Jack O'Connell - Wireless

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Ronnie never knew her father. Classic abandonment story. All her mother would say was he was “in sales” and was “too handsome to be trusted.” He left one weekend, supposedly to put a deposit on a vacation rental. Instead, he cashed out the checking account, gassed up the Chevy Impala, and never came home. Ronnie was born five weeks later.

Her mother went to work as a skittish waitress willing to date the first generous tip she saw and Ronnie grew up watching the woman slide from being badly disappointed in a series of stupid and abusive men to being genuinely unbalanced. In between there were a lot of moves and two quick, horror-story marriages.

At one point between these marriages, for a short time when Ronnie was about twelve, she and her mother ended up living in a trailer park outside of Gainesville, Florida. It was here that Mother got into the habit of leaving the radio on all night. At first it drove Ronnie crazy, all these Bible Belt preachers yelling about repenting before the fires of eternal damnation consumed your evil flesh. She wanted to hear the Top Forty, pop music for the young. They reached a compromise when they found a strange AM station that was broad-casting old-fashioned radio plays. They’d lie in the dark, in the mini bunk beds, Ronnie on top, and listen to intriguing voice productions like The Invisible Man or The Tell-Tale Heart . Over the course of several weeks there were romances and detective dramas, love stories, and O. Henry adaptations.

Then one night, the narrator’s voice announced the station’s final production. He said there’d been a format change. From the top bunk in the trailer, Ronnie thought she heard her mother start to weep. She asked if everything was all right, but her mother didn’t answer. So she closed her eyes and began to listen to The Diary of Anne Frank .

In the twenty years that have passed since that night, Ronnie knows she has never been so moved and torn up and generally affected by any book or movie or song or painting or relationship. Over the course of two hours, in a pitch-black trailer, in stifling Florida, it was as if this young victim, this girl called Anne, with her intelligent voice and perfect words, had stood next to the bunk and whispered her story into Ronnie’s ear. Ronnie could see every aspect of it, the family, the movement into the attic, the others — Mr. and Mrs. Van Daan and young Peter, Miep bringing supplies to the hiding place. Ronnie balled the ends of the worn sheet that covered her legs and felt everything alongside Anne. Terror, frustration, anger, infatuation. But mostly terror, agonizing fear when a noise sounded below the attic floor, crippling worry when the food rations shrank with each merciful delivery from Miep. That night in Florida, Ronnie’s trailer became Anne Frank’s attic.

And for the next five or six years, as her mother’s condition worsened and they continued to move around America, Ronnie began to daydream, to fantasize a very elaborate, ritualized invention where she and her mother, like Anne and the Frank family, were pursued by heinous, deranged, Nazi-like men in dark uniforms and leather boots that came high up their shins. But, unlike Anne, Ronnie stayed mobile, always a step ahead of these murderous soldiers, always leading her mother to narrow escape in a new town, always using intelligence and an emotionless savvy to maneuver around the elaborate traps and roadblocks and ambushes.

The fantasies ended when Ronnie turned eighteen and her mother slid into the fully delusional. They were living near a distant cousin in upstate New York. The cousin helped place Mother in something like a nursing home where she died of a massive embolism after six months.

Ronnie doesn’t like to think about the fact that there might have been some degree of relief mixed in with her pain that day.

There turned out to be a surprise death benefit from an old life policy her mother had purchased when she was born. It was only ten grand, but it got Ronnie through two years of a junior college, where she stumbled upon the campus radio station. Her freshman year, she pushed until she got a night slot spinning late-seventies disco. And each night in that makeshift studio, fitting on the taped-up headphones and adjusting her meters, muting the Gibb brothers’ voices from the studio speakers and maybe smoking a joint in the dimness and the quiet, she’d approach a feeling that was something like the night in Gainesville, Florida, when Anne Frank’s ghost stood next to her and taught her how to be wise and strong and practical, how to survive.

In that junior college studio, Ronnie came to realize that it was possible to present yourself simply and solely as a voice. Pure voice. A ghost with no bodily presence in this world.

Sitting in that Mickey Mouse broadcasting booth, while most of the campus was studying or partying or screwing or sleeping, Ronnie dredged up the last remnants of her mother’s face and decided three things, three primary commandments that guide her life to this day:

Never put your faith in someone simply because you’ve slept with them.

Never lie to yourself.

Never stop moving.

Exactly , she thinks now. Never stop moving .

She gets up from the lounge, tightens the belt of her robe, walks to the railing, and looks down over Main Street. All the night cliques are out, a half dozen nighthawk subcultures prowling around the alleys off Main, trying to move quickly in the darkness, to wrap up their transactions before dawn. The gay hustlers and the runaway whores. The Toth clinic outpatients and the beeper-packing crack clerks. Ronnie feels like she’s watching an enormous ant farm, filled on a cruel whim with a random mixture of life-forms, who may or may not be suited to this artificial environment. And she wonders about the varying extent of their awareness. Are they conscious of their own motivations? Or are they instinctively driven by the last and best commandment, Never stop moving ?

So why are you still sitting here in Solitary?

And why are you starting to screw around with a guy you could end up liking?

It’s four-thirty in the morning and all Hannah can think about is eating the remains of the takeout carbonara that’s sitting in her refrigerator. She knows she won’t bother to heat it. She’ll wolf it straight out of the carton, wash it down with the last of the Chablis. On the drive home she realized, in an instantaneous and almost shocking way, just how hungry she was. Crossing Hoffman Square she flashed on the carbonara, pictured it sitting on the fridge shelf like a forgotten Christmas gift that turned out to be exactly what she’d wanted. As she pulled in behind the house and killed the engine she sat in the car for an extra few seconds, thinking about the sad fact that even if there was some mate, some devoted insomniac lover, waiting on the other side of her apartment door, some caring and thoughtful individual who’d spent the last hour preparing something hot and delicious and nourishing, she’d still want the cold carbonara. She wonders if this is a sign she should always stay single.

She scoops her mail off the top stair where Mrs. Acker leaves it every afternoon and lets herself into her apartment, the middle unit of an old wood-frame three-decker opposite St. Matthias Hospital. She’s lived in the same place for over five years now. Mrs. Acker lives on the first floor with a Rottweiler named Franz, after her late husband. The top floor has been empty since Mr. Bradbury died last spring.

Hannah loves the apartment, a spacious two-bedroom with all-natural wood, antique brass fixtures everywhere, and eleven-foot-high ceilings. The rent is more than reasonable and she’s got a full-sized kitchen and this enormous old bathtub with claw legs. Sometimes she considers approaching Mrs. Acker about eventually buying the place. Maybe they could work out some sort of arrangement, an agreed-upon price, or at least something like a right of first refusal. It’d be a sensible investment and the rents would make the mortgage workable.