Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Frequency That Reads
Between stations at 03:00 a radio arrives with reading lists and a day's appointments, and the last appointment is one the technician does not have yet.
- dated: "Late in the wet season"
- narrator: "Piotr Ottley, radio technician"
8th of the month, past midnight. Logging the watch as usual. Between the coast station and the dredging channel there is a gap in the band where nothing ought to be, a stretch of dead air I have patched through for nine years, and tonight at three by the hall clock something was in it. Not a carrier. Not a skip off some far set. Voice, low, flat, close, the way they are when a man reads standing up. He was reading a list. I caught eleven items before the band shut him off, and I wrote the first one down before I thought about not writing it down, and the item was: care of the stitching on the left glove. It was not said to me. It was said to whoever was being read about.
11th. Three nights on and it is a pattern, which is worse than a one-off. 03:00 on the watch, the gap opens for less than a minute, and it is always someone reading, different voices I am nearly sure, the same manner, unhurried, item, item, item. A reading list, then, is the phrase the logs will want, so the logs can have it: between stations, 03:00, a list is being read. Items from tonight's catch, verbatim where I got them: turned to dry on the south side; a spare house key, lost, returned to a hook it had never hung on; the back step, third plank, tightened. I do not know whose life this is. That is the whole of the wrong of it. A list of ordinary repairs, read aloud in the gap where there is no station, to a listener who is given no call sign and addressed by nothing, and I sit in the marshes of the band picking the items up like a man picking up someone else's washing off a line.
14th. I did the thing I should not have and answered. At the next item I keyed the set, one word, present. The reading stopped for the length of a held breath, which I timed because timing is what my hands will do when my head has gone somewhere else. Then the voice resumed at the item after, as though the interruption had been noted in the margin beside my name. My name. I have gone back through the log pages and the items are not mine. The glove stitching is not mine, the plank is not mine. But the voice paused where I spoke, and resumed, and skipped nothing, and if a man reads a list and a listener answers, the list does not change, that is what I am telling myself, and the self I am telling it to can hear the kindness in it, and kindness is the last thing I want from that gap.
17th. Wrote to the office for a distant reading of the watch and got back a form asking which station the interference originates from, and I could not fill the box in, and the form is in the drawer with the unanswered night letters. The list went on all four nights, every night at three, steady as a man reading at a bedside. Tonight's last item before the band closed, and here the diary stops being comfortable with itself: a new appointment for the technician, dated tomorrow, which he does not yet have, but which the voice read as though it were already a thing on the calendar, held, waiting, at the gap where the station is not.