Aloha's End (c) 2006 By Michael F. Zangari Chapter Ten: The little radio station at the back of your mind (UpDated)

Aloha's End By Michael F. Zangari

Chapter Ten: The little radio station at the back of your mind

TrueWest walks like a cat across his hotel room, his toes eating the Asian carpet like it's a gourmet meal. It feels like velvet, the little furry threads grabbing at his flesh.
The room is dark. The lights are out. The curtains are drawn.
The sun is setting.
It is late afternoon. Muted light sillouttes the boots on the register, and the hat on the boots.
TrueWest is as naked as the day he was born, but less bloodied and upset. He's lanky and relaxed coming out of a hot shower.
He is still wet and air drying.
The room is a little chilly. The big hotel air conditioner is blasting away, doing the big blow, like the engine of a network Lear Jet on take-off.
He shuts it off and goes over to the window.
He pulls the chords on the curtains and they open up on the opera of the world, the red balloon of the sun setting into a copper-fired sea. The clouds are full of Valkarie, riding wild bronko on beams that strike off of the enflamed clouds.
There’s also the surprised couple staring at him from the lanai of the hotel across the way.
He shuts the curtain down again, paniced.
Then he opens the window partway, slowly, leaning over from the side wall to open it.
There’s a honeymoon story to tell, he thinks, the naked man in Waikiki.
“Hie” he thinks.”
His sigh rises and sets.
The jet lag and coffee hangover are catching up with him. He is exaughsted.
He tackles the bed closets to the window and stretches out with his arms and legs extended. He’s Leonardo’s redeemed man, cowboy, staked out on clover under open praire sky.
He dozes awhile, then pulls back the sheets and climbs in.
They are stiff and cool and smell like they just rolled out of the dryer.
They are clean, in a hotel kind of way. Sniffable. Germ free.
He takes the Electrical Cranial Unit from the table stand and hoops the horns of the electrodes around his skull. The electrodes clip him just below the ears like a stethoscope. He turns the juice up half way and feels the tingles of the microelectronic vibrate his brain. His body relaxes. The glands of his brain ooze a little brain honey, the neurotransmitters he needs to be sharp and relaxed. It leads him into a half sleep.
He uses brain machines. (People Magazine, 2000) “Like some people suck martini’s at the end of the day.
“It’s not an electrical highball” he said. “It doesn’t make you dull and numb to the world, but it provides a gateway back into the body. You get normal and smarter, more here. Forty minutes is like three hours of Zen Meditation or really good sex.”
TrueWest is notoriously single.
“You come into your body and afterglow" he said.
It's cowboy-cyber punk for sure.
He said that it helps with his focus when he’s on the air, as well."
What ever.
It feels good.
He thinks about his penis, down there out of sight the lurking below the ice of the covers.
It’s as warm as rising bread dough.
He falls into sleep as the warmth spreads to the rest of his body.
An hour? He wakes and absently takes off the electrodes.
He grabs a pillow and turns over.
In the back of his mind, there is a tin lizzy of a buzz.
A tinty tin-can telephone of a call. It contours to the music.
A country kind of dobro slide. Then it sharpens like a knife blade.
It’s Johnny and June Carter Cash doing the Mimi Farina song, “Pack Up Your Sorrows.”
It’s at the verse, “No use talking to a stranger about the troubles you’ve seen. There’s too many bad times, too many sad times and nobody knows what you mean.”
It’s a dream flash, or maybe a radio from another room.
No.
It’s dream sweet, Dolby Dulce. Clear as mountain stream water and all pervading. He can hear it in the tips of his fingers. All vibration and bass.
As the song fades out a deeply resonant but raspy voice comes over the music.
It’s as gentle as baby breath.
“It’s the little radio station at the back of your mind with the Duckeroo doing the dials. A little bit of Johnny and June C . doing "Pack up your sorrows."
It sounds like radio from a different time.
Like a broadcast from the past.
The dj blows a whistlful duck call. He talks after in a very slow and deliberate way, like the words are drum beats in a dramatic ceremony.
“As the sun fades out and the night fades in I’m thinking of the way things change around and become different in the middle of the trauma sharpened mind, how nothing is ever the same in the day to day to day willie willie of things.
How everything has it’s own flavor and taste.
It's a real stewball this afternoon, I can tell you that.
Full of grief and giddiness. That's Aloha's End."
Then he does the liner.
“Welcome to it, We’re the little radio station in the back of your mind,” he says.
He goes into “Long Black Veil” by the Band.
TrueWest wakes up for real when they hit the line “Nobody knows, and nobody sees. Nobody knows like me.”
“The little radio station at the back of your mind” he thinks.
He’s had another manifestation.
It's like the ghost ship, the Marie Celeste.
The ghost radio station that phases in from another dimension, another time.
He has heard it before.
And others have too.
Like the broadcast of a man in a doomed submarine, just keeping time as the air runs out.
Like a man is a runaway space station. The Duck. Alone but putting out a constant signal, hoping to be found.
It’s eerie but exciting.
It's real.
The little radio station at the back of your mind, the ghost fuzz that touring rock and country bands talk about on long bus rides through interstate oblivion, that truck drivers describe hearing on long overhauls. That the grieving and traumatized hear after sobs.
TrueWest is suddenly filled with tears. He's overcome with emotion.
He’s near. Very near. The End is near.
Like the cockles of his fears.