Jack O'Connell - Wireless

Without thinking, she opens the notebook randomly, looks down at the page, and reads:

Maybe the only reason I’m writing is to thank you for looking in on my brother. Don’t ask how I know this. It could simply be a guess.

Like my guess that I must be the central joke down the division these days, Richmond gagging himself trying to come up with the new one-liner. “Why did Lenore cross the road?” It’s all right. We always joke about things that terrify us. Things we’re too stupid to fully comprehend.

In the midst of all the mockery, I can still claim my refusal to hold an ideology. I will not be raped by anything as limiting as a belief system. Because the nature of each and every one, from the dawn of that most hazardous of realities, human consciousness, all the way through to the milliseconds in which these words are being born, is predicated on the most primal and deceptive system of them all: language. And yet, I’m still trapped within it, still bound to make the slashes and circles, the lines and dots and waves, the pathetic icons accumulated throughout the nightmare, if I want to communicate with you, H.S. Your only approach at the moment is the eye scan, your brain decoding this hash of ink and pulp.

Remember this, Hannah: that once I was the queen of rational thought. I was the Mother Superior in the order of cause and effect. I was a loving concubine for ideas of pragmatism, logic, deduction, pure reason, and free will.

And then things began to change. And the changes began to come faster, until their speed began to increase geometrically. And my faith in the supremacy of our senses began to wobble. Because I could see the limitations of these organs — the eye, ear, nose, tongue, the skin itself. And it began to appear to me that while our environment perpetually evolves around us, our capacity for perceiving it is frozen. So, we end up terrified apes on a roller coaster whose engine has revved and gone out of control and started to build to a limitless speed.

And once an understanding like this violates you, Hannah, you can never go back. You can’t help but be certain that every clove of garlic in the kitchen of Fiorello’s Ristorante has an infinite number of tastes. Every drop of cold water that slips down your neck in a late-autumn rainstorm has an infinite number of sensations. Every gust of powder that drifts past you in the shooting bunker has an infinite number of fragrances. Every tone you hear on the radio has an infinite number of components.

And every gesture you witness, from every landscape you observe, has an infinite number of meanings.

It’s like a cancer of analysis: malignant possibilities reproducing themselves without restriction.

If you’re convinced I’m psychotic, Hannah, then you should have no fear taking up this challenge: Go down to Bangkok Park and look for evidence of the gangs. Just walk around and note what you see — things like the graffiti and the tattoos. Then go home. And in an hour more signs will come to your mind — the hand signals, the footwear dangling from the streetlamps, the color of their cars.

And in two hours, more signs will come to you — the earrings their whores wear, the sources of the brand names they hang on their smack, the specific day of the week they shake down the merchants, the peculiar patterns in the bandannas they wear around their smooth shaven skulls, the placement of the knife wounds on the bodies of informants.

Guess what happens after three hours, Hannah?

How does a woman go from being a detective with a methodology, a devotion to the clue and the motive and the conclusive solution, to …

She slaps the book closed and throws it against the bathroom door. It bounces down to the floor and lies there, like a taunt, like one of Lenore’s perfect, stinging put-downs, a fast comment about cowardice or stupidity.

And finally, in that moment, Hannah realizes what she would say to Lenore. The words come to her brain without any effort or preparation. She’d say, “Go to hell, you bitch.”

She’d say, “You’re a goddamn loon. There’s nothing you can show me anymore. You’re over the top. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. And thank God, because there is no one. And it’s a relief to finally understand that. Not just in my brain, but in my heart. In my stomach, where all the real understanding has to come from. There’s no one left, Lenore. No one who could understand how badly, how desperately, I want to leave this city, how many people I’d be willing to hurt just for a chance to escape. And I have no place to escape to. No preplanned destination. No geographical goal. No resting place that I can aim for. I simply, only, want motion. Movement. Distance. From all these familiar streets and buildings and signs. From all these memorized faces. From all these voices playing over and over in my ear until I hear them in my sleep. I want distance from Quinsigamond. I want distance from my own life. From my past. All these years piling up with events and choices, decisions and random crap, until it’s such a weight on the shoulders you feel the ground giving way under your feet. You feel you’ll be pushed straight into the earth, buried alive and then buried dead by the weight of your accumulated past. I want out before this happens. I’m not as brave or smart or obsessed or committed as you, Lenore. I want out. I want movement. I want to be a solo pioneer. I want to head west, toward the next big ocean. I want to maneuver the Mustang onto a series of secondary highways, one leading into the next, roadsides painted with state boundaries and all of them blurring as I speed past. I want no more memory and I want no more prophecy. I want no news-casts or weather reports bleating from my radio. I just want to drive forward, sleep in my seat, buy fruit and crackers in anonymous convenience stores, and sit on my trunk at dusk, pulled into some overgrown field hundreds of miles from red brick, hundreds of days from my point of origin. I want to lie back and look up at the sky and not attempt to recognize and name constellations. I want some peace and I want a lifetime of quiet.”

She starts to cry now, fighting against it and failing, a burning behind the eyeballs as she hunches down over her thighs and knees, her face falling into her hands as a childish sobbing begins to catch and her breathing goes rapid and shallow.

“So I reject you, Lenore. I don’t want you. I don’t want anything to do with you. Let the fucking cock crow, Lenore. Three times. Ten times. I don’t care. I reject you. Just go away. Just leave me alone.”

Hazel put out the word to meet at midnight, but by eleven-thirty all her people have arrived at the old airport. They file into the abandoned terminal in groups of two and three and take their seats silently on the long-dead baggage claim conveyor belt.

Gabe has built a small campfire in the center of the semi-circle formed by the belt. The fire is not an original idea. Gabe spotted the debris of several previous fires when he first arrived. He assumes the old airport is probably used by a number of transient groups, from homeless drunks and tramps to moody, horny teenagers. He hopes none of them decide to stop by tonight, but if they do, he’s sure Hazel will handle the situation. He thinks there’s not much Hazel couldn’t handle. His walloping crush on this strange woman is growing daily.

As the group settles in around the fire, Gabe starts to think they look like a mock Indian tribe. Heavy-metal Apaches. Biker-punk Comanches. There are at least a half dozen Mohawk ’dos present, a lot of lampblack around the eyes, pounds of jagged silver jewelry — ear and nose rings and all kinds of symbolic neckwear — and tattoos. The whole crew is big on tattoos. It’s not like it’s a requirement. Hazel says there are no requirements. They just happen to share an intrinsic love of body design. So, underneath all the studded leather and torn denim is a wide variety of well-toned skin canvases exhibiting multicolored scenes of both natural and mythic art. But most of all, engraved across biceps and buttocks, are strange non sequiturs, clipped and illogical phrases, linked words and sometimes numbers whose meaning is a code known only to its bearer and his immediate circle.