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Radio Nights
They’d hired him on the spot, after a few brief questions. Questions that seemed strange to him now, but which the state of his nerves that afternoon had made it impossible to focus on at the time. Like, “ Do you own a car?” And then it didn’t really seem to matter that he didn’t, that when he replied “No, a bike is all I seem to need. I ride my bike everywhere,” the conversation just moved briskly on to another non sequitur, like, “I see. And, um, do you have a life-partner? Any children?” None of it seemed to have anything to do with his qualifications or preferences in music, which was the occasion for the interview, his suitability for the role of late-night disc jockey at the station. But his answers must have been adequate somehow, not shamefully disqualifying, as he’d feared, because here he sat now, gainfully employed in the glare of the overhead light, beside the long boom of the desk-lamp, in this tiny control room, his reflection in the window separating him from the darkened studio behind it, surrounded by turntables and disc players, the dangling, intimidating microphone and all those knobs and dials and glowing meters, most of which he didn’t dare to touch, not knowing anything about what they were for.
And he never saw them again, those interviewers, up to now at least. They’d asked when he could start. “Midnight Friday okay? Be here ten minutes early. Betty will show you the ropes.” And Betty was there, just as they’d said, to point out the five or six important buttons and dials, all he really needed to know, along with the four or five power indicators and volume meters. He’d usually pass Betty in the hall on his way in, three nights a week, proverbial ships in the night. Otherwise, he never saw anyone at his place of work except the night janitor whose presence, round about 2 am, ususally, was announced by the sudden flick of a light switch outside his window, the abrupt disappearance of his reflection in the glass, a hasty circuit of wastebaskets emptied, a quick mop-up, some purely ceremonial flourishes of the feather-duster, a perfunctory wave, never a glance in his direction, and then the room beyond restored to darkness again, the abrupt return of the mirroring window, the echo-chamber of his workspace, the sense that he might just be the very last person left on an empty planet.
But his concern about the vagueness of the interview was probably unfounded, considering the good possibility that no one out there was listening anyway, to these peculiar selections of his, at this late hour when most of the city had retired for the night, where these broadcasts were just a kind of placeholder, he figured, to keep the signal alive over the six hours of his shift. And sitting here surrounded by the stacks of vinyl he’d brought from home, he’d marvel at the good fortune of this dream job he’d landed, quite improbably, where he was free to send out into the ether all the sounds he liked best, each evening’s broadcast carefully selected, sequenced, meticulously curated, designed to reach the specific kind of audience of which he was perhaps the only breathing member left.
He’d often just start with sounds, like whalesong sometimes, or a chorus of didgeridoos, an amplified recording of locusts chewing, the approach, passage and retreat of a thunderstorm, a computer-generated audio made from the pulsing of a quasar, an orchestra of gamelans, a Georgian choir of women’s voices, a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, a cantor intoning the calendar’s Koren Siddur, a quarter hour or more of throatsong from the steppes at Kyzyl Kum, a selection of Hopi, Hunkpapa or Tlingit ceremonials. And from there on to something lapidary, usually, something he thought crystalline, a motet of Josquin, a madrigal of Gesualdo, something fom the Gymnopédies, perhaps, or Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder or Mendelssohn’s Kinderszenen, a quartet of Bartok, a Late Quartet of Beethoven, a Chopin Nocturne, some Samba or Minnesang or Schubert or Szymanowski, Britten’s Sea Interlude or Hertha Töpper’s Agnus Dei from the Mass in B minor. And most nights he’d end up in the company of Armstrong’s Hot Five or Hot Seven, with Jack Teagarten or Roswell Rudd, Jimmy Hamilton and Russell Procope, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bud Powell or Cecil Taylor, Billie Holiday, Otis Redding, Leadbelly, the inevitable Francis Albert Sinatra. Sometimes he’d devote an entire show to a single performer, composer or lyricist: Hank Williams or Patsy Kline, Charlie Christian, Augustín Lara, Astor Piazzola, Umm Kulthum, perhaps, or Amália Rodrigues; or maybe Piaf, Aznavour, Brel; or Robert Johnson, Son House or Ma Rainey; the music of Billy Strayhorn, Thelonious Monk or Harold Arlen; the lyrics of Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Yip Harburg.
It didn’t seem to matter. All he needed to do, it seemed, was to show up, and to nurse the little station’s signal into the dawn. Because he was indeed in every sense the last of his kind, he’d often think, as he sat and listened, about this curious vocation of his, supplying sounds that no one seemed present to hear, noises issuing from this obscure little moribund enterprise, this perishing medium, sounds whose sources, human and inhuman, no one, perhaps, had ever heard or even heard of, much less thought about. Each of his precisely sequenced programs, though, he knew, was something like a little universe, an elite little university of melody and meaning, ripe for the picking, available for free, should anyone happen onto his slender frequency at this unholy hour of the night.
And he remembered reading somewhere how radio signals never die. If this is to be believed, their languid vibrations can be imagined as something immaterial, insubstantial, sent wandering into the night, out over the sleepers and the insomniacs, over the rooftops of the dreaming city, over the cosmic hum of 3.7 degrees Kelvin, swept past all hearing, across the water, out past the reciprocating company of others, hurrying slowly, as if in keeping with that ancient prescription, a festinare lente that vanishes as it arrives, an unnoticed vibration carried along, as we all are carried, voice and flesh alike, past every point of no return, outward into the furiously expanding, quietly exploding dark.
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DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. Born in California in 1951, he was raised in Japan and Mexico. After several Wanderjahre in Spain, France and Italy, he studied philosophy and literature at the Universities of California and Padova, and earned postgraduate degrees at Princeton and Yale. Following his retirement from a long career in business and the sciences, he returned to the practice of poetry. His work has recently appeared in Tar River, Blue Unicorn, Whistling Shade, Neologism, Consilience Journal, Poetica Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review, The Amphibian, Willows Wept, Sequoia Speaks; Revue {R}évolution and others.
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