A ROOM WITH A VIEW
A lonesome highway stretched straight across the vast desert. It was a sorry little highway, narrow with only two lanes. It was riddled with potholes, and cracks snaked across the pavement like skeleton fingers. There was a line dividing the two lanes, once yellow but now baked and sunbleached pale, almost white. It’s discoloration was made more dramatic by the lonely blue illumination of the full moon that hung overhead.
The silence and isolation of the desert was broken only by a single traveler. A man on a roaring black motorcycle tore down the highway at great speed, his eyes squinting against the wind and particles of desert dust. He cursed himself for having lost his helmet, which had a visor on it and could have protected him from the stinging particles as they hit his face. He rode by the rocky flats and randomly interspersed patches of desert sage and tumbleweed. Thinking of home and hoping that he would not meet the police, he rode on. It was illegal to ride a motorcycle without a helmet in this state and, although nothing worse than a fine would be given him for that offense, he was not a man that wanted to be recognized by the police. Aside from his lacking a helmet, the man made an inconspicuous biker. The leather jacket he wore, a fawn brown with fleece lining inside that showed at the collar as opposed to black leather and entirely without patches, separated him from the roaming Nomadic chapters of the California and Nevada motorcycle gangs. His hair was long, hanging to his shoulders when he stood and blowing out behind him now as he rode. He was slight of build, though one couldn’t tell that under the jacket, and he had a fine, soft face, though it was hardened by the elements and overgrown with a unkempt shadow of whiskers. The man on the motorcycle’s name was Harvey Turk, and he was an outlaw.
At least, he told himself that he was an outlaw. Somehow the notion made the long days under the hot sun, the lonely life in an aluminum airstream trailer, the endless smoking of Marlboro cigarettes and hand after hand of solitaire seem less pathetic. In reality, he was a military deserter, living off the grid in the great big nothing of the Nevada desert. He had only been a private in the Marine Corps, and had not warranted too much of a man-hunt. He had joined the Marines when he was eighteen, all gusto and oorah, but he sang a different song when he was deployed to the Mexican Border. It was a warzone down there. After a month of bullets whistling over his head in the night and homemade explosives crashing around him while he sat on the toilet, Turk had decided that the military was not for him, and he wasn’t going to try his luck with another three years on the border. He snuck out in the middle of the night and made a run for it. He was lucky. As he ran, he imagined himself an escaped prisoner, bravely charging for his freedom. It was a nicer thought than a Devil Dog fleeing battle with his tail between his legs. He made it to Nevada. He picked a new name for himself, got some basic supplies, and vanished into the desert to live among the lizards and heat shimmers, and eventually to become little more than a mirage himself.
He had only a few human contacts, which were unfortunately necessary. One was Bill Razor, a crusty, mostly blind old man that ran the Desert Mercantile, a dusty little grocery store about one hundred miles away from Turk’s spot. Bill knew Turk by the Name Howard Clinton, no relation. The other was Alex Knapp, Turk’s man in Reno who took his bets. Every couple of months Turk would ride from his spot in the desert into the Biggest Little City in the World and bet on the horses. In Reno, he went by the name Lucky McGraw, and lucky he was. In the fifteen years that he had been playing the Reno horses, he had never come out with empty pockets. If Alex Knapp thought Turk, or Lucky McGraw, was cheating, he sure kept his mouth shut and pocketed his percentage without a hint of conscience. With the steady inflow of cash from Reno, and all the supplies he needed from the Desert Mercantile, Turk, Clinton and McGraw lived like true outlaws.
Turk was riding home from Reno now, the panyers on his bike buttoned safely, carrying his winnings from a day at the track. It was a good one. Over three grand in small bills sitting in the bags behind him. Turk smiled, and immediately got a mouth full of bugs and dust. He coughed and scowled once more.
Nighttime in the Nevada desert was a surreal thing. In the distance to the west, the Sierra Nevada mountains made up a jagged horizon line, dark and inky black. Overhead the stars spread out forever, and the full moon cast its light onto the otherwise lightless wasteland and shone up the desert pale and daunting, like bone with patches of scrub brush here and there. Out of the corner of his eye, Turk saw something move across the night sky. He glanced at it only briefly.
“Shooting star.” he muttered to himself, and refocused his eyes on the road. Turk was not a sentimental man. It was only when he happened to glance back a moment later and noticed that the thing was still in the sky that he began to pay real attention. The thing which he had taken for a shooting star was still there, now larger, and no longer the pale blue of a star, but bright, hot orange. Turk nosed his motorcycle to the narrow shoulder of the highway and brought it to stop. He dismounted and stood watching. The thing was getting larger and redder every second. It was going to crash to earth. A bomb? Perhaps, he thought. For a second his instincts told him to get back on the motorcycle and ride like hell away, but it was useless. If the bomb was going to drop there, it hardly mattered if he was right where he stood or a quarter mile off. Either way, it seemed that Lucky McGraw’s luck had just run out. With a silent sense of horror that manifested itself in quiet fascination, Turk watched the thing approach. The air was filled with a low whistling noise, and Turk muttered a prayer that he did not truly believe under his breath, then closed his eyes. I am ready, he thought to the sky, now make an end.
The thing hit the earth with a boom and a flash of light. With his eyes closed he did not see the impact, but the light turned his shut-eye vision bright orange and pink for a moment, and it was accompanied by a wave of heat that approached, enveloped him, and passed away. He opened his eyes and looked around. Still here. Covered in desert dust now, but still here. He was almost disappointed. It was an anti climatic result. As if in a trance, he walked away from the bike toward the place where the thing had struck down. There was a crater, a billowing cloud of dust around it, and a trail of smoke smoldering from the spot in the center. He walked slowly, his hands in the pockets of his coat. Then, as if the importance of the event had just hit him, he took his hands out and ran to the crater. He came to a skidding stop by the edge and looked down. His heavy boots had sent a loose shower of dirt down into the center of the wide conical crater. Between the dust in his eyes and the smoke that emanated from the thing in the bottom, he couldn’t make out what it was. With his heart in his throat and half his mind screaming to turn tail and get out of there, Turk eased himself down the incline to where the object rested. Waving smoke out of his face, he got a look at the thing.
It was a round, metal object, about the size of a basketball, apparently made of two riveted hemispheres. One the top, or perhaps the bottom, he didn’t know, there was what looked like a rocket booster. The thing had hinges on one side and a turn handle on the other. He hardly dared to do it, and yet he couldn’t bare not to. With quivering hands he reached for the handle.
“Shit, fuck!” Turk yelped and backed away from the object, scrambling back out of the crater. He stood for a moment, nursing his hand and looking angrily at the object. It was red hot to the touch. Looking at his hand he could see the blisters already forming. He cursed again and put his mouth on the sore spot. He would wait, then. He sat down on the edge of the crater and pulled a battered pack of cigarettes from the inside pocket of his coat. As he did so, his hand brushed the grip of a Sig Sauer P220 .44 caliber Equinox that rested in a shoulder holster. It was a comforting reminder, though he didn’t know how it could help him here. He lit the cigarette and puffed, staring the object in the crater. The dust had settled and the smoke was clearing away. He thought he could see some sort of writing on the one of the metal hemispheres. Queer letters, printed in block-like white paint, dots, dashes and squiggles that he didn’t recognize. His untrainted eyes tagged it as being of an Asian variety. Either way, it was certainly not English. It was not an American device.
His eyes opened wide suddenly. A thought that should have occurred to him at the very start now presented itself. Whatever country this thing had come from, the military would be very much interested in it. And perhaps they might comb the desert looking for more. And perhaps, in their combing, might spot a certain Airstream trailer and, mistaking it for a Chinese or Russian satellite, might come asking unpleasant questions. He choked at the thought. He had to get this thing out of here before it was discovered. He looked at the thing. If it wasn’t too heavy, he could probably strap it to the back of his bike. He could take it back with him. He wouldn’t be able to fill in the crater, but then again what was a crater with nothing in it? Panting, Turk looked over his shoulders, half expecting to see the headlights of Jeeps already approaching. In that flat wasteland he would see any vehicle approaching miles before it got there. To his relief, he still had the desert to himself. Hoping that the thing had cooled some, Turk scrambled back down into the crater. He wrestled the jacket off his shoulders and placed it on the thing so as to provide some kind of barrier between his hands and the metal. He stooped and found that he could pick it up relatively easily. He felt the warmth through his jacket, but didn’t stop to think. It was difficult to climb back out of the crater carrying his unwieldy object, but he managed. Then, carrying the thing over his head, he jogged back to the bike. He was right. He managed to strap it on top of his panyers, then put his jacket back on and jumped on the bike. The jacket was warm with the heat of the thing. He started the motorcycle and roared away. He thought he was still about two hours away from the head of the unmarked dirt road that lead to his trailer, and it was another hour and a half of rough riding down that road. It was a lot of time to get through, especially when every second seemed an hour long and he expected to hear the whoop of sirens, the chop of helicopter props, the bullhorn voice of a Recon squad ensnaring him.
He made it back without incident. With a heavy sigh he dismounted the motorcycle. The object sat on the back, and somehow it seemed to mock him. He grimaced, wiping the grime of the road off his face, and undid the straps that held the bizarre object on the back of his bike. He carried it to his trailer and put it down just inside the door. He sat down at the small table and looked at it a while longer, smoking another cigarette. It was just past three o’clock in the morning. He would deal with the object later, when he had some sleep and a full belly. He snubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray he had made for himself out of stone, the center chipped out with a chisel, then undressed and climbed into the small, overhead bunk. He fell asleep quickly, and was awake with the sunrise three and a half hours later. It was enough.
In the morning, Turk made coffee. It was cheap coffee, the kind he could buy in bulk from the Desert Mercantile. It was bitter and seemed always to be scalding, but it was better than nothing. With his coffee he ate Spam, fried on the kitchenette stove in his trailer. He tossed the empty can out the open window and heard it fall with a clatter into the pile of countless other empty cans. He had dug a pit for his garbage waste. He dug one per year, deep enough for one year’s worth of garbage, then covered the whole thing up on New Years Eve. He spent New Years Day digging the next pit. There were now fourteen soft mounds of dirt covering old pits and one still open. Some people popped champagne, lit off fire crackers or went to New York for the ball drop to ring in the new year. Turk dug his garbage pit. It meant about the same thing.
The inside of Turk’s Airstream was a curiosity in and of itself. The walls were plastered with various things he had found along the road over the years that had interested him or, more accurately, disgusted him with humanity. His shining example was a licence plate frame he had picked up on the side of the highway about five years back. In the bottom corner was a graphic of Disney’s tinkerbell, down on hands and knees in all innocence, perhaps inspecting a flower. The top of the frame read “If you’re going to ride my ass” and the bottom read “at least pull my hair”. Somehow, in Turk’s mind, that summed it all up. Everything that was wrong with people, all the dirty, disgusting, brutish ugliness of humanity could be found in that lame joke of a license plate frame. There were other frames with poor jokes, though none as dirty. “Grandma’s the name, Spoiling’s the game” made several appearances, along with “My Other Car is a Spaceship” and “Happily Married, Hope my Girlfriend Doesn’t Find Out”. Turk had pasted old newspaper clippings inside the frames too: “ First Fire Fight Breaks Out between American Troops and Mexican Insurgents Mexico, May 2nd 2043” for example, or “Mass Shooting in Disneyland, Terrorism in the Happiest Place on Earth”. An outsider might have thought Turk a paranoid lunatic. Turk thought himself a social revolutionary without a following, therefore simply an outlaw.
After breakfast, Turk stepped out of his trailer into the desert morning. There was something fresh and grand about the loneliness of his camp in the morning. It usually got old by noon, but he enjoyed it when the sky was still shot with little bits of pink. He lit a cigarette and went to his garbage pit to take a leak. There was a vulture hopping about among the can, his long, naked neck extended, reaching for the shreds of canned meat that Turk had missed.
“Morning.” Turk said to the vulture. It paid him no mind and continued with its can. Turk shook his head.
Back by his trailer, Turk set himself to his occupation for the day: the strange object. He took the metal ball from the trailer and set it on the card table outside. He had a large, open air tent outside his trailer, with a card table and chairs. With a cigarette clamped in the corner of his mouth, he ran his hands over the ball. It was cool now, which was good. Whatever was inside, if there was anything inside, was not generating heat. The scalding burn he had received the night before was strictly from entering the atmosphere. He studied the queer letters, but it was in vain. He couldn’t pretend to understand them, or even know their origins. He had made it through high school, but his consistent C+ in Spanish was all he could boast for his knowledge of foreign language, and Spanish at least used the roman alphabet. This was something else entirely. Probably Chinese, Turk thought, they write in these kind of dash-and-squiggle letters, right? He didn’t know. Still, it was safe to bet that this was not of American origins. He would proceed with caution. He no longer thought it was a bomb. If it was, then it was simply a defective bomb. The United States was at war with Mexican insurgents on the border, but there had been peace between Asia and the US for a good many years. And, again, Turk was sure that the writing was not Spanish, so he did not think it was a weapon. His bet was a satellite of some kind, thought why it had hinges and a twist handle like this was beyond him. He decided to open it. If it was a bomb and took him out along with half the desert, so what? Not his problem anymore at that point. Still, his hand trembled as he reached for the knob. It turned easily, noiselessly. There was the slightest click as it locked into the open position. He lifted the upper hemisphere. There was a whoosh as the once-vacuum sealed compartment let in the rush of air. Turk found himself looking at two objects encased in some bizarre padding, almost like styrofoam, yet with more give. It was almost a jelly. He wrinkled his nose. The padding smelled funny. He didn’t like it. Holding his breath, he pulled the first and smaller of the two items. It was a little bottle, no larger than his pinky finger. Inside was one solitary white pill. He stared at it, fascinated and horrified at the same time. Not likely, he thought to himself about the pill. He might have been a fool for picking up the satellite, but he was so foolish as all that. He wasn’t going to take a pill that had just fallen from the sky. He put the bottle aside and turned his attention to the second and larger item. It was a metal box, about a foot high, a foot wide, and four inches deep. The front had a ten by eight inch screen on it, with a variety of buttons and holes that might have been speakers underneath. Pulling it out, Turk held it close to his face. The screen was blank, grey behind thick glass. The rest of the box, except the buttons, was grey too. He turned it over. On the back were more of the same queer signs. They were formatted such that he thought they might be instructions, but he couldn’t read them. He turned the box over in his hands, looking once again at the front. The buttons had little symbols on them too, but they were useless to him. Still, he was sure that the one on the far right side, the one that was a switch instead of a button, had to be the power. He didn’t need queer letter instruction to know an on-off switch when he saw one. Holding his breath, he flipped the switch.
For a moment nothing happened. He was disappointed. He set the box down on the card table and slumped into the chair, his eyes fixed on the blank screen. Then a crackle like radio static came from the speakers. He sat up and leaned in closer, straining his ears. The crackle gave way to an audible hum, but without distinguishable sounds or words. There was a faint light on the screen. Turk stared, enraptured, as the light melted to colors. Within a few minutes Turk was looking at an image of a wide field. The grass was lush green, long and untended up beautifully full and bursting with life. Squinting, Turk thought he could just make out dots moving about just above ground levels, dots that could be butterflies or cheerful bumble bees humming about their business. He smiled. It was certainly a pleasant meadow. Here and there trees sprung up from the grass. He couldn’t recognize them as any he had seen before, but he knew that he was no botanist. This was most likely a recorded video of a foreign country side. Curious cargo for a satellite to carry, but there it was. He liked the scene a lot, and for half an hour he stared into the screen intently, not once looking up at the contrast between the lovely, lush green life on the screen the brown and tan deadness of his surroundings. He had picked up the box and brought it closer to his face, trying to make out the details. The grass, he thought, was different than the grass he had seen. It was green enough, sure, but it seemed to be shot with streaks of blue, giving the whole body a peaceful aquamarine hue. The long blades rustled with an unfelt wind and the meadow looked like a vague ocean, stretching out to an unreachable horizon through the screen. Turk sighed, and the sigh turned into a wheeze, and then to a harsh, hacking cough. He doubled over in the chair, his fist uselessly covering his mouth, his eyes shut and watering.
In a few minutes he had finished, and he straightened himself, rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. Heaving deep, shaky breaths he walked back to the trailer and opened the door. Inside he found the bottle of Tussin DM. He uncapped it and took a swig, grimacing against the abrasive sweetness of the syrup. He checked the fist he had been coughing into. No blood. So that was alright. He took a cup from the shelf and went to the water tank, three-quarters full still, that he had in the corner. He drank deeply and looked around. After a hard fit of coughing always felt like returning to the planet for the first time in a century, all things around him only vaguely recognizable, silent, somehow askew, indescribably wrong. He shut his eyes again and took another drink of water. He’d need to ride into the Desert Mercantile soon, but maybe not today. It was probably better to lay low for a day.
The sun in the desert is the only mark of time, the only thing which moves aside from the occasional skitter of an animal across the sunbaked rocks or the distant rustle of a far off tumbleweed. The sun marches resolutely across the sky, a smooth gliding metronome without ticks. And for most of the day, until the sun was setting fire to the Sierra Nevadas on the western horizon, Turk did not feel like he could do anything. His body felt limp, smothered by the heat of noon, and the lingering heat of afternoon. He sat in the shade of his open air tent, leaning back in the chair and staring lazily at the screen. It hardly meant anything, he decided. An accident, or a joke. Somebody had launched a tiny television that played only a video of an empty field. It was a pretty lame joke, he thought. The machine itself seemed old. It wasn’t of a kind he’d seen before, and it lacked the sleekness of the electric devices he had known in his youth. This one was boxy, and not the whole front side was even covered by the screen. The buttons were manual, rather than the touchscreen technology that had been standard for so long. He shook his head. This was something out of a junk heap, or from the shelf of some long forgotten thrift store, and then somebody had built a satellite and launched it. Probably a high schooler’s science project. The writing was queer, but perhaps it was a form of English afterall. Code, perhaps, or mathematical symbols that he simply did not understand. Either way, it did not seem so serious as he had originally thought. He did not think that any government patrols would be combing the area looking for it. All throughout the day, while he sat, he had kept an eye and an ear open for the sound of a chopper or the distant dust cloud that meant cars. Nothing. So it couldn’t be as serious as all that.
The sun set, and the desert air grew cold, though the ground retained the heat of the sun for some time longer. Coughing, Turk went back to the trailer and undressed. The box, it’s outdated television screen still lit and showing the quiet meadow, illuminated the dark trailer in eerie blue tones. Turk fell asleep gazing at the scene.
When he awoke, the screen was dark. At first he thought that it had somehow shut itself off in the night, or that it had run out of battery, but when he looked closer he saw that the image was still there. Night had fallen over the meadow. The bizarre trees and sloping hills were nothing more than shadows and silhouettes, and overhead blazed stars in their grand familiar brilliance. And yet, not quite familiar. There was something off about them too, though he could not say what it was. He shook his head and turned away. There were only three cans of Spam left, and Turk cooked one for breakfast. He would have to go to the Mercantile today, and no question. He needed more Tussin, as well as another carton of cigarettes and a few other odds and ends. He tossed the empty can out the window and heard the clatter.
When he had finished eating, Turk went out to his motorcycle. He needed gas. Turk grabbed the jerry can from the side of the trailer and turned back to the motorcycle, but stopped short. A vulture, perhaps the same one he had seen the day before, had perched itself on the leather seat of his bike.
“Shoo” Turk said, waving a hand at the large, bald bird. It cocked an eye at him but did not move. He waved again, coming a few steps nearer, and shouted at it. “Go on, now!” It rustled its black feathers and hunched its neck. “Alright.” Turk said. He set down the jerry can and drew his Sig Sauer from the shoulder holster. He aimed high, so that he would not hit the motorcycle by accident, and fired. He missed the bird, but it flapped away and out of sight. Turk took the jerry can and emptied the gasoline into his bike, then placed the empty can in one of his panyers and started the bike engine. He would need to ask Bill Razor if he could get a new motorcycle helmet anywhere, and he would be more careful with this one. The last one had been stolen from the handlebars where Turk had left it hanging. Well, he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He climbed on the bike and rode away in a roar of engine and a cloud of dust.
When Turk returned he had a helmet. It wasn’t as good as the one he’d had before. It was not a DOT, and did not have the visor. It was more of a cap, but it would at least keep him from being pulled over by the police on that accord. The sun was hot. Turk had been gone four hours. He unloaded the supplies from his bike and then sat down sweating and coughing into his fist in the shade of his tent. He stared out at the desert, watching the heat make the horizon shimmer and waver. After a while he got up and went back inside to get water and another slug of Tussin. He was coughing more than usual.
The screen, which Turk only glanced at, still showed darkness, though it seemed more grey than black now. As if dawn might be approaching. He picked up the box and looked closely at the screen. Nothing moved. He put it back down and went outside, an unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He studied the spherical satellite that had brought the box to him, the strange packing material inside, and the lone pill in the little vile. He thought about it. What was the harm? If it were poison, so what? If it were drugs, what fun. If it were something else… In a moment of sudden decision he grabbed the vile and went back into the trailer. He drew of a cup of water from his tank and took the little white pill out of the vile. He glanced for a moment all around him, taking in his surroundings. Afterall, it might be the last time he saw them. He looked at the Marine Corps pin that he had hung on the wall, touched it for moment, then tossed the pill in his mouth and drank the water. For a moment nothing happened. Then he felt something in his head. He squirmed. It was an unpleasant feeling, as if a gloved finger coated with cold vaseline were reaching in through his skull and poking the center of brain. He groaned and clutched his head. The feeling persisted for a few moments behind Turks clenched eyes, then faded away. He blinked and looked around him. For a moment everything shone, as if it were made of aluminum and placed under a bright lamp. Then it returned to normal.
“Huh.” Turk was confused. He shrugged, took another drink of water and was about to go outside, but stopped. He was looking at the box with the screen. The button was turned to “on”. That was no shock, except for the fact that he could read it. He could clearly read, printed in small but clear white letters, the words “on” and “off” over and under the switch. Surely he had not been able to read it yesterday. Surely it had not been in English. But there it was. And the other buttons too; they all had English inscriptions underneath. “Pan Up” “Pan Down” “Pan Right” “Pan Left” “Volume Up” “Volume Down” “Zoom In” “Zoom Out” “Transmit”. He grabbed the box and held it close to his face, reading over each button again and again, unable to believe it. He turned the box over. He could read the inscription on the back now too.
“To establish communication, press Transmit button while facing screen. When attendant appears, speak message followed by ‘over’ to indicate when finished.”
With trembling fingers, Turk turned the box so that he was looking at the screen once more. The horizon was just being lit by the first rays of sun, and how strange a sun it seemed. It was a deep red, and cast orange light over the hills and trees. His heart in his throat, Turk pressed the “transmit” button and waited. Nothing happened. He pressed it again. Still nothing. He mashed the button, desperate beyond his own reasoning or understanding for someone on the other side to pick up, whoever they may be. He pressed the button over and over, nearly with tears in his eyes.
“C’mon, attendant, don’t be asleep at the switch. Come on! Wake up!” he yelled at the box. No face appeared, but there was a disturbed rustling among the trees and a group of small birds took flight a great cloud. Frustrated, Turk set the box down with a hard thump and went outside. The cigarette still rested unlit his mouth, and he struck a match to get it going. Smoking, he gazed at the satelite it had come it. He could read that too now, though it didn’t make much sense.
“Redtown Space Program” it read, and underneath a series of numbers and letters that didn’t mean anything to him. He didn’t know where Redtown was, but it certainly sounded Russian to him. Still, if it were Russia, why would be in written in English? Because it had been intended for the United States? And was it written in English? He was sure that he had seen queer symbols and not the Roman alphabet the day before. Perhaps he had been sick, and his eyes had been blurry. It was a weak suggestion, but the best he had. He shook his head.
On the screen inside, unknown to Turk, a curious animal had heard the shouts coming from Turk’s side of the transmission. It had climbed the ruins to the tower where the other box, in that other place, was still fixed. It was an odd sight, if Turk could have seen it. This creature, somewhat ape like, though with two more arms, a total of eight eyes that extended all around the circumference of its head, and with fur the same aquamarine color of the grass, climbing up the bombed out ruins of what had once been the most progressive center for Cosmic Science Research and Exploration in the Messier 31, more commonly known as the Andromeda, Galaxy. It would have been darkly comical, if there had been anyone to see it, but there wasn’t. After a few minutes of nosing about the box, which had miraculously survived the bombing and was still transmitting to it’s satellite counterpart, the creature climbed back down. There was nothing to eat up there, and the noise had since ceased. Nothing too interesting about that at all.
Turk came back to the trailer in the evening. He had spent the day with his feet up on the card table, shooting at the vultures whenever they came in sight and coughing violently into his fist. A pretty good day, on the whole. He had been turning over and over in his head what the satellite could mean, what it had to do with him, and where it could have come from. With evening, he brought the box out to the card table once more. He had decided he would sit with it and watch until something or someone showed itself. Afterall, the instructions said to hold down transmit until an attendant appeared. Perhaps they had just missed the call. It was an odd place to hold a video communication. The view from the camera looked out over an empty field, and seemed perched high up. Strange, but all of it was strange. He pressed the “Transmit” button again, then set the box down on the table and leaned his face on the palm of his hand to wait. It was midday in that other place, Redtown he thought it was called, and the sunlight was bright and yellow. He watched for a long time, and the light faded into orange as the sun sank. He contemplated the other buttons, and tried them. He found that, with the pan up, pan down, pan right and pan left buttons he could change the view on the screen. So then this was not definitely not a recording. He was interacting with it. It couldn’t be. It was a live feed from Redtown, wherever that was. He messed with the buttons for a while, and discovered that he could turn the camera three-hundred and sixty degrees right or left, but about ninety degrees up or down. He looked around. He though he could see some hint of masonry in the bottom of the screen when he had planned all the way down, but he couldn’t be sure. Looking closely, he saw white dots here and there that could have been buildings. He used the zoom buttons, but was only able to zoom enough to get an unclear idea of what they were. Buildings, he decided, but the picture was so bad that they looked like ruins. They couldn’t be. Why would someone send him a live feed of a ruined city? They wouldn’t. It must have been poor resolution, he decided.
He watched far into the night, as the sun set over the field and the strange buildings. When all was inky shadows and navy blue night, Turk got up and went back to the trailer. He placed the box on the shelf, undressed and got into bed. He could not sleep, however. The thoughts of what could be on the other side of that box, who had sent it and why bounced around loud and unanswerable in his head. He sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette, thinking, and was sent into a fit of coughing. He snubbed out the cigarette, half smoked, to be finished later. Out here, all things were too precious to be wasted except himself.
Over the next several days Turk watched the screen intently, hoping that the attendant spoken of in the instructions would show himself. He watched with dissipating hope as day after day the sun rose and fell over empty fields. Here and there he caught sight of animals that he took to be deer, though the antlers were unlike any deer he had seen before. They rose from their heads in wide, flat paddles bone white, and when the animals spared they swung their necks sideways so as to whack each other with the broadside of the antler. It was interesting, but not what he wanted. The strange animals of another country were, nonetheless, just animals, and he was no naturalist. They were the same greenish color as the grass, but their white paddle antlers stood and stuck up, making them easy to spot.
On the fourth day of watching, however, he noticed something that caught his serious attention. Far off on one of the hills he saw what could be a person. He zoomed as far in as he could, and still the image was vague. It was definitely a thing with two arms, two legs and a head. It was dressed, he could see, in clothes with patches of randomly alternating green, blue and aquamarine, the pattern not unlike modern military camouflage. He wore a helmet too, the same patterns and colors except for a wide red band around it. A soldier? He certainly acted like one. He was crawling along a hilltop of his stomach. The pack on on his back was a formless shape to Turk’s eyes, but every now and then the man took something from it and held it to his face, as if he were looking through it. A scout, Turk thought. Perhaps he was hunting the deer, but if he was then he was not very good at it. The deer were standing about in lazy groups, unknowing of the scout’s presence. If he were a hunter he could have made a clean kill shot a hundred times over by now. Something moved away from the man, and Turk panned the camera for a better look. Some yards back there was another, then another and another. There were dozens of them, crouching in the tall grass, nearly invisible except for the red bands around their helmets. By this time Turk felt sure that they were soldiers. Their formations seemed familiar, similar to the ones he’d been drilled in while he was at Camp Pendleton. He could not see their faces. They were covered by a thin mesh screen of the same blue and green pattern as the rest of their bodies. With a rising sense of alarm, he panned the camera around. They were everywhere now, among the trees, behind the hills and in the grass. How long had they been there? He had no idea. Probably they had come in the night while he was not watching, but he had no way of knowing. And what were they doing. The solemnity of their movement, the silence that still reigned unbroken over the fields suggested to him that it was not simply a drilling of some foreign platoon. He was overwhelmed with the sudden certainty that he was about to be a spectator to a battle of some kind. But that would require an enemy. He panned the camera to the left, trying to see.
Sure enough, just as the red banded soldiers filled the nooks and crannies, the shadows and niches of the right side of the field, the left was swarming with soldiers too. These had yellow bands around their helmets. Aside from that, the two sides were identical. They both faced the center of the field where, still unwitting grazing and sparring among themselves, the deer meandered. Turk bit his lip, wondering where in the world Redtown was and who was going to war before his eyes. Should he tell someone? But who? Everything inside him screamed against going to the military authorities. The indescrepencies of his own identity would be sure to come into question, and he did not think that he could get away with selling himself as Lucky McGraw or Howard Clinton. He watched with numb horror as the armies crept towards each other. Even if he did go to authorities, it was hours and hours ride before he could have reached anyone, and by that time he felt sure the battle would be raging. The sides weren’t more than three-hundred yards apart now.
The first fire came with a sudden, ear splitting noise. While he had been surveying the landscape over the past several days, Turk had turned the volume all the way up. The roaring report of the first rifle nearly burst his eardrums. He crumpled over, holding his hands to his ears, and for a moment he was back at the Mexico-United States border, soiling himself as bullets whistled overhead. He collected himself slowly, coughing, and got back to the table. He turned down the volume, took a slug of Tussin and lit a cigarette, watching intently. The sides were firing at each other, though he heard nothing. It was hard to make sense of who was who, and who might be winning. The sides looked so similar except for their helmet bands, and in the rush of the fight it was hard to make out.
The first fight lasted about an hour. When the firing stopped both sides were engaged in carrying their dead and wounded out of the field on stretchers. Turk was horrified, but glad that it was over. He watched as the few that remained peered at each other through the objects they pulled from their packs, and facelessly turned to each other, motioning with gloved hands.
Night fell and there was silence. Turk went to sleep, but turned up the volume on the box. He wanted to know what was going to happen. If it got too bad, he might have to go to the authorities anyway. If there was to be a great war that broke out, he did not want to go down in the history books as the man who could have stopped it, but didn’t. Still, he would Court Marshalled and killed for desertion if he approached the authorities and the whole thing turned out to be a gag. He laid in his bed, undecided until the sun rose on the screen. He brought the box with him into the bed and sat watching and the sides resumed their advance towards each other, reinforced in numbers and bearing heavier arms.
Back and forth for days the sides traded bullets, curses, shells and dealt death with an easy hand. The reds, as Turk had begun to call them, definitely had a leg up. Each day they took out more and more of the yellows, and the reinforcements that arrived by the next sunrise got smaller and smaller each time.
On the morning, morning by the screen that is, Turk had lost all track of real time and when the sun outside his trailer was rising and setting, the yellows had vanished from the field. Victory for the reds, Turk thought and that was that. The reds seemed to think so too. They were hesitant for a while, unwilling to stand up and make themselves easy targets. An hour passed, then two, and still nothing moved on the far side of the field. Finally, with a great whooping cheer that Turk could hear even with the volume most of the way down, the reds began to stand up and clap each other on the back. They took off their helmets and threw them up in the air, revealing their faces to Turk for the first time. He gasped and nearly fell off the bed where he was sitting. They were unlike any men he had ever seen before. He zoomed in on the closest man to him. He was taking off the body armor with the pattern. As he gazed, Turk realized that it was not a man at all. The thing had a long, narrow face, with high cheekbones, no hair at all, and large, glassy eyes that wrapped around the side of the face like domes. The shock of this discovery came in a surreal wash over Turk, instead of the sudden pang that one might feel when they realized they were looking at the face of an alien creature, a humanoid, clearly intelligent thing that was all the same not human at all. Turk, however, felt no fear. He felt an immediate love for the creature, and all its brethren. They had mouths much like humans' mouths, and all were turned up in joyous grains of exaltation. In his heart and soul Turk cheered alongside them. They had won some great war, and the revelries that he observed on the screen were so ecstatic that he himself, millions of lightyears away as he was now sure he was, could not help but joi in them. They waved flags and embraced each other with their spider-like thin arms, and it was beautiful. Glory, it seemed, honorable victory, valor and greatness lived in these creatures, and something that had quelled forever in Turk’s soul was satisfied in this. He felt that he was not alone in the universe for the first time in many, many years. He rose to his feet and saluted the brave soldiers proudly as they rejoiced. The war was over, ring the bells and let the people throng their heros with cries of happiness.
And then the first bomb dropped. It made no sound at all. Just a burst of orange fire, white in the center, flowering up from the ground and consuming all within its reach. Still standing, Turk watched, horrorstruck. Another fell, and another, blanketing the area with coats of fire, sticking to the rejoicing soldiers, climbing their unarmored bodies, licking up the trunks of the trees, leaving the soft green-blue grass charred and black.
Turk sank into a chair, watching. All was finished within ten minutes. Not a single of the beautiful, rejoicing men was left. Fire had consumed all, not only the men but the trees and flowers, the deer and the bees, and finally consumed itself and went out. Blind with rage, he let loose cries of impotent despair. Turk shook his fist at the screen, which now showed barren ground as rocky and dry as the one that surrounded him now. All that glory, that feeling of comfort within the universe, snuffed out as soon as it had been kindled, engulfed in flame and death. Turk wept unashamedly in his hands, the sobs broken up by violent fits of coughing.
On the screen, men in yellow bodysuits, with masks and rifles, wandered slowly across the burnt field. Here and there they stopped to shoot a wretched survivor in the head. One climbed the ruins that had once, many years before, been the Cosmic Science Research and Exploration Center. On the top, somehow having survived whatever had caused the initial ruin and the most recent wave of fire bombs, a single camera stood on a pivot, it’s light blinking that it was still transmitting. The soldier in the yellow bodysuit, without a word, took it off the pivot. Turk was busy coughing to watch the screen as for a moment it showed a close up of yet another alien face, this once shielded behind a clear mask in a yellow helmet. Then it was turned around. A quick glimpse of boots, then the screen went blank. The soldier had ripped the cables out of the camera, and that was all there was to it.
Turk saw none of this. He was staring at his hand, which he had just been coughing into. This time, there was blood.