The Radio

It is night and we stand in a laneway. The car door is wide open. Music moves from the car radio, out through the door, and reaches us. The signal is strong. We nearly dance.

We are deep in the city and there is no traffic here. Up above our heads, a single yellow lamp glows. There is nothing else in the laneway, except our car. It shines under the film of the small lamp. We stand in the alcove of a fire exit. We are quiet and we listen. Again, we nearly dance.

*

She is quite old now and she rarely leaves the house. She is happy to receive visitors and she loves conversation, especially if she can tell a story or two. Her green eyes fix upon you.

She speaks in a slow and steady voice. It is familiar and natural. You never think that this is not her original language.

At home, when she is alone, she plays the radio. She moves through the dial, according to the time of day and the particular program she wants to hear. This day, as you arrive for a visit, she listens to a news program. Two men discuss a particular historical event. They use confident tones. They hold a posture of certainty. They maintain the clarity of deductive logic and quote usefully from various documents of that particular time.

The show irritates her and as she scans the dial she begins to tell you a story.

*

It is the perfect song. The two of us nearly dance. The night is still and the signal is strong. We are alone and we are under the spell of each other. Above our heads, a small yellow lamp glows. We cannot see the night sky.

The radio plays out the car door and we talk in low voices. We stand in a position of no past. Everything is to unfold. The night is still, our world about to be. We are deep in the city.

The signal is strong.

*

She tells you a story about organization and its narcotic effect on the intolerable pain of hunger and the chaos of homelessness. She tells you how, in the early stages, organization works like a sedating hope, and how the newly-fed stomach and cradled mind readily enjoy the fascinating momentum of working machinery. She tells you about the steady reordering of the state, and of the clear and determined retelling of the past, and how everything gears up, higher and higher, to reorder the future.

She tells you about organization and how its narcotic effect moves up from the base of the ever-hardening system. The dosage always increases and soon no longer soothes. Pain spreads again through the widening base. Only the higher strata enjoy a continuing comfort and hope. To maintain this euphoria, more pervasive measures of organization are employed.

She tells you how security is achieved through a system of tens. An ordinary citizen is responsible for ten neighbours or co-workers or school children. This citizen reports, in turn, to another who is responsible for ten. This secures one hundred citizens and so the organization is maintained, from housing block to block, from factory to sport field to schoolyard.

She tells you that only an internal rupture causing a vicious and unrelenting gash in the social order, or an external saviour causing turbulence and fury, can dislodge such organization. And she tells you how, in spite of fear, at night, one listens, the volume low, the words charged, the illicit signal clear.

*

The radio plays a perfect song. We nearly embrace. We are alone in the night and no one can tell us anything. We are close. The sound of traffic does not cut into the laneway. The radio plays out the open car door. It is a perfect song. We nearly dance.

The radio plays and together we are bigger than anything we recognize. We assume nothing outside of us. Without effort we speak to each other. And each thing we say moves out, away from us, and becomes the world around us. We unfold one secret after another and we create the world, there, from this filmy light through the black night, there, through the lane, out onto the street. And when we get into our car and drive away, the world will be, in creation, just that way.

*

She tells you a story about a farmer. He is a smart man. He operates a small farm and owns the land. He grows corn, for which there is always demand.

The state constructs a power line through his land. Clean and even towers, tremendous against the hot sky, the wires sing from tip to tip, thick black cable, running for miles.

He is a smart farmer and he can read and he reads about electricity and about the electromagnetic field.
He builds a coil of wire on the roof of his barn, wrap upon wrap, wire selectively cut from the state fence that runs along both sides of the power line. He reads and measures and cuts and works the wire into a long and large coil on his high barn roof.

There is no one with whom to talk. There is no one to question his activity. All the children are gone. Any visitors are easily deceived.

And when the coil is complete and the measurements are correct, he runs a single wire from each end of the high cylinder down into his dark barn. There he secures a single light fixture and attaches the wire and snaps in a light bulb and it shines. He runs the line to the house and there fashions another light. At night, even when there are no stars, his barn and his house are bright.

In time, word about the farmer's light travels and someone brings an old radio to his house and a wire is run. The signal is clear and the word travels. And often, many of the people of the region meet at the old farmers house and listen to the radio.

This continues until, from the blue, soldiers come and destroy the barn and the coil on the roof and take the farmer and cut off his head. The heavy corn falls and dries and no new planting is done on the land that runs on either side of the state power line.

*

We are not young. We are not waiting. We are about to embrace. We are about to dance. We talk about driving. We talk about music. We talk about movement and all around us the cool night is black and open. We fix eyes, as though wise to everything in the night. We are true and alone and the radio plays.

We are in the laneway and the night gives way and we exchange secrets.

You tell me about everything you will do. The radio plays a perfect song. We talk within a sheer desire and it gives us an expanse of time.

*

Unlike radio, the movies lessen the rigours of our perception. In the movies, we concentrate on the surface of things. When we only hear things, when we listen to the radio, we concentrate on the apparent depths. We interpret the sonar and from that we imagine and create the surface.

In a movie scene there is a young man, dressed in a dark formal evening jacket, leaning forward in a chair, his elbows resting on a large mahogany desk, his head in his hands. On the desk is a revolver, an open box of bullets and a single long red glove. It is a woman's glove. It has three sequined lines running down its length, converging at the thumb. On the floor is an open shoe-box, envelopes and documents carefully stacked around it. The young man is crying. A single light glows. It is the desk lamp. It is difficult to see the rest of the room. Yet as the camera pulls back, we see the figure of a woman, a cut of light across her red dress, her hand bare and motionless on the carpeted floor.

*

Now, it is cold outside, and the night shifts to the grey film of early day. We sit in the car, the engine on, the heater on and the radio plays. We sit close to each other and share a cigarette, the last one we have. The lane is damp and the light is flat and a garbage truck grinds nearby.

We are not young. Our throats are dry. We gaze through the windshield and say nothing. We each have things we keep from each other. We decide to drive out from the laneway, into the city. The radio plays. It is a perfect song.