The Stay-Awake Men & Other Unstable Entities Read online

  Alan Rampart:

  I can’t wait.

  Jim Ritchie:

  Us neither. All right, folks, enough jibber-jabber, let’s talk March Madness…

  As the recording played, snapshots sailed across the screen in succession, stopping just long enough to avoid careful examination: six men in a recording studio, all wide lapels and wider grins, their names in orange italic Helvetica captions across their bellies; a man in a brief bathing suit, sunburned belly and shoulders, straddling a purple inflatable raft in a pool glowing with asterisks of light on a field of impossible blue, holding aloft a cocktail; the same group of men in leaf-patterned short sleeved shirts surrounding some manner of trophy sitting on a table; a curly-coiffed man with a lascivious grin, his arms around two tanned-orange, beefy blondes in abbreviated dresses.

  Don’s lip curled. He had an instinctive distaste for this manner of broadcaster, for fatuous, unserious, artless men. He’d first seen them in person at WXBK, a television station in Atlanta where he had held a brief internship. They spoke in an unnatural cadence, presumably meant to sound authoritative, official, punctuated at random intervals with slight forward lunges, even off-air. Their quips were clichés, their observations trite, and they wore their lusts on their lapels like gaudy flowers.

  “Now, we’re at 96 hours and counting. Seventeen bathroom breaks. Twelve meals plus a mostly finished veggie platter. How we doing, so far, Alan?”

  “Doing great. Hanging in. I’m tired, though, fellas, I’m not going to lie to you. The lights seem very bright. Your voices seem very loud. They bother me, tell you the truth. They make me angry, like someone’s having an argument as I’m trying to drift off into sleep. Heh. My own voice bothers me.”

  “Any hallucinations? Visual, aural?”

  “I see…I see a big fat ugly fellow with a mustache asking me a lot of irritating questions.”

  “Now, Alan, I’m not that fat.”

  (laughter, sustained, hysterical)

  “Alan?”

  Rampart’s mouth spanned the screen. Thin lips; the tip of a tongue peeked out like a ripe strawberry, slid across, moistening the upper lip. Red splashed across the skin: the On Air light.

  On the screen appeared the words: “Two days before.”

  The mouth began to move, not quite in time with the audio. “My father used to watch baseball games on television. Something about the sound of the games—the announcers, the murmur of the crowd, the crack of the bats hitting the baseballs—made me so sleepy. Even at that young age, I had bouts with insomnia, and before long the solution hit me. One evening, I brought my tape recorder from my room and put it front of the television and recorded the game. I played the tape every night as I fell asleep. I remember the audio of the game now as though it were the music and lyrics of my favorite records…’…now there’s young Thomas, still waiting for the chance to throw out that opening ball. He has been primed and ready for an hour now. This is the young man, you will remember, who was injured in the stands, last month, who got a fractured skull for his trouble, but is back now and ready, his parents at his side, proud as can be. He looks good. It’s a bright and beautiful afternoon under a cloudless sky…’ It worked. That tape is long gone, now, but all I have to do is call it to mind, and my eyelids flutter like moths.”

  Now the words on the screen read: “142 hours in.”

  The mouth again spanned the screen. Now the lips were flaked with dried spittle. They trembled. The tongue, paler than before, zipped across the teeth like the platen of a typewriter zipping back to the left margin.

  “May I tell you something in private?”

  “Cut it! Shut it down!” someone called out from the back of the theater. Don sunk in his chair, did a half turn, preparing for the crowd to hush the person, but instead the film froze—Rampart’s pale pink, pocked tongue jutting luridly out at the audience—and the lights came up. What was this? A fire drill? A practical joke? If it was the latter, was he the only person not in on it? He considered asking the thin, tower-coiffed woman in front of him, but she shrunk into herself, drawing her shoulders inward, as if she’d heard Don’s thought and found it mortifying.

  A shriek sounded from the back of the room, high and feminine. Don, along with everyone in the audience, looked back. In the doorway shadows scuffled, men whispered. Then sounds of fists hitting flesh, grunts and muttering. The shadows elongated and disappeared as the dust-up retreated into the lobby. When he turned back to face the screen, a cadre of police officers stood in front of it, a few feet beyond the first row of seats. Their faces were occulted behind riot masks, and they held nightsticks at their sides. Echoing footsteps filled the room, and a man stepped out from behind the right side of the screen. He was tall, almost a giant, but gaunt, and bent as though bowing. His hair was white. A wig, Don thought, definitely a wig.

  The man spoke in a syrupy voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is with the utmost apology that I must call an end to the evening’s proceedings. It has come to my attention that the film shown here tonight contains proprietary material to which the rights have not been legally acquired. The film cannot be shown publicly as it is. I apologize for your having wasted your evening, but this entire enterprise is quite illegal. You may exit the way you came in. The police are here to ensure that you do so in an orderly fashion.”

  The tone of the man was unctuous to the point of sounding sarcastic, a parody of an apology. Insincere. Don rose, and as he stepped into the aisle, rough hands grasped him by the sleeves and propelled him forward, right over to the tall man. Policemen, masked and silent. Don looked at one, turned his head to the other.

  “Are you guys twins?” he asked. They did not reply. The tall man grinned down at Don. The audience murmured as they filed by.

  “Camera, please,” said the tall man.

  “I don’t have a camera.”

  The grin morphed into a grimace.

  “I didn’t take any pictures,” Don said.

  The man tilted his head, still grinning, like a confused dog. Up close, Don saw that his flesh was dull white and mottled, like soaked fingertips, his pupils large, barely any whites in his eyes, like an animal. Don reached into his pocket, proffered the camera, a small digital. The man crushed it in his hand as though it were of flimsy plastic.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You may go.”

  Don turned to leave and the man called back to him, “You won’t be writing about this.”

  “I won’t,” Don agreed, eager to be out of there. The man unnerved him, as did the anonymous police. He had noticed that their uniforms were not city-issued. They were black, rather than blue, and bore a profusion of pockets, and epaulets at the shoulders. The badges were shaped like half-moons, and shone in the theatre lights.

  Don followed the last of the crowd out the door. He was stuck for a story now, and his curiosity burned like reflux in his esophagus.

  The lot was empty of cars, save his own, parked at an angle, the driver’s side door open, the interior bathed in soft light. The alarm dinged away, as though the car were singing to itself in the blackness of the night.

  The tiles in the studio are changing. They don’t think I notice, but I do. I do. It used to be a rectangle adjacent to a square and a smaller rectangle, and next to that, three squares, all in shades of blue, like underwater blue, or white, like the hull of a boat. But now the squares are dividing, the rectangles are elongating. The old patterns are being compromised. The lines between the tiles will be forming words soon. Human words, maybe. Maybe not. Oh, they’re not there yet. But they’re getting there. And when the transformation is complete, the things that whisper outside will come in. I saw the word “Cohark.” Cohark. Mark it. Mark it down. I’ve got it in my notebook, and now there’s a record, because I’m saying this on the air, and the FCC are listening. They have ears everywhere. Believe you me. The words in the tiles have to be right. Stop it. Don’t touch me. It itches. You’re trying to distract me. I can’t forget. Cohark. Cohark
. Cohark.

  Keyed up, unable to countenance sleep, Don walked the city streets, looking through the grates into shuttered shops, staring at the skyscrapers’ tops as clouds blacker than black swam across the sky. He rounded a sharp corner and his gaze was drawn to a row of apartment windows lit brightly, sending a glow into the darkness. In one, he spied a painting in a swirling antique frame. It depicted in blues, blacks, and greys the rough waves of an ocean at night, rows of whitecaps diminishing in the distance. On the horizon floated black amorphous shapes, too far in the distance to identify. Above hung a white-glowing moon, its light ghostly and ethereal. The painting filled him with a hard-to-name longing. He wanted to swim up through the air, enter the window, climb up into the frame, walk into the water, and drown. He yawned until he nearly pulled a muscle in his neck. Then he looked down at the last second and stopped short. A mop-haired kid stood in the sidewalk before him, directly in his path. Don moved to evade the kid, but the kid stepped back into his path He stuck out his lower lip and blew, sending his bangs skyward, revealing a crisscross pattern of ugly scars.

  “The tape, mister. I have the tape. Hundred bucks.”

  “The tape? Rampart?”

  The kid looked at him, looked around. He pulled from his long coat an unlabeled cassette tape. He raised an eyebrow, an oddly adult expression on a kid who could not have been older than nine.

  “Hundred bucks.”

  Don looked around too as he reached for the wallet in his back pocket. No one seemed to be paying attention to the transaction. But there were cars parked along the streets, windows reflecting buildings back at one another.

  It occurred to him then that perhaps he was being set up, that he’d been followed from the theater, that someone had paid the kid to pass off a blank tape, purported to be a copy of the tape that may contain the missing three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, as contraband. But the kid hadn’t said what was on the tape. If it were in fact a set-up, wouldn’t he have, so that it was clear that Don was willfully participating in an illegal activity?

  What was the worst that could happen?

  He paid the kid, who dropped the tape on the road and ran down the street and around the corner. A car that had been sailing along slowly braked, then executed a quick and dirty U-turn, and sped in the direction in which the kid had gone. Don ran to the corner and looked, but kid and car were gone. Clutching the tape in the pocket of his overcoat, he hoofed it back to his car and aimed it for home.

  “You want to keep the door closed? Every time you open it, more come in. I don’t like them. I don’t like them one bit.”

  “Alan, no one’s coming in…who do you see coming in?”

  “The shadow men. So many of them. So many. Can you ask them to stop whispering? Can you do that for me? Can you ask them? Can you stand closer to me? Can you come closer?”

  (weeps softly)

  “Please keep the door closed. Please keep the door closed. Please. I’m sorry. Please.”

  Don Wright liked to keep his apartment dark, each room lit with only one bulb, shaded, in a corner. It had started as a way to save on the electric bill when he’d fallen upon lean times, but he’d become accustomed to the shadows, the fact that his five rooms, with the curtains drawn, existed in a kind of moody half-light. He poured some rye into a tumbler and went into the living room. He put the cassette tape in the player, pressed down the PLAY button.

  A voice murmured, unintelligible. Don turned up the volume and a drone filled the room. Alan Rampart’s voice, distorted and trembling, sounded from the speaker:

  May I tell you something in private?

  Then a terrible scream filled the room, distorted, buzzing. The drink fell from Don’s hand, the glass landing with a clink on the floor. Rye poured out, soaking the carpet. The lights in the house dimmed…

  …and Don woke back in the theater. The screen was still split horizontally by Alan Rampart’s lips, the tongue at the center of the screen.

  The shriek from the back of the theater. The scuffle in the doorway. The line of strange policemen. Don led to the white-wigged man…and right by him, into the darkness behind the screen. The cops shoved him through a set of velvet curtains and into a dim corridor. He could see a few feet in front of him, but could detect no light source. He moved forward tentatively. Before him stood a door. He took the knob in his hand. It was warm. He opened it.

  Who’s that?

  Don’t “Alan” me. That’s not Finn. I know Finn. I know Finn’s wife. I have lunch with Finn. Coffee breaks. Okay? Who are you? Get your hands off me. Who are you?

  Hands. Hands.

  I know who you are.

  You won’t bury me, shadow man. I’ll fight you. I have spiders. Spiders come out of my fingers, see? I fire black widows like bullets from my fingers, shadow man. Undertaker. Their legs unfold like an umbrella opening and they’ll kill you with their poison. Shadow man. Undertaker.

  That’s who you are. Undertaker. Take me under. I dare you. I dare you to try.

  Cohark. Is that your name? Is that your name, Undertaker? Cohark?

  He flinched. Did you see him flinch? I’ve got your number, Cohark.

  A brightly lit corridor with an industrial-gray ceiling snaked with track-lighting and carpeted in a complex maroon and black pattern. People, 15 or 20 or so, some he recognized from the audience, all walking past. He turned and shuffled along with the group. The hall emptied into a gymnasium with high ceilings and, sitting desolate in the center, six rows of director’s chairs with strips of paper affixed to the back bearing names written in black marker. The people began to look for and find their names, to sit. The names were in no order Don could discern, and he was shaken by an atavistic frisson of terror at the thought of being the last one standing on this mute version of musical chairs. He rushed along the rows and the relief he felt at finding his name, three rows in, on a chair nearest the aisle, almost made up for the confusion.

  A soft hand lighted on his shoulder and stayed there as its owner circled round to face him. A woman in a black smock. Long, straight red hair and huge eyes.

  “Mary Kate,” she said by way of introduction, and then she leaned forward until her lips were almost at his ear. He nearly flinched, but caught himself. “You’re doing great,” she whispered. The people seated in front of Don turned to watch. Their eyes were empty of emotion, unfocused. Mary Kate’s lip grazed the outer rim of Don’s ear and her breath felt warm on his cheek. He caught a smoky sweet whiff of amaryllis belladonna.

  She pulled back and looked directly into his eyes. She began to speak again, and her voice faded out. Don heard clicks and a faint hiss, only the occasional syllable, as her lips moved and her eyes stayed locked on his. It was like a radio station out of tune. Her face betrayed mild alarm. He thought madly that if he reached up and turned her nose, he might be able to hear her again.

  Her brow furrowed, a deep horizontal line forming between her arched brows. She shrugged and pulled from the interior of her smock a soft looking brush. She opened a small compact, daubed the brush on its surface, and said “Close your eyes.” Don obeyed.

  The brush whisked softly across Don’s forehead, over his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, back and forth across his neck, touched lightly on his eyelids, back and forth, back and forth. When she had applied the finishing touches, she leaned forward and kissed him briefly but softly on the lips. She took his hand. “Sh…c…on,” she said. “Th…eddy…oo.” He stood and followed her down the aisle, along the wall, and out into a long, wide hallway. Windowed doors appeared here and there, and in them sat small, dimly lit studio sets: a sandy oasis with a glimmering blue pool ringed with palm trees; a restaurant table draped in white cloth, atop it a bottle of wine and a flickering votive sitting between two elegant place settings with tented cloth napkins and shining silverware; a radio studio with a dimmed ON AIR sign and a bulbous foam-gloved microphone looming over a paper-strewn desk, framed gold records on the wall.

  Mary Kate led Don
into the radio studio set, sat him in the chair. Above the console was a poster. He recognized it immediately: it was a print of the painting he had seen in the city window. But the angle from which he had seen it through the apartment window must have distorted it. He saw now that it what it depicted was not in fact an ocean, but an unmade bed, sheets of blue rippled and crumpled, sweat-stained pillows hunched where the head of the bed met the wall. Above glowed not the moon, but the shining bulb of a lamp at the end of a curved adjustable arm. He yawned again, covering his mouth with his hand. Mary Kate took his other hand into hers. “It’s okay to let go,” she said, her voice clear and strong, laced with sadness and, strangely, compassion.

  “Thank you,” he said, but he said it like a question.

  She was gone, vanished. He turned, and the door to the room was gone too. The room was of clear glass, but everything outside it was a blur of industrial off-white, hulking machines, the hint of lights of different colors blinking and winking, like room-sized computers in old movies. Don turned back to examine the console. Was he meant to speak? To broadcast? A sudden exhaustion spread from his heart to his extremities, and the soundproofed walls of the glass enclosure blurred and pulsed. No one was here. Nothing was expected of him. He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes. A face appeared at the window above the console, blurred and ghastly, hollows for eyes, white wig.

  Then people crowded in behind the white wigged man. Don watched as their faces painted the glass. They looked so eager, so expectant. Don smiled. Energy flowed into him, filled him up as water fills a vessel into which it is poured.

  The crowd gathered in a tight cluster around the booth to watch the Disc Jockey. Despite the black circles under his eyes, he looked assured, confident, comfortable, and awake as he adjusted the microphone, studied the instrument panel, turning a knob here, hitting a button there. The On-Air sign, above him, was unlit. From time to time, he glanced up at it as he arranged his carts, as he adjusted his seat to the perfect height. He cupped his hands to his mouth and cleared his throat, coughed a few times. The crowd sighed, jostling for a view.