Radio Free Alice
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 07, Number 2, January 1997 |
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Paul Andrew Smith
Cary, Illinois
fedmunds@aol.com
Let the priest in surplice white,
that defunctive music can,
be the death-divining swan,
lest the requiem lack his right.–William Shakespeare
Radio Free Alice wheels in, nurse in tow, logs-in early– 11:35 pm–I’m on till midnight.
Relief, I confess.
AITOR, types Radio Free Alice, MY FRIEND, GIVE ME SOME GOOD NEWS.
I shrug. You’re early. Nothing to do?
Radio Free Alice shrugs as well as can be expected. The chair shrugs. The entire unit, jockey and machine and nurse, move together. A single, sanitary unit.
What time did you log? I ask then.
MIDNIGHT. I LEFT A SPACE FOR YOU TO LOG-OUT
Did you check the plates on your way in?
DID YOU?
I don’t answer.
I WROTE DOWN THE SAME NUMBERS YOU HAD.
I nod, confess again: I put in what Cam had for her show. I don’t reckon anybody’s actually checked the plates or filaments for years.
DAYS ANYWAY, says Radio Free Alice. THE FCC EVER COMES IN HERE, THEY’LL MARVEL AT OUR CONSISTENCY.
Possible we haven’t even been transmitting.
POSSIBLE, agrees Radio Free Alice without seeming to care one way or the other. The whoosh of the vacuum pumps is marvelously quiet and magical; some frothy liquid slips through a clear tube winding across Radio Free Alic e’s shoulder and collarbone.
The wheelchair, enameled white with chrome, a Cadillac really, glows under the red on-air light. A silver shaker and gunmetal Zippo glint blisteringly from the right armrest. The cursor blinks green on the empty screen, waiting for the driver’s nex t command. Radio Free Alice types slowly, moving only the middle finger on the left hand, the nurse in bleached whites shifts from one foot to the other, the chair pauses tense, ready to vocalize the ponderings of this degenerating physicist cum disk jock ey.
At eleven forty-five I give station ID and read a Public Service Announcement about the early detection of skin cancer. I throw on a Scorpions’ tune and talk into the boom-mike: You won’t need be lonesome, Lizzy my love, when your beau gets his glut of cold meat and hot soldiering; one last night, Liz my love, to take your beau out, to the warm steamy streets where the music is smoldering.
I time it just right and, as soon as I stop speaking, The Zoo pounds through the monitors. Radio Free Alice rocks in quiet laughter, the chair rocks. SICK BOY. STILL, YOU GOT PAST ORIGINAL SIN.
And redemption, I say, I have arrived.
WE HAVE ARRIVED, types Radio Free Alice, WE’RE ALL LIFERS HERE. Yes, the nurse, the chair, the corpus delicti. TIME FOR YOU TO LEAVE. THE AIRWAVES ARE NO PLACE FOR SUCH SUBVERSION. Radio Free Alice attempts a smile.
Subversion. Radio Free Alice is subversion, the hero we all want to turn to: the one who proclaims: if you don’t like the way I do it, don’t come to the show.
SOMEONE’S TRYING TO CALL, says Radio Free Alice indicating the flashing light on the studio phone.
I know. It goes all night, but I never answer it.
POLITICS? queries the throned.
Not politics, I say, I just–you know.
PHYSICS. A flat statement.
I guess.
Radio Free Alice nods. POLITICS.
The phone keeps flashing.
DO YOU KNOW WHO IT IS? asks Radio Free Alice.
I shake my head. This phone thing bothers Radio Free Alice. I’d never have guessed.
Answer it if you want, I say.
IT ISN’T FOR ME, NOBODY KNOWS I’M HERE YET.
Fuckit then.
Radio Free Alice types quickly, but the machine speaks these three words with great pause: MIGHT BE ALICE.
I shake my head.
I SEE HER AROUND THOUGH.
Me too, I say.
The nurse lights a cigarette, leaves a long scorch mark on the NO SMOKING sign with an Ohio Bluetip–the Zippo must be for show–and puts it in the Rabbi’s mouth. Radio Free Alice offers me a cigarette. I decline. A DRINK THEN? The nurse unscrews the cap from the silver shaker, drops in two straws. Radio Free Alice takes a deep sip off one.
Whatcha got there?
MARTINIS.
How do you get the olive out?
The nurse laughs, the chair does not. Not even a whir.
A LITTLE TREAT I CALL AN YVES KLEIN: STAINS YOUR KIDNEYS, MAKE YOU PISS BLUE FOR ABOUT A WEEK. Pause. IT BREAKS, YOU KNOW, THE MONOTONY–
I’ll pass.
GO NOW, types Radio Free Alice, I‘LL RE-SHELVE THE RECORDS FOR YOU.
I’m half-out the door when Radio Free Alice says to wait. THERE WAS SOMETHING I WANTED TO TELL YOU, SOMETHING IN THE NEWS–WELL, SHIT, IT’S GONE NOW. SEE YOU.
Ahlan wa sahlan, the bird of loudest lay, says Giacomo Josu, as I walk into The Cinder at 11:55. He points one dark finger at me and one at the sky. You’re on the air, but I’m looking at your ugly face.
He thinks that if he weren’t ugly, says Alice, He’d be on t.v.
It’s true, it’s true. I’m certain of it.
A small radio sits on the table between Josu, Cam and Alice. My voice introduces the last song of my every evening: She’s a Blue Light.
What took you so long, Cam asks–I sit and order a coffee, You signing new boots and panties in the parking lot again?
Sex and drugs and rock and roll, I say, making the peace sign, the figs, Churchill’s V for Victory.
The song ends, and my voice closes the show: this has been another edition of blue music for blue balls–
You’ve got no taste at all, Alice speaks.
Tell me again, I say to Cam, do you say panty or panny?
Neither, she explains, but I call bras brawls.
Sounds like you’re looking for a fight, I say.
And Giacomo asks: So, could a woman have a set of brass brawls?
I’ll give you a panny for your thoughts, Cam looks at me.
Ooh, says Josu, I’ve never played strip-coffee before.
I’m very self-aware now, so I ask: Do I really only have one thing on my mind at all times?
Alice nods. Hotbodies, she says.
Cam comes to my defense: You did skip over the dirty words when you read the Penthouse letters. Then she adds: I filled them in for you.
Radio Free Alice locks on, live and vibrating, giving the time, station ID and a PSA about helping senior citizens get into stamp collecting.
Why listen at all? I ask.
There’s nothing else on any of the stations, says Alice as if I should know.
Get sick of classic rock? I ask.
The war, says Josu, we got sick of the war.
My second favorite sound I had built myself when I was still too young and frail to scrape the car window. It wasn’t baba or mama or dada or doodoo–though all fine words in themselves–but the voice of Ray Nordstrand on WFMT. I had constructed it, th e voice, with a crystal radio–a kit that arrived among the subscription of other bi-weekly science vignettes intended to turn me into a prodigy. It might have worked if only I’d been able to decipher the instructions to most of the projects: a pendulum, a slide rule, a pedometer. Only the crystal radio made sense to me in both construction and function.
Far from becoming a genius, I built a tent on my bed, and imagined myself dug in, waiting for reinforcements, listening to the radio till I fell asleep.
Actually, I’d listened to and recognized Nordstrand’s voice long before I knew the difference between Foucault’s pendulum and a crystal radio, but the completion of that project and the autonomy it gave me from The Family Radio, seemed
HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, says Radio Free Alice, THIS IS RADIO FREE ALICE, THE SHOW OF CHOICE IN BUDAPEST, BERLIN AND PRAGUE. AND TONIGHT ESPECIALLY IN BEAUTIFUL DOWNTOWN BAGHDAD. HERE AT RADIO FR EE ALICE EVERY DAY IS A HOLIDAY. UP HERE IN THE STATION WITH ME TONIGHT IS A LADY WITH A LITTLE PEACE OFFERING: A BIT OF STRANGE FRUIT.
Her voice admits the air gently and condenses, falls to the ground like mist, and I see them swinging in the trees, picked at by the treble-dated crow whose sable gender mak’st with the breath he giv’st and tak’st, teasing gravity like a r ipe
It is 12:20 in Chicago a Wednesday three weeks after Christmas when Alice left me, yes it is 1991 and I sit and drink coffee. Because I am tired and haven’t eaten dinner, because I always want other people to feed me, I drink only coffee.
It is 12:20 in Chicago. Wednesday. 17 January 1991. We have begun bombing the cradle of humanity, the origin of art, the seat of song and religion. Somebody at the next table says sand-nigger, and Giacomo Josu, our sole Arabian tree, tenses his Persian m antle of sarcomere and sweat, and I know immediately and briefly, how Radio Free Alice’s mind works: Beauty, truth and rarity, grace in all simplicity, here enclosed in cinders lie.
TODAY, says Radio Free Alice, THE ROBOTS GO TO WAR IN OUR PLACE. Leaving no posterity IF IT WAS THE FALL OF AN APPLE THAT OCCASIONED NEWTON’S AWARENESS OF GRAVITY AS H E SAT AGAINST A POPULAR TREE, THEN IT WAS TURING’S APPLE THAT FELL.
My favorite sound this night could be the Feyn’d idiocy of the Village Crier
My favorite sound tonight might be the drop of a ripe apple into a dewy field, the sound of that cyanic fruit rolling into the lap of a crumpling lab coat
My favorite sound tonight: formica and nickel.
It will remind me of the stirring of a dying fire or the echoing crunch of re-frozen snow–that feeling that someone is walking behind and in step with you–and it won’t take a genius to understand, but I will not understand. I do not understand, but want to take the flat and round metallic tasting onto the tip of my tongue and press it between these fingerprint lips.
AITOR, LISTEN: YOU KNOW THAT YOU DON’T REALLY FALL IN LOVE UNLESS YOU’RE SEVENTEEN.
Is that on the radio? Nobody else at the table seems to hear it.
Is ignorance bliss, Josu’s sing-song voice made his abuse tolerable, or is it an envious sneaping frost that bites the first-born infants of the spring? We started bombing around five or so.
I’ve been inside all day, I say.
A radio station, contests Josu.
You’re supposed to flip to the news every once in a while, berates Alice, if only to get the sports’ scores. It’s frigging procedure.
Forget it, Cam assures me, then to Alice: When’s the last time you actually logged-in legally, went to the transmitter, checked the plates and filaments against the FCC regs?
Josu stands, puts on his jacket.
Alice stands. Which direction are you heading?
Josu sort of points, open handed, an indication that the night is–mada yoi no kuchi da zo–what–young? That he is, perhaps, only certain about standing and putting on his jacket. I can’t tell. Alice, however, can: Great, she says, I’m headi ng that way too.
Josu nods and looks at me as if–and I don’t–but I act like I understand. He seems relieved somehow. Quieres la radio, pendejo? he smiles.
When we were living in Spain, Josu and I made up stories to tell each other and keep expanding our creative vocabularies. It was too easy to fall into a rut of mimicry when ordering food or asking for directions. Josu told this story about a man who fe ll in love with a voice on the radio and let it control his life until, one day, he turned into a radio. Quieres la radio, pendejo, is a line from this story.
Radio Free Alice pops an olive from a jar by the door, sips blue martini, smokes blue smoke. A sign above the control console says: ON AIR. A red light flashes, its photons always carrying 3.3 * 10-12 erg of energy. Light waves are simple r than water waves because they travel at one speed (c, or 3 * 1010 cm/s), whereas, in water, waves of a long wavelength travel faster than waves of a short wavelength. The radio wave is an electromagnetic wave propagated through the atmosphere with the speed of light and having a wavelength of something from .5 cm to 30,000 m., depending on what station you listen to.
Hotbodies, Alice had said.
It’s true, I think again. The only thing on my mind: fleeing in eternal flame
THE CONCEPT OF SCIENTIFIC DETERMINISM HAD TO BE ABANDONED WHEN LORD RAYLEIGH AND SIR JAMES JEANS SUGGESTED THAT A HOT BODY MUST RADIATE ENERGY AT AN INFINITE RATE. THAT IS, A HOT BODY SHOULD RADIATE THE SAME AMOUNT OF ENERGY IN WAVE S AT FREQUENCIES BETWEEN ONE AND TWO MILLION MILLION WAVES PER SECOND AS IN THOSE WITH FREQUENCIES FROM TWO TO THREE MILLION MILLION WAVES PER SECOND. IF THE NUMBER OF WAVES PER SECOND IS UNLIMITED, THEN THE TOTAL ENERGY OUTPUT IS INFINITE. WHICH IS INS ANE.
Radio Free Alice watches the light filter through the smoke and wonders: waves or particles?
IN 1900, MAX PLANCK SAID THAT LIGHT COULD ONLY BE EMITTED IN PACKETS CALLED QUANTA. EACH QUANTUM HAD AN AMOUNT OF ENERGY THAT INCREASED WITH THE FREQUENCY OF THE WAVES. AT A HIGH ENOUGH FREQUENCY, THEN, THE EMISSION OF A SI NGLE QUANTUM REQUIRES MORE ENERGY THAN IS AVAILABLE–THE RADIATION AT HIGH FREQUENCIES IS REMARKABLY REDUCED MAKING THE RATE OF ENERGY LOSS FINITE.
I nod to Josu. I expect him to put his sandal on his head.
He walks out with Alice, leaving the radio.
You poor guy, says Cam in mock-pity. She stretches one leg out from under the table: good lord, she’s wearing red velvet pants. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Alice is, I throw up my hands, I don’t know what to tell you.
Maybe you should be drinking something stronger than coffee, she says.
I never noticed it before, Cam speaks after a silence above the background music, how you look, I mean.
Ugly? I ask.
Just ugly enough. Strange, she explains, not good enough to be sinister. Bitter?
My my. Maybe we should talk about your face instead, I tell her.
She entirely agrees: We should.
It’s a nice face, I begin.
I know what it is, she declares, it’s unfinished. That’s why I can’t figure it out–your face isn’t finished yet.
I thought we were talking about your face, I say.
We are. It’s different than mine–non-elastic.
I always wanted to be granite-jawed.
You aren’t.
What am I?
Good looking enough to be on the radio.
It occurs to me now, my new favorite sound, as she slides a subway token across the table to me.
I don’t take the subway to get home, I tell her.
I do, she says.
Just ugly enough, then.
She nods and says this: If only your fantasy life were as good as what’s happening to you right now, you could stay home more often.
And I wish I had said that.
What are you trying to say? I wanted to ask.
I wanted her to respond: I’m saying it.
If Gertrude Stein was a child of the Civil War then I, at twenty-three, am a child of Desert Storm.
And I know finally how people remember where they were during a horrible event.
I lean across the table and kiss her with my unfinished lips. She pulls away.
Don’t, she says. I’m not sure yet what I want from you.
It occurs to me now, all the stuff I’ll never understand: If only I’d built the pendulum.
How’s that? I ask.
She continues: Let’s just take this slow and see what happens.
I borrow two dollars from Cam and pay for our coffee, then I take the subway with Cam and her tokens.
Imagine this story in the way we learn war–some true literary sense of time, event causal, event effect, outcome: then it might be legitimate to expect that I spent the night on Cam’s couch; however, it’s important to remember the rules of Radio Free Alice. On the air: no spit-takes, no double-takes, this phoenix explodes and births–il y a là cendre–distilled from physical convention–il y a le centre.
When we lived in Spain, Josu and I would swim out on red flag days when even the lifeguards went home. We liked the constancy of the waves and riptides working against us.
When we lost sight of each other, we’d measure the distance by shouting, listening impossibly for the Doppler effect.
In another week I will be at Cam’s apartment again. Expecting to love as love in twain has the essence but in one; two distincts, division none.
We will order a pizza pie and, when the boy rings the bell, Cam will hand me a twenty. I will meet pizza boy in the lobby and he will say: I can’t change this. Give it to me and I’ll come back with your money in fifteen minutes.
Of course, I will say, tearing the bill in half, handing him half.
His face will fall. Nobody will take this, he’ll say.
I’ll agree. You’ll get the other half when I get my change.
Cam and I will not make love. We will speak again only twice more after that evening.
Radio Free Alice thrashes red flag air waves. Scratches back of hands, thinks: I am going blind, everything seems so far away. Radio Free Alice squints into the white desk-lamp and the computer screen becomes unreadable for about thirty seconds. The n type type type
THE FREQUENCY OF THE WAVES RECEIVED ARE THE SAME AS THEIR FREQUENCY WHEN EMITTED. UNLESS THE LIGHT SOURCE MOVES. IF IT MOVES CLOSER, THE SPECTRA SHIFT TOWARD THE BLUE END, FURTHER AWAY, RED-SHIFTED.
Cam turns the television on and we watch the war. My family couldn’t afford a TV during Viet Nam, so this is my first time–save for news clips. She turns the sound down and flips on Radio Free Alice: it’s incredibly sexy, I’m embarrassed to say, th is do-it-ourselves extended rock video.
We do not mate head-on, Cam and I, but choose instead to live hand to mouth–like eating dates and pomegranates and saffron. We press lips. An attentive audience, she responds to my voice unspoken as if that canal really were an ear pricking up at m y dense vibrations from beyond Radio Free Alice and the war. Aural sex.
WE MEASURED THE SILENCE, types Radio Free Alice, the background a click click click, IN MOTHER OF PEARL, SLIPPING SOFT AND FAT FROM THE SHELL AND DOWN THE HATCH WITH HORSERADISH, BEER, HANK JR. ON THE JUKE BOX–TEN TUNES FOR A DOLLAR–AND THE SEXUAL DYNAMICS WAFTED OVER THE OLD URINE SMELL OF A DISCOMFORTING QUESTION, KEPT ME FROM ASKING IT, KEPT ME FROM VOCALIZING THIS LAST SONG ABOUT LOVE AND OYSTERS. WE ALL NOTICED ABOUT THE SAME TIME, ALL OUR STA RING AND SMACKING AND SUCKING, THAT SHE HAD PULLED OFF HER SOCK. I SHOULD HAVE CLOSED MY EYES AND THOUGH OF CHRISTMAS OR BASEBALL OR THE ENVELOPE OF AN F-16 WITH THE STAMP AFFIXED UPSIDE-DOWN. WE ALL THOUGH WE UNDERSTOOD UNTIL SHE, TURNING AWAY, PLACED HER LAST WORDS ON A CRACKER: THEY’RE ONLY OYSTERS.
THEY’RE ONLY OYSTERS, continues Radio Free Alice, SOMETIMES APHRODISIACS AREN’T, BUT I’M HERE FOR YOU. I’M ONLY ONE MACHINE, BUT I’LL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANT IN A SOUNDTRACK INCLUDING AN EXCUSE.
I could almost blame you, Cam explains later, making it sound so simple about sex and friends as if it were just the right song was all you needed. Your voice might be the only handsome thing about you.
I rub Cam’s shoulder blades. You’d have to know Alice, I tell her. I did this for Alice.
I did this for Alice, Cam says.
Not my Alice.
No, another Alice.
The station is clean. Neither a cathedral nor a confessional, it displaces myth. It is where Radio Free Alice plays records and reads poetry and types observation and other people listen or do not: a personal ten thousand watt stereo.
Radio Free Alice defies context.
The problem is: Radio Free Alice defines context where context is a dangerous issue. Clearly, there is more at stake than whether to play Love On The Air or On The Air or In The Air Tonight. And Radio Free Alice plays none of these. The point is: the information is immediate and constant and people always believe what they hear. That is, they believe that what they hear is being broadcast at that time.
Alice, I tell Cam, never made an issue of truths. You know? I mean, facts were matters of–I don’t know–matters of discipline.
Yes? Yes, I think I know: if you stay with something long enough–
–that’s right, I say, it solves itself.
The phone is patched directly through the chair–the hotline, the redline, the quanta, code blue–Radio Free Alice always answers, never takes requests.
I trace the cut of Cam’s arms and back: bicep, tricep, traps, lats. Do you lift weights? I ask.
Some. I swim mostly and play a little handball. We should play sometime.
We are.
You know what I mean.
I’m not much at sports. I ran in Pamplona: white shirts and slacks, red berets and sashes, like little targets darting across immovable objects…or were they irresistible forces, the angry bulls? The one casualty when I was there: an American soldier.
She turns over, I drum my fingertips along her collar bones.
These are my favorite part, she says, do you know what they’re called.
Leaping virginals, I tell her.
What? No, dopey, the clavicle.
I know, I say, but I always think of music: the clavicembalo. The parts that hit the strings in a harpsichord are called leaping virginals.
No they aren’t.
Nevermind then, I defer.
She pulls me toward her. Let’s make love again, darling.
And with Radio Free Alice crescendo, war-blue screen washing over us, Cam’s teeth sink in my neck, humming to go slow, honey, go slow.
FREQUENCY SWING IS NOT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MAXIMUM AND THE MINIMUM VALUES OF INSTANTANEOUS FREQUENCY IN A SIGNAL, BUT A DANCE. DOWN ON YOUR HEELS, UP ON YOUR TOES, STAY AFTER SCHOOL, LEARN HOW IT GOES
The chair, the nurse, the turntables, the phone, all do the Charleston: the Varsity Rag, the Chastity Drag.
Cam still has on her white bobby socks. I couldn’t get her to wear the oxfords to bed and it’s just as well now, since she’s kicking to get the socks off. It’s that schoolgirl look for the physicist who does his best work in strip clubs:
“Don’t you want something left to the imagination?”
“Good Christ, what do you think pubic hair is for?”
FREQUENCY MODULATION, whispers Radio Free Alice, ISN’T HOW OFTEN YOU GET LAID. IT’S A CONTROL YOU CAN’T EVEN SEE, MAKES YOUR EYES BIGGER THAN YOUR STOMACH.
Cam asleep, I walk around her apartment quiet and cold. The war flickers silently, Radio Free Alice: white noise; Doppler sirens and Mars lights–red and blue–pull me to the window. Ice crystals have formed along the inside edge and I press my thum bprint into the facets. Shiver. If I listen hard I can hear Cam talking in her sleep.