The Frequency

Every night at the listening station, Tomas tuned through the static for a voice that had stopped speaking eleven years ago.

The station sat on a headland at the edge of the country, a squat concrete building the government had built to monitor shipping and then, in a fit of austerity, forgotten. Officially Tomas logged maritime traffic and weather bulletins. Unofficially, in the dead hours after midnight, he turned the great dials past the assigned frequencies and into the no-man's-land of the open band, where amateur signals drifted and died, and he listened.

He was looking for his daughter. Not literally — he was not a fool, and he knew Lena was eleven years dead, drowned off a coast much like this one during a crossing she had never told him she was making. But she had been a radio enthusiast as a girl, the two of them hunched together over a kit set, and somewhere in the recesses of his grief he had convinced himself that voices, once broadcast, never fully vanish — that they merely thinned, scattered, bled into the noise, and could, with sufficient patience, be gathered back.

This was, he understood, a form of madness. He had made his peace with that. As madness went, it was a quiet and well-behaved sort, harming no one, costing the state nothing but the electricity it had already written off.

The static had its own weather. Some nights it hissed flat and indifferent; on others it seethed and crackled with distant storms, and once, during an aurora, it sang — a high shimmering tone that rose and fell like breathing. On those nights Tomas leaned close, certain that if a voice were ever to surface, it would be then, carried in on the same strange tide that lit the sky.

He kept a notebook. In it he recorded times, frequencies, and the fragments he caught: a Portuguese fisherman cursing his engine; a woman in what might have been Estonian reciting numbers in a voice drained of all expression; a man, somewhere, who played the same four bars of a folk tune every Tuesday and never finished it. Tomas had come to think of these strangers as his congregation — the only people awake at his hour, all of them, he imagined, listening for something too.

Then, on a still night in the dead of winter, he heard it.

A girl's voice, young, speaking his language, breaking through the band on a frequency no licensed station used. "—anybody there? This is —, calling anybody. Over." The signal wavered, swallowing the name. Tomas's hand went to the transmit key and stopped, trembling, an inch above it.

For eleven years he had wanted exactly this and never once considered what he would say. He sat frozen while the voice called again, fainter now, drifting off the frequency as conditions shifted. He understood, with a clarity that pierced the fog of his hope, that it was not Lena. It could not be. It was some living girl with a cheap transmitter, calling into the dark for the simple thrill of being answered.

And that, he realised, was the thing he had got wrong all these years. He had been listening for the dead. But the band was full of the living — lonely, transmitting, hoping to be heard. His daughter had crossed a sea at night because she, too, had been calling out, and the one frequency she had never tried was the one that ran straight to her father's door. He had been so busy preparing to receive her that it had never occurred to him she might have been waiting for him to send.

He pressed the key.

"This is the listening station on the headland," he said, and his voice, unused for hours, came out rough. "I hear you. You're not calling into nothing. There's a man here, and he hears you. Over."

The reply, when it came, was delighted and ordinary — a teenager agog that the thing actually worked, asking where he was, whether he could hear her music if she held the radio to her speakers. Tomas laughed, a sound that surprised him, and said yes, play it, let's hear it.

He did not tune past the assigned frequencies again after that. There seemed little point. He had spent eleven years convinced that the dead were trying to reach him through the noise, and it turned out the noise had only ever been full of the living, clamouring(# "calling loudly and insistently") to be let in. So he answered them. One by one, night after night, he answered them all — which was, he came to think, the nearest thing to forgiveness a man in his position could expect to be granted, and far more than he had ever thought to ask.