The End of The Broadcasting Era
It was an overcast day in Buenos Aires, and the radio frequencies had pretzeled themselves into snarls or smooth tangles, creating new musical combinations and filling the air with a sort of chiming dissonance that resolved, often enough, into harmonies almost unbearable to the human ear, unbearable because of their beauty, and because of the limitations on our tolerance for surprise.
Rodriguez opened his windows to get some air. It had been stifling for weeks, the malignant heat of the southern hemisphere coupled with the rising mephitic stink of the stagnant river, and so the cool breeze, laced with splinters of rain, offered welcome refreshment.
Did the radio waves ride in on beams of sun, and was it the clouds now covering the city that created this ineffable tangling of sonic vibrations? Was music dependent upon light? Both are waves, which our ear and eye, respectively, deceive us into experiencing as concrete sensations. But could they actually be two sides of the same phenomena?
Nonsense. There had been overcast days before, and there was night.
Rodriguez paced the length of his room, with his hands behind his back. He could estimate the length of a footstep in a twinkling, and the velocity of an insect’s flight as it hurtled through the earthbound atmosphere. His mind was full of measure, and distances, and calculations.
But his true area of expertise was unknotting.
And so he knew the phone would ring even before the shrill alarum startled his two cats, Choripan and Lorenzo, from their nap and sent them skittering across the room.
“…Hello?”
“This Rodriguez?”
“Yes?”
“Rodriguez?”
“Yes, what is this concerning?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
Rodriguez patiently waited for the password phrase.
“They always come back.”
“Yes. How can I help you?”
“You’ve got to stop this thing – this, noise. Old people are dropping dead from it – apoplexy. Young mothers can’t force their babies to hush, are suffocating them with pillows – brute murder, but maybe justifiable. For the courts to sort out. Cultists saying it’s a message from god, or a punishment. Rebels calling for revolution, the overthrow of the institutions of law and order. You must help us end this!”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure how. For now, I’d counsel that you advise everyone to turn off their radio apparati.”
“But that’s the thing, Rodriguez – they will not! It’s as though they are enraptured by, by this – noise!”
“Then unplug the broadcasting towers. Cut the power. Smash the control boards. Shut the doors. Lock the gates. Post patrols. Swallow the keys.”
“But we have already! We did that hours ago, and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference – perhaps it even, even made things worse! No, Rodriguez, we have done everything, everything that …” A voice in the background rose to cut him off. “Hold on a second, please.”
Rodriguez heard the null sound of being put on hold, like a seashell filled with hardened wax held up to his ear.
A new voice, this time: deeper, coarser, with an unidentifiable accent. “Rodriguez. There has been a miscommunication. Your assistance will not be needed in this matter. Please disregard all information in the previous communication. And need I remind you the penalties for revealing what you’ve heard?”
“No, sir,” said Rodriguez.
…
It was dusk. The city was still, but unquiet. Rodriguez put on his official uniform: a dark navy jacket emblazoned with the words “Death Before Disorder” in gold thread, slacks cut narrowly to his tall legs, a stiff-brimmed chapeau with a red carnation (silk) in the hatband.
He wore his official uniform, but he hit the streets on an unofficial patrol, his ears wadded with cotton to keep out the spellbinding noise of the tangled radio broadcasts.
Rodriguez was searching for clues. He went first to the place he knew best, a place he knew would almost certainly be free of the noise. And if it were not, that would be an important clue.
He passed under the white gate, murmuring to himself the words on the lintel, “Requiescat in Pace,” and entered the Recoleta cemetery.
Rodriguez walked among paths, the mausoleums like snuffed lanterns, with bronze plaques listing the date of death, but not the year of birth. These were not monuments to departed life, but shelter for the next one, and thus only recorded the date of the commencement of a journey that would never be completed.
A vivid silence, full of potentials and resonances that felt electric on his skin. His fingertips tickled, then ached, then grew numb. So it was here that the noise had its source! So the city of the dead had its host – the city of the living – in its thrall!
It was past midnight before he found the source: the tomb of Luis Angel Firpo, never world Heavyweight champion, who passed into death nearly half a century before, in 1960. From the weathered stone walls emanated a static that could have been mistaken for crickets, had it not caused his eyes to water with acrid tears, his sinus cavities resonating painfully at the unique frequency.
Gently, and then louder, Rodriguez knocked on the tomb. The ghost rose.
The spaces where his eyes should have been were not hollows, but convex and deeply cragged, like the pits of peaches. His nose was a melted pancake, and his mouth had an astonishing brightness: it was filled with luminescent teeth, many more teeth than a living person has. Rodriguez reflected that in death, one is reunited with all one’s lost teeth – one’s milk teeth, the teeth knocked out by accident or misadventure, and the teeth gone missing in old age.
This was a sad, familiar ghost – a spirit compacted from sweat, defeat, and futility in a furious mix, with a bitter-almond odor, corrosive to the peripheral vision and the corners of the eyes.
Rodriguez, as only he knew how, asked, “How can I help you?”
“Who are you?”
“I am Rodriguez, unknotter of knots. I restore things to their proper places.”
“’Proper.’ Now that’s a word fit to choke on. Choke to death!”
“Ah, yes. But yet it is the word that we have built our society around. We’d still be half-brutal if we only did what was right. Civilization is doing what is proper.”
“Let me ask you this, Rodriguez, if you know so much,” said the ghost Luis Firpo. “Let me ask you why, in 1923, when I challenged Jack Dempsey for the world heavyweight title, let me ask you why time slowed to a trickle after I knocked him down. Why did time turn turbid and viscous, and why did a full fifteen seconds go past before ten were even counted, so that Dempsey rose, and Dempsey defeated me? In the name of all that’s proper, should we not swear upon a clock? And when the clock betrays us, what then?”
The ghost once called the “wild bull of the pampas” wept. His weeping was not the noise, but it was the cause of it: it was an unguent, like a sonic mucilage, binding everything together in a gummy mess. The weeping itself was a betrayal of time, which by all rights, should not exist beyond the grave – and weeping, as you know, can only happen sequentially.
Rodriguez realized: the ghost Luis Firpo was only partially dead. Resentment poisoned rest – that was the source of the bitter-almond smell – and staved off death, at least enough to keep the poor man weeping through his ghost.
The recent heat, the sudden cool and rain, must have been too much for Luis Firpo, melting and contracting in his tomb. The only way to end it would be to restore his faith in time, so that he could leave it behind once and for all.
Rodriguez knew what he must do. He took off his watch, slipped off the silver backing, and removed the lone battery. He gave the stopped watch to the ghost.
“This is yours,” he said. “You own it now. Never say it moves too slow. It moves always at the same pace.”
The ghost looked at the gift, with gratitude and then awe. The ghost opened his luminous mouth to say something, shimmered, and vanished.
Rodriguez walked home just as the sun was rising. Songs which made people dance or cry, songs that relieved boredom or fed memory, songs that expanded experience or deepened solitude, cantered forth. Some came from radios. Some came from human voices. Some came from the mouths of birds. The city filled with its own peculiar noise, a living noise.
All was well. And like a dream, all that had happened was forgotten.
Rodriguez returned home, removed his official uniform, fed his cats, and went to sleep.
**Curious, baffled, eager, or self-flagellant readers may wish to consider reading my essay on Luis Angel Firpo as a supplement to this story.**