Lost Signals (10 page)

You’re ready to pull the plug when suddenly you’re hearing two voices from the speaker that aren’t part of the movie. You know this because the movie was at the end, right at the part where everyone gets what they deserve, and all you should be hearing is gunfire, one-liners and big, dumb music. However, this whispered conversation is something you’d hear in the middle of a flick, maybe the beginning, when you’re not sure what the characters are really up to and you’re supposed to be all suspicious of everyone.

The sad thing is he has no idea I hate his guts.

You sit down by the speaker, actually thinking about getting a glass to put between the television and your ear to hear the voices better.

Remember his last story
 
? Even the goddamn dog was rolling his eyes.

You adjust your legs to get comfortable, hoping the reception lasts a while. You know the “hearing voices” thing is supposed to make you nervous, but it happens in this building sometimes. A couple times, a year back, when your surround-sound speakers were still working, you picked up some random banter between truckers. It’s the bad wiring that does it. Sometimes, you’ll suddenly get three more people in the middle of your phone call, and you’ll find yourself answering a question about the first time you stuck a finger up someone’s ass instead of answering your grandpa’s question about car insurance.

But those fractured conversations lasted a minute at the most, and they were nowhere near as clear as this. This is like you’re holding the tomato cans between two people, but their strings are coming out both of your ears.

If that bastard had any idea what people say about him . . .

Right then, the speaker crackles and the voices are buried under static. You lean in closer and bang your head on the glass. There’s a final
POP
 
!
and you yank the cord from the wall. You sit with your back to the TV, feeling the electricity tickle your neck as both you and the equipment power down. You reel in the cord, wrapping it around your knuckles, working to bend the prongs straight.

You hold your breath when you plug it back in. Thank Christ it still works. You stare at the green stain in the corner of the picture. It’s back, but it doesn’t bother you. You’d watch TV if the whole screen was green. Nothing happens in the corners of a movie anyway. A green sunset in this western
 
? The gunfighters wouldn’t even notice.

***

00:00:03:57—“Love Without a Life Jacket.”

When you claim there’s a long list of things about her that used to drive you nuts, you’re not talking about a sheet of paper, or even a stack of paper with both sides filled plus illustrations in the margin and a flip-cartoon in the corner to reenact the top ten, you’re talking about the kind of list where you could stand at the top of the stairs and you let the pages drop and they bounce down the steps and unroll out the door and down the hill and across the street and over the cars and stray dogs are crashing through it like a finish line. That’s how long your list is. And at the top of that list
 
? Surprisingly, it’s not how shrill her voice gets when she gets drunk. It would have to be the way she used to walk into the bathroom to use the phone. It drove you crazy. Well, maybe not
crazy
crazy, but crazy enough to ruin your day. Crazy enough to think about the word “crazy” until it renders the word meaningless. Luckily, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about any more. This new girl though
 
? Sometimes she stares right at you, even when she’s not on the phone. And she lets you listen to even her most embarrassing conversations. And she’s never turning the volume down on the receiver in case the caller says something you shouldn’t hear. She’s never pressing the phone hard against her head, so afraid a secret would sneak out while she was talking. So hard her ear looks like a ripe tomato slice when she finally snaps the phone shut.

This new girl though
 
? She’s got nothing to hide. Probably doesn’t even own a phone. She’s in the bathroom right now, and you trust her so much you’re not even turning down the volume on the TV to listen to her piss.

Then the toilet flushes once, twice, and chokes on a third attempt. She walks back into the room, then slides down to her hip in a quick motion that would make any gunfighter shake in his boots. Your smile slips when you see her phone drop into her pocket.

“I thought you drowned,” you tell her.

***

00:00:28:09—“Bugs Cannot Use Tools.”

It’s too cold to have a fly on the window, on either side of the glass. There’s no leaves on trees. The birds are long gone. The morning before, you had to dig your car out from under the wake of a snowplow with red fingers. There’s nothing alive outside without fur, nothing alive out there smaller than a rat, because you brought your rat inside with you.

But there it is.

One of those big, blue-eyed garbage flies, crawling around the edges of the glass like it was summer out there, like there isn’t a kid kicking the head off a snowman two houses down. In a daze, you pull the black tape off the window, taking some of the paint with it, knowing it’s going to take another hour to seal that window back up. You yank it up with a grunt, cold air freezing the snot in your nose.

It’s the first time you’ve ever seen one trying to get in instead of out.

What the hell do you feed it
 
? Usually, you’re trying to stop a fly from drinking off the edge of your pop can instead of keeping it alive. So you just stand back and let it ricochet off the walls like a drunk hoping it’ll find a stray cornflake or damp toenail to munch on. You watch it circle the room about six more times, increasingly confused by its behavior, cruising frantic figure-eights about a foot from the ceiling. Finally, you grab a stuffed animal still upside down in a corner from three ex-girlfriend’s ago and chase it toward the bathroom. If you’re going to have a pet fly it should be near the bowl, right
 
? You’re a pretty clean person, but you figure if there’s anything around this place a fly can eat, it’s going to be in there. Hell, cats and dogs get water bowls, don’t they
 
? You consider writing the name “Spike” on the side of your toilet.

***

00:00:42:31—“You’re Gonna Eat
What
Exactly
 
?”

The next day, your new girl comes over to watch a movie. Halfway through, the speakers start popping again, and while you’re screwing with the wires in the back of the box, she sighs and runs to the bathroom and suddenly you’re listening to her piss even though she’s a hundred feet and a closed door away. It’s splashing so loud you flinch and think she squatted down over your head, and that’s when you remember the fly.

Same old shit, you know
 
? Why do I even come over here
 
?

The voice is fading, so your crawl over to your bookbag and pull out your headphones. Several books tumble onto the ground, but you don’t retrieve them. The ones that land face-up are
If They Move . . . Kill ’Em
 
!
 
: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah
by David Weddle,
Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem, and
Choose Your Own Adventure #2
 
: Journey Under the Sea
by R.A. Montgomery. You don’t have time to imagine the significance of those selections and you quickly try plugging the headphones directly into the TV and get zapped with static instead. Like a fool you sit there, with the headphones unplugged and dangling, still listening for the voices. The headphones are new. They’re the kind that go in your ears instead of over them, sometimes too deep, the kind that you might lose in your head if you scratch too hard. Like you always do. And just like they always told you would happen when people are talking shit, your ears really do start burning.

I have to go watch the rest of this horrible movie, if he ever gets it to work . . .

You’re so excited about hearing someone’s voice through unplugged headphones that, at first, you don’t care what she’s saying. It’s not like the truckers you heard through the speakers before. This time you can only hear one side of the conversation. Her voice is a non-stop sigh, like the endless hiss of a tire valve.

Maybe I’ll pretend I’m sick.

Then the toilet flushes, and it’s as loud as a cyclone. You grab the sides of the TV in case you start spinning around a drain and get sucked on down. You’re so wired about this discovery that you’re smiling like a maniac when she comes out, struggling to keep your new eavesdropping skills to yourself. By the time you finish the western, you realize it’s not just the headphones. The fly was in there with her. Always the fly.

. . . the first time I’ve ever seen one trying to get in instead of out . . .

***

00:01:34:07—“Spiders Are Not Our Friends.”

After she’s gone home, you’re thinking you should call NASA or whatever government office deals with the physical manifestation of metaphors. Or, at the very least, spy on about ten more people you suspect are talking shit about you. You’re already making a mental list and considering how you might propose marriage to her when you go back into the bathroom.

The fly is dying. At least, it’s moving slower. Your eyes follow its sluggish path until it vanishes into a crack in the porcelain box behind the toilet. You panic and shove the clock radio and empty box of tissues onto the floor and take off the lid, shaking your head in disbelief as you look inside. Impossible.

The fly is caught in a spiderweb, flailing like a drunk trying to navigate beaded curtains at a party. Spiders in the toilets
 
? Flies in the snow
 
? You wonder what’s next.

Suddenly, you know what to do. You stick it outside the bathroom window still glued to a tangle of web, and, just as you hoped, the cold air seems to revive it. It’s moving fast again, but it never gets back to full speed. It’s not going to last much longer. You check the clock radio on the bathroom floor to try and estimate how much time the fly has left. The display is flashing a green “12:00 a.m.” since you never figured out how to set it. Now you’ve got two problems. A time limit, you’re not good with math,
and
you can’t get everyone into your bathroom to spy on them.

Staring at the word “Spike” on the bowl, you decide you should take your fly for a walk. Once, your grandpa told you he used to stick flies to his fingers with honey when he was a boy.

“We were bored as hell back then,” he said, “Now, don’t think I’m reminiscing so I can tell you how it built character or any noble shit like that ’cause the only thing playing with flies does is make you wish you had toys instead.”

He told you his flies didn’t fly too long because he always smacked them just a little bit too hard to slow them down, sort of like your grandma did to you.

Yours won’t last long either, you realize, and you have to move faster than you’re moving. You look around the bathroom, find some dental floss the last girl left behind. You have no trouble grabbing it out of the air, and it’s still sluggish enough to tie a leash around its body without risking a swat to stun it, but the floss is too thick for a knot. You look around and around and around, and finally your eyes stop on the answer stuck to the side of your toilet, underlining your pet fly’s new name. You crouch down to get closer.

All this time you thought it was a crack in the porcelain, but it’s a long black hair stuck to the moisture on the side of the bowl. You peel it loose and hold it up to the window. Black. Thick. Curly as phone cord. One of hers. You half-expect it to twitch like a severed spider’s leg, and even though it’s just a hair, even though you haven’t cleaned the bathroom since she left, you’re amazed to find a piece of her still here. You’d be less surprised to find a five-foot-five layer of skin she’d shed, rustling and drying in a corner.

You tie the leash quick. Too easily. You decide it’s because you had one of your hands buried in her hair for so many years that when they’re not connected to her head any more they still know your fingers, and sometimes you can still get them to do what you want.

The fly grabs her hair and starts stroking it with two front legs. Does that damn thing have thumbs, you wonder
 
?

Impossible. If bugs had tiny thumbs, they would have already invented a tiny wheel.

You tie it to your finger where the skin is still white from the ring she gave you, then you put on headphones plugged into nothing, a power cord dangling down and tucked into a belt-loop. You start your day.

***

00:01:09:13—“Bringing a Fly to a Fist Fight.”

You’re out the door looking at your watch, and you see it’s time for free doughnuts. The gas station makes new ones and throws out the old ones at exactly 8:00 every day. They’re always real cool about giving you those old doughnuts, but you got to time it just right. The fly tugs on its leash, circling your ring finger, then resigning to wrap itself around the steering wheel. You worry about a sudden turn breaking the leash, so you pull over and carefully unwind the hair without breaking it, thinking about the old westerns your grandpa used to make you watch, and the way the cowboys made their horse stay put by dropping a leather strap across a bush or twig without even tying it up or anything.

Inside the gas station, the girl behind the counter smiles, and you grab one of each kind of doughnut before the kid can slide them into the trash. He sighs and waits for you to drop them into your bag, then quickly clears the case. You take longer than usual because you’re trying to keep one hand behind your back. You don’t know what would be worse, someone thinking that flies follow you around, or someone seeing that you keep one on a tiny little leash.

When she’s counting the cigarettes behind her, you tie the fly to a bag of peanuts near the cash register, not really tying a knot, just winding the hair around the peanuts once, knowing it will stay, then you run out to pump your gas.