I can’t look at him that way on hands and knees. I stand back up. You could say that about any story there is, I tell him.
Now you’re singing my song, brother.
What’s all this brother stuff? Since when are you and me brothers?
More than brothers, Davis says. We’re one mind.
It’s the highest compliment he has to give. I’m going to show you a top-secret thing, he says. Brother that you are. I keep it just here.
He leans down and lifts up the red-and-white checked tablecloth that covers up the space below his tray. Davis points his flashlight under there and I get a pretty good view of a whole lot of crap: Cups. Plastic forks. A shower head. Mustard packs. Newspapers, nail brush, bottle caps, rubber bands, plastic bags, a beat-up phone book, soda cans. It looks like one of those nests a hamster makes, except Davis is 6'2" and can bench-press 350 and he’s been in this cell a year plus and the nest is more like what ten thousand hamsters would make. Right on top is a sheet of white paper. I pluck it out: forty-five.
Things settle down in my head. I stand up and put forty-five back in its spot and knock the pages against my mattress until the edges line up and slide it all underneath where my head goes.
Davis is rooting around in the nest. Out come two skateboard wheels and some paper party hats for little kids and a bunch of prison forms: work orders, permission slips—all contraband. I see cotton balls and some kind of birdwatching guide. Finally he pulls out a cardboard box painted orange. It’s about the size of a shoebox—in fact it is a shoebox, I can see the Adidas logo right through the paint. He lifts off the top and I look inside the box and see dust. Lint, hair, fur. Dust of every color and thickness. A lot of dust balls all clumped into one big clump. Davis holds the box right under my face.
Listen, he whispers.
I think I’m waiting for Davis to tell me something, but he closes his eyes like he’s listening, too. Right now is as quiet as the castle ever gets. I hear the quiet, but the more I listen the more the quiet starts to dissolve and I hear all the little noises of 412 men breathing on metal trays. And there’s a background noise, too, a ringing sound you almost can’t hear but it’s there, maybe a leftover vibration from so many gates and locks clanging shut through the day.
It’s not an ordinary radio, Davis tells me softly.
I look at him. Radio?
Gaze at the face of a revolution, Davis says.
There are dials on one side of the box. As in: Davis has collected broken dials off other machines and punched them through the cardboard. Now he starts twisting those dials with his eyes narrowed up like he’s concentrating. There, he whispers. Wait—that! You hear that? Okay, let me tune it…now she’s coming through. Listen to that—clear as day. You hear? And he’s so goddam believable I have to keep looking at the nubs of those broken dials he’s turning to remember that what we’re dealing with here is a shoebox full of dust.
What are we hearing on this radio of yours? I ask.
Davis glances at me. You know it, brother. Don’t start pretending on me now.
Okay, I know. But say it anyway.
It’s the voices of the dead, Davis says. He looks gentle, like the idea hurts him somehow. He says: All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel—not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who’s ever walked this beautiful green planet—how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can’t disappear, it’s too big. Too strong, too…permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can’t pick it up. And in all these thousands of years, no man has found the technology to tune in to that frequency except once in a while—you know, by mistake. Blips and blops here and there, but nothing steady, nothing regular.
Until you.
Until this, he says, and he holds up his box full of dust. Here’s what I’ve been doing all this time, brother: developing this machine! Making the design, tracking down the necessary parts. Assembling and testing and revising and testing some more, until finally I’ve got myself a prototype that lo-and-behold actually works!
His eyes shine like a little boy’s. I’ve been calling Davis crazy from day one, but in all that time I missed out on the fact that he’s actually crazy, as in nuts. A genuine bug. A bug who thinks he’s built a machine that can talk to ghosts.
I see that look, Davis says. You’re thinking, What’s old Davis playing at? Is he trying to pass himself off as some kind of sorcerer? But think about it, brother: new technology always looks like magic. When Tom Edison turned on that tin phonograph of his back in 1877, you think people believed that was for real? Hell no. Ventriloquism, they said. Voodoo. They thought no machine could do such a thing. Or Marconi with his radio: voices floating around from one place to another place—you think people believed that shit? Well, this is no different. It looks mysterious when you don’t understand the technology. But if you’re the engineer, if you built the thing from the ground up, there’s no mystery to it.
He holds out the box and I open the lid and look inside again. After all his talk I don’t know what I’m expecting—something different. But there it is exactly like before, except now I can pick out stuff inside the dust: A burnt match. A piece of wrapper from a straw. A dead spider. Half a blue button. A piece of maybe scrambled egg. A tile chip, a pin. Chunks of cigarette filter. A ton of hair: head, chest, pubic, most of it dark but some light. Some gray. And between all that, around it, dust: grit, sand, powder, debris, some of it glittery like sand or glass, some in chunks like plaster, some in little fibers thinner than threads. Someone told me once that ninety percent of dust is dead skin cells. It looks like you could put together a whole human being from what Davis has got in that box.
With all the people out there who are dead, I say—still playing along because why not, what have I got to lose?—how can you tell which ones you’re hearing?
Now that’s an excellent question, Davis says, and he actually gives me a pat on the back. The fact is, he says, right now I’ve got no control whatsoever. It’s like an old CB radio, picks up whatever happens to be out there at any particular time. It needs years of refinement like any new invention—hell, when Alexander Graham Bell first put in his telephones, every line was a party line. You couldn’t even have a private conversation! What we’ve got right here is just a start, but it’s a big start. Eventually other inventors will get involved too, they’ll make their own improvements and modifications. And a hundred years from now, a bunch of kids on one of those school trips? They’ll look at this old prototype through some museum window and laugh about how crude this old thing was.
I had no idea you were an engineer, I tell Davis. I mean it to be mocking, but it comes out absolutely serious.
Davis gives a cackle. We fooled each other good! Here we’ve been thinking we had nothing in common beyond where we happen to be, and all this time we’ve been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts. We’re in lockstep, brother. We’re like twins.
Don’t get carried away.
And we’re just getting started. You won’t believe the stuff we can pick up with this machine. You’re gonna hear shit that’ll make your eyes jump in their sockets.
He smiles at me, and damned if his teeth aren’t the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen in a human head. We. We: it’s an offer, an invitation to believe in his nonsense. I watch Davis put his ear against his “radio” and nod with his eyes closed, and all of a sudden I think: How do I know it’s not real? Okay, it’s a shoebox full of dust with knobs pushed through the cardboard, but what if it works? What if it actually does what Davis says? And in that split second I go from pretending straight into believing—it’s like all the pretending made me believe, except that doesn’t make sense, because pretending and believing are opposites. I don’t know what happens. Maybe it’s this place. Maybe if old fruit can be next week’s wine and a toothbrush can slit a throat and holding a girl’s hand is the same as fucking her, maybe a box of hair is a radio. Maybe in here it’s true.
Or
maybe it all comes back to Holly. Maybe if you believe that a word—door—is a thing you can walk through, and then you walk on through it like I did, there’s nothing out there you won’t swallow.
You gonna teach me how to make one of these things, Davis?
Oh, Ray, no, he says, apologizing. I’m waiting on my patent, and until that comes through the blueprint is a state secret. But you don’t need one, brother! You’ve got the use of mine any time you want.
Thanks, I say.
The main thing is, let’s get to work! Let’s put our time to some use!
Work! Time! Use! He shouts them all. Guys on the block are starting to bang and yell. I don’t think Davis even hears.
What kind of work do you have in mind? I ask him.
Davis looks at me awhile. It’s that same look he’s been giving me all night, like I’m blocking his view of another thing he’s been waiting to see. I’m starting to get used to it.
How long you got left in here, Ray? he asks me.
This is just the beginning, I say. The fun part. When I’m done in here I go on trial someplace else.
By the time I get out, Davis says, rapping on his radio, you’re gonna need one of these to get in touch with me. But I can’t wait, Ray. I can’t wait.
He clutches his box full of dust. His crazy worn-out face is full of life.
I’m in, I say. And I don’t even know what it means.
You were already in, Davis says. Right from the start. That’s the whole reason we had this conversation.
When Danny woke up, he had no idea where he was. The room looked abandoned, piles of old broken stuff around, cobwebs, like an attic no one had been inside for fifty years. He was in a bed, between sheets that were maybe the softest sheets he’d ever felt because they were old, we’re talking old, to the point where they were coming apart around his feet. He was naked. And his clothes were nowhere in sight.
Danny felt like shit. In fact he felt shitty in so many different ways that saying he had a headache or he had a stomachache would be wrong, because it would give the idea that the shitty feeling came only from his head or his stomach when actually it came from every part of him at once: head, stomach, chest, hands, neck, face, knees, eyes, feet. Hangover doesn’t get near it. Every part of him hurt or felt bad in whatever way it could, to the point where he couldn’t do what he normally would do within ten seconds of waking up naked in an unknown bed in an unknown room (and it had happened to Danny before, more than once): get the fuck up. He felt too shitty to get up.
The room was dim, but the sun looked bright outside its little windows. Birds were chattering and screeching, all of which gave Danny a feeling like he’d missed something, he was late—there was someplace he needed to be, people he needed to call, an event he’d forgotten about where he was expected. Normally that kind of feeling would make Danny jump out of bed and try to get things under control, but the shitty feeling had him paralyzed. And then he remembered the satellite dish: no people, no events. And none on the horizon.
All that was the good part. Or at least it seemed pretty good compared to the bad part, which was the scenes flashing through Danny’s head: the feel of the baroness’s hands, her wet laugh, her mouth, the twins looking down from the painting, none of which was so horrible or even horrible at all, but it seemed very horrible now because of what it led up to. When Danny thought about that part—what it led up to—it was like thinking about a food that has poisoned you. Had he really fucked the baroness? Based on the scenes in his head, it seemed like the answer was yes. At the time he’d thought he was dreaming—a layer of fuzz was in between Danny and everything that was happening. But now the fuzz had burned off and the scenes in his head were brutally real, sickeningly real. And they included him. He was remembering things he’d never gone through in the first place!
Danny shut his eyes. He held still and listened with both ears, with his whole head, trying to figure out if he was alone in this room and especially in this bed. When he didn’t hear sounds or even feel vibrations of anyone else, Danny cracked his eyes and made the turn to look at the other side…slowly, so slowly…ready if he hit a point where he saw or felt a person there to stop before he had to face them.
He was alone in the bed. Danny got a rush of relief when he realized this. No one was there, thank God! He managed to raise himself onto an elbow. But someone had been. There was a dent on the old yellow pillow and the sheets were torn up on that side, shredded like ancient cloths you’d see in a museum. Along the edges were sewn flowers with long green stems that came apart when Danny touched them. There was a cover of faded green velvet, and something made Danny push back that cover and the sheet underneath it to look at the spot next to him. He found a kind of residue on the bottom sheet: a trail maybe five inches long of coarse gray powder like dust or ashes or crushed-up bodies of moths.
That got Danny out of bed—boom—despite feeling like shit. Because he felt like shit. He needed to puke is what got him up, and he did it out the pointy window that was closest to the bed. There wasn’t much in him; his last solid meal was yesterday’s lunch. When he pulled back inside the room he was shaking.
He badly needed to piss, but the logistics of trying to do that out a chest-high window with all his limbs jerking spastically made Danny pretty desperate for other choices. There was a narrow door to his right, and behind it was a hole cut in a slab of stone with an unmistakable smell coming up from below it. Jackpot. There was even a crude stone sink that turned out to have running water. Danny pissed and washed his hands and his head in the sink, where the water was one or two degrees warmer than ice, and that made him feel the best he’d felt so far that morning, meaning toward the upper spectrum of very very very bad, so he went ahead and splashed his whole naked body until he was shivering on top of the shaking.
When he came back out, limping on his damaged knee, Danny spotted his pants dangling over the side of an old Chinese screen. They looked like they’d been thrown there, which made Danny actually say out loud, Don’t think about it, meaning the exact scene or moment that had sent his pants flying six or seven feet into the air. Don’t think about it. Just get the pants on. Danny tugged them over his wet legs. He found his shirt and jacket and underwear and socks in different parts of the same general area—all thrown, it seemed. Don’t think about it. Just get the stuff on (except the underpants, which he stuffed in his jacket pocket). Danny had advanced skills when it came to not thinking: he would picture himself deleting things, disconnecting them from his brain so they disappeared the way digital stuff disappears—without a memory. But sometimes he still felt them, the disappeared things, hanging around him like shadows.
Within minutes Danny was dressed except for his boots. He couldn’t find them around the bed, and when he moved beyond it, looking under furniture, thinking maybe the boots had gotten shoved or rolled or thrown (don’t think about it), he found nothing but dustballs the size of grapefruits. The more he looked, the more his heart clenched up. These were Danny’s lucky boots, the only boots he owned, although he’d shelled out enough repairing and resoling them over the years to buy five or six new pairs, easy. He’d bought the boots right after he got to New York, when he’d just figured out who he was not (Danny King, suchagoodboy) and was burning up with excitement to find out who he was instead. He’d come across the boots on Lower Broadway, he couldn’t remember what store, probably long gone by now. They were way beyond his price range, but those were the days when he could still count on his pop to fill in the gaps. The store had a big rubbery dance beat coming over the sound system, a beat Danny had been listening to ever since, for eighteen years, in stores, clubs, restaurants—he barely noticed it now. But that day in the shoestore, Danny felt like he’d tapped into the world’s secret pulse. He’d pulled the boots over his feet and stood in front of a long mirror, watching himself move to that beat, and got a sudden flash of how his life would be—his new life. Wild, mysterious. Danny gritted his teeth from excitement. He th
ought: I’m a guy who wears boots like this. It was the first thing he knew about himself.
A part of Danny wanted out: to get away now from the keep and the baroness and all the shit he wasn’t thinking about, with or without his lucky boots. But he knew that if he ran outside barefoot it would only be a matter of time before he missed his boots and wanted them back, especially since the only other shoes he’d brought to the castle were sandals. And that would mean coming back in here—an even worse idea than staying to look for the boots now. So Danny stayed and looked, first haphazardly, lifting up dropcloths and finding upside-down chairs, a desk on skinny legs crammed with papers and ledgers and letters tied up in shredded yellow ribbons. Eventually he got organized, searching one section of junk before he moved on to the next. He searched with a sick cringing feeling inside because every once in a while he got a jab of the baroness: two jeweled rings on a silver stand. An ivory comb full of yellow-white hair. Teeth in a glass of water. And every time, Danny would feel a wave of nausea and an urge to run, and when he didn’t run he’d get a pressure in his head from all the stuff he wasn’t thinking about.
After the teeth, Danny left the room. A dust headache was coming on him. The narrow stairwell was right outside the door, a window at its turn, and Danny pushed the window open and stuck out his head. He was high up in the tower; the trees looked a long way down. This side of the keep faced away from the castle, so all Danny saw was the outer wall and then a slope of green that must be the one he’d slogged up with his suitcase that first night. At the bottom of the hill he made out part of the town where he’d waited for the bus. Danny was surprised by how nice it looked—red roofs, a church steeple—because the town where he’d waited for the bus had been ugly and dark. Maybe daylight made the difference.
Danny heard sounds from the town, shouts, maybe kids, that churning noise of people you heard so constantly in New York that it seemed like silence. It worked on him like suction, pulling him out toward the world, this bit of it he could reach. There had to be an Internet café down there, or at least a cell phone store, and thinking of those things was like a caffeine rush hitting Danny’s brain—he had to go, had to get down there, had to find his goddamned boots so he could escape from this weird despair he felt around him—not on him, not completely. But too close.