Let All the Children Boogie Read online

  “Why do we scream at each other?” I said, and then we launched into the chorus with one wobbly crooked magnificent voice.

  My first view of Fell’s house was also my first view of Fell’s mother. She sat on the front porch wearing several scarves, smoking.

  “Fuck,” Fell said. “Fuck me, times ten thousand. I thought for sure she’d still be at work.”

  “We can go,” I said. I’d been excited to see the house, for that insight into who Fell was and what had helped make them, but now panic was pulling hard at my hair. Fell’s fear of the woman was contagious.

  “No,” Fell said. “If I act like she can’t hurt me, sooner or later she really won’t be able to.”

  She laughed when she saw me. “Of course it’s a girl.”

  “Mrs. Tanzillo, I’m Laurie,” I said, holding out my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  My good manners threw her off. She shook my hand with a raised eyebrow, like she was waiting to see what kind of trick I was trying to pull. I smelled alcohol. Old, baked-in alcohol, the kind that seeps from the pores of aging drunks. Which I guess she was.

  “Don’t you two turn my home into a den of obscenity,” she called after us, as we headed in.

  Fell let the door slam, and then exhaled: “God, she is such an asshole.”

  The house was sadder than I’d been expecting. Smaller; smellier; heaped with strange piles. Newspapers, flattened plastic bags, ancient water-stained unopened envelopes. A litter box, badly in need of emptying, and then probably burning. My parents were poor, but not poor like this.

  “You’re shaking,” I said, and pulled Fell into a hug.

  They stiffened. Wriggled free. “Not here.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Sorry.”

  The TV was on. Squabbling among the former Soviet states. A bad divorce, except with sixteen partners instead of two, and with thermonuclear warheads instead of children. I watched it, because looking around the room—or looking at Fell looking at me—made me nauseous. A talking head grinned, said: “It’s naïve to think our children will get to grow up without the threat of nuclear war. There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle.”

  Fell talked fast, the shaking audible in every word. “This was a terrible idea. I felt good about us, like, it wouldn’t matter what this place looked like or what you thought of it, because you know I’m not this, it’s just the place where I am until I can be somewhere else, but now, I’m not so sure, I think I should probably take you home.”

  So Fell wasn’t fearless. Wasn’t superhuman.

  So it was in Fell too. Whatever was in me. Something so small, that could chain down someone so magnificent.

  Of course I should have put up more of a fight. Said how it didn’t matter. But I hated seeing Fell like this. If Fell was afraid, what hope was there for me? Fell, who welcomed every awful thing the world had to show us. Fell was my only hope, but not this Fell. So I shrugged and said, “whatever you want,” feeling awful about it already, and we turned around and went right back outside, and Mrs. Tanzillo thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and we didn’t talk the whole ride home.

  * * *

  “That is what it sounds like when doves cry,” Ms. Jackson said, as the spiraling keyboard riff faded out, as the drum machine loop wound down.

  I’d called the song in. I wondered if Fell was listening, if they knew what it meant. How hard it had been for me to dial that number. How bare the floor beside me was. How cold. How much my chest hurt.

  “This extended block of uninterrupted songs is brought to you by Friendly Honda,” she said. “They’re not on Route Nine. Let’s stick with Prince, shall we? Dig a little deeper. A B-side. ‘Erotic City.’” Her laugh here was raw and throaty, barely a laugh at all, closer to a grumble of remembered pleasure. Some erotic city she’d taken someone to, ages ago.

  The song started. A keyboard and a bass doing dirty, dirty things together. Strutting, strolling. Becoming one thing, one lewd gorgeous sound that made me shiver.

  I imagined Fell listening. Our minds entwined inside the song. An intimacy unencumbered by flawed bodies, troubled minds, or the fear of what could go wrong when we put them together. Small voices inside our heads that made us miserable.

  What a magnificent thing we would be. If Fell ever spoke to me again. If we could make whatever our weird thing was work.

  Just when things were getting good, as Prince was shifting to the chorus, the static sizzle:

  “There are a million ways I could have done this. But anything else, something more straightforward, well, I thought it might just blow your minds. Cause panic. Do the opposite thing, from what I wanted to accomplish.”

  Prince and the star man struggled for dominance, dirty talk giving way to flanged static only to steal back center stage. I only heard one more intelligible phrase before the intruder cut out altogether, even though I stayed up until three in the morning to see if they’d return:

  “—know it’s all worthwhile—”

  * * *

  “I want to find her,” Fell said, the next day, when I walked out the front door and there they were, sitting on my front steps.

  I hid my shock, my happiness. My shame. My guilt. “Find who?”

  “The voice in the night. The one Ms. Jackson keeps calling the star man.”

  I sat down. “You think it’s a she?”

  Fell shrugged. I had been imagining the voice belonged to a male, but now that I thought about it I heard how sexless it was, how mechanical. Could be anything, in the ear of the beholder.

  Cold wind swung tree branches against the side of my house, sounding like someone awful knocking at the door. I could not unhunch my shoulders. The magnitude of my awfulness was such that I didn’t know where to start. What to apologize for first.

  “How would we even begin to do something like that?” I asked instead.

  Fell picked up something I hadn’t seen before. The size of three record album sleeves laid out in a row. Four horizontal lines of thin metal, with a single vertical line down the middle.

  “A directional antenna,” they said. “It picks up radio signals, but it’s sensitive to the direction of the origin signal. Point it directly at the source and you get a strong signal; point it away and you’ll get a faint one. Plug it into this receiver”—Fell held up a hefty army-green box—“and we can take measurements in multiple directions until we find the right one.”

  They talked like everything was fine, but their face was so tight that I knew nothing was.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked, making my voice laugh. “And how do you know how to use it?”

  “I told you, machines are kind of my thing.”

  “So, wait, we just turn it around until we find the signal, and then go in that direction?”

  “Not necessarily,” Fell said. “It tells direction, but not distance. So the signal could be three miles away, or three thousand, depending on how strong it is. With just one measurement, we could be driving into the wilderness for days.” Fell produced a map from the inner workings of the complex blazer they wore. “So the best way to do it is to take a measurement from one place, draw a line on the map that corresponds precisely to the signal, and then go to another location and take another measurement, and draw another precise line on the map—”

  “And the point where they meet is the probable location!” I said, excited.

  “It’s called triangulation,” Fell said.

  “Amazing. But for real. How do you know all this?”

  “My uncle, he learned this from my grandfather, who did it in the war. Transmitter hunting is kind of a nerd game, for amateur radio operators. They call it foxtailing.”

  “Your uncle as in your mother’s brother?”

  Fell nodded. And there it was, the subject I’d been trying to avoid.

  “He was the closest thing to a dad that I had,” Fell said. “We used to have so much fun together. Didn’t give a shit about sports or
any of that standard dude shit. He was into weird shit like directional antennas and science fiction. Then he met this girl, and moved to Omaha with her. Fucking Omaha. I’m sorry about the other day, at my mom’s. I acted like an idiot.”

  “You acted like an idiot? Don’t be dumb, Fell—that was all me. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I didn’t know how to react when I saw how upset you were. I should have stayed. I wanted to stay.”

  Fell grabbed my hand. I had so much more to say, and I imagine so did Fell, but we did not need a word of it.

  Mom might be watching out the window, I thought, but did not let go of Fell’s hand.

  “What if the source of the signal is moving?”

  Fell nodded. “I thought about that. I don’t have a good solution. We just have to hope that’s not the case, or we’ll be triangulating bullshit.”

  “It’s not the end of the world, if we end up standing in some empty field together.”

  * * *

  We drove to the top of Mount Merino, to take our first measurement. And then we waited. Kept the car running, blasting the Graveyard Shift from shitty speakers. Across the street was a guardrail, and then a sheer drop to the river beneath us. The train tracks alongside it. We lay on the hood and looked at stars.

  “You won’t run out of gas like this?”

  “The average car can idle for ninety-two hours—that’s just under four days—on a full tank of gas, which is what we have,” Fell said. “The battery will die long before we run out of gas.”

  I marveled at the intricacies of Fell’s mechanical knowledge, but I had some knowledge of my own to share. I told Fell about my computer classes, and how, yeah, computers were incredible, they could do anything. Fell was as impressed as I’d hoped they’d be, but they kept asking me questions about the hardware that I couldn’t answer. All I knew was software. Fell looked at programming the way I looked at machines: probably fascinating, but way over my head.

  Fell told me about transistors, and how processing power was increasing exponentially; had been for decades. How eventually computers would be able to store as much information and process as many simultaneous operations as swiftly as a human brain. Then Fell showed me how to work the antenna, read the receiver, detect signal strength. We practiced on other radio stations, penciled lines on the map.

  Then three hours passed. We were way past my curfew, and the star man hadn’t shown.

  “Fuck it,” Fell said, at the end of Ms. Jackson’s program. “Star person stood us up. We should go for a long drive. Charge the battery backup.”

  “Okay,” I said, just assuming Fell was right and that was how those worked.

  “Your parents won’t mind?”

  “Nah,” I said, although they absolutely would, if they caught me sneaking back in, and there was a very good chance that they would because I am extremely clumsy, but that was the future and I didn’t care about that, I only cared about the here and the now with Fell in Fell’s car on this freezing night on this weird planet in this mediocre galaxy.

  The radio show after Graveyard Shift was significantly less awesome, but we had to stick with it. Who knew whether star person would stumble onto any other stations. I had my portable radio and my headphones, so that I could periodically coast back and forth across the radio dial in search of our elusive visitor, but somehow I knew that this would be fruitless. For whatever reason, the signal was pegged to this specific station.

  The new DJ talked too much between songs, and he had the voice of a gym teacher. The opening notes of “Where Is My Mind” came on and we both started screaming, but this asshole kept rambling on about a concert in Albany coming up next weekend, and he only stopped when the singer started singing.

  “Goddamn him,” Fell said, and then—static—then—

  “—that’s why I’m doing this, I guess. To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now. And the one you embrace will be the one you end up with.”

  As soon as the voice began, Fell raised the antenna, held it out like a pistol. Turned slowly. We watched the receiver respond to the signal’s varying strength, and hastily drew a bold thick line on the map when we found it. Cheered. Watched our breath billow.

  “Told you he or she was a time traveler!” Fell said.

  “That’s not what that means.”

  “What does it mean, then?”

  “We’re picking up lines of dialogue from a movie, maybe. Or love letters from a lunatic. We should keep driving, wait for another one.”

  “It’s late,” Fell said. “My mom’s not doing so well, lately.”

  The temperature dropped twenty degrees. The final notes of “Where Is My Mind” faded away.

  “You can talk to me about it,” I said, gulping down air as the ground opened up beneath me. “Whatever you’re going through, I have your back. You know I love you, right?”

  “I love you too, Laurie,” but I could hear the unspoken rest of the sentence—like our minds had linked up already—like Fell knew, in a way I never would, how little love mattered.

  “We’ll go hunting tomorrow night,” I said.

  Fell nodded.

  * * *

  At school the next day, alone with the computer, I saw why Fell loved machines so much. Not because they were simple, but because the rules were clear. And when something went wrong, there was a way to fix it.

  * * *

  And the next night, hands clasped on the hood of Fell’s car again, listening to Ms. Jackson with the directional antenna balanced across our thighs, I thought—if only we were machines. The sturdiness of hardware; the clarity of software. Not these awful meat puppets, in this awful world. Heads full of awful voices holding us back.

  “I feel so good, when it’s just us,” Fell said, tapping into my thoughts with that eerie precision. “Our minds linked up inside the music. I want to stay there, forever.”

  “Maybe someday,” I said, nonsensically, and Fell had the kindness not to point out that it was nonsense. We were what we were. Damaged minds alone in dying bodies.

  Ms. Jackson exhaled smoke. “This one goes out to our friend the star man. Hope you get where you’re going, buddy.”

  I groaned at the opening chords. “Starman,” by David Bowie. “This song always makes me cry,” I whispered, the lump already emerging in my throat.

  Fell said, “I knew you were a Bowie girl.”

  We listened. The chorus hurt.

  Fell heard me sniffle. “Hear the way his voice rises, between ‘star’ and ‘man’?” they asked. “That’s the same octave jump as in the chorus of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ You hear it? Star-man; Some-where?”

  Fell was right. I’d listened to the song a million times before, and never noticed. And now for as long as I lived I’d never hear it without noticing. And now I was crying. Because the song was so beautiful; because Fell was so incredible; because the world was too awful for love like ours to last.

  The final chorus wound down:

  Let the children lose it

  Let the children use it

  Let all the children boogie

  And the guitar cranked up, and the background singers crooned, and we were doomed, Fell and me, I felt it as heavy as the skin on my bones, how impossible we were, how soon we’d be shattered, and then—there the voice was again:

  “The future is written, you might say. What will be will be. What’s the point of this? But so many futures are written. An infinite number, in fact. A billion trillion ways your story could end. I want to make sure you end up with the right future.”

  Fill raised the antenna. Turned slowly, searching for the signal. Found it. We drew a line on the map. We circled the spot where our two lines met.

  Both of us were crying, but Fell’s tears were happy ones.

  * * *

  Fell didn’t call me the next day, the way they say they would. Nor did they come by the house. And there was no answering machine at the
Tanzillo household, and no one picked up, no matter how many times I called.

  I told myself this was something sacred, something practically supernatural, to go to the spot on the map where our lines crossed, where the star person’s signal came from. So of course Fell was scared.

  I told myself that’s all it was.

  I told myself that, the whole long bike ride to Fell’s front door, where I knocked three times. The pounding echoed. How had I found the courage to come at all? What was I becoming?

  “Quit calling my house,” said Fell’s mom when she opened the door. I’d only seen her sitting down before. She was taller than I’d imagined. Her long loose gray hair would have been glamorous on anyone else. “Christ, I feel like I spend half my time watching the phone ring, waiting for you to give the hell up.”

  “You could pick it up, actually talk to me.”

  She shrugged. The gesture was the same as Fell’s, heavier on the left shoulder than the right, but this version oozed with cynicism and inertia instead of energy and exuberance. The news was on in the background, turned up too loud, more talking heads talking nuclear annihilation. On the way in, I’d passed more military trucks. Trailers getting set up along the Hudson River. Satellite dishes blooming like steel flowers.

  “Where’s Fell?”

  “Not here.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “Sometimes they go to sleep at their grandpa’s place.” Except Mrs. Tanzillo used the wrong gender pronouns, and clearly took great pleasure in doing so. “Old trailer, been abandoned since the man died ten years ago. Full of raccoon shit, and wasps in summer. I’ll tell Fell you dropped by though.” Her sweet smile made it clear she’d do no such thing, and then she shut the door in my face.

  I got on my bike.

  This pain, it was Fell’s. It wasn’t mine, and I couldn’t do anything to diminish it. I could ride away and never feel it again.

  I said that, but I didn’t believe it. I remembered what the star person had said. About how we could have a future that was magnificent or one that was terrifying, depending on which one we embraced.