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Line Three
Episode 1 of 3 of The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer · free to read
“KQVT, you’re on the air.”
Nobody answered. I took the break.
The overnight is midnight to five, Monday through Friday, and it is mine alone. One room with the console. One corridor. One lot with gravel. After one the calls come from truckers on 169 and from people who cannot sleep.
Line three lit at ten past two.
The phone had not rung yet. The light came up, then the ring, and in between a man cleared his throat in my headphones.
I monitor off air, which is seven seconds behind the room, because of the delay unit in the rack. That box lets you dump a caller before the transmitter sees him. My ears get me from seven seconds ago.
I had not cleared my throat.
“KQVT, you’re on the air.”
“Evening. Is this the whole show, just you?”
“Just me and the board. Who am I talking to?”
“Ellis. Ellis Abernathy. You’re new since I listened.”
“Four years is not that new around here.”
“Four years is nothing out here,” he said.
“You ran something at one I had not heard in years.”
“The one o’clock hour is mostly requests.”
He talked slow, leaving room in it.
“How long do they keep you in that room?”
“Midnight to five, Monday through Friday, every week.”
“That’s the long one. Nobody rides it with you?”
“Nobody has ridden it with me since I started.”
“Who takes it off your hands at the end?”
“The automation does. I lock up and go home.”
He was quiet long enough that I checked the meter.
“That is not the same as being relieved,” he said.
“It’s close enough for a town this size.”
“No,” he said. “It really isn’t the same.”
He hung up at fourteen past.
At the top of the hour I walked the corridor to the rack room and read the transmitter.
Plate voltage, plate current, power out. You write them on the log sheet and initial it every hour, and nobody ever reads it. The room is loud in a way that stops being loud after a month. I took the numbers down and reached behind the rack for the delay unit, because the red LED had been half lit all week.
A screw head opened my knuckle. Not much. I finished one handed, and there was a smear on the log where my thumb went.
The old sheets live in a banker’s box under the bench. I opened it because I was standing there bleeding.
The handwriting in the eight year old sheets was small and slanted. H. Drury. He had the overnight before the station went to automation. His readings were neat. In the margin of a Tuesday he had written 2:10, L3, and nothing after it.
I went back three weeks. 2:10, L3. Every sheet.
The last one in the box was a Friday. He had taken the four o’clock readings and initialed them. The five o’clock line was blank. Under it, in the margin, he had started a word and stopped after two letters.
I put the lid back on the box.
The corridor light is on a motion sensor and had gone off while I was in there. I waved my arm in the doorway until it came back on.
Then I went up and did the two thirty break.
“I have opened my knuckle on a screw back there,” I said, on the air, to the county.
At two thirty you say what is in front of you.
“KQVT, you’re on the air.”
“Evening. You told the county about your hand.”
Line three had lit before the ring again. My hand was on the dump button before I knew I had moved it.
“Who is this, please.”
“Ellis. We talked Tuesday.”
“You listen to every break I do?”
“I do not listen,” he said. “I am in them.”
“Say that part again for me.”
“I am in the breaks. Between you and the tower.”
“What do you want this late, Ellis?”
“Same as anybody. Somebody on the other end.”
“Most people want a song.”
“I have had forty years of songs.”
I hit dump.
The dump button does one thing. It throws out the seven seconds in the buffer and gives the transmitter music instead. Nobody at home hears anything but a seam. I have used it six times in four years.
The line went dead. The hybrid screen said no line in use. Line three was dark.
In my headphones, off air, seven seconds behind the room, Ellis Abernathy finished his sentence.
“...somebody on the other end,” he said. “That is all.”
The music came up under him the way it is supposed to, and anybody awake in Calder Junction heard him say it and then a song.
I did not touch anything for a minute. I watched the modulation meter move.
Then I pulled the call log off the hybrid. It keeps every number with the in and out times. Tuesday at 2:10, nothing. Thursday at 2:10, nothing. Four calls logged all week and not one of them was his.
The delay is a bucket. You cannot pour out what was never poured in.
He had never been on the phone.