Dennis Etchison - The Dark Country

"Let's talk to him," said the woman. "He might be able to help."

"He's too young, can't you see that, Jenny?"

"I beg your pardon?" said the young man.

"It's been such a long time," said the woman, rising with a whoosh from her chair and stepping in front of her husband. "We can try."

The man got slowly to his feet, his arms and torso long and phosphorescent in the peculiar mix of ultraviolet and television light. He towered there, considering. Then he took a step closer.

The young man was aware of his own clothing unsticking from the inflated vinyl, crackling slightly, a quick seam of blue static shimmering away across the back of the chair; of the snow pattern churning on the untuned screen, the color tube shifting hues under the black light, turning to gray, then brightening in the darkness, locking on an electric blue, and holding.

Morrison seemed to undergo a subtle transformation as details previously masked by shadow now came into focus. It was more than his voice, his words. It was the full size of him, no longer young but still strong, on his feet and braced in an unexpectedly powerful stance. It was the configuration of his head in silhouette, the haunted pallor of the skin, stretched taut, the large, luminous whites of the eyes, burning like radium. It was all these things and more. It was the reality of him, no longer a statistic but a man, clear and unavoidable at last.

The young man faced Morrison and his wife. The palms of his hsuids were sweating coldly. He put aside the questionnaire.

Six minutes to six.

"I'll put down that you — you declined to participate. How's that? No questions asked." He made ready to leave.

"It's been such a long time," said Mrs. Morrison again.

Mr. Morrison laughed shortly, a descending scale ending in a bitter, metallic echo that cut through the hissing. "I'll bet it's all crazy to you, isn't it? This stuff.'"

"No, not at all. Some of these pieces are priceless. I recognized that right away."

"Are they?"

"Sure," said the young man. "If you don't mind my saying so, it reminds me of my brother Jack's room. He threw out most of his underground newspapers, posters, that sort of thing when he got drafted. It was back in the sixties — I can barely remember it. If only he'd realized. Nobody saved anything. That's why it's all so valuable now."

"We did," said Mrs. Morrison.

"So I see."

They seemed to want to talk, after all — lonely, perhaps — so he found himself ignoring the static and actually making an effort to prolong his exit. A couple of minutes more wouldn't hurt. They're not so bad, the Morrisons, he thought. I can see that now.

"Well, I envy you. I went through a Marvel Comics phase when I was a kid. Those are worth a bundle now, too. My mother burned them all when I went away to college, of course. It's the same principle. But if I could go back in a time machine. " He shook his head and allowed an unforced smile to show through.

"These were our son's things," said Mrs. Morrison.

"Oh?" Could be I remind them of their son. I guess I should be honored.

"Our son David," said Mr. Morrison.

"I see." There was an awkward pause. The young man felt vaguely embarrassed. "It's nice of him to let you hold his collection. You've got quite an investment here."

The minute hand of the clock on the wall ground through its cycle, pressing forward in the rush of white noise from the speakers.

"David Morrison." Her voice sounded hopeful. "You've heard the name?"

David Morrison, David Morrison. Curious. Yes, he could almost remember something, a magazine cover or.

"It was a long time ago. He — our son — was the last American boy to be killed in Vietnam."

It was four minutes to six and he didn't know what to say.

"When it happened, we didn't know what to think," said Mrs. Morrison. "We talked to people like us. Mostly they wanted to pretend it never happened."

"They didn't understand, either," said Mr. Morrison.

"So we read everything. The magazines, books. We listened to the news commentators. It was terribly confusing. We finally decided even they didn't know any more than we did about what went on over there, or why."

"What was it to them? Another story for The Six O'Clock News, right, Jenny?"

Mrs. Morrison drew a deep, pained breath. Her eyes fluttered as she spoke, the television screen at her back lost in a grainy storm of deep blue snow.

"Finally the day came for me to clear David's room…"

"Please," said the young man, "you don't have to explain."

But she went ahead with it, a story she had gone over so many times she might have been recalling another life. Her eyes opened. They were dry and startlingly clear.

It was three minutes to six.

"I started packing David's belongings. Then it occurred to us that he might have known the reason. So we went through his papers and so forth, even his record albums, searching. So much of it seemed strange, in another language, practically from another planet. But we trusted that the answer would be revealed to us in time."

"We're still living with it," said Morrison. "It's with us when we get up in the morning, when we give up at night. Sometimes I think I see a clue there, the way he would have seen it, but then I lose the thread and we're back where we started.

"We tried watching the old reruns, hoping they had something to tell. But they were empty. It was like nothing important was going on in this country back then."

"Tell him about the tracks, Bob."

"I'm getting to it. Anyway, we waited. I let my job go, and we were living off our savings. It wasn't much. It's almost used up by now. But we had to have the answer. Why? Nothing was worth a damn, otherwise.

"Then, a few months ago, there was this article in TV GUIDE. About the television programs, the way they make them. They take the tracks — the audience reactions, follow? — and use them over and over. Did you know that?"

"I–I had heard…"

"Well, it's true. They take pieces of old soundtracks, mix them in, a big laugh here, some talk there — it's all taped inside a machine, an audience machine. The tapes go all the way back. I've broken 'em down and compared. Half the time you can hear the same folks laughing from twenty, twenty-five years ago. And from the sixties. That's the part that got to me. So I rigged a way to filter out everything — dialogue, music — except for the audience, the track."

"Why, he probably knows all about that. Don't you, young man?"

"A lot of them, the audience, are gone now. It doesn't matter. They're on tape. It's recycled, 'canned' they call it. It's all the same to TV. Point is, this is the only way left for us to get through, or them to us. To make contact. To listen, eavesdrop, you might say, on what folks were doing and thinking and commenting on and laughing over back then.

"I can't call 'em up on the phone, or take a poll, or stop people on the street, 'cause they'd only act like nothing happened. Today, it's all passed on. Don't ask me how, but it has.

"They're passed on now, too, so many of 'em."

"Like the boys," said Mrs. Morrison softly, so that her voice was all but lost in the hiss of the swirling blue vortex. "So many beautiful boys, the ones who would talk now, if only they could."

"Like the ones on the tracks," said Mr. Morrison.

"Like the ones who never came home," said his wife. "Dead now, all dead, and never coming back."

One minute to six.

"Not yet," he said aloud, frightened by his own voice.

As Mr. Morrison cranked up the gain and turned back to his set, the young man hurried out. As Mrs. Morrison opened her ears and closed her eyes to all but the laughtrack that rang out around her, he tried in vain to think of a way to reduce it all to a few simple marks in a now pointless language on sheets of printed paper. And as the Morrisons listened for the approving bursts of laughter and murmuring and applause, separated out of an otherwise meaningless echo from the past, he closed the door behind him, leaving them as he had found them. He began to walk fast, faster, and finally to run.