OFFRAMP
Late one night, very late, when nearly everyone has gone to bed and most of them are asleep, a million street lights and fast food signs reflect off the scattering clouds of a summer thunderstorm and cast dim illumination across the eerie landscape.
He stands in the desolate center of an embryonic freeway, alone atop a sand dune. Amid hastily sculptured acres of lifeless dirt, he stares unfocused across the accumulated construction debris of broken wood, discarded concrete from a previous era and tangled rebar. His eyes can’t focus when he looks in the deep chasms between the smooth caissons and abutments. He wonders what is down there in those shadows.
He walks alone in the dim light, his fingers occasionally lingering along smooth, virgin surfaces, still fresh and untouched by the stress of highway travelers. Heavy machinery sits at rest, waiting for retrieval from months of digging, pushing, pounding and scarring the land.
Three months ago, these snarling orange construction machines pulverized a distant generation of streets and suburban houses, disintegrating someone’s postwar American fantasy, crushed under its own momentum. A thousand yards beyond this nascent overpass, his small trailer squats alongside the soon to debut stretch of Interstate Whatever.
He hears the distant whine of a downshifting jet as it approaches the airport, off to the south. The heavy machinery reminds him of when he was a boy, playing in the backyard and saw the massive graders and bulldozers building the new freeway and thought them giant insects, massive mantises, humming bumblebees the size of locomotives, angry metal beings chewing up the landscape and coming down from the freeway embankment to crush him.
While he played, the metallic shell of a scorpion shined vivid red on the wall next to the patio. He stood transfixed in the baking desert dusk. His mother screamed and his father swatted the scorpion with a nearby broom. The scorpion didn’t die right away but staggered around in a twitching circle, jerking like a broken wind-up toy, stinging itself in the back repeatedly. Watching it kept him transfixed, watching, mute, fascinated. He reached out to touch it, his father jerked him back and sent him flying, falling to the pavement, bouncing his head off the concrete. He woke later with the scorpion’s jitterbug death etched forever in his memory.
Bulldozed dirt cascades down from the raised freeway berm. Below and a short distance away, the last line of recent homebuilding stands with a few lights and mostly dark windows overlooking empty driveways. Through one window he sees what he thinks might be a test pattern and then looks away. No one has test patterns anymore but the thought stays with him and he thinks about the patterns in his life and how he failed his tests numerous times, once with fatal results. He drank then to have a good time and it was good until it wasn’t and then it wasn’t good at all. He drinks now to forget and drinks until he remembers nothing, not even how to walk, sometimes rolling his desk chair to the edge of the adjacent bed, rolling over onto the mattress and burying his head in the pillow to try to sleep away the sorrow.
At one time a scholarship student and now a poorly paid night watchman, he wanders the freshly crafted roadbed, smelling sharply of new concrete. Some rebellious weeds are reclaiming the berms and a few sneak their heads up in the median, still waiting for paint and concrete barriers. In the dim glow of reflected lights, he kicks at the small, scattered construction debris still left behind on the poured and brushed surface. He likes to think of himself as a watchdog, overseeing the callous construction oversights perpetrated by the megacorps who create these massive fabrications. He stops and stares into the distance, alone along the edge of the dense suburbs, alone in his alertness, amidst this great sleeping mind, save for the lights that signal a flickering humanity, like random flashes of insight in between sips from his favorite pint of “Old Shitheel,” as his cousin calls the whiskey they drink when he visits.
He thinks a flashlight only dulls the senses making it more difficult to see into the dark spaces, to see the movement of creatures in the dark. Without it, he patrols from one cement mass to another, leaping down from fresh abutments, peering into the calligraphy of twisted rebar in the debris piles. The true eye is only tested in the dark. The true eye is the touch. Sight is only for those who can’t feel. His touch is magic and he can feel vibrations through the cold density of the freshly poured concrete. “Let us use the sonar at those fingertips,” he lightheartedly utters to himself, like a preacher guiding the lost to a sense of meaning and redemption.
“With these fingers,” he says to himself in the night, “I can find the flaws in any fool’s foundation.” Until first light, he roams the newly born freeway, running his fingers along the textures, surfaces and peering into the spaces in between. Then he writes a report in the amber light of his small trailer, before drinking a pint of forgetfulness and laying down to sleep through the remainder of the day. No longer so skilled with words, especially when he’s drunk, he often draws diagrams to hopefully illustrate what he’s seen. The crude characters linger somewhere between diagrams and cryptic ideograms that line the corridors of hallways into places he can’t talk about, doesn’t want anyone to know about and, try as he might, can’t hide.
As the sun sets the following day and as nighttime nears, the night watchman sits at his desk, tuning the radio dial to the talk show station he adheres to, with its distant signal hard to find and frequently broken by static and gaps of silence. The later it gets, the clearer the signal. To him, the shows offer skillful and reaffirming insights into the corrupt nature of his world, our world, the world without accounting for all the betrayal, remorseless exploitation and generally immoral behavior in our daily lives.
Tuned in, he hears, through the static, “Next up in our ongoing conversation about recent discoveries of ancient artifacts and how they shed light on our current political crisis is an interview with a well known researcher, who you will all recognize.” Then comes a long series of commercials. He switches off the radio and prepares for his patrol.
Darkness comes and the watchman resumes his duties. He steps out into the windy night and closes the door behind him, having to push against the wind. The broadcast signal doesn’t die and he hears it as he shuffles through the dirt to the raised dais of the freeway tonight. He envisions the broad and nearly towering roadbed as a podium from which the titans of industry dictate the pathways of our lives.
He can hear the interview’s closing statements about how the recent discovery of the Holy Grail, kept hidden from public knowledge, is being used to decipher the machinations of those in power, its Braille-like engraved message linking the political subterfuge of the ancient world with present day struggles for power and wealth.
“…and thank you for all those amazing insights,” says the host, “and I hope everyone can go out and purchase your best seller, The Braille On The Grail. After a short break, we’ll open the phone lines to callers. Be right back.”
Now there is only the sound of the wind and he climbs the freeway berm, breathes in deep and surveys the vast, luminous, concrete panorama. As he begins his walk, he can hear the voices again and knows the show has come back for him. He knew it would. “Good evening, caller number one. What’s on your mind tonight?”
“Yeah, it’s me again, the mind of a whiz kid, the soul of a urinal. Last night I dreamed I was a toilet and I said to myself, ‘What’s it like being a toilet?’ I learned I was full of shit. Of course, my dad thinks I’m full of shit. He’s shit and I’m pretty well full of him, just about all I can take.” The teenage voice goes on and on and the watchman can hear the host trying to reshape the call-in, with little or no success. The signal fades.
With or without the distorted wavelengths, his mind leapfrogs from meaning to meaning, images falling together and falling apart, as in a kaleidoscope, disintegrating with a twist of the wrist, his once formidable intellect broken into fragments that mingle and disintegrate as the waves of awareness come and go. He flickers with moments of insight, devoid of continuity, lacking substance in their vaporous swirls of vaguely related imagery, sowing brilliance during tenuous fractions of cohesion, dissolving into translucent and expansive gaps of emotional chaos. He fills those gaps with whiskey, strong and putrid in the dark.
He knows the distant voice. He hears it like a ringing in his ears. As the morning sun splits the clods and creeps through the cracks of the boards nailed across his windows, he tries to sleep but he can’t stop hearing it. He switches off the radio so many times, he’s no longer sure which is which. Is it off? Is it turning itself on? “Is this auto-erotic radio? Otto’s Ear Attic Radio Show? Awful erratic radio, though, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day the voice of erratic poetry for a fractured age,” lurching from point to point, never quite nearing the seamless blend of metaphorical elegance that might transcend its awkwardness. He realizes it’s his son, broadcasting from a deserted ammunition bunker somewhere near… …somewhere near… …another place. That’s the part he can turn off.
Late at night, when vague and terrible things can happen, the son stays up all night at the control board, programming his own channel from his bootleg broadcast bunker. The erratic signal bounces off hills, mountains, canyon walls and overcast skies. On the cracked, concrete wall of the subterranean chamber, he’s taped up posters to remind him of music and its magic. Elsewhere, taped to the wall are notes and messages he leaves for himself to connect all the meaning.
One message arrived one day without him writing it or knowing how it got there. It says, “Call when you can.” He knows who wrote it and he’d call but he’d rather forget the number.
Beside him sits a young woman, cross-legged, sitting on an old army cot, wearing faded jeans and a v-neck sweater, absentmindedly scratching at the mosquito bite above her breasts.