TT TUESDAY secondary Flashcards
02 TRAFFIC How long until I’d realize what it was I’d noticed?
Ron had lived beside traffic all his life. That is, until he woke up and it was quiet three years ago, he’d lived beside traffic. In the days before it was stylish
to play music to the unborn child in the womb, Ron had had prenatal music of a sort.
05 ALLMAN She comes into the room.
Coffee? she asks. Sets one of the mugs on his table. Records, tapes, CDs. A microphone. Walled in by mismatched players, patched together with cables of all sorts. Billboard Book…
06 AFTER ALLMAN You don’t agree? Fine!
You just come on down to the station and you let me know. Fix your gaze on that pillar of light in the midnight sky and make your way to the corner of Fortieth and West Boulevard, we broadcast from the top floor of 2107 West Fortieth, tallest tower in beautiful downtown Kerrisdale, one-time home of yuppies and old folks…
08 Bobby Thomson’s home run.
Real faint. In a couple seconds it faded out again. I stopped the four wheel, slammed it into reverse, backed up to where I heard it, and there it was. This announcer, the crowd sounds – Jesus, a crowd, I’m thinking – And when that’s over, there comes this other voice. That was you. A live voice, not just somebody on tape, I could tell. And then you put on… this song.
10 FIRST MORNING Sometime around sprinkling the brown sugar on the Rice Krispies
he started listening, trying to pick up sounds elsewhere in the building. Outside. Anything at all. Birds outside his window. Rice Krispies in his bowl. But that was it. Not a human sound to be heard. Opened his window. No traffic, not even the occasional car. Not even in the distance. A dog barking somewhere.
11 FIRST MORNING FM, AM, nobody on the air.
No static even. Not a thing. Except hiss.
He got on the phone. Called work, got the answering machine. Well, okay, it’s early, he thought. Called his supervisor at home. No answer. Left for work already, not a big deal.
12 FIRST MORNING back to the way things were supposed to be,
to do anything but go outside where something was waiting for him.
He didn’t step back inside, but he didn’t head for the drug store either. Not right away. He stood there, looked around, mostly listened around. It seemed artificial, somehow. Like a movie soundtrack. A soundtrack with no music, and not quite enough sound effects. Slight tree rustles, birds, his shoes on the ground as he started to walk.
14 BRIDGES But Janice keeps talking about bridges,
what if they can’t get across a river somewhere, all the bridges are down, or they don’t look safe. Especially the Columbia, you know that one that cuts across northern Oregon, for some reason she’s got it in her mind they’ll get that far and never be able to cross the Columbia River. And it’s not like you can just go around. You can’t just go around the Columbia.
15 FRESHMEN I don’t know. People.
She’s trying to talk him into it again. Into going. He thought all that was decided. He’d stay behind, keep the station on the air…
17a INVISIBLE movies like A Thief In The Night, songs like I Wish We’d All Been Ready.
Or maybe the way it all turned out, that would have just confused things even more. But he’d grown up with the Beatles…
17b INVISIBLE So he was quite unprepared for what actually came to pass.
He remembered when he was little, heading for school one morning and imagining, what if he had suddenly turned invisible when he left his house, and nobody could see him?
18a INVISIBLE nobody came over to play with him
on the school ground.
And when the bell rang he waited to be at the end of the line to go in and the playground monitor didn’t even look at him, and the illusion was perfect until his teacher Mrs. Peters called his name when she took attendance…
18b INVISIBLE and he had to answer, and she heard him and everything, and that was that.
Remembering that, he also thought of another game from his childhood, where he pretended everybody else had disappeared and he was the last person alive on the earth.
18c INVISIBLE the game would start seeming a bit too real,
And he’d start thinking maybe there really had been a nuclear war in Russia or somewhere and that’s what everybody was in watching on TV. And pretty soon the radiation would get to Calgary, and everybody’d be dead. And he would catch himself not breathing, because that wasn’t impossible enough, even a kid knew that…
19a YEW STREET Turned the corner and saw
A half-ton with Globe & Mail on the side imbedded in a crumpled Vega that had been parked at the curb.
