but something is definitely going on with my perceptions. Maybe with yours too.”

He opened up the suitcase and fingered the photo of Colett, then stopped. Fear crept over him. Could he really show her this photo? What would happen? At that moment anything was possible: the implosion of the universe, Alondra's disappearance, a rift in the space-time continuum.

“What do you have in there?” Alondra asked.

“Old, unwanted memories. Nothing important.”

“Let me see.”

“Later.”

“No, I want to see it now, if we're searching for signs and clues.”

“I'd prefer to leave it alone for the moment.”

“Why? What's in there?”

“Photos and souvenirs. But here's another interesting piece of the puzzle,” he said, remembering the tape.

He took it out of his pocket.

“An audiotape?”

“Yes. A recording of
Ghost Radio,
but dated 1983.”

“Okay…”

“This has to be the broadcast I listened to with Gabriel when we were in the hospital, the one I told you influenced me to create our show.”

“I didn't know it had the same name. You copied it?”

“I didn't remember that was the name, I'd forgotten what it was called.”

“And why is that tape from an old radio program so important now?”

“Because we're on this program that was allegedly recorded twenty years ago.”

“Twenty years…?”

Joaquin described his visit to Winkler's archives.

“I lost my head, and with it the chance to take this any further. The guy was kind of creepy, no doubt about it, but he had no reason to con me, and he couldn't be so careless as to have randomly misclassified dozens of the exact recordings I was interested in.”

Alondra insisted that there were plenty of ways to explain it. This kind of thing happened all the time with archives. She gave him some examples of poorly classified documents, even in libraries with the best reputations in the world. Joaquin listened patiently.

Then he told her about the newsbreak.

That set her reeling. She gripped the top of chair, and took a series of deep breaths.

“Something strange
is
going on, but you know we have the tendency to get carried away by our imagination. We overanalyze to the point that we confuse and complicate things.”

“Gabriel has appeared to me several times. I've seen and talked to him just like I'm talking to you now. It's like I keep tuning in to his station on the spiritual airwaves. Unless I'm completely psychotic, I can't think of any other possible explanation.”

“Dreams?”

“That's what he says. But if they're dreams…well, they're a world beyond anything I've ever encountered.”

“What does he want?”

“I don't know. He says I've wasted my life, that it isn't fair I survived and he didn't.”

Joaquin didn't want to go into any greater detail; it felt weird talking about it.

“You mean Gabriel wants to hurt you somehow?”

“I'm not sure. I don't know.”

“But you talked to him. It wasn't clear to you what he's looking for?”

“No. Although he did express some interest in you.”

“What are you saying? Is this a joke?”

“No.”

“I've fulfilled every Goth girl's dream: a suitor from beyond the grave.”

“There's more,” Joaquin said, now that Alondra seemed to be open to his tale. “I want you to see this photo.”

Joaquin took out the picture of himself standing next to Alondra-Colett an hour or two before Gabriel had died.

“Many years ago, on a pivotal night, I met this young woman who looks a lot like you.”

He hesitated, and then showed it to her. She was smiling again now. Whatever had worried or scared her during Joaquin's absence was apparently starting to fade away. She took the photograph, but as she looked at it her expression changed; her face seemed to crumble and her eyes filled with tears.

“The resemblance is astonishing, isn't it?”

Alondra didn't answer. She remained frozen, as if she couldn't hear him. She seemed to be gasping for breath. Joaquin jumped up to his feet and reached for her. She was much paler than usual, her pulse was weak, and her eyes rolled back. Joaquin said her name and gently shook her. The Polaroid fell from her hands. He fell to his knees in front of her and picked it up off the floor. It showed, with unusual clarity for such an old photo, Alondra-Colett lying on the floor of the radio station with her eyes rolled back. She looked dead.

But she wasn't dressed as a Goth. She was dressed in ancient Mesoamerican garb. The clothes of a Toltec priestess.

Joaquin laid Alondra down on the sofa, and tried to think. It seemed as if her life was slipping away with each passing second; no wonder, if he'd confronted her with proof of her own death. He dialed 911, and then saw Gabriel standing beside the living-room window.

“Don't waste your time,” he said. “The paramedics and doctors can't do anything for her now.”

“What did you do, you son of a bitch?” Joaquin yelled, slamming down the telephone. He approached the specter threateningly.

“I didn't do anything. You still don't get it.”

“Leave her alone! Do whatever you want to me, but leave her alone.”

“It's not like that, Joaquin. You've got to understand. I don't have any power over Alondra, or over you, or over anyone. I can put together little shows; perform tricks that take advantage of your gullibility. I can show you interesting, tragic, morbid things. But I don't pull the strings around here. Now, when Alondra gets to my world, I can't make any guarantees.”

“What's happening to her? She collapsed when she saw the photo you gave me. You set me up!”

“You saw the photo I gave you. She saw something else.”

“What is the photo of, then?”

“In certain cases, the observer affects the phenomenon merely by her presence.”

“What?”

“You know, it's an observer effect, like Schrödinger's experiment with the cat; the cat isn't alive or dead until someone sees it. Or, to put it in terms you'll understand, a radio signal doesn't exist until someone hears it.”

“Alondra's dying, and you're spouting physics bullshit?”

“I've become very interested in science. It's fascinating.”

“What do I have to do? I'll do anything to save her.”

“I'm telling you, it doesn't work that way. This isn't a Wes Craven movie. I can't affect those who are on the other side.”

“You're lying. You blasted my way out of the hospital. If that isn't intervening in the world of the living, then what is?”

Gabriel laughed. “It wasn't like that.”

“Who did it, then?”

“That was in your hands, just as this is in your hands.”

Joaquin went back to Alondra. She felt cold. He looked for Gabriel, but he'd disappeared. He thought about Gabriel's parting words. In my hands, he repeated to himself as he picked up Alondra and held her in his arms. He dialed Watt's number. “Watt, I need you here right now, come to my apartment. It's Alondra; she's real bad, hurry up. Use the key I left you.”

Joaquin hung up before Watt could ask for an explanation or even say anything. Time was precious. He couldn't waste a second. Once more, he considered calling 911, but an internal voice told him there wasn't any point, that only he could save her. Just then, the shaman's apartment came to his mind, and he thought of the strange similarity between the chaos in there and the design of the pseudo-religious punk altar, baptized by the Mexican media as “narco-satanic,” that he and Gabriel had installed at the radio station. Finally, the strange sensation he'd had in the shaman's apartment made sense. He grabbed the car keys and took off running.

He drove like a madman, ignoring the other cars, going up on the sidewalks and down one-way streets. The possibility of having an accident couldn't have been further from his mind. In just a few minutes,
he reached the street where the temple-apartment of the pastor, Cuahtémoc, J. Cortez, could be found. He wasn't sure how he'd found it, but he knew, almost by magnetic attraction, that it was where he had to go. He parked hastily, jumped out of the car, and ran into the building. The stairs seemed endless. He knocked on the door, first hesitantly, then harder, desperately. No one came to open it, but he could hear voices inside. He tried the knob and it was unlocked. The apartment was just as he remembered it, except there was no trace of J. Cortez's body. The radio was on; it was a discussion, and someone was furiously screaming insults. Joaquin examined the apparent disorder. He studied the objects with a growing feeling of certainty. They were the same objects that Gabriel had used to build his altar. But he couldn't remember the arrangement.

Ghost Radio
isn't a show. It never was. It's a machine.

Gabriel's words echoed in his head. A machine that had triggered all that had happened in the last eighteen years.

But how could he build it? How could he make it work?

And as these questions coursed through his brain, a CD player across the room turned on, and “Kill the Poor” by the Dead Kennedys blared from the speakers.

As he stood there, listening to the lyrics, he realized the song could be viewed as a rallying cry of the Toltecs. Kill the poor with empire, kill them with a false sense of nobility, kill them in their quest for technology. Their quest for the machine.

He rushed over to the CD player, found the jewel case, pulled out the lyric sheet, and stared at the lyrics. These lyrics somehow provided the clue:

He stared at the words for a long time. But he couldn't figure it out. He paced about the apartment, screaming at the insanity of it all. He looked at the lyrics again. Looked at them long and hard. And then he saw it. The first letters in the first two stanzas. He pulled back his arm and looked at his tattoo. Yes, they were the same, and the pattern of his tattoo provided the arrangement.