The Days of Radio Silence
by
William Haskins
They came for me at daybreak in a blur of stomping boot heels, shattered glass and orders barked through Chem-Bio masks. I leapt from my bed and cowered in the corner, shielding my head with my arms to ward off the hail of truncheon blows. I wailed like a child and my bowels turned to liquid.
The age of the hero was over.
One of the soldiers ripped off my shirt and fashioned it into a crude mask over my mouth and nose before shoving me out the door. The sunrise was a pale yellow orb behind the curtain of ash and smoke, and I held my breath all the way to the truck.
It was the first time I had been out of the neighborhood since martial law was declared. That small maze of brick and steel had become my entire world as, one by one, newspapers, television, radio and the Internet had all disappeared—an ever-shrinking circle of communication until I was afraid to even speak to my neighbors.
The gunshots and helicopters, the screams from revenge killings and the distended bellies of starving children—these became my news.
The truck weaved recklessly through abandoned cars, and I stared straight ahead, my captors flanking me, their breath hollow and mechanical under their masks. As we neared the freeway, I turned, perhaps by habit, to the park where I had played as a child.
To my astonishment, a little girl was swinging, her yellow sundress splashed like paint against the scorched earth. I wanted to see her eyes, to know what wonders they could still behold, but as she lifted her head, I saw only the horrible insect-face of the gas mask.
The city was dead-zone of fire-gutted buildings and toppled stone. Soldiers patrolled every corner, and choppers hovered like birds of prey. Dogs ran loose in the streets, one nipping at the skull of a corpse hanging upside-down from a street sign, a sign reading
“Traitor!” affixed to his chest with a knife.
As we drove through a gate between rolls of concertina wire, and I knew I had passed into the mouth of Hell.
*****
The room was empty except for two chairs on either side of a table, upon which sat a cardboard box. The soldier pushed me inside and ordered me to sit with my back to the door. I could feel him standing behind me, and I snuck a cautious look over my shoulder. He raised his rifle. “Turn around.”
A few minutes later, I heard the door open. A slight man moved into my field of vision and calmly sat down opposite me. His eyes were pale-blue and severe behind wireless spectacles.
“Do you know why we’ve brought you here?”
Fear gripped my brain and paralyzed my throat. I couldn’t answer.
His eyes narrowed, and he shifted his gaze over my shoulder to the guard.
I felt the cold kiss of metal against my neck and an electric shock pulsed through my body. I stiffened in my chair and screamed, and the taste of batteries filled my mouth.
My interrogator slid his chair back and stood up.
“Any pain you experience here will be of your own making,” he said. “I will not tolerate insolence. I’ll ask you again: Do you know why we’ve brought you here?”
I shook my head.
He picked up the box and dumped out its contents. Books slid across the surface of the table, some coming to rest splayed open like dead birds. “Do you recognize these?”
I hesitated—until I saw his eyes cut to the guard again. “I… I wrote them.”
“Very good,” he replied. “Now. I want you to tell me
why you wrote them.
My mind raced, but I couldn’t remember why. I searched through the possible answers: money, fame, acceptance, ego-gratification…
Every one the truth. Every one a lie.
I heard the guard stepping toward me. I panicked and blurted out, “To make the world a better place.”
This seemed to fascinate my interrogator. “Tell me,” he said, “how a book makes the world a better place.”
I stared down at my shackled hands. “By improving the human condition.”
He sat back down. “Do you really believe the human condition can be improved?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Man is every bit as greedy and violent today as he’s always been,” he said. “It’s his instinct. No other species seeks to elevate itself from its nature.”
“We have art,” I said. “That’s what separates us from the animals.”
He took off his glasses, and his blues eyes grew a thousand degrees colder. “No. What separates us from the animals is our capacity to annihilate sixty million of our fellow species… in the blink of an eye.”
He put his glasses back on and stood up. “Art is a lie. We will no longer tolerate rebellion and moral corruption being peddled as a path to enlightenment. The days of your sedition and philosophical trickery are over.”
He circled the table and leaned over my shoulder. “You will help us usher in a new age of literature, one that teaches loyalty and obedience and the glory of work. You will give people hope.”
“That’s not hope,” I said. “That’s propaganda.”
He whipped his head toward the guard and, before I could react, electricity blinded me in white light.
****
I awoke in a cramped cell, alone and cold, my screams answered only by echoes off concrete walls.
On the cot lay a book:
Neo-Social Realism: Literature After the Revolution. I picked it up and opened the cover. Inside were chapters with titles like
The Poem as Anthem,
Newspapers and State Unity and
Fiction as a Tool of Indoctrination.
I closed it and never opened it again.
Each morning they brought me a loaf of bread and a bottle of water, along with a pen and pad of paper. And each night, when they returned and found the paper blank, they beat me without mercy.
I measured time by this violence until the beatings all ran together. Seasons changed, but I don’t know how many times. The floor of my cell was soon littered with pads of paper, nothing on them but the rust-colored smears of my own blood.
I rebelled by not even thinking about writing. After a while, I didn’t think at all. I pushed language, itself, from my mind until I lived in a haze of white noise, like a radio whose dial is stuck between stations.
I devolved into a numb and empty animal.
*****
This morning, I awoke to the sounds of gunfire and frantic screams, and felt the distinct physical sensation of smiling for the first time in months. I had no idea if the men overrunning the prison were my saviors or my assassins, and I no longer cared. I just wanted it to be over.
I heard footsteps and moved to the back of the cell. A soldier entered, his rifle leveled at me. I shut my eyes and a single gunshot rang out. When I opened them, the soldier was lying dead.
A man in street clothes peered into the cell.
“Let’s go!” he screamed, as he stepped over the body and grabbed my arm. I pulled away long enough to grab a pen and paper, and then was led through the carnage to a waiting car filled with Resistance fighters.
I was free.
*****
As I sat in the park this afternoon, words began to creep slowly back into my mind, marrying into phrases, then sentences and paragraphs, like seeds exploding through soil to bathe in a spring shower.
Like a radio dial finding its frequency with a voice sharp and clear.
I watched trucks deliver food to long lines of sunken-eyed mothers while civilian police, instead of soldiers, kept the peace in streets that were no longer a graveyard.
I touched the pen to paper and wrote for hours, as the children on the swing set laughed and squealed, their faces kissed by the breeze and warmed by the sun that watched over them from a cloudless sky.