Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Without looking at her, Flynn asks, “What about with you?”

She doesn’t say anything, gives out a quick brush-off laugh.

He pushes it. “I mean, you’re this Zen master of the sensual, right? Authority on things erotic. How’d that end up your schtick?”

The door opens and Wayne sticks his head in.

“You’re on in five,” he says. “Ray is doing windup after the spot.”

Ronnie nods, raises her mug up to him, and he disappears. She takes a long swallow from her mug, refills it, and starts out the door. Flynn follows her to the broadcast booth and they stand in the doorway staring at Ray’s back, watching him sit rigid with one arm parallel next to the mike, a cigarette with a long head of ash jammed between his index and middle fingers. Over the booth speaker comes the close-out music for a mortuary ad. Ray twists his head from side to side as violins fade. Watching him, Flynn almost expects to hear an awful, high- pitched scraping noise escape from the guy’s shirt collar. The sound of a rusted pipe being forced from a welded joint. Instead, there’s a few moments of silence that become dramatic, almost uncomfortable. Flynn can feel anticipation blooming, a readiness or yearning in every set of ears tuned to QSG. Ray knows how to work the invisible audience. There’s no need for eye contact or physical presence. All Ray needs is the sound of his voice, his ability to lower timbre and increase the richness of tone and construct a fullness in the vibrations emitting from his larynx. The man knows how to play the pauses, knows, instinctively, the power of timing.

If it wasn’t for his lack Of control, Flynn thinks, he could be captivating, a real aural commodity.

Ray takes in a last drag from the Camel, blows it out over the mike in a long vapory line, and begins his summation.

My friends, I think you know as well as I do that we barely scratched the surface here tonight. We’ve quoted scripture and shown the folly of man, the weakness of his science and his ego. We’ve let the crackpots have their say, within the limits of decency. Let the liberal-spewing eggheads and lovers of darkness vent their routine spleen. It’s been over a century since Mr. Charles Darwin trotted his little simian sideshow across our path. And in that time his doctrine has infiltrated our schools, assaulted the minds of our children until they turned their backs on truth and righteousness. Perhaps those of us blessed with the knowledge of the divine wisdom haven’t fought hard enough. Perhaps our weakness is the greatest outrage of all. I don’t know.

[Pause. Voice rising]

But I do know that the Millenium is coming. It is racing down upon us like a blazing chariot. We’re already starting to feel its flames on our mortal skin. Those are the flames of eternal damnation, the province of the dark one, the final home of the wicked and the cursed. The place where the seeds we have sown in this life will bear fruit forever after. There are choices to be made in the days ahead. Battles waged. The worst kind of battles. Civil wars. Blood struggles between kin. There are two mighty armies readying to clash. They carry the same blood in their hearts, but they’ve been divided by choices of the soul. There is a family of light.

[Pause. Voice rising]

And make no mistake, there is a family of darkness. We know these two clans by different names from time immemorial. The family of Righteousness and the family of Evil. The family of Truth and the family of Falsehood. The family of Order and the family of Chaos. They’ve clashed since the archangel Michael cast Lucifer downward. There can be no compromise between them. Only one family can prevail.

[Pause]

And so, I think our discussion tonight can be seen in the larger picture. Its implications are staggering. The question is nothing less than — Are we men, made in the image and likeness of God, or are we soulless animals, creatures of the flesh void of any chance for redemption? Darkness or Light? Order or Chaos? The days of tabling that question are over. Each of us must seize the truth and fight the enemy with a viciousness that won’t allow defeat.

[Pause, a long audible breath]

Next time: Jane Fonda, the International Monetary Fund, and the Book of Revelation. I’m Raymond Todd. Good night and God speed.

He queues up his theme music — a weird, midspeed mix of something like organ and zither. It makes Flynn uncomfortable and he’s grateful when Wayne fades into the top-of-the-hour network news feed.

Ronnie moves forward, reaches down, and mutes the lead report about an air crash at O’Hare. She leans over Ray’s shoulder and says, “They let you alone tonight, big guy. How come?”

Ray doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge her or relinquish his chair. He continues to draw on his cigarette and stare past the hanging microphone out the plate glass at the dim corridor beyond. Finally he wheels backward, collects his things, a pack of Camels and a clipboard fat with scrappy mismatched pieces of paper.

“Tide is turning, sister,” he finally says, giving a look to Flynn, who nods.

“Smells that way,” Ronnie says, sliding into the seat and adjusting the headphones over her ears.

“I’ll leave you to your little orgy,” Ray says to Flynn on the way out of the booth.

“Pleasure meeting you,” Flynn says back.

“Get comfortable,” Ronnie says, and Flynn settles down on a small stool behind her. Through a window to their left they can see Wayne on the phone in the engineer’s booth, lining up Ronnie’s first calls.

Ronnie brings up the volume on the news and they come in on the upbeat close-out story, really just a headline and a few words of follow-up on a young girl in Nova Scotia who found a classic message in a bottle. Then the network announcer signs off and the theme music comes up.

Wayne breaks in to ask, “All set?”

Ronnie takes a sip of coffee and nods while adjusting the position of her mike.

“I got a nonorgasmic twenty-eight-year-old female banker on line one,” Wayne says, “an impotent gay musician with chronic nightmares about wild dogs on line two. Line three is standard bondage, male. And line four is a recent divorcee with a bad body image.”

Ronnie hits a button on the board and says, “Gimme the wild dogs and tell the divorcee to hang on.”

Flynn watches Wayne nod and slide on two different headsets — one heavy model around his neck, and another light, black plastic model over his ears. The ear set has a small tube-like mouthpiece that curves to the front of his lips. He looks like a NASA programmer. His hands are both on a mixing board that’s below the level of the window. An ad for a real estate development fades and the theme music to Ronnie’s show starts up — some low-key after-hours pseudo-jazz, alto sax, light brush drum, a little piano doodle. Flynn wonders who chose this theme and if they thought it appropriate to the show. And now, listening closely for the first time, instead of sitting in the darkness of his study, lying in the dentist’s chair and anticipating the sound of Ronnie’s voice, he decides it is appropriate, somehow it does convey the mood.

A pretaped announcer’s voice slides on, female, very low, on the verge of raspy, suggestive. It says, “Live from downtown Quinsigamond, it’s Libido Liveline , with your host Ronnie Wilcox.”

Ronnie takes a sip from her mug, tilts her head back, and lets the coffee run down her throat in a slow trickle. Then she takes in some air, lets it out through rounded lips like she was blowing a smoke ring, and as Wayne brings the theme music down, she says, in a slightly breathless but confident voice:

How are we tonight? How is everyone feeling? The lights on my phone tell me there are some problems, some sadness or misunderstanding. It feels like a good night to banish some of those troubles, to start down the path toward self-realization. Self-intimacy. Because the better we understand ourselves and what gives us pleasure, the better we can pass that pleasure on to others.