Lost Signals Read Online Free PDF Page A

lower lip.
    “Phineas   ? Dear, earnest Finn,” called the goat in an unblemished baritone that echoed through the trees. Finn crouched lower, his mouth hanging open, staring. “How you’ve grown. Your mother brought you to me, you know   ? You were just a boy. A sapling, a whelp. I remember it well. Jessica carried you into the wood and stood right where Eric did. She flung you to the forest floor, offered you up like a prize. She begged, begged like a wretch, cried like a brat. She was very demanding.” He shook his head sadly, condescendingly. “And I tell you now even as I told her then, sorry, boy, but you are simply not worthy .
    “She never hit the water, by the way. She landed on the rocky shore, broke into pieces on the sharp and mossy stones. They needed more than one tarp to hide her sad, broken body from all the rubberneckers. Not that they didn’t get an eyeful, though.”
    Finn fell to the ground, grabbing handfuls of earth, crushing it in his fists, and sobbed. His mother had betrayed him. She didn’t love him. And then she had taken her life, left him alone with an obstinate liar of a father. Why did she do it   ? Out of sorrow and remorse   ? Or because her offering had been refused   ? He sobbed himself hoarse, beating the muddy ground with his fists.
    They had to take him. They had to. He stood. The goat and Eric were gone. The forest stood still and silent.
    “If you won’t take me, kill me,” he shouted into the thick wood. “Kill me   !”
    The only response was his echoing voice.
    Snuffling and panting, Finn searched out the piles of skin that had pulled away from Eric and fluttered to the forest floor. As he gathered them, he heard music from somewhere, he couldn’t tell where, the insistent beat of a thousand drums, overlapping, rising in volume and intensity. He piled the skin in his arms and headed back toward the clearing where the kids waited among their tents. He prayed that they would take him in for keeps. He prayed to see his mother again, that he might forgive her and once again fold himself into her betraying arms and offer her his forgiveness. And he prayed that one day he might find that signal hiding in the static at the low end of the dial, and it might tell him how to become worthy.

Even this far out, away from the light and the bilge and the droning nouveau bullshit lounge music rasping from a purposely old LP, things were still sort of a blur.
    The same blurry party with the same blurry people with annoying hipster headgear and piercings and tattoos and post-ironic t-shirts and uniformly blurry beards. The off-brand bottle of blurry liquor in his hand. The blurry, slurry skank that he had seen before but never recognized, pressing in too close, breathing all of his air.
    The shouting. The broken furniture. The fight. The blood. The weaksauce ghetto insults hurled from a safe distance as he ran out of the blurry room in the blurry house on a blurry street in a forgotten Midwestern city that blurred brown and green but mostly brown under a thousand jumbo jets every single day.
    A blur. All of it. And none of it worth a single fuck.
    Max scratched at the crusted gash on the side of his face and concentrated on the tunnel of pavement opening foot by foot ahead of him, trying to clear the blur from his mind as he drove west, ever west, in a last ditch effort to outrace the smudge of his past. This was it, he felt. A wagon train of one, fueled by a last hope for blessed clarity waiting amongst the swaying palms of the Pacific coast. Failing that, he’d drive off the end of the goddamn continent and drown in the murk of the darkened deep.
    Max blinked his eyes and lit up a cigarette, checking the cheap plastic compass he picked up at a truck stop in Grand Island, Nebraska, stuck lopsided to the dash of his shitty late model Dodge. West, the bobbing arrow assured him. West. He was still heading in the right direction. At last that much was certain.
    Max knew he