Dusk found Gregory sitting still in his office, whose door was but two steps from the kitchen. A slatted, burnished light filtered onto his desk through the closed blinds of two flanking windows. The room was all but empty, though it had recently housed an installation of modules and components, all of which had been integrated to facilitate the functions of a powerful HAM radio.
A few weeks earlier, during the first break in the concluding summer’s oppressive heat, Gregory had been on-air, cruising frequencies in search of a worthy interlocuter. The pods on the trees outside had only just erupted, and the lukies, ferried around on the livid backs of the Chicago gales, had been sucked high into the atmosphere. They had acted as a sort of diffractory chaff, disturbing the natural, all-pervading flow of the city’s electromagnetic fields. As an immediate consequence, Gregory Deinde (or W4TKI, as he was known in the HAM world) failed to discern even the faintest intimation of human speech in his headphones.
But, then again, he had heard something. This was not the static hiss of dead air, but rather a high-pitched whine, machinic and nearly musical. Gregory had sat there, hunched over his console for some several hours as he dialed through the frequency spectrum.
Each wavelength possessed its own peculiar timbre: toward the bottom end, the noise was blunt and guttural; further up the dial, a jubilant note bassed with the reverberations of a million-man barbershop choir; somewhere in the middle frequencies, Gregory encountered a sudden and violent glottal snapping, followed by a couple hundred hertz filled with absolute silence; in the buttery mid-high zone, the hydraulic whine was at its shrillest, at certain sweet spots producing the deft simulacrum of a pig’s squeal at the moment when it feels the cold steel bore of the butcher’s pop-gun leave an impression in its ruddy skin, just above the frontal skull plate; and at the highest extremities, the drone tapered down into a pastoral buzzing: an aural realm of infinite flies – ZZ-ZZ-ZZ.
As the hours passed, Gregory had begun to describe the quality of these evolving tones in his radio operator’s diary. By late that evening, he had filled nearly fifty pages in his dense, minute script. While economy of space precludes me from sharing the entire contents of his observations (and though it greatly pains me to exclude them, for they were piercing revelations which may never see the light of day), I reproduce below for the reader a selection of salient excerpts:
“(01:27:35) – I’ve been listening to this signal for a small age. Initially, it was raucous and seemed to be damaging my hearing, but now it sounds almost harmonious. I am currently stopped around 330 MHz, where the tone appears to have taken on a sinusoid dullness. After having listened to this for twenty minutes, I feel that it is goading me. I feel utterly unbeholden, now, to the regulations of that great, yet irrelevant giant of conventional human communications – the FCC. That may just be the result of this total radio isolation. But every aspect of these new, insulated signals, which I presume to be the product of electromagnetic radiation rebounding off of the flurrying fuzz outside and back onto my antenna, alludes to something more than a mere disturbance pattern […].”
“(2:25:33) – I went ahead and fired up my old oscilloscope, thinking I might be able to glean a definite visual pattern. There was a pattern there, indeed – but unlike anything I ever expected to see printed in green light across my humble grid. Some sort of sine wave motion is definitely involved, but the wave is oscillating at so rapid a frequency that it is phasing across the screen in a wide, solid band, through which only the most occasional darkness seems to appear. I am almost seeing shapes in this image. Things seemingly impossible, even for the most contrived arrangement of modulations, set into motion at the hands of a hermetic hobbyist. No, this is something like a hologram. A bas-relief chiseled into the side of some gigantic megalith. Just now, I am looking at what could be an extremely weathered hand, pointing at something, or signaling some definite direction […].”
“(05:03:31) – Just a moment ago, I looked up from the stack on my desk to rest my eyes, and I looked out the window. I couldn’t see the usual street with its line of parked cars and its walls of brick. It was like opening the door to a room where a fatal pillow fight has just ended. Just like the blinding green strip of light on my oscilloscope, my window was a rectangle of off-white, with only the occasional aperture opening in the blustering blankness to afford me a glimpse of something: the corroded metal hood of a streetlamp? One of those ceramic dowels around which powerlines are spooled? I couldn’t say for sure, and my words would be doubtful even if I could. Because, in this new context of the visible, the street furniture has been assigned a new identity and purpose. It’s all a part of a deliberate communication. I see that now […].”
“(06:23:32) – All plausible deniability has evaporated. They’re not just some excrescence of nature. They have a name. I discovered this by scrubbing quickly through the dial. Each notable alteration of sound that comes with the various frequency ranges is clearly delineated from the others. At the right speed, I began to hear a voice, almost human yet profoundly not, stringing together the following phonemes: L – U – K – I – E – S. This is what they are, what they are called: Lukies […].”
“(10:01:10) – And just like that, the lukies have fallen out of the sky. Now they are bunched up in the wheel wells of cars, nesting in the upper crooks of trees where the limbs diverge from the trunk. They are whipping around in dumb vortices after the sucking acceleration of a passing car. And, needless to say, the signal is gone. Now the chatter of the world has returned. The first person I heard on the radio was going on in a drawling Esperanto. I could not tolerate it for long. I felt compelled to switch off the power strip under my desk. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve had my fill of HAM. Perhaps this is W4TKI’s final sign-off […].”
And, indeed, Gregory had had his fill. So oppressed was his gorge with this now superfluous burthen of human interaction that, even after having sat for over ten hours to probe the aural tissue of the lukies’ communiqué, he labored yet three more hours in stripping his office bare of the radio and its attendant paraphernalia. He had hefted these clattering aluminum modules into the hallway by his front door, dropping them carelessly into partially collapsed cardboard boxes, which quickly flared up with a patina of mold and liquid rot, due to the irreducible humidity issuing from the doorway of the bathroom nearby.
The bathroom was the one area in his apartment which Gregory had perpetually avoided since that day. he had taken to urinating in the kitchen sink. Defecation had become a much more delicate consideration. Eventually, he settled into a regime of controlled dehydration, drinking just enough water to eject his post-peristaltic waste, while ensuring that the fecal excrescence would emerge each time in a rigid, compact oblong. These latter he deposited into the remaining surplus of cardboard boxes that had colonized his apartment. A given box, designated for this purpose, would be positioned in a crumb-strewn corner of his kitchen under the breakfast table until Gregory had filled it to the brim.
The aridity of the decomposing feces, I imagine, was meant to counteract its inevitable stench.
Meanwhile, the bathroom had changed both in form and function as the lukies filtered in from the street. Given their singular moisture-wicking properties, they gravitated to this epicenter of apartmental humidity, crowding around the faucets of the sink and bathtub, coagulating into permanent fiberglass plugs over the respective drains. The toilet lid had mechanically risen to a vertical position as a quivering tower of lukies accumulated and crystalized; the toilet tank had developed a lacework of hairline fractures, from which miniscule ridges of oozing, transparent teeth had begun to protrude.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, this growing accretion around the various water sources in the bathroom only seemed to draw more moisture into the air. It was as though the lukies acted as a sort of nebulizer for water molecules, projecting them up into the heights of the small room, where they condensed into cloudy strata and began to billow out into the hallway.
After several weeks, Gregory had grown accustomed to the new variables of his home. Now he spent his idle moments in his vacant office – the driest room available to him. At the current moment, he sat erect before his battered desk of faux-oak, the veneer surface of which had begun to bow upward, separating from the grizzled particle board beneath. Even here, the occasional lukie hung suspended in the air, minutely revolving in the molasses glower of sundown.
These last weak solar beams painted a tawny grid of parallel lines across Gregory’s face. Around his nostrils, two fanged coronas of pneumatized lukie sparkled and deliquesced.
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