Lost Signals (5 page)

Exhaling a small nimbus cloud of smoke into the windshield, Max sat back, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he relaxed and opened the window, allowing the cool dry air to clean out the car. The blur had begun to recede, which allowed him a smile. He was moving again, had been for two sunrises, and the road behind him was growing longer. He was carving a proud wound into the hide of the central Nevada desert, and no one could force him to do otherwise. Max had regained his footing about the time he hit the Rockies, and with the great peaks of the continental divide doing just that between where he currently was and what he had left behind, he found himself feeling the music again, the rhythm of pavement as the highway danced for him beneath the floorboards.

Max turned on the radio, switching immediately from the dead FM presets of his last layover to the strange anonymity of AM. A veteran of the road, Max loved to scan the monophonic dial when moving through the most remote areas of the country. Amplitude modulation radio in major cities was the cozy bed of blustery right wing shitsuckers, sports broadcasting, and Madison Avenue country pop. But out in the forgotten hinterlands, especially in the desert southwest, the bedfellows become more strange, inhabited by a disparate mix of yammering Spanish, mournful cowboy crooning, random snatches of Chinese, thunderous Evangelical sermons, and UFO whistleblowers who always seemed to concentrate in the dried out, forgotten places, using the AM airwaves to vent their spleen and warn the ignorant masses about the alien entities already moving amongst us. The desert seemed ideally suited to a curious collection of castoffs, eccentrics, weirdos, and sociopaths naturally drawn to the dusty fringes. Meth cooks, anti-government militias, New Agey art nuts, murder cultists. All headed to the sandy heat like Jesus himself, looking to face down their demons, or possibly create them, away from the prying eyes of the better irrigated. Owing to the circumstances surrounding his exit from his last stopover, perhaps Max should join this sun-blasted freak show, he thought. Get lost amongst the lost. But he knew something else was out there for him, waiting far beyond the arid wasteland, where the mountains and trees sprang up again along the ocean cliffs, trying to slow the momentum of western trajectory before all frustrated life again ended up in the sea.

Max pressed “scan” and skimmed over an offering of MexiCali accordion music and a low rent advert for industrial shedding, arriving at what he loved the most—the Born Againer martyrdom rant against the encroaching forces of the Antichrist, who was always some eastern hemisphere powerbroker carefully selected and re-christened by each new generation, and then watched like a chicken coop eyes a hawk—albeit a hawk two thousand miles away. No matter what latitude or longitude traveled, Max could find cold comfort in the certainty of religious zealotry flooding AM airwaves in the forgotten places of North America, stoked by paranoia, bigotry, xenophobia and a sort of gleeful fatalism that would have chilled Nietzsche to his knickers. Land of the free. Home of the brave.

“And so the days of the tribulation are nigh, my brothers and sisters,” roared the firebrand, buzzing Max’s tiny speakers. “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet here. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows
 
!”

The signal faded a bit, but came back strong a few seconds later, allowing Max to continue his front row seat to the theatre of holy fear. “The signs are everywhere, if one knows how to look with the eyes of Jesus and the mind of God
 
! The return of the Chosen Ones to their ancient land, the gathering of crows, the massing of armies . . . ” Hoots and hollers from the unseen audience gave credibility to these ravings that would be deemed insanity in the western world if spewed under a different banner, or no banner at all. “It’s all in the Word, and the Word shall come to pass
 
!”

The Word. Max chuckled and lit up another cigarette, shaking his head at the dead-ass certainty of the Evangelical blowhard. How can one be so assured of
anything
 
? Faith aside, if this were a country settled by Bronze Age Norsemen and founded on the teachings of Odin and his hammer-wielding sprat, Americans would have a totally different outlook on the afterlife, and pine for bloody laurels while ascending to the Halls of Valhalla after being split in two on the field of battle. But this wasn’t that country. Thanks to Rome, then Columbus and Cabot and Cortez, pious Americans from every bloodline under the mongrel sun got the longhaired peacenik from Galilee as their redeemer, who Max surmised was more dope smoking flower child than gun wielding capitalist. Luck of the historical draw, as all the books that mattered to posterity were written by the victors. How many times had Max roared some version of this half-baked pundit screed into various living rooms and barroom bathrooms the past ten years like a C-list Beatnik
 
? How many times had no one given a solitary fuck what he was saying
 
? Gospels aside, the Son of Man probably experienced the very same thing, albeit to a better tanned crowd.

Max pushed himself back from his annoying existential meander just in time for the signal fade from the Bible thump. He sighed and pressed scan again, starting the lottery anew.

Outside his bug-painted windshield, the sign for “Fallon, NV—30 Miles” whizzed past. Max barely glanced, concerned only with how far he was from the Pacific, where his future would be made or broken on the chewed coastline of California. The place of childhood soft drink commercials and 80s beach comedies. Paradise under an eternal sun that didn’t burn or wither but lit everyone to camera-ready perfection. He just needed to get through the desert, and he’d be fine. The answers would be waiting for him at the water’s edge. They had to be. What was the meaning of life for a flyover boy
 
? California, your honor.

As the radio scan continued to cycle through dead air, Max looked out into the night around him. The range of his headlights hinted at an endless stretch of dried-out nothingness, colonized by scrub grass, creosote bush, cacti, and probably a fair share of bleached bones of varying size and species. Forty days and forty nights in all direction. This wasn’t land that had recently gone dry. It looked like it was
born
dry, shot malformed from the ocean to land under a misanthropic sky that refused to grant it any relief, any taste of that wet place where it was formed.

This backcountry was broken by the occasional squatty house, built low and set far back from the highway, as if the structure itself was trying to run from civilization and—reaching the end of its tether—collapsed glumly onto the dusty ground in defeat. Max could never figure out why anyone or anything with any sort of viable option would choose to live in such a God forsaken environment. No appreciable water, daytime heat that could kill a man, and a bloodthirsty landscape populated entirely by flora and fauna that was either poisonous or covered in deleterious thorns, or both
 
; a brutal ecosystem crafted with an eye on repelling or murdering any non-native species that was stupid enough to wander into the neighborhood. And yet, softheads came out in droves to parched places such as this to restart their ridiculous lives, pumped in borrowed water, set up artificial air conditioning, and hunkered down inside their suburban pillboxes, waiting out each day as if they lost a bet.

The radio found a tether and stopped on a fuzzy station espousing the tourist attractions of the area. “—orthern Nevada, some of the most accessible examples of these mysterious petroglyphs can be found at Grimes Point, about twelve miles east of Fallon on Highway—” And just like that, the signal was gone again. Scan . . .

Max was pondering the important issue of how petrogylphs differed from hieroglyphs when the radio halted its roll at the very far end of the electronic dial. After a brief silence, the weak signal transmitted indistinct sounds, like whispers, intermingled with an odd chanting that faded in and out like a spectral dirge. Intrigued by this strange combination, and hoping for a broadcast of a lonely Indian powwow, Max turned up the volume, but the higher it went, the softer the voice and chant became, going silent. There was no apparent signal, but the radio scan was still stopped, locked in on something.

Perplexed, Max noticed that the compass on his dash began to shimmy in its housing, spinning this way and that, even though the road ahead was straight as an arrow.

The silence was shot through by a booming intonation that blasted from the speakers, startling Max, who grasped at the volume button, barely noticing the brownish, misshapen hulk that lurched onto the highway ahead at the far edge of his headlights, gripping something large in its massive paws. Max mashed the brakes while cranking the wheel away from the creature, which dragged a half-eaten carcass of a deer—or was it a dog
 
?—up the rocky embankment, as the Dodge swerved by, skidding onto the shoulder and burying the front grill into the opposite hillside as the radio went silent again.

The car engine gurgled and pitched under the slightly crumpled hood, then jerked to a stop with a wheeze. Breathing hard, Max fixed his eyes on the compass. It was spinning like a top inside the plastic housing. Was this from the crash
 
? But the car wasn’t moving, and probably wouldn’t be anytime soon. The radio was again cycling through dead air. And what was that huge fucking thing that ran across the road
 
? Pebbles rolled down the hillside and onto the car like a hundred tapping fingers.

Max sat frozen, blinking his eyes that were obviously playing tricks on him after too many hours on the road. That thing . . . Was it a desert inbred
 
? Some sort of mutated bear that wandered too close to a nuclear test site
 
? This
was
Nevada, after all, the bullpen of the atom bomb. Max was unnerved, more by what he did know of what he saw than what he didn’t. Or maybe it was what he heard. They both happened so fast, so close together. He was sweating, and felt as if the car was closing around him like a tin can prison. He locked the doors, not sure if what was out there was worse than what he heard inside, as he quickly realized what most terrified him was that the radio would again find that baritone chanting that seemed to echo from somewhere impossible deep. He reached out hesitantly to push the off button, when the scan again stopped on the far end of the dial, but this time, he heard . . .
weeping
. The strange, uncomfortable sound of a man crying, as if profoundly grieved by the tragically occurred or the unfortunately inevitable. This stayed Max’s hand, before the sobbing splintered into sudden, spastic laughter. What was this nonsense
 
? What sort of psychotic local pirate station owner or ham radio operator was pranking over the air, scaring the shit out of those who scanned the far end of the dial
 
? This fucker owed Max a new, shitty, late model Dodge. Or at least a ride to the coast.

The laughter then stopped, and in the silence, the mic picked up sounds of papers being shuffled, tapes stacked methodically. Then, a flat voice that sounded distant in tone and emotion began. “You can hear everything in the desert.” The voice wavered, as if the speaker needed to stop, to breathe, to collect himself. “The buzzing of insects, the hooting of owls, the mad yap of the coyotes . . .

“You got that right,” Max chimed in with irritation to no one but the unhearing voice at the other end of the radio transmission, which came to life again
 
:

“Sometimes those sounds fall away by some unspoken agreement, and in that profound silence, the right type of ears can hear, can
sense
, the softer, more terrible noises that lurk underneath the normal nighttime din . . . ” Another pause, another intake of breath. “The desert whispers to me, telling me things I never knew existed, never dared dream, giving up secrets older than the primordial soup . . . I record these secrets, as I have been tasked, and broadcast them when I can. But the recording is the key, and I have been diligent, as were those who came before me.”

Outside the car, dry lightning carved the sky, highlighting clouds that looked like seething shapes forming on the horizon. “If you could rewrite the Bible, the Nag Hammadi, the Tablets of Thoth, directly from the source, would you sacrifice your life to do it
 
?”

Another religious loony tune—this one with a shiny heretical paint job, Max thought, trying to chuckle in spite of a gnawing fear that was coiling in his stomach. He quickly turned the key and tried to give life to a halting ignition while avoiding glancing out into the darkness. He was still shaken by the crash, and nervous that he might be stranded out on this forgotten ribbon of highway with this obviously insane misanthrope and whatever loped up into the hills.

After much protesting and cajoling from Max, the battered engine sputtered to life. He revved out the kinks, then backed out from the embankment and out onto the highway, jammed the car into drive, and drove wobbly on in the same direction he was going, the voice continuing its diatribe, with Max trying not to listen. The compass still spun like a mindless dervish, so it was no good to him. But Max knew where he was going. West. Ever west and as west as he could. He had to leave this weird fucking place behind.

As he built up speed, the radio signal got stronger, and Max found himself listening more intently in spite of himself, finding courage in motion, and increasingly fascinated by this obviously deranged individual who somehow attained access to the radio airwaves. It was like an auditory train wreck, the ultimate metaphysical reality show, and Max couldn’t turn his ears away, or move himself to turn off the radio.

“It’s late in my mission,” the voice said, “and nearly time for me to move on. I’m waiting for my replacement so the work and the message can continue. They tell me that the time of the awakening is at hand, and as such, the preparations have become more urgent than ever before.”