Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Alter my future, Margie. I’m waiting.

Send me a message.

Ronnie steps inside the apartment, turns off the alarm, and begins to undress in the dark. She has that strange tired but excited sensation, kind of a sweet fatigue, like when she drinks too-potent cappuccino on top of too-cheap mescal, that slow but giddy war within the nervous system that makes her almost stupid the entire next day.

It’s not that she’d take back the airport dance with Flynn. She’s glad it happened and she hopes it happens again. But she has screwed with her normal postshow routine and that always leaves her a little concerned, as if she’s messing with a system that’s taken years to fine-tune and once broken, might never heal.

So, though she’s only got an hour till dawn, she wants to squeeze in at least some of the ritual. She dumps her clothes in the bathroom hamper, takes her short kimono from the hook on the back of the door, and slides it on. She goes to the sink and throws some cold water on her face, dries off, and jogs into the kitchen, where she grabs a pint of ice cream from the freezer and a pint of mescal from the liquor cabinet.

Then it’s out to the balcony, seventeen stories above Main Street. The air is really too cold now for the kimono, but it reminds her of the summer, when every night, from two-thirty till dawn, she took her watch over the city, still hard-core, still the cutting-edge night-owl and still-young Voice of Quinsigamond.

Ronnie’s apartment building is the gray-faced, concrete Heptagon that shoots up twenty-one stories at the west end of Main Street. The first three floors were once owned and occupied by Westblitz Savings and Loan, but about a year ago the Feds walked in one Monday morning, seized the books, sent home the staff, and directed a vanload of bulky young men weighed down with elaborate toolbelts to change all the locks and alarms. A week later the Spy reported that the S&L’s president and two senior V.P.’s were thought to be in either Antigua or southern France, that the institution’s assets were frozen pending a lengthy audit and analysis, and that the trust which owned the Heptagon, which housed Westblitz, had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Outside of Westblitz, the trust had managed to rent only three of the luxury apartments that made up the remaining eighteen floors of the building. In a registered letter, the court had informed Ronnie they’d release her from the lease she’d signed when she’d moved in. Her two neighbors took the opportunity to cut their losses and run. But Ronnie saw no reason for another disruptive move, so now she’s the sole occupant of over 350,000 square feet of downtown Quinsigamond real estate. And as such, she’s taken it upon herself to rename the building. She now insists on calling the Heptagon Solitary , after a sleazy women’s-prison movie she saw on cable late one night.

After the last tenant moved out of Solitary, Ronnie took to exploring the building. One morning, as dawn began to break, she found she still couldn’t sleep and decided to head out to a convenience store and buy a newspaper. But she hit the wrong button in the elevator and instead of the doors sliding open to reveal the garage, they parted on the hallway of the fourth floor. And on impulse, Ronnie stepped off and started to walk around. There wasn’t much to see. She tried the door to every apartment, but they were all locked. She got bored, forgot about the newspaper, went back up to seventeen, and took a bath and listened to the radio.

But the next morning, at dawn, she did the same thing, this time exploring the seventh floor and this time finding an open apartment. It was bare and still had an unfinished feel to it. The electrical outlets were missing faceplates and the carpeting was dusted with dozens of those stray fabric strands left after installation. But Ronnie spent a half hour in the apartment, enjoying the feeling that she wasn’t supposed to be there, savoring this imagined danger of being discovered.

The next night, for reasons she refused to analyze, Ronnie brought her sleeping bag down to the seventh floor and napped in the bare unit until 8 A.M.

Since then, she’s discovered another half dozen open doors. She’s slept in each of them at least once. But she’s made a rule that she’ll only play squatter once a week and so far she’s managed to obey herself.

She’s been in the building for over a year, which for Ronnie is a long stay. She rented it over the phone, long-distance, telling the broker her only requirements were “to be up high and have thick walls.” The height requirement was more for radio reception than view, but now, out on the balcony, seventeen floors over the street, she appreciates the perspective. It’s not that she’s treated to some stunning panorama each morning at two-thirty, coming home from the station, shedding her clothes and washing her face, throwing on her favorite white silk kimono and sprawling on the plastic-weave lounge chair she bought mail-order, snacking on “Cappuccino Commotion” Haagen-Dazs or microwave popcorn washed down with mescal and orange juice. It’s that at this height everything down in the street can seem like a distant film, some grainy B-flick thrown up on a weathered drive-in screen, something she could glimpse from a highway and pass on by. From this height, every action down on Main Street is void of the bulk of its sounds and smells, from the visceral impact of a real encounter. Living on the seventeenth floor is like continuing her radio show throughout the context of the rest of her life. The individuals that she watches in that hour after she returns from QSG are like embodied voices of her callers, their faces still hidden, their crises and obsessions and bizarre traumas all reduced to a distant summation. There’s all the qualities of the true confession, from boredom to physical danger, with none of the consequences of real interaction. She sometimes thinks of Main Street, between the hours of three and five, as her own enormous wide-screen TV, the biggest cathode-ray tube in the city. And the ability of her head to pivot on her spine is a deft remote control that allows her to flip from the gay pickup lines that roll in and out of the bus terminal to the homeless scavengers forever sifting through the Dumpsters outside the public library to the twin sisters who alternate tricks behind Kepler and Gleick’s All-Night Billiard Hall.

This downscale voyeurism has turned into something of a ritual over the past six months and Ronnie wonders what she’ll do when winter hits and she’s forced to lock up the sliders that lead to the balcony. The summer was wonderful. She’d finish Libido Liveline at two, then pack all her gear into her worn, faded-green Girl Scout knapsack, kiss Wayne on the forehead, usually leaving bright red lipmarks, and hand over the airwaves to Sonny Botkin’s Pagan Confidential . During the summer months, she kept the top off the Jeep and sometimes she’d jump up on the interstate before heading home, pick up the speed a little, and let the rush of warm wind drum on her body and head. When she felt fully decompressed, she’d head for Main Street and Solitary. She’d pull the Jeep into her empty underground garage and keep her thumb on the red button of her Mace tube while she waited for the express elevator. Then she’d ride up to her floor singing aloud to the Muzak versions of Supremes hits that played on a tape loop every night.

Ronnie doesn’t know where her habit of renaming things comes from. Technically, and as far as the post office is concerned, she lives in apartment 1707. But in the privacy of her own quirky brain, she insists on calling her place apartment 3G, after the classic comic strip that she only vaguely remembers from her childhood. Wasn’t it three gals in the big city, all roommates, all young and cartoon-glamorous and ready for new romance at every turn? All summer, Ronnie got a kick out of pretending her roommates were on lengthy modeling assignments in Europe. The vision of Lu Ann and Margo quarreling with a thin, slightly fascistic fashion photographer against the backdrop of spurting Roman fountains contrasted beautifully with the gritty Quinsigamond land-scape below the balcony. It was like mixing the sweetness of the gourmet ice cream with the saltiness of the microwave popcorn — it shouldn’t have worked, but for Ronnie it did.