Lost Signals (17 page)

I took two more steps to her and she staggered to her feet. Her body seemed to bounce off of an invisible wall that surrounded the perimeter of the circle. The lights in the room grew brighter when she stood up. Her fingers were bloody.

“Please look at me, Sharon.” My jaw chattered, from cold, from fear.

She turned. The scream that rose from my stomach cracked my throat and sent me into a coughing fit. Her chin was black with coagulating blood. Her bottom lip looked like an animal had been chewing on her face. Her left eye was deep purple and shiny, not a bruise. Just iridescent. Her right eye bled indigo light. In one hand she held a bloody camping knife. She brought her other hand up, two fingers tapping on her chin as she smiled at me.

“It was the only way they would listen,” the radio said, static tearing her voice. Her lips didn’t move. She smiled, an awful, gaping thing that sent rivulets of bloody saliva cascading down her chin and chest. And then she flicked out her tongue, what was left of it. It looked like she was holding a lumpy meatball between her teeth.

“What’s happening, Sharon
 
? What’s happening
 
?”

“You tell me.”

“There’s light everywhere. The sky was in the sea, and the real sky was black. Everywhere I look I see light. I see the cracks.”

“And do you hear them
 
?”

“It’s too much. I just hear noise. Songs and screams and whispers.”

“All I see is the dark, but I can hear them perfectly.”

“Them
 
? Who
 
?” I asked.

“I know how this must look. But it’s okay. I’m hearing everything. It’s all in pieces. You see the light everywhere
 
? I can’t. I only hear them. Together we can put it all together. You just have to let them use your eyes.”

She smiled again and extended the knife toward me. She raised her eyebrows in that same way she used to do when she’d reveal surprise anniversary presents to me.

“They want your eyes. Give them your eyes and you’ll see everything.”

Sharon stepped forward, not threatening, just earnestly holding that blade up like this should have all made perfect sense to me.

“Lance Corporal Raymond Wood. He was here when it opened. He listened to them and he tried to see them and speak to them and it was too much. But together . . . Maybe together we can . . . ”

She walked over to the window. The sky outside looked flat, burnt orange. There were no stars, no moon, no rising sun.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t. What did you do, Sharon
 
?
What did you do
 
?
” This last scream broke my voice.

Sharon dropped the knife and held her hand out to me. “You were always afraid of commitment, weren’t you
 
?”

“What did you do
 
?” My hands shook as I raised them to her face. She closed her eyes and nuzzled her cheeks into my palms, her blood still hot and sticky on her chin.

“I always wanted you to know. I was never
zzzxzxzx
. . . –ou.” A burst of static overrode her voice. “You wer—
xxzzzxzxz
—and all I
zxzzzzzzz
—and you only had to say it. You only had to say
zzzzzxxxxx
. . . ” Her voice grew quieter. The lights in the room faded and the radio gave out a final sputter before silencing.

Sharon slid her stained hands up my bare arms, leaving streaks of her blood until she held my face in her hands. Our foreheads touched together, I looked into her eyes, watching the unnatural blues and purples fade, her pupils dilated and pulsed until her eyes were almost black. Her mouth went slack and she let out a soft sigh.

“Sharon
 
?”

She didn’t move.

I pressed my lips against hers, ignoring the tang of blood, the shredded lips, willing my breath into her. The room grew colder. I began to shiver, the lack of clothing finally catching up to me. Sharon swayed on her feet, her skin losing color, her eyelids fluttering.

I yelped when an explosion of static came from the radio in the corner. It grew louder and louder until it filled the room, no longer an exhale or inhale but a sustained scream threatening to shred my eardrums.

My knees knocked together and my breath came in hitching rasps. I put my arm around Sharon’s shoulder and pressed myself into her, leading her forward, out of the room. I briefly considered picking up the lump of her tongue from the floor. It was no use. It was just bloody meat now, speckled in plaster chips and sawdust. I’d never hear her voice again, never see that tongue stick out when she was concentrating, never feel it brush my neck, kiss me deeply. How much of us is our voice
 
? How much of ourselves can we lose before we become something else
 
?

We staggered down the stairs and through the lobby, out into the rising sun. It was the final blow to my addled mind. We hadn’t been inside for more than a few hours, and the sun had just been setting when this all started.

The car was locked. I dumbly patted my bare hips as if searching for keys. Sharon’s pockets were empty. My steps were a matter of inches. If I could get us to the road, we’d have a chance. Sharon was near catatonic. The cold had eaten me through to my bones. I looked down at my feet, sliced and bloody and stuck through with thousands of fish bones.

Get to the road. Someone will see us, someone will find us, help will come, or we will die.

Words raced through my mind. Hypothermia. Fear. Failure. Death. Divorce. Armageddon. I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked.

The tripod that held our camera was at the edge of the lot, so I picked it up. We kept walking until we couldn’t. I made it out to the main thoroughfare, Grapefruit Boulevard, and then my legs just wouldn’t move anymore. I took her by the hands and gently pulled down until she followed. I sat cross-legged in the middle of the eastbound lane and leaned her head into my lap. In the sun, she looked terrifying. Her lips were dried and cracked, her face coated with blood. In the light I noticed odd shapes carved into her arm. Glyphs and symbols that could have been a map or a message or just mutilation. My vision started going grey at the edges and I leaned my head against hers. I wanted to whisper to her, all of the things I’d wanted to say for so many years and stupidly kept buried. The good, the bad, all of it. My voice was broken. Breathing took effort. I tried to tap my fingers on her wrist, this little gesture we used to make at the movies to remind each other that we were there, close, in the silent dark.

I looked up to the sky and saw the crack, clear as day, sharp as permanent marker on glass. It wasn’t a crack at all. It was a design, geometric, orderly symbols that almost matched the ones on Sharon’s arms.

I fell unconscious as I heard the roar of an approaching engine, downshifting, tires biting into gravel. Then came shouting. I disappeared somewhere into the blackness of my mind, where everything was quiet and the inside of my brain was painted with the endless sea of stars that should have been in the sky that night.

***

They found one of our voice recorders during the investigation. I’ve reviewed the audio countless times. It’s just static, with a high-pitched whine in places that may have been an odd frequency or maybe Sharon’s screams. The only surviving footage on the camera from the lot was when I ran from the yacht club the first time. Hours of nothing, and then something hits the camera from the side. I’m pretty sure it was me, wobbling off to the sea. Twenty minutes later, from a skewed angle, my naked, mud-smeared legs walk past the camera. Somewhere around forty minutes after that, there’s a brief movement near the corner of the building. A shadow falls from the upstairs window. It’s too grainy to confirm that it’s a man, and the shape lands out of frame. They found a hiking boot and a belt near the spot where it would have hit, but there was no telling how long they’d been there. Inside of the yacht club, they found syringes, spent bags of powder and empty pill bottles. Five different knives. Three of them had dried blood on the blade, none of them matched Sharon.

This year will be the last that I go to visit her. No amount of reconstructive surgery could give back her tongue. It wouldn’t matter because she hadn’t tried to communicate with anyone since the EMTs brought her back. I have dreams every year on this day, the same as the fever dreams I had when they found us by the roadside the next day near the Yacht Club, near-hypothermic.

We spent a week recovering in the hospital before the detectives came. They questioned us for days, convinced that we’d been kidnapped, drugged, and tortured. They started building that narrative while we slept and did their damnedest to get us to confirm their worst suspicions. The first time the detective suggested it, I spat in his face. The second time, I stopped talking to them. They tried getting Sharon to write a deposition, but she was catatonic.

They eventually settled on diagnosing us with a hallucinations based on toxoplasmosis. They said we’d spent so many hours inhaling powdered bird shit that it snapped something in our brains. They didn’t bother to test the empty water bottle Doreen had given us. I didn’t want them to.

That was as close to famous as we got. The first year, we were ridiculed in the media as a pair of crackpot hippie lesbians who got lost on a drug adventure. The years after that, nobody but the conspiracy theorists would talk to us. There were a few out there who’d heard Doreen’s tall tale. I wanted nothing to do with them. I returned to Slab City twice to find Doreen, but nobody would talk to me. They’d seen me on the news. Thought I just wanted to bleed more sensationalist stories out of them.

I went back to Bombay Beach. The black line in the sand was gone. The Yacht Club got its much needed renovation, reopening as the glorious Salton Sea History Museum. I kept my head down the whole time I was there, though there was nobody to hide from. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. Instead, I walked down to the shore and stared at the sky until I was dizzy.

The last time I visited Sharon, I brought in a print of that selfie we took on the way in, her silly smile, the nervous energy on our faces, and tears started pouring down her cheeks. She looked at me then, really saw me for the first time in I don’t know how long, and it was nothing but hatred. She pounded on that photo with her finger, hitting the same spot in the background over and over
 
: the sea.

So we’re going to drive back to the sea, and we’re going to wade in. I’m going to take Sharon to the sky beneath the Salton Sea, show her the stars, the world below our world. I’m going to get it all back. The singing, the sound, her voice, us, all of it. There’s nothing left for us here. What broke us once will make us whole again. I’m going to find the crack in everything and shatter it, blow it wide open, dive through.

Last night, I dreamed of the last page of that journal we found in the yacht club, that page of spirals that I was certain were the scribblings of a madman. He wasn’t trying to bleed the ink from his pen. He was trying to draw the stars below the waves. It was a map available to anyone brave and insane enough to follow the path. Here is where I’ll be. If you’re looking, here is where you’ll find us.

There were explosions
in the distance. The sound was distant, a faint rambling, but he could see the lights. They were bombing . . . something. From the roof of the palace, he could see a whole lot of nothing. Kabul was somewhere over those mountains.

Daniel Shaw walked the perimeter of the roof and then went downstairs. It was getting cold. It wasn’t even his shift
 
; he just liked how quiet it was up there. The marines on guard duty knew it and never bothered him or tried to talk.

He met Stafford coming down the stairs. Both men nodded, but said nothing.

Stafford was a loudmouth redneck who liked to talk shit. Daniel had thrown him through a plate glass window back when they were on base, for saying he fucked his girl.

He reached the courtyard, which was deserted. The palace was mostly a ruin. Up in these mountains, it held no strategic importance that Daniel could imagine. An Afghani president and his family had been murdered in the Palace in the ’80s. The soviet army had been stationed there during the Soviet-Afghan war. The building had been built on top of the ruins of a castle dating back centuries. Now it was occupied by jarheads.

Their detachment was made up of fuck-ups and head cases. The discards. And Daniel Shaw was their king.

He stood for a moment, untied his shoelaces and shook his boots out. Small mountains of sand formed on the courtyard stones. He glanced at his watch, the hands glowing in the dark. He crossed the courtyard and went up the stairs on the other side. This was his last stop for the night before racking out.

The comms room actually had four walls, which was more than you could say for most of the rooms in the Palace. They had done some patchwork, using old furniture and planks, but it hadn’t helped a whole lot.

Nick Kocher spent his days in here, sweating profusely and listening to the radio. He rarely had anything to say to it. He pulled long shifts, letting the backup slack off. Not all of the soldiers knew why, but Daniel did.