Dante walked over to a selection of jackets on hooks on a wall near the door, pulled a coat down and shrugged into it. Kendell picked his coat up from the couch, slipped into it and followed Dante out of the apartment. Dante locked the door to the apartment and the two of them made their way down the stairwell and out onto the city streets, Kendell peppering Dante with questions about how Dante manipulated his vocals to sound so weird.
“I did it on purpose, fire, I don’t know what to tell you,” Dante said as they made their way down the street, city traffic buzzing by on the streets. “I kind of tried to – I don’t know – to imagine an alien singing in English in an alien karaoke bar. It was sort of like imagining what it must sound like to hear somebody in Tokyo singing Britney Spears, knowing all the word sounds of English, but not able to speak English, but loving the sound of the music.
“It took me about a dozen takes on each song to get it right, and I’m still not sure I’ve got what I’m looking for, and there’s no way I can actually go to Tokyo to sit in a karaoke bar and listen to Japs sing songs in English that they don’t know what the words mean.”
Kendell glanced at Dante, wondering why Dante thought his songs weren’t perfect after Kendell had just praised them as perfect.
“Naw, you got it right, Scots, trust me,” Kendell said. “What’re you going to do with Kaylinne’s track? Are you going to re-record it with you on vocals?”
Dante shook his head. “No way, it’s perfect. I put it up on the Web a couple of days ago and it’s already been downloaded a couple hundred times. So, that’s good.”
Kendell stopped and stared at Dante. “You getting any money off that?”
“Nah, but that song’ll get me a deal, so, I’m okay with giving away some of the milk if I can eventually sell the cow,” Dante said.
The two stopped at the corner at a “don’t walk” indication on a light on the street lamp, and Kendell turned to Dante.
“Well, what do you want to do?” Kendell asked.
Dante shrugged and watched the traffic pulse through the intersection, his mind momentarily wondering if there was music to such motion. How would the movement of traffic sound, if it could be sounded out, he wondered. Not horns and brake screeches, but sound as a meter, as something that could be understood. There had to be a pattern that could be understood musically.
Kendell lightly punched Dante in the shoulder, recognizing his friend had drifted from the conversation.
“Yo, what do you want to do?” Kendell asked.
“I want so see if anybody’s gong to play my song tonight,” Dante said.
Kendell tilted his head in disbelief. “Hey, somebody’s been downloading it. Stands to reason somebody’s gonna play it. Let’s go.”
Chapter 31
Tom stood in the doorway of Lincoln’s radio studio holding the rhinoceros tumbler, a cigar smoldering in his other hand. Behind him, Lincoln, Grover and Charles were finishing up a radio conversation on one of the ham sets, a conversation that had instantly bored Tom and caused him to wander off to his new position, where he was looking up at the evening sky and the first few stars poking through the atmosphere.
“Make your wish,” Lincoln said from behind him.
Tom barely shook his head. “Nah, I’ve got everything I want.”
Lincoln smiled. “Me, too, but I keep on wishing.”
Tom stepped through the door to the outside and turned to face Lincoln. “For what?”
Lincoln shrugged. “That depends on what I’m thinking about at the moment. Maybe for my kids to be happy, or for someone to get well if they’re sick, or for the Sooners to win the national championship again.”
“The Sooners?” Tom said mock incredulously. “Sheesh, I’m drinking with the enemy.”
“Aww, crap, you’re a Texas fan,” Lincoln said, turning his head over his shoulder and shouting into the studio. “Hey, Grover, Tom here’s a Texas man.”
Grover turned from the ham set he was fiddling with and frowned deeply at Tom before flitting his eyes to Lincoln. “Well, then, tell him he’s got to bring Johnnie Blue from now on if he wants to drink with us. He’s going to need a lot of good will.”
Lincoln smiled and walked through the doorway and into the yard.
“You know, Johnnie Blue is a blend,” Tom said.
“Yeah, but it’s expensive, and Grove’s been wanting to taste it for a while to see if it holds up,” Lincoln said. “And, don’t worry, Jed’s a Texas man, too, he’s just not here tonight to stick up for you.”
Tom smiled and took a puff on his cigar. He was unsure how to puff on the cigar as the muscle memory of smoking cigarettes urged him to inhale the smoke, and the one time he’d allowed himself a small inward drag had created a coughing fit worse than the last time he’d had a bad cold, and his throat burned in a way he never remembered from his first attempts at smoking a cigarette. Just holding the cigar smoke in his mouth felt, somehow, unsatisfying, a cheap imitation of inhaling a cigarette. Looking at the cigar in his fingers, he wondered why anybody had invented the cigarette and why the rules of inhaling had changed with the addition of “ette.” Hell, he wondered with a smile, how many different things did the original harvesters of tobacco do with the plant before figuring out it was only good for smoking?
“Have you heard anything about that music broadcast you listened to a couple of months ago?” Tom asked, not because he had any real interest, but it was the only subject of conversation that had persisted within the group since he’d joined.
Lincoln shook his head. “No, apparently it was a one shot deal,” Lincoln said, puffing on his own cigar. “It doesn’t happen often, but every once-in-a-while some clown decides he has to break the rules and broadcast music or a radio play or some such crap.
“I don’t know what kind of thrill it gives those kinds of people. I mean, if you want to be an entertainer on the radio, use commercial radio, that’s what it’s there for.”
Tom looked back up at the sky and the stars twinkling through and suddenly remembered a conversation he’d had with his wife about the signal. He thought twice about it before deciding it wasn’t the stupidest avenue of conversation he could possibly pursue with Lincoln, and turned back to him.
“My wife said the strangest thing about it,” Tom said. “I guess she’d read something on the Internet about it being investigated by the government as a possible communication from extra-terrestrials.”
Lincoln guffawed mightily. “Space aliens?”
Tom nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why the heck would they try and talk to us on a ham freq?” Lincoln said.
“Like I would know, I just come for the scotch,” Tom said.
“I figured that out a while ago. You can’t possibly be interested in the conversations we have,” Lincoln said. “You get terribly quiet when we talk about sex or politics.”
Tom didn’t know how to respond to this, and it was true. Several moments evaporated into the night air as the two men more or less stood in silence next to each other, neither sure which way to go next. So, Tom made a gesture with his cigar.
“So, is it possible, do you think?” Tom asked.
Lincoln looked long and hard at Tom, thinking over his answer.
“Aliens, you mean?” Lincoln asked.
“Yeah.”
Lincoln took a quick succession of puffs from his cigar, spouting out little balls of smoke as he thought about how to answer.
“Well, technically, sure,” Lincoln said. “If you were an alien you could broadcast a signal on a ham freq if you wanted – it’s just a radio frequency, nothing more. It’s not magic or anything that the amateur band consists of certain frequencies, it’s just the way the governments of the world have chopped up the radio spectrum. They gave ham a certain section, limited us by power and other regs, and that’s that.
“I mean, if it were aliens, you’d think they’d know how to get our attention, given all the spectrum we emit from this planet. I’d thin
k they’d show up on TV.”
Tom took a long puff on his cigar and stared up into the blackening sky, the last bit of blue nearly surrendered.
“What do you think they’d want to say to us?” Tom asked.
“The aliens?” Lincoln said.
“Yeah.”
Lincoln made a small laugh. “Don’t they always want to be taken to our leader?”
Tom laughed back. “If they were really watching our TV, wouldn’t they already know who that is?”
Lincoln tapped cigar ash onto the ground. “Hell, you’d hope so, but depending on what they’re watching, they might not know. Everything on broadcast TV since ever has been beamed into space. Just based on duration of broadcast frequency, they might think Johnny Carson was the leader of the planet.”
Tom gave Lincoln a curious look. “Carson? He’s been retired for years.”
Lincoln nodded. “But he was on TV forever. If you were sitting out there monitoring our TV broadcasts, how would you know who was in charge? By frequency of airtime? Any given president is on TV a couple of minutes here and there, mostly. Carson was on five nights a week for something like thirty years.
“Nobody else on the planet has that kind of presence on the airwaves. And, if you’re an alien, how would you know what’s entertainment for humans? You might think the nightly Carson broadcast was an informational lecture from the leader of the planet, complete with interviews with experts in certain fields.”
“That’s weird to think about,” Tom said, trying to imagine what an alien would make of Carson as Karnak or any of the oddball people showing off their weird “talents.”
“What, Carson as planetary leader?” Lincoln mused, puffing his cigar.
“Well, sure, but no,” Tom said. “Just the fact that every broadcast made to people here on earth is going to someone else up there in space, too. It just takes a lot of time to get there.”
Lincoln nodded. “It’s the same here. Some alien with a TV station on Betelgeuse could be broadcasting now, and at some point in the future his programs will suddenly appear on Channel 78 or something, and somebody living in a trailer park in Ada watching a TV connected to an antenna will wonder what he’s looking at.”
Tom and Lincoln both stared up into the night sky, each imagining that sudden moment when a television somewhere picked up the first alien television program. Tom figured nobody would believe it was real, especially if alien television programs resembled human ones, with characters and plot lines and commercial breaks. Lincoln, on the other hand, imagined a suddenly frightened individual rushing from his trailer and pounding on his neighbor’s front door.
“You know, my wife asked me a strange question a couple of weeks ago,” Tom said, turning toward Lincoln. “She asked me if I thought aliens believed in God.”
Lincoln turned his head away from the night sky and looked quizzically at Tom. “Oh?”
“Well, she figured that if you were an alien broadcasting in the blind, maybe you’d broadcast about God.”
Lincoln smiled. “Your wife has quite an imagination, Tom. My guess is if we ever get a signal from aliens in outer space, it’ll be something more banal than someone asking about God.”
Tom took a sip of scotch and considered the point. “Yeah, that’s what I thought at first, too, but it got me thinking. If there are aliens out there, what if they were sending out messages in the blind asking what it’s all about, if there’s a god, what’s the meaning of life?
“I dunno, it’s just weird to think about. If there is life out there amidst the stars, wouldn’t it be strange if everyone was trying to find someone else to explain it all?”
Lincoln took a deep puff on his cigar, exhaled and tipped some whisky into his mouth. “What if everyone was asking but nobody had any answers?”
Chapter 32
Peter and Chloe were both leaning against the railing above a dance floor jammed with dancers. Below them, people were dancing wildly, and Peter looked down at them with less curiosity than the last few times he and Chloe had gone clubbing. He no longer felt quite as out of place in a dance club, as was evidenced by the clothing he was wearing, which was more fashionable and hip than he would have bought for himself left to his own devices. Chloe had gone shopping with him over the last few weeks to pad out his wardrobe, an activity that had both interested him and made him wonder why such a beautiful girl would waste her time on him in such a way.
Nothing obvious had made it through Peter’s ability to discern the world through the lens of inter-personal relations, and Chloe had found this to be both funny and endearing. Peter was oblivious to what the world thought of him, and he was totally unaware that the world might notice him. More to the point, though, was that he might not notice her interest in him, a fact their shopping expeditions had revealed to her. Chloe could tell Peter liked her, and liked her in that way, but he was so uncertain of himself that she had had to take the first step in finding out if there was any “there” there.
Peter looked over at Chloe and she gave him a small smile. Then, again, her phone buzzed inside her pocket and she pulled it out. Peter watched as she read a text message.
“Well, now, Jessica’s just canceled,” Chloe said.
This meant almost nothing to Peter, but the gears in his brain churned and he put a few facts together. “That’s odd, all three of them canceling at the last moment.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said, smiling larger than life. “That is weird.”
“Yeah,” Peter said.
Chloe took a quick sip from her drink and turned to stand in front of Peter. “So, I guess this makes this our official first date, then.”
Peter looked at her absently. “I always thought our first date would involve dinner at a restaurant and a movie.”
Chloe laughed happily, a smile erupting on her face, an expression of pure joy. “Oh, really, then why is it at a dance club?”
Peter looked at Chloe’s face and the pieces suddenly fit together. Her friends had canceled as part of a plan so that the two of them could be alone for the night. Suddenly, all the daytime “friends” activities made sense to him as he realized she was getting to know him on a non-dating level, a way to make it easier for him to get to know her in ways where the possibility for a letdown, on either end, was minimized. Although it would be weeks before his mind processed all the information to that conclusion; at the moment, he was a little flustered at the notion that she had been working behind the scenes to achieve this moment.
“I, um, well,” Peter said in a stumble, “I wasn’t sure how to ask.”
Chloe rolled her eyes dramatically. “I know.”
“You knew?” Peter said.
Chloe shrugged matter-of-factly. “How many times was I going to have to sit with you at your table at the coffee shop before you said anything? I mean, you’re cute, you’re smart, but after a while, I figured I was going to have to make the first move.
“I mean, I totally knew you were checking me out every time you were there.”
Peter was momentarily mortified. “You saw?”
“Come on, Pete,” Chloe said. “I know I’m not the cutest girl in the world, but I do notice when I’ve got a serial-checker-outer checking me out.”
Peter was now conflicted. Was it right to have checked her out at the coffee shop all those times now that he knew she had noticed? Had that put her in a weird position? Not that he could’ve helped it, though, as he thought Chloe was one of the more beautiful women he’d ever had any semi-interpersonal interaction with, and he’d always liked when she sat down at his table to chat.
“Sorry,” Peter said.
Chloe stared at Peter for several long moments, realizing that Peter didn’t entirely grasp the situation at hand. “Pete, I was checking you out, too. Didn’t you notice? I mean, come on, ‘hello,’ how many times did I sit with you while you surfed the Web?”
“Uhh, well, to be perfectly honest with you, I thought you were just trying to make sure I was
harmless,” Peter said. “You know, protecting your space from some guy with a laptop by interacting with him to defuse any potential tension.”
Chloe laughed hard at that explanation, not having thought that Peter would’ve thought so long and hard as to why she was interacting with him and Peter not realizing it might be the possibility of a physical attraction she recognized the two shared. He really was clueless, she thought, which meant he was malleable, which she didn’t think, but knew somewhere deep in her soul.
“We don’t have to stay here,” Chloe said. “Unless you want to dance.”
Peter took a pull from his drink and tried to wrap his mind around the situation. He was now officially on a date, which meant, and this was his first thought, that he might get to kiss Chloe at some point during the night. That possibility excited him, as he’d previously excluded it from the list of possible interactions he could have with her. But he didn’t know what he’d want to do with her, not on such short notice, now that he was on a date, and his mind drew a blank as to the possible alternatives. The first thing that sprang to his mind, taking her back to his apartment and collecting his telescope and driving out into the countryside to show her stars and far off planets was immediately vetoed by him, as there was no way to shift gears from dance club to remote location without seeming, well, weird.
And then a new song dropped into the mix and the crowd on the dance floor reacted enthusiastically, not that Peter noticed. Instead, there was something in the song that Peter knew, and he lost all focus with reality for a moment as he listened to the music. Chloe noticed.
“Do you want to dance to this song?” Chloe asked.
Peter held up his index finger, indicating he needed a moment, and listened to the song. The dancers on the floor writhed and gyrated to the beat. There was something to the song.
“What?” Chloe asked, suddenly confused and wondering if her ‘first date’ declaration had derailed everything. He was clueless, after all.
“This song,” Peter said, looking at Chloe. “I know this song. I’ve heard it before.”
Chloe was indifferent. “Well, maybe two weeks ago when we were here before.”
Peter shook his head. “No.”
Peter listened more. “I mean, no, I’ve never heard this particular song before, but the substructure of the song, that I’ve heard a million times. It’s just different, now, somehow.”