Nights on 4625 kHz

The listening has become a discipline now, which is a polite word for what it actually is. Most nights end the same way: headphones on, the receiver warm, a map of Russia spread on the table with pencil marks where the transmitter might be, and the buzz on 4625 kHz doing what it has done since before I was born - continuing.

I log it like a scientist and listen to it like a superstitious sailor. Twenty-five buzzes a minute, give or take. Then, rarely enough to make your heart jump, a voice: a callsign, names, numbers, read flat as a shipping forecast, and gone. Nobody official has ever explained it. The map is my way of pretending the question has a geographic answer. The notebook knows better.

What keeps me at the table is not the hope of decoding anything. It is the sheer fact of persistence - that somewhere a machine or a duty roster or a habit keeps this sound alive, decade after decade, indifferent to whether anyone listens. The notes from these nights are past the point of being notes. They have started to argue with each other, which is how I know a manuscript is coming.