These periods of...productive slumber continue, and the latest writing is much longer, so I will have to break it into several parts. I have no real new updates on my own condition, other than the easing of my dead hand's throbbing as I henpeck these words with my other hand. If you are unfamiliar for how I arrived at this point, I talk about that journey here. Thank you again for your time and your attention. It is a bright spot in this deepening well of darkness I find myself in.
FM Rider
I drive around at night because I can’t sleep normal hours any more. I used to—back when I was a teenager, I was always the first one to call it a night. Not early, you understand, but by midnight I was usually out. When my parents died, I was in bed asleep. I got the call to come to the hospital, to identify the bodies and pick up my sister Mary.
There was no one else to do any of it. Our grandparents on both
sides were dead and our mother’s sister, Beth, was a reoccurring
character in many meth-fueled dramas that played out across various
parts of the state. Even if I could have found her, I wouldn’t have. I
was twenty-four at the time, and I was old enough to take care of an
eleven year old girl. Two years out of college, I had relatively good
job as a shift manager at a large food distribution plant only a few
miles from my apartment. The work was dull and I didn’t want to do it
forever, but it paid the bills for the time being and it gave me
flexibility since I could work out my own schedule for the most part.
This last point was key now. Looking down the hall at the impossibly
tiny and shell-shocked little girl sitting in a molded plastic chair
next to an older, heavy-set woman, my heart broke a little.
She’d never know how much she was going to miss out on. Our parents
weren’t perfect, of course, but as I’d gotten older I’d come to realize
how great they were. They were caring without being smothering, funny
without trying too hard, encouraging without being pushy. Best of all,
they believed in us, and not in the willfully blind way that you see
some parents do. They knew us, understood us, and pushed us to be the
best version of ourselves that we could be. I realized I still needed
to identify them and that I couldn’t put it off, couldn’t see Mary first
without having to explain why I had to leave again. So I stopped and
turned around, heading back to the nurse’s desk and following the
directions down to the coroner’s office adjacent to the morgue.
They only made me look at the faces, which weren’t badly damaged on the surface other than some dark patches and a spot on my father’s face that went down too far where his cheekbone used to be. The cuts and scrapes that were visible had stopped bleeding some time before and the bodies had been cleaned, at least above the sheet. Below…well, from what I was being told, the car accident had been terrible. How Mary had survived, let alone without anything more than a few bruises, was anyone’s guess.
After I signed the forms a squat, clammy man thrust at me with robotic condolences, I went back upstairs to get Mary. She started crying when she saw me, jumping into my arms and hugging me tight. The woman seated next to her eyed me suspiciously.
“You her brother…” She glanced down at a clipboard in her ample lap. “Mike?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Julian.” She smiled thinly and nodded and I saw it had been some strange kind of check that I was the right person. I already didn’t like her.
I looked down at Mary. “Ready to go?” She nodded against my chest, and as I turned to go, the woman stood, her smile gone.
“Hold on for me, son. There’s some things we need to go over. Is there someone else we should call? Your Aunt Beth maybe?”
Turning on the woman, I tried without much luck to keep the anger out of my voice. She’d been picking Mary for information at a time like this. “No. Beth is a junkie, and I don’t know where she is. And my parents named me her guardian in their wills.”
She recoiled slightly, but then she narrowed her gaze slightly and pushed forward. “That may well be, son, but we still need to…”
“We don’t need to do anything. You need to fuck off.”
The first few days were really hard on both of us, but within a few weeks things started feeling somewhat normal. I’d changed my work schedule so I was always home from when she got out of school until I dropped her back off the next morning. I saved some money up, and by the time summer came, she was able to go to a day camp the days I worked. Mary had always had friends, but she made a couple of new ones at the camp that lived just a few blocks away and went to her school in a grade below her. I didn’t know what a little girl’s life was supposed to look like, but Mary’s seemed like it was getting closer to it anyhow. She was going to the movies, hanging out, having sleepovers. It was taking time, but things were going good again.
Then I got a call a little after 8 one night when Mary was at a slumber party. The mother, Ann or something, said that Mary’s nose was bleeding and wouldn’t stop. The edge of panic in the woman’s voice told me it was bad. I got there and took her to the hospital in less than twenty minutes, and less than twenty hours later we knew that she had a brain tumor. Very lethal and inoperable.
It went quickly. Less than two months later she was dead, only a few weeks before her thirteenth birthday. I felt some anger and sadness to be sure, but mainly I felt scooped out. I went through the motions of living, but I didn’t really think about what I was doing. I didn’t think about anything. And I didn’t sleep very much anymore.
So I started driving at night. I lived an hour from what most people would consider the edge of the desert, but I wound up going there most nights. The lack of people and lights, the lack of noise and reminders of people living lives, it helped somewhat. Most nights I’d be back home by four, collapsing into a fitful sleep for a few hours before getting up to go to work, but there were times I’d stay and watch the sunrise climb past the edge of the world, turning everything the color of fire. The thought of that fire comforted me in some strange way.
I also started spending more time on the internet, looking for hobbies and things to read, anything to occupy my thoughts for a bit. There are so many odd corners online, and as time went on I started delving deeper and deeper into pockets of esoteric groups. Conspiracy theorists, occultists, ufologists, you name it. Most of them seemed sadly desperate to me, as though they wanted something to believe in and were grasping for whatever lay close at hand, just needing a life line. None of it stuck with me much, and after a few months I’d given it up almost entirely. I’d found my life line on the roads.
And the radio. As much as I didn’t want to see people, I oddly developed a habit of listening to the radio when I was driving. What didn’t matter that much, though I found myself gravitating more and more to late night talk radio as time went on. There was a surprisingly large overlap between radio crazies and internet crazies, and something about that was strangely comforting.
It was one night late in August, nearly eighteen months since Mary had died, that I first heard the woman’s voice on the radio. I was turning the dial idly, knowing there was at least thirty minutes before the next good talk show was on, when suddenly out of the static I heard a woman speaking. Her voice caught me before I really heard what she was saying. It was raw with emotion, some combination of terror and desperate sadness that hit me hard.
“…I don’t know how long. But I hope someone can hear this. Please, please help if you do. I don’t kn…” The signal faded out and didn’t return. After another few seconds of driving, I stopped and turned around, trying to find the signal again. No luck. I went back and forth a few more times, but nothing.
I couldn’t sleep when I got home. Over the next few days, I couldn’t get the thought of the strange transmission out of my head. Reason told me that it was nothing. Either part of a movie commercial or radio play or something equally benign and boring. But I didn’t really believe that. It sounded too real.
Or maybe I just wanted to believe in it because it was a mystery, a distraction. I enjoyed driving around at night, roaming the desert roads, but it was in a detached way. It was a form of therapy, and it did help some, but never brought me real joy or excitement. This didn’t either—not exactly—but going out that night was still the first time I’d looked forward to anything since Mary died.
I’d done research during my lunch break on my phone, trying figure out how far away that broadcast could have come from, and it was disheartening. I knew I was on the FM dial when I heard the transmission because I remembered some of the stations I passed. And according to what I’d read, while FM signals didn’t typically travel as far as AM and relied more on line-of-sight reception, they could still be broadcast 60 to 100 miles depending on the location and power of the source, and depending on occasional atmospheric events, some signals would get bounced way further for a time, even from another part of the world. But I didn’t think that was the case—it didn’t feel right and the woman had sounded American without a strong accent that stood out to me—but that was still a lot of ground to cover. I started to get down again at the realization that I was unlikely to ever know where the voice had come from or what it meant, if anything.
But still…I didn’t have anything better to do, and if I wanted to spend a few nights listening out for it, what was the harm? Thinking about the best way to do it, I could feel my anticipation growing again. After work I went to a bookstore and found a book of maps that covered a thousand square mile area of the region. The maps in the front were big and more general, but as one went deeper in they zoomed in more and more on bigger roads and towns, while also filling in some geologic and historical points of interest that lay in the vast brown and grey seas of desert lapping at the edges of every highway and county road.
I ran home and spread open the map book, trying to figure out exactly where I’d been when I first heard the woman. I’d grown familiar with those roads in the last few months, but it was still hard to say. Driving aimlessly like that through the dark, tired and not paying attention, and then having your attention awoken by a strange voice on the radio…it didn’t exactly foster the best recall of landmarks and mile markers. Still, I was pretty sure of the road I was on and could narrow the stretch to probably a thirty mile span. But I still had no way of knowing how close or far I was from the source, so I had to assume up to one hundred miles in every direction. So over two hundred square miles…it was a lot.
I used a ruler and a pencil to draw out the distance on one of the maps mid-way through the book. Even out in the desert, that kind of area covered five small towns, the edge of two medium-sized cities, and nearly fifty roads. On the one hand, it was daunting. At the same time, the complexity of it, of driving those routes, keeping track of where I’d been and still needed to go, all while searching for some elusive signal…it was appealing in a strange way. So I headed out.
Deciding to start with that same stretch of road, I’d alternate driving and pulling off for a bit, rolling the dial back and forth, ears pricked for any sign of the woman’s voice. But there was nothing. Just the standard stuff and the dim crackle of static in between. After a couple of nights of this, I started expanding the search, going further and further out from that center point each night. But it was a slow process. The roads didn’t conform to my desire for an organized grid search, and even with the large gaps that keeping to the roads led to, after a week I was only fifty miles away from where I had started. I wasn’t discouraged exactly, I still looked forward to going out every night, but I did think another angle might be helpful, so I started trying to think of ways to figure out what the signal could be.
I started with the commercial idea. I took a couple of nights off from riding and combed the internet for any currently playing ads or descriptions for movies or tv shows that might be compatible with what the woman was saying. There were a few potentials, but nothing that panned out. Then it occurred to me that I knew someone who listened to the radio as much as I did.
Ricky was in his late fifties and could generously be considered a functioning alcoholic. He was a line manager at the plant, and while he was only semi-reliable as an employee, he was a warm and likeable guy. He’d been one of the first people to talk to me when I went to work at the center, and one of the very few that continued to be friendly once I got promoted. Despite his age, Ricky was always off doing something on the weekend, and he had a myriad of hobbies. One of them was listening to talk radio at all hours of the night.
I went to him when he was on lunch break and he grinned when he saw me. “What’re you up to, Cap? Coming to give me a raise?”
I laughed. “I can’t give raises. And why would you get one?”
“Hard work and ingenuity, man. I’m always thinking about the company.” He gave a smirk and a wink.
“I’ll pass that a long. Got a second?” He chuckled and gave a nod. I told him about being out driving and hearing the voice. I didn’t tell him I kept going back out there, tried to make it sound very casual, just wondering if he’d ever heard anything like that. When he said no, I told him about the internet research I’d done to make sure it wasn’t just a commercial. He nodded again, more thoughtfully, clearly more interested now.
“Hmm. Have you ever heard of number stations?”
I shook my head. He smiled a little and continued.
“They’re weird. Basically, at different points in time since people have had radios, there are these strange stations that will pop up. Sometimes briefly, sometimes for years. They’ll play strange music, or have strings of numbers being repeated, hence the name.”
“Weird. Where do they come from?”
“A lot of them are suspected to be a way to send encoded messages. Some old-school espionage. But some of them, no one knows. And people have tried to triangulate where the signal is coming from, but it’ll move on them when they get close. Real spooky stuff. I haven’t heard of anything exactly like what you’re describing, but there’s definitely some weird shit on the radio from time to time.” Ricky smiled expansively, proud to show off his obscure knowledge.
A search of the internet told me Ricky was telling the truth. I wasn’t sure how I’d never heard about the phenomena during my days of surfing the strange back alleys of the web, but I also wasn’t sure how the information that existed helped me. This seemed different than most of the accounts I read, and again, I couldn’t even rule out it was a one-time fluke transmission of something boring and innocent. I went back out again that night, but I could feel my enthusiasm waning.
Then I heard the voice again.
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Credits
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