Richard Static

Richard Static

This is the story of Richard, a man who always wanted to help, but never quite knew how to help, a man who said the wrong thing so much…well, not necessarily wrong, but overly complicated. Richard was a worried man, a serious man, and if we were to start at the end of his story, we would see him coming apart, literally disintegrating, pixelated by sound, torn to pieces by varying frequencies. Minutes before his pixilation/disintegration, he was a tired mess. His black pleated slacks and white button-up shirt plastered to his thin frame like plastic wrap. His hair gel washed down the storm drains, mixed with the runoff of a tropical storm. Dirty clouds faded like lumpy pillows on wrinkled grey sheets. The peeping-tom moon winked through these clouds and kicked open the door on a sunrise, spilling like orange juice across a TV tray, soaking a red shag horizon. Wind bit through him. The grass wet and waxy beneath him.

But this isn’t a story about the weather. This is a story about Richard hiccupping a burp and disappearing in a blip.

***

Richard grew up in a small North Carolina town with one traffic light. He lived in a tin roof farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Sun blared or rain tickled the tin like tiny jokes laughing into gutters. His Grandfather died when Richard still toddled, but his presence lingered in the marrow of a place—the Basset-Hound lamp in the den, the war-worn Carbine rifle propped in the hallway, the Monte Carlo in the driveway, collecting the dust of plowed fields.

Richard wished his Grandfather’s ghost would walk into the room. He talked to his Grandfather like he was there, but he ignored Richard.

His Granny worked third shift at a carpet plant. Whenever she woke up, her and Richard would sit together at the kitchen table. Granny snapped peas and yelled Wheel of Fortune answers at the television. Richard munched peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, crust and all. Granny’s hands twisted with arthritis. Her wrists rolled on knobby joints, always a task to be done—muscle memory wrapped in tissue paper.

Richard’s mother would come to visit, every now and then. His mother looked like her mother. Richard looked like a stranger. The women yelled in private. Richard listened through walls. He pulled the chain on the hound-dog lamp—click, light, click, darkness. He stared at the bulb under the shade until his vision splotched.

Granny was rocks and dirt roads. His Mother blew like a dust-filled breeze. The two couldn’t last for long in the same house for too long. He wanted to ask them to behave, to love one another more, but he couldn’t find the song to sing, the right words to say.

When Richard was alone with his Mother, she’d ask him about school or girls, he’d answer her reflection in the vanity mirror as she got ready to leave again. He’d ask to go with her.

“Come inside,” Granny would say from a creaky screen door. The car crunched rocks—the birds’ gave a disgusting whistle. The fizzle of a coca cola in a glass on a table. The pluck of a chord inside him. The shuffle of sounds.

***

Richard migrated south for college. In Charleston, he shared a house with three other business students. His roommates laughed in another room. Their house rotted, jammed between a locksmith shop to the left and a French confectioner to the right. Paisley tapestries covered peeling paint. His roommates sat on a couch with mismatched cushions. His room smelled of shaved metal and day-old dough.

Richard would crawl out of his window to smoke a joint on the roof—shingles, rotten and splintered, but the pitch was kind, only a slight slant. Over the roofs, the barge lights twinkled on the bay like floating, fallen stars. He’d scoot to the edge, where the gutters dangled loose, just a small leap to the ground. The city sat in uneven fences and narrow backyards and falling-down houses converted into apartments. The sounds of the city heaped together.

Once, Richard stretched out too stoned to climb back inside. Cries rose from below. Looking down from his ledge, he spied a little girl sprawled in one of those backyards. She laid on packed dirt and sprigs of spider grass. He could see into what must’ve been the girl’s house, four paint-chipped windowpanes, like four tiny drive-in movie screens. People talked around a table, laughed into wine glasses.

The little girl, no older than eight, curled fetal, just below those windows. She scratched at the earth, like she wanted the ground to swallow her whole. Richard could’ve whispered to her like an angel hovering above her, but he didn’t. Her sobs trapped in a vacuum, unheard by everyone except her and Richard and the dog next door that stood by the fence with a tilted head and perched ears.

Richard felt that familiar fizzle down his spine. The fizzle to a burn in the gut. He was struck mute, unable to find the words in the void, only the tinkling of metal chimes—empty, useless sound.

***

Richard met an English Major named Maggie. She was older than him. She talked a lot. Often, she told him how his quiet disposition made her want him more. She said things he liked to hear. She said things like, “Your efficiency of words showed restraint and strength.” She said his words meant more, because they were few. She kissed him with tornado force. They watched smart movies and when they watched dumb ones, she made smart comments about them. Richard would wait until the credits rolled and try to say something quippy. “Oh, this is my favorite part, I love when they list names and accomplishments…it’s like graduating from the movie.”

She’d smile, slap his shoulder. Sooner or later, they’d kiss in gusts and blusters.

She loved Irish poets and grapes, and she could toss one so far up in the air it’d hit the ceiling, but they always came down in her mouth. The whiz of the toss, the plop of the catch, the squish of the bite.

They married straight out of college. Got a house on the suburb side of the bridge. The distance sounds of lawnmowers on sodded lawns and freshly-painted firetrucks. Two years in, they had a daughter. They named her Rebecca, called her Bec. Richard used to watch Bec sleep, just like he saw all the Dads do in the movies. She grew older, looked like her mother. Only when she was troubled or angry could you see his faraway eyes and wrinkled brow.

At seven, Bec would sit alone in her room at night with all the lights off. She’d close her eyes tight and hope a ghost would come to her in the darkness. She hoped for something to scare her, anything. But their house was only five years old, and they were the only family who’d ever lived there. Still, Bec tried séance after séance to summon a wayward spirit. Any spirit would do. All she ever received—intrusive headlights of her Father’s car on the eggshell walls when he came home late from work.

***

The crack of eggs. The dimmed vroom of a car cranking.

Richard worked in a second-floor office. An old brick building converted from an industrial-aged boot factory, filled with fluorescent lights and cubicles and people on phones. People rarely came face to face, unless they marched to the breakroom for more coffee. Occasionally, people held meetings about what other people did in their cubicles.

Richard stared at in-boxes and out-boxes full of paper-clipped pages. Green file-folders stuffed with red bottom-lines. Stacked index card laminates of addendum tax-codes and state-law amendments and loopholes tacked to his cushioned wall. On his cubicle wall, directly in his line of sight, he’d hung a black and white Ansel Adams’ calendar. It was three years out of date, stuck on December.

Judy sat on the other side of Richard’s faux wall. He’d ask her questions about international bank codes through the wall, drifting down Ansel’s Snake River on the way to the Teton Mountains.

Rapids whirring. Judy’s voice droning.

Judy was quiet. She sneezed more than normal. Every day, she brought a microwave bag of popcorn and a piece of fruit for lunch. An orange on Monday, an apple on Tuesday, a pear on Wednesday, an apple again on Thursday (usually a Granny Smith), and Friday she would shake things up with a Kiwi or a star-fruit. Judy weighed more than she wanted to, and her skin never tanned. She only talked to three people in the office—Noreen, two cubicles down, Beverly in the glass office and Richard.

Judy’s conversations added up to Richard asking her a question and her responding with three words before Noreen or Beverly interrupted her with their giggles about a funny email they’d just read. Judy’s green eyes never glittered. They hunched behind tired eyelids, atop bags.

Judy went home to her cat, her Nicolas Sparks’ book and her chunked apple-spice candles, She’d take a deep breath, chug some wine and transform into Dominatrix Deana—a moderately successful queen of webcam S&M.

Judy’s cat o’ nine tails snapped the air. Her laptop dings another payment, dings another request to be dominated.

Once, late at night, Richard researched cures to his numbness, his inability to say the right thing, his need to take on the numbness of others. This worry, this burden, like a heap of broken things in a lumpy satchel upon his back until the straps ripped at his soft skin. An email popped up from Judy—no text or explanation, just a link. He clicked it and zap, there she was, Dominatrix Deana. Her leather mask wasn’t enough to hide Judy, her voice different and deep and in control. Richard knew she’d found her waystation, a way to lay her burden down. Where was his whip? Where was his release. He lay in bed and felt the hum of nothing grow into an anxious squeal.

***

Day after day in ticks and tocks, Richard’s wife would ask how he felt about Bec’s teacher or about getting a new car. She would ask how dinner was. Half the time, he’d say something, “good” or “fine” or a flat “great.” The other half, he’d say nothing. Richard stopped dropping funny one-liners after she finished talking. At first, Maggie thought his pent-up ideas must be so big that one day they’d burst insplash all over the floor, but the floor never got dirty from Richard’s ideas.

Night after night, Richard began to feel Maggie toss in bed. She whispered to the lumpy sheets that wrapped Richard’s body like a sarcophagus. Eventually, her whispers turned into burning wisps. “You’re so cold.” Her tone sharpened against the stone of Richard.

Richard wheezed fake snores from a possum stance. He didn’t know how to fix this, couldn’t see the fissure to fuse it back together, had no idea it had been there. He didn’t know how to roll over and put his arm around her and reassure her. He hunted and couldn’t find a phrase funny enough to break through what boomed there. It would pass. Even when she yanked the sheets and punched her pillow and cleared her throat with grunts and groans.

***

The synapsis fired, Richard smiled, thick in a dream. His wife sang from the bathroom, over the sound of the shower. A steam buzzed around him as he rose, pushed open the already cracked door. The humidity kissed him, wrapped around him. She sang “Sunday Kind of Love” or was it “Easy Like Sunday Morning.” Richard woke up. It was too late. He yawned loud, put on his robe and inched down the stairs. The house was clean. Parts of the house were empty. Little by little, Maggie had been packing, and he couldn’t think of a way to stop her. She’d finished while he slept. He knew the weight of his silence would’ve been too heavy for her if she had to work as he glared, always so empty. Why couldn’t he find the laugh? Why was he so tired?

The moving van roared alive. Maggie’s car already idled, whirred from the pumping air conditioner. It was weighted down except for two seats. She’d left the house’s front door cracked.

Richard walked barefoot out to the porch. The moving van jolted away, his brother-in-law at the wheel. Maggie followed in her car with Bec in the passenger seat. It was a beautiful day. Bec squinted from the sun and waved goodbye. Maybe Maggie smiled, Richard couldn’t tell.

Richard flinched when he heard the music from the car window. Bec belted the high notes. Maggie took the lows. It sounded like a church choir…no, it sounded like the thing that would bring him out of the void. The song that might reach down and pull him up, and like a new birth, the lyrics would launch from his mouth. He might be saved and singing along and clumsily dropping into a harmony. But the song faded and he forgot the words.

***

Richard sat in a meeting on a Monday morning. His boss repeated the same talking points as last week. A variation of the same questions came from the employees around the table. The same people gave the same pushback as last week. The same open-ended results. “I thought you said there are no bad ideas,” someone said.

This wasn’t a solution, Richard thought. He pushed away from the table, made his way for the glass door.

His boss asked, “Are you okay, Richard?”

Richard nodded all the way down the row of cubicles and under the EXIT sign and down the stairs. He bypassed his car on the way out of the parking garage—horns blared in the street. Down East Bay, past the outdoor markets, he weaved onto the uneven cobblestone of the side streets, ignored the delis he’d never eaten in, the specialty stores he’d never shopped, the coffee shop he couldn’t remember seeing before. He passed blank faces or snaps of conversations or people staring down at their phones, trapped in motion. Music from the shops and restaurants crammed together. The city unveiled and folded fetal and rose and barked and breathed smoke in his face. A string in his spine felt pulled and his legs pumped across the Battery’s grassy park and its statues and cannons. He stopped at the waterfront. A strange mumble cursed his lips.

The spring rain drizzled. People walked fast around him. Tiny diamonds tapdanced in the bay. He could hear it coming—the crackle of a flame, the burning of his gut. Palm trees shook loose unwanted fronds. Winds swept trash to the gutters. The city knew like an ex-lover, rerouted and pushed away the rain. Richard clinched the railings. His clothes blasted to his body. He faced the rain head-on. He screamed. Until his lungs deflated and his throat throbbed.

Cars slash through the knee-deep puddles beside him. Across the street, people on balconies blurred in the downpour. Voices lost. Richard felt his weight shift, felt his feet leave the broken sidewalk. Umbrellas passed under him. Bodies lost in the shadows. No one bothered to look up at Richard.

He wanted to call to them, let it out, let them in—see the wonder. But screams retreated and embers flared in his gulley. His blood, his bones, the flesh around them, his thoughts trapped in his skull, his brain burned, and he opened his mouth to pour his guts, the blaze erupted, caught hot air, and he rose higher.

He can see the house he lived in during college. That dirty, sad, little girl would be a woman now. Maybe she escaped. Maybe, she doesn’t exist anymore.

Here’s when it happens—the pixilation, the disintegration. Time chased time until it caught up and no longer existed. Richard felt weightless, like he rose through the air without rules. The rain reversed in a whoosh. Morning exploded. Richard strained for a message, a meaning, a scroll of credits to read how it was all made, but the frequency blurred. A new transmission fused his soundwaves—a pulse—roaring thunder and quiet sigh, roaring thunder and quiet sigh.

His body relaxed. His mind went fuzzy, hazed fuzzier still. Richard was Richard no more. His atoms unhitched. His pores widened until black holes opened and swallowed the matter around it, turned it all into music. The gore of unleashed, discordant, un-orchestrated sound. A body of sound, transcending, wafting in the in-between, blanketed in a scratchy frequency—a white noise.

***

Blocks away, Maggie wrote an email to Richard and saved it. He’d already snatched the message from the ether as her fingers tapped out the words, Talk to me. Talk to me. PLEASE, TALK TO ME!

She sat her phone beside the kitchen sink and gathered her coffee from the windowsill. She smiled at Bec sleeping on the couch. Unknowing, her daughter rolled over in her sleep and smiled back.

Maggie sat at her new bistro table in the corner of the kitchen. It only had two chairs. A small antique radio served as a centerpiece. She sipped her coffee and clicked it on. She turned the dial—only static. From station to station, hissing frequencies grasped for a friendly ear, transmitting in unheard languages.

A static shock—a sign, her fingers stopped. The radio’s lighted dial brightened with a pulse. Through the speakers came a grainy and faraway buzz, rising and taking shape.