Ghost Radio (2 page)

I had to call
you tonight. Well…I had to call someone…someone who might understand my story. Everyone thinks I'm crazy. But I'm not
,
I swear. Though I think if I don't find someone who believes me
,
I may truly go mad.

It all started when my marriage went on the skids.

You know how the closer you get to someone
,
the farther away they often seem? That's the way it was with my husband. He shut a door inside himself
,
and threw away the key. Every conversation became an argument. Every question
,
an accusation. Eventually
,
he even recoiled from my touch.

One night it got really bad. We said the kind of stuff you should never say to another human being. Evil stuff. Stuff that hurt right down to the bone.

I knew we couldn't go on this way. So I grabbed my children
,
Mateo and Josephina
,
and ran from the house. And I mean
ran,
pulling the children behind me like rag dolls. They screamed
,
they cried
;
but I just had to move
,
to feel the rush of wind against my face. Nothing had felt this good in months.

After a few blocks
,
my head cleared and the insanity of my actions kicked in. Where was I going? What would I do?

Before I could even begin to answer these questions
,
I saw a woman waving at us from down the block. It was Lorenza
,
a friend from my job. She rushed up to us
,
concerned.

I tried to explain what had happened. I don't think I made much sense. But she nodded compassionately
,
placed an arm
around my shoulder, and led me and the children back to her house.

She put Josephina and Mateo to bed in her spare room
,
fixed me a cup of tea
,
and I had a good long cry. She understood where I was coming from. She had a lousy marriage too. And although I'd never met her husband
,
he sounded an awful lot like mine
:
the same distance
,
the same coldness
,
the same…well…everything.

After talking with Lorenza
,
I realized I couldn't go back. My marriage had been over for years. It had just taken me a long time to realize it. But I still had nowhere to go
,
and no way to get there.

Again
,
Lorenza came to the rescue.

She told me that her parents owned a small house on the outskirts of town. They rented it out to earn some extra income. But it wasn't occupied at the time
,
and Lorenza told me that the children and I could stay there as long as we wanted.

It wasn't much of a place
,
she said
,
but it would give us a roof over our heads while I planned our next move.

She asked if I wanted to go. I nodded. The longer I stayed
,
the greater the chance my husband might show up looking for me.

So we grabbed the children
,
bundled them into the car
,
and drove off into the night.

We drove for hours. The house was not on the outskirts of town at all
,
but in a sleepy desert community some two hundred miles away. At that point I didn't care. The motion of the car relaxed me
,
and the desert air smelled wonderful.

At around 2
A.M
., Lorenza turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. We continued on for about a mile
,
and then parked in a clearing. I pulled the kids out of the car
,
and looked around. The moon was almost full
,
and it illuminated everything around me. I spotted a cactus or two
,
and the vague shape of distant mountains
,
but no house.

I turned back to Lorenza
,
only to find that she and the car had
vanished. Even the gravel road we'd been driving down only scant seconds before was nowhere to be seen.

Worst of all…my children were gone.

I called their names loudly
,
frantically
,
into the moonlit night. But the only response was the wind whipping across the desert
,
and the distant
,
plaintive call of a coyote.

Finally
,
not knowing what else to do
,
I started walking. I walked and I walked
,
each step more laborious than the last.

As dawn approached
,
I reached the highway. After several minutes
,
a car picked me up
,
and drove me to a nearby bus station. Once inside
,
I found a pay phone and called my husband.

I was shocked when Lorenza answered the phone. I asked her if Josephina and Mateo were all right. She told me they were
,
but was curious about why I wanted to know.

I told her that I had the right to know the whereabouts of my own children.

“Your children?” Lorenza said. “Josephina and Mateo are my children.”

I can't remember what I said next. I screamed
,
I wept
,
I sounded like a madwoman.

Finally
,
Lorenza put a man on the phone. A man she called “her husband.” I recognized the voice immediately. It was
my
husband.

He spoke to me calmly
,
sounding as distant as ever.

“Get into the cab,
we're going to miss our flight,” Alondra said insistently.

Joaquin wanted to comply. The car was only inches away. He could be inside it in seconds. But he couldn't move.

It was the car: a 1990 Ford Taurus. Color: metallic green.

Fleetingly, he wondered why a taxi service would use such an old car. But this thought was quickly pushed aside by a crush of memories about a car just like this, and a trip so long ago.

He could smell the upholstery, see the back of his father's neck, and feel the ground bumping beneath him. The memory was so vivid it almost hurt. He could even remember how the volume knob felt on his beat-up Sony Walkman.

“Joaquin, c'mon!”

Joaquin took a deep breath and reached for the door handle.

Joaquin stared out
the car window, listening to a mix tape on his run-down Walkman. The sun, suspended in a bright cloudless sky, swept the highway with a harsh, blinding light. He found it hard to keep from blinking.

He maxed the volume.

Another sunny day, he thought, squinting at the passing vehicles through the insect graveyard on the windshield.

The sun had shone this way before. It would shine this way again. A forgettable day, an anonymous day.

But Joaquin welcomed this.

He wanted this day—this trip—to be over as soon as possible. He wanted to return to Mexico unaffected, unmarked. So much had gone right in the last few weeks: things that had never gone right for him before. Things that made a difference. Things that made him happy.

He prayed that nothing on this trip would change that.

A lot of fifteen-year-olds say prayers like this. They're rarely answered.

This one wouldn't be either.

 

Up to this point, the trip from Mexico City with his parents
had
been uneventful. Airport to airport with no delay. Through customs without a hitch. Their luggage among the first off the carousel. And there wasn't even a line at the car-rental place.

They grabbed a quick bite at a roadside steak joint, and then headed for downtown Houston and their hotel.

Joaquin hoped it would continue this way. Then his father opened his mouth.

“What do you say we take a tour through the skyline district before hitting the hotel, Joaquin? I really want you to see that Dubuffet.”

Joaquin cringed.
Dad and his art lessons
. Why was it that adults always wanted to teach you boring stuff?

“Dad, I'm actually kinda tired,” Joaquin said, hoping that would be enough.

It wasn't.

“This Dubuffet changed my life. You're gonna look at it.”

Joaquin sighed, resigned to his fate.

At fifteen, the idea of a family trip felt ludicrous to him. His differences with his parents, more now than ever before, seemed as vast and impassable as the empty, silent reaches of outer space.

His father tried to nurture in him a taste for modern art, but Joaquin never paid much attention. He had his own ideas.

He flipped the tape and hit play. The mix of punk, metal, classic rock, and electronic music crushed reality—hurtling him into a world of aural bliss.

As Tangerine Dream's
Phaedra
came on, his father stopped the car in front of 1100 Louisiana Street. Joaquin looked up and saw Dubuffet's
Monument au Fantôme
.

Without a word, he got out of the car and walked up to the sculpture. Strange irregular shapes outlined in thick black lines, suggesting human and animal forms. Christopher Franke's Moog synthesizer caressed these irregular forms while the amber light of sunset gentled against the rough edges.

He was captivated by the sculpture. He moved into the center of the piece and sat cross-legged on the ground. He looked up, watching clouds roll overhead through Dubuffet's embracing forms.

As he unhurriedly slouched back to the car, he felt a strange sensation, as if he'd spied the corner of some immense, hidden object. It sent a tiny bat-squeak of recognition through his body. Had his father's lessons finally sunk in? If true, he wouldn't let on…ever.

“What do you think about Dubuffet?” asked his father.

“Like him. Already knew his work,” mumbled Joaquin, and then he was silent.

Those were the last words Joaquin spoke till they arrived at the hotel. His parents were accustomed to these long silences. Joaquin often milked the silences, hoping they might read his teenage angst act as something more profound. Not today. He wasn't thinking about them. Something else occupied his thoughts.

Her name was Claudia Guerrero.

Considered the prettiest girl in school, she had filled his thoughts for months. Even before they started dating. They had intended to spend the weekend together…unsupervised. Every teenage boy's dream: a weekend, alone, with the hottest girl in school. But this trip had blown that out of the water.

He tried to convince his parents to let him stay. But they wouldn't budge.

“Your grandmother is very sick. Who knows how much more time she has?” his mother said.

Just the same, he didn't know how long his relationship with Claudia would last, and to lose that precious time was devastating—doubly so because Claudia's parents had kept her under close watch after finding a pile of Polaroids of a dick (Ernesto Meyer's, they later learned) in their daughter's mouth. It didn't help when she explained that all of her friends had pictures just like those.

Joaquin's argument did gain him something. His mother agreed to buy him an inexpensive electric guitar. The bribe worked. He stopped resisting the trip.

Immediately afterward, he regretted it. Why did he give in for so little? He should have insisted on a vintage '62 Stratocaster. Or at least a Fender.

At the hotel, while his parents were out, Joaquin called Claudia. She picked up on the second ring.

He immediately launched into a rant. He told her that he was fed up, that he hated the food and the hotel. There was nothing that disgusted him more than hospitals; he would have to spend the entire next day in one. When he tried to tell her about the Dubuffet sculpture, he couldn't find the right words to describe it, and ended up changing the subject. He was too embarrassed to tell her that he loved her or missed her, or that he wanted to touch her breasts, so he said good-bye with a cold ciao.

“Ciao”—excellent move, he thought.

The conversation frustrated him.

For a while, he lay in bed and watched TV. He wasn't enjoying it at all. He couldn't believe the caravan of imbeciles that paraded around, submitting to the most ridiculous stunts imaginable. He fell asleep numbly contemplating the decomposing wasteland of late-night television.

The next day, after a bland hotel breakfast, they got into the rented Ford and went to the hospital. Joaquin listened to the Dead Kennedys.

His parents listened to the radio. Some talk program. Under Biafra's growl, he heard a voice say:
You really should listen.
He rewound the tape and played it again. It wasn't there. Weird, he thought, must have been my imagination. But somewhere deep in his brain, nestled in the limbic system, a preternatural fear arose.

Danger was near.