Part of our World Tonight
Emily Doak
In a place where the forest is leveled, there is a television station low to the ground, a bunker on top of a bare hill. On the clear-cut horizon: satellite dishes, huge white circles, pick signals out of the air, and a red-and-white erector set tower transmits the Channel 1 signal out across the Florida/Georgia line. I’m on a break outside in the parking lot watching the Weatherman and the Anchor in the fields driving golf balls. The tiny white balls are bright even in the half-light of dusk. They soar up and are lost against the white of the dishes. I imagine the sound of impact, a metallic ding as Weatherman and Anchor finally bull’s-eye a dish, but the balls always drop far from their target with an unsatisfying silence, and even from this distance I can see them shake their heads, disappointed. Then they drop another one down and tee off again.
My truck is parked in the production lot facing the fields. Sitting on the tailgate, I listen for the solid contact of wood driver to a new Titleist. Hearing the crack, I turn to see their backs arching with their follow-through, clubs high, frozen in the hopeful silence, watching the trajectory sail through all those invisible signals the dishes are collecting.
I work Master Control, a small room that is dark and cold and electronic in all directions around a single chair. When I sit in the chair, I am Master Control in charge of the air signal from 5:00:00 p.m. to 1:30:00 a.m. My main duty is to cut in the local commercials making sure the air signal is always live, that we never go to black. Computers should be doing my job. Computers are doing my job in all the big market stations across the country, but while I am here, I have mastered the art of sitting with the monitors and not really seeing or hearing anything on them. Live monitors marked “Preview” and “Air” squawk and move. Lighted rows of orange, white and yellow buttons are my desk top.
I did like to watch when National sent down their news. The music started and a wash of blue spun itself into the oceans and embossed continents of a mighty planet Earth, then shrank down to become the CBS Eye. It would then be 6:30 p.m. and Dan Rather, shuffling his papers, would appear to welcome us to the Evening News.
But they never actually start the broadcast now; it’s continual. Dan looks tired. Since Tuesday it’s been a commercial-free, all-news format and he’s always on which means all I can do is always watch. I’m not sure he’s ever broadcast this long. The bags under his eyes are not smoothing out in the camera filter anymore. He’s trying to make this real for us, trying to find us some sort of understanding of news that is so large.
Master Control is dubbed “The Cave” by men that have worked here long enough for nicknames. I hope not to be here that long, but I agree with them. It’s all closed up and cold as cellar hell in here. I never feel it, but behind where I sit there is a crawl space, generating ungodly heat, crammed with miles upon coiled miles of wiring. It’s probably one of those things like if you laid your cells side to side they’d reach to the sun and back. I made that fact up but it’s that type of fact, the type that tries to put things in perspective but with proportions that make my mind shut down. The distance to the sun is too far to comprehend. But the thing the engineers with nicknames at the station would probably say is that if you took a truck out with the wiring from Master Control and laid each cable end to end in a long line, it could reach from Panacea on the Coast to maybe as far as Tifton up Georgia, which is far, at least as far as the signal we send.
Outside, I have taken off my sweaters, watch the golf. There was the rare activity of National giving us a Local News Break earlier, but now we’re waiting again for a commercial, for the weather report, for anything different. I had had a sudden desire to walk out to the satellite dishes and block Weatherman and Anchor. Stand until we were introduced, till I was asked to join the game. My impulse has faded.
There is a real News/Production rift in this place. There’s a set of six steps that separate the sides of the building as it follows the grade of the hill. This is usually fine by me because seeing Anchor’s ruddy, sunburned face on air is more than enough time with the guy, but tonight I wanted to talk to someone.
In a very quiet studio 30 seconds before the News Break, Anchor tried to do what he usually does. He gave his chair a cocky spin, drummed his hands on the desk and said, Let’s get this show on the road. He asked the only girl camera operator how he looked and egged her into flattery, left her giggling at the final countdown, getting shushed and told by the director that she was very inappropriate.
Anchor got tongue-tied on air. A minute and a half later the News Control Room was again showing Dan Rather on National, but in Master Control I watched Anchor in the little preview monitors I have of every studio camera. He pointed straight at the lens. In black and white pixels he pointed straight at me.
What we have here is failure to communicate, he said quoting Cool Hand Luke. He’s a movie quoter.
He’s got a real attention thing, needs people to know who he is. He said after school it was this gig or driving to NY with his buddy who was trying the stage. Of course I only overheard him tell this to Weatherman at the vending machines.
They whack the hell out of those golf balls out in the fields. They seem to be talking to one another with each swing. The more muscle they use, the louder their conversation. Half of me is hanging out the open side door of my truck and the dome light is blazing. I pretend to look in the glovebox but cut my eyes just above the dash and stare out at Weatherman in his shorts and T-shirt that they wear between newscasts. I watch his camera monitor when the director doesn’t have him on air. He rushes into the weather matte shot, tucking in his shirt, straightening his tie, slipping the receiver to his mic into the small of his back then buttoning his suit coat.
Weatherman has a name that is something like Everett Franklin Myers, III which he shortens for TV. He hails from just outside New York City and once we had a nice little conversation about New York when he came down to Master Control and saw The New Yorker in my lap. He thought it was my name on the address label and not that I’d swiped it from a waiting room. We talked and found out we had the same days off, we wanted to see the same movie, so... So... Come on... COME ON! I thought.
I had seen the front coming in on radar, so a part of me already knew why Weatherman had come down to Master Control. There was a tornado warning. He had to ask someone directions to get to me, totally lost after he climbed down the six steps to Production. He asked me to run a warning crawl along the bottom of the screen and turn us over to generator power.
Will you tell me when I can come off generator? I asked.
Turning to leave he said, No, I think just stay on it all night, Catherine.
I nodded and smiled and thought, I would sleep with you, you idiot! Don’t men care about those sorts of things? Catherine Baker, D.D.S., my dentist with the glossy city magazines.
Sun crawls down the Live Oak, the only tree on top of this clear-cut hill. It’s a pretty tree, but it’s molting stiff leaves, loud leaves in the wind we’re having. They run along the pavement out into the fields where a thud sounds, another golf ball missing the mark. A silhouette against one of the big white dishes, Weatherman bends, collecting the too-short drive, as a shrill ring sends me up, slamming my nose into the dashboard. I let out a yell, clutch my nose. Anchor and Weatherman turn way out in the field. I duck down on the bench seat. My cell phone is in the glove box. My mom got it for me because the drive here is so long and so late at night and she needs me to be reachable at all times. I jiggle my nose, seems to be in one piece. I answer the phone, Mom?
No, no. It’s me, a male voice says.
I wish I did not recognize me, didn’t know someone that would say me. Staying low, I slide off the bench seat and peek up through the window of my open passenger side door. They’ve turned back to the dishes. Weatherman pats Anchor on the back. I feel it between my shoulder blades.
What Kelly? I ask as I stand, closing my door. I walk back and start pacing behind my truck.
I can’t quite get rid of Kelly. Last time he popped up he claimed to be in the neighborhood delivering patio furniture, a new job. He was standing in the middle of one of my mom’s flowerbeds that the weeds had taken over. He had his face up against the window cupping his hands around his eyes to try and see inside. He’d buzzed his hair again. It looked good. Strong dark hairline parallel with his dark eyebrows and the eyes underneath—eyes that asked you to please help him, asked you to sleep with him, asked for everything and made you feel noticed, made me almost say yes. I went straight to the front door and screamed, NO!
Listen, my truck’s about to overheat, he said.
I gave him water for his radiator. He carried it out. Multiple trips in a Big Gulp cup.
So have you been watching this shit? Kelly asks.
Yeah Kelly, it’s my job, I say. Can we talk about something else?
Finally too dark for golf, Weatherman and Anchor load their pockets down with Titleists.
So I was by your house the other day, Kelly says, It looked empty inside.
Each slings their club over their shoulder. If they had bandana pouches on the ends they could be kids running away from home.
I didn’t know your house was for sale, Kelly is still talking.
We had to save money, I say.
As they walk along the edge of the Production lot to the Newsroom door, Weatherman leans in and says something to Anchor. I feel him talking in my ear. Everything will be okay, he tells me.
Look Kelly, I’ve really got to go, I say. Why are you calling?
Kelly is having a forget-the-TV-coverage, get-off-dry-land party and he wants me to come to the Coast to his boat.
You know I don’t get off till 1:30 Kelly.
They’ll be plenty of beer all night, he says.
Great, I think. Alcohol and the water, drowning, dragged under a sail boat and night, the lights from some little crappy bar on shore and that’s it. Too dark, them not even remembering my name. Kelly trying to row the dingy and his father banging some woman down below and no one hearing our cries and I’d be already bloating, filling up with water, starting to float, the dead man’s float.
Dead air.
I check my watch.
Kelly, I scream, Gotta go. I start running.
Gotta go.
I am missing a break, the break, our first break back in commercial television since it happened. National sent down the timings over the wire this afternoon. This was going to be our chance to return to normal. I fumble getting my access card out of my pocket. Running. I have never missed a break before. Swipe in through the back door. Round the corner to Master Control and see it: black. Black on all the monitors. Dead air.
Footsteps pound towards me from all the air monitors broadcasting black in every corner of the building and as fast as I can, I hit the buttons: ROLL on the commercials, CUT into the empty air National is sending us to fill. But our decks have a pre-roll of about two seconds, the tape telling itself to play.
Shit, shit, shit!
All the noise is getting closer. Still dead air. The phone starts ringing. Through my window into the control room, I see people running, pushing past chairs. I see someone’s mouth saying,
What’s going on?
Someone shouts in my ear, Master Control! I have picked up the phone without knowing it. Is National down? they ask. Are we down? they ask.
Why are we in black? I hear from the hallway.
I hang up the phone without answering. Dead air.
Someone asks from behind me, How long?
I don’t know, I honestly say.
We need a signal now!
It’s coming, I say.
Viewers are going to think something else just happened somewhere, a voice reminds us.
We are all staring at the black imagining what something else could be. Then a commercial starts to roll and the whole room flashes unnaturally bright. I lift a hand to my brow for shade.
1:30:00 a.m.: I roll down the windows already covered in that dew you find in the morning. Flap the wipers a couple times to get it off the windshield. Past the lonely oak, I speed out of the parking lot, revving my engine out of first gear, loud.
I cross the horizon line of the clear-cut that circles the station and enter the trees. They have chainsaws up at the station because when a tree goes down, we’re stuck out here till the road’s cleared.
The wind starts beating in through the windows and I turn up the radio. Turn off my headlights, drive by the moon. I don’t worry about cops; this road doesn’t even have a name. I drive as fast as I want since this road has no speed limit signs either. On curves, I cross over the centerline. The main road comes up fast after a dip, and I brake hard at the T where I can almost spit into Georgia, but turn right, down into Florida.
Radio songs string me along towards town. At this hour they are fond of Ground Control to Major Tom. The Classic Rock station plays standards and is one of the only channels that didn’t switch their format to news this week. I picture the station in a barren field, a little shack, a fully automated machine inside with a play-list programmed in years ago and forgotten about by its owner’s children after his death.
The woods are burning. They do it at night so there is less chance of the smoke causing accidents. I pass the big graveyard of construction beacons. A whole field of striped barrels, orange and white with flashing reflectors, blink at me like a landing strip.
A truck blasts towards me coming up from the interstate. I have to squint my eyes and turn my wheels into the smoke and wind it’s pushing at me, but David Bowie keeps on singing ...Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong...
At the 24-hour gas station, the old man is spraying down the parking lot and he gives me a little wave and puts down the hose. I blink through a swarm of gnats as he follows me up to the store. For some reason I want to turn around and tell him I went to black tonight. He’d probably hug me and tell me that’s okay. He was probably watching. Everybody was watching. It wasn’t that bad, he’d tell me, We weren’t that scared.
I walk around needing something. Same radio station as my truck. I take my time and walk down the aisles, looking at all the bright packaging under the florescent light. A girl framed in a light box in the middle of the night. Wide glass walls showing everything, but everyone at home has fallen asleep with their TVs on. No one is watching.
The door dings. A couple of kids in white baseball caps come in. I decide on some snack mix with pineapple pieces and nuts and get a beer out of the cooler. At the counter, the halted kids are fighting with the old man over their six-pack. They are definitely under-age, already drunk. The old man has a hump in his back and in order to look at the customers, he cranes his head up in a way that seems real painful for him. He recognizes me now without having to do this, by my hands, I think, maybe by my wristwatch. The kids look to me as if I’ll be impressed that they drink, will empathize with how ludicrous it is that they aren’t being served. I’m tempted to buy it for them so they’ll leave the old man alone, but I just look around like I don’t see or hear a thing. The old man doesn’t give in. He could say to these kids, She shows me her ID every night and I know she’s old enough.
One of the kids would say, That’s stupid. Why card her?
I forgive him for carding me every night and his little act that he doesn’t remember me, but I have been stopping here five nights a week for seven months, which makes roughly 140 visits with the old man. He could be my grandfather more than my grandfather if seeing is what connected people. His name is Randall across his plastic nametag.
The boys give up, shouting a bunch of shit, half-heartedly threatening to take the six-pack. Jerks.
After they leave, a bouncer-sized man comes out of a back room I never noticed was there. I’ve never seen anyone but Randall in his red suspenders over the company’s polo shirt, leaving the radio on in the empty store while he hoses down the parking lot.
Man, you have to give it to them. Don’t do that ever again. You don’t know what they could have on them. You might not see it coming. Do you hear me? No heroes at the Texaco. Just give it to them next time. Do you hear?
The old man nods his head. Then for the first time he waves my ID back into my wallet without his usual inspection of taking it in his hands and pressing it to the bottom half of his bifocals.
Well you’ve got to card her still, the huge man says over my shoulder.
At my old house, the motion light clicks on as I pull along two overgrown wheel ruts in the woods. I take a cigarette out of the glove box, leaving the key in one turn so the radio is still on. Standing in the open door to my truck, I dance a little as I smoke, waiting for the next song. I sit down on the tailgate and open my beer. Scan the woods for animals.
The motion light is on a timer and it clicks off. I crawl along the bed of my truck covered in oak leaves and reach through the cab window to turn off the radio. I lay back in the leaves, dropping snack mix straight down to my mouth. There are stars and I even see an airplane through branches crisscrossing the sky. I think it is an airplane. I don’t remember the way they sound, the way they look up there. If I stood on top of the cab I could reach the Spanish Moss on the trees, rip it down and make a blanket. Get the stars down to keep this place lit up. I could pull the planes down to study them, so I won’t forget next time they stop flying. I could see my mom in the two tall kitchen windows. I taste the beer up in my gums and realize I’m on my side with my knees tucked up tight and my hands pressed in prayer as a pillow and there is a phone ringing.
It could be Weatherman calling to tell me he’s disappointed I went to black. I will apologize. I’m so, so sorry, I will say. He will accept and tell me all is clear: the radar shows an empty green scope, the x-rays are cloudless, the diagnosis fair, the air feed live. The generator has hours more fuel. Thank you, I will say. He will sign off as always with, That’s your wake-up weather.
The phone is still ringing. I scramble for it. It must be my mother. She has said not to come around just to watch her anymore. But tonight she’s changed her mind. She will ask me.
I answer. Kelly is shouting, HELLO! the way people shout into payphones. Since I stopped seeing him, he calls from parties making sure I hear the background noise. He tells me what a good time he’s having.
Tonight he tells me there is no one but me. He’s broke down. When he tries to explain his location, I don’t understand. We decide he’ll direct me on my cell phone as I drive. He’s at a payphone outside a service station in the middle of nowhere, pretty close to Panacea. Do you have enough quarters for this? I ask.
Kelly gives me directions as I go, talking to him on my cell phone. Every now and then, I hear a pause and then the rattle and clunk of a quarter dropped into the payphone. I veer left at the fork like he tells me, leaning into the unfamiliar curve after the wheel’s been straight for so long. My knee, lifting off the gas, jingles the keys hanging from the ignition. I ask him for the next direction. He tells me he’ll call back and hangs up. Silence on the phone. I hear an airplane, its pitch changing as it passes low overhead. I duck inside my truck. Must be Mosquito Control, which means it’s almost morning.
I’d turn around this instant, but I’ve got no idea where I am. I’ve been driving for forty-five minutes. I throw the phone down on the bench seat. Wind blowing in the back window keeps pushing hair in my face. It’s the only thing keeping me awake. No oncoming headlights. Thick trees on either side wall me in, holding me to the road. I turn off the radio. Even my Classic Rock station has been found in its field and had its music switched over to the news.
I used to think I would move to a city so big you couldn’t see the city for the buildings, no forests, no trees. I’d have a nameplate above my desk and I’d go to work when the people did at 9:00 a.m. When it was dark outside, I would sleep.
In the middle of the night on weekdays nobody buys commercial time, so we show public service announcements. People up in the middle of the night need more help than they need to buy anything anyway. In one PSA a young black woman, babe in arms, walks up the steps to a halfway house. She has on cotton tights and on step three a leaf blows into the frame and gets stuck right below her calf. Always step three. I count one, two, three, feeling the breeze picking up the leaf. It’s one of those sad leaves left at the end of fall crushed down to its veins. Just a very frail edge gets stuck to her tights so it seems with each step it might let go. But it never does. It goes all the way to the front door with her. It’s the most depressing thing. I need to get her attention, need to point down at her leg the way you gesture someone’s got food on their lip.
Up ahead there is a glowing in the dark. His truck. I slow and my headlights scan along it. White. Rust. Tailgate broken, always down. Definitely Kelly’s truck.
A couple miles farther, the road Ts as Kelly said it would and in a gas station parking lot, he is walking out towards the road. He’s got on jeans and a wife-beater undershirt. The shirt is really all I can see bobbing towards me through the dark, too far from the light spill of the gas station and not close enough to my headlights. The sun hasn’t hit the horizon, but it’s close. I pull over. Check myself in the rearview mirror. Pull a leaf from my hair.
In the halfway house PSA, the woman is at the front door and the wind blows again. The blanket flies from her baby’s head, revealing the pink tone flesh of a plastic doll. She doesn’t need help at all, but the screen door opens, and we, the viewers, are there to welcome her and her gracious smile feels good.
Kelly reaches my headlights. I can see his shape from back when he worked the tankers, before the furniture job. It changed his muscles, the width of his shoulders, made his skin tan easily. He hobbles toward me over the pavement. Poor guy’s barefoot and shivering. I reach over and unlock the passenger side.
The overhead light comes on with the open door and I see fine sun-bleached hairs on his cheekbones, on the tops of his ears. I reach out my hand, but when he closes the door, the light switches off and my hand hits lower on dark stubble. I’m not sure why I’m reaching out at all, so I bring down my hand and clap it on his thigh a couple times and ask him, Where are we going now?
His Dad’s going to kill him over the truck. They share this truck since Kelly’s blue truck died and just sits in one of the parking spaces at his apartment building, oak leaves all stuck in the windshield wipers. The white truck is actually in much worse shape than the blue truck but keeps running despite itself. His big man fingernails brush along my forearm. His Dad needs this truck for work, tomorrow. His Dad is, yet again, going to kill him. His eyebrows squeeze closer together on his forehead. He looks like he might start to cry. Can we go get his dad at the marina? he asks.
The marina is a little place, probably only six slips. A couple empty. Thrown lines on the dock, though, expecting boats back from the Gulf. It’s a narrow slot of inland waterway, a creek. Both sides walled in by rust stained concrete smelling like salt, barnacles breathing, wind slapping lines high on metal masts. Bing.
Kelly and his Dad went in on this sailboat together a couple months back when I first met Kelly, actually when I met Kelly and his Dad out together. I just needed to be around people and I thought with live music I wouldn’t need to talk to anyone. They both bought me a beer, they both invited me out sometime when they got their boat. They were trying out names and when they got really drunk they both agreed to name her after me.
Bright yellow paint peeling on the teak, no name on her side yet. Kelly leaps aboard. She’s tied pretty loose to the dock so it’s a wide gap, but he just arcs over it not stopping to think. Beauty. He readjusts his weight just right. The guy does have boat intelligence, if no other kind.
The deck is littered with empty High Life cans that were no doubt full just a few hours ago. They seem like relics now, visitors from the night world. It is bright morning. It came so gradual I didn’t see the exact moment.
He brings up flip-flops, drops them down and slips his feet in. I stand in the grass. He goes down again and returns with a girl’s bathing suit that he carefully lays on the deck to dry. I guess it’s not the bathing suit of a girl Kelly could call for help. He invites me aboard. I feel almost special. He stands at attention with his hand extended to help me. Empty beer cans are floating in the gap between the dock and the boat.
It’s too far, I say, I can’t.
Yes you can, he says.
That suit is teeny and black and I imagine it coming off of her last night. I decline.
He shrugs and goes back under. He brings up two empty folded cardboard beer cases and two fresh cans. He’s going to toss one to me.
I don’t want one.
It’s 6 a.m., I say and sit down in the shade on a couple of wooden stairs to a teeny house, which seems to be the marina office.
You’re too pale, he says, Sit in the sun.
No thanks, I say. There’s water running inside, and I expect to smell bacon next. Kelly mutters something about me looking like a ghost. He finishes his beer, glugging it down like his morning OJ. He snaps open the next can, and my eyes close. I hear Kelly crushing cans, but I know I’m asleep. That’s okay, I tell myself, I have to get some sleep so I can drive Kelly and his Dad home later. I hear the shrill ringing that National sends down when there is going to be a Special Report, but I’m still not waking up, and it is a jarring sound. They use it for disasters like when there was that school shooting. Where was that? It was the name of a flower. There were a couple wars too, but they weren’t in America so they never used it. Then on Tuesday the shrill ring was used for an airplane crashed in New York... Dan Rather walks up to me. He brushes off the step, unbuttons his navy suit coat and sits down beside me. I want to talk to him, but I’m so tired my head nods on his shoulder.
He shakes me awake. Okay Dan okay, I say, You’re from Texas, right? We’ll take Kelly’s boat and sail across the Gulf, okay. We’ll get you home too.
No. no, he yells at me, shaking me, No, we’re not going there.
A screen door bangs closed behind me. My head bashes on the step railing. I’m awake. Jerky head movements. I’m awake. Kelly’s Dad has his hand on my shoulder, stepping over me on the stairs with just a towel wrapped around his waist. Dripping from a shower and chuckling, he says, So he finally got you out to Panacea.
Kelly is blatantly ignoring his father, crushing cans and throwing them in a big garbage bag. His father looks to me. I shrug my shoulders.
I thought they’d have you working ‘round the clock, he says.
There’s nothing to do, not here, I say.
Kelly crushes a can with a violent stomp, throwing it hard and loud into the trash bag.
What’s your problem? his father asks.
Kelly explodes. He tells him about the busted truck, the good one, the white one, the only one.
It’s a truck, son, his father says, It could be worse. I think there’s a jug in the cooler. We’ll take her a drink of water.
Kelly screams, That’s not going to work this time. It’s really busted. It fucking is this time. It’s broken, okay? No fixing.
I escape into the marina office. My eyes take some time to adjust to the dark. The screens are clotted in dust, and the place smells like mildew. I hear them arguing as I lock myself in the bathroom. The mirror is cloudy and has a rusty pockmark rash spread under the glass. I’m grey, huge pixels, a monitor with bad reception. I splash water on my face.
I have to sleep, I tell Kelly.
He says if I drive them home I can take a nap there. I can sleep on the bed for as long as I need to. I’ve never seen the bed. His Dad took over the bedroom when he moved into Kelly’s apartment right before I met them. His Dad has five alimonies to pay, and when he got kicked out of six, he showed up at Kelly’s door strapped for the legal costs. Kelly doesn’t make him pay anything. You can tell mainly they like having each other around. I think Kelly might actually be from marriage one.
Kelly and I slept on the couch, but we would end up on the floor, my head staring up at his fish tank, his feet tangling the TV stand. Rolling onto shoes and the remote, turning up the volume on the disaster documentaries he liked to watch on those high cable channels. His Dad would come out toga-ed in a sheet to use the bathroom. It was a fight to make Kelly stop playing with me and just pretend to be asleep. Last time I was there I heard his father’s toga sheet dragging along the carpet. I opened my eyes the tiniest slit and he was just standing above us, looking down. I held my breath. Finally, he reached over and bolted the front door.
It’s too early to knock, so his Dad leaves the truck keys under the doormat. Mechanic he’ll call later. We drive three tight across the bench seat, and I have to shift gears through Kelly’s crotch. I consider crashing the truck, but then people from the television station would show up and see me with them and this really would be my life. The reporter would go looking for grieving members of my family to give sad sound bites and they’d be directed to my mother’s hospital room. We flip down the visors against the sun sitting on the horizon making the woods look on fire. Kelly, in the middle, raises his hand up to his brow.
Father and son want breakfast. Hardee’s please, they say, Because they have those raisin biscuits. I pull into the drive through. I roll down my window. Of course neither of them has any cash. Kelly says he spent all his calling me. A buck twenty-five? I’m too tired to care and about to nod off again as I get out my wallet. A voice tells me, That’ll be $6.45 ma’am. Please pull through. Kelly pokes me on the shoulder. PULL THROUGH MA’AM, the voice shouts.
The woman behind the window is smiling sadly and shaking her head. I’m so sorry, she says.
I want to cry, want to bang my fists on the glass. Scream to that woman in the window I’ve got AAA. I’d never get into this kind of mess. I’ve got roadside assistance.
Does that matter now? she asks me.
I don’t know, I tell her.
She’s got like a hundred American flag pins on. It must be Fourth of July again, already.
Is it summer? I ask.
She’s getting our biscuits from under the heat lamp.
Hey, listen to me! I shout, Is it Fourth of July?
September, she says, Want to buy one? She’s stepped forward, leaning a big, flag-pin encrusted breast out the drive-through window at me.
I say, No thanks.
No thanks?
Inside the window again she shakes her head with that sad smile.
Stop that, I scream.
The window opens. Grease and air conditioning fall in my lap.
$6.45, ma’am, the woman says.
Kelly has to ask me twice, Do I want something more comfortable to sleep in? He’s got T-shirts, boxers, sweats, a tank top? He picks them off the floor as he asks. I’ve never been in the bedroom. The mattress is bare, gray. I tell him, I’m fine the way I am.
When I first met Kelly he worked the tugboats that connected things. Tanker to tanker, shore to tanker, tanker to drilling rig. Traveled around the Gulf, then to Biloxi, New Orleans, down Texas. He described these systems of hosing full of oil so heavy it was unbelievable and metal rings and closing valves and oil spilling out over the decks. I should have seen the men he worked with—giants. He was miniature compared to them. They grilled steaks out on the back deck every night and you should have seen how dark it could get out on the Gulf, he would say, You should see the stars. You could eat by them and never had he eaten so well. They had to eat well because it was such hard work connecting things.
I share the one pillow with him. Let him spoon me, but he tries to kiss me and I flinch so he knows not to. It is so bright in this room. There is nothing over the window, nothing that could be pulled down over the window. I will go soon and I will get up to find my shoes, but before I can, everything goes to black.
I stand in one of my mom’s old flowerbeds trying to see inside. In the reflection, someone walks up behind me. It’s Dan come on by.
Dan, I turn and ask, what is going on?
Everything, he says.
You never sign off anymore and say that’s part of our world tonight.
How long have I been doing that?
All night, I say.
We stand below the one live oak and watch the golf balls drop.
Well this has been a strange time, he says, rocking back on his heels, his hands in his pockets. There have been shockwaves so big that the radii of our satellite dishes are useless to collect them. Airplanes push whitecapped turbulence through the ether, buildings crash, the earth moves in man-made seismic waves. And we send out one solitary, weak signal, a lone narrow wavelength to a silent city...
Dan why are you crying? I ask.
That’s part of our world tonight, he says sitting behind his desk, shuffling papers and staring me down clear-eyed through the monitor. A new story begins... The tape skips. The machine seems broken.
A computer will replace me at the station one day. Actually not me. I will already be gone. Weatherman and Anchor will not realize the new girl they call Master Control is not me, nor will they notice when Master Control becomes an unmanned capsule. The phone will ring every once in awhile, someone messing up a transfer in the Newsroom. Eventually the Daytime Engineer will take the phone home with him. No one will notice.
I scoot back into Kelly. I take his arms and wrap them to me, use his warmth against the heavy air conditioning here. Burning from the sun he got yesterday, he is on the verge of snoring. Finally his system is saying goodnight, past beer, past morning. He will not wake up when I leave.
The new story has begun about where we are going. One of those hypothetical stories about what strange and wonderful advancements will be made in the future. It is about microchips that will be implanted in our brains. Neurons will bring them into our nervous system. They will show diagrams inside our brains of the neurons and chips fusing. The scientists acknowledge our fears, but say, It will help. The neurons’ invisible connections with each other pulse across charged gaps in quick jumps with sure-footed landings. The microchips will start simulating these tiny, silent leaps. Place these leaps side by side by side. There will be an age when thought is understood. The report will end.
Not a very romantic notion, Dan will say.
He’s playing to an empty room, a bare mattress. I’m already gone. There will be an age. Thought will be visible.
Emily Doak currently lives in Indiana. She recently completed a novel entitled The Rock Hound’s Daughter. Her short fiction has also appeared in Inkwell.