Jack O'Connell - Wireless

“Okay, then,” she mouths. “Let’s shake things up.”

Her thumb squeezes the walkie-talkie’s talk button flush to the side of the unit. About one, awful, aching second hangs. And then another. And another. The tower continues to stand tall and complete. A murmur starts to spread around the roof, a communal voice of surprise and embarrassment and confusion. Hazel looks down at the plastic box, trying to control both panic and outrage. She extends her arm out again, the magician now frantic to get the trick right, to redeem himself before the audience heads for the lobby. She thumbs the red button again and again, but the result is the same. The tower stays erect and untouched, a stubborn wall of resistance.

“Eddie,” she says, in a seething, about-to-explode voice, “what the fuck did you do wrong?”

Eddie’s behind her, shaking his head, wiping his mouth over and over with the back of his arm.

There’s a crackle of static from the walkie-talkie and then a run of distant, forced laughter from the small mesh speaker. Hazel closes her eyes and bites down on her upper lip.

“Are you there?” Loke asks.

The murmur from the rest of the group increases and Hazel keeps her back to them.

“Hazel, my love?” Loke says. “Are you there?”

Hazel stares down at the speaker and mouths the words please and no . She looks out at the tower, brings the walkie-talkie up to her mouth, presses the red button, and whispers, “Why did you do this to me?”

Then she thumbs down the volume and brings the speaker up next to her ear so no one else can hear.

“I’m afraid,” Loke says, “your request to immigrate has been denied, Hazel. I’m so sorry. But this does happen to the best of us. There are quotas to be maintained.”

Hazel jams in the red talk button like she was crushing an insect and says, “What did I buy? It sure as hell wasn’t plastique.”

“You bought shit, Hazel. That alone should show you how out of your depth you are. You should take your little party there and swim home fast.”

“I can’t go back,” Hazel says, and is shocked to find her eyes starting to sting and water. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Loke transmits a small snort, then says, “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? You should come back down Bangkok and thank me, Hazel. I’ve given you a memorable lesson. You’ll take this one to the grave. This wasn’t a swindle, this was an education. Your own little MBA. Take the gang out and celebrate. On me. And if you get lonely, later on—”

She clicks off the box and heaves it. It sails in an arc like a weak pop-up, then comes down out on the runway and shatters into a pile of plastic shards and wire and aluminum. She brings a hand up to her eyes, presses hard, takes a breath, then begins to turn around to face her people. But before she can see their faces, before she can record the looks that have to signal something like pity, she moves to the edge of the roof and starts to climb down the rope ladder.

Ronnie had wanted to call it an early night, to take advantage of her one night off, maybe eat some lo mein from a takeout carton and watch the Weather Channel until she fell asleep. Instead, she forced herself to sit at a scarred and battered table at the public library and page through the more recent issues of Chronicle of Modern Media and Wavelength: The Radio Industry Weekly. She opened a notebook and copied down about two dozen possible employment prospects, then moved into the audio room, donned a pair of heavy, archaic headphones, and listened to Lulu’s Greatest Hits for about an hour.

Now, crossing Main Street and staring up at Solitary, she’s convinced she brought this feeling on herself, this sense of almost-adolescent sadness, of a kind of nostalgic ache for a city and a life she’s only known for a little over a year. She’s never been one who enjoyed playing martyr, who secretly relished her own misfortunes. But tonight she wishes she were. Like her mother. Or maybe like Flynn. Or like the callers she ministers to six goddamn nights a week, people who’ve allowed fear to strip them of pleasure and sensuality and even, sometimes, of movement. Right now, she wants to scold herself in the same unflinching manner that she scolds her faceless callers: It’s old but it still works, boys and girls, face the truth and the truth will set you free .

And the truth is that for all its griminess and decay, for all its disorder and regression and violence, she’s come to love Quinsigamond. She’s come to care for this city in a way that’s never happened to her before. She’s felt a naturalness here, a sense of not exactly contentment, but more like correctness, this Zen-like assurance that these are the streets she was meant to move through, that the air hanging over this city was destined to be filled with the ring of her voice.

And on top of that foundation came G.T. Flynn. More than anything, she’d love to be able to say that it was simply Flynn’s doubt that ended everything. Or that he meant nothing more than Yves back in Toronto, a warm body and a shared laugh, a way to pass the time during one more extended stopover. But the truth, the magic bullet of her career, the freeing agent of all repressions, the truth is that in a matter of hours she let Flynn become something else. In the glow of her own headlights, in the sway of some retro slow-dancing, like an overprivileged teenager with too much time on her hands, she let Flynn enter the realm of a possible future.

Why? She wishes there were at least some theories, some ideas about the effect of the city’s drinking water on her brain functions. Or about some chemical kicked free in her blood-stream on her last birthday. But what she hasn’t wanted to acknowledge until just now is that she sensed something about Flynn almost at once. She picked it up in the form of a pure signal, an uninterrupted line of energy, like the crazed bleating of a spastic Geiger counter stumbling onto a pile of virgin uranium.

She sensed the need, the vacuum, the total force of want . Not the simpering cravings of the average emotional cripple, but the wantings of a pro, the black hole yearning for connection that subsumes every other desire. Like her mother, Flynn’s a creature of binding, an absolute copulator, a high priest of the drive for communion. His doubt was never the product of disinterest. Just the opposite. He needs complete coupling, seamless unification. He wants to be twinned in the way other people want money or immortality. And that kind of raw, ongoing want can bring someone to the edge and then nudge them over.

Just like my mother , Ronnie thinks.

She steps into the elevator and presses for the seventeenth floor. If I felt the signal , she thinks, if I remembered the consequences, why didn’t I run out of Wireless? The truth is: I let this happen .

She lightly slaps herself in the head with the notebook that holds the names of twenty-five radio stations, all of them thousands of miles from Quinsigamond. A couple of them in Europe. One in Jerusalem.

The elevator deposits her on her floor and she digs out her keys and lets herself into the apartment. She’ll have to talk Vinnie into an extra night off this week. He can give Ray a double slot, her going-away present to the most amusing fascist she hopes she’ll ever meet. There are dozens of things to do. Get the updated resume and stat sheets reprinted. Set up a rush job with a modeling agency and photographer — she thinks she’ll be a blonde this time out, design her next face in the form of a neo — Marilyn Monroe type. The furniture rental company will have to be called. And then there’s the ritual sorting of the cassettes, the junking of the disposable sound crap, and the trunk storage of the tapes she’ll take out of Quinsigamond. She’ll make lists, slide into her organization mode.