Variations on a(n Historical) Theme: Part II

Second Part: “The Spirit of Radio” - Wherein Alex begins his grand adventure.

'The day had just started to drag on as Alex put things in order. His basement bedroom at his parents' house was starting to look more like living quarters and less like the burrow of some large rat. The bed was shoved into the corner with a digital clock on the nearby windowsill, books and compact discs were strewn about the floor and piled onto the duo of lackluster bookshelves at odd ends of the room. There was no order to the books, just a simple, accepted acknowledgment: a couple-three bibles of varying translation and condition mingled with textbooks which touched on Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Daoism; Stephen King and Neil Gaiman novels were cluttered alongside some of Alistair Reynolds' space-opera epics; Far Side collections shared shelf space with Kant and a much-worn double feature encompassing the Mill treatises “Utilitarianism” and “On Liberty.”

Ancient audio equipment shared as much real estate as the bookshelves, speakers that made better furniture than sound production equipment flanked a television stand. Next to these stood a long, thin teardown table made of white plastic. Beneath this sat the behemoth that was Alex's desktop computer tower – atop it, the vast black portal that was its monitor as well as a keyboard and mouse. Keys and a dated-looking mobile phone filled the majority of the mouse pad, and the shattered-but-functional remnants of a touch-operated mobile music device clung by umbilical to one of the PC's several forward USB ports.

“And where are you going again?” Alex's mother was a worrier, which couldn't be said of everyone.

He shrugged, shuffling papers, deciding which manuscripts were worth reworking and what of his prose work was garbage, and responded with a single word: “South.”

“That's a lot of area.”

“Yeah, it's most of the country,” he sighed. “I get the feeling we're headed to Pennsylvania or West Virginia or Tennessee or something. Maybe northern Georgia. Maybe I'll even get to see Blood Mountain, see about finding that crystal skull or cyclopean sasquatch.”

“What?”

He looked up at her, blinked, and realized that he'd just rambled off a good chunk of a Mastodon's third album. “Nothing.”

“No, you said something about a skull. Are you sure this trip isn't about black magicks or ritual sacrifice or anything?” Alex's mother's concern never failed to simultaneously astound, alarm, and – ultimately – confuse him.

“Mom, allow me to recount a short tale for you,” Alex started, putting clothes and books into a duffel bag. “When I was fourteen, my friends and I started looking into Dungeons and Dragons. You told me that the game would end up responsible for my death: that the authorities would pull my half-starved, probably asphyxiated corpse from the maintenance tunnels beneath MSU because we would wander said corridors fighting imaginary monsters. No matter how much I claimed to understand that the monsters only existed in the context of the story on paper, like a book, and that I would be a combating these monsters on paper only to allay your fears, you insisted that we research what can essentially be called the Church's view on the game. And do you remember what finally made you decide to let me play?”

“No,” she shook her head, playing with the doorknob as he slung the pack over his shoulder and pocketed the phone, keys, and MP3 player.

“Your mind was changed by a thirty-something employee at a local hobby shop, who laughed in your face when I told him what you thought of the game, and summed up play sessions as essentially a poker game with less alcohol, fewer cigars, bigger cards made of flimsier paper, and dice.”

“Oh,” she replied halfheartedly.

“Besides,” he kept going, walking past her into the furnished basement. “That wasn't the game you should have been trying to keep me away from. Player characters can be driven insane by occult horrors in Call of Cthulhu.”

“That doesn't make me feel any better about this trip!” she sputtered as he reached the small foyer which branched off to kitchen, garage, utility closet, and laundry room. He put down the duffel and started sliding his feet into pair of old-timey Clarks. After tying the shoes, he stood and held three fingers up near his shoulder in a Scout's salute.

“I solemnly swear not to intentionally kill, or intentionally allow the death, of any person – or of any animal not intended for sustenance.”

“What about self-mutilation?”

“Mom, I'm not even going to acknowledge that one.” With that he opened the door to the garage, waved to his friends in the waiting vehicle, and turned back to his mother. “Bye, I'll see you in a few days. I'll call from wherever we stop tonight.”

“Okay, Allie, I love you!”

“Yeah,” he choked out, nodding. Those were tough words for him to hear, and tougher ones to say. They always had been; not least because he was entirely convinced that no single person had ever meant them toward him.

# # #

“So why are we taking twenty-three?” Alex asked, peering up over the seat backs toward the dash, trying to catch a glimpse of the directions they'd printed off after having watched the I-96 exit fly past.

“Why not?” David asked from the front seat.

“Because it makes no sense. I-75 hooks up with just about everything southeast of Michigan, and we would have taken sixty-nine over to ninety-six, or at least we would have just hopped onto 96 back there if we were headed west.”

“I'm still not entirely sure why we haven't told him where we're going. I doubt he'd know what was going on if we did,” Michael asked through bites of cherry Pop Tart.

“Yes,” Alex played along, “I am ignorant of all things south of Cedar Point, including people who may or may not live there.”

“He has to figure out what he can on his own. He'll get where we're going soon enough, I'm sure, but not exactly for whom.” George was driving and searching the airwaves for some radio station suitable for the drive. He finally settled on a country station, to the chagrin of the other passengers. “This might do us.”

Talk turned to school. David was in graphic arts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, George was finishing out a history degree at the same school, Michael was waist-deep in a chemistry program at U of M's Flint campus, and Alex was dissatisfied with being three quarters of the way to a Bachelors of Science in Psychology from Central Michigan University. He seemed to be the only one who hated what he was learning, which didn't help his inherent feeling of isolation.

They drove south, eventually jogging several tens of miles to the east to hop back on I-75 just north of Toledo, verbally ribbing each other and being a general pack of twenty-something hooligans. George, while he drove, kept jumping between pop and country stations, as though trying to single one voice out of a crowd. Alex started to doze, and had the strangest dream of sitting on a park bench next to a pretty singing girl. He accepted that the imagery probably had to do with the radio, and let himself fall asleep as the sun sank beneath what had become Ohio's horizon.'

Variations on a(n Historical) Theme - Part One: "Change"

- Wherein the reader is given an exposition of Alex and his circumstances.

'He ground his gears shifting into first like he normally did. The noise and the car's physical reaction made him click his teeth and curse internally. He supposed that he was getting better with the gearshift and clutch, but going into his second week of manual transmission was aggravating. Between school having just ended for the summer, having just moved home, and the continual fights with his girlfriend, the car seemed like just the cherry on top of Alex Ashbourne's perfect start of summer.

In fact, he wouldn't be grinding his gears through suburban Flint, Michigan at this moment if it weren't for the incessant phone calls. Apparently he was incapable of doing anything right in his girlfriend's eyes. He wasn't supposed to have even looked for a job this summer, less yet found one and accepted the position: he was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day to come running. He hated that, that his life paled in comparison with that of some girl he guessed he knew pretty well but wasn't entirely sure he wanted to continue being serious about. He sighed as he pulled into her driveway, took a deep breath as he got out of the car. Composure was key.

That was a statement he'd heard somewhere, probably years ago in high school. He doubted that what he thought it meant was even true: nobody seemed to really care how composed you were, they just kind of went on their own way and ran ragged over you if you gave them half the chance. Or maybe that was the Hobbes, still fresh in his mind from the just-finished semester, telling him that everyone was being as deceitful about his or her feelings as he was trying to be. Alex took the walk to the front door at a slow gait. Sometimes every second he wasted was worth the wait.

“Where have you been?”

She, of course, was waiting. She had no patience for his issues; no sympathy for his schoolwork, no will to understand his clinical depression, a willful ignorance of his money troubles.

“What do you mean, 'where have I been?'”

“I called you like twenty minutes ago. Where have you been?”

“Well, it's a ten minute drive and my family likes to talk to me as I leave the house, and the new car.”

“Oh, whatever. Learn how to drive, moron.”

He sighed. This was, unfortunately, usual. Next she'd demand he go get food or something, like he had the money to, and then when he was saying he didn't have money he'd get blamed for never being capable – future tense, mind you – of supporting a family. That conversation made him want to scream. If he wasn't expected to be with her every waking moment of his life, he could get a job and pay for food and then finish school and get a career. Not that she bothered to examine his pitiful life.

“Go get me some food.” He'd called it.

“Don't have any money.”

“Oh, whatever! That's just an excuse. You'll go out with your friends tonight and buy food or rent a movie or something. Don't tell me you don't have any money.”
“Well, I'll start having some money in a couple weeks.”

She was appalled. Huffing, she tried to forge a cogent sentence. Had he actually gone and underhanded her on the job front?

“I told you not to get a job.”

“And I told you I didn't care what you said about it.”

“That's it!” she screeched. “We're through!”

“Okay,” he said solemnly and turned away to return to his car.

“And I've been sleeping with Gerald for the past three weeks!”

He nodded, frowning, as he walked away. “I figured as much. See you around.”

“You can't just walk away from me like that!” she continued screeching. He did, though, and climbed into his car. And then, as she threw sticks and rocks from the yard at him as he stoically pulled out of her driveway, he drove off.

---

“Fucking Gerry?” George laughed, his teeth glinting from behind his full beard.

“Yeah, I guess. Or that's what she yelled at me, anyway. So I just left,” Alex agreed, sipping from a bottle of cola.

“Man, you should be drinking right now,” George said between swigs of beer. “You just got broken up with and found out there's another guy.”

Alex just shrugged. “Too expensive. Broke my last five on the Coke.”

“At least the job's starting in a few weeks, though, right?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “At least.”

“Plus you can start playing the field again, now. How about that friend of yours up at school?”

“Amanda?” Alex asked, raising his eyebrows. After George nodded, he continued: “Kind of moved into the sister zone. That'd be pretty awkward to start pursuing.”

“Well, let's list off what you need in a girl, see where it gets us.”

“Hold on,” Alex was wary. “So I've been single for all of three hours and we're already on the hunt again?”

George shrugged: “Why not?”

“Because it's been an eighth of a day.”

“And it'll have been a sixth of a day in forty-five minutes; what's your point?”

“Shouldn't I wait?” Alex wondered aloud. His emotional attachment had been thoroughly destroyed over the past month or so, but wasn't there some sort of time restriction or something?

“Listen, you aren't taking some broad home with you tonight. Oh, thank you, honey.” George traded his empty beer bottle for a fresh one the cocktail waitress had brought him. She looked at Alex and cocked an eyebrow – she was attractive enough, but he didn't return the gaze and she moved on. “I'm talking a list: what you want in a significant other.”

“Well, I guess I'd like it if she were pretty tall,” Alex said wistfully, sipping from the Coke again.

“Okay, there we go: pretty and tall. That's two,” George glazed over the distinctions between 'pretty tall' and 'pretty, tall' while leaning over the small table, procured a mechanical pencil from his pocket and began scribbling on a napkin. “What else? Any hair preferences? Other build preferences?”

“Blonde, maybe with curls. I don't know.” Alex hadn't actually thought through this scenario.

“All right: tall, pretty, curly blonde. You like the artistic type don't you?” George was tapping the napkin with the pencil. He wrote the word 'artsy' on the list before Alex could even respond. “This last one was artistic, though. Any particular differences you want?”

“No more graphic design; I don't want to look through edited photographs and be expected to see a difference anymore,” Alex grimaced. “Seriously, I spent like half an hour looking at two pictures of the same damn bee. The filter had been tweaked on one of them. I couldn't tell the difference. There was screaming involved.”

“So what? Music, then? I know you look down on poetry; maybe someone with a shared penchant for prose?”

“Yes, definitely musically inclined. I could take or leave the other two; most people hate writing.”

“Tall, pretty, blonde, curls, artsy, musician,” George muttered, still tapping the napkin. “How about real personality?”

“I'd like for a girl to be both interested and nice to me. That'd be a change of pace worth paying attention to.”

“Okay, but are we talking like candy-store sweet, or more like bakery sweet?”

“Is that like the difference between Hungry Jack-hungry and GI-Joe-beefed-up-after-a-hard-day's-work-in-the-chopper-hungry?”

George actually looked up. “I'm not sure I follow.”

“That was my point. What's the difference between the two?”

“Well, candy-store sweet is the kind where you think you're liable to become diabetic. Bakery sweet is... I don't know; mellower?” George shrugged.

“Is this even a known distinction, or are you just making this up as we go?”

“Little of this, little of that.”

“Well, I'm too cynical for candy-store sweetness, I think,” Alex suggested broodily.

“Yeah, probably. Okay, baker's chocolate is on the list. Any preference in age or sibling number differentiation?”

“Well, legal would be nice, and no; she could have ten siblings, and be any of them numerically.”

“So, then: tall, pretty, blonde, curly, artsy, musical, bakery-style, of-age, smart, puts up with a complete nerd.”

“Thank you,” Alex said, bowing deeply and then bringing the Coke to his lips, “for adding those last two. Ass.”

“Okay. I think I have the perfect girl for you.”

Alex choked on his soda. “Wait, you what?”

“I know who you should date next,” George said simply, sitting back in the chair and taking another swig of beer.

“And might I be amongst those knowing who she is?”

“I'm sure you know of her. I'll see if she's interested in meeting you, but we'll have to take a road trip to pull this off. Be ready to leave in the next day or two.” With that, George stood up, put money down for his drinks, patted Alex on the shoulder, and walked out of the bar.

Alex just sat in his chair, shocked. He knew he was getting into trouble somehow, but he also guessed he'd go along with the plan – for a while, at least. After all, George was his friend, and a road trip surely couldn't mean leaving Michigan. Maybe he'd even have some fun before work started. Maybe he'd even meet a nice girl.'