Radio (Archive)

I don't sleep. That's almost not an exaggeration. I average around two hours a night on a good night. That's two hours of deep sleep, REM sleep. The kind that your body uses to fix itself. It's been getting worse for a while, but it'll go away eventually. It always has before. I just have to ride it out. Keep my strings from unraveling until I can get myself glued back together.

They say it's better for you to lie in bed the hours that you'd be asleep and just pretend to sleep, because it helps get the body's natural circadian rhythm back. So every night I lie in bed for eight hours, and I spend six of them watching the man on the top of the radio tower.

There is a window above my bed, and when I'm sleeping in it I have to sit up to see out of it. I like to be aware of my surroundings, so I installed a mirror on the opposite wall to allow me to see out of it. I have blackout curtains to ensure that my "sleep" is as genuine as possible, but some nights I like to leave them open so I can watch the sky.

Down the road from me is a radio tower. It's the largest thing on the horizon, and at the top is a little maintenance balcony. The tower is close enough for me to see this balcony clearly. On this particular night, the blinds were cracked so that I could watch a storm approaching in the mirror, safe in bed. Heat lightning started to strobe across the sky, and it illuminated something moving on top of the radio tower.

I sat up in bed and looked out the window. On the top of the tower, on the little balcony, I could see the very small shape of a man waving something. He was moving his arms in strange, rhythmic jerking patterns, facing toward the storm. I had never seen anyone on the tower before, and I couldn't think of a single reason that this man would have been there at midnight while a storm was coming. I called the police and they sent someone out, but at some point the man left. I don't know how I missed him. He didn't come back the next night, or for weeks afterward. I thought about him a lot though, and I kept watch every night for him. Something about it bothered me deeply and I thought of his strange jerking arms, the things he'd been holding. I wasn't sleeping anyway so I invested in a pair of binoculars and I kept a vigil for him, every single night.

I didn't see him come up the tower but he was there as soon as it got dark. I'd already gotten my two hours of sleep and now I was awake and ready. I grabbed the binoculars and brought him into focus.

He was an older white man in a casual jacket. He reminded me of every single cubicle worker I'd ever seen. Nothing about him was remarkable except the cloth he was waving, which was an almost stunningly bright white. He stared vacantly out at the skyline and moved his arms in those odd, sharp movements. His mouth hung open and even from here I could see he hadn't shaved in some time. He blinked occasionally but most of the time he just stared, mouth open, looking at nothing.

Even though I was watching him the whole time I didn't see him leave.

He went away again for almost two years. The insomnia faded and I slept very soundly without the mirror, which I had thrown out not long after the last sighting. I wasn't afraid of seeing him again. I threw it out because I couldn't stop myself from waiting for him. I could not get the man out of my thoughts. I did research into the company that owned the tower and I knew, with concrete certainty, that the man did not belong to anyone in the city. He was not employed with any government agency or department.

So what was he doing on the radio tower?

My suspicions about him began to grow. I researched nearby airports and he didn't belong to them, or at least no one who looked like he did that night. But I felt certain that somewhere, someone would know him.

I found his family in Topeka. The address on the missing persons report was still current. He had a wife and four children and was loving and loved deeply. He had vanished on the way to his car one morning and hadn't been seen since.

The night he came back, I was reading, pretending that I was choosing to stay up, and I saw the orange flag out of the corner of my eye.

He was back, illuminated on the radio tower by the light of the moon. His orange flags stood out like beacons and I grabbed my binoculars, my other hand gripping a pen.

I waited until he reached the end of the message and started over again.

He raised his arms as if to signal ten on a clock. I wrote down the letter 'T'.

He held his right arm straight out to the side and the left crossed over to hip level. I wrote it down.

Left at knee level, right raised above the shoulder. Five till three. Arms out at the sides. Hands at knee and shoulder again. I wrote them all down.

When he started over, I read the message.

They're coming back again.