The pump on Lane 3 was pressing the wrong numbers again. Mike pressed it with his right index finger, watched the display count up, pressed it again, watched it count down. Press, count up. Press, count down. Like breathing. Like everything.

He worked the night shift at the Quick Stop gas station outside Bismarck, North Dakota. Population of the town: 847, though nobody in that town would call it a town. Town implied community. Community implied something that wasn't just a collection of people who drove past each other on Interstate 94 without slowing down.

It was 2 AM on a Friday. The fluorescent lights inside the convenience store were humming. The coolers behind the counter were humming. The pump on Lane 3 was humming. Mike was not humming. Mike hadn't hummed in about two years.

A trucker pulled up to Lane 1. He got out, opened the door to the store, and immediately started yelling at his cell phone. Mike kept pressing the wrong numbers on Lane 3. Up. Down. Up. Down.

"No signal?" the trucker said, more to the phone than to Mike. "What do you mean no signal? I'm right here. I'm standing right here."

Mike pressed the wrong numbers. Up. Down.

The trucker went back to his truck. Mike pressed the wrong numbers. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. The display read four dollars and twelve cents. Down. The display read four dollars and ten cents.

Bonnie Briggs called at 3:17 AM. Mike was in the break room, eating a sandwich he didn't want, watching the news on a small TV that someone had mounted to the wall. The TV showed a picture of Iraq — sand, heat, soldiers moving through something that looked like desert but smelled like oil and bad decisions.

The phone rang. Mike looked at it. He looked at the TV. He picked up the phone.

"Quick Stop," he said. He never answered with his name. Nobody called him Mike. Not since Iraq. Not since the snow.

"Is this — is this Mike Durnham?" The voice was a woman's. Older. Tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix.

"Yeah."

"This is Bonnie Briggs. Tommy's mother."

Mike put down his sandwich. He had not spoken to Bonnie Briggs in four months. Tommy had been deployed in March. Bonnie had called in April, then May, then June, each time asking the same question in a different way: Have you heard from him? Have you heard from him? Have you heard from him?

Mike had always said the same thing: No, ma'am. No, ma'am. No, ma'am.

"Mike," Bonnie said, "the news says something is wrong with the communications in Iraq. Tommy's unit hasn't checked in for two days. I called the Red Cross and they said they couldn't tell me anything and I know you were his friend and I know you're closer to the army than I am and —"

"Ma'am." Mike's voice was flat. Cardan flat. The kind of flat that isn't cold — it's just flat. Like a road. "Everything is down. Not just there. Everywhere."

"What do you mean everywhere?"

"Cell phones. Landlines. Radio. TV. The internet doesn't work either, probably, though I don't use the internet. Everything that uses electromagnetic signals is down right now. Not just Iraq. The whole country."

"Is it — is it the war?"

Mike looked at the TV. The news anchor was saying something about an unconfirmed report of electronic warfare activity in the Middle East. The word electronic was on her lips but the sound didn't come out. The TV had gone to static a moment ago. The picture was just snow. White noise.

"I don't know what it is, ma'am," Mike said. "I just know what it sounds like."

"Tommy," Bonnie said. She didn't say anything else. She didn't have to. Tommy was her only son. He was 22. He was from a town with a population of 347. He had enlisted because there was nothing there and the army offered dental and a salary and a direction that wasn't working at his father's hardware store.

"Ma'am," Mike said. "I'm sorry."

He hung up. He picked up his sandwich. It was cold now. He ate it anyway.

The snow in Afghanistan had been so cold that his M4 had stuck to his bare hand. He remembered that — not the cold itself, but the moment his hand came free and the skin came with it. A thin layer of skin, peeled off the steel like wallpaper. He hadn't thought about it in months. Not since he'd come back to North Dakota and the truck with the busted heater and the gas station and the way that nobody in this town — nobody in this state, maybe not in the whole country — understood what it was like to be cold the way he had been cold.

His platoon had been walking through snow with paper maps and compasses. GPS had died. Radio had died. Every piece of electronics in the column had died at the same time, like someone had reached up and turned off the sky.

He had talked to his radio operator, a kid named Cole who was 19 and from Alabama and had never seen snow that wasn't on a TV screen. "Cole," Mike had said, "I don't know where I am." And Cole, whose voice had been cracking because he was 19 and cold and scared, had said, "Nobody does, Sarge. Nobody does."

That was six months ago.

Mike drove to the Veterans Association at 6 AM on a Saturday. The Ford pickup died twice on the way. He restarted it each time, like restarting a thought he didn't want to have.

SFC Ray Kowalski was inside, watching football on a small TV with no sound. Ray had lost a leg in Iraq. He drove a small truck for the Veterans Association and lived in a trailer on the edge of town and occasionally sat on the porch and watched the highway and waited for things that never came.

"Morning, Ray," Mike said.

Ray turned the TV volume up. It didn't help. The TV was broken. "Morning, Mike. You look like hell."

"Thanks."

Ray paused the game with the remote. He looked at Mike the way men look at other men when they want to ask something but the thing is too big for the space between them. "You hear about the Briggs boy?"

"Yeah."

"His mother called the association. She's — she's not doing good."

"No," Mike said. "She's not."

They sat in silence for a while. The TV showed football players colliding without sound. It was like watching a painting.

"Mike," Ray said. "You want to do something?"

"No."

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"You know what that means?"

"Yeah."

"You sure you're sure?"

Mike looked at Ray. Ray was his squad leader. Ray had pulled him out of a burning Humvee in Ramadi. Ray had sat with him in a field hospital in Qatar while medics stitched up the layer of skin his hand had lost to a rifle in Afghan snow. Ray knew what being sure meant.

"Yeah," Mike said. "I'm sure."

But he wasn't.

He drove to the post office three hours later. He bought a postcard. He wrote three sentences on the front. He did not sign it.

The Pentagon was testing an electronic warfare system called White Noise. It was designed to disrupt enemy communications across all frequencies. But it also disrupted everything else. Civilian radios. Cell phones. GPS. Emergency services. The news called it "an unfortunate side effect." Mike called it what it was: a system that blinded everyone equally.

He had written about this in a classified report he'd filed after his discharge. Two pages. Four paragraphs. A suggestion, really — he was a corporal, not a colonel, he had no right to suggest anything to anyone. But he had seen what happened when the sky went silent. He had seen Cole's face. He had seen the snow.

They hadn't responded to the report. Nobody ever responded to reports from people like him.

The post office was almost empty. A woman in a grey coat was sending a package. A old man was buying stamps. Mike put the postcard in the box. The postmark would read BISMARCK, NORTH DAKOTA. The recipient would be the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The return address would be blank.

He drove back to the gas station. The truck died once more. He restarted it. He walked into the Quick Stop. The boss was there, a guy named Peterson who was 45 and had the permanent expression of a man who was mildly disappointed in everything.

"You pressed the wrong button on Lane 3," Peterson said. "Three times this morning."

"Sorry," Mike said.

"Try to pay attention, will you? We don't pay you to play games with the pumps."

"Sorry," Mike said again.

He went to Lane 3. He pressed the button. Up. The display counted up. Down. The display counted down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. He pressed the wrong numbers. The trucker at Lane 1 got out of his truck and looked at him the way you look at someone who is standing on the sidewalk staring at nothing. Mike kept pressing. Up. Down. Up. Down.

The sky was grey over Bismarck. Somewhere in it, White Noise was humming. Somewhere in Iraq, a 22-year-old private named Tommy Briggs was waiting for a signal that wasn't coming. And here, at a gas station outside a town that wasn't on any map, Mike Durnham pressed the wrong button on a pump and said sorry twice and went back to work.