Ghost Radio (18 page)

Desperate, he stopped the car in the middle of the street, beat his forehead on the steering wheel, and howled:

“What the fuck!”

Then a car behind Joaquin honked its horn. The spell was broken. The city had reawakened. Everything moved again. There were people walking here and there, entering shops, eating and talking.

The car radio came on with a strident burst of static, the noise beginning as a cacophony of voices until it resolved itself into a dialogue: two men arguing about the war.

“Where'd everybody go?” he said to himself. He slowly accelerated, overwhelmed by the uproar filling his ears.

He was relieved, but a nagging undercurrent of doubt lingered in his thoughts. What happened today? What
really
happened? Had he actually seen a dead body? Were the pastor and Barry real? The only thing he knew for sure was that his cell phone was still missing. He drove down streets and avenues that were familiar once again. Soon he was back in front of his apartment.

He glanced at his watch: 8:00
A.M.
How was that possible? It was later than that when he'd gone out.

The moment took over. Joaquin sat in the car and wept.

Alondra awoke to
the sound of someone trying to force the door open. She knew Joaquin hadn't come home that night, and she assumed it was just him, blind drunk. It wasn't a common occurrence, but it wasn't unheard of either. She stood up, barely able to keep her eyes open; covered only by a T-shirt a couple sizes too small and some underwear, she walked barefoot toward the door. Before she got there, it swung open and Joaquin stumbled in. He was sweaty and disheveled.

“Alondra, you've got to listen. I know what I'm going to say sounds crazy, but something completely incomprehensible just happened to me.”

“I'd imagine it must have for you to show up at this hour. Go take a shower and get some sleep. We'll talk later.”

Alondra wasn't fond of surprises, and she was even less fond of hysterics. Maybe it was her Irish blood—she tended to dismiss people who gesticulated wildly or raised their voices to say things that didn't seem particularly urgent. She had an especially strong aversion to excited men who acted like their enthusiasm and heightened emotions made what they said more important. She wanted to hear whatever Joaquin had to say, but he'd have to calm down in order for her to take him seriously.

“No, you don't get it. We've got to talk,” he said.

“Now? Is it absolutely necessary?” she said, pushing her hair off her face with the back of her hand.

“I went over to the place where that call came from.”

“What call?”

“You don't remember? The call that woke us up.”

“What are you talking about?
You
just woke me up.”

“I know it's eight o'clock. I'm not sure what's happening, but I got a weird phone call at eight, got the address from the caller ID by Googling. It was a priest or preacher or shaman or who knows what the hell he was; I got into a fistfight with him, and then Barry arrived and I had to chase him, and when we came back, he was dead.”

“Who was dead?”

“The preacher. He'd been stabbed and Barry thought I did it.”

“And who's Barry?”

“He's the preacher's assistant, disciple, friend, lover…how should I know?”

“Let's start over.”

“Look, something really bizarre happened to me, and the strangest part of all is that now it seems like
nothing
happened.”

“Come again?”

“You don't remember? Us having coffee earlier? You went to take a shower. And then I left.”

“It was probably yesterday.”

“No, it wasn't yesterday, it was today. If it never happened, then when did I leave?”

“You didn't come home after the show.”

“So where did I go?”

“Joaquin, pull yourself together. I don't know where you went. I was hoping you'd tell me.”

“I slept here, right next to you. The phone rang at eight in the morning and woke me up.”

“I can say with absolute certainty that it didn't happen like that at all.”

“This has got to have something to do with the waking nightmares I've been having. It's like my brain is being used by someone else; as if someone were hacking into my head. It's a downward spiral: the experiences are getting longer, more intense, more mesmerizing.”

“Brain hacking?”

“That's what it feels like. I can't think of another metaphor that would
explain it better. What's happening to me goes beyond simply hallucinating. It's like living in a parallel universe.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Astral projection and out-of-body experiences?”

“I don't know what they are, but I can assure you they've been neither pleasant nor illuminating. I feel like I'm losing the ability to distinguish between what's real and what's not.”

“They sound like bad trips—are they flashbacks from when you were doing 'shrooms or acid? Did you do something heavier?”

“No, I never did those drugs, and they can't be flashbacks, this is different. It's like they're coming from outside me, not inside.”

“That's exactly what a flashback feels like.”

“They aren't flashbacks.”

“Then what's happening to you? Because I'm afraid that if these hallucinations aren't drug induced, the only other option is that you're suffering from acute psychosis.” There was a certain condescension in her tone.

“I know there's no rational explanation for this, but I'm being sucked into the stories told by some of the callers. I mean, literally, all of a sudden their voices start dragging me in and my surroundings change. Just like that, I leave the radio station and become an unwilling participant in their terrifying episodes.”

“You're taking your work at
Ghost Radio
too seriously. You're also taking your empathy with listeners to an extreme,” she answered, still not really believing what Joaquin was saying.

“This goes beyond imagining what people tell us on the phone.”

“Well, since you're not going to let me go back to sleep, let's have a cup of coffee.”

“Another one?”

“No, the first one. Believe me, I know with complete certainty when I've had my first cup of coffee for the day.”

They walked into the dining room. Alondra sat down, rubbing her eyes.
Joaquin made a beeline for the coffeemaker. It wasn't warm, and he prepared two espressos. They drank the coffee in silence. As he met Alondra's gaze, he felt a little ridiculous for having burst in the way he had. The preacher's body and the paralyzed city seemed remote, like something he'd seen in a movie. As soon as he sat down and relaxed, though, he felt the pain from his injuries. He ran into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. The blow to his face had left a mark, and he had several bruises on his ribs. He went back to Alondra, but didn't say anything. The apartment was more luminous than he had ever seen it. Everything glowed, like photos in
Architectural Digest
. The noise from the street grew louder, but he barely noticed.

“Your coffee,” Alondra said.

“What about it?”

“It's getting cold, and you hate cold coffee. Or has that changed?”

“No. That already happened.”

“Okay, we're going to continue this debate.”

“No, forget it.”

“Thanks.”

“You remember I mentioned I'd been having a recurring dream about Toltecs?” Joaquin asked.

“Yes, and I also remember asking you how you could be so sure they were Toltecs, and not Olmecs or Nahuatls. Were there signs that said ‘You are now in Toltec territory'?”

“No, of course not. But it was a dream. You just know things in dreams. I know they were Toltecs. And this preacher said he had a Christian-Toltec temple.”

“You haven't been reading
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Toltec Wisdom,
have you?”

“What's that?”

“One of those self-help books whose system is inspired by Toltec phi
losophy. The author was some suburbanite woman named Rosenthal—no doubt from Long Island or Redondo Beach.”

“And how do you know all this?”

“Don't ask. Just believe me, the Toltecs have been exploited by the shaman tourism industry, exoticist self-help gurus, and antiscientific anthropology for several decades now.”

“Now I'm even more confused. Why don't you want to talk about it?”

“Let's just say it's stuff I knew about at some other time, in some other place, and I'm not the least bit interested in rehashing it.” She sighed. “Besides, I try to steer my students away from it. If I didn't, we'd have more generations of little Carlito Castanedas running around the hills playing Nagual, and that, I can assure you, is something we don't need.”

“You could at least give me a clue. What's this Toltec knowledge that even an idiot can master by reading some cheap paperback?”

“It's a series of techniques to following the ‘Path of the Toltecs,'” she said, making a face. “Literally hundreds of books, CDs, and movies are available to indoctrinate anyone gullible enough in the secrets of alleged Toltec prophecies, gospels, and oracles.”

“Barry mentioned prophetic visions.”

“There are also guides to using Toltec wisdom for inner peace, personal transformation, knowledge, happiness, freedom, manipulation of body energy, and even for having the same glorious, magical sex the pre-Columbians had, which, as we all know, was truly spectacular,” she said with a snort of laughter.

“Okay, this isn't helping.”

“I don't know what you want me to say.”

“Who were the real Toltecs?”

“Now that's the question, isn't it?”

“And the answer?”

“Complicated, complicated…complicated.”

“Try me.”

Alondra sighed deeply and ran a hand through her thick black hair.

“Where is this going to get us?” she asked.

“Humor me. I think it's important.”

Alondra walked over to the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of water, twisted off the cap, and took several long gulps. Taking a deep breath, she looked lovingly at Joaquin and told him the story of the Toltecs:

“The mistake most people make is to think the Toltecs were a people, a civilization, or a nation. For a long time those in Mesoamerican studies accepted this view, placing their civilization in Tula, Hildalgo. You can even find a book called
Art of the Toltecs,
which furthers this misconception.”

“Okay, they're not a people. What are they?”

“They're really a mythology created by the Aztecs to lend quasi-religious weight to their quest to conquer the disparate peoples of Mesoamerica. It was one of the tools they used to build an empire.”

“Wow! Really?”

Alondra nodded.

“Doesn't sound very ‘New Age.'”

“Hardly.”

“So how did it all work?”

“Well, the Aztecs claimed that there was an ancient civilization called the ‘Toltecs.' And I could go into the myth of the Toltecs in detail. But what really matters is that they were an ancient civilization with vast cities and empires. So everything that suggested art, city development, or any centralized government was Toltec. Toltec equals ancient nobility. Hence, by supporting the drive for empire, you are noble.”

“That's brilliant.”

“The Aztecs were smart dudes.”

“And it went beyond that, because the word
Toltec
meant ‘artist' or ‘artisan.' In common parlance, it could probably be stretched to mean ‘bricklayer.' So the Aztecs used language to co-opt the very workers who were building the edifices of empire.”

“Wait a second,” Joaquin said. “We're all battling this today. We're becoming Toltecs even when we think we're fighting them.”

“I'm not sure I follow.”

“It's so clear. Don't you see it?”

“Not really.”

“We think we're so smart and progressive. But when we idolize technology, even for good reasons, or for silly reasons, even for
Ghost Radio,
we're pushing forward the phalanxes of empire. We're becoming Toltec.”

“I think you're right,” Alondra said with a solemn nod.

“Wait, it goes beyond that.”

Joaquin looked around the room. His eyes darted from floor to ceiling, they snapped into the corners, and traced the moldings.

“What's the matter?”

“They're here: sliding between day and night, light and shadow, dream and reality.”

“The Toltecs? That makes sense,” Alondra said. “The Toltecs supposedly believed that life is a dream.”

Joaquin remembered Barry's words:

The dream disappears when the dreamer stops dreaming.

“They believed that our lives aren't real. We've been trained to believe in a reality that someone else has dreamed. That way, when we finally wake up, we can take control of the dream and be happy. I guess.” She shrugged.

“That's what Barry said, that the dream disappears when the dreamer stops dreaming. What I hadn't mentioned yet is that after the pastor died, the world stood still.”

“Okay, unless your pastor was Pope Benedict himself, I think we can assume that what happened was a dream of your own. Do you think everything really stood still?”

“After Barry said that, I left, and the streets were completely deserted—like an abandoned city. Tell me more about the Toltecs. Do you believe in that stuff?”

“I never believed in it, but someone else in my life did. Forget about it. You know how I hate talking about the past.”

Joaquin leaned forward. “Right now I'm asking you to make an exception.”

“I'm no expert on the Toltecs, but like I told you before, these cults exploit the concept of lucid dreams.”

“Lucid dreams?”

“It's the notion that you can dream and be aware and in control at the same time, and thus experience your dreams as a sort of ‘alternate reality' where you can do anything: you can fly; you can fulfill your most perverted, wild sexual fantasies without any danger.”

“I feel like I've been living out the nightmares of other people, but not of my own free will.”

“Joaquin, I think it's natural, up to a point, that when you listen to horror stories every day, your mind starts playing tricks on you.”

“But where are my visions coming from?”

“No doubt the same place as the rest of our stimuli: the environment, TV, movies, video games. What do I know? Maybe
The Matrix.
Insisting on seeing that trilogy fifty times in a row couldn't have done your imagination any favors. You're turning into a Neo of the airwaves.”

“This isn't funny.”

She stopped smiling, but not very convincingly.

“Fine, fine, it's a matter of vital importance and not simply indigestion of the mind.”

“They're not just images or visions or echoes of the media, Alondra. They're living experiences that drag me from place to place complete with smells, colors, filth, pain. Everything. Look at these.”