Page 32 of Them

He stopped in the center of the yard and began to dig in slow, methodical strokes. It felt good, taking his time for once. He didn’t stop, and neither did the radio, though he’d lowered the volume a little.

A couple of songs later, the man had dug a skull-sized hole six or seven inches deep. He went back inside, taking the radio with him, and returned with a number of objects: the old, corroded batteries he’d stripped from the radio, the to-do list he’d torn out of the bedside notepad, and the bloodied shirt he’d been wearing at the waterfall. From his breast pocket, he withdrew one additional object—a spent bullet casing.

The bullet he’d used to kill a man in Florida.

He placed everything into the center of the hole and began filling it with dirt. It was a shallow grave, but a resting place, nonetheless.

The man wiped his dirty hands on the grass, got to his feet, and slowly wandered over to the fence. He reached out and gripped one of the wooden pickets, struggled to break it free, but eventually did so with a deep grunt and a heave that landed him right on his ass.

Under the waxing eye of the sickle moon, he drew his multi-tool and began carving in a castaway’s rough handwriting:

R.I.P. ROCKIN’ RAY

AND EVERYONE ELSE

ROANOKE, VA

He wasn’t sure if it was cruel or something else. He didn’t know their names. He barely knew his own. He wanted someone to talk to, at least apologize to, but as he hammered in the makeshift memorial, he doubted he would ever have the chance.

He spent much of the next week listening to the radio, which broadcasted about four more nights of songs before the playlist returned to “Atlantic City” and the loop began all over again. Every day, an hour before sunrise, the music automatically cut out, and didn’t return until well after sunset. The man didn’t mind, though. In fact, he was grateful for Rockin’ Ray’s foresight. Now, he could fall asleep to the melodies, drown out his tiresome, useless fears. And wake up again to their angelic tones.

The music brought upon lovely dreams. One night, he was roaming a bustling futuristic city where every surface seemed to be a window or a solar panel, only to awake and discover it had apparently been inspired by Electric Light Orchestra’s “Xanadu.” In a separate vision, spurred about by “Fast Car” from Tracy Chapman, he dreamed he was driving down a long desert highway, wearing a nice suit and cheap novelty sunglasses. The entire car was upholstered with shiny red leather.

In one particular dream though, the man saw his mother. She was dancing, hands and feet moving in mesmerizing sync. The radio mounted below one of the kitchen cabinets had a CD player, and the voice slipping out from its static-struck speakers was almost as beautiful as Mom’s. Probably his own bias seeping in, but to him, it was the truth. How old was he in this living memory? Five? Six? Old enough to stand and take his mother’s hand as she swung him to and fro, their bare soles pattering on the linoleum.

When the man woke up that night, Whitney Houston was just beginning to fade away; the song was “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).” Whitney was Mom’s favorite. She liked that song, but she loved that album. “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” “Love Is a Contact Sport,” “So Emotional,” the man knew them all word for word. But when he played them back in his head, it wasn’t “the Voice” he heard. It was Mom’s. It was always Mom’s.

After that dream, the man turned off the radio and tried to will the tears back into his eyes. It didn’t work, but he attempted to anyway, at least long enough that the saline eventually dried up. Only then did he get out of bed and turn the music back on. The rest of that night was outwardly uneventful, but his insides never stopped wanting to cry.

As the desire to eat returned, it did so with tremendous power. The man was glad he’d settled in a neighborhood. It became his own personal grocery store, as it probably once had been for an army of hungry metal chimeras. He ate well and drank bottled water free of spigot rust and the lingering taste of WD-40. He found himself downing so much plastic, and so seldom using his refillable canteen, that he began to feel guilty.

But then he reminded himself: It’s all trash now. Everything we left behind. Garbage. Scorpions don’t have any use for it. Let them choke on our waste. It’s the least they can do.

Still, whenever he tossed a piece of litter onto a desolate street—because who was there to judge?—he couldn’t help but stop and turn around to pick it up.

As the days passed, numbered by tally marks on the notepad, the man slowly began to feel competent again. Confident. The need to record time stamps faded as his memory returned. For the first time in a long while, it felt like things were looking up. He had Rockin’ Roanoke Ray to thank for much of that improvement.

The man was near enough to Roanoke. The Chesapeake was close by. She, or whatever essence of Her remained, was drawing near. Whatever essence remained. But that was okay. The man had come to terms with it. I’ll be okay. Need to stop trying to lay claim to a girl I haven’t seen in years. A girl that might not even be alive. Not very feminist of me. He snorted an ugly laugh. Should let Her go. Let go of everything.

He visited Ray’s memorial every night with the radio cranked up to a volume that should’ve been too loud for comfort. He lay on the cool grass and watched the sky. Sometimes clouds, invisible in the darkness, obscured his sight, but mostly the man saw luminous, meandering stars that seemed to roam as they pleased. Once he thought he saw an airplane, but it was only a trawling comet. Light-years away. The stars looked so tiny, thousands of flickering pinpricks floating on the fabric of night, but he knew they were so much more.

Parallax. That’s the word.

There was no light pollution. The man was grateful for that. Some things had improved in humanity’s absence. He didn’t mind thinking that. Maybe the world hadn’t gone to an entirely dark place after all. It had simply moved on. If a small part of him didn’t believe that, he was almost certain that he would’ve found himself in the land of Rockin’ Ray long ago, a static soul searching for solace among change.

Yet what beauty had the man left behind? What did he have to show compared with Ray? To the miraculous music that never died or got sick? No glory in survival. Not with the things I’ve done. The things I try to forget.

Sometimes, on the bedside notepad, he doodled aimlessly, random shapes scrawled with silent restlessness. Usually, the shapes were triangles.

Ten days after he stopped to sleep in the basement bedroom, once again kneeling alongside the memorial, the man shivered as if someone had stepped on his grave. And perhaps someone had, but there weren’t many people stepping much of anywhere these days. Something was bothering him, itching at the corners of his brain. Then, as a Bee Gees song faded and Ray’s monologue began again, the man had a revelation.

He’d never bothered to check beyond Roanoke’s 93.1 station.

He didn’t move with the urgency of epiphany. Instead, he carefully drew out the notepad and scribbled down 93.1. He knew he’d remember the station number after hearing Ray’s dirge a hundred times over, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance. He was done with chance.

The man seated himself in a crisscross position and reached his fingers to the radio dial.

The first click came the slowest—a part of the man suddenly terrified to leave the comfort of the music—but it wasn’t long before he was cutting through the static channels with empty fervor. It wasn’t hope that drove him, merely diligence. The faster he ensured that no other radio stations were broadcasting, the quicker he could return to the music again.