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ananicoleta · 3 years ago

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Together Again

(A Space Jam 2 FanFiction)

Ok, so I imagine that after Bugs "died" in Space Jam 2, he didn't show up immediately. Instead, there were needed a few days for him to reappear, time during which the Looney Tunes thought he was dead. This fic shows their thoughts during that time, as well as a surprise at the end.

Enjoy!

WARNING: angst + kinda long

Daffy crept around the forest, always looking over his shoulder to make sure no one had followed or seen him. Not that it was very likely to happen. None of the Looney Tunes paid that much attention to anyone or anything anymore, so his absence would probabpy go unnoticed. All of them - him included - were trapped in their own thoughts and regrets, and the outside world just didn't matter anymore. The dynamic, the jokes, the atmosphere weren't - couldn't - be the same. Not ever since Bugs had...

Shaking his head, the duck snapped out of the thought that threatened to cloud his mind with pain and fog his eyes with tears. He had promised himself he won't let that happened. Just focus on the road, Daffy. You're almost there.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he reached his destination. The glade he knew so well looked just the way it did when he had left. The fresh grass, wet from the rain, shone into the sunlight as if it was made of cristal. The lively river cut its path through the strong rocks, running like a carefree child, while the birds happily sang their lovely tune.

Right in the middle of the glade, stood the well-known oak tree, tall as always, like a nobleman, proudly wearing its green attire. On the trunk, there could be spotted a poster that read: Duck Season. That was what Daffy was looking for.

He walked quietly towards it, still paranoic that someone might be there and see him. They for sure would ask him what was he doing and, honestly, he didn't know either. All he knew was that if he stayed one more minute alone in his house, trying to not think about Bugs, while automatically thinking about Bugs and missing him dearly, he'd go insane. He needed to feel the taste of their old game again, even if he had to play it all by himself.

Standing near the tree, he took a deep breath and began.

"Wabbit stheason!" He said, ripping the Duck Season poster.

Then, moving to the side opposite to him, he said in a quite accurate Bugs Bunny impression.

"Duck season!"

After, Daffy moved to the other side again and repeated the procedure. This went on for a while and it was, surprisingly, relaxing. It took his mind off of things and if he pretended hard enough, he could actually see and hear Bugs...

"Daffy?"

The duck slipped and fell right in the pile of posters that he had torn. When he lifted his head, he saw none other than Elmer Fudd, looking down at him, confused. He wore his usual clothes, complete with the hat and hunting gun.

"Didn't your mother tell you it wasth rude to sthcare people?" Daffy snapped, getting back on his feet.

"Sowwy, didn't mean to cweep up on you, duck." Elmer said apologetically. Then, peeking at the pile of sheets behind Daffy, he asked.

"Uh, what were you doing hewe?"

"I could ask you the sthame question." Daffy responded, not wanting to explain himself.

Elmer sighed and sat on the grass, his expression turning sad. In that moment, Daffy realised that the reason the hunter decided to come in this specific glade was the same as his.

Sighing as well, the duck sat down near his friend, feeling the depression taking control of him again. None of them spoke for a few minutes. They just sat there in silence, listening to the forest's whispers that seemed to mourn as well, as if it could feel someone was absent.

"You miss him as well, don't you?" Daffy asked after a while.

Elmer nodded. "I nevew thought I would miss him so much. He always annoyed me, always made me cuwse him. Now, though, I would give anything to heaw him again, to do pway 'Wabbit Season! Duck Season! Fiwe' just one mowe time..."

Elmer let out a stranggled sob and Daffy bit back his tears. If he had known that a few months ago would be the last time he, Elmer and Bugs would go through their hunting routine, he wouldn't have left, no matter what Al-G Rythim would have promised him. He would have listened and stood by the rabbit's side. But he was too selfish, as usual. He wanted to spread his wings, to be the hero of his own story and didn't care when Bugs practically begged them all to not go. And now it was too late. The rabbit was dead and there was nothing he or anyone could do.

Looking over at Elmer, he saw tears falling down his cheeks. Daffy extended his hand and gently wiped them away, ignoring how wet his own eyes were getting.

"Come on, Fuddsey." He said softly, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Let's go home and do something else. There's nothing for us here, anymore. Maybe we can help Granny with that big dinner she wanted to prepare for all of us."

And with that, the two left the glade that held so many happy memories, never looking back, afraid that they might get a glimpse of the past, one that would make them lose their composures completely.

/////////

Porky walked through Tune Town, making his way to Granny's house. He had recieved a message that morning from her that kindly asked him if he wanted to come over and help her make a delicious meal for the family, since cooking alone was a bit depressing.

Although she didn't say it, he could tell from her tone that the reason she wanted him near was so she wouldn't have the opportunity to think about Bugs. Who could blame her? None of them wanted to think of Bugs. And they all tried so hard not to.

The pairs of enemies, like Road Runner and Wile E., Sylvester and Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Barnyard, went right back to chasing and teasing each other, though Porky could see the lack of energy and how forced it looked. Toons like Yosemite Sam, Marvin and Speedy were always away, probably somewhere where there was just them alone and their thoughts, where no one could bother them. Then there were the ones like Garnny, himself and occasionaly Pepe Le Pew and Penelope, that tried to cheer them all up, while they themselves were almost dead on the inside.

And it hurt a lot. It hurt to look at their dishearted family, trying to do anything in order to forget, even for a moment, that Bugs was dead. It hurt to feel so powerless to put an end to their pain, to hear them crying their hearts out, knowing that no matter what he said, it won't make a difference. It hurt to see them separated and not wanting to interact with anybody.

This was the main reason Granny had proposed the dinner.

At first, he didn't think it was such a good idea, but then he figured that they couldn't just stay in their houses forever, watching time fly by, grieving their friend. As painful as it was, he knew he had to put it all behind him and accept that they would never see Bugs again. If only they wouldn't have left...

"Hi, Porky." Came a voice from nearby.

Wipping his eyes quickly, Porky greeted his friends as well.

"H-Hi, Da-Da-Daffy. And hello, Elm-Elmer, t-too."

Seeing the black duck and the toon human cheered him up a bit. His family always managed to do that.

"Whe-where you guys o-off t-t-t, uh, going?"

"We thought we might stop at Gwanny's and hewp her with the cooking." Elmer said.

"Oh, re-really? Th-That's great, 'cause I was he-hea-heading there a-as we-we-we, uh, too."

As they walked down the road they continued to chat about this and that, just for the sake of making conversation and not walking in silence. They climbed the hill that led to the valley full of nice, suburban houses, meaning they were almost at Granny's.

When they made it to the top, Porky simply glanced in to the distance... and his heart caught in his throat. Stopping dead in his tracks, causing his other two friends to bump into him, he stared forward convinced that his eyes must be playing tricks on him.

"Hey, what gives, Pig?" An annoyed Daffy asked.

Seeing as Porky didn't answer, they followed his startled gaze, and saw exactly what had caused the pig to react like that.

Down in the valley, right near the entrance of Tune Town, there was a silhouette walking towards the suburbs. It might've been just a trick of the light, or maybe a product of their grief-struck minds, but the creature (that also appeared to have grey fur and long ears) looked an awful lot like...

"BUGS!" Daffy shouted and before one of them could do something, the duck broke into a run, all while screaming the rabbit's name at the top of his lungs.

The silhouette also started running, and in less than ten seconds, the two crashed, warping their arms around each other in a tight hug.

At that moment, Porky felt an uncontrolable smile spread across his face. All the negative feelings that had polluted his mind until then, evaporated. Instead, his heart swelled with pure and utter happiness. He also heard Elmer repeating over and over, excitedly:

"He's awive! Gwacious, he's awive!"

Letting out a joyous laugh, both of them ran as fast as they could, to hug their brothers.

Behind them, the rest of the family, that had probably heard the noise and came to see what was happening, shouted with surprise and glee, and ran right after them.

Slowly, one by one, every Looney Tune joined them in a giant, family hug that warmed their hearts and casted off their sadness.

Finally, they were all together again, and they were never ever separating.

#looney tunes #bugs bunny #elmer fudd #porky pig #daffy duck

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thebrownssociety · 3 years ago

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Across The Serververse, Part 8

Roadrunner didn’t get more than one foot in the spaceship before Penelope threw herself at him with a high-pitched squeal.

“Oh, that’s nice.” Came the mock-affronted voice of Wile.E. Coyote from just behind them. “You know there are two of us.”

“Eh...technically three, ‘super-genius’” Bugs said, smirking as he hopped of off Roadie’s back.

The coyote glared and muttered something about giving him [Bugs] the bird if he was allowed, but his complaints were drowned out by the rest of the toons saying various versions of how pleased they were to have him back as they hugged him as well.

“Okay!” Wile.E yelled at the point where he began to feel suffocated. “I get it! You’re all glad to see me, I don’t blame you, I get it, now will you please...GETOFFA ME!?”

Roadrunner beeped, cheekily.

Wile.E rolled his eyes and flapped a hand in his twins direction. “Yes, yes and Roadie to. Now, from what I understand this is rather like a game-”

“-Of what? Hide an’ seek?” Bugs said, incredulously.

Ignoring him the coyote swept on with: “-So the next ‘object’, so to speak, is to pick who we’re finding next and go after them? Any suggestions?”

“Excuse me, Mr Coyote.” Marvin said, reproachfully as he sped-walked towards him. “I appreciate you are about the only one here on the same level as myself intellectually [everyone else: “Hey!”] but I am the one in charge of this expedition on account of the fact that it is my spaceship! So if you could kindly ‘zip your lip’, that would be much appreciated!”

Wile.E looked startled, but - to give him credit - did literally ‘zip his lip’ and nod at Marvin who nodded back his appreciation and, clearing his throat, said:

“Well, first of all, welcome back to Wile.E and Roadrunner [much cheering erupted at this]. Secondly, I have been looking at the coordinates and it seems that the toon we are closest to now is...drum roll please...[Bugs got a drum set and duly ‘bah bum tished’]...Yosemite Sam!”

Tweety looked disappointed, but the others all nodded, no doubt all thinking the same thing; not only would Sam not need much rescuing, being perfectly capable of fighting toons five times his size, but when they got him he’d be a good asset for getting the others.

That decided Marvin took the helm and was just about to drive off when he stopped, sighed and, without actually looking at Wile.E, said, stiffly. “It has come to my attention that perhaps as this journey progresses it may be helpful for myself to have a co-captain so to speak. So with that in mind...Wile.E?” Marvin cleared his throat. “Would you be willing to assist me?”

The coyote tried to contain his excitement at the prospect of co-piloting Marvin’s very gadget-heavy ship [he failed completely] and, with a sharp nod, walked up to the controls and helped out.

Less than five minutes later they were setting of for Cartoon Network World, Subsection Wacky Races, all wondering exactly how Sam was faring there.

[Meanwhile, In Wacky Races at that exact moment]

“Yaa-Hoo!” Sam hollered as he sped past Penelope Pitstop in his thrown-together car that was titled ‘The Canon-Doubloon’ by Sam [on account of the fact it was both painted gold and shaped like a canon.] and ‘The Junkyard’ by everyone else on account of the fact it was made from junk that Sam had somehow managed to make into a working car. “Outta mah way! It’s ah ‘Plunderin’ Sam’ comin’ through!” With a laugh he drove sidewards into Dastardly’s car sending it crashing off into some rocks.

As Sam disappeared into the distance leaving behind nothing more than a trail of smoke, Dastardly and Muttley emerged both looking furious. “That pirate has GOT to go, Muttley!” Dastardly stated.

Muttley sniggered and laughed in agreement.

So while Dastardly and Muttley went about setting up the greatest plan ever {”I’m sure this one will work, Muttley!”} Bugs and Co arrived about twenty metres away from a part of the race track that bent alarmingly down the side off a cliff.

“Ah!” Wile.E sighed happily as he looked around. “It’s just like home, isn’t it Roadie?”

Roadie beaped in agreement.

“Jus’ keep yer eyes open for Sam.” Bugs told them, not wanting them to get distracted by the art style.

The toons all nodded and started looking round. At that precise moment a cloud of dust came streaking along the track and everyone looked, in first fascination and then alarm, as the car came within a cats whisker of them.

“Ya-hoo! Take that ya bunch of lily-livered land-lubbers!” Sam’s voice rang out above the noise of the engine.

As he disappeared up the other side of a different cliff the rest of his family stared after him in slight disbelief that while they had all been worried/finding life difficult for the past couple of months, Sam seemed absolutely fine.

Marvin was the first to speak. “Well, that’s just fantastic.” He said, sarcastically. “HOW are we meant to get Sam to come back with us when it seems he’s having a fantastic time here?”

Bugs went to speak, then was instantly cut off by the rest of the Wacky Racers [sans Dastardly] zipping past them, engulfing the Looney Tunes in a cloud of dust. When the cloud had cleared Bugs had a lightbulb above his head that was glowing brightly. “Well, ya know what dey say.” He said, thoughtfully. “If ya can’t beat ‘em, join em’.”

#Space Jam 2 Fanfiction #Across The Serververse #Bugs Bunny #Wile.E.Coyote #Roadrunner #Marvin The Martian #Yosemite Sam #Wacky Racers #dick dastardly #Fanfiction

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years ago

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Dial Tone

Benjamin Percy (2007)

A jogger spotted the body hanging from the cell tower. At first he thought it was a mannequin. That's what he told Z-21, the local NBC affiliate. The way the wind blew it, the way it flopped limply, made it appear insubstantial, maybe stuffed with straw. It couldn't be a body, he thought, not in a place like Redmond, Oregon, a nowhere town on the edge of a great wash of desert. But it was. It was the body of a man. He had a choke chain, the kind you buy at Pet Depot, wrapped around his neck and anchored to the steel ladder that rose twelve hundred feet in the air to the tip of the tower, where a red light blinked a warning.

Word spread quickly. And everyone, the whole town, it seemed, crowded around, some of them with binoculars and cameras, to watch three deputies, joined by a worker from Clark Tower Service, scale the tower and then descend with the body in a sling.

I was there. And from where I stood, the tower looked like a great spear thrust into the hilltop.

* * *

Yesterday—or maybe it was the day before—I went to work, like I always go to work, at West Teleservices Corporation, where, as a marketing associate, I go through the same motions every morning. I hit the power button on my computer and listen to it hum and mumble and blip to life. I settle my weight into my ergonomic chair. I fit the headset around my skull and into my ear and take a deep breath, and, with the pale light of the monitor washing over me, I dial the first number on the screen.

In this low-ceilinged fluorescent-lit room, there are twenty-four rows of cubicles, each ten deep. I am C5. When I take a break and stand up and peer into the cubicle to my right, C6, I find a Greg or a Josh or a Linda—every day a new name to remember, a new hand to shake, or so it seems, with the turnover rate so high. This is why I call everyone you.

"Hey, you," I say. "How's it going?"

A short, toad-like woman in a Looney Toons sweatshirt massages the bridge of her nose and sighs, "You know how it is."

In response I give her a sympathetic smile, before looking away, out over the vast hive of cubicles that surrounds us. The air is filled with so many voices, all of them coming together into one voice that reads the same script, trying to make a sale for AT&T, Visa, Northwest Airlines, Sandals Beach Resorts, among our many clients.

There are always three supervisors on duty, all of them beefy men with mustaches. Their bulging bellies remind me of feed sacks that might split open with one slit of a knife. They wear polo shirts with "West Teleservices" embroidered on the breast. They drink coffee from stainless-steel mugs. They never seem to sit down. Every few minutes I feel a rush of wind at the back of my neck as they hurry by, usually to heckle some associate who hasn't met the hourly quota.

"Back to work, C5," one of them tells me, and I roll my eyes at C6 and settle into my cubicle, where the noise all around me falls away into a vague murmur, like the distant drone of bees.

* * *

I'm having trouble remembering things. Small things, like where I put my keys, for instance. Whether or not I put on deodorant or took my daily vitamin or paid the cable bill. Big things, too. Like, getting up at 6 A.M. and driving to work on a Saturday, not realizing my mistake until I pull into the empty parking lot.

Sometimes I walk into a room or drive to the store and can't remember why. In this way I am like a ghost: someone who can travel through walls and find myself someplace else in the middle of a sentence or thought and not know what brought me there. The other night I woke up to discover I was walking down the driveway in my pajamas, my bare feet blue in the moonlight. I was carrying a shovel.

* * *

Today I'm calling on behalf of Capital One, pitching a mileage card. This is what I'm supposed to say: Hello, is this _______? How are you doing today, sir/ma'am? That's wonderful! I'm calling with a fantastic offer from Capital One. Did you know that with our no-annual-fee No-Hassle Miles Visa Signature Card you can earn 25 percent more than regular mileage cards, with 1.25 miles for every $1 spent on purchases? On top of that, if you make just $3,000 in purchases a year, you'll earn 20,000 bonus miles!

And so on.

The computer tells me what to tell them. The bold sections indicate where I ought to raise my voice for emphasis. If the customer tries to say they aren't interested, I'm supposed to keep talking, to pretend I don't hear. If I stray too far from the script and if one of the supervisors is listening in, I will feel a hand on my shoulder and hear a voice whispering, "Stay on target. Don't lose sight of your primary objective."

* * *

The lights on the tops of cell towers are meant to warn pilots to stay away. But they have become a kind of beacon. Migratory birds mistake them for the stars they use to navigate, so they circle such towers in a trance, sometimes crashing into a structure, its steadying guy wires, or even into other birds. And sometimes they keep circling until they fall to the ground, dead from exhaustion. You can find them all around our cell tower: thousands of them, dotting the hilltop, caught in the sagebrush and pine boughs like ghostly ornaments. Their bones are picked clean by ants. Their feathers are dampened by the rain and bleached by the sun and ruffled and loosened and spread like spores by the wind.

In the sky, so many more circle, screeching their frustration as they try to find their way south. Of course they discovered the body. As he hung there, swinging slightly in the wind, they roosted on his shoulders. They pecked away his eyes, and they pecked away his cheeks, so that we could see all of his teeth when the deputies brought him down. He looked like he was grinning.

At night, from where I lie in bed, I can see the light of the cell tower—through the window, through the branches of a juniper tree, way off in the distance—like a winking red eye that assures me of the confidentiality of some terrible secret.

* * *

Midmorning, I pop my neck and crack my knuckles and prepare to make maybe my fortieth or sixtieth call of the day. "Pete Johnston" is the name on the screen. I say it aloud—twice—the second time as a question. I feel as though I have heard the name before, but really, that means nothing when you consider the hundreds of thousands of people I have called in my three years working here. I notice that his number, 503-531-1440, is local. Normally I pay no attention to the address listing unless the voice on the other end has a thick accent I can't quite decipher—New Jersey? Texas? Minnesota?—but in this case I look and see that he lives just outside of Redmond, in a new housing development only a few miles away.

"Yeah?" is how he answers the phone.

"Hello. Is this Pete Johnston?"

He clears his throat in a growl. "You a telemarketer?"

"How are you doing today, sir?"

"Bad."

"I'm calling on behalf of—"

"Look, cocksucker. How many times I got to tell you? Take me off your list."

"If you'll just hear me out, I want to tell you about a fantastic offer from—"

"You people are so fucking pathetic."

Now I remember him. He said the same thing before, a week or so ago, when I called him. "If you ever fucking call me again, you fucking worthless piece of shit," he said, "I'll reach through the phone and rip your tongue out."

He goes off on a similar rant now, asking me how can I live with myself, if every time I call someone they answer with hatred?

For a moment I forget about the script and answer him. "I don't know," I say.

"What the—?" he says, his voice somewhere between panicked and incensed. "What the hell are you doing in my house? I thought I told you to—"

There is a noise—the noise teeth might make biting hurriedly into melon—punctuated by a series of screams. It makes me want to tear the headset away from my ear.

And then I realize I am not alone. Someone is listening. I don't know how—a certain displacement of sound as the phone rises from the floor to an ear—but I can sense it.

"Hello?" I say.

The line goes dead.

* * *

Sometimes, when I go to work for yet another eight-hour shift or when I visit my parents for yet another casserole dinner, I want to be alone more than anything in the world. But once I'm alone, I feel I can't stand another second of it. Everything is mixed up.

This is why I pick up the phone sometimes and listen. There is something reassuring about a dial tone. That simple sound, a low purr, as constant and predictable as the sun's path across the sky. No matter if you are in Istanbul or London or Beijing or Redmond, you can bring your ear to the receiver and hear it.

Sometimes I pick up the phone and bring it to my ear for the same reason people raise their heads to peer at the moon when they're in a strange place. It makes them—it makes me—feel oriented, calmer than I was a moment before.

Perhaps this has something to do with why I drive to the top of the hill and park beneath the cell tower and climb onto the hood of my Neon and lean against the windshield with my hands folded behind my head to watch the red light blinking and the black shapes of birds swirling against the backdrop of an even blacker sky.

I am here to listen. The radio signals emanating from the tower sound like a blade hissing through the air or a glob of spit sizzling on a hot stove: something dangerous, about to draw blood or catch fire. It's nice.

I imagine I hear in it the thousands of voices channeling through the tower at any given moment, and I wonder what terrible things could be happening to these people that they want to tell the person on the other end of the line but don't.

* * *

A conversation overheard:

"Do you live here?"

"Yes."

"Are you Pete Johnston?"

"Yes. Who are you? What do you want?"

"To talk to you. Just to talk."

* * *

Noon, I take my lunch break. I remove my headset and lurch out of my chair with a groan and bring my fists to my back and push until I feel my vertebrae separate and realign with a juicy series of pops. Then I wander along my row, moving past so many cubicles, each with a person hunched over inside it—and for a moment West Teleservices feels almost like a chapel, with everyone bowing their heads and murmuring together, as if exorcising some private pain.

I sign out with one of the managers and enter the break room, a forty-by-forty-foot room with white walls and a white dropped ceiling and a white linoleum floor. There are two sinks, two microwaves, two fridges, a Coke machine and a SNAX machine. In front of the SNAX machine stands C6, the woman stationed in the cubicle next to me. A Looney Toons theme apparently unifies her wardrobe, since today she wears a sweatshirt with Sylvester on it. Below him, blocky black letters read, WITHCONTHIN. She stares with intense concentration at the candy bars and chip bags and gum packs, as if they hold some secret message she has yet to decode.

I go to the nearby water fountain and take a drink and dry my mouth with my sleeve, all the while watching C6, who hardly seems to breathe. "Hey, you," I say, moving to within a few steps of her. "Doing all right there?"

She looks at me, her face creased with puzzlement. Then she shakes her head, and a fog seems to lift, and for the first time she sees me and says, "Been better."

"I know how you feel."

She looks again to the SNAX machine, where her reflection hovers like a ghost. "Nobody knows how I feel."

"No. You're wrong. I know."

At first C6 seems to get angry, her face cragging up, but then I say, "You feel like you would feel if you were hurrying along and smacked your shin against the corner of the coffee table. You feel like you want to yell a lot. The pain hasn't completely arrived, but you can see it coming, and you want to yell at it, scare it off." I go to the fridge labeled A-K and remove from it my sack lunch and sit down at one of the five tables staggered throughout the room. "Something like that, anyway."

An awkward silence follows, in which I eat my ham sandwich and C6 studies me closely, no doubt recognizing in me some common damage, some likeness of herself.

Then C6 says, "Can't seem to figure out what I want," nodding at the vending machine. "I've been staring at all these goodies for twenty minutes, and I'll be darned if I know what I want." She forces a laugh and then says with some curiosity in her voice, "Hey, what's with your eye?"

I cup a hand to my ear like a seashell, like: Say again?

"Your eyeball." She points and then draws her finger back as if she might catch something from me. "It's really red."

"Huh," I say and knuckle the corner of my eye as if to nudge away a loose eyelash. "Maybe I've got pinkeye. Must have picked it up off a doorknob."

"It's not pink. It's red. It's really, really red."

The nearest reflective surface is the SNAX machine. And she's right. My eye is red. The dark luscious red of an apple. I at once want to scream and pluck it out and suck on it.

"I think you should see somebody," C6 says.

"Maybe I should." I comb a hand back through my hair and feel a vaguely pleasant release as several dozen hairs come out by the roots, just like that, with hardly any effort. I hold my hand out before me and study the clump of hairs woven in between the fingers and the fresh scabs jewelling my knuckles and say to no one in particular, "Looks like I'm falling apart."

* * *

Have you ever been on the phone, canceling a credit card or talking to your mother, when all of a sudden—with a pop of static—another conversation bleeds into yours? Probably. It happens a lot, with so many radio signals hissing through the air. What you might not know is, what you're hearing might have been said a minute ago or a day ago or a week ago or a month ago. Years ago.

When you speak into the receiver, your words are compressed into an electronic signal that bounces from phone to tower to satellite to phone, traveling thousands of miles, even if you're talking to your next-door neighbor, Joe. Which means there's plenty of room for a signal to ricochet or duplicate or get lost. Which means there are so many words—the ghosts of old conversations—floating all around us.

Consider this possibility. You pick up your phone and hear a voice—your voice—engaged in some ancient conversation, like that time in high school when you asked Natasha Flatt out for coffee and she made an excuse about her cat being sick. It's like a conversation shouted into a canyon, its words bouncing off walls to eventually come fluttering back to you, warped and soft and sounding like somebody else.

Sometimes this is what my memory feels like. An image or a conversation or a place will rise to the surface of my mind, and I'll recognize it vaguely, not knowing if I experienced it or saw it on television or invented it altogether.

Whenever I try to fix my attention on something, a red light goes on in my head, and I'm like a bird circling in confusion.

* * *

I find myself on the sidewalk of a new hillside development called Bear Brook. Here all the streets have names like Kodiak and Grizzly. All around me are two-story houses of a similar design, with freshly painted gray siding and river-rock entryways and cathedral windows rising above their front doors to reveal chandeliers in the foyer of each. Each home has a sizable lot that runs up against a pine forest. And each costs more than I would make in twenty years with West Teleservices.

A garbage truck rushes past me, raising tiny tornadoes of dust and trash, and I raise my hand to shield my face and notice a number written on the back of it, just below my knuckles—13743—and though I am sure it will occur to me later, for the moment I can't for the life of me remember what it means.

At that moment a bird swoops toward a nearby house. Mistaking the window for a piece of sky, it strikes the glass with a thud and falls into the rose garden beneath it, absently fluttering its wings; soon it goes still. I rush across the lawn and into the garden and bend over to get a better look at it. A bubble of blood grows from its beak and pops. I do not know why, but I reach through the thorns and pick up the bird and stroke its cool, reddish feathers. Its complete lack of weight and its stillness overwhelm me.

When the bird fell, something fell off a shelf inside me—a nice, gold-framed picture of my life, what I dreamed it would be, full of sunshine and ice cream and go-go dancers. It tumbled down and shattered, and my smiling face dissolved into the distressed expression reflected in the living room window before me.

I look alarmingly ugly. My eyes are black-bagged. My skin is yellow. My upper lip is raised to reveal long, thin teeth. Mine is the sort of face that belongs to someone who bites the heads off chickens in a carnival pit, not the sort that belongs to a man who cradles in his hands a tiny red-winged blackbird. The vision of me, coupled with the vision of what I once dreamed I would be—handsome, wealthy, feared by men and cherished by women—assaults me, the ridiculousness of it and also the terror, the realization that I have crept to the edge of a void and am on the verge of falling in, barely balanced.

And then my eyes refocus, concentrating on a farther distance, where through the window I see a man rising from a couch and approaching me. He is tall and square-shouldered. His hair is the color of dried blood on a bandage. He looks at me with derision, saying through the glass, "The hell do you think you're doing on my property?" without saying a word.

I drop the bird and raise my hand, not quite waving, the gesture more like holding up something dark to the light. He does not move except to narrow his eyes further. There's a stone pagoda at the edge of the garden, and when I take several steps back my heel catches against it. I stumble and then lose my balance entirely, falling hard, sprawling out on the lawn. The gray expanse of the sky fills my vision. Moisture from the grass seeps into my jeans and dampens my underwear. My testicles tighten like a fist.

In the window the man continues to watch me. He has a little red mustache, and he fingers it. Then he disappears from sight, moving away from the window and toward the front door.

Just before I stagger off the lawn and hurry along the sidewalk and retreat from this place, my eyes zero in on the porch, waiting for the man to appear there, and I catch sight of the address: 13743.

And then I am off and running. A siren announces itself nearby. The air seems to vibrate with its noise. It is a police cruiser, I'm certain, though how I can tell the difference between it and an ambulance, I don't know. Either way, someone is in trouble.

* * *

The body was blackened by its lengthy exposure to radio frequency fields. Cooked. Like a marshmallow left too long over flame. This is why the deputies shut off the transmitters, when they climbed the tower.

Z-21 interviewed Jack Millhouse, a professor of radiation biology at Oregon State. He had a beard, and he stroked it thoughtfully. He said that climbing the tower would expose a person to radio frequencies so powerful they would cook the skin. "I'd ask around at the ER," he said. "See if somebody has come in with radiation burns."

Then they interviewed a woman in a yellow, too-large T-shirt and purple stretch pants. She lived nearby and had seen the commotion from her living room window. She thought a man was preparing to jump, she said. So she came running in the hopes of praying him down. She had a blank, round face no one would ever call beautiful. "It's just awful," she said, her lips disappearing as she tightened her mouth. "It's the most horrible thing in the world, and it's right here, and we don't know why."

* * *

I know I am not the only one who has been cut off by a swerving car in traffic or yelled at by a teacher in a classroom or laughed at by a woman in a bar. I am not the only one who has wished someone dead and imagined how it might happen, pleasuring in the goriest details.

Here is how it might happen:

I am in a kitchen with duck-patterned wallpaper. I stand over a man with a Gerber hunting knife in my hand. There is blood dripping off the knife, and there is blood coming out of the man. Gouts of it. It matches the color of his hair. A forked vein rises on his forehead to reveal the panicked beating of his heart. A gray string of saliva webs the corner of his mouth. He holds his hands out, waving me away, and I cut my way through them.

A dog barks from the hallway, and the man screams a repulsive scream, a girlish scream, and all this noise sounds to me far away, like a conversation overheard between pops of static.

I am aware of my muscles and their purpose as never before, using them to place the knife, putting it finally to the man's chest, where it will make the most difference.

At first the blade won't budge, caught on a rib, and then it slips past the bone and into the soft red interior, deeper and then deeper still, with the same feeling you get when you break through that final restraining grip and enter a woman fully. The response is just as cathartic: a shriek, a gasp, a stiffening of the limbs followed by a terrible shivering that eventually gives way to a great, calming release.

There is blood everywhere—on the knife, on the floor, gurgling from the newly rendered wound that looks so much like a mouth—and the man's eyes are open and empty, and his sharp pink tongue lolls out the side of his mouth. I am amazed at the thrill I feel.

When I surprised him, only a few minutes ago, he was on the phone. I spot it now, on the shale floor, with a halo of blood around it. I pick it up and bring it to my ear and hope for the familiar, calming murmur of the dial tone.

Instead I hear a voice. "Hello?" it says.

* * *

One day, I think, maybe I'll write a story about all of this. Something permanent. So that I can trace every sentence and find my way to the end and back to the beginning without worrying about losing my way.

The telling would be complicated.

To write a story like this you would have to talk about what it means to speak into a headset all day, reading from a script you don't believe in, conversing with bodiless voices that snarl with hatred, voices that want to claw out your eyes and scissor off your tongue. And you would have to show what that does to a person, experiencing such a routine day after day, with no relief except for the occasional coffee break where you talk about the television show you watched last night.

And you would have to explain how the man named Pete Johnston sort of leaned and sort of collapsed against the fridge, how a magnet fell to the linoleum with a clack after you flashed the knife in a silvery arc across his face and then his outstretched hand and then into that soft basin behind the collarbone. After that came blood. And screaming. Again you stabbed the body, in the thigh, the belly, your muscles pulsing with a red electricity. Something inside you, some internal switch, had been triggered, filling you with an unthinking adrenaline that made you feel capable of turning over Volkswagens, punching through concrete, tearing phone books in half.

And you would have to end this story by explaining what it felt like to pull the body from the trunk of your car and hoist it to your shoulder and begin to climb the tower—one rung, then another—going slowly. You breathed raggedly. The dampness of your sweat mingled with the dampness of blood. From here—thirty, then forty, then fifty feet off the ground—you could see the chains of light on Route 97 and Highway 100, each bright link belonging to a machine that carried inside it a man who could lose control in an instant, distracted by the radio or startled by a deer or overwhelmed by tiredness, careening off the asphalt and into the surrounding woods. It could happen to anyone.

Your thighs trembled. You were weary, dizzy. Your fillings tingled, and a funny baked taste filled your mouth. The edges of your eyes went white and then crazy with streaks of color. But you continued climbing, with the wind tugging at your body, with the blackness of the night and the black shapes of birds all around you, the birds swirling through the air like ashes thrown from a fire. And let's not forget the sound—the sound of the tower—how it sounded almost like words. The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that coursed through you in dark conversation.

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