California
‘Helicopter announcements?’ the text from your wife lights up your phone.
The night air hits your feet when you reach the bottom step. Her face is pressed up to the window screen, looking into the dark sky. A droning, buffeting whirr bounces off the other townhouses and into the living room. A canned echo of a loudspeaker can be heard - a male voice, authoritative. You recognize the pattern of speech to be that cop/military style, dictated, but you can’t make out a damn thing they’re saying.
“I can’t hear it”, she says, still looking through the screen.
“I’m going out.” You say. You slide your sandals on, leave your coat, and step out.
The whirring is louder as you walk through the corridor, out into your community’s roadway. Your community, “community”, you like to use air quotes when talking about it, was built in 2004; townhouses, relatively nice, with little front patios with little gardens, pre-installed with tall-ish bushes lining each entryway to provide you privacy from your neighbors’ homes, which was really only effective from the ground floor. Thanks to the space-saving layout of the complex, many of the townhouses faced each other, and there were many opportunities to see directly into your neighbors’ homes. This led to inevitable moments like witnessing the married-too-young couple’s shouting match in their kitchen, or accidentally stepping out of a midday shower to your neighbor’s son, home from school early, staring from the opposite window. The solution for many was to drop the blinds and keep them shut. Privacy is important after all. In America, everyone has something to hide.
You take the shortcut that carves between the wrought iron fences of the two different townhouse complexes; a kind of suburban no-man’s-land, one way leading to the shops and the dog park, the other leading to the main road, San Pescado Road, where you finally decide to situate yourself. From the sidewalk you finally have a clear line of site to the helicopter, though you can’t actually see it against the night sky. Just an array of blinking lights - one red beacon and the port/starboard running lights. It’s hypnotic to you, the helicopter’s oscillating blades. You find yourself enjoying the consistent rhythm of its sound. It phases and modulates as the bird goes into a banking turn. That same crackling voice emanates from it, but its only modestly clearer. The problematic echo you were fighting has been replaced by road noise. Here on San Pescado there are far too many cars, their tires drumming the pavement, for you to hear what announcement is so important the SDPD felt warranted to scramble the whirlybird.
Maybe you turn around and go to the park, or go back the other way, towards the community pool but you remember that San Pescado wraps around, and you’ll end up next to it regardless. You wonder what’s so important, anyway, to justify such dramatic use of police resources. A missing person perhaps. Alerting the immediate area, drawing the citizens outside to become an impromptu search party. Maybe something even bigger. Perhaps the communication systems have collapsed, some enemy force had began their invasion, and we’re having to resort to analog technologies. Something with real stakes.
The full moon stares at you from just across the street, hanging over the high school like a disco ball. It looks heavy to you, waiting to be dropped.
So you stay in your little spot, waiting for the traffic to die down, but it never does. Two women, dog walkers, pass you by, seemingly unfazed by this helicopter announcement situation. They’re much more engrossed in their own conversation.
“They couldn’t find him anywhere?” emphasizes one of them. She wears a softshell jacket embroidered with the logo of a biotech company on its breast.
“If you google his name now, nothing comes up. He’s been completely scrubbed. It’s like he never existed.” the second woman wears bright red slides from Amazon, along with a head to toe cotton sweatsuit, patterned in a checkerboard of light and dark blue squares.
The color palette reminds you of middle school gym class, of the girl who wore her Cookie Monster pajamas out for the Fun Run (a not-so-fun lap around the school grounds meant to measure students’ distance running aptitudes, this being a sort of recruitment funnel for the school’s district-dominating track team). The Cookie Monstress had slipped down the final descent of the route, on the hill back by the baseball fields and portables, accumulating a large streak of mud all down her back. She flew into such a rage that day, never crossing the fun run finish line, just standing there in her muddy pajamas, face red with tears while she blamed another girl for tripping her. She had to spend the rest of the day in the principal’s office. You remember laughing about it with your friends, and later feeling guilty about it. You finally give up on this helicopter announcement. Whatever it is, you figure you’ll find out one way or another. You head home to your wife.
In the dark corridor leading back to the townhouses, you see a faceless neighbor approach, walking his own two dogs, just as uninterested with the helicopter as those women. You feel like a guppy. First time seeing the helicopter announcements? you imagine this dog walker saying. But no words are exchanged in actuality. You don’t really feel like you need to be a part of this community at all. I won’t be here long, you think, knowing it’s already been a year, it’s not like it’ll do me much good. Then you wonder, as anyone would, if that’s how they all feel. Everyone expecting something better for themselves. No one accepting where they are at or who they actually are. Everyone believing the people around them are footnotes in their own heroic journey. These people, yourself included, seem to be interested in hurtling themselves through their lives with their blinds down, their headphones in, the windows up and their sunglasses on while there are people just like them, just next door maybe, or across the street, might be the answer to all those inexplicable feelings that they keep feeling, like they’ve been shattered inside and were simply being held together by elastic bands.
No smile, not even a look at each other. Not even when the smaller dog lunges for you, does he say anything. Just a yank, a word to the dog that you can’t make out, a jingle of the collar.