I Hope You Get This Message Read online

  All day, he’d gotten lost in the sound. Listening to the messages was cathartic, captivating, even, a front-row seat to the world’s slow unraveling. Strings of code, waves of voice: they were one and the same. Full of hidden meaning, if you cared to look deep enough. After tearing out the USB connecting the radio to his laptop, Adeem shifted the screen toward Derek. With a double click, the audio file he’d downloaded earlier opened, and he fast-forwarded the cursor to the spots where the audio spiked.

  10:33 a.m. at 1610 kHz: “Code 10-33. I’ve arrived at the scene and we’ve got armed suspects, mass attempted suicides. I’m trying to get in, but—”

  Derek’s breath stilled. Adeem shifted frequencies with a click.

  11:42 p.m. at 6125 kHz: “Algunos han dicho que el Papa planea declarar un estado de emergencia para toda la humanidad . . .”

  1:04 p.m. at 6950 kHz: “Alma: Friends or foe? And does it matter? We’re lucky to have Keith Maloney, formerly an astrophysicist at SETI, here to give insight into the seemingly impossible technology necessary for Alma to have sent their message . . .”

  4:17 p.m. at 9478 kHz: “In these approaching dark times, we invite you to shine the mighty light of the Gospel on your heart and keep America in your prayers . . .”

  6:21 p.m. at 9565 kHz: “Officials from China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States will be meeting tomorrow to strategize ballistic missile defense systems in place in preparation for invasion . . .”

  “What is this?” asked Derek.

  Adeem paused the file. “Radio broadcasts—stuff you won’t hear on the news. Not yet, at least.” He stretched his arms over his head, and his shoulders popped gratefully. “This is just what I’ve picked up in the past couple hours. Haven’t even cycled through it all yet.”

  Derek let out a long exhale.

  “Sooo yeah, as you can see, we’re all going to die, probably.” Adeem kept his voice light, but all day, his stomach had hurt like he was stuck in free fall. In a way, he was.

  Derek swallowed. “What else are people saying?”

  Adeem moved the cursor farther across the lines of sound recording.

  His speakers let out another crackle of static, and then, at 2438 kHz: “Think about it, how are we supposed to fight these things when we have no way of knowing how they’ll get here? What if they don’t need to get here? With the technology required to send a message that fast in the first place, they could use lasers—”

  Click.

  4082 kHz: “This is the BBC World Service, and as promised, we’ll be counting down the next seven days with the seminal classic Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns . . .”

  Click.

  1020 kHz: “When whatever you want to do cannot be done,” a woman’s voice began, “When nothing is of any use; —At this hour when night comes down, When night comes, dragging its long face, dressed in mourning, Be with me, My tormenter, my love, be near me.”

  Her voice faded to static. Adeem was supposed to shift the cursor again to the next spike in the waveform, but instead, he yanked his hand away from his keyboard as if it’d bitten him.

  That voice. That poem.

  It’d been one of her favorites, an Urdu poem—Dad had introduced her to it. They would recite it to each other, back when they were still learning Urdu, and she’d teased Adeem for his clumsy pronunciation. “How can you be so good at computer languages but suck so bad at your mother tongue?” she’d said, throwing her head back and laughing.

  “Adeem?” Derek asked.

  Adeem couldn’t stop shaking. He was so cold, his blood making a hasty retreat from his head. His ears throbbed with his frantic heartbeat. Derek’s voice sounded so far away.

  Where? Where was it coming from?

  Be near me.

  He grabbed the notebook he’d filled with frequencies. No shortwave radio frequency operated twenty-four hours, so more often than not, Adeem wouldn’t hear anything—at least, not until the revival of all the dead channels. So he’d filled the notebook with stations he’d pinpointed locations for, or ones that had identified themselves with call signs; it made it easier to track time zones, so he’d known exactly when to tune in to hear something.

  His glasses drooped as he flipped a couple pages in his notebook. 1020, 1020 . . .

  Seconds dragged on and his heart wouldn’t calm down, bursting at the seams with a delicate hope, a longing that made it hard to breathe.

  His fingers ran down the column of numbers before finally landing on a location.

  Roswell.

  “You okay?” Derek was squinting at him.

  “Yeah,” Adeem managed to say. “Yeah. Fine.”

  Of all the places in the world she could be, why would she chose Roswell, the weird little town filled with aliens and superstitions? Roswell had always been a joke.

  But it wasn’t so funny now.

  He was sure of it, though. He knew that voice. It was deeper than he remembered, breathier even, a voice drifting like cirrus between his ears. With every day that had passed these two long years since she’d left, he’d been so afraid he’d forget. But no, he would always know that voice, more familiar to him than his own—how could he forget?

  How could he ever forget his sister’s voice?

  The sun was lingering just behind the top of the giant oak trees that bordered the backyard by the time the garage rumbled open. The twilight gloom made everything blurry, dreamlike. Lately, even during those rare evenings when he and his parents were home together, a bleak and hollow silence remained, as though when Leyla had left, she had taken the sound with her.

  Now, though, the quiet especially stung. After Derek left, he’d sent countless ham radio transmissions back to the Roswell channel, only to get no response. Which meant the message was just a prerecording, a mirage of his sister he couldn’t quite reach.

  His dad finally walked into the kitchen, limping, clutching a single grocery bag. He looked exhausted.

  “What happened?” asked Adeem. He was surprised by the force of his own relief. He was used to being alone, but it was good to see his parents back in one piece. He needed to research nearby fallout shelters to make sure his mom and dad stayed that way. Though, knowing them, they’d spend the next six or so days at the mosque. Praying.

  His mom trailed in now, throwing her purse angrily onto the countertop. “Hell is other people—that’s what happened.”

  His dad chuckled weakly. “People were acting like animals at Costco, fighting over every little thing.” So much for armed guards. “I sprained my ankle trying to grab some bottles of water from some guy in a foil hat. Your mom had to beat some guy off me with her purse.” His dad fell into a chair at the dining table. “There wasn’t much left.”

  It was an understatement. His parents had only managed to get a few cans of nonperishables, a few rolls of toilet paper. Powdered milk packets, which Adeem made a face at. The water bottles, apparently, hadn’t made it home.

  “Will that be enough?” Adeem asked. Enough for what, exactly, he wasn’t even sure.

  “We’ll be okay,” his dad said.

  We’ll be okay. Adeem felt a vein throb beneath his brow. Did “we” include his sister?

  Adeem took a deep breath. “What about Leyla?”

  His question brought an instant chill. The awkward tension in the air was so palpable, Adeem could have plucked a blob of it and thrown it at his parents’ blank faces. Start an awkward tension food fight. A mood fight, if you will. After all, there were many unspoken rules in this house, and he’d just broken unspoken rule number one: don’t bring up Leyla.

  “Adeem—” his mom began.

  “Don’t.” He hated it when his parents started a sentence with his name. He almost never liked what followed.

  “Of course we’ve reached out to her,” said his dad, grasping for a newspaper that wasn’t on its usual spot on the table; the paper had stopped being delivered. He pulled his hand back. “You kno
w we have. We’ve tried. But she changed her number. She wants nothing to do with us anymore.”

  “So that’s it? A couple texts and you give up? You don’t think the end of the world constitutes, I don’t know, more of a freaking effort?” He hated how his voice was dripping with sarcasm. He was taking out his anger on the wrong people; his parents were just as much in the dark as he was. But still.

  The worst part? His parents hadn’t even said the wrong things. It wasn’t as though when Leyla had admitted in shaky whispers that her best friend, Priti, was way more than just a friend, they’d told her to leave and never come back. They weren’t like Qasim Uncle, who’d cast out his own son a few years ago, openly called him horrible things in front of the whole mosque. Instead, his parents stared, mouths agape, as though she’d grown another head, all while Leyla stood in the kitchen, still in the crisp button-down and black slacks she’d wear for her part-time job at the Sunday school, and clutched her necklace—a silver chain with a crescent moon Priti had gotten her. He’d wanted to say something, anything, but even Adeem’s brain malfunctioned, overheating from sheer panic over how his parents would react. They hadn’t agreed with Qasim Uncle’s actions, but they hadn’t exactly publicly denounced them, either. He didn’t even have time to process it himself, the thought bouncing too fast in his head for him to pin down and explain, but there it was just the same: Leyla is gay, Leyla is gay, Leyla is gay. And with Priti.

  Before words could come to any of them, Leyla left.

  She had just turned twenty-one then. Even if they’d known she wouldn’t come back that night, his parents would have been powerless to stop her.

  “Effort?” his dad parroted. “You’re almost seventeen now. You could have been out there finding her yourself, but I’ve never once seen you make an effort—in anything. So don’t tell us we haven’t done enough.”

  Without a newspaper to hide behind, Adeem could see his dad’s chest rising and falling quickly, in sync with his own. The words stung, both for Adeem to hear and his dad to tell.

  Adeem said, “I heard her.”

  His mom nearly dropped the cans she was putting in the pantry. “What?”

  “On my radio,” Adeem continued. “I’ve been listening in on frequencies across the country, and I think I heard her. She was reciting a Faiz poem.” Be with me.

  He swallowed, his voice becoming smaller.

  “I think she’s in Roswell.”

  His dad looked at Mom. “Roswell?” His eyebrows crinkled in confusion. “Why Roswell? The last we heard, she was in Reno.”

  Adeem’s breath hitched like a stone in his throat. Reno was only a forty-minute drive from their place in Carson City. She’d been so close all this time? “But if you knew she was in Reno, then why didn’t you guys say anything?” Adeem squeezed his fist, stiff from hours of scouring the internet and radio for her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His mom shook her head. “There was nothing to tell. Reza told us he’d seen her there, but then she was gone before he could do anything. That’s when she changed her phone number. Apparently, she was trying to find a job, but . . .”

  Reza. Adeem hadn’t heard that name in forever. Reza and his sister, childhood friends, had once been thick as thieves—had been much more. That was before Priti came into their lives, before Leyla and Priti disappeared without a trace.

  After she left, Adeem was convinced Reza would have been the last person she’d ever want to see again. And yet.

  He ignored the pang of jealousy in his chest, and the fury that his parents hadn’t told him anything sooner. “Was she alone?” he asked.

  His parents knew what he was really asking: Was Priti with her?

  “Yes,” his dad replied solemnly. “She was alone, as far as Reza could tell. Something must have happened.”

  The thought of Priti now made Adeem squeeze his fingers into a fist so tightly they went numb. He knew what happened wasn’t her fault—it’s not like she made Leyla gay, as if Priti were some kind of magical proselytizing queer unicorn. That wasn’t the issue at all. The issue was that they’d left, and part of him couldn’t bear the idea that it’d been Leyla’s idea to run away without a word and break her family’s—and Reza’s—heart. It couldn’t have been.

  And yet it’d been two years, and neither of them had called. But if something happened between them, if Leyla was alone now, then why hadn’t she reached out yet? And where was Priti, anyway?

  He had to find the truth.

  “Maybe Reza has an idea of where Leyla went,” said Adeem. At least Reza might actually have some semblance of a trail he could follow.

  His dad shook his head. “Reno, Roswell—if your sister wants to be left alone, that’s her choice.” But Adeem could hear the grief behind his words. Leyla’s departure had aged his parents overnight. “Besides, you can’t go hunt her down now. It’s chaos out there already, and it’s only going to get worse. We need you to be safe. You need to be with us right now.”

  “But you just said I haven’t been making an effort. So this is me making an effort. I can find—”

  “It’s. Not. Safe,” his dad snapped, punctuating every word. “For now, we wait it out. We just have to have faith everything will turn out for the best.”

  Hypocrite, Adeem almost said; it was his dad who always repeated the hadith “Trust in God, but tie your camel.” Trust, faith—Adeem didn’t have time to waste on things that wouldn’t give him answers. He needed to know for sure what had happened. He needed to see her one last time.

  The sun had disappeared now, and the kitchen was shrouded in darkness, casting them in their own family vortex of shadow and silence. But none of them moved to flick on the lights.

  It reminded Adeem of one of the poems his sister had shared with him once, one by Rumi. In the poem, Rumi banters with God over life’s usual philosophical questions: what to do with that pesky thing called a heart, where to focus one’s eyes, etcetera, etcetera. But when Rumi asks God what to do with his pain and sorrow, God tells him, “Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

  “Weirdly comforting, isn’t it?” his sister had asked him dreamily. That dingus tended to swoon over poetry like she was a Sufi romantic herself.

  Adeem had thought it was stupid, and when he’d said as much, she’d flicked his forehead. But the problem with visible light, he’d argued, is that as far as electromagnetic waves went, it never got very far. It was weak; it couldn’t cross through walls, easily bounced off surfaces to oblivion. If God wanted to reach you, He or She or They wouldn’t use light.

  Radio waves, though. Radio waves had more energy, were more resilient, and in the right circumstances, could travel across the planet.

  Well, if light couldn’t reach her, then maybe Adeem would.

  7

  Jesse

  The bright orange eviction notice was taped to the front door when Jesse returned home from his group session. Jesse saw it from half a block away. Subtle, it was not: the envelope screamed up at him in red letters. They had one week to pay up or be homeless.

  Of everything that had happened in the past few days, this—the fact that they might soon be homeless—was the most unbelievable.

  Also: the scariest.

  Because now it was clear as day to Jesse that the whole Alma thing was a prank. A joke. A distraction from cruel reality. Maybe when Jesse was a little kid, he might have believed in something like alien planets. He’d have wanted to believe: because if aliens existed, hell, anything could happen. Of course, he’d grown up since then. Aliens were up there with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, as faraway and imaginary and impossible as he and Mom finally being free of Dad’s debts.

  If he’d gotten worked up over Alma at the QuikTrip, it was only because of his nerves, not because he actually believed in this bullshit.

  But these days, people would buy anything they saw on TV. A bunch of especially inspired kids had managed to break into the International UFO Museum
and move—or fly, one of them drunkenly claimed—the giant flying saucer replica through one of the windows, leaving behind mounds of broken glass and shattered beer bottles. Despite the destruction, tourists clad in starchy GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS T-shirts still trickled back in to the museum, convinced that the debris from the ’47 UFO crash hoax had actually been a sign from Alma all along. They’d even made the Vulcan salute at Jesse as he’d made his usual Wednesday trek to La Familia Crisis Center.

  It had taken every fiber of his being not to flip the bird back at them.

  He should have been happy to see them: more tourists meant more jobs, more life. But he preferred the tourists before Alma, the ones who’d take a couple photos with rubber martians with painted mustaches in the Alien Zone and would buy commemorative key chains at the Roswell Plaza Hotel gift shop and leave decent tips, more out of pity than anything else. The tourists now didn’t even seem like tourists so much as religious pilgrims.

  Alma fever had even seeped into his group counseling session at La Familia Crisis Center. Normally, their counselor, Ms. K, started with affirmations or positive poems by Maya Angelou or Rumi, citing some “healing power of poetry” bullshit. But Tom Ralford was even more eager to talk than usual. Tom used to run the local UFOs & U program on the radio, which actually had a decently big cult following until he’d had a nervous breakdown on air. He didn’t go out much after that.

  “I just wanna say, I’m real worried about Alma, y’all,” he’d said. His eyes glinted as he tilted his embroidered safari hat with the UFOs & U logo down his forehead, something he did, Jesse had noticed, whenever a bad idea was brewing. “With the kind of comms tech they got, they could invade us in hours. Zap us into dust in an instant. So, as many of you know, I’ve been working on a radio program of my own built with the best kind of comms tech there is: Love.”