“All of those voices, all of those strangers, all night long in so many languages, thousands of miles apart yet overlapping on the frequency band...all that, and one man plugged into his reception.”

--Albert Goldbarth, A Sympathy of Souls
 

He had always approved of distances.  When he was very small, he tried to fly and imagined that he had, bumping around the white-washed ceiling of his room and then sailing out the window into the night to spy on all the tiny people from above. He wanted to be invisible, too. He could manage that by pressing his fingertips together hard and closing his eyes. But eventually, he realized that what flight and invisibility really gave to him was distance, and that distance was important, it mattered.

Every Wednesday night in summer from his open window he heard the bells in the tower at the high school do their Big Ben number, striking eight o’clock, and then if he listened hard, magic took place. Every Wednesday night in summer the mixed glee club warmed up with scales, ascending and descending by whole steps. The sound pulled at him, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do..do-ti-la-sol-fa-mi-re-do, as it poured through his window. They sang their  magic exclusively for him. The voices were pure. He could tell they were old voices, but they sang straight to him from far away.

He was fascinated as the singing got louder and softer, now rising and strong now fading and weak, as if the wind had blown it onshore like the spray of ocean waves.  From then on, he associated the sound of fading music or any other rising and falling sound, with a sort of magic. It was the distance--you couldn’t create it and enjoy it at the same time. Someone had to be over there making sound while you were over here listening to it. As for the glee club, sometimes he had to stop breathing to hear anything. The music enchanted him and made him giddy. It was the sound of elves singing.  Light currents of breeze blew the music around while he stood on his bed and conducted the singers with both his arms waving. The singers followed his beat. 

When he was small, the city was quiet at night because it was wartime and with gas rationed few cars were on the streets. It was also very dark, due to the nightly blackouts. He was alone in his special world, and the darkness, the quiet and the distance made him feel safe. He wanted to feel even safer.

In the spring it was always foggy in the early morning.  Walking to school, before crossing Wilshire, there was a plateau of dirt a whole block square. He scrambled to the top and followed a diagonal path that would lead him to the opposite corner. But on foggy days he stopped in the middle and just listened, listened, to the muffled, distant sound of the early morning traffic and the songs of hidden birds calling to him from their wires. He was in his element there, encircled by fog.

He read Astounding Science Fiction every month. He believed that people would someday travel back and forth through distant future and past time. They would cover vast distances by teleportation of their bodies. They would travel faster than the speed of light. Much of what he read involved distances of millions upon millions of light years.  He tried to think of himself at that distance. Huge galaxies are out there that have been dead for billions of years, but their formation and early history are just now being seen. We are looking back in time when we look up in the night sky. These galaxies and constellations are forming and exploding and expanding into each other and creating stars out of dust. What might that sound like? How far out there could he go in his lifetime if he could sign up and shoot off in a rocket right now? 

He was taken to the planetarium to watched the sky show. Excitement gripped him in the pit of his stomach. The domed ceiling would grow pink and then purple and then darken like real dusk, but more rapidly, as it might on a smaller planet. Then the stars would begin to emerge. When the outlines of the galaxies covered the ceiling a voice would say, “Now we will look at the heavens as they appeared four thousand years ago,” and it all would slide around while he tilted his head back and gawked. The galaxies lost their familiar shapes and were distorted in all directions. He felt he was there, living in that time, watching. After the show, his mother shook him, thinking he had fallen asleep, but he was in a something like a deep trance. So many galaxies, so far away.

Phillip grew, feeling safe when he could see but not be seen. The invisible wall that protected him from the rest of the world grew in thickness and became a hard shell. He put more and more distance between himself and others. It was a very effective technique and it worked for him. The other kids at school couldn’t make fun of him because he kept his distance from them and ignored them, looked at his shoes instead of in their eyes.  Sometimes he’d play a game with himself--how long could he go without speaking to anyone? One day? Two?

But he could see, and that caused a problem. He saw a very pretty girl sitting at the desk in front of him. Her name was Billie. He fell in love with her. They were both twelve. She wore long braids and a tight sweater that showed off her budding breasts, and a tartan skirt, a pretty smile, and her thin legs ended in saddle shoes. Her slender white neck was ever-present, and ever-close, a temptation and a taunt, an invitation and a rejection. He never looked at her face directly and she never appeared to notice him. They never spoke, although he got her parents’ address out of the phone book and rode his bicycle in front of her house, back and forth, a few times.

Sometimes he asked himself what he feared about being in close contact with the world. Was it fear about being different? Fear of being thought different when, he was told by his parents, being different from the other kids was a bad thing? He was different--could he help it?
In high school electric shop he discovered short wave radio and was swept away. The sound of loud static crashes was beautiful to him because it was almost rhythmical, and it was far away--who knew where it came from and what caused it? Another continent perhaps, or sun spots, or a layer of atoms in the ionosphere where radio signals bounced back to earth, maybe even from some galaxy, undiscovered, unvisited, unknown--was that where it came from? It was magic. No one created static, it just was. 

The very first time he heard real music coming in on the short-wave from overseas, he was hypnotized.  The broadcasts came from far, far away, from half-way around the world, from OTC, “La Voix de la Concorde,” in Leopoldville, the Belgian Congo, whose station identification was seven musical notes played on a bongo drum for five minutes or so, accompanied by rapid, deep fading between the notes.  Then the station signed off with a violin concerto by Vieuxtemps, music that made him cry. 

From Radio Australia, he listened to the chimes atop the Melbourne Post Office clock announcing three p.m., and suddenly a military band burst out, and the sound of the music rose and fell with long swells as the band marched across the Pacific.  For him, listening to short wave radio made the very distant signals--DX as they were called--feel closer without actually bringing them closer.  If the band conditions were right he entered a different world when he put on his earphones.  He stayed up late to hear Radio Moscow, to listen to the news read on the African Service of the BBC, and the odd folk music from Radio Helsinki, and from the sound of their signals, he gradually came to believe that during the middle of the night he was alone with them. There were no other listeners. Everyone, both on the air and off, was as lonely as he was.  Time slowed to a sluggish crawl. Things took longer to happen, and there was no human tension. Listening was like floating weightless in space. It was his chance to escape into nothingness.

Every afternoon, he resumed listening to the short wave through a headset and achieved the distance he sought.. He felt like a safe-cracker blowing on his finger tips, as he got ready to twist the knurled knob of the Hallicrafters receiver. There were precious jewels to be found inside. He ran inside himself and slammed the heavy door shut.

In the dead of night reception from the Pacific region was strong, and sometimes, around dawn, he could even hear stations in Africa. The “skip” was unpredictable--that’s what made it so much fun to listen. Once in awhile signals from European stations would bounce into the sky and come back down to him from two directions at once: the long way, around the South Pole, and the direct way over the Atlantic, their echoey, fluttering sound betraying their paths.  Eleven years is the duration of a sun-spot cycle. At its peak, the sun spots destroy radio propagation on earth and there are blackouts for days on end and poor listening conditions for several years on either side of the peak period. As his childhood came to an end, so did the peak period for good reception.

He told himself that he wanted to become a real short-wave operator, a “ham” radio station with a transmitter of his own, because it was a public service. In an emergency he would use his radio to summon help or relay phone messages or give reports.  So he studied for the test and passed it, receiving a federal license and an awkward set of call letters, W6FCX. Willie six foxtrot Charlie x-ray. Willie six funny colored x-rays. Willie six fat candy xylophones. Saying the phonetics into a microphone made him feel silly, so he talked to other hams only in Morse Code. You could hear it farther than voice propagation because of the musical note, and so it gave him a longer reach. But it was slow and old-fashioned and formulaic, lacking in genuine personal contact.  Most contacts were in symbols, like QTH for “this is where I live.”

To see how far he could reach out, to contact DX was exciting sport for him; it was like trout fishing with light line.  Because he spent so much time listening, he became an expert fisherman who knew when to cast for DX.  He walled himself off in a place where he knew he would be safe. Nobody but another ham operator could understand that. And the music. Those thumps and hisses coming over the air had overtones that he could control with an oscillator that made them into musical pitches. 

It was a night in the summer, when band conditions are usually poorer than in winter because sunlight absorbs radio waves and the days are longer.  Conditions were erratic because the sunspot cycle was peaking. It was in the middle of the night in his time zone, four a.m., or later.  The Japanese and the New Zealanders had gone to bed, and all was quiet, so it had to be past four.  He was sitting in his “ham shack”--the garage--listening to the static crashes on the lower bands, forty meters and eighty meters. They sounded like huge waves crackling down on a surfer’s head, and they were so loud that any signal, no matter how strong, would be drowned. He switched to the higher bands, ten and fifteen meters, where it was quiet, the static sounding like gas from a jet.  Quiet and boring and lifeless. 

He knew there was potential for DX somewhere in between, in the twenty meter band, but couldn’t tell where the skip was, whether the ionospheric layer that bounces radio signals was high or low.  It could have caused signals to land in the middle of the Arctic Ocean where nobody was around, so he wouldn’t hear anything being transmitted even though the band was open.  He kept listening, though, and after awhile he thought he heard a tiny chirp, like the peep of a young sparrow. 

His body tensed. Listen!  Listen!  It’s way, way down in the mud, the background noise is awful, but he can read a little of it’s signal.  It will come up to barely audible and then fade down and disappear completely, like a bottle bobbing as it comes from overseas.  From the time of night he figured it had to be coming from Central Asia, possibly Siberia.  He tried calling out, but the other station wouldn’t answer or else couldn’t hear him.  Then he heard another sound, another chirp.  Same frequency, but a bit lower in pitch.  They were transmitting extremely rapidly and operating break-in--they weren’t transmitting and then switching over to receive, but were talking and listening to each other at the same time, and these were signs that they were professional operators.  This second signal was even weaker than the first. Nothing could be made of it. Was he more distant? Was there even a third? Or was he imagining? 

The chirping was raw and wavery, which made him think they were using home brew equipment and battery power instead of line current and not much power at that, maybe only one watt, a thousand times less than what he had.  He pictured a line of bearded old men, bundled-up, eighty-year old men, telegraphers, living in little huts spaced a hundred versts apart along the Trans-Siberian Railroad, like birds strung out along a telephone wire. Here is the one in Utsk, Siberia. He has noted the passing of the slow daily train and the bag of supplies for his next few days has landed in the snow outside his door. Now he wires greetings to his friends down the line.

They were using some Morse characters that were strange to him.  Dah-dah-dah-dit, for instance. And dit-dah-dit-dah. That’s not International Morse. He thought they might be symbols in the Cyrillic alphabet.  By now he was convinced that something important was happening to him. He was being transported.  He pressed the headphones tightly against his ears, cranked up the power, and escaped. He flew off the top of his antenna toward these signals, using his full gallon--his kilowatt. He entered a cloud of electrons, waved at them and yelled, and by radio he called and called and called.  But they were in a different cloud. 
They never stopped chittering and they never responded. He was sleepy. Maybe they were never out there at all. But he reached for them desperately across the vast wastes of the North Pacific, the Aleutians, Mongolia, and on into central Asia, across thousands of miles of emptiness, and if they were there, nobody else was in the world but the three of them.  He called to them for two hours, until sunup--teatime in London, dinnertime  in Capetown, bedtime in Samarkand. It was hot, but he couldn’t bear to go back into the house. His escape had come so close to success.

That night  marked the end for him.  Nothing left to discover. There could be no escape.
Nothing he heard on the air ever made him feel like he had that night.  But once he was totally alone and out of school, once he had left home and actually was distant, he felt ashamed of himself. He did nothing. Oh, there were days when the sunspots would start to erupt and conditions were obviously going to pot for DX hounds, and the only reception would be brief scatter transmissions from strange places like Portuguese East Africa.  Two CR6’s one Saturday afternoon, both loud as hell. They were the only two stations he could hear on the entire band.  And five minutes later they went down to nothing, like a train swallowed up in a tunnel.  Just faded out and were gone forever. Then a Brazilian station from the state of Minas Gerais came on, blasting away, and lasted about the same-five minutes. Gone. 

Over Alaska, he knew, the northern lights would go crazy, and in space, ninety million miles away, there were solar flares, and for weeks at a time the earth was bathed in magnetic storms.  The days of good DX were over for at least five or six years..

Still, he sat. Conditions were worse now.  Nothing was coming in on the upper bands but the sound of a hiss like a played-out surf. On the lower bands there was only electronic drizzle. There was neither ebb nor flow.  He sat with his ham station equipment on the desktop in front of him.  By remote control he rotated a beam antenna on the seventy-five-foot tower he had erected outside. He sat naked in a chair, headphones tightly clamped, and slowly masturbated.

He still had hopes and he still tried to bring something in.  His shack contained only his desk and chair, a bed, and his radio rig. He listened intently, straining at his earphones.  Somewhere, far away, he heard dust piling up in corners and a clock that wasn’t ticking.