After work Clara would sometimes take the stairs down to the dock where the aged longshoremen would drink beers after loading or unloading whatever cargo they had to chuck for the day. They cursed and spat and made passes at Clara as she sat on top of pallets with a permissive grin, flirting and jibing with the longshoremen.
“Hey sweetie, why don’t you come down from there and give ol’ Rob a kiss.”
“Only kiss you deserve is one from the dock, you ugly bastard,” she cut, playfully.
The exchange of insults was a welcome form of play for Clara who was stuck all day in the office doing inventory control and bookkeeping and she knew that the dockworkers appreciated having a pretty girl talk to them occasionally. They were mostly married and middle aged or older and these conversations imparted a modicum of youth to their otherwise dwindling lives.
Clara would drink a Dr. Pepper that she had let warm in the window of the office as it reminded her of her home in the South. She’d let the cold New England wind whip at her longish blonde hair and kick her crossed legs playfully, saying things like “Jerry, you’re looking pretty rough. The old lady give you a hard time last night? I swear, if you were any less of a man you’d have to work in the office with me!”
The other men would laugh and Jerry would grunt unpleasantly, trying to hide a grin.
“Hey, Clara,” Terry began to ask, his words slurred from his sixth beer of the afternoon, “I ain’t never seen you with no boyfriend. You like girls or something?”
“I don’t know, Terry. You seem to spend a lot of time around the docks, do you like girls?”
The other longshoremen roared with laughter and Clara tittered along with them, though she was a petite woman, the men were aware that she was no plaything. They were especially aware that any attempts to touch her would be met with uncharacteristic violence. The first week that she had started to visit the docks, Bill had tried to grab her ass and she dislocated his shoulder. Then, as Bill moaned and complained, she had re-located it swiftly, meting out double punishment for his presumptuous behavior.
Regarding the question, it wasn’t something that Clara cared all that much about. It had been a year since college, which also marked the end of her long-term relationship with her boyfriend, Dylan. Dylan had it in his head to move back to the midwest with Clara, get married and have children in quick succession. Clara disagreed with this plan rather plainly.
“How can you be so callous about this, so cold,” Dylan whined on the night of the breakup. “Doesn’t this mean anything to you? We’ve been together for so long.”
“Three years isn’t that long, honey,” Clara said with a self-possessed smile. Dylan found her behavior distastefully inappropriate. They never saw each other again and he would always refer to her—unfairly—as, ‘that bitch I dated in college’.”
Clara saw family life as a form of waking death and was too excited about living at the time to submit to a relationship like that. It had been a year. She had gotten this job at the docks and she hadn’t thought of getting another relationship at all. Casual sexual thoughts crossed her mind on occasion, especially on the weekends when she was most lonely.
Never taking passing thoughts too seriously, Clara figured that she just missed university life. The constant conversations all around that had nothing to do with her or what she was doing. Everyone in this little sea-side New England town seemed to walk around in silence. It was odd and a serious departure from the life she was familiar with.
But these passing thoughts never had much weight with Clara.
One night she read a chapter of a book called “V.” which depicted a German man trapped in a castle somewhere in Africa—one of those countries that doesn’t exist anymore because they were simply the product of European imperialism. All the Europeans in the castle partied and orgied while the country was falling to a local revolution and there was a hallucinatory and ominous pall over the whole chapter. The German man, Mondaugen, whose name meant moon-eyes, a monniker that only added to the whole ominous feeling of the chapter, was a scientist of some sort and was apparently studying radio signals called sferics.
The next day, on her way home, Clara saw a ham radio hobbyist shop and stopped in and asked about these strange signals.
“Sferics?” the shopkeeper asked. “Ah, that’s nothing at all. It’s just atmospheric disturbances getting in the way of a transmission. A carrier squelch will take care of that kind of crap. You know, a lot of people don’t know this, but we’re getting bombarded by subatomic particles and waves from space all the time. You could look at it like it’s random information thrown our way from stars and nebulae and other astrological stuff. That’s what sferics are. Random, galactic information.”
“Astronomical,” Clara corrected. Her blue eyes calmly looking around at the various gizmos that the shopkeeper kept under the glass of the counter. Their mysterious dials and unknown purposes were interesting to Clara, who had only nominal knowledge of physics. She had graduated with a degree in accounting.
“Yeah, astronomical,” the shopkeeper confirmed. He was a short, fat man who had large and curiously thick glasses. Soldering flux burns marred his hands. “What did I say?”
“Astrological.”
“I can’t ever keep those two straight. So what can I help you with today?”
“What’s this thing?” Clara pointed at a small black box with worn knobs and one of those liquid crystal displays that had those large polygonal pixels that could only display a certain set of predetermined numbers or letters.
“That’s a police scanner.”
“What’s it do?”
“You know that the FCC designates certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum for certain uses, right? There’s the tv part, the radio part -”
“The maritime band…”
“Right, so you know. Well, this one switches back and forth across the band that’s reserved for the police and when it gets something that has a strong enough signal, it sends it to the speakers. You can hear the conversations the cops are having over their radios with this thing. They aren’t so popular anymore because some jurisdictions made them illegal, and, really, you can get a better signal through the Internet.”
“Can I hear what it sounds like?”
“Sure, let me just plug it in.”
The scanner came to life in the little shop and Clara was spellbound. There would be silence and then a voice would rise out of the void and speak in code. A language composed of constellations of numbers, names that didn’t refer to actual people, jargon that seemed like it would take years to learn. To top it off, the distortion that covered every syllable seemed to possess the same kind of ominousness that the sferics did from the novel.
She bought the scanner for twenty dollars, took it home and practically never turned it off.
She listened to dui arrests on the freeway while cooking dinner, she listened to welfare checks gone awry while she sat in rapt attention at her kitchen table, she caught the end of license plate checks in the morning when she woke up, she listened to the chatter behind a four-alarm fire at the petro-chemical plant while she was in the shower, and she fell asleep to the occasional pop and hiss of a malfunctioning radio as she fell asleep.
“Ksssshhh-kak-kak-kak-kak-fusssshh!”
“10-9, Gomez. Please say again.”
“Ksssshhh-kak-kak-kak-kak-fusssshh!”
“10-9, Gomez. Check your radio…”
And the sounds of the static punctuating the dark New England autumn put her to sound sleep quicker than anything else.
***
Clara played with complacency during these months and life fell into a semi-boring, ritualistic rhythm from which - she assured herself - she could extract herself at any point.
Dylan’s suggestion seemed so much more permanent and therefore so much more objectionable than just playing around with a comfortable life. But, as she later learned, comfort is addictive, socially acceptable, but addictive nonetheless. And like any other addict, Clara calmed herself with heaping loads of denial that covered up the concerns of her soul like drygoods covered up the dock outside of her office window. Some days you couldn’t even tell there was a dock under there, it just looked like pallets fixed to the shore.
The ominous creepy feeling began to build during these months as she listened to the police scanner. The weather chilled as autumn fell and winter approached. The cold, wet streets took on an ancient and angular aspect as she walked to the dock in the morning. Tricks of perspective made the outlines of the buildings seem to loom and stab out into the negative space over the stone-paved road she walked down. Men and women that she passed on the way to work had faces that were drawn and sharp. Noses jutted out and chins threatened her morning and evening walks. She could feel the edges of the stones beneath her feet more and more every day as if the coming winter contracted the earth and pushed them up unevenly. Colors in daylight would fade from sepia tones to gray scale and at night the sea was invisible but omnipresent. The winds that charged down the street cut into any part of her skin that was left exposed. Cold nights, when the moon was out she imagined that she could see the skin on the back of her hand crack and in the shop windows she thought she could see her own face get drawn-out and angular like the locals’ she saw everyday. The clouds never seemed to clear during the daytime and imparted a lightless quality to everything. There wasn’t any contrast or dynamic from light and shadow, rather everything seemed to be equally, but dimly, lit.
Looking out of her window late at night she would let her mind wander and imagine the fabric of the universe. She imagined huge sheets of material folded and twisted and clumped into the crenelated details of the neighborhood architecture, which seemed to be an illogical combination of art-deco and gothic. The gargoyles on the top of the bank across the street barked into the night and into her apartment and she imagined that they threatened to tear through the elegant cloth that made up the universe. She fell asleep imagining a small tear in the subatomic fabric, ever widening, casting errant threads to the winds of time and unravelling catastrophically.
She continued to confidently and calmly walk to work, a pleasant and subtle grin on her rosy face. Clara felt particularly beautiful at this time of year and hardly ever wore makeup as the cold seemed to have the desired effect of rouging her cheeks. Her flirtations with the longshoremen became more and more explicit, even to the point of surprising herself.
One afternoon, as Bill walked past her perch on a pallet, she reached out and tousled his hair. “Looking good Bill, got some hot young thing keeping you warm lately?” she said, coyly raising her right shoulder and winking.
This so startled Bill (having not fully recovered from his last encounter with Clara) that he looked like he had just been told of his unanimous election to the presidency.
The other men laughed hard, not at Clara’s gesture, but rather at the look on Bill’s face. Clara was hit by a wave of awkwardness. Maybe she had transgressed the hardened shell that she maintained with the insults and threat of violence and compromised her well-cultivated defenses.
But it will only be a matter of time before one of them gets the guts to grab her ass again and she’ll rebuild her shell with her favorite Aikido move.
***
Walking home that night, she seemed to trip along the stone street more frequently than normal and she felt disoriented, but not in a dizzy way. She felt more like she had become unmoored, set adrift, flagging in the wind. Thinking all of these maritime cliches irritated her and she decided to get a bottle of wine to cozy up with beside the police scanner.
It was a busy night for the police. Apparently there was a lot of gang activity on the other side of town. Dispatch and officers traded information in thinly veiled references, trying to keep the details to a minimum so that if the gangsters happened to have a police scanner of their own, they wouldn’t get wise.
Clara hated when they did that.
It’s hard enough to tell what they’re saying over the din of signal distortion. Everything statement sounds muffled. After a while it becomes white noise, the signal starts to get that perfect curvature to cancel out other sounds indiscriminately.
Clara fell asleep and dreamed of a more interesting conversation on the scanner. The wind made the wooden frame of her apartment creak and the remaining wine in her glass shuddered imperceptibly as she laid sprawled out on her bed making up her own version of events to the static of the scanner with the voices of men and women she had heard in her waking life, but could no longer remember.
“10-4 Officer Charles. We’re sending backup to your location,” the woman dispatcher said. “Patrol Victor-9, come in.”
“This is Victor-9,” a man responded. His diction perfect, the signal clear. Static had been swept from Clara’s dreams.
“Victor-9, please provide backup for Mary-11 on Jefferson and Tenth… Oh wait, are you still in the area?” dispatch had forgotten who was where.
“Yeah, I’m done - break’s over - I’ll check in when I get to Jefferson and Tenth.”
Silence.
Clara dreamed of her room, her dream-self floating above her bed, able to look at her own body on her bed, thinking that she looked like she might get cold if she didn’t pull the blankets up. One pant leg of her flannel pajamas had ridden up past her knee. Two buttons of her top had come undone in her sleepy twisting. The corners and edges of her room seemed to shift and stretch out to impossible lengths as if it was breathing. With every inhale the room grew unevenly and every exhale shrunk it back. Straining. Vibrating. The wine-stem stretched uncomfortably on the nightstand as if restrained, struggling to break free. Wine sloshed about letting loose the occasional droplet from the rim. The police scanner blurred and then crackled to life.
“Dispatch, this is Mary-11. Where did you say that Victor-9 was?”
“Dispatch, can I get a license plate check? Plate reads: One-Four-X-ray-X-ray-Adam-Ocean,” another voice on the police band.
“Jefferson and Tenth, Mary-11,” a pause. “Just a moment on that license check, please.”
“Yeah, there’s nothing here, dispatch. Are you sure that Victor-9 didn’t move on?” and there was silence for a moment, that weighty sort of silence that is so common on the scanner. The signal comes back with the sound of distant shouting, “Hold on, dispatch. Karlssen saw something. Going to investigate.”
“10-4, Mary-11… Victor-9, please copy. Victor-9.”
“Victor-9, here.”
“Where are you, Victor-9? See any patrol cars around?” A pause on the band and then the dispatcher spoke again, “No priors on license plate One-Four-X-ray-X-ray-Adam-Ocean, registration up to date.”
“10-4, thank you, dispatch.”
“We’re at Jefferson and Tenth still, dispatch. No sign of any other pat - What in the hell is that?”
A crash of static. A thousand voices fighting to be heard at the same time. A million subconscious recordings of conversations playing at the same time in Clara’s dream. The static fades and a voice, cold and aware, hissing and abrupt calls, “Clara.”
With a start Clara sits up bolt upright in bed. She can feel the cold sweat on her skin and she’s freezing from sleeping without the comforter. She feels ill and runs to the bathroom to vomit. She panics for a moment at the sight of a half liter of blood coming out of her mouth and into the toilet before she realizes that it’s the wine. She’s panting over the toilet, her guts in a terrified twist, but why?
She’d fallen asleep after drinking. She forgot to eat. That must be it. She got sick from the booze. Good thing she hadn’t puked in her sleep. That would have been dangerous.
Though she felt pretty satisfied with this explanation, a conversation that she remembered from Rob the longshoreman nagged at her.
“I don’t dream when I sleep, sweetie. Gotta get my dreaming done in the daylight.”
“Why don’t you dream, Rob?”
“You don’t dream if you’re drunk, Clara. It’s science. The county’s psychologist told me.”
But it has to be even more unlikely that you get so scared by a dream that it makes you puke, she reasoned in the dark. She turned the police scanner off and tried to read the dictionary to get herself back to sleep, but ended up staring at the first page of “A” all night with the light on.
In the periphery of her vision, in the dark parts of her living room, the lines of the room extended and retracted like the darkness was breathing.
***
Two days later, the memory had all but faded from Clara’s memory, as dreams do. But a vague uneasiness possessed her. The confidence with which she walked down the street faded and she avoided looking at her own reflection in shop windows. She hid her face from passers-by and jumped, startled, by nothing at all. She’d be all alone on a street and start running a few steps before realizing that there was nothing at all around her, nothing chasing her. Her neck ached from a constant tension as if she was always trying to keep her head from snapping to the left or right. It was as if her neck struggled to keep her head on her shoulders.
She took her usual perch on a pallet at the dock at the end of the day with the longshoremen, but didn’t have much interest in their joking and cursing. The men noticed that something had changed and accordingly changed their own behavior. They were quieter, focused their energy on peeling beer bottle labels, kicking trash into the ocean, stretching awkwardly.
“Hey, Clara,” Rob said. “Been watching Dancing with the Stars this week?”
This set off a cacophony of insults and hooting laughter from the other dock workers. It made them forget about the pall that had been cast over the dock, about the colorlessness of the autumn evening, about the accelerating white caps in the harbor, about the fact that Clara didn’t seem to be herself.
“Godammit!” Rob bellowed. “I’ve told y’all I’m watching it with my wife! The goddamn counselor says I got to work on having some shared interests with Sarah. He says that shared experiences will help with the marriage.”
“Why don’t cha just divorce her,” Jorge asked. He was the youngest of the dockworkers here and saw little point in marriage, not unlike Clara.
“Sarah’s been real good to me. I couldn’t divorce her. She helped me out of some pretty bad times when I was a little asshole like you, Jorge.”
“Hard times huh, Rob?” Clara asked. It was the first thing she’d said the whole afternoon and the longshoremen looked at her expectantly and with a touch of surprise. “What kind of hard times, Rob?”
“I don’t get along alright without a woman in my life, Clara. It ain’t like I’m gonna be able to go out to the bars and pick some girl up if I were to get divorced either. I used to get into all sorts of trouble when I was on my own. Getting into bar-fights, drinking too much, skippin’ from job to job ‘cause I just had a bug up my ass with the boss or manager or whatever. I got so bad that I was eventually just sick as a dog, I don’t know what came over me.
“The doctor says to me, ‘There ain’t nothing wrong with you, Rob. If there was a war on I’d say you was a draft dodger, but it ain’t, so you ain’t. It’s all in your head, Rob. It’s psycho-sicko-matic!’”
“Psychosomatic, you dumb bastard!” Terry laughed.
“I know what I said, shut up, I’m tellin’ a story,” Rob stared Terry down and took a pull from his beer. He wiped the beer from his beard with two fingers and continued his story. “I knew it wasn’t in my head. I felt real bad. My granny said that it was this place, the town, that had me down. She said, ‘Rob, this town ain’t right for sensitive souls like you.’
“And you’d better believe I took offense to that ‘cause I’m about as sensitive as a steel-toed boot, y’know, but she’s my granny so I can’t say anything. She said, ‘Robbie, this town got evil all throughout it. It climbs out of the ocean and hides in the corners and cracks of the roads and brick walls and it’s so old no one can’t even see it. You gotta be a strong man to get along in this town.’
“I took my granny giving me grief as a sign that I should tough it out and stop whinin’ about how I ache all the time and I can’t sleep at night and I can’t stop but puke every morning for no reason at all. So I kept working and getting up in the morning even though I didn’t want to and one day I go into the bar and there she is. Sarah. She was beautiful. I was three sheets to the wind, but she was beautiful anyways and I couldn’t help but go into that bar - ‘cause she was working there then - and look at her and talk to her every day. Hasn’t been a day that’s passed where I didn’t see her since.
“There are days when she’s beautiful, y’know. And there’s days when she’s dog-ugly, especially recently. But that’s always been true. I ain’t the most handsome asshole around either. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but I can’t imagine living without her. I used to hide in the bathroom and cry - yeah, to hell with you all, you wouldn’t know love if it sucked you off - I used to go in the bathroom and cry for fear of losing her when she was sick five years back.
“When she started talking about getting a divorce in February, I had to get brave and make sure that didn’t happen. I’d fall apart without Sarah. I told her that I knew I’d been a shitty husband and that I’d do anything to keep her around. So that’s why I ain’t drinking and I’m eating right and I’m going to the counselor to learn how to be more emotionally intelligent and all that crap.
“And the moral of this story is that none of you all are to ever tell her that I ever eat that hot dog with my salad during lunch break or I’ll drown you in the goddamn estuary!”
“Aw! Rob! You’re just a little softy on the inside,” Clara said, kicking her foot out to jab at Rob’s beer-belly. “Looks like you’re pretty soft on the outside, too!”
The dock resumed its normal atmosphere. Jorge told everyone about his most recent conquests at the bars, which everyone tried their hardest to tear down with logic and local knowledge.
“Stacy? Ain’t that the Anchor Bar’s pet goat?”
“When did you take her home, Jorge? Juneteenth of Never?”
“You know you’re supposed to take your pants off to make love to a woman, right, Jorge? You know that, right? I just gotta make sure. Don’t want you making a fool of yourself! Hey! Why are you getting all defensive?”
Clara went home restored, rosy-cheeked, in a fine mood. So fine that she whistled a little bit as she made it up the stairs to her apartment. She made herself a grilled cheese sandwich and some soup and sat by the police scanner without turning it on. Instead she read a couple of magazine articles about new revisions to the language of a particular convention in the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which was almost as engaging as the dictionary. She promptly fell asleep with the magazine partly covering her face.
She began to dream again. This time she dreamt that she was walking home to her apartment. It was a vividly detailed dream. All of the buildings, the street, the lamp posts, the stars were all composed of bright polygons that tessellated into more complex polygons and then back to simple ones with the rhythm of her breath. The sides of the polygons swung out and in forming more and more complex figures while maintaining the general shape of her apartment building, the cobblestones, the police car on the corner…
The police car on the corner?
It was there, parked, it’s lights flashing and throwing off little shapes of its own, blue, white and red. It inhaled when Clara did, and it exhaled when she did and then it exhaled a police officer who didn’t as much walk, but morphed and stretched down the street towards her apartment building. The officer turned its shifting head to its shoulder and spoke something Clara couldn’t hear and then was absorbed into the breathing polygons of her apartment building’s door.
Clara slowed her walking and stood watching the scene of her street for a moment. Everything was in motion, but staying still at the same time. It was like an optical illusion where a flat pattern of shapes tricks your eyes into thinking that it’s a roiling mess of color and form.
Then another police car showed up, but where was the other police car? There was only one car here now. Two officers got out of this car and slid and popped along the cobblestones, their shapes constantly shifting and switching position to help the polygons move. One of the officers leaned over to its shoulder and said something.
Suddenly all of the polygons that composed the street scene began to stretch and their sides began to arrange themselves to converge at one particular point, which originated at Clara’s apartment. The facade of the building darkened with the gathering collapse of the shapes.
Clara heard the echo, but not the scream, from the cop, “...the fuck is that?!”
The concentration of the brightly colored shapes on her apartment building intensified with the echo of the cop’s voice and everything - her vision, the street, the building, the cop car - all vibrated wildly, threatening to come undone. The echo, unlike an echo in real life built up into a shout that barked up and down the street. Then silence fell upon her street again and the calm, colorful tessellation of the strange neighborhood resumed.
She heard, unsure of whether it came from the dream or from reality, a voice hiss, “Clara!”
She woke up sweating again, or rather she thought she was sweating. In fact, she had pissed herself.
***
Clara staggered down the stairs to the dock completely disheveled. Her teeth chattered and she half-spoke and half-hummed a disorganized free-time melody. Her face was pale and strands of hair were plastered to her forehead by sweat. Her steps were wild and uneven like a drunk’s. She had managed to put two buttons into the same buttonhole in her pea coat and half of a shoe-lace was gone. The shoelace had gotten snagged on something and she had pulled at it until it ripped instead of unsnagging it.
She felt profoundly unpleasant, but the unpleasantness came in waves. By the time she had gotten to work, she didn’t look too bad. She didn’t feel that bad either. However, after four hours, she’d fallen apart again.
“Jesus, Clara! Go home! You’re sick!” The office manager spat in disgust.
When Clara staggered onto the dock, Rob was the first one to see her. He slammed the controls on the forklift and lept out of its seat before it had stopped moving causing it to rock back and forth on the dock boards.
“Clara! Are you alright? Are you hurt? Who did this?” Rob said, anger boiling within him.
“It’s nothing, I’m just real sick,” Clara stuttered, hiccoughing. “Could you take me home, Rob?”
“Of course, of course,” Rob said, the anger fading and concern rushing to fill the void. “You boys’ got the rest of the load?” He asked without turning back.
Rob walked Clara up the steps to the parking lot while the rest of the crew gawked in wonder completely baffled.
“Jesus.” Jorge said, “She looked like shit.”
“I hope she’s alright,” Terry muttered.
Rob got Clara into the car and started to drive her home. He’d taken her back to her apartment last winter during a particularly bad storm and knew the way.
“Are you sure you’re alright? Do you need to go to a hospital?”
“No, no, Rob. I’ll be fine. I just need to go home and get some rest. I shouldn’t have come to work today. I’ve had a pretty bad flu for a few days that I’ve just been trying to ignore.” Clara seemed a little more coherent in the car than she did on the dock, but she wasn’t magically better in any sense of the word.
“Alright then. But I’m going to go and get Sarah and have her look over you. She’ll divorce me right away if I get home tonight and tell her that I took you home for being sick and didn’t let her take care of you. You know how much Sarah likes you, right? She thought you were just the funniest thing at the Fourth of July picnic.”
The ride wasn’t long and soon the car was parked on the curb outside of Clara’s apartment. Clara looked around quickly and Rob took this to be some sort of feverish delirium. How could he know that she was looking for patrol cars?
Rob led Clara upstairs to her apartment and she instructed him to put her on the couch. He covered her with a huge, thick afghan blanket. He looked around at her apartment.
Water stains decorated the walls instead of pictures. Three books sat on a milk crate that served as a coffee table, one of which was a dictionary. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t much more but a single pot in the sink and cheese burns on the range. All the furniture came with the apartment. He could tell from his own days of living in destitution.
“Honey, where do you spend all your money? Is it drugs? Is it the drugs that are doing this to you? You can tell me, I can help you.”
“I’ve got money. It’s in the bank. This place isn’t that bad. I don’t need much more than this,” Clara said sleepily letting a reassuring smile stretch her face.
“It’s pretty awful in here. I bet you could use a vacation, huh? Get out of the damp and into the sun? Go somewhere that isn’t so… awful… Okay, I’m going to go get Sarah and then we’re going to decide if you need to go to the hospital. Oh shit, I don’t know what to do…”
“Okay, Rob. If you say so…” Clara trailed off.
Before Rob left, Clara suddenly said, “Rob! Do you mind turning the radio on for me?”
Rob walked over to the machine and turned it on. The staticky voices of policemen and women from all around the city filled the room. “A police scanner?”
“Yeah, it keeps me company, Rob,” Clara said luxuriously stretching under the blanket on the couch.
“Girl, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I’m getting Sarah,” he said, unhidden panic in his voice.
Clara didn’t feel like sleeping, but kept her eyes shut. She warmed under the blanket and felt comfortable in her small apartment. She listened to the police scanner:
“10-4. No priors on license plate One-Four-X-ray-X-ray-Adam-Ocean. Registration up to date.”
“10-4, thank you, dispatch.”
“Dispatch: Lima 12 requesting backup at the corner of Ocean Boulevard and 14th.”
“That’s my intersection,” Clara slurred to the empty room.
“November 4, can you provide backup to Lima 12 at Ocean Boulevard and 14th - Wait… are you still in the area?”
“Yeah, I’m done - break’s over - I’ll check in when I get to Ocean and 14th.”
Clara’s eyelids snapped open and she stood up to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. There was something eerily familiar about this dispatch exchange. She began to hyperventilate and felt dizzy.
“Dispatch, this is November-4. Where did you say that Lima-12 was?”
“Ocean Boulevard and 14th,” a pause.
“Yeah, there’s nothing here, dispatch. Are you sure that Lima-12 didn’t move on?”
Then a long pause. The silence was punctuated by the minute vibrations of the speaker cone in the scanner, still humming and hissing and popping, the squelch circuit couldn’t avoid static from a faulty cone. The silence was oppressive and weighty on Clara. It’s intensity increased, if silence can even be described as to crescendo, that’s what it was doing and then the signal strength broke the squelch circuit and a distorted, gritty voice said, “Clara.”
“FUCK!” Clara screamed and heaved the radio against the wall.
She stood in the room, silent again, without any hisses or pops, and stared at the broken radio on the floor.
“CLARA!” A voice screamed that could only be from a radio.
Clara shrieked and ran to the door. She fumbled with the lock, but got it open and began to run down the stairs, but she was dizzy and had to take a sort of controlled fall down the stairs. She burst out of the front door of her apartment building and tumbled into the street. A woman who was walking a dog shrieked when she saw Clara, who still looked much like she did at the dock earlier.
She ran hard. Past the patrol car on the corner, down streets and alleyways that jutted this way and that, relics of old city design that allowed five and six way intersections. The sharp and colorless streets loomed over her and seemed to pulse with her breath. Her name echoed down every street she came to. “Clara! Clara! Clara!” And tears streamed down her face.
She made her way in a haphazard route to the train station on Main and 10th and slid into the lobby with a startled shout. Trying to compose herself, she straightened her hair and re-buttoned her peacoat. She wiped the tears from her face and walked up to the ticket booth.
“Ah...hmmm...ehm,” she said, still panting from her mad dash from her apartment. Where was she going to go? She doesn’t have a plan…
“Ma’am? Are you alright?” The woman in the ticket booth said. She had a thick Southern accent and frowned with concern. “Do you need help?”
“No. I need a ticket to…” Where? Where? Where? “Texas!”
“Where in Texas,” the ticket woman said suspiciously. Her eyes arched and her mouth tightened.
“Houston!”
“We’ve got a train that goes to Austin leaving in five minutes.” The woman’s expression softened into confused curiosity.
“That’s fine!”
“It’s a six-hundred dollar ticket!”
“Okay, okay,” Clara said, pulling out her wallet. She pulled out a credit card and slid it under the glass.
The ticket woman processed the transaction and handed Clara the ticket adding, “Girl, I don’t know where you’re going in such a hurry, but I hope that wherever it is got a beautician somewhere…”
“Thank you,” Clara called without thinking and ran to the train platform which was just about to leave.
She got on and took a seat in a car that didn’t have any other passengers. She breathed a sigh of relief and waited for the train to start moving. The train got going and started out of town… Then it left the state, which was small even for a New England state.
The conductor came by and asked for her ticket. Before he punched the slip of paper he took a long look at her over his glasses and asked where she was going.
“Texas.”“What are you doing there?”
“A friend of mine told me that I should take a vacation, so I’m taking his advice.”
“Hmm. He’s got the right idea. You look like you need a vacation,” the conductor said, punching her ticket and handing it to her.
The sun had come out from behind the clouds as she passed into Pennsylvania and she warmed herself in the sun’s rays through the window. This spontaneous decision put her back on the kind of track that she wanted for her life.
Throw it all out. Run for the fading sun. Stir up the stagnant stream.
She was contented in her decision, but she couldn’t help thinking that maybe it hadn’t been her decision. She wondered for a moment if she had been run out of town by something supernatural, though she couldn’t form exactly what it was that had chased her away. Something to do with the radio.
Oh, nevermind, the sun was warm and she was free.
Clara leaned against the window and fell asleep. She didn’t dream at all.