Dennis Etchison - The Dark Country

"I knew it," she said. She wiped her hands and turned around in the kitchen, distracted, as if trying to spot some small betraying detail. He knew she wanted his plate. He didn't move. "Well, he surely won't need any of that nonsense to keep him occupied once we're settled into Greenworth. A man of his age…"

She knew his eyes were on her and stopped.

"I'll just see to the rosebushes," she said. "The new people made me promise to leave them, but I've packed away enough cuttings."

He didn't watch her leave.

He returned to the book. There was the name of his best friend."… Bill and Cathleen enjoy water sports, horseback riding, camping and life. The proud parents of Kevin and Teri Lynn, they presently reside in Santa Mara, where Bill is General Manager of the Lee Bros. Shoe Mart…"

He stood up.

He saw his father at the curb, waiting like an animal for the exterminator. Slowly Martin walked to the door. His hand touched a box.

The deck had been re-packed in the original shipping container. He ran his fingers over the brushed aluminum and molded plastic. The tapes were arranged around the edges of the box Hke eggs in a carton.

He wandered back to the kitchen table. He turned another page, started to skim the book, then snatched it up and pitched it into the trash can.

He looked out again at his father, who was now ambling out of sight around the garage, head down, as if watching for cracks in the cement.

Martin picked up a carton. He would carry it outside, wait for the moving truck and put it in himself so that nothing would be broken. He could do that much. And the box underneath. It was probably full of more tapes. He flipped it open with his shoe.

He saw a large, misshapen white object.

He set the box down. The object looked like plaster of Paris.. He touched it. It was a cast, bent and molded to fit an arm and part of a shoulder, the cast his father had been fitted for at the hospital, after the fall. The whitewash was smudged, dirty and — he bent closer.

It was covered with graffiti. Probably the signatures of nurses, patients. But in among the angular, unreadable letters were the words Do you know the way to Santa Mara?

What the hell? he wondered. Was this the message «they» had left behind? He read it again.

It was, unmistakably, his father's handwriting.

He sighed, shaking his head. He pictured the old man saving the cast after it was removed, hiding it, perhaps even dragging it out every evening and sitting there in front of his TV or his machinery, lost between his earphones, waiting for a sign that they had come again. Like the Cargo Cult out in the South Pacific. Waiting, with the sign he believed he had been given, that had come from the inscape of a fever dream. Waiting. For the return of the gods and their answers and their salvation. It wasn't true, of course. It never was. But, he thought, maybe, just maybe there is a key to some kind of truth in the asking, in the very questioning itself; maybe; maybe there is, after all.

I want to be out there, he thought, to be there with him, next to him.

But before he went outside, he knelt down and gingerly removed the deck, disturbing the arrangement of tapes as little as possible. He set it on the linoleum, unwound the cord and plugged it into the wall. He found the mike, the headphones and the last tape his father had recorded, the one not yet covered with check marks, the one that had yet to be monitored.

He inserted it, connected the microphone and headset and started the cassette. He listened to the rushing of blank tape for several minutes. Once he seemed to hear a real sound, only to recognize it as the faint crying of the pups down the block, a plaintive weeping that had been picked up during his father's recording. Then, with perfect precision, with perhaps the greatest care he had ever taken in his life, with one eye on the window and one eye on the mechanism, he depressed the SOUND-ON-SOUND RECORD button, uncovered the microphone, lifted it to his lips and, in the weakest and most unrecognizable voice he could muster, began to whisper calculatedly inarticulate, mysterious and indecipherable syllables onto the track.

announcer: Hey, let's go into this apartment and help this housewife take a shower!

assistant: Rad!

announcer: Excuse me, ma'am!

housewife: Eeek!

announcer: It's okay, I'm the New Season Man!

housewife: You— you came right through my TV!

announcer: That's because there's no stopping good news! Have you heard about New Season Body Creamer? It's guaranteed better than your old-fashioned soap product, cleaner than water on the air! It's —

assistant: Really rad!

housewife. Why, you're so right! Look at the way New Season's foaming away my dead, unwanted dermal cells! My world has a whole new complexion! My figure has a glossy new paisley shine! The kind that men.

announcer: And women!

housewife:. love to touch!

announcer: Plus the kids'11 love it, too!

housewife: You bet they will! Wait till my husband gets up! Why, I'm going to spend the day spreading the good news all over our entire extended family! It's —

announcer: It's a whole New Season!

housewife: A whole new reason! It's —

assistant: Absolutely rad-i-cal!

The young man fingered the edges of the pages with great care, almost as if they were razor blades. Then he removed his fingertips from the clipboard and tapped them along the luminous crease in his pants, one, two, three, fout, five, four, three, two, one, stages of flexion about to become a silent drumroll of boredom. With his other hand he checked his watch, clicked his pen and smoothed the top sheet of the questionnaire, circling the paper in a cursive, impatient holding pattern.

Across the room another man thumbed a remote-control device until the TV voices became silvery whispers, like ants crawling over aluminum foil.

"Wait, Bob." On the other side of the darkening living room a woman stirred in her bean-bag chair, her hair shining under the black light. "It's time for The Fuzzy Family."

The man, her husband, shifted his buttocks in his own bean-bag chair and yawned. The chair's styrofoam filling crunched like cornflakes under his weight. "Saw this one before," he said. "Besides, there's no laughtrack. They use three cameras and a live audience, remember?"

"But it might be, you know, boosted," said the woman. "Oh, what do they call it?"

"Technically augmented?" offered the young man.

They both looked at him, as though they had forgotten he was in their home.

The young man forced an unnatural, professional smile. In the black light his teeth shone too brightly.

"Right," said the man. "Not The Fuzzy Family, though. I filtered out a track last night. It's all new. I'm sure."

The young man was confused. He had the inescapable feeling that they were skipping (or was it simply that he was missing?) every third or fourth sentence. I'm sure. Sure of what? That this particular TV show had been taped before an all-live audience? How could he be sure? And why would anyone care enough about such a minor technical point to bother to find out? Such things weren't supposed to matter to the blissed-out masses. Certainly not to AmiDex survey families. Unless.

Could he be that lucky?

The questionnaire might not take very long, after all. This one, he thought, has got to work in the industry. He checked the computer stats at the top of the questionnaire: MORRISON, ROBERT, AGE 54, UNEMPLOYED. Used to work in the industry, then. A TV cameraman, a technician of some kind, maybe for a local station? There had been so many layoffs in the last few months, with QUBE and Teletext and all the new cable licenses wearing away at the traditional network share. And any connection, past or present, would automatically disqualify this household. Hope sprang up in his breast like an accidental porno broadcast in the middle of Sermonette.