Hello It’s Me

Hello It’s Me – Todd Rundgren (listen in new tab)

The old clock radio crackles alive, doing its best to make its low, muffled and dispersed noise, drawing in the weak, aging oscillations of the AM band.

It’s a familiar and lonely sound. Like visits to old age homes; music sitting almost quiet, almost in stillness. Songs we all know the words to, but would never ask to hear. Like memories we wish we could shoot into space, but instead they just bounce around the stratosphere of our brains.

Maura’s mouth is pasty, dry. Her nose is crusted, smells faintly of vomit. Her stomach is scratched bare, suddenly cavernous and empty. She puts a hand to her forehead, finding that her arm is surprisingly weak and that her forehead throbs ungratefully when she touches it.

The world is blurry. She fumbles for her glasses, finding them with relief in one of their three usual spots. She looks at the dusty, browned garage sale clock radio, slapping uselessly at it to turn it off. The button appears to be jammed. “Stupid thing.” She regrets the one dollar she’d paid for it.

It’s 8:30, Saturday. The drapes are closed. A crack of sun sneaks in, making a line across the floor. Over the bed and her almost naked body, before disappearing in shadows. She must have slept over the covers.

She tries not to smell her own breath. The taste of stale rye and sick mix uncomfortably. She wonders what she had been thinking. Maybe she hoped she’d wake up with more resolve, a sense of strength. But, really she just wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep so soundly and securely, so surely cupped in the cold hands of dreamlessness.

But her dreams were warm with hurt and too familiar. Three days since she realized Edmund was in Toronto. Two restless nights during which she tortured herself and twisted the knife further for doing this to herself. The third night she flattened herself with whiskey.

Brae watched her get drunk, offered her consolation. But Maura couldn’t tell her everything. She wanted to. But the words still choked in her throat and cruelly pooled in her mind at night.

And like the last two nights, she dreamt (Are they dreams if they happened?) about a pacific island.

She was fresh out of school, then. The O’Baird family was a legacy of seafarers and travelers that fueled her blood. She wanted an adventure.

At 22, she signed on with a company that worked with indigenous peoples in those places the multinational companies caress with their wet mouths and sharp claws. She was sent to some far flung island to help people fight forced relocation by oil companies.

Exotic locales, peoples in need, the endless battle of the righteous. It was eye-opening.

And then she fell in love. Mr. Edmund Gloucester walked up to her, unstrugglingly handsome in the tropical heat. But even then his eyes were clouds, behind which a hotter sun burned. They met in a bar on a beach, one of those shacks that leaned against the forest, your feet sinking into alabaster sand as you got drunk.

Two months on the island and she was swept away by him. One day after a few weeks, he stopped her on the road, made her come back to his hotel room and he confessed his heart. He worked for one of the oil concerns, Agravaine International, and he was risking his job by seeing her. She realized she was, too.

When she kissed him, pressing her body up against his, it didn’t matter. They were on fire for each other. They were in love. It was bigger than everything. It didn’t matter.

But, it did. Soon, she was spending less time on the job, less time paying attention to the white men and their translators sent by the oil men.

And then Edmund suggested they head to Sydney for a weekend. He had the time off and would foot the bill if she couldn’t afford it (she couldn’t, not on her pitiful martyrs salary). Her colleagues were off island to help coordinate a different project, and she hadn’t left the island in four months. She went. He proposed to her in the nicest restaurant she’d ever seen. The ring slid on with casual care. It fit snug with somnolescent weight.

Years later, she still isn’t sure that Edmund wasn’t in love with her. Maybe Agravaine played him, too. It’s irrelevant now, indistinguishable from the fact that while she was in Sydney (on a trip that was unblinkingly extended three days), the oil company undid all the work she and her colleagues had done.

When she got back. They were loading people on busses. Bull-dozers were standing ready. Some of the community elders stood their ground with their wives and children. They were unprepared to leave. As the buses rocked and rumbled away, these people stood, staring down tractors and armed men.

Maura stood helplessly with her colleagues, cordoned by angry company men with rifles. It looked like it would stay static and angry forever, but there was a scuffle and a young man from the village grabbed a gun and fired. The bullet bounced harmlessly off a bulldozer’s blade, disappearing in a puff of sand.

It was a cue. The men with guns fired back. Thus, their problem with the locals was solved. The village had been there for over a hundred years, maybe more. And it was gone in a little under an hour.

That night she went to see Edmund. He said he didn’t know anything about it. Maura’s mind was torn with rage. She couldn’t hear him, his eyes and his words didn’t match. She threw his ring at him hoping the diamond would gouge a hole through him. Instead, it bounced off his shirt, landing heavy and small on the floor.

Then she quit the aid agency and went to teach English in Taiwan and then Africa. The faces of the dead villagers followed her night and day and then stopped once they felt satisfied with the weight of her guilt. It took three years. The next week she moved back to Toronto.

In three days, Edmund had unraveled everything she tried to put back together.

She listens, prostrate in bed, to the song the radio offers. It is an old jukebox favourite of Edmund's. They slow danced to it once. She quickly puts that aside.

There is a familiar knock on her door. She knows it’s K.