Jack O'Connell - Wireless

[Pause]

And what’s the first feedback we hear? “It’s not them, man.” “Couldn’t be the O’Zebedees.” “No way. They’re still tending bar in Dublin. These guys are a weak imitation.” Fine. Break my heart some more, you little ingrates. What is it you need to be sure? Would you like to press your hand into our old cart-deck? How about probe our microphone ports with your fingers? Would that do the trick?

Whoa, boy, calm it down. Here, take mine, it’s decaf. Hello, friends, Brother John, back again. As you can hear, you’ve done some momentous upsetting in the heart of the boy wonder. I’ve tried to salve the wounds with ancient adages — no man’s a prophet in his own market share. But though he proclaims otherwise, I think your suspiciousness genuinely surprised him. He expected more from the hard core, as the saying goes. My own feeling is, you stay on top of the mountain by giving the people what they want. So if it’s proof you need, we’ll try to come up with some irrefutable evidence that we’re the one and only, genuine, original saboteurs. Until we can think of something airtight, however, I’m going to have to ask you to try to have faith. It’s the honest-to-Marconi James and John, no matter what your ears tell you.

Yo, hermano, the timer says we just passed our safety margin.

That means it’s time to recede into the caverns from which we came. Keep the ears peeled ’cause we’ll be back. And until then, Hic Calix .

Normally, the small bathroom off Flynn’s office is a little sanctuary, a solitary free zone where he can steal five minutes from the day and browse through his collection of rare old Shadow magazines. Today, it’s more like a holding cell or an isolation booth from some upscale, impossible game show.

He leans the weight of his body against the black lacquered sink, stares at his Cartier watch. He can feel a sweat breaking under the Bill Blass suit and, though he knows it will do no good, he taps on the top of the Grundig, slaps at its side like it was a clogged parking meter.

“Bound to happen,” he whispers. “Should have known.”

The Grundig is an antique. Flynn rescued it from a flea market seven years ago. He has it mounted on a shelf over the toilet. He keeps the original handbook in a sealed Baggie under the radio. The handbook is entirely in German, a language Flynn can neither speak nor read.

“Son of a bitch, come on,” he whispers.

He comes forward, leans over the toilet, presses his ear to the mesh that covers the speaker. A squeal of interference sounds and he steps back awkwardly. There’s a few seconds of static and then:

… and for those among the faithful who worship the voice of the goddess, the brothers will try to vamoose by ten …

Flynn lets out a lungful of nervous air, comes forward again, plants a kiss on the mesh, and laughs at himself. He runs some cold water over his hands, splashes some on his face, dries off with a towel, and looks at himself in the mirror. Thin traces of pink vein run through his eyes. He’s gotten maybe two hours of sleep. He’s definitely not at the top of his form for the coming pitch. The phone call from Wallace came at 3 A.M., just as he was climbing into bed. He couldn’t catch all the words. The dwarf’s voice was high and frantic, something about meeting him at the hospital, something about 01-ga’s accident and questions from the police. He’d driven to St. Matthias dressed in sweats and slippers and only been allowed into Olga’s room for a few seconds. She looked so tiny in the mechanical bed, swimming in the pale blue johnny and the frayed sheets. She was wrapped like a fragile, shrunken mummy and medicated into a sleep that Flynn hoped was beyond pain. In the corridor he’d paced with Wallace and tried to get the story straight. The Brownings had come home from their dance. They’d both had a few drinks. Olga had gone down to the rec room for some reason, tripped on the first stair, and fallen the rest of the way. Everything else out of Wallace’s mouth was a jumble — words about the look on the doctor’s face in the E.R., a visit with some young cop with a clipboard and a series of endless questions. He kept looking up at Flynn, wringing his hands, saying, in that awful cracking voice, “She’ll be all right, won’t she, G.T.?” When the sun started to come up, Flynn finally talked Wallace into going home. He looked away as the dwarf climbed up on a metal stool to kiss his wife’s bandage-swathed cheek, then followed after Wallace in the Saab till his friend was safely back home. He’d gotten back to his own place by six, sprawled in the dentist’s chair for a couple hours, taken a hot shower, and swilled some black coffee.

Now he shakes his head and opens the medicine cabinet, takes out the Visine and shakes drops into each eye, towels off again, and looks in the mirror a last time.

“Okay, G.T.,” he says, “time to make some coin.”

He runs through a series of deep breaths, squares his shoulders back, flattens down a rumple in the front of the suit, tightens his tie. He brings his hands up so they block his face in the mirror, interlocks the fingers, and cracks the knuckles elaborately.

Then he clears his throat, takes a last breath, forms his mouth into a humble smile, and exits the bathroom.

Mr. and Mrs. Miller are seated in front of his desk, sunk deep into the buttery leather chairs Flynn had special-ordered from Europe. The rest of his office, his whole building for that matter, is authentically Victorian. Five years back, when he first purchased the property, he hired a pricy decorator and paid through the nose to bring the whole place back to its original 1875 look. The hand-cut sign hanging out front that reads was modeled on a genuine Yankee shingle on display in the city’s historical society archives.

G.T. Flynn CFP, CLU

Life Insurance

and

Estate Planning

But Flynn had to pull an annoying compromise when it came to the customer chairs. He split with the decorator over this issue. He couldn’t make her see that the chairs were part of a larger, intricate process, a ritual or ceremony, a subtle but complex therapy. He couldn’t convey to her that the chairs were an essential cog in the wheel of the coin, a strut that sat next to Flynn’s voice, eye contact, the lighting of the room, and, most of all, the words, the individual signifiers that linked together in a logic chain and formed something larger — a picture, an image, a 3-D full-color hologram of total security and peace of mind. He needed the clientele to sink down into that expensive leather until they felt almost weightless, or better, until they felt like they were floating in saline, womb-rooted again, protected from the horrible glare of air-breathing life.

He stops in the doorway to make the judgment call. They look ready, he decides, so he starts to walk to the desk, lets them see he’s relaxed, unhurried, unpressured, as if he were walking toward a summertime hammock on a farmhouse porch.

He takes his seat behind the antique, hand-scrolled Chip-pendale desk and says, “Sorry about the interruption.” He smiles and nods his head.

There have been times, instances set up just like this, when his voice box failed him and his first crucial, tone-setting words came out in a squawk or, worse, a phlegmy, throat-clogged rasp. Now he’s superstitious about the first words. He keeps an old-time atomizer in the bathroom medicine cabinet and a jar of honey in the mini-fridge.

“Well, Mr. and Mrs. Miller — let me ask, do you mind if I call you Bob and Carol?”