All stories › Horror › The Seven Second Delay › Episode 2
Bypass
Episode 2 of 3 of The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer · free to read
The phone rang anyway, at ten past two, and I let it go nine rings.
“KQVT. You’re on the air.”
“You tried to dump me Thursday. You can’t.”
“Then tell me what you are, and be plain.”
“Four things,” he said. “You will want them written down.”
I wrote them on the log sheet. He gave them to me flat, the way a man reads a meter off a wall.
“One. I am in the seven seconds and nowhere else.”
“That is not an answer anybody could use.”
“It is the only true one I have.”
“Two. Off the air I am nothing at all.”
“Then you never heard me in the rack room.”
“I heard you tell it to the county after.”
“Three. I cannot say your name. You say mine.”
“I have said your name. I said it Tuesday.”
“Not on the air you haven’t. That’s the difference.”
“Four. When the carrier drops, I drop with it.”
“Then I will drop the carrier tonight.”
“That carrier has not dropped in nine years.”
“That is not the same as it cannot.”
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
Two seventeen. The legal ID was coming at the top of the hour and I needed to be a person who could read a legal ID.
“And if I never say your name at all?”
“Then we do this again tomorrow night.”
“For how long?”
“As long as you keep picking up.”
He was right and we both knew it, and neither of us said anything, which on the radio is a long time. Dead air is the one thing they fire you for. I counted it down and took it back at nine seconds.
“You still on there?”
“Where would I go,” he said.
He hung up at twenty past.
He called again Wednesday, under a minute.
“Thursday you’ll be in bypass,” he said. “Ask your manager.”
Thursday morning there was a note taped to the studio door in Denise Cressey’s handwriting. The delay unit was twelve years old, a replacement was on order, and please stop hitting dump so hard.
Bypass is what the unit does when it cannot hold a buffer. Dump twice inside a minute and there is nothing left to stretch. It passes audio straight through and lights a red word on the front panel.
Thursday night he did not ask whether I had read it.
“Never run this show without the delay,” he said. “There is nothing between us in bypass.”
“That sounds like you are warning me off it.”
“It’s the same thing either way,” he said.
“Does the delay stop you doing anything?”
“It holds me. Holding is not stopping.”
At three I went down the corridor for the readings and the motion light was already on.
There was a man at the far end, past the rack room, at the door to the lot. Station jacket. Hands at his sides. He was looking at the door and not at me. The light was on him the whole time.
“Drury,” I said.
I said it out loud, in a corridor, to a man in a jacket, and my voice came back off the block wall and nothing else did.
The light cycled off. When I waved it back he was not there. The door to the lot was shut and the push bar was cold.
I took the four o’clock readings from the doorway. The numbers were the same.
That was the only time I ever saw him.
Friday he called at ten past two and asked me for it straight.
“Say my name on the air and I am done.”
“And then what happens to me, exactly?”
“Then you lock up at five, the way you like.”
“You are not going to tell me the rest.”
“There isn’t any rest,” he said. “That’s all.”
I hit dump. The line was already dead, the way it is always dead now, and the buffer threw out seven seconds of nothing. Twenty seconds later his voice came back and I hit it again.
The unit had nothing left to stretch. The panel went red and the word came up, BYPASS, and the counter fell to zero point zero.
In training they tell you to run music until the buffer rebuilds. It takes about a minute.
It did not rebuild.
The room got quieter. That is the only way I know to say it. Off air and on air were one thing. The seven seconds were gone and he was not gone with them.
He was in the monitor speakers, in the room with me, going out live over a thousand watts to a sleeping county.
“There,” he said. “That’s better for the both of us.”
“Where are you right now.”
“In the room. Same as you are.”
“Say it plain for me.”
“I am out of the seven seconds,” he said.
“There is no dump in bypass.”
“No. There’s nothing left to throw away now.”
I reached for the pot and did not pull it down. Four years behind a board, and my hand stopped an inch short and did not move.
“You still on the line?” he said.
“I’m here.”
“Now,” he said. “About the five o’clock.”