The White Static

The recording plays back his own voice, a stranger’s voice scraped thin by digital compression. Palpable. Yes, that was the word the psychiatrist had used, hadn’t he? Or was it the word Joel himself had chosen, years later, trying to pin the writhing thing down for the microphone, for the listeners huddled in their own primitive places? Their disbelief is palpable.

He remembers the cobblestones, slick with a soft summer rain that passed through his outstretched hands. Water, refusing physics. Or he, refusing physics. The memory—even now, a dizzying lurch. Below, the meat-sack sprawled, half-in, half-out of the guest house door. His meat-sack. The disconnect was instantaneous, profound. A sudden shedding, like shrugging off a filthy coat.

Then the frantic pounding on the chest. Each blow a jolt, a sickening return to the cage of bone and nerve, excruciating. Stop. He tried to form the word, push it through the ether, but language belonged to the cage. Out here, thought was transmission, raw, unfiltered. Unless—

Unless you lied.

The boy. The young soldier, earnest, helpful, who’d driven his wife. Whose eyes, even then, held a flicker. A flavor, Joel called it now on the recording. The metallic tang of intent beneath the surface chatter. Designs on her. The poison wasn’t just the few sips from the glass; it was the thought itself, polluting the shared air, the telepathic hum Joel hadn’t known he was still attuned to, a faint echo from Cro-Magnon times. The flavor of betrayal.

He’d followed the car, a phantom tethered to the frantic flight across the border. Austria falling away, Germany rushing up. Blurring. Confusion. One minute hovering behind the taillights, the next… somewhere else? No, back again. Watching them drag the unresponsive body—his body—into the clinic. The doctor in the wheelchair, the locked doors after 8 pm. Absurd details sticking like burrs to the memory.

And the boredom. He hears himself say it on the tape, the interviewer’s faint intake of breath. Boredom. Watching them cut away the uniform, stick tubes into the flesh. It was grotesque, that boredom. An alien dispassion settling over him like dust as they worked on the abandoned machinery below. Stripping clothing off… what do I put on next?

Then the heat on his neck. Rolling over, expecting the glare of the surgical lamps, finding instead… Light. No, not light. Annihilation by whiteness. A presence, a voice inside his head that wasn't a voice, saying It's okay, bathing him in an understanding so complete it felt like love, but bigger, fiercer. Total commitment, he tries now, inadequate word. The instantaneous dump of seventy-whatever years, not reviewed but absorbed, the full weight of every action, every consequence rippling through the inter-connected shards he suddenly knew they all were. Even the boy? Yes, even him. Heaven or Hell wasn't a place, but the facing of that dump. Mao Zedong facing his fifty million dead. You do it to yourself.

You cannot stay.

The snap back. Naked, tubed, panicked German patient fleeing his pronouncements: God’s a white light! You can’t cease to exist! The needle. The psych ward in Munich. The careful questions, probing for damage. How badly your brain has been damaged? They couldn’t hear past the static of their own fear.

“Act normal,” the second psychiatrist had whispered, leaning close, breath smelling faintly of mints and complicity. What’s normal? The shared laughter, a tiny crack in the wall of disbelief.

He’d learned. Tone it down. Filter the transmission. Use language, the great concealer, the tool that allowed tribes to meet without immediate bloodshed born of envious thoughts about a spear, a woman. The tool that allowed the boy to drive his wife, smiling. The tool that allowed Joel, now, to sit here, listening to his own voice trying, failing, to describe the indescribable.

Humanity stuck. Candy-addicted, chasing power, money, terrified of the silence, the truth humming beneath the noise. Terrified of the knowledge that the body is just a suit, death a doorway, and experience the only currency that matters.

The gun is gone, of course. The beautiful, customized .45, swallowed by paperwork and the assumption of death. A tangible piece of the primitive world he can’t get back. Sometimes, the loss of the gun feels sharper, more real, than the memory of the light. A stupid, grounding grief.

He switches off the recording. The silence in the room feels loud. Is he still hovering somewhere, detached, bored? Watching this old man who wears his name, this shard remembering rain passing through phantom hands, trying to translate the white static into words?

The echo pulses. It never stops.