“Do you think we’ll find people there?”
“Unlikely.”
Julie releases a low sigh that gets lost in the wind. Her father finishes checking the buildings and heads out into the evergreen blackness. Her mind suddenly recalls one of last night’s dreams and begins to flood with images—a deep, murky hole lined with teeth, a voice from the bottom beckoning her father—so she retreats to the Tahoe and sits in the driver’s seat next to her mother. Her stomach growls like the voice in the hole. She reaches around the seat for the bag of Carbtein, tears open one of the little foil packages, and pops a dusty white cube in her mouth.
“Hungry?” she asks her mother, offering her a cube as she attempts to chew the one in her mouth. Her mother stares at it like she’s never seen one before. Like she hasn’t been eating these nutrient-packed billiards chalks and little else for months. She scratches at the sunken brown spots on her neck and shakes her head. Julie forces herself to swallow the lump of gritty, astringent mortar in her mouth, then slumps into her seat, relieved to have it over with. She begins to wonder what they’ll do when that bag is empty, but she stops herself. The bag is still half full.
Her mother flips the radio on and leans her seat back, lying with her arms folded, gazing at the ceiling. The radio hisses static as always.
“At least there’s no commercials,” Julie says, anticipating a big laugh for such precocious wit.
Her mother’s lips curve just slightly. “I would love to hear a commercial. I’d listen to commercials all day if it meant there were people out there making and selling things.”
“Even those suicide pill commercials?”
“Especially those.”
Julie doesn’t understand this comment but it creates a cold feeling in her chest. She looks away from her mother.
“Has your life gone on long after the thrill of living is gone?” her mother intones through a bitter smirk. “Are the dreams in which you’re dying the best you’ve ever had?”
Julie starts flipping through stations, looking for something to change the subject.
“Knock, knock, knock on Heaven’s door, with Enditol. Because only the good die young.”
Each station plays a different genre of static. White noise, brown noise, blue noise. Then she lands on 90.3 and her mother’s smirk vanishes.
“Mom!” Julie squeals under her breath.
For the first time in 3,208 miles, there is music on the radio.
“It’s that song!” Julie says.
An oldie. Something from the late ‘90s, long before pop music began to resemble horror movie scores. Julie has never particularly liked this song, but her mother is transfixed as it fights through the clouds of static.
Starting and then stopping…taking off and landing…the emptiest of feelings…
Julie’s mother watches the radio as if the singer is inside it. Her eyes begin to glisten.
Floors collapsing, falling…bouncing back and one day…I am gonna grow wings…a chemical reaction…
The song ends with an ironically cheerful guitar strum, and a kstr wingsyoung woman's voice claims the silence, soft and shaky between spasms of static.
This is KEXP, 90.3 Seattle, bringing you the perfect soundtrack for huddling with your loved ones waiting to die.
To Julie’s surprise, her mother laughs. She wipes at her eyes and grins at her daughter, who returns the grin twice as big. They both turn to the radio.
If you’ve been listening for a while I apologize for the repetitiveness. We usually try to keep things diverse here, but our door’s being battered down as I record this and I didn’t have much time to put a playlist together…
Her mother’s smile starts to stiffen.
But anyway, if you’re hearing this it means they didn’t break the equipment, so enjoy the loop for as long as the power lasts. Consider it the last mix tape from us to you before our big breakup. I’m sorry, Seattle. America. World. We knew it couldn’t last.
Julie’s mother hits the radio’s off button and sinks back into her chair. Her smile is gone with no trace.
“Mom?” Julie says softly.
Her mother doesn’t respond or react. Her damp eyes regard the ceiling, as blank as a corpse’s. Julie feels horrible things crawling in her belly. She gets out of the truck.
Her father is still securing the area, marching around with his gun in position, all procedure and tactics. Her mother has told her stories of when they were both young and wild. How they met on an airplane while in line for the bathroom, how he stole her away from her friends at the airport and showed her around Brooklyn, how they holed up in his tiny apartment for days and played music and drank wine and talked philosophy and causes and things they wanted to fight for. She knows he changed when the world changed. Adapted to survive. And there is a small part of her—a tender, bleeding organ that’s been battered and bruised for too many years—that’s starting to envy him.
She wanders out toward the trees that surround the rest stop like an infinite void. She sticks her earbuds in and clicks play on an iPod she found on a dead girl somewhere in Pennsylvania. There is a song on this dented, cracked device that she reserves for moments like these, when she needs a reminder that there’s still a world out there. That her family is not alone on a spinning ball of rock.
The song is called “For Hannah.” She has never heard of the band and the song isn’t especially good. What makes it her favorite is the date listed on the file. It’s the most recent date she’s seen on a song by at least two years. Everything else in her collection was released back when there were still remnants of a music industry, money to be made and goods to spend it on. She has come to believe that this song—a sappy little ballad strummed clumsily on an out of tune guitar—is the last song ever recorded in the daylight of civilization.