Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Like walking into an antique spaceship, Ronnie thinks. I should have worn my steel-cone bra .

She looks at her watch, gets out of the Jeep, and moves inside. The interior of the shop is no less striking than the outside. The ceiling is high, maybe a full twelve feet, and it’s composed of some kind of chrome or aluminum, some reflective metal, worked into a series of concentric circles that culminates in a good-sized, multipointed, crystal-looking star that hangs dead center like a Martian chandelier. The walls are done in black and white deco tile and they’re covered with artwork taken from dozens of 1930s science fiction pulps, classic stuff from names like Earl K. Bergey and Frank R. Paul and Howard V. Brown. There are pictures of bullet-shaped spaceships with gaping holes torn through them by an asteroid storm. There’s a future city of glass, built in ascending tiers, being shattered by a massive tidal wave. There are flying insects as big as Buicks doing battle with laser-cannon-equipped sailors of tomorrow. The art is all framed by tubes of red neon. Ronnie thinks Toby Odets’s electric bill must be backbreaking.

She starts to wander the aisles. The display racks are sloping metal frames that mimic the I-beam design outside. A sign mounted on the rear wall announces 100,000 Volumes Always in Stock The Infinity speakers on the wall fill the room with Throbbing Gristle’s Second Annual Report . The store is busy for a Saturday morning. There are a half dozen teenagers decked out in skateboard attire mulling over the comic book racks. There’s a flock of college students swinging their bulging nylon knapsacks over their shoulders as they rummage in the used-paperback section. There’s an elderly couple scanning the new releases.

Ronnie starts down a random aisle, stops in the middle, picks up a paperback, and starts to thumb through it. After a minute, a skateboarder moves up next to her and starts paging through a fat anthology. He doesn’t appear to have much interest in the book. He keeps lifting his head and looking over his shoulder. The kid’s mulatto with a tight head of curly hair. He’s wearing a peach-colored T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. On the front is a cartoon of a skateboarder, suspended in the air, flying through a gap that’s been cut in a barbed-wire fence. Underneath the picture are the words Rupture the Linkage .

“I didn’t th-think you’d sh-show,” the kid stutters without looking at Ronnie.

She can’t help but smile at him.

“I’ll assume you’re Gabe,” she says.

He clenches his teeth and whispers, “You w-want to keep it d-down a little.”

Ronnie folds her arms across her chest and says, “What, is it bad form to be seen with an old broad?”

Gabe moves farther down the aisle and she looks around, then follows him.

“Hey, kid,” Ronnie says to his back, “you contacted me, remember?”

He turns around and gives a version of a solemn nod.

“First off,” she asks, “how’d you get my number? It’s unlisted.”

“Oh, p-please,” he says, as if she’s just told him a bad joke, then he smiles and says, “I can’t believe you c-c-came.”

“I wouldn’t have. I almost didn’t. You mentioned Flynn.”

He nods again and says, “We should p-probably keep moving, you know?”

Ronnie lets out a sigh. “Jesus, you people are bora paranoid. How old are you anyway?”

Gabe head-motions her toward a stairway. “C-c’mon,” he says, “I don’t think anyone’s in the b-b-basement.”

They descend a narrow black spiral staircase into a low-ceilinged cellar filled with rows of silver aluminum picnic tables. The tables are, in turn, lined with red plastic milk crates that hold runs of old magazines with names like Wonder Stories Quarterly and Astounding Science-Fiction . Gabe picks an aisle and starts halfheartedly flipping through the magazines. Ronnie moves next to him and does the same.

“You know, I don’t have all day,” she says.

“I really ap-appreciate that you came. I didn’t think you w-would.”

“What about Flynn? You said you had to tell me something about Flynn.”

Gabe seems torn, like he needs to talk and at the same time he’s bound not to. He takes a breath and blurts out, “Fl-Flynn isn’t the one hitting your station, l-lady, okay? It’s not him.”

Ronnie gives him a forced smile, shrugs, then mutters, “If you say so, kid—”

Gabe interrupts her and says, “L-look, there’s a lot of talk down W-W-W—”

“Wireless?” she says.

He nods quickly. “People s-say you were in there last night. People heard the voice, all right? They s-say you left with Flynn—”

“And what if I did?” She cuts him off with the same challenging finality that never fails on Libido Liveline .

Gabe moves his head side to side and stammers, “Look, if you’re trying to n-n-nail Flynn—”

“Who said that?”

She’s got him on the run. And he knows asking to meet her was a bad idea, that he should always clear everything, every goddamn move, through Hazel.

Ronnie lets him hang for just the right amount of time, then turns her body toward him and relaxes her posture a little. She allows a glance at the spiral staircase, lowers her voice, and says, “All right, now calm down. I just want to make a point with you here. You people, you jammers, you seem so sensitive about being judged the wrong way, about how the newspapers write about you, about your goddamn image …”

Gabe is staring up at her trying not to look nervous. Ronnie lets her voice soften a little more. “We meet for the first time, right? And you want me to just take it on faith, on your word, on this teenage-skateboard-punk word, right, that you’re all innocent of jamming QSG. That it’s the mythical O’Zebedee Brothers who’ve come back into town and attacked my station. Flynn’s got nothing to do with it. He can’t control these guys. Doesn’t even know who they are—”

“But that’s the tr-truth,” Gabe says, too loud.

“Quiet down,” Ronnie says. “Okay, let’s assume it is. Maybe I believe you. Maybe I believed it from Flynn and there was no need for you to even call me …”

She pauses, steps forward, and gives Gabe a soft push to the chest with her fingertips. He thinks she might be teasing him but there’s no smile on her face.

Her voice gets even lower and she says, “But you’re asking for a lot, kid. You’re asking that I believe the words of a bunch of strangers. And you’re asking that I believe these particular strangers never lie to each other.”

“What’s that s-supposed to mean?” Gabe asks.

“It means,” Ronnie says, “how the hell do you know that Flynn isn’t behind the jams? How do you know Flynn isn’t playing O’ZBON? He sure as hell has the equipment and the brains, right?”

“Oh, c-c’mon,” Gabe says, shaking his head.

“Yeah, fine,” Ronnie says, giving an annoyed smile. “You’re convinced. To doubt each other means the whole thing starts to fall apart. But this is what pisses me off, kid. Like I just said, maybe I really do believe Flynn. And beyond that, maybe I don’t care whether it’s him or not. No one’s jamming my show. Whoever it is keeps hitting Ray Todd, the station scumbag. I think it’s a riot, okay?”

“Then what’s the pr-problem?”

“The problem,” Ronnie says, “is that you’re all presumptuous bastards. You get hold of my phone number somehow. You call me up at the crack of dawn. You ask me to meet you here on Venus, right? And I show up like an idiot. And you want to ask me to lay off big daddy Flynn, the fat wallet behind the whole Wireless cult—”

“It’s not a ca-ca-cult.”