Frequency
“Shocking new photos have been released in the Pareles torture case. The Pentagon has yet to release an official statement, though an inquiry is already underway to determine-”
Click.
Paul switches the car stereo from radio to auxiliary. I see a muscle around his eye twitch.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah.”
“Is this one of yours?”
He twists in the driver’s seat and gives me a look. That pleading, you-know-I-can’t-tell-you look. Same look he gave me when I asked if he was fucking Karen. Paul softens words for me, like bread in soup. He’s not CIA, he’s a ‘cop’. He and Karen were ‘very friendly’.
“Why is it that so many news anchors and broadcast journalists are men?”
“I dunno.”
“They all sound exactly the same. It’s like they’re begging us to trust them. Or tricking us into it.”
“Or maybe they all just sound good and like the news.”
Paul pulls over the car to the curb and unlocks the door so JC can climb in the back.
“Hey buddy, how was school?”
“Hey dad. Good. We got to go to the creek in science class!”
“Well that sounds pretty cool.”
“It was! We took water samples. Hi mom.”
“Hi, sweetheart.”
Our little caravan takes off again in the Möbius strip commute towards home. People move to the suburbs because they’re quiet, or they’re supposed to be. But I find our neighborhood terribly loud, all the televisions and cars and lights and computers running with their own frequencies, mechanical insects rubbing their legs together to make a discordant kind of music.
Once the dinner plates are cleared and cleaned, once JC is showered and in bed, the lights go on in our bedroom, too bright as always like we’re being presented before an audience. Paul comes to me and takes my hand in his, pulling me down into the bed. At least his smell is something I trust, familiar and animal. He eases my legs apart with his knee, sucks on my neck. He’s having no trouble performing tonight and I’m wondering if that means this torture case has nothing to do with him. Even if he is home earlier than usual now that the investigation is underway. Or that could just be a slow work week. Or he could just be really good at pushing things aside. I wonder if he ever had trouble getting it up for Karen. I wonder what it means to torture someone, what you do in the moment and then maybe especially what you do in the hours and days and years after. How could you pretend that it doesn’t bother you, take something away from you? How is anyone good at keeping secrets?
There’s something inside of me and it takes me a couple of seconds to realize it’s Paul.
When all is said and done I wash my face and take my sleeping pill. Maybe it’s the shorter balmier nights but they aren’t working like they used to, merely blunting the corners of my consciousness until I can lie still and quiet. Paul, for all the dirtiness he sees, sleeps like the dead, an enviable dreamless sleep that I can’t seem to approximate.
I pull the covers up to my chin and pantomime being a good wife, sleeping next to her good husband, in their lovely home. Inside me there’s a clear cold stream of loneliness. It’s going to be a while before the pill kicks in to its full extent so until then it’s just me digging through the mud in the dark.
My eyes are open in black, blink closed in black, open again. I feel the tiny hairs on my arm calibrate and tune in to some electricity in the air. My head tingles. I can’t see what I can’t see.
Something in the room clicks. I tighten, still. Then there’s the sound of a seashell when you press it up against your ear. The sound of a fuse burning down to detonation. A hollow sound that snakes through you like a crack in the wall.
Hssssssssssssssss.
It’s the fucking radio. Paul keeps his dad’s old radio in our room so he can listen to the news sometimes before bed and then always in the morning, crashing through my dreams like a crane into a building. It’s his lifeline. I listen, unable to get up and turn it off. Maybe minutes tick by.
Hssssssssssssssss.
Then things start to swim and the pill whispers in my blood and I fall asleep.
When I wake up it’s morning and he’s gone already. I must have slept through the tinny morning broadcast. The radio sits on the dresser across from me. Its face and mine, both blank. I turn the knob and hear the familiar click, then an assault of canned voices tumble out. Torture, they say. Extreme. Conjecture. Experts. Click.
Today is a day I don’t have to do anything, so I don’t. I probably pick up JC from school, or else I don’t and go grocery shopping, or else I don’t and I watch shadows move from the floor to the wall. The thing is, I don’t remember the daytime. I don’t know if it’s a side effect of the pill, if I’m supposed to be getting more sleep with this thing than I am or what. Whole chunks of time seem to be escaping me. At least Paul is back at work, at least I think he is. He took his gun with him, either way.
On our first date, Paul told me he was ex-military, an Army intelligence officer in the Middle East for a couple of years. I remember finding it terribly hot. Squished into the same side of a squeaky diner booth, I pestered him with questions. Did you conduct interrogations? Good cop or bad cop? Alone or with a partner? He joked that I should have been the one pumping the bad guys for information. That night I let him snake his hands up my shirt in his car in front of my apartment in yellow streetlight.
Tonight I watch Paul feed my son. Paul who makes the money that buys the food that JC eats. Paul makes burgers, mixes meat with his hands. Hands that -- I don’t know. Hands that hold PTA papers, hands that hold heads down in basins of water. Hands that close around steel and flesh, hands that press inside of me, hands that push heavy doors shut away from the sun. I don’t know what I don’t know.
Night means another pill. I wash it down with boozy, minty mouthwash. I listen to him breathe, Paul breathe, my husband breathe. I watch the ceiling. In a few minutes, the same woozy electric frequency takes me. My hair dances on my skin. Then, as if a maestro had tapped on his music stand, I catch the sound of it -- a hiss, a release of contents under pressure.
Hssssssssssssssss.
And this time, I hear something else under it. A man or a group of men, a vicious whisper. I can’t make out words, just saliva, poisonous and angry, swirling around in unseen mouths. Tonight my feet find the floor, and I slide left and right forward until I am staring at the source of the sound, a patch of pitch black.
“What? What is it?”
Unintelligible. Then, breaking through the static, I hear the wooden croak of a man’s laugh.
“What? What?!”
Paul stirs, sits up in bed. The laughter abruptly stops.
“Babe, you okay?”
“Go back to bed.”
I don’t remember the day. I don’t remember what I don’t remember. It feels as if someone’s turned the volume way down. I don’t think I’m sleeping anymore, at least not what most people call sleep. How strange that Paul carries a gun with him everywhere. It’s his job. How strange that Paul gets paid to do the things he does, things no one hears about. He and his colleagues and our enemies, the people he fights against, and the broadcasting men with their disembodied voices. Unseen men delivering information in the dark. Offering shorthand for us. Trust us so you don’t ever have to see the kind of things we do. The snake in the garden offering fruit. I’m tuned in. Hssssssssssssssss.
Paul’s out doing something he won’t tell me about. I run up and down the stairs. JC will be fine at school a little longer, he likes school. It’s so loud in here. I turn on all the lights. I turn on our television. I turn on our laptop and our computer and our cell phones and I round the corner to the bedroom and I turn on his radio. A reedy voice calls out. A man’s voice.
“OH GIRL
I’D BE IN TROUBLE IF YOU LEFT ME NOW...”
All of the lights are on but it’s still black in here.
Paul tells me when he gets home he found me in the driveway in the car with the headlights on and the engine on and the windshield wipers on and the brakes on and the car radio on and my eyes open and my mouth open my mouth my mouth full of wires and his radio broken and me chewing and the metal in my mouth and me laughing he says I’m laughing but I’m fast asleep but I don’t believe him no not a word he says no not anymore not a word--