Disc jockeys spun sad songs from the echoing band as they delivered their farewell transmissions.
Signing off on our final broadcast day….This network wishes you good night and good luck.
Their ancient words famously ribboned and waved through interstellar space, inspiring some middling, unconfirmed beliefs that we would be heard by someone else out there. But when our messages changed in the most important way imaginable, we went dark, encrypting everything that could be called a transmission. But someone gave the game away. That’s what games are for.
The game was immortality. We had cracked it, but just barely, which means just for the wealthy and when it worked, and not for those seniors who lined up at the Golden Apple. Humanity had left a direct line for whoever was out there to follow the transmissions back to our burning planet and claim the prize, assuming they hadn’t discovered the method already.
Those transmissions bounced off the icy bodies in the Andromeda galaxy and came back to us garbled, edited, corrupted by stellar dust, no one could say for sure. The AIs couldn’t crack the changes, so we asked humanity to solve a problem, possibly the last time it received a task.
Radio words and music come through a hollow aluminum tube. I tune, never turn, the dial, but always more stations have dropped out of existence, replaced by a high-pitched squawk. Yesterday, I heard a DJ yell, “Can you hear me?” It was a scream. I’m getting fewer and fewer stations and more space in between. Sometimes, a suicide gunshot came back. I believed that investigating the macabre incidents could slow or corrupt my search, so I focused on voices I couldn’t understand, the voices that didn’t sound period-correct, or seemed edited, or that didn’t sound human, or that I mistook for something interesting between the stations.
I’d taped a rubber skin customized for this month to my rear-view mirror. If I got this exact parking spot, which I managed to do today, shadows slowly gliding across the skin would silently tell me the time. But it rarely worked, mail order skins being what they are, neither skins nor accurate. So, I asked the air, and it told me it was 11:35 a.m. on January 25th, 2045. Therefore, the elderly would soon arrive for lunch.
A rumor had recently gone around that at the Golden Apple cafeteria’s parking lot you should rub an inflated balloon over your head and have someone film it.
“Wait,” the Golden Apple quickly posted online. “No, stop. Don’t do this.”
That was because some forty kids had used drug store balloons to explode their heads against the Golden Apple that day. With the DNA washes of the wall confirming the miracle, the exploded kids, appearing alive hours later at home, shuddering and a little bit shaken—how couldn’t they be?—disoriented, their t-shirts bloody messes and their attitudes suddenly indescribably shitty. Some didn’t recover. Three of the 47 kids blew from the inside-out, meaning, no more meaningful contact with anyone.
Why would some kids receive that fate, but not others? The city’s reward for answering the question is there, and as I do my morning’s receipts I keep it in mind, hoping to help.
My to-go catfish smells of clean water and french fries, whose freshness deducts that doubt. I’d ordered the fish generated just that morning. The Golden Apple still does that. Freshness has sustained them as their clientele has aged and expanded. Do you close your restaurant just because children used your parking lot to blow their heads into abstract splatters against your outdoor walls, but then re-appeared at home as little monsters? Not if you have a healthy, older clientele. I’d say you should just wait till you know the patterns better, which is what I set out to do.
Two hundred car windshields fired back against the sun rising opposite the Rockies. The elderly neared fifty milling about, held up at the entrance by a man connected to an oxygen tank on wheels. He negotiated with two other men over who would hold open the restaurant door for the women. That’s the excitement here. The real storms and T-4 winds migrated east thirty years ago, and the tornado chasers followed.
I stayed here for the radio static. In that thick, continuous band of voices and music that used to run together when you turned the knob, like those satellite images of glowing webs of light connecting East Coast cities—in all of that, a rot had started opening holes through which something new came. A noise, some music, but altered and not right in the original sense. I had zero interest in things being correct in the original sense.
An old cowboy plugged four quarters into the last remaining newspaper dispenser in front of the Golden Apple and took out three copies of USA Today. Sunlight illuminated him a dying gold. His straw hat glowed dirty yellow. A red Western shirt strained across his belly; its arms jaggedly hacked off just below the shoulders. A blue, faded tattoo spread over his hairy right forearm, the remnant of some ancient enthusiasm.
I sat in my car, floating on pain pills and working on my breathing. I run an independent ad house for eastern New Mexico’s media from my vehicle. It’s just luck that I have a place to work. I have eaten tuna subs with every human digital designer hanging tough in the county. Mountain springs of the next season’s colors flow from my one-bedroom apartment. Some of my ads were likely in the newspapers the old cowboy just had stolen. That’s a snack on both status and worthlessness.
With the purloined papers tucked under his arm, the yellow cowboy crossed to a brown-and-white striped Winnebago, tiny matching curtains in its dirty windows. When he opened the driver’s door, the sound of a sermon wafted out. He climbed inside.
Dayton, New Mexico had no library but did support a truckers’ lending library. Spiritual audiobooks left by drivers making their drops could be picked up at any truck stop, run between towns for a while, then dumped off at a drug store and exchanged for a different set, in the name of privacy from their surveilling employers whose AI drivers couldn’t stop their carnage. I still had “In the Time of Our Lord: #8,” a sermon on what the world would look like if God had not sent Jesus. Probably we wouldn’t be sitting here, the evangelist claimed. Without Jesus, we’d be pagans standing around in Jerusalem surrounded by animals to sacrifice. Totally futile. China or Africa would be the center of the world. And we would gather things and use things and eat, but we would be living only to survive. Jesus provides a life in this world that nothing else can.
I laid the Styrofoam box containing my fish on the passenger seat and started my car, then drove to the Golden Apple’s exit. I popped another of my father’s pain pills and followed the Winnebago onto the freeway.
I turned on the little battery-powered portable radio/cassette player I had unearthed from my junk drawer. Those things last. But the radio had lost the weather station. The disappeared channels left behind a breathy groan, like the sound of the noisemaker that sits on the floor next to my girlfriend, Michelle’s, office door. The little radio didn’t get better reception than the car radio. Still, I settled for listening to the news through its moon-shot haze.
My phone rang. It was Michelle. I always accept, but I let her speak first.
“Richard? I have the rest of the day off. Three patients in a row cancelled. Are you there? Triple paid vacation! Are you there?”
Michelle is the only psychotherapist with a PhD in a 105-mile radius of Dayton, New Mexico. Her days are booked three months in advance—children, teens, adults, the entire, abominable human landscape. She’d been pushed to her limit by the stress, but somehow, she sounded now like a length of silk rather than an exploded fringe of wool.
“I’m driving,” I said.
A ten-year-old boy and a toddler girl watched me from the wide rear window of the Winnebago. I’d become so acutely aware of Dayton’s aging population it was a slight shock to see children again. I wondered where they were being taken. The boy executed toward me a series of gestures, foreign vulgarities. His movements were clear and well-rehearsed, the flicking of his fingers around his elbows and chin and skinny armpits, all obvously learned online. I showed him the most popular finger in this country.
“Are you driving my way?” Michelle said. “Because I’m home now.”
The boy disappeared from the window, leaving the girl alone. She tapped her doll’s forehead against the glass. The small scene, suddenly slightly sad.
As the Winnebago and my car emerged from beneath an overpass, a staticky station tuned itself in. The artificial DJ said, “It’s twelve forty-five, two-twenty-five-forty-five, and 48 degrees. The Number Four lane is closed today. Exit Ten, Eleven and Eleven-B are closed until the twenty-ninth. Praise Him now, tomorrow, Forever. And now, let’s get it on with the top one-hundred countdown through the Thirties.”