Cat In An Indigo Mood

Chapter 40

Call and Recall

The calls started jamming the switchboard during the last half hour of Ambrosia's seven-to-midnight shift.

Matt watched her fielding phone-ins and programming appropriate songs, every movement efficient, her Buddha-calm voice never indicating for an instant that she was keeping track of six things at once.

Thank heaven he didn't have to select and play the proper background music for every caller with every kind of problem.

He didn't know the past thirty or forty years of popular music anyway, although he was catching up fast after a few hours of listening to Ambrosia spin her spells and her platters.

Callers were eased off the air as fluidly as they were drawn into revealing their losses, failures, fears, and hopes. It was first names only and the comforting anonymity of public confession.

"Then Ambrosia clocked off, she motioned him to take over the hot seat.

"The whole world wants to talk to you, Mr. Midnight. Come on in and assume your headset."

"I'm not sure l want to talk to them."

"Why not?"

"After all the calls I've been fielding all day . . . talk shows and people who want to write true-crime books and so-called Hollywood producers. I don't know how they all got my home phone number."

"People like that want something bad enough. they get it. Are you listed in the phone book?"

"Maybe. By now. Depending on when a new edition came out. l haven't looked. When l moved here last year and got my phone, it never occurred to me that l should get an unpublished number."

"Such problems," she mocked. "The man is popular."

He checked the big schoolhouse-style clock on the wall with its boldly sweeping second hand. He trusted its massive, plain face more than the gilded hands on his wristwatch.

"My friend Temple is helping me get an agent. Then I can get an answering machine and tell everybody to call him. or her."

"An agent."

"You don't think it's a good idea?"

"For you, baby, sure! For us. . ."

"Oh. Well. it's not like I'm expecting a raise or anything, not so soon."

"Oh, but your agent will be." She chuckled. "Let's see what the people want besides you, Mr.

Midnight."

Her stately form glided out of the tiny studio like an ocean liner leaving the dock. Matt felt panic clutch his throat. What did they want, all these callers? Not him, really, but something they thought he could give them. He couldn't be getting more alien-baby calls, could he? Surely something like that happened once in a broadcast lifetime? And he was just an amateur at this.

The first voice came bubbling into his ears like effervescent empathy, female and heartfelt.

"Is this Mr. Midnight? I want to talk to Mr. Midnight, not some operator. Oh. It's you! That was the most sad and. and most scary thing I've ever heard. Thank you, thank you, for saving that girl."

"It was her baby that was in danger--"

"And if the baby had died, what would have happened to her?

What is happening to her?"

"I tried to get in touch with her today, but she's in the hands of the professionals.

Sociologists, doctors, psychologists. They're examining her. You're right; she doesn't have something unthinkable on her conscience. I have to believe she'll be all right."

"Well, you just keep trying to get through to her. The professionals! Where were they when she needed help?"

"They're there, but you have to ask them for that help."

"Well, at least we know where you are, Mr. Midnight. Keep up the good work."

The line didn't even go dead. Another voice was harping in his ears.

"Oh, it's a sad story. all right." Male and bitter. " 'Poor girl.' Where's the father. I gotta ask?

Did he have any voice in any of this? What about vows? What about promises? And miles to go, and promises to keep? Nobody keeps promises any more. Wedding rings, worthless. Throw them in the sewers, in the bushes. Web rings, that's what people want. Internet. Not interconnection. The world is crazy--"

"The world is crazy, but people are made that way by other people, sometimes. We can't blame the victims. . . ."

"Yes, we can! We can when everybody's a 'victim.' Isn't there any responsibility anymore?

Everybody weaseling out of everything. In the old days, people paid. People did what was right, no matter the cost. There were no easy outs."

"You think running to hide in a run-down motel room is an easy out for anyone? Especially an expectant mother?"

"The Virgin Mary was an expectant Mother, and she didn't run to hide."

"She had an angel come to tell her everything was all right. Is that any different from an alien visitation? Which do you believe, that the young, unwed pregnant woman of two thousand years ago saw an angel, or the young, unwed pregnant woman of today saw alien abduction?"

"There's no comparison. Mary was holy; she bore the Son of God."

"And at the time, who saw a Son of God?"

"Joseph. Joseph was faithful. He protected Marv from herself. He saw that she wed herself to Heaven and himself."

Matt was taken aback. Joseph was the forgotten man of Scriptures. God's cuckold, if you wanted to be crass about it, the first celibate, to go by church teaching, an avuncular husband and stepfather to the Lord. A man who made sure Mary remained a Virgin Mother the rest of her days, unto the foot of the Cross.

Then there were the Lutherans, who said Jesus had many brothers and sisters. and that John the Baptist was his cousin. . . .

Theology was not what the Midnight Hour was about, Matt knew that much. Nor was finger-pointing, not if he had anything to do about it.

"She was a young girl," he said' "In some societies she would be buried to her waist and stoned to death for the very fact of her pregnancy, never mind who had perpetrated it on her."

"Pregnancy is a holy state; it is never wrong."

"It is initiated by someone who has an obligation to be there," Matt pointed out, "and in so many cases isn't. What about him?

What about the father of the child? Where was he?"

"He was everywhere, and nowhere. That doesn't matter. lf she had wanted to get rid of that baby before it was born, it would have been her right without getting anybody else's say-so.

Maybe it's lucky she called a radio station to get talked out of murder, but hundreds of thousands of babies are murdered every day--"

Gone. Gone with the control booth. Abortion debate was a no-no on WCOO. And Matt was glad of it.

Another voice. Another point of view. "What about birth control? Why aren't our young people educated to avoid that kind of awful trouble before it hits them? Where were her parents? They should have educated her better about the birds and the bees."

Matt felt he had to say the unthinkable. "She had nowhere to turn. Her father was the father of the baby."

A gasp. Radio in the raw. Ignorance unveiled unto the third generation. and who knows how many generations before that.

"You have to understand," Matt told the empty airwaves that were so crowded now with sensation-seeking, sensation-touched souls. "That's why she was in such an incredible state of denial about what was happening to her. It violated everything society says shouldn't happen.

But it does happen."

"Mr. Midnight?" A timorously soft female voice. Matt didn't know whether he was rescued, or about to be subjected to another incredible dilemma.

"Yes?"

"My name is Tammy. I . . . gave up a baby a long time ago. Everybody said it was better for the baby. I was so young, and I hadn't really understood how it all happened. So fast . . .anyway.

I Want to say that l can see how she got herself thinking so weird. It's like that. Everybody around you says it's not supposed to be, but it is. You can't stop it, not after a certain point, and that man who said it's so easy to get rid of a baby early. he just hasn't been there. l hope she'll be all right. l hope her baby is all right. I hope my baby is too. Baby. He's grown up by now. He could be one of your callers. He could be the man who has no time for girls who get pregnant, even though some guy had to help."

"It's true, Tammy. Men don't really know. So many of us get into terrible trouble because we just don't really know."

"I'm glad you admit it. When l had my . . . trouble, almost thirty years ago, everybody else was good and right, and l was bad and wrong. They asked who the father was, but they never really cared. Nobody expected anything from him, least of all me. Now . . . I think maybe that was wrong, even unfair to him. We should have asked, maybe. Maybe even have . . . expected."

"He might have been so young he just wanted to escape."

A silence. "Yeah. But we women can't escape. She was right, that girl. We have that other . .

. alien in us, and there's no getting away from that, no matter who put it there."

Matt was eyeing Ambrosia and the technician, Mike, through the glass that threw back a faint reflection of himself, his head oddly swelled by the earphones so he looked like robo-shrink.

The calls were so heavy in content and issues. "There was the hopelessly lovelorn girl or guy?

The estranged son or daughter? The ordinary day-to-day heartaches you had a prayer of chit-chatting about with confidence, and even a certain glib superficiality?

Macbeth had murdered sleep, but Daisy and her sad dilemma had slain the slick sympathy of radio feel-bad/feel-good talk shows.

"It's still the same old story." The low, burning voice thrummed into his eardrums. "Men do what they want and the woman gets left with the dregs. Then people want to crucify her when she refuses to meekly accept the burden."

"It's not just a gender issue. Every story is different."

"Every story is the same! You know what I would have done if I'd been driving Miss Daisy?

I'd have got me a gun or a knife or a bomb, and I'd have blown some bastard up."

"Thelma and Louise was a movie. Blowing people up has never solved the inequities that keep them committing the same wrongs, paving the same price, seeking the same revenge."

"You're wrong. Every act is a revelation. Every nail pierces fresh flesh, no matter the age, no matter the century, or the country, or the person, or the person's gender. It is all retribution."

"You can't believe in a Divine retribution that merciless."

"Who believes in the divine? I can believe in a human worthlessness that worthy of being wiped out."

Matt waited, letting the faint lilt of the syllables sink into his unconsciousness and rise again with a name. Kitty the Cutter was on the air and making points.

"Your viewpoint is interesting, but too dark to cast much light on what most of humanity faces."

Matt the Cutter made the gesture--his own finger slashing across his throat--that signaled Mike the technician to deep-six this caller.

She left without another word, but the scar at his side burned, and he realized that being found by the public meant being exposed to the personal.

A grandmother came on next. mourning the grandchildren torn from her by a bitter divorce, grandchildren alienated by a hostile ex-spouse and a social system that needed to assign rights for everything from birth to visitation to death.

Matt left the studio exhausted, but not too tired to study the dark and light pooling around the Hesketh Vampire before he claimed it for the ride home, to look for a darkness in the shadows that was as bad as anything demented Daisy had seen in her extremity.