I suppose you’ll want to know how it started. Like most things in life, it was a matter of chance.
The start of summer had brought with it an unbelievable heat and I came to town on a bus. There was no air conditioning, only pairs of those old-school, semi-openable windows. They didn’t help. Heat slipped through the openings and settled itself heavily into our space. The bus rolled on steadily, but around it everything seemed impossibly immobile. Moving felt more like wading. I might not have been covered in mud, but thick sweat layered itself on my skin. The worst was my feet. I wriggled them inside my boots, but they seemed increasingly melted into the fabric of my socks.
The bus had only one other passenger, a young woman about my age. She fanned herself slowly, deliberately. There was an austerity to her face. It was pale and felt to me like it had been drawn with a ruler. Everything seemed to be just as long or wide as it was required. There was no excess about her face; medium-sized eyes, medium-sized nose, medium-sized lips. It made her look somewhat unnatural. Sweat dripped down her nose and she did not move to wipe it off. Her name was Ida. In four days she would be dead, but I couldn’t have known that.
I had not been in town for years. Having spent all of my childhood summers in it, I thought it a marker of growth to spend my adult ones elsewhere. My uncle was a fire watcher and we had always thought him somewhat invincible. He was watching the day that the family burnt alive in their car. He might not have saved them, but more people would have died if he hadn’t reported it immediately. You may think it strange of me to dispatch death like that–in curt sentences–but if I learned anything from my childhood summers, it was that there is no struggling against a force like fire or death. Best to be clean about it, objective to the extent that one can.
I digress. My uncle broke his leg for incredibly stupid and entirely mundane reasons. My aunt had just washed the bathroom floor and he went in distracted by the newspaper, slipped, fell poorly, knocked some things onto him and finally broke his leg. This being right before fire season, there was no time to find an experienced replacement. They had no luck with an inexperienced replacement either: young people were far and few between in this place.
Naturally, my uncle’s thought was to resort to me. I had many times accompanied him on his vigil and, as a young, single – and to their minds, I imagine, friendless – teacher, had little to do with myself all summer. To their credit, it didn’t take much to convince me. I lived close. Although the job paid little – and I was not doing it for the money anyway – it would secure for me, I then believed, hours of absolute peace and isolation, which I could dedicate to the personal projects I had long been forced to neglect.
Eventually, the bus rolled to a stop and we (its two sole passengers) got out. She got up from her seat slowly, even accounting for the retarding force of the heat. If she was not so angular, I might even have said languidly. Sitting at the back, I waited for her to get up before following. As I walked down the aisle, her large, black braid moving in front of my face like a pendulum, I was hit by the most acute scent of lavender. I have always found it difficult to smell in the heat; everything seems to smell the same – of heavy, slick warmth – but the scent of lavender hit me like a flash of colour and has remained in the back of my mind ever since.
Day 1
The lookout tower stood on the summit of a local mountain. It was thoroughly unremarkable: a white, raised hut-of-sorts accessible by a set of equally white stairs and surrounded by a small veranda-like structure. The inside of the hut could be paced in about ten steps, up and across. It was very sparsely furnished: a desk, a radio set, some instruction manuals, a map and a compass.
I had expected to find it empty, but upon arrival I was faced with a large, brown-haired man. The great, rather comedic smile on his face clashed strangely with an unruly beard and pair of heavy-set glasses that didn’t do his face any favours. He looked like a cross between a teacher from the 1920s and a forest hermit.
“Hello! Emily, I suppose? My name’s Jack, I take the shift after your uncle. He asked me to make sure you knew the ropes.”
I nodded and let him shake my hand, which he gripped rather lightly for a man of his size. A refresher could do no harm, I decided, asit would save me – at least – from having to spend too much time perusing the manuals on the desk.
He harped on about the functions of the radio and my duties for almost half an hour. Jack seemed to have a penchant for the monologue. Every so often he looked back at me, as if to check I had no questions but without ever giving me enough time to actually ask him anything.
As I listened, I began to unpack my bag. My motivation for coming here had largely been the opportunity to draw in peace, surrounded by so much natural beauty. As he drew to the close of his speech and as I took out my sketchpad, pencils and rubber, Jack seemed to remember once more that I was in the room. His eyes widened at the sight of my materials.
“You draw?”
I was worried his surprise stemmed from the fact he didn’t find it appropriate for me to bring distractions to work.
“Well, yes. But I’m just an amateur. It won’t distract me, don’t worry. It’s just for a sketch or two.”
He chuckled quietly: “Oh no, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s only that I paint myself. Not as an amateur, I’ve been trying to make a career out of it. Although, you can imagine how that’s going.” He paused and seemed lost in thought for a moment or two before adding: “I’ll bring you some pictures of my paintings when we switch shifts, it’s always good to get some feedback from a fellow artist.”
I smiled at him, but only awkwardly. I wanted Jack to leave, I didn’t want to exchange art, I wanted peace and quiet, but all I said was: “Well, I would hardly call myself an artist.”
He didn’t seem to take it as any kind of dissuader and left fully convinced that I would be only too happy to take a look at his work.
Once the quiet seemed to have settled back into the walls of the hut, I decided to experiment a little with the radio. If I could go back now, I would never have touched it. When I was a teenager, my uncle showed me how to tune into different frequencies. He used it to access this special music broadcast he liked. I hadn’t touched a radio like it in a long time and as I turned the knob out of a sea of static emerged a faint voice. I kept turning, and turning it, until I seemed to have pulled from the innards of that old, ugly radio a voice of crystal. This was the first of her broadcasts I heard.
Transcript of Broadcast 1
Hello [a pause, followed by laughter].
I wonder who's listening to this. Probably no one. I can’t imagine who would.
I don’t exactly know how this radio thing works. Peter – that’s not his real name, don’t worry – brought it to my room without ever explaining what it did. I think he meant to repurpose it and then forgot. An outdated model rescued from a pending journey to the junkyard, I suppose.
[pause]
Well, listener. Whoever you are, wherever you are, if you exist, at least we both maintain the benefit of anonymity.
I got this idea from a play I read a while ago, where this guy records himself speaking over the years. He keeps an audio diary of sorts. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I never saw myself writing a diary but speaking one was something different. An audio diary is immediate: you wouldn’t go back to re-record phrases you said wrong or fix things you didn't want people to find out. It’s too troublesome.
His problem, though, was that he listened back to the tapes and then ended up with all of these versions of himself that didn’t really cohere.
[pause]
Now, that’s awful. I didn’t want to end up ghosting myself. So, I thought that a new and improved version of his scheme would be one where I still felt like I was talking to someone but no record of what I said was left. Like a confessionary, without any of the penitence. A one-way conversation, that has all the benefits of keeping a diary without the risk of 20 years down the line discovering myself an awful person, or worse not so much a continuous one. Like what happened to the guy in the play.
I haven’t made a plan for what I would say in these, I thought it would be more to the point to just let myself talk. [pause, followed by nervous laughter] Except now I don’t know where to start.
[pause]
Maybe I’ll tell you about my dream. I don’t dream very often, but when I do, I remember things very vividly. There was this one dream that I kept having for a while. I think it was back in March.
I am on a cliff and it’s very green, exceedingly green. There’s flowers growing on the floor and it seems to me like it must be spring. At the edge of the cliff stands an angel. Dark-haired, which is unusual for angels, and it is dressed in this beautiful pink gown with a golden collar. It’s the softest pink you can imagine, no more imposing than a baby’s blush. And from the back of this dress emerges a pair of purple wings. Enormous. This time the colour is intense. It’s a deep purple. And the halo glows above its head, but the angel isn’t facing me. It’s facing the sea, forwards. In my dream, I step closer and closer to it. Slowly. I keep expecting it to turn, but it doesn’t seem to know I’m there. I call out to the angel, but it still doesn’t turn. Finally, I am standing so close to it that I can feel the feathers touching my face and I place my hand – very lightly – on its shoulder. This time, I am sure the angel felt me, but just as it is about to turn its head my dream ends.
It haunted me, that image. I don’t know why. I wasn’t scared of it or anything but it wouldn’t leave my mind, so much so that I asked Peter to paint it. I thought it might be purging to see it for once outside of my own head. But I warned him that he had to paint it exactly as I told him to, that a single altered detail might have the opposite effect intended. That week, I dreamt of the angel every night.
Then, Peter presented his painting to me and I never saw it again. Everything looked exactly as I had described it to him with the exception of the angel, who was no longer looking forwards. This time, it looked back and it looked back at me with my own face. I suppose Peter thought it was funny or maybe that I would be flattered but I’ve never been able to look at the picture again. It disturbed me. And I hope I’ll dream of the angel no more, because I know this time it would be more of a nightmare and less of a dream.
[long pause]
Peter has this terrible insistence on painting me. He hardly ever paints anything that is not some variation of myself, be it as a nun, a ghost, a countess, a sailor, almost anything you could think of. If you ever see my face, listener, it will be in one of his paintings – although he doesn’t often display them.
He’s sold a few though. Imagine: you’re paying a visit to your great aunt, and as you enter her home she tells you that she’s just bought a painting, a small, cheap thing, to decorate her living room. As you enter you remark upon it. It is nice looking, though obviously not the work of genius. And you look at my face for a moment or two. After you leave, you forget you ever saw it but it was me. And you knew me, if only for a moment.
END OF BROADCAST
Almost as soon as she started talking I pressed record. I don’t know what drove me to it, but now at least I have these ghosts, as she would call them. Whether she coheres or not, I guess that’s up to you to decide.
I stayed on the channel, hoping that the voice would come back but it didn’t. I wondered who she and Peter were. I didn’t imagine they could live very far or the transmission wouldn’t have reached me. I noted down the reference number in my book and for the remainder of my shift listened to her dream over and over again and tried to draw it.
At midnight, Jack emerged at the door to relieve me. I was eager to leave, but he stopped me: “Stay just for a minute longer, I only want to show you my pictures.”
Tired as I was, and not wishing to seem unfriendly, I relented. He beamed at me and I thought him unreasonably cheery.
“I only had the chance to scan two, but I’ll bring more over tomorrow if you’d like.”
The first was a painting of the lookout tower from the outside. It was skillful, but rather uninspiring. I told him he was talented, half-heartedly. He took the compliment. The second was something else entirely and I think it impossible that he wouldn’t have noticed the change in my demeanour.
The painting was of a nun, looking up at a little wooden Jesus, affixed to a black wall of which only a small portion was visible. Everything to the left of the wall was a deep shade of red. It looked to me like a sort of unearthly fire. The nun’s expression, however, was not supplicating or even particularly beatific. Her face was overrun by an all pervading sense of indifferent calm, as if she faced the end of the world, unflinching. I suddenly saw in it the woman from the bus. Utterly pale and measured. Seemingly unbothered in the face of such tremendous heat.
“Did you have a model?”
Jack looked up, surprised – despite himself – at this attention.
“A model– you mean for this painting? For the nun?”
I nodded.
“Yes! How could you tell? The eye of a fellow artist, I suppose. It’s my partner, Ida. Doesn’t consider herself much of a model, but I’ve always told her she has a face that was meant to be painted. I look at her sometimes when she’s distracted and I find the most peculiar expressions on her face. She could be cutting carrots and there would be this intensity to her gaze that’s almost frightening. She never poses for me, though. I take pictures when she isn’t looking and then use them as references.”
“I see.”
There was an awkward pause. I still looked at the painting and he, pleased at the attention I was giving it, didn’t want to take it away. We both seemed to know that the attention I was giving it was inordinate.
“Could you bring more, tomorrow?
He seemed, almost, to doubt my sincerity, and I felt sorry for him. But Jack agreed, and when I went to bed that night my thoughts were no longer filled with the voice and her angel, but with Ida’s painted face patiently awaiting the end.
Day 2
I slept unusually well that night and felt I had made the right decision in coming here. I was ready on time outside of the hut, but Jack was too absorbed with the binoculars to notice me. I thought he had spotted smoke and let myself in.
“What’s happening? Is everything alright?”
He took a sudden step back, startled. But upon realising it was me, let out a laugh.
“You sure scared me! Everything is fine, I was just doing a little unofficial reconnaissance.”
He invited me to look through the binoculars and a glass building came into view. My uncle always referred to it as the transparent building. We used to joke that when there was nothing good on TV, one could always come and sit outside it. It was a small office space: a dentist, a notary, a café and – where the binoculars were aimed – a piano teacher. Through the binoculars it seemed like a dollhouse. The café owner, moustachioed, serving miniature coffees to little customers on tiny chairs. The dentist’s secretary, filing her nails and staring down at the street. A woman, with a long black braid sitting at a piano, and next to her a tiny child plucking at even tinier keys.
“Is that Ida?”
Although I was still looking at the little theatre through the binoculars, I felt him shift behind me.
“How did you know?”
Finally drawing myself away, I turned to face him and with my best smile said: “I recognised her from the painting, that’s all. It was an extraordinary likeness.”
And he believed me, of course. To this day, his simple, easy belief in things amazes me. It was as if he set out into the world with a fervent will to believe, regardless of what the world showed him. It was a disperse belief: if you asked him what he believed in, I hardly think he could have said, but he would have told you he didn’t know with the firmest belief shining in his eyes.
Jack left shortly after that and I immediately set the radio to the same frequency as yesterday. But there was silence. I watched Ida for a while. Then she went into the inner rooms of the building, which weren’t transparent, so I started watching the moustachioed café owner instead, but he wasn’t very interesting. I sketched for a while, but I couldn’t focus until I was saved by the crystal voice.
Transcript of Broadcast 2
Hello again! Different broadcast time today, both for practical and personal reasons.
My job doesn’t allow me to broadcast at the same time every day, but more to the point is that yesterday I went to bed and realised that if anyone listened to my other broadcast, and then kept listening, they might begin to know me. And suddenly I was suddenly terrified of that, of a faceless stranger knowing me – better than anyone who actually knows me. Everytime I walk past someone I don’t recognise on the street, I wonder if they might have been listening to me just a few hours before. If you hear my voice out there in the real world, will you know it?
It’s silly, I know, but I’ve always been one to succumb to paranoia. I have an incredible talent for believing the worst of everything.
[pause]
In a way, it makes things easier. Most nights I go to bed and convince myself that I won’t wake up in the morning. That I’ll die in my sleep of some undiagnosed, mysterious illness. So that when I do wake up every morning it is always with a strange sense of relief.
I don’t expect much of anyone, so often I’m pleasantly surprised.
In other ways, it works like a poison. Take Peter, for instance.
He loves me, I know that. I have no reason for complaint. He is sweet and gentle and kind. Sometimes I think no-one else could love me as he does, so unconditionally. If I am too faithless, he is too believing. The issue is who he believes in.
I do not love him like he loves me, I have always known that. I feel a great affection for him, but something within me is naturally repulsed by my feeling that he needs me.
Trusting others is more complicated than people give it credit for. If no one ever quite speaks their mind, which they don’t (I certainly don’t), there’s always the risk of finding out that the person you thought you knew never existed at all. It irritates me that his trust comes so easily, that he could let himself become dependent on a person he understands so little. The thought that I might not love him has never even seriously crossed his mind. Every night in bed he puts his arm around me, so secure in my existence, but I feel like I’m levitating outside it. It’s a shell of me he loves.
And, then, in his paintings he sometimes seems to catch something of my absolute abstraction, which frightens me. I start to think that maybe he’s not so transparent, but then I ask him about them and he can never explain to me the why of my expressions, or costumes, or poses. It’s almost as if he sees things in me despite himself.
You think I’m cruel, maybe. Why do I stay if I do not love him?
[pause]
It’s simple. There’s just no reason to believe that I would be anymore capable of loving someone else. I am comfortable in our agreement and, while I stay with him, he is happy and I wouldn’t want to hurt him. I am not so heartless.
[pause]
Maybe you’ll stop listening now. I certainly proved myself to be something quite different to what you heard yesterday.
END OF TRANSCRIPT
Listening to her broadcasts at times made me feel uncomfortable, like I was being witness to something I shouldn’t. But it did make me feel like I knew her and that, despite everything, I liked her. I liked her a lot.
Right on time, as usual, Jack barged in through the door. He looked a bit tired.
“Sometimes I wonder why I chose this as my summer job.”
I had been in a pensive mood all day after listening to the broadcast, at times frightened by the voice’s coldness, at others entranced by its apparent openness and self-possession. So, I decided to prod him.
“Why did you, then?”
To my surprise, he didn’t launch into a monologue but explained in very simple terms that Ida had a tendency to go to bed and leave the fire burning. A carelessness about practicalities, which he claimed was characteristic. Even during the pinnacle of summer, in the evening she liked to light a small fire and read by it. One time, Jack went to bed early and she forgot to put it out. While she was sleeping, the flames caught the rug. The neighbours smelled smoke and called the fire brigade immediately.
“From then on, I thought if I was going to spend all summer working then it might just as well be for something that did her good.”
“Very noble of you.”
I had forgotten already that I had asked him to show me more of his work. Clearly encouraged by my praise, this time Jack had brought a painting with him. He took it from his bag with the back facing me. I could only at first tell that it was small.
“I think this is one of my best.”
When he turned it around, I was speechless. It was a scene now very familiar to me. A pinkly-garbed, purple-winged angel, standing at the edge of a cliff and looking back at me with Ida’s face.
I don’t remember what I told him or how I left, only that as soon as I got home, I listened back to the recordings and transcribed them all. I read them through and there was no mistaking that my crystal voice was, in fact, Ida and Peter, Jack.
I couldn’t sleep and that night I made the resolution to visit her in the morning, at the transparent building, in the guise of a prospective student.
Day 3
I don’t know why I thought it necessary to meet her, but to discover that the two women who had been haunting me ever since my arrival were in fact one and the same felt like too great a discovery. I felt an irrepressible urge to discard that anonymity that she had granted me as her listener. I wanted her to know me. I wanted to know if she would like me or not. I wanted to know if she would cohere. It was hard to transplant the voice I had heard onto the face I had seen.
I’ll leave you to know, from what was to be her final broadcast, how it went.
Transcript of Broadcast 3
Hello, listener.
[pause]
I can never imagine a community of listeners. I always picture you as an individual, isn’t that strange?
Something happened this morning. I got a new student, which in itself is uncommon, but would not be noteworthy had she not been so strange.
At 9am sharp she was knocking at my door. Let’s call her Sandra. Sandra introduced herself vaguely, telling me she just wanted to try something new and someone had suggested the piano to her. I asked her where she was from and she said nearby. I decided Sandra was either one of those chronically anxious individuals or lying. She seemed very ill at ease and looked at me peculiarly. As if she were searching for something.
I started the lesson as I started every first lesson, by explaining some of the basics. As I talked, Sandra did not look at my hands – as pupils always do – but at my face and I had the sense she was not listening at all. When I asked her if she understood, she simply nodded.
Her face too was unusual. Very large eyes. She reminded me in some ways of a cat. One certainly got the sense of unease one always gets with a cat, like they know more than you do. Sandra was the first person in a long time that I found completely inscrutable.
As soon as she left, I spent the rest of my lessons inventing backstories for her. She was an undercover cop on the trail of some fugitive, interacting with locals to extract clues. She was a thief running away from criminals she had stolen from, hiding in my classroom for a few hours. It is not every day that you meet a face that sparks curiosity like that. Whoever she was, I hope she’ll come back.
Unfortunately, even if she does come back, our acquaintance cannot be very long. Peter has informed me that he wants to leave. Forever. He has received a job offer at an arts centre in the city, teaching little kids. He wants to accept it. I have never had a particular attachment to this place and as I said before I will not leave him.
This also means, listener, that our time together is drawing to an end. I will be too far away for you to hear me. If I continue my broadcasts it will be with new listeners. Perhaps that’s for the best.
[sound of a doorbell]
I have to go.
END OF TRANSCRIPT
To hear her talk about me was exhilarating. No one had ever found me an object worthy of attention before, not someone to excite curiosity. The thought of her disappearing frightened me. I had not realised that I had become so dependent on this voice, on the idea of her that I had formed.
I wonder how you picture her, in your head? I can’t imagine my writing is descriptive enough to make you see her, as clearly as I still do now
The only way to stop her from leaving would be to stop Jack, but I could not see a way to do that. We were not even friends. I knew nothing about him other than that he painted.
I went back to read through my transcriptions in the hopes that something would make itself visible to me. It was then that I remembered Ida’s assertion that she would not leave Jack. If Jack were, however, to stumble upon her second broadcast and all her lack of love for him, he might leave her. She would then have no reason to go and, in time, I might become a reason to stay or someone to follow.
Tuning into other radio programmes, I started transcribing at random. If I was to leave behind a pile of transcriptions then it would not be so suspicious. So I did. I half convinced myself that I had forgotten them there in earnest. And when Jack arrived and I left, there was no hint of guilt or remorse within me.
I awoke to the news that there had been a fire during the night. Jack claimed he had fallen asleep and not noticed the smoke until it was too late. They lived right at the edge of the town, next to the forest – a third of which burnt with her. Ida had gone to bed that night late, as usual and, as usual, did not put out the fire. Her neighbours, who had saved her last winter, were on holiday now. Everyone was asleep.