by G. C. WALDREP
It is approaching the hour when individual letters of the alphabet begin broadcasting directly through the waves of light shed like so much hair from the pelts of stars. The sound is staticky, indistinct, a blur of Roman and Cyrillic, Malayalam and ancient Greek. Even after the men and women and cultures and nations that invented and read them die back into the mud and glaciers the letters of each alphabet continue broadcasting, as if each were a spy in a long-ended war, barricaded somewhere, tapping out its semaphore of defiant intelligence. Phoenician, Coptic, Korean, all blending together the way the bands of radiation we see as color blend to form white light at the threshold of hearing. I tune my radio at night to the lowest frequencies, hoping to distinguish the broadcasts, the pure, crisp frequency of K, say, as opposed to the hiss of X, the hollow boom of Ω. Each letter is broadcasting its story, its only story. In one a boy born with six fingers on each hand sacrifices his sister to prevent the destruction of his village. In another, enormous self-aware computers decode the genome of a common fungus to discover a cure for sleep. I find it difficult to keep the stories straight, even when my mathematics is correct. Gupta, Batak, Japanese; unpronounceable glyphs. The problem is not so much that the stars keep shifting position in their vast grazing herds as that the darkness in between them resembles velvet stage curtains that will never part. Somewhere there must exist a script in which to record, perfectly, what the alphabets are saying. I punch holes in a clean sheet of paper and shine a flashlight through. Shine a flashlight through, whispers the atomic clock, the iron, the transistor radio, in Akkadian, in Hebrew. The constellations abandon all pretense and walk out of their roles, moving forward like the lakes they are, vast and silent and inhuman, reservoirs in which children have drowned. Murderer, they murmur. I feel their bitter cold even as I brush the dial. Their war is over. They’re going home. |
