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Open Line

A NOVEL By Ellen Hawley

COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Ellen Hawley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-209-4

Chapter One

Annette didn't believe it herself at first. It was a slow night, and some caller had a bug up his ass about Vietnam. He said it marked the beginning of the end of American greatness, led directly to September 11th, to Saddam Hussein, not to mention to America's loss of pride, and how many kids these days even knew this great nation's history, and rah rah rah until it was getting up Annette's ass too and there was nothing to do about it but scratch.

"Brian," she said into the mic, but he kept talking-taxation, terrorists, and it all traced back to et cetera and so forth. God, he was boring. Annette was damn near asleep on her own show. She had a good voice for radio-low, sexy when she wanted it to be-and she pitched it at him hard, but he wasn't having any of it. He ran right over her, going on about individual responsibility, the decline of educational standards, stuff she didn't disagree with but that didn't mean she wanted to hear it from him.

"Brian, sweetheart, if you don't let me get a couple of words in here I'm going to have to cut you off."

"I'm just trying to make a point," Brian said, but he stopped talking after he said it, which was good because she only had one other caller standing between her and dead airtime. She lived in terror of dead airtime.

"Here's what I'm trying to tell you," she said, drawing it out now that she had space to work in. "And listen carefully, because this is important. This is what the government doesn't want you to know: there was no Vietnam War. It never happened."

Brian went ballistic, talking about weapons, graves, photographs, costs. The open phone lines lit up and the callers' names lined themselves up on her screen as fast as Nick could single-finger them on the keyboard. With the hand that wasn't typing, he gave her a thumbs-up sign through the window.

"Brian, sweetie," she said, cutting in. "I've read all that, I know what they say. What I'm telling you is it's a fake, a phony, the biggest scam a government ever put over on its citizens."

Brian splattered himself all over the phone lines. The dead, the injured, their families, and what kind of a person ... Annette grinned at Nick, although he was still looking at the keyboard, searching for the space bar, or the enter key. This was too good not to share, even if she had to share it with nothing better than the top of Nick's head. The waiting callers glowed on her screen, as lovely to behold as money in the bank.

"On top of which," Brian said, "the photos ..."

"Hey, pictures can be faked. Anything can be faked. You read the papers? We've had the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, the Department of Warm Feelings about Your Government, all of them planting news stories that are really just P.R. pieces and the media gobbling them up as if they were the real thing. We've had reporters getting paid to say what the government wants them to say. We don't know what's real anymore. I see a tree these days, I have to kick it to make sure it's not metal. Brian, baby, a photo's nothing."

Brian said yes but ...

"O.K., answer me this," she said. "If the Communists won the Vietnam War, how come the Soviet Union collapsed?"

She punched a button and cut Brian off, then gave his silence half a second to prove he couldn't answer.

"Can you answer me that?"

He couldn't and she took another caller-not the one who'd been on hold, who wanted to talk about the Islamic hordes piling up at the borders to attack America, or so she'd told Nick, who'd left the s out of Islamic. Annette would've been fine with that last night-she'd done a pretty fair riff on Islamic hordes and they were a thousand times better than having to talk about the fishing season-but the thing about them was that she didn't own the topic. The best she could do with it was come off like a pipsqueak echo of everybody famous who'd already defined how America thought about the issue. So screw the Islamic hordes. Vietnam was hers, and tonight Annette was rich. She could skip anything that didn't interest her and take the first of the callers she'd drawn out of the deep night silence.

"Diane, talk to me. Did you fall for it too?"

"What I think? I don't know. I know the last caller was rude to you and I don't think that's right, but I do know some people who went over there and one of them lost, you know, a part of his leg and all, so I don't know, when you think about it, how it could help but be true, you know?"

"So you're telling me you fell for it."

Annette uncapped her bottle of Evian while Diane explained how she wouldn't say she'd fallen for it exactly, but when you know someone, and she'd seen him in shorts and all, and there was no question about the leg ...

Diane had an invertebrate's voice, a jellyfish voice. She was the kind of caller who'd talk all night without ever committing herself to an opinion but who'd never let herself be budged from whatever it was she sort-of believed. Annette set her water bottle down without drinking from it.

"Diane, Diane. I'm not talking about a leg here. I believe the leg, but have you ever asked yourself if you really know how he lost the leg? Have you ever wondered why more people came back from this war with their heads messed up than from any other war in history? It's because of the disjunction between what really happened and what they believe happened."

Disjunction, her mind echoed. A great word, disjunction.

On the other side of the window, Nick shook his head and grinned at her. The lines were full, and he had nothing better to do than look moony. That was Nick's great gift: he looked at her as if he'd never seen a better looking woman, and night after night Annette rode on that. For the full length of the show, he let her believe that she was more than just pretty enough not to embarrass the truly beautiful, let her believe it so intently that her voice became the voice of a blindingly gorgeous woman. The forgettable brown hair and the thick knees dropped away. Hell, it was all a trick anyway, this beauty business. First she had to believe it, and then the men would. Or maybe the men had to believe it first, and then she could. Whichever way it worked, it didn't matter. This was radio. She was the best looking woman her listeners could imagine.

She let Diane dither: she didn't think people should be rude, of course, even when they disagreed, but on the other hand . . .

It struck Annette that Diane was arguing with her seriously-that a full bank of callers was waiting to argue with her seriously-and that could only mean one thing: Annette was really good at this. It was ridiculous how good she was.

Half a long minute later, Annette lost any hope that Diane would complete either a thought or a sentence, so she cut in.

"What I'm saying," Annette told her, "is it was a massive experiment in mind control. Mind control and god only knows what else. I don't think anyone knows yet what they were really trying to hide, but I'll tell you this much: this isn't the first time the government's tested weapons on its own soldiers. You know about the A-bomb? The atomic veterans? They lined these guys up, stood 'em at attention, set the bomb off, and then studied 'em like guinea pigs to see what happened."

Nick was still watching her with cow's eyes, but he was chewing on a slice of dried pineapple now. He grazed his...