June 24 2004, 11:25 PM 77459 67116

There are stories in radios. I mean: there can be stories about particular individual radios, or there can be stories that are delivered via radio. Sometimes, radio itself can deliver up stories from someplace within. I have read a handful of short stories about the massive radio transmitters of the midwest, amplitude modulated super stations pouring power into the night and keeping the trucks and dreamers company. They were pretty good. Radio still has some magic.

I listen to the shortwave radio at night, most nights. It is a continuing amazement how very noisy the night sky is; all manner of radiation pours into my thin metal antenna from point sources around the globe and beyond, energy leaking in from the stars and the winds they drive. Sometimes, there are those who have taken it upon themselves to overwhelm a feeble signal with noise, smothering a static riddled voice in the night with a loud, mechanical jabber. They do this for their own reasons; it is never explained, but sometimes it is easy to guess. Sometimes, it means a dimmer switch is on in the other room. I have discovered that a neighbor is craftily interfering with bits of the bands by operating a window air conditioning unit, churning up the power each time it becomes too warm for the piano. There are stories there! Most of them are innocent. We live in a noisy place.

There are a group of men who live on a mountain someplace; I can only gather they are far from civilization. On a given evening in the month at a given time, they speak to each other in serial on a single frequency, handing off to the next as each finishes. When a member of the group does not appear at his allotted time, the others work plans into the rest of their conversation to check up on the man at some point in the coming days, one at a time, for five minutes each. They say "So long!" when it is time to go.

The radio becomes a darker place with numbers stations. They are making the rounds again; they are mysteries spun of espionage, intrigue, and large governmental agencies that prefer acronyms. It is worth searching them out. There is much to them; simply put, they are an unassailable way to send private messages to secret operatives deeply in the field. The manner of transmission is usually strings of numbers, unending numbers.

There are stories here, but one can usually only see the edges. It is a method of communication almost as old as radio itself, but little is officially known. As the geopolitical map has shifted, stations have risen from the night as others have faded out entirely. During the 1991 Moscow coup attempt, a plaintive broadcast of a single fragment in Russian, over and over and over again. There is a station that has broadcast a metronomic metered buzzing for longer than I have been alive, and has only stopped to broadcast once. It broadcast numbers.

I am listening to numbers now on my radio in simple stacks of 5, sent from somewhere, meant for someone else. I understand nothing.