DARK SIGNALS
She drives the rattling truck between the foothills, alongside the river beds, steering down the warm ribbon of asphalt until the sun begins to set. She hears a song on the radio and makes up words to go with it. She sings the words to herself, silently. Her words. Hers. She hears the words or so she hopes, echoing on the radio, repeated through the flimsy speaker. She hears her words echo through the valleys and the foothills, chanted by a soft chorus a thousand miles away, though they’re words she’s never spoken, only thought. She’d heard this station before and sometimes thought about following the signal, though she had only the vaguest idea of where it might be.
Exhausted that evening, she parks among the oaks in a lonely valley. As the twilight spreads across the summer sky, she labors to bring the vision and the message forth, trying to call by name something she doesn’t quite know or understand.
She closes her eyes to dream but too many thoughts spin silently for her to sleep. She stares skyward and, pretending she’s an ancient astronomer or astrologer makes up little stories to go with her visions of good and evil dancing in caricature across the nighttime sky. In the dim light, she sees shifting shadows in the ancient lava mountains off to the south and feels the signal of unseen radio beams that undulate across the sky, distorting the stars and their little stories of good and evil. The soothing fantasies soften her anxiety and she drifts off to sleep, atop the hood of her truck.
Hungry for meaning in her dreams, she hears the message and climbs the broadcasting tower in her dream. Her tumbling mind losing footing and, folding over its fantasies, falls through thoughts, anxieties and bewilderment. Landing in the soft ground, she senses the radio waves broadcasting a message, not the one she came for and wakes up.
“Hate and pity, the two sides of you. You hate yourself and want the whole world to pity you.” She hears this over and over as she looks at herself in the side view mirror, her face lit only by the dashboard dials. She reaches to turn off the radio, her insight fading as the moon begins to rise in the east. The radio isn’t on.
There, in the dark, with only the dim dashboard lights glowing softly, under the stars, in the slowly fading heat of the day, she thinks she might be schizophrenic, with both of her or maybe more, thinking she might be schizophrenic. Afraid she might be paranoid, they all realize how right they both, or more, are.
Not so far away, above the valley floor, behind his own dials in the dark, amidst his discs, tapes, memorabilia and assorted debris, he broadcasts his message into the night. Never knowing the right words and only understanding the music, he plays to suit his mood, piggybacking the bandwidth of more powerful broadcasters that surround his small bunker. Inside, underneath a single soft light, he flips the switches, punches the buttons and broadcasts meaning with few if any, words. Old posters cover up small cracks in the walls, the walls painted a faded red.
Electronic sounds hum through the metal frame of the old truck. She rests quietly on the hood, her long arms supporting her relaxing frame like a tripod. There, on the hood of the old Ford truck, she stares up, captivated by the midnight sky, drawn upwards by the stars and moon, anxious to get away, fleeing into the dark, imagining herself the sleek, pale hood ornament of some cosmic vehicle, racing towards release and endless expansion.
She laughs softly, crawls into the cab and, eased from her anxiety, sings herself to sleep. Occasional insects buzz in her ears and sometimes she twitches. Not bothersome enough to wake her, the bugs weave themselves into her dream tapestry. She feels the buzz from all the highway miles and dreams herself flying, like a giant mosquito, hovering and gliding, still and buzzing over the moonlit truck. Slowly she circles lower, each circle slower and tighter than the one before it, the buzz unrelenting. Closer she can smell the perfume in her hair and the smell of the day on her skin. As she lands softly on herself, she dreams of the disc jockey, dreaming herself as if she is him and seeing him through her eyes, nearby on a hilltop, cloistered in his crimson bunker, his head transfixed before the glowing dials.
“I’m you fondest fantasy and your darkest dream, all at the same time. Isn’t that wonderful?” She laughs harshly in her dream as she whispers in his ear. “I’m a part of you as close as the twisted center of your deepest doubts and as distant as your pornographic dreams of me. Go ahead, touch me if you can.” She strokes his long dark hair, then wrapping his hair around her supple fingers. She pulls his head away from the dials and switches, pulling his hands from the controls and looks him in the eye, her knuckles pushing against his skull. Looking into her eyes, he sees black pits, centered with golden stars, each the color of a rattlesnakes’s, each with six points, spinning around their axis. She twists her wrist, wrapping his long dark hair around her hand. The pain burns, the roots nearly coming free from his scalp. He begins to hyperventilate and, in panic, begins gasping for breath, his throat burning from the effort.
“I’m a part of you that you’ll never escape and never know,” she says, jerking her arm down, slamming his temple onto to control board. He moans. She slips away and he says nothing. She’s now gone and his shaking hand searches neat the right ear for the wound and finds it, the firm, tender, nearly numb lump, swollen and bleeding.
On her chest, just above the edge of the blouse, on her pale skin, a mosquito shudders and flies away, leaving a tiny black jewel of blood under the moonlight, centered in the triangle between her breasts and neck.
“Listeners…” she struggles to awaken as a voice comes softly, clearly through the speakers, though the radio should be off, she thinks. A strange parody of music follows, with undulating brushing cymbals, combined with nasal intonations and nonsense rhymes. It leads her serpentine thoughts through a labyrinth of worries and fears. As thoughts sometimes do, they been to merge in half consciousness with the strange sounds from the speakers. She realizes she’s lost control of her thinking, where romantic fantasies lead to reservoirs of anger and betrayal, going where she can’t explain and doesn’t want to go. She snaps awake and opens her eyes and stares across the pale, moonlit fields and shadowed oaks, to the vaguely crimson towers of of twisted rock at the end of the valley.
Music she’s never head before comes across the radio as she drives the gravel road to the mountain top radio bunker, the road going from bright, moonlit white to pitch black beneath the canopies of oak trees. With each alternating turn, pinholes of light from houses in the small towns of the valley floor come and go in view. A coastal breeze blows puffs of clouds across the summit.
“Tonight I will be the signal, the sender, the message and the eternal, expansive, receptive embrace. I will be my own broadcast, be my own sender. I am the signal. I am the message. Too bad the tuner’s a little damaged,” she laughs cynically to herself.
She parks at the summit and leaves the truck, walking through the oaks, along the paths, crunching the gravel, losing her way between the moonlit patches of high ground. The broadcast towers seem to glow in the darkness. The moon, at its apex, lights the way in spots and she finds her way slowly, along the cracked cement walkway. Atop the mountain, among the towers, among the uninhabited brick and cinder block buildings, among the whine of transformers and generators, she finds no destination, only locked doors, padlocked gates and chain link fences.
She retraces her steps again and again, looking around unfound corners and repeated her steps once again. This goes on for what seems like hours. As the moon sets and the smell of dawn blows in, she knows she has wandered far along the crested ridge of the mountain. In the distance she hears the chugging of a generator. Atop the nearby rise, a few hundred years away, a flat topped building sits above the naturally carved steps in the hill, the final landing of huge stairs, jutting and dropping in regular sequence into the dark valley like a primitive pyramid. The light from an open door fits symmetrically in the center of the building. She stands in relief and disbelief, beginning to walk, the beginning to run to her destination. On her way, she finds every gopher hole and rock to stumble on but what started as a spontaneous journey becomes the conclusion to a manic and maybe mythic quest.
When she gets to the open door, she sees faded red walls and a soft light, hanging chest high in the room. Tibetan bells play through speakers in the corners. Wind chimes hung by the door ring lightly from the pre-dawn wind. She stands there beaming, fixated at the doorway of mystery. A first hint of light flows over the mountain to the east. She knocks on the open door frame, getting no answer. Again. Still now answer. She looks inside.
On her right, an old tape deck runs huge ten-inch reels through the heads, playing back the Tibetan monks, ringing bells and chanting softly. Across the room, on an old cot, beneath a frayed army blanket, sleeps the dj, a band-aid partially hidden by his tousled hair. She reaches to touch him.
“Hey,” she says. “Whoever you are, I want to talk.” She shakes him again, getting a twitch and some stirring. With that motion, the tape deck switches off with a loud click, an odd coincidence, she thinks. Startled, she spins around and the generator sputters and chugs to a stop. The single light flickers and the room drifts into half-light, the only light coming from an open doorway’s view of the coming dawn. She then hears only the wind and the chimes. The room is silent. The spell broken, she stares at the frozen, silent tape deck.
Whether she stared for thirty seconds or thirty minutes, it doesn’t matter. When she turns back to the cot, it’s empty. The wool blanket lay heaped on the floor. The light of the dawn comes in through the door. A cool morning breeze blows through.
In the kind of slow motion that happens in sickness or in a dream, she watches her arm reach out and switch the tape deck back on. Though the generator seems silent, the control panel glows, the reels turn and the tapes move. No sound comes through. Tibetan monks no longer chant. All that comes across the tape heads is a low hiss, like an empty wind coming through the speakers. Through the open eastern door comes the first rays of the rising sun. Her misguided quest pushed to its irrational finale, she stands frozen, running her fingers through her long dark hair, squeezing the fist closed, straining her skin and scalp. She stands there lost, unable to separate which dreamer is in a dream and who is running from whose truth.