Lost Signals (11 page)

Inside, you see the girl at the counter talking to the next guy in line and he throws a thumb your way. You quickly pull the headphones from inside your shirt and pop them in to see if this guy is talking shit. Amazingly, he isn’t. But she is.

He just tries to act like he had no idea they were free even though he was in here last night . . .

Your head down, you run in and grab your fly. For the first time since you started going there, she talks to you.

“You paying for those peanuts, asshole
 
?”

You stop at the post office and check the stamp machines in the lobby. Just as you hoped, there’s a wagging tongue of five three-cent stamps sticking out. You tear them free and put them in your pocket. Ever since the price of stamps went up, people usually leave the difference behind. Every little bit helps. It helps you stay on the periphery of responsibility but also feel like you have a job. For some reason, this feels like integrity.

The girl behind the counter smiles and waves as you leave.

He doesn’t have three cents
 
?

What the hell
 
? You scratch your ears hard to see if the voice goes away. You scratch harder. If you could scratch your ears with your foot, you would. You don’t understand. The headphones are around your wrist. The fly isn’t anywhere near her. And neither are you. How is this happening
 
?

You go to the diner. Are there females behind every counter
 
? Do they grow them back there, just out of sight, ten more rising up behind every register, and you can’t see them just yet because they haven’t grown high enough for their heads to clear the cash drawer.

The waitress has a pencil shaped like a tiny pool cue. You stare at it, hypnotized, every time she takes your order. You asked her about it once, but she ignored you. Tonight is no different.

“Excuse me,” you say. “There is a fly in my soup . . . ”

She looks down at the fly tugging against its leash on your finger.

“ . . . and I think the little bastard just lassoed me.”

She wanders away, a miraculous combination of expressions on her face that you didn’t think was possible. You stop in the restroom on the way out. In the urinal, just above the line-of-fire, there’s a sticker that declares
 
: “You hold in your hand the power to stop a rape
 
!” For a second, you think the sign refers to the fly crawling across your knuckles, and you’re suddenly ashamed. “Is it so wrong to be a fly whisperer
 
?” you want to ask the urinal cake. When you’re zipping up, one headphone falls from your left ear and plops into the yellow water. You sigh, pull the rest of the wires out of your shirt and toss them all in with it. Your obsessions have their limits.

You stop at the garage to get air for your tires. Your Rabbit’s always had this problem, but new tires are expensive, and if you find the right gas stations, air is free. This garage is one of the only places in town where you don’t have to pay fifty cents to fill them up, and the guy who owns the place gives you a knowing smile and the better part of a wave. You wave back whole-heartedly and accidentally bounce your fly off your forehead. He’s cool. The last time you stopped by, this man smiled and agreed that paying for air was “freaking ridiculous.”

You get out, tie the fly to the compressor, snake the hose, hit the button.

How fucking low do you have to be to steal air . . . c’mon.

Was that a woman’s voice
 
? You thought it was all men in that garage. Could it be a girl from one of your earlier stops
 
? What kind of reception does this fly get, anyway
 
?

I heard of someone stealing dirt once, only that was from a construction site and that shit ain’t cheap. But air
 
? Nope. Never heard of anyone stealing air.

The compressor stops rumbling. Your fly strains on its leash, then curls back to land on a coil of hose.

I’ve heard of people stealing water once, but that was during the war.

You throw the hose. 29 pounds of pressure will have to do. In your tires and your brain.

Honestly, who the hell steals air . . .

You can’t contain your rage any longer. You yell at the shadows in the garage.

“Well, who the hell
sells
air
 
?
 
!”

Two mechanics slide out from under their cars and into the sunlight. They stand and walk toward you, wiping grease from fists, blowing sweat off noses, staring at you like you’re nuts.

***

00:01:45:22—“Fly Factory Revealed.”

Do you ever get the feeling someone is talking shit about you
 
?

You stop at the video store to steal some movie inserts. You do this because those throwaway pieces of paper in DVDs really are great reading. Sure, sometimes you get a paragraph of summary or some decent production notes or an interview, but that’s not what you’re looking for. You steal the inserts because you like to read the chapter titles. It’s like a whole movie in ten seconds. The chapter titles tell you all you need to know.

You grab a random one as if to prove your point. Okay maybe not so random. You’ve read this one before
 
:

Sharks with Guns

•“Love on a Lifeboat”

•“Sharks Are Using Tools
 
?”

•“Are You Gonna Eat That
 
?”

•“Dolphins Are Not Our Friends
 
!”

•“Bringing a Shark to a Gun Fight”

•“Shark Factory Revealed
 
!”

•“Duel to the Deaf”

•“Quitting the Coast Guard for Good”

See
 
? What are you missing from the story after you read that
 
? It’s all there. The crisis, the love interest, the surprise ending. Didn’t someone once say there are really only three stories you can tell
 
? A stranger comes to town, and a man goes on a journey
 
? Man sort of talks to fly
 
?

You study the box and snicker. It’s one of those pre-fab cult movies that are so popular these days, and you scoff. There’s no way that shark could hold that chainsaw, much less a gun. They don’t have any thumbs.

Now that would be a scary movie, you think. If they had thumbs, they could make a phone call. It wouldn’t have to bite anyone. Just show one shark whip out a phone and every asshole in the audience would start screaming their head off.

Could happen. You’ve seen more far-fetched things than that in a movie. One time, in the bathtub, your ex-girlfriend checked her phone underwater so you couldn’t see who called her. You figured she’d ruined it, but it turned out the phone worked fine when you blew the bubbles off of it later that night to find the number she was hiding.

You slip some DVD booklets into your sleeves. You avoid the Blu-Rays since they rarely have them. Then you go up to the counter and grab one of those free internet CDs. She
is
up there, and you see a strange light flickering in her eyes and realize this girl is watching something under the register with the volume turned down. You wonder when she snuck a TV in there and now you have to know what movie she’s watching. Is she watching something she’s not supposed to
 
? Why else would she have the volume down like that
 
?

On the way out, you finally see what it is. A security monitor. She was watching you steal those movie inserts the entire time, and you can see yourself in the corner of her screen, standing by the door, hunched and alone, unbelievably small, looking over her shoulder, guilty as hell and green as the sunset.

Sitting in the car with your hands on the steering wheel, your heart jumps. The fly is dangling on the hair like a suicide, so you turn on the air-conditioning, open all the vents, and hold it in front of the cold air. It starts to climb back up its leash like a spider. It’s moving slow, but it’s still alive. You realize that every time you hide the fly, it starts to die.

Sounds like a children’s rhyme, doesn’t it
 
?

You have to get home. Or get it to the bathroom. Or a restroom. You think about how cold toilet water is even on the hottest day, and you realize that, even if you know what’s been floating around in there, it’s got to be tempting to swim in it when you’re burning up. For a bug, you mean.

You drive fast, checking the size of the gas stations, trying to gauge whether they’re big enough for a public restroom. You glance down at the fly and see it slump on the string and swing from the hair like a pendulum. You slam on the brakes and make a hard right into the smallest gas station you’ve ever seen. You ask the third-grade boy behind the counter if they have a restroom. He says no and turns back to counting the candy bars. In desperation, you hold up your hand with the limp fly swinging from your finger.

“Dude, my fly needs to drink from a toilet fast or it’s going to die.”

The kid smiles over a huge piece of gum and stares at you for 13 . . . 14 . . . 15 seconds. Then he points to the door behind the beer.

“Hurry up.”

Unfuckingbelievable. You guess he’s seen stranger things than this.

Inside the bathroom, you’re assaulted by a stench worse than any outhouse, and you walk over to the toilet and cautiously lift the lid. The water is clear as a mountain spring, and you carefully lower your hand until the fly’s head just breaks the surface. You think about the part of the buddy-cop movie right around the second act where the drunk partner has to get revived by the more wise-cracking partner, so he shoves his face in the bowl. You’re much more gentle than that.

And it works. The fly starts to activate, cranking its legs over its head to clean itself off. You smile. It looks like it’s playing a tiny air guitar. No, it would need thumbs to do that.

“Ears burning
 
?” the clerk asks you on your way out.

You smile. They’ve been burning for years. Once, you read a story about a mythical creature that ate nothing but ears, left behind the rest of the animal, just snacked on them like potato chips, leaving a trail of stone-deaf barnyard beasts all through the Dirty South.

Sometimes, you envied them.

Back in the car, you wonder how many people would believe you’re actually worried about this fly. You’ve never taken care of cats very well. And plants
 
? Forget about it. But this feels like everyone’s fly now. You feel the weight of new responsibility. You try to imagine yourself in the waiting room at the veterinarian with your fly. You’d be the only person who a kid with a sick hermit crab could feel good laughing at. You watch it perched on the radio knob, cleaning its wings, and you stab the gas pedal over and over, keeping the car in neutral, smell of hot metal in your nostrils.

You realize you’ve spent more time worrying about this fly than you worried about all of your ex-girlfriends combined. Even when that one had to get her appendix out. You mess with your stereo.

Equalizer,
you think.
That’s a good word.

Suddenly you understand something. It just seems like you care about the fly more than her, but if you were to line them all up against the wall and put a little pencil mark over their heads, you’d find that actually your feelings about the fly and her are precisely the same. And it’s not that you think more of a fly really, it’s just that, the more you find out about human beings, and the more you listen to their voices when they don’t think anyone is around who can hear, the less you think of them.

***

00:01:58:19—“Your Gears Are Burning.”

One time you told her you were going to invent a phone that, instead of ringing, released a swarm of bees. You said it would guarantee she would answer the thing every time you needed her to. She didn’t understand what the hell you were talking about. You think she thought you were talking about some special ringtone, and you said, “Okay, listen, how about just three small bees, just enough of a scare to buzz around your ears and make you swat the air in a panic every single time I called you
 
?” She had no answer to that. Later, your uncle invented something that played cupid with telephone numbers and license plates, but you don’t tell too many people that story, unless they’ve had as much to drink as him.

You walk out of the bathroom, and you see she was reading that same magazine again, the one with the prescription label with your ex-girlfriend’s name on it. You told her once how this old girlfriend used to snort painkillers off those very same pages, which seems like a worse addiction than drinking, but it didn’t really feel like it at the time. You’d think that alone would make her not want to read the thing, but she folds a page over to remember her place. You used to try to get a letter published in one of her magazines so she’d stumble across your name and accidentally listen to you.

Wait, did you say “prescription” earlier instead of “subscription”
 
? Because that is exactly what you meant.

The speaker suddenly starts popping again.

Shit fuck shit
. . .

You pull the cords on everything. You hate the wiring in this house more than you’ve hated anyone. It eventually destroys everything. You hear water running in the sink, and you figure she’s going to be in there awhile. She does that sometimes. Runs the sink so you can’t hear. Like you’re really listening to hear her pissing
 
? Come on. Then you remember something, and you quickly crawl to your box of old cassette tapes rotting in the corner. It’s your worst, last pair of headphones. Huge ratty ones from the ’80s that cover your entire fucking head. You hesitate to put them on. Your headphones are getting bigger and bigger, and you seem to be sliding further back down the headphone-evolutionary ladder. Once you’re holding them in your hands and blowing the dust and insect shells off the foam, you realize they’re older than you thought.

These are from the ’70s, not the ’80s, no joke, and they’re also the only thing left of your mother. One time, your mom came up to you and put these over your ears, and you were pouting about something like kids do, so you didn’t say anything, didn’t even look up, but you didn’t take them off your ears either. And you still can’t remember the song she wanted you to hear or why she wanted you to hear it. Maybe there was something funny in the song
 
? Maybe the lyrics meant something important to her
 
? Maybe she thought it was your favorite band
 
? You can’t remember. You were too busy ignoring her for reasons long forgotten. And now you’ll never know what song it was because you just sat there, arms crossed, mad about something stupid, frowning until the song was over and she finally shrugged and walked away.