Bass notes climbed and descended drunkenly, causing a dizzying, disorienting sensation that reminded me of an inner ear infection. Guitars were in play too, fighting off abusive, obtrusive hands and other...parts...and beneath it all a rising, implacable, impending drone that seemed to fill the woods, darken the sky, still the thrushes, curdle the cream in our cooler. I fainted dead away...
...and awoke with Janet above me, her face creased with concern. The only sound was birds. She touched her hand tenderly to the back of my head and drew it back with blood in the whorls of her fingertip, then she felt around and said she couldn't find a wound. I felt strange, off-kilter, but physically unhurt. Not saying much, we hiked home in the reddening dusk.
* * *
The next weekend we set out again, driving through Southampton and Westhampton and into the woods somewhere beyond Huntington. We parked on the curve of a deeply shaded wood, grabbed our gear, and started walking through an expansive field. At the field's end was a wall of impossibly tall pines, like a wall concealing a secret city. The treetops were a child's frenetically penciled scribble across an expansive painting of a bruise. The tree trunks were sprawled, glistening, mottled with black lichen in intricate patterns, looking for all the world like malignantly eschatological graffiti. The ground around them was thick with varicose roots twining through, around, and over soft mushrooms the size of chair cushions. Some of them were partially collapsed or split with gaping fault lines, revealing their inner craggy textures. They seemed to breathe out a pulsing fog, fetid, fusty. I pulled my shirt up over my nose. We climbed over the roots. At one point my boot slipped through and plunged into one of the mushrooms and I had to fight off nausea. We disappeared into the woods and whatever daylight had been evident disappeared along with us.
* * *
In the intervening week I had become a devoted listener to WXXT. I did not tell Janet. I don't know why. She had seemed so intent on making me listen that day in the woods, but had not brought it up since I passed out. I'd leave for work, call in sick from the car, park on the shoulder of 202, and listen all day. I heard Captain Calumny's Rockabilly Riot; twisted, imperious, impious sermons by a crusty-voiced preacher named Ezekiel Shineface; prolonged psycho-sexual confessions by announcers with names like Benjamin Stockton, Guy Stanton, Rivven Stallhearse, and Rexroth Slaughton. One day I listened for four straight hours to a four word mantra repeated over and over again (I forget what it was). On another day I listened to an hour of someone very realistically pleading for his life, set to jaunty polka music. Occasionally there were percussive bleats that made it sound as though the victim was being violently assaulted with an accordion. I heard dirges and Satanic hip-hop, monologues and weeping. I heard strange and upsetting news items read by an Uncle Red. Thursday, a day of crashing thunder and strong winds, I heard only whispers. I could not make out the words. I listened all day.
I'd arrive home at my usual hour, as though I'd been to work. We'd plod through our evening rituals: take-out, television, video games on the Wii. I was withdrawn and distant. My head was swimming with the day's broadcasts. Janet was patient, affectionate, almost doting. I thought it was she who suspected nothing.
* * *
We hiked through the late morning through deep deep woods, up and down steep inclines choked with dead branches from the October snowstorm. We inched along a dizzying cliff edge with coiled chains and disused, leaning stanchions the only protection from a surely fatal fall. The roaring river below was muted to a whisper. At one point a cat fell into step with us. He was black with a white throat. He looked up at me companionably then, after twenty minutes or so, split off into the underbrush. Janet began
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