Lost Signals Read Online Free PDF Page B

the music again, the rhythm of pavement as the highway danced for him beneath the floorboards.
    Max turned on the radio, switching immediately from the dead FM presets of his last layover to the strange anonymity of AM. A veteran of the road, Max loved to scan the monophonic dial when moving through the most remote areas of the country. Amplitude modulation radio in major cities was the cozy bed of blustery right wing shitsuckers, sports broadcasting, and Madison Avenue country pop. But out in the forgotten hinterlands, especially in the desert southwest, the bedfellows become more strange, inhabited by a disparate mix of yammering Spanish, mournful cowboy crooning, random snatches of Chinese, thunderous Evangelical sermons, and UFO whistleblowers who always seemed to concentrate in the dried out, forgotten places, using the AM airwaves to vent their spleen and warn the ignorant masses about the alien entities already moving amongst us. The desert seemed ideally suited to a curious collection of castoffs, eccentrics, weirdos, and sociopaths naturally drawn to the dusty fringes. Meth cooks, anti-government militias, New Agey art nuts, murder cultists. All headed to the sandy heat like Jesus himself, looking to face down their demons, or possibly create them, away from the prying eyes of the better irrigated. Owing to the circumstances surrounding his exit from his last stopover, perhaps Max should join this sun-blasted freak show, he thought. Get lost amongst the lost. But he knew something else was out there for him, waiting far beyond the arid wasteland, where the mountains and trees sprang up again along the ocean cliffs, trying to slow the momentum of western trajectory before all frustrated life again ended up in the sea.
    Max pressed “scan” and skimmed over an offering of MexiCali accordion music and a low rent advert for industrial shedding, arriving at what he loved the most—the Born Againer martyrdom rant against the encroaching forces of the Antichrist, who was always some eastern hemisphere powerbroker carefully selected and re-christened by each new generation, and then watched like a chicken coop eyes a hawk—albeit a hawk two thousand miles away. No matter what latitude or longitude traveled, Max could find cold comfort in the certainty of religious zealotry flooding AM airwaves in the forgotten places of North America, stoked by paranoia, bigotry, xenophobia and a sort of gleeful fatalism that would have chilled Nietzsche to his knickers. Land of the free. Home of the brave.
    “And so the days of the tribulation are nigh, my brothers and sisters,” roared the firebrand, buzzing Max’s tiny speakers. “And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that ye be not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet here. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these are the beginning of sorrows   !”
    The signal faded a bit, but came back strong a few seconds later, allowing Max to continue his front row seat to the theatre of holy fear. “The signs are everywhere, if one knows how to look with the eyes of Jesus and the mind of God   ! The return of the Chosen Ones to their ancient land, the gathering of crows, the massing of armies . . . ” Hoots and hollers from the unseen audience gave credibility to these ravings that would be deemed insanity in the western world if spewed under a different banner, or no banner at all. “It’s all in the Word, and the Word shall come to pass   !”
    The Word. Max chuckled and lit up another cigarette, shaking his head at the dead-ass certainty of the Evangelical blowhard. How can one be so assured of anything   ? Faith aside, if this were a country settled by Bronze Age Norsemen and founded on the teachings of Odin and his hammer-wielding sprat, Americans would have a totally different outlook on the afterlife, and