Amalie watched the speaker for some time.
The burn of static had stripped the paint from the speaker where it had embered, the wooden cabinet below left greyed with atrophy as it had died. She had seen the static; she had almost brought it into her station. Frantically the station operator began checking the receiver for damage. Had the cards been fried? Were the pots still dialled in correctly. She had spent a decade tidying this mess of the receiving station and she knew its every wire, its every resistor, by colour and by code.
As a child she had helped her father run the cables. With no experience in electronics, the two cobbled together a working long range receiver from a field manual and spent three happy years making improvements.
The two were a nightmare for the other operators. Transmissions too amplified, sometimes so over-gained that they would bleed onto another frequency. But they continued to learn. At sixteen, Amalie had worked out how to duplicate a signal and convert the antenna into a repeater station. An isolated fragment of the world was now connected to the main wavelength and words flew through the air, dissolving distance as they were received.
There was an open channel now, operators that were only ever known through morse code now had voices, they had personalities much more than dots and dashes they were people. Amalie had found friends in far off places, visited a few, she had even trusted Ben with looking after her station while she travelled to the mainland. But the city was too much, there was sound, far too much noisome sound that it became like a haze that burbled from every speaker or billboard. The world was so connected by words in the city, but Amalie had never felt so alone; she had given up on travel after that trip. Port was her home.
The snow glittered orange as the Western sun slowly set over the ice sheet. Everything moved slowly in this part of the world.
It was quiet enough–despite the hum of her isolation transformer–Amalie could almost hear a note play over the separate parts of the day. There was a low frequency that rose and lowered in pitch and a work Amalie would often mute her speakers thinking that some kind of interference was echoing in the lines. It was life, voices of things that were before, the dead, rost.
‘Amalie!’
The voice played again in her mind. It was there, grey memory held in translucent hands. Her father’s last voice, the feeling of being thrown outside.
Again and again this memory repeated. Again she felt helpless, the scars felt more present than before, there was an ache on her cheek, her arm, her back.
Hearing that familiar note reach fever pitch, Amalie opened the volume on four channels and let the crumble of static noise fill the station.
How had he done it? How had her father brought so much static into the signal that it found form. The salt planes were so far, the dead land was only a story in Lefa’s ramblings.
The tavernkeeper had seen it in his days as a sailor. “A swarm of light,” he had called it, “like a creature without mind, buzzing black and white granules all swirling amongst themselves. Nothing evil, nothing good.”
Amalie had wanted to see the static one day, to confront it and know that it was nothing, but in its appearance, in the colour that it had stripped from the air, that old fear was still fresh in her mind.
Wiping a tear, Amalie looked across the descending slopes into the town, she saw droplets of blood trailing off in the snow, she saw her footprints and a memory of the past that has been silent ever since.
‘Ajax to Port station, come in Port station.’
A transmission cut from the radio at max level and was gained almost beyond comprehension. Remanent static as like water, spat from the damaged speaker and made a patter of neat holes upon the station’s wooden floor.
Running to the desk, Amalie threw down the dials and took a moment to steady her ringing ears.
Slowly, she returned the open channel to a sensible level.
‘–ome in Port station.’
Ben. He was as painfully on time with his station log as ever. The Morse printer began to clack merrily as the brass hammers punched out a uniform pattern in the unfurling paper.
‘Receiving, Ajax.’ Amalie spoke into the microphone almost hesitant of reviving any further transmission and recalling whatever had brought the static this far from the Salt plane.
‘Bit busy at the moment though, Ben.’ There was silence, Amalie knew that he was struggling to think of something to say. He was a good friend but tonight she wanted to be alone.
‘Busy?’ he replied, ‘It’s snowing, what could you be busy with?’
A question: Amalie hadn’t expected that. But he did operate the weather station, it must have come naturally.
‘It’s actually clear at the moment, Ajax. Nice sunset.’ she replied.
‘I don’t believe you.’ there was a noise of rustling paper audible over the transmission, ‘There’s a huge cold front on the radar, you’ve got a nine-tenths storm coming tonight and there’s more snow falling than your monthly average.’
There was something innocent about Ben, Amalie thought, now distracted from the worry of the static. He was too good natured to realise when someone was trying to be a hermit. He’d talk of the weather until you couldn’t help but smile.
‘Red sky at night,’ Amalie mused, giving up and resigning to small talk, ‘you’re not saying that the sailors are all wrong, are you? Lefa will be heartbroken.’ hearing no reply, something inside Amalie opened in a moment of honesty.
‘I saw it again. I saw some static bleed out from the short-wave. It looked like fire’
‘Tonight?’ the reply was excited and delayed enough that it appeared that Ben had forgotten to hold the transmit button on his first attempt, ‘What did it look like? Did you catch any? What frequency was it on?’
It was a barrage of questions but that was always going to be the case when Ajax’s operator heard of something beyond the mundane.
‘Catch it? Really? Are you an idiot? It about the size of a pinecone. I was scanning, but I think that the secondary was still on that dead number station. I haven’t found anything more interesting to point it towards.’
Knowing that protocol deemed her secondary channel to be locked on the emergency band, and that her admission of neglect over an open channel was rather foolish, the wind of the conversation began to leave Amalie’s sails somewhat.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Too many memories.’
‘–is wild. You have to replicate it.’ he replied, once again forgetting to transmit in his excited bluster.
Ben’s excitement was too much for one night, Amalie decided. Best to let his imagination have the rest of the conversation by itself and sign off for the night
‘Over and out, ajax.’
‘No, come on Amalie.’
‘Over and out.’
Clicking mute and dropping the open channel to zero for good measure, Amalie stood and watched the final light hanging on the edge of horizon. Lefa called this time gloaming and she always thought that it was a sad sounding name. There were so many words, words in people’s minds, words in the air. Sometimes Amalie’s thoughts felt cluttered, all this noise, all this talking. The hum of static trapped in a speaker was the only thing that would help her think.
‘Central to Port station, this is Central calling Port station.’
Freja’s authoritative measure called out from the station-to-station channel. Operators were allowed to name station and the fact Freja had chosen “Central” had always annoyed Amalie to no end.
‘Go ahead,’ she replied, trying and failing to sound professionally chipper.
‘Your open channel seems to be on mute, dear. Ajax station was calling for you just now.’
“Dear”!? The old bag was two years older than Amalie and she called her dear? Drumming her fingers angrily on the console, Amalie counted to ten and then swore loudly into the still muted open channel. Silent words for no one to hear, may they all fall upon deaf ears and become a pimple on the tongue of anyone who still wants to hear them.
‘Must be interference.’ she lied plainly after calming down.
‘Well, maybe just check all your levels and then have a check that all your secondaries are as per the manual. Wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, operator.’ She had a way of saying operator as if it were an insult.
Pulling back from the desk, Amalie opened the window and marched through the snow with a frustrated determination. The air was brisk. Despite the patchy clouds, a gentle snow was now falling with a building urgency. Looking up to the gathering storm, the flittering of white snowflakes on the dark sky saw patterns move erratically as the snow swayed to the ground, granules flickering against blue and grey, a thing so peaceful and so without sound.
There was that note again. That hum of the earth still trying to turn.
Somewhere out there, things moved on.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 