Noise by Peter Wild Page A

the little red socks looked, drifting down through the fog under their white chutes. Some of them always wafted over the goo, where a wave would reach up and draw them in.
    I went back inside. Slime with Worms was on. It was always on. In fact, it was all that was ever on, playing continuously on Channel 63, which was the only channel anyone got. Slime with Worms was just the name kids had given it. We couldn’t tell what its real name was, if it had a name. The reception was too bad, unless it was good. Maybe the show really did take place in adense fog and in near-total silence. Everyone complained about it, but secretly I liked the fog, the indistinct figures, the humming that rose and fell in tides, and often found myself there in dreams from which I awoke also humming.
    Nobody could agree on whether it was a science programme or a how-to show or some unfamiliar kind of pornography. The figures were always touching objects to other objects with strange intensity. Then the camera would swing close to the objects, which moved furtively against one another for a while. Then something would happen. Nothing more definite than a hoof knocking against a cobblestone or a little coat being draped over a rail. You could rarely identify the objects involved, but one time I had made out what appeared to be the jawbone of a small, sharp-featured mammal (maybe a fox), being inserted carefully into an oversized padlock. Some months later, a seashell tumbled out of a wave at my feet which, if you accounted for months of being softened and mauled by the goo, could have been that very object, though the padlock was no longer iron, but the same substance as the jawbone, which itself was no longer bone, but the same firm but pliable, beigey, slightly translucent substance of which all seashells were made. I smuggled it home in my sweatshirt. It was the only evidence I had to support my private conviction that the show was broadcast by the goo, and that therefore there was a chance, however slim, that one day among the blurry figures that came and went would be my mother. I’d recognise her and call Dad, and he’d recognise her and right away he’d start thickening up, and she’d look up, just as if she could see us through the screen. Yeah, right, and then she’d come for me, over the goo, standing on a clamshell with her hair whipping around, etc.
    That particular fantasy had died. But a few times over the years the same thing happened–an object I had glimpsed months before washed up on the shore. I could never be quite sure it was the same object. The picture was so blurry and the seashells were blurry in a different way, changed and softened and grown together like old memories. Still. I always took them home, thinking someday I would know what they were for.
    This was one thing I had in common with other kids my age: we all loved Slime with Worms . It was sort of a joke, because there was nothing definite to love. The faces were blobs, when you saw them at all, so you couldn’t tell the characters apart, except for ‘Moustache Guy’ who had a big swatch of shadow on his blob, ‘Hat’, whose blob had outriggers, and ‘Anteater’, whose blob was situated lower than the others and seemed to possess a long snout. And yet we were attached to them. Most people liked Hat or Moustache, but I liked Anteater, though there were those who said he was just a vacuum cleaner or some sort of power tool. I had even made myself an Anteater T-shirt.
    Today, Moustache Guy was touching a sort of trowel to what looked like the end of a coiled rope held by Hat. Anteater appeared to be smelling the rope, or maybe his nozzle was emitting some kind of glue, you just didn’t know with Anteater.
    I got up and looked out the door. ‘Od poklopu ku poklopu kyklop kouli koulÌ,’ said Dad. It was Czech for ‘The cyclops rolls the ball from one trapdoor to another’.
    I closed the door.