The Radio Magician and Other Stories

ECHOING

The semi’s engine roared steadily while the heater poured warmth on Laird’s ankles. His headlights cut into the snowstorm, flakes coming hard. He rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. There hadn’t been another truck or car for the last hour on the long stretch of I-25 between Trinidad and Albuquerque, but he wasn’t surprised. Christmas Eve in a snowstorm, who would be moving then?

The road unfolded. No tracks. Every twenty seconds or so he passed a highway reflector on his right. He moved the truck closer to the middle, or at least what he hoped was the middle. Snow dove from the darkness, slashing straight toward him, blindingly white. His knuckles ached from gripping the steering wheel. It had started snowing when he pulled out of Denver after dinner, soft at first, and glowing in the late afternoon light. The radio had played an instrumental medley of carols. Laird hummed along, thinking about his family waiting in Albuquerque. After he checked the shipment in at the warehouse, he would climb into his car and drive home in plenty of time to be awakened by the kids. Denver to Albuquerque: eight hours on a good night.

Laird downshifted, but the snow swept in just as hard, erasing distance. Sometimes it didn’t look like snow coming toward him; it looked more like streaks of darkness exploding from a black center, wiping out the white. He blinked and shook his head. If this were a normal storm on any other night, he could find a pullout, park the truck and sleep until dawn, but the last weather report he’d heard said highways were closing behind him. They’d stopped traffic between Denver and Colorado Springs twenty minutes after he’d traveled that route. “Looks like our first big winter storm, folks,” the DJ said.

Laird twiddled the radio dial. Nothing but static now. Most times he picked up stations the whole way.

Last year a trucker froze to death in a pullout thirty miles from Taos. No CB, just like him. No cell phone. The storm closed the road, and two days later when the plows broke through, they found him wrapped in a sleeping bag in his truck’s cabin. Laird hunched over the steering wheel. They weren’t going to find him like that because he wasn’t going to stop. Nothing would prevent him from getting home to his kids.

Still, the snow shot from the darkness. When he switched on his brights, it was worse. He thought about being alone, about the long distance. What if, he thought, the snow wasn’t snow at all, but stars? What if I were flying through the galaxy, passing stars…

…passing stars? Watch Commander Tremaine shook his head. For a moment the flying stars in the viewvid made him think of snow, but he hadn’t seen snow for the last third of his life. What he’d seen instead, between long sleeps, were representations of stars scooting through the wall-covering viewvid during the long journey from one edge of the galaxy to the other, 100,000 light years, past one hundred billion stars at 2,000 times the speed of light.

He checked the [M]-space figures again. This couldn’t be right! He refigured them. The ship didn’t know where it was. Through the mental interface the computer wailed, scared into incoherence. Sometime while he’d been sleeping, they’d been thrown off course. Stars zipped by. Some swelled, became perceptibly larger. How close were the stars coming? The ship was off course! Tremaine shuddered. Even in [M]-space, they could not go through a star. The collision would create a spectacular display, destroying not only the star, but swallowing up its neighbors. The ship was supposed to slip between the stars. Their course had been designed for that. The passengers slumbering in the long-sleep cots in the holds depended on that, and so did he. After the long trip was done, he would find a place in the cots himself for the return voyage home where his family waited.

He broke open the emergency console, concentrating on the scores of steps necessary to slow the ship, to bring it below light speed where it could recalibrate itself. Be calm, he thought to the computer, and its keening voice silenced for the moment. Tremaine didn’t look up. He watched his hands instead. Anything so he wouldn’t see the cascading stars. He could almost hear them: deep gravitational wells and surging gases compressed to unimaginable density at their cores. They hissed in his imagination as they went by. As he worked, he wondered if the star that would kill them all would be visible. Might he have a chance to see it, appearing as small as the others at first, then growing out and out in the vidview’s display as the computer scrambled to keep up with the data it was representing? Would he have time to flinch?

He’d quit working. His gaze locked on the viewvid. Stars appeared from nowhere, still at first, picking up speed as they moved from the center. His eye caught on one, followed it until it vanished to his left. Picked up another, followed it too, until it missed. A beautiful representation, if it weren’t so dangerous. Of course, if he really could look out a window, he wouldn’t see anything. Light in [M]-space wasn’t light anymore. Nothing his senses could respond to existed in [M]-space, and what he thought of as the ship’s movement was only a metaphor for what was happening. His understanding of [M]-space itself was metaphoric. It changed reality and the perception of reality. Still, the computer showed him a starfield, the ship rushing forward, a thousand near misses a minute.

Tremaine breathed hard. What would it be like to see one appear and never move, only grow? He felt like a child for an instant, staring forward, mesmerized. The sense that he was someone else, someone younger, a girl, gripped him. He shook his head. What if just for once, the screen changed…

…the screen changed. Brianna flinched. For a second the pixels spreading to the edge of the screen didn’t look like pixels to her anymore: not plain white specks on a flat black background (her dad’s 17-inch flat screen monitor), but glowing, moving, 3-dimensional diamonds, and the black wasn’t screen-black; it was palpable black. She let go of the monitor, then fell back into Dad’s leather office chair. For a second, she’d been someone else: a man, panicked at a console, afraid, so afraid. Afraid of what? Brianna breathed hard in the dark room. Through the closed door she could hear the Christmas party. Aunt Agnes sang something off tune. Her brother, Ray, played the piano in accompaniment. He was so much better than Agnes that he made her almost sound good.

Brianna rubbed her eyes. She played the screensaver game often. Once after smoking some of Ray’s stash. Once when she’d snuck home from school to miss a sophomore English test on Julius Caesar. Mostly when she wanted to get away. Her therapist had asked her once what her personal motto was. “Everyone has a motto. It’s what guides them in how they behave in the world. Mine is ‘Make everything right.’ I struggle with that,” said the therapist, a perky woman who rubbed her cheek when she paused between words. Brianna wondered if the cheek ever became chapped. “So what’s your motto, Brianna?”

Without thinking, Brianna said, “Ignore them, and they’ll go away.” And what she thought was, it’s about isolation. It’s about not connecting to anyone or anything, like Sylvia Plath who wrote a poem describing her stay in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Plath liked the sterility of the room. She despaired when friends brought her flowers because they broke up the porcelain and steel solace of white walls and shiny, tiled floors. Brianna loved that poem. “I’m an eyeball on a pillow,” said Brianna to the silent screen, “just observing.” Plath tried an overdose to kill herself. Brianna rested her hand on the drawer in her dad’s desk where she’d put the baggie full of barbiturates. Light blue capsules with pink logos. Ten times more than the job required.

The door to the study opened behind her. Brianna pulled her arms close, hiding in the office chair. The door closed. She’d already taken a dozen pills. If they found her now, it would be too soon. The pill’s acrid bite lingered in the back of her throat.

“I don’t know where she is,” said her father. “She’s going to miss the eggnog.”

Brianna sighed in relief. If it wasn’t the eggnog, it would be the popcorn balls, and if it wasn’t that, it would be the Christmas video. Probably It’s a Wonderful Life again or White Christmas, which wasn’t nearly as good as A Muppet’s Christmas Carol that they never watched, even though she asked for it every year.

On the screen, the stars seemed different again, sweeping away from the vanishing point in the monitor’s center. Brianna leaned forward. The room felt cold, her chair rigid, and the stars came too fast, too fast by half. She gasped for breath. It couldn’t be the pills working already. She’d just taken them. The screen game was about going somewhere else, leaving her life, but it had never worked so well. These weren’t pixels. They weren’t even stars anymore. She cocked her head to the side. What were they? Snow? Her breath came out in a visible plume. Was a window open? That couldn’t be it, or she would be freezing. For a second she could feel a winter’s coat on her arms, her hands gripped a steering wheel, her foot reached forward to find a brake pedal. There was too much speed. It was dangerous. She had to slow down. Where was the brake…

…where was the brake? Laird pressed so slowly. The wheel squirmed under his hands. It must be pure ice beneath the snow, and his headlights didn’t show what waited on either side. Ditch or cliff, it didn’t matter; the shoulder that would grip his tires and send him into a deadly jackknife threatened more. Gently he pumped the brake. A reflector appeared on his right, so he was on the highway—for a second he hadn’t been sure—and he still could be home for Christmas morning, but he’d have to be oh so careful. The speedometer needle crept downwards: thirty miles per hour, twenty-five, twenty. He downshifted, letting the clutch creep out so as not to break the tires’ traction with the road. Now the snow swirled, no longer diving toward his windshield, but twisting in the headlights. The snow wasn’t that deep. No more than a few inches. If he could make his way from reflector to reflector, he could find his way home.

His watch said 3:30. Five hours until dawn. At this speed he’d make Albuquerque by… he checked his watch again. How long ago had he gone through Trinidad? He remembered the lights at the edge of town, blurred by the whirling storm, and Raton Pass, he was pretty sure… yes, Raton Pass for sure, but had he made Maxwell yet? It was only another twenty-five miles or so. Had he gone through? He shook his head. Surely he had. But what was the last exit he’d seen? So many little towns off the highway: Springer and Colmor, Levy and Wagon Mound. He knew he hadn’t reached Wagon Mound yet.

Laird leaned forward, pressing his chest against the wheel, close to the windshield. I-25 was a broad road, clearly marked. There was no way he could be lost, but he thought about the way exit lanes curved off so gradually, and they were lined with reflectors too. Could he be heading away from Albuquerque? He tried to picture the map. What if he’d taken the Springer exit without realizing it, and he was headed east now instead of south? No way to tell, and nobody would know where he’d gone. If only he’d pass a sign, a lighted building, a marker of any kind.

He thought, should I stop? At least now I’m still on the road. The engine will idle for twelve or thirteen hours. Plenty of heat. Surely someone will come along before then (but what if this isn’t I-25? What if I’ve lost the interstate and this is state highway 56? Eighty miles of empty back road that never gets plowed).

He stretched away from the wheel. The backs of his arms hurt, and he realized his jaw was clenched. What can you do if you’re lost except to press on and look for a landmark? Through the steering wheel, he could feel the road, still slicker than slick…

…Watch Commander Tremaine wiped the sweat off his forehead, slicker than slick. The ship was slowing. He imagined the eddy of [M]-space behind them, like a boat’s wake, spreading evenly from their passage, washing up against the stars. The psychic disruption wouldn’t matter. Life was so rare that a million systems wouldn’t feel the ripple, but he’d never heard of a ship slowing as fast as he was slowing his. Tortured reality could be catching up to them now. He watched his hands. Were they blurring at the edges? He glanced up. The stars weren’t coming toward him anymore; they gyrated in their paths, curving randomly. [M]-space was catching them. How could he trust anything he saw or did? Even his thoughts could become scattered, the neurons flowing unpredictably. The confusion was already there: for an instant he thought he was a young girl; for a blink he was driving down a long, snowy road. Or was it confusion? Could he be close to a world with sentient life, connecting to them through the no-space of faster-than-light travel? Causality stripped away. Trembling [M]-space turning distance into concepts no farther apart that two thoughts.

He pictured the passengers, helpless in their cots. What dreams could [M]-space’s backwash cause them? Would they sense his fear? Would that be the last thing they knew, his fear quivering on disaster’s edge? How could he find their way home?

Tremaine held a sob close in his throat. He didn’t have to see the controls to slow the ship. He’d trained through the procedure a thousand times. He let his reflexes take over. Fear didn’t matter if he kept moving. But the ship would know that he was scared. It would respond.

Now the starfield slowed, or maybe his perceptions speeded up? No, no, they had to be going slower now; he’d completed so many steps. He closed his eyes. Just feel my hands, he thought. Fingers on controls. Push this one. Slide this one over. Listen to the calibrations reset. I want to go home. Everything must be done right so I can go home. Where am I?

Through the mental interface, Tremaine felt the computer struggle. A trillion stars! It needed an orientation, a landmark, a point of view to start a search. How long would it cast about in its memory trying to find a match? Laird could grow old and die while it sorted through the images, the old star charts.

Tremaine imagined his wife, a tall woman waiting at the edge of the woods where they’d met. At night they looked at the stars, and in the day everything was green. He could smell trees, so pungent, green on green, he could smell it, and there was music…

…playing behind the closed office door. Brianna opened her eyes. The feeling she was someone else possessed her so strongly, she nearly threw up. Ray had switched to “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Strong bass line countering the melody. He held the high notes before dramatically entering the chorus. The room smelled of pine. Dad had bought a real tree this year, and no matter where she went she couldn’t escape the resiny odor.

“I’m not lost,” whispered Brianna. “If I open the door, I’ll be home. That’s all I have to do. I’m home now.”

But that wasn’t the lost that she felt. With her eyes closed she’d broken contact with Earth, for a second, as if she’d been cut loose and was spinning. “Where is the galactic center?” she’d thought. She clenched her fists. On her fingertips she could still feel the dials and levers and touch pads of what… a ship… a slippery road without a landmark… and there was something about [M]-space (she almost giggled at the sound of the term), but where am I? This is way out of control. What would my therapist think of this?

There is an answer, she thought. Her hand crept toward the desk drawer. There’s no confusion in the baggie. But her motion stopped when she touched the handle. In the room beyond, they sang, Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, And the mountains in reply, echoing their joyous strains. She leaned toward the monitor. The stars had stopped moving, or at least they were moving very slowly now. What did the screensaver represent? All the time she’d looked at it, she’d only thought about where she was going, never about where she’d come from. What star had she started from? Where was she? (A tiny voice said, “Yes, where are you?” and she felt again the panic of the man at the console. “I need to know where you are.”)

Brianna shook off the sleepiness growing in her. The room seemed so dreamlike. It was the drug spilling into her like ink in water, spreading away, darkening the center. Languidly, she touched the enter button, and the screensaver blinked off. She chose her encyclopedia program. Typed in “Milky Way.” A schematic flickered into focus on her monitor, spiral arms spinning away from the thickened blob of a middle, a little arrow pointing to a place halfway out on one of arms, closer to the edge than the middle. “You are here,” it said, and Brianna took a deep breath. “I am here,” she said. She switched to a picture of the night sky, the Milky Way, like light leaking around the edge of a closed door…

…Where am I? thought Laird. The truck barely moved now. His heater worked better at seventy miles an hour. At this speed he had to wipe frost off the windshield with his coat’s sleeve. It would be so easy to stop, but he had another vision: his truck parked not at the side of the highway, but in the middle. What if another truck, later in the night when things had cleared a little, came barreling down the road? It wouldn’t have time to swerve when the bulk of his truck loomed up through the snow. But I want to stop. He was so tired that he didn’t trust what he saw in the headlights. Fantastic shapes forming in the drifting flakes. Faces. He tried to think of his family, his wife, his son, his daughter, but they seemed so far away. They were the dream. Endless snow, a cold that bit through his coat, that numbed the backs of his legs, that was reality. He thought about hypothermia, dementia, the end of reason. There’s rest, he thought, in a bag full of blue pills with pink logos.

Laird punched his leg hard with a closed fist. The pain, for an instant, felt good. Cleared his head. What was that thought about pills? He could see them, resting in a desk drawer, Christmas piano playing in the background. I’m in trouble, he thought. She’s in trouble too. She’s stopped, parked in the middle, waiting to freeze.

He punched his leg hard, twice, twisting his fist when he did to sharpen the sting. It’s just a road, and I’m a few miles from somewhere, if I can keep going, but within minutes the snow ceased to be snow again: it fashioned itself into hands reaching to get him, into the backs of monsters blocking the road. Vertigo gripped him, and an impression that he was falling straight down instead of driving forward surprised a scream out of him. The storm was a mouth; he saw it open, teeth at the edges, swallowing him and the truck whole, but he couldn’t stop. He drove on. I saw it! He wept in fear. Hallucination or not, I saw it…

…Tremaine closed his eyes and opened them again. What had he seen? For an instant, it was there, a schematic of the galaxy, an arrow pointed on one spiral arm. The girl had thought, “You are here,” and then he’d seen a photograph of the stars. If he could align what he’d seen, just an approximation, the computer might be able to do the rest. He concentrated on the memory, the gauzy middle of the galaxy, the arrow, the long strands circling away, and the computer watched what he watched. The diagram was such a rough location, but the computer hummed contentedly while it worked, because even a rough guess eliminated the near infinite number of wrong choices.

For the first time since Tremaine had realized the ship was off course, he relaxed. The stars in the viewvid weren’t moving now, and he wondered which star held the girl with the diagram. In answer to his question, without breaking its rhythm, the computer brightened one dot on the display. Tremaine enhanced the image. A plain star, unremarkable to look at. On further magnification he noticed an unusual ringed planet in the system. That wasn’t where she was. Third planet from the sun, almost a double planet, its moon was so large. Maybe if he concentrated, he could send her a thank you, although she’d never know for what. When he tried to see what she saw again, he only saw stars moving, and beneath the stars, a bag full of blue pills with pink logos. No galaxy. No arrow saying, “You are here.” On the viewvid he studied the planet’s blue face until the computer whistled happily. It had located them. Reluctantly, Tremaine clicked off the display while the computer recalibrated their course. I’m going home, he thought. They would be on their way soon, and he had duties…

…What duties? thought Laird. Where did that thought come from? All that kept him going was habit, now. Nothing he saw could be trusted. The reflectors, when they came seemed too far or too near (or too high or the wrong color). Was this hypothermia? He imagined his brain settling into a solidifying jelly, growing colder by the minute. For a second he thought the snow was stars, and he thought he could set a course by them, but now it was just snow again, flying through his headlights.

I could pull off, let the snow pile up. It would be so easy. His hands barely held the wheel, and his eyelids slid closed on their own accord. It’s dark in here. So comfortable to fade away into sleep, into dreams where a piano played “Angels We Have Heard on High” and a Christmas tree beyond a closed door smelled of pine resin and popcorn strings and people laughed at a joke he didn’t hear.

The truck can recalibrate itself, he thought. But if I keep moving, it will find my way home…

…I’m already home, thought Brianna, aren’t I? The sense of home formed within her, a longing for it. A vision of a forest with a woman someone loved; a Christmas morning so far away, and so wished for. Home, like she’d never thought of it before. She reached around her. There were the office chair arms; there was the desk, although they seemed vague, and she was so cold. She wrapped her hands around her arms, the skin stiff as marble.

How could this be? She gasped. The pills were working. She could barely move. After a long struggle, she put her feet on the floor. If she could get out of the office, maybe, and into the other room where it was warm, they could save her.

I’m alone, she thought, and I’m lost. The highway will never end. I’m in snowy hell. Her hands rested on the steering wheel. There was no place to go, only the truck cab stuck in front of clouds of dancing snow. (I’m not in a truck—I’m in my dad’s office) The steering wheel’s solidity seemed more real than the computer monitor. Frost on the window. The low rumble of the geared-down diesel engine. The accelerator and the clutch, more real than the office carpet beneath her feet. I’m going to sleep, she thought, but I have to get to my family…

…my family. Laird forced his eyes open. If he slept, he’d never get home. He imagined opening the front door on Christmas morning. “I’m home,” he’d say into the empty room, and there would be a giggle: his son behind the couch, his daughter behind the chair, waiting to surprise him. His wife smiling in the hall, just out of sight.

I’ve got to get home, he thought…

Yes, said Brianna in the darkness of her dad’s office. I’ve got to wake up…

They both hunched forward. Stay focused, they thought. Keep moving…

Brianna staggered out of the chair. Braced herself on the desk’s edge. She wept with fatigue…

Laird waited for the next reflector. There it was. The speedometer hardly twitched, but he was still going forward. The road ended somewhere, as long as he didn’t stop…

How far away was the office door? Brianna couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything now. Why not? The headlights were on. The reflectors marked the road, if she just kept them to her right. (Don’t stop now, came the thought through the diesel noise—there’s a light ahead).

There’s a light ahead; it came from under the door, where the piano played…

There’s a light ahead, beyond the headlights and the crashing snowflakes; it’s a gas station next to the highway…

Brianna grabbed the doorknob. It twisted beneath her hand. The door was opening. The light poured in, and the piano played “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Before she entered the room, she thought, how many times has he played that song? Maybe he’s played it all night.

She stepped into the light…

…light in the darkness. The sign said WAGON MOUND GAS AND CONVENIENCE. Laird edged the truck onto the exit ramp. People sat in the café. He could see them, drinking coffee. Beside the window, under the wreath they’d painted on the glass, waited a phone booth topped by six inches of snow.

He could call his wife.

When he stepped out of the truck, the wind picked up. For a second, the snow came straight at him, unswerving lines, glittering in the parking lot’s light, like stars sweeping past a starship. He was a Watch Commander. He was a young girl hoping to escape. In the last tremor of [M]-space, he was the three of them, trying to get home.

Laird beat his hands together against the cold.