THE FUTURENESS Ch7: Radio Kill Report

My car announces the time. It’s 12:35 … It’s 12:36. Time can be a nag, or it can teach you to see it, hidden inside its weird dimension, depending on how you imagine her to be: as a scold or a mentor. I toggled the time announcements until I excelled at telling time myself. It’s 3:34, I would think, then ask and hear, It’s 3:35 pm. The car had a timer too. That presented a greater challenge. How much more is 15 minutes? You must hold on. It’s not easy, with that new feeling of the funnel. The funneling-out sensation. Of the future. I wasn’t immune. I was just the only one talking about it. During the spring thundersnows after Aventura, my panics turned red. Sometimes, I hallucinated blood. It pooled on my apartment floor, flowed into the street, vanished. In a white tile public bathroom, I hallucinated a naked heart lying on the floor pumping stalks of blood from its valves.

When I was twelve, I lived two blocks from Xavier. Each of us slept on the first floors of our houses. His house had a half-circle drive and mine a flat pull-in, with a hoop nailed over the garage door. We played HORSE and acted like we knew the rules of basketball.

Xavier invented a game to help us become better people, using the oracular power of radio running in the middle of the night. The game was played using the twin portable A.M. sets and the integrated walkie-talkies Xavier’s parents had given him for his birthday. We promised each other to keep our radios on all night, tuned to 1600 A.M., our station.

On the day he got the present, Xavier waited up past midnight, then climbed out of his bedroom window to prowl the gravel outskirts of my backyard and speak into his handset.

“Good evening,” he said, waking me with his tinny voice crackling through my radio’s little speaker. “This game is called Radio Kill Report. Here is your report. I’m in your future. I’m going to come for you. When you’re walking up the hall to your 12th grade physics class it’ll happen if you’ve become an asshole. I’ll slice you in half with my katana. Or I’m still in the future, and I find you when you’re fifty years old, and you’ve become the chief of a county prison, you’ll slip off your office chair and fall to the floor with a fukiya dart in your neck, the poison halfway to your heart.”

Summer nights, when we were passing thirteen, we began to see our parents as people other than what we’d come to expect them to be. Xavier’s warden father, my electronic-parts salesman dad and tour guide mom. I played along, but I wasn’t as good at the game as Xavier.

One night I wrote on my hand, wallet, Hot Springs, neck fat. I paced the dirt strip that ran between the fence and the brick wall of his bedroom, staring at my hand. I took out my transmitter and whispered to him over the A.M. band.

“Welcome back to Radio Kill Report. These are the things you can’t become. In the future, if you yell at your wife about how she lost your wallet, and it’s in your hand, I will be a botanist and I will come in the night to place some tree frog’s nerve toxin in your left shoe. In the future, if you are a tour guide of the hot springs who yells at people she thinks are throwing trash into the water, but really they weren’t, then I will become the assistant Scoutmaster who let your only son fall from bad rappelling rope. If you develop neck fat and talk during movies, I’ll run you over with my Maserati.”

When the future felt like science fiction, our conversations and cautionary tales came over A.M. radio. Radio Kill Report made our lives seem bigger, but fainter, like a star. Each night that summer, I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling trying to generate enough psychosexual zing to bring on a wet dream, when soft, fuzzy static would announce the arrival of Xavier’s next report.

“Good evening. I’m here to tell you that if you start lying to get people fired so that you can keep your own job, I’ll sniper you from a snow cave I dug by the side of the road. In the future, if you tell your kids about all your expensive watches instead of talking to them about what they really needed to talk about at that particular moment, you won’t hear my shoge wrapping around your neck until it is too late. You’ll stagger back in terror, if you become the kind of person who’s too scared to leave Dayton, when I come to take you out. Piece by piece, if necessary.”

For eighth-grade graduation Xavier’s father gave him a gold geo-positional wristwatch. Xavier was humming with excitement over the fact that we were getting ever closer to being free of Dayton. He shook as he opened the box, and I remember I looked at this father, really saw him in a new way, narcissistically proud of the gift he’d bestowed on his son. When Xavier slid the silver band, huge, over his thin 14-year-old wrist we saw that the watch’s brain was buggy: its hands eternally spun as it tried to set itself to every time zone on Earth. Time was speeding up, always wrong, never right, running out, whatever the hunk of metal and glass was saying, it also told him, because Xavier never had it fixed and wore it broken, that he could never stop moving.

After college, Xavier went to Chicago to become an independent investor buying and selling futures. I asked him about it over the phone.

“I’m interested,” I said.

“Why? It’s not interesting from the inside.”

He’d been making and, mostly losing money he wouldn’t tell me about.

“I want to learn about futures trading,” I said.

He said, “Are you trying to make fun of me, Rich?”

He never told me about his job again, and I never asked. He had moved to a higher plane, and there were no translators available, our languages were now too different.

“If freedom isn’t free, like it says on those bumper stickers?” Xavier said to my voicemail on a night when I wasn’t picking up. “They’re right, but they’re coming from the wrong place. Money’s the only way to capital F freedom, not Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. That is monkey freedom, you choose yours under them.”

Gradually, his voicemails turned to emails turned to nothing. And he said nothing after Aventura, even though I appeared in the papers as one of three witnesses who survived. The news called us the “lucky three,” Mr. Gary Preston, Ms. Lisa Langhorne, and me.

I imagined the silver plane that glided a hundred feet above me carried Xavier, and I imagined him saying, “As we made our descent to Dayton Regional Airport I looked out my window and saw a little you waiting for me. You’d been spying on old grandfathers as they cleaned fish during your lunch break.”

I turned on the radio, tried to locate a station, but found only static.

Inside the airport terminal I installed myself near the Arrivals/Departures monitors and waited for Xavier to disembark with the other passengers.

Most of the arriving were old. They clustered together near the monitors, looking for their families. Before graduating college, I decided that departure monitors were romantic, with their destination city names glowing blue on the black background, but these before me, I knew were call letters for disasters. The elderly were flying to Dayton to attend funerals or to sit by hospital beds. What I saw on the departures screen were outgoing flights that would lead them into a future with fewer people in it.

Xavier emerged from the sky bridge wearing a chocolate brown suit. He seemed too young to be comfortable inside it. He walked with a stiff-backed gait that made the suit and the black overnight bag on his shoulder look as though they had been assigned to him by some careless wardrobe department, and in concentrating on his work he’d neglected to pay the beginnings of any kind of attention to this fact. He wouldn’t have been able to pick out his clothing or luggage from a pile of lost-and-found objects. After that, the intensity and same basic look of a Tom Cruise type. Which is, borderline too much whites of the eyes.

“Why do you look like that,” he said. “I haven’t said anything yet.”

Xavier stood before me as contingent as any person who has just spent a good parcel of time in an airplane, ready to put it back on me, whatever it was.

“How was your flight, here let me take that, are you hungry,” I said.

He said nothing in the car. We ate fast food someplace I’d never been, in an area near the airport, at a deli that had a locally famous breakfast sandwich.

“I have something for us to do,” I said, “once you’re settled in.”

“I doubt I’m going to get settled in,” Xavier said, “but go ahead.”

“It’s a mock-up of Interstrike,” I said, meaning the video game we played when Xavier lived here. In the game, players around the world met in mazes to kill each other. A year ago, a Dayton entrepreneur bought a piece of land near the airport and carved it into a life-sized version of the game’s most popular maze, as a tourist thing. The idea was to paintball in the same maze where you shot South Korean kids from your couch at home.

“When are we going to play Radio Kill Report?”

I hadn’t expected anything other than a bored reaction to my Interstrike idea. I immediately agreed with him, as I always did, without thinking.

“We can do that.”

“That’d be good,” Xavier said.

“How do you mean to play it? Get walkie-talkies? We were just kids.”

“I mean play the second part, where the things we said would happen actually do happen.”

“Where I break your elbow or cut off your foot for something.” I couldn’t think of what, at that second. “Are you serious?”

“Yes. We can get the walkie-talkies too.”

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