Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence @ Radio Shack, Part X

While his dog was off in outer space, Quantus meditated in the radio shack, mostly about the extreme importance of ground. "I like simple things," his thoughts said.

"These simple radio theremins require the strongest and truest source of electricity, the Earth. Otherwise, they're floating on the power lines like birds. I'm trying to broadcast the Earth here, through the air. I start with the same Earth that the corncob man, Heinmann, plows."

Quantus' thoughts drifted to space, as he envisioned his residency in a satellite transmitter: "The spaceship has no Earth, so all signals dwell within it. It's like a little environment of electronic signals. In a way, electronics are the natural life forms of outer space, for electromagnetic radiation dwells in the void. It feels good to disperse. The dog knows how to play the ship. He has a special paw-shaped button that turns off all the electronics so he can fart in the void."

The sun shone through slits in the radio shack's wooden walls. It illuminated odd corners of the room, bases for musical bagatelles about hairballs. With his sharply pointed pinky fingernail, Quantus strummed the string of his zither on the low end, producing a sharp foghorn. He looked again into the strange corner of the room, blurring his eyes to make it appear a sleepy Pacific bay. In this bay, a disturbance appeared on the water as if an actor was breaching.

Focusing his eyes, Quantus noticed a paper bag stuffed with something. The motes of dust were swirling above it in the thin beams of sunlight. Someone had stuck their hand in through the walls of the radio shack, to put that bag there. Quantus reached out with his walking stick and shuffled the bag towards him. He reached down, tipped it, and felt a wet heavy body inside. A fish fell to the ground, with red dots painted on its side.

Quantus picked it up. Its skin was not slimy, having dried to a thin leathery film over the flesh. "Did I just see its eyes light up? It must have been a trick of light as it crossed the red cornea of the fish. What a prank, a bass in a bag." He drummed his fingers on the side of the fish, and its eyes did indeed light up red.

Astonished, Quantus realized quickly that the bass contained a transducer inside its belly, and two red LEDs in its eyes: "What a strange prank! However, I think I can use this on my radio show. For optical disks we use light-sensitive diodes. I can position one on a tiny crane above the eye of this fish. Now, when I drum on the side," Boom, boom, boom, the thrilling motion of his fingertips articulated a loud sound in the radio station monitors.

The sound became radio waves in the station's transmitter, and traveled over the corn fields, and one of these waves reached Blanc's house by the lake, as he was tending his bleach-lagoon. He chuckled to himself. I had an idea to get an old MLPT (Multi Layer Piezo Transducer) from electronics surplus. I disemboweled that fish enough to slip the transducer inside. Then, I drilled the eyes of that fish out, and inserted red LEDs. So Blanc chortled to himself mischievously. To bring the dead bass firmly into the domain of his personal artistic medium, he painted red dots on its side, as a secret message to his frenemies within the sect.

In the next installment of "Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence,"
Blanc's bleach-lagoon.