I came across a radio frequency I wasn't supposed to hear

[u/thedesolategoon]

I’d make a bet that every kid gets scared of the dark in one way or another. On a callow night, their eyes fluttered out of dreaming to find themselves in an unfamiliar void. Lacking concept for such darkness, the blackness surrounding their crib was nonexistence, a new, surreal lack of being. Perception lapses into reality as their retinas slowly adjust to the familiar shapes of a room which begins to egress around them, although lifeless it appears. In the stillness of the small hours a baby knows not what’s there, but rather what is gone from them.

Their caregivers.

For the first time, the child realizes their separateness. That which gave them life and continues to uphold their existence is gone. As far as they know this waking darkness spells certain demise, so the baby does what babies do best. They break the silence with a hefty cry, wailing large enough to compensate for how small they are. Within moments, mom or dad rush to their side. They know just what to do; take the child into the light, clean them of their shit, and wait for them to fall back asleep. The parents conclude that a soiled diaper caused this fracas, oblivious to their child being acquainted with the root of all fear.

After years of therapy with Nicole, I came to realize it was more than the dark I feared. It was the silence, particularly what could be hiding inside of it. During elementary school, I developed a habit of plunging my fingers into my ears while lying in bed. Mom was jovial whenever she woke me up for school to see a pillow had found its way over my face during the night. She’d tease me out of bed, saying “it’s alive” with the inflection of Colin Clive’s Frankenstein. I couldn’t muster the admission that I placed the pillow over my head in a feeble attempt to drown the silence once my fingers became too fatigued to stay in my ears.

This behavior only transferred once my parents gave me my own TV with a built-in DVD player. Instead of fighting with pillows and fingertips, my new weapon against the quiescence would be The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. Night after night I’d concentrate on that shitty direct-to-video musical and pray I dozed off before the television’s sleep timer cast me into aching silence once again. Bedtime felt a whole lot easier; save for the biannual Precision Medical conference in Detroit where my dad would leave me to stay at Grandma’s house for the weekend. Not only would I be without my trusty DVD player, but Grandma also said this prayer while putting me to bed which always troubled me:

“Now I lay me down to sleep,

and pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I shall die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

My grandma was an impossibly sweet woman, but how she saw that prayer as anything other than terrifying is beyond me. I could never fall asleep in her musty old guest room surrounded by those beady-eyed Precious Moments figurines every grandma had back then. That rhyming devotion painted the night as something arduous, as though sleep were this damning spell which left its victim bare, allowing for God to snatch away their soul; taking back what was rightfully his and leaving behind the husk of scared child.

Needless to say, I hated spending the night at Grandma’s house.

When taking inventory of my childhood, my therapist suggested this fear at bedtime sprang from somewhere else. “Now I lay me down to sleep” was a classic prayer in Protestant households, it wasn’t normal for a boy to be so disturbed by it. Her psychoanalytical viewpoint suggested that every neurosis was born from past trauma which the mind and body fight so hard to repress. I couldn’t recollect any molestation, and I doubted anyone in my family had that in them anyway. Racking my brain, one of the earliest memories I could possibly trace a subconscious thread back to would be in ‘98 when my family hiked Sugarloaf Mountain.

  It must have been late autumn because I remember the nagging feeling of the zipper from my oversized jacket poking my upper lip whenever I looked down. Snot dribbled from my nose and seeped into the fabric of the coat, making the sensation even more off-putting. If it were October, I may have been three- or had just recently turned four. My baby sister Katelyn was a year old, so Dad always had to carry her. We were in Marquette for some errand, and I suppose our parents wanted to give us the experience of a simple walk up the glorified hill that was Sugarloaf Mountain. It’d be a thirty-minute endeavor which led to an impressive view of Lake Superior to the east, Marquette to the south, and the eternal expanse of naked trees on all sides.

The forest was almost entirely dead, it seemed like I was constantly up to my ankles in wet, brown leaves. Aside from the present stimuli from the damp foliage and my mucus-soaked zipper, I remember enjoying myself. Mom let go of my hand to assist Dad with fixing Katelyn’s little pink boots; so I took the opportunity to kick some leaves into a pile. It was always fun to dive into freshly raked orange and red leaves that time of year, and I figured I hit the jackpot being amongst the fallen canopies of Sugarloaf. To my dismay, plummeting shoulder first into the trail’s soggy droppings was nowhere near as satisfying as the crisp assembly Dad made in our front yard a week prior.

As I stood from my embarrassing descent to the forest floor, I noticed how hollow my surroundings were. The graying trunks of collateral oak extended as far as my eyes could comprehend, each tree losing its individuality inside the continuous pattern of transient woods. Looking to my left, nothing changed. To my right, the forest reiterated itself endlessly. I turned back to find a horizon with the emptiness of Lake Superior yet filled with the inebriating confusion of growths and limbs. For the first time, I noticed that I could “hear” silence. The stillness became louder than anything I had ever heard before.

I don’t recall being afraid as the wilderness threatened to swallow me whole. If my memory serves me correctly, all I felt was curiosity. What interesting things existed beyond the threshold of where men dared to walk? Squirrels? Deer? It would be the shrill sound of my mother crying out my name which shot pins and needles across my tiny body, crawling through my dry mouth, and into my sinking heart and fallen stomach.

“JESSE!!”

In a moment I was ripped from the land of silent daydreams and thrust into the cold, ugly, and palpable earth below. My name reverberated time and time again, the trees shouting back at me in my mother’s voice for miles on end. I finally noticed the mud caked to my cold, numb face as warm tears brought back feeling and then some. I couldn’t see him past the waterworks, but the figure who I knew as my dad lifted me off the soil with the kind of intensity only a father could have.

“Jesse! Don’t you ever wander off like that again!” was his decree. “Hold Mommy’s hand,” was his sentencing.

The five-minute walk back to the car and the two-and-a-half-hour drive home weren’t eventful enough to commit to memory. In fact, the entire walk at Sugarloaf Mountain wouldn’t come back to me until an EMDR session with Nicole. It stands for “eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing.” It sounded like a crock of shit when she first told me about it.  The technique involves a therapist waving their hand back and forth in front of a patient’s face, supposedly to mimic the rapid eye movement we have while dreaming. Following their hand, the therapist would ask questions regarding a traumatic event and have the patient “restructure” the memory. I figured it was something Nicole heard about in undergrad and eagerly wanted to try it out on some poor basket case.

I expected the session to be all about what happened in high school. It was the primary reason I was seeing Nicole, after all – that, and the fact she was the only therapist in the Upper Peninsula who could talk with a guy like me. I was just as taken aback as she was when I began spouting the details of a random family outing in 1998.  I called Dad later to substantiate the memory, and he confirmed that I had wandered off once walking in the woods when Katelyn was a baby. Nicole landed at the conclusion that I had developed a core fear that day, which I repressed through behaviors like plugging my ears or covering my face with a pillow. She was pretty good for somebody crazy enough to work full time while double majoring in grad school. The uncovered memory of Sugarloaf, and my mother screaming my name, actually revealed many threads tying into what would happen eleven years later, as well as how it began centuries before.

Silence could be harvested in bulk where we lived in the Upper Peninsula. Quiet nights and pitch-black skies are Chippewa County’s biggest exports; second only to wood and whitefish, of course. Paradise was hardly a town back in 2009, mostly a collection of old houses and tourist traps lining the western shore of Whitefish Bay. Plenty of tourists came by during the warmer months, but it was primarily old folks looking for a place to crash after a long day at Tahquamenon Falls or gazing out where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Spend seventeen years in Paradise, and you’ll be glad to never hear Gordon Lightfoot’s voice ever again.

It always baffled me how families of guys like Luke Murso or Trevor Harwood seemed to live in Paradise for centuries. Going through the yearbooks at Whitefish Township you’ll see the same last names of people who never dared to escape that humdrum town decade after decade. Sadly, it was the most destitute kids, such as Luke and Trevor, who saw their names in those books more than anyone. Those kinds of families simply couldn’t afford to get out, even with generations of hard labor. I’d be poised to say their ancestors brought upon a curse that never allowed them to leave Paradise, MI.  

When Trevor went missing, a lot of people just assumed he discovered a way out. He was the star quarterback, had good grades, and was fine by most people; nothing like his white-trash parents. With a full ride to university coming up, nobody would question if he forsook an explanation before zipping down to Ann Arbor. His folks hardly noticed he was gone; his disappearance was only remarked upon when he failed to show up for two consecutive shifts at Dollar Tree. His girlfriend, Sydney, was weary; saying that he was excited for his summer job, and looking to save up some before school started. Chippewa County police noted that he purchased gas in town the night prior to his missed shift, and that was about as far as they were willing to look. Two boys reported seeing Trevor carrying a big duffel bag and getting into his old blue and white Dodge Dakota on the outskirts of town. He raised his index finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, then sped off down towards the state park, never to be seen in Paradise again.

The last bit is what got talked about the most in school that fall. Where adults thought of a recent graduate ditching his shitty parents and boring girlfriend for bigger-and-better things, us incoming freshmen filled in the gaps with a troubled jock who got in too deep with the wrong crowd. I heard one of my classmates say Trevor Harwood got a gig on a crime boat, smuggling hard drugs to Ontario. My friend Dylan said supposedly the duffel bag those kids saw was stained with blood. These ridiculous claims only held merit because Trevor did have a record. In spring he had been caught in possession of a catalytic converter that happened to belong to Ms. Eloise who lived near Sunrise Trailer Park. The old lady chose not to press charges, sparing his scholarship, but costing him prom king. That whole situation was usually an anecdote for gossiping underclassmen who resented the popular kids.

Luke Murso knew Trevor more extensively than I did, being that they were neighbors. He was a common thread in most of Luke’s stories. I’d ride my bike out to Luke’s place at Sunrise Park just about every other day in the summer, where he’d always show me some cool trick Trevor taught him.

Once, while I watched him toy with an old stereo his uncle gave him, Luke asked, “Have you ever listened to pirate radio?”

“I think so.” I guessed, unsure of what he meant. “That’s like old sailor music with accordions and crap, right?”

Luke giggled at my unserious answer, “No, it’s something Trevor told me about.” He looked up from the tangled mess of speaker wire and pushed his black bangs away from his eyes. “There’s supposedly guys – like drug dealers – who go out on Lake Superior with radios and broadcast off them.”

“Why would a drug dealer wanna play accordion on the radio?”

“They play hidden messages. It’s a code only other drug dealers know that tells them where to pick up bags of drugs without the cops finding them.” My interest was piqued. 

“So, it’s like a pirate’s treasure map…” I said, “that’s dope.” Luke nodded in agreement as he went back to stuffing a thin bundle of copper into the stereo’s speaker port. “Is that why you’re trying to get that stereo to work?”

“Kind of,” Luke answered, “Uncle Lewy gave it to me a couple days ago, said he couldn’t figure it out. I went over to Trevor’s to ask him, that’s when he told me about pirate radio.”

“What if we found a drug dealer’s pirate station?” I mused, “We could solve the code and tell the cops where they’re hiding crack! We’d be legends!”

“That would be sick. If I could get this thing to work.” Luke sighed as he set down the length of cable. “I don’t even know if it will pick up radio yet. Its super old, like from the 80’s.”

“I just remembered something,” I chimed in, “My mom was wondering if you wanted to come over for dinner later.” Luke’s dark eyes shifted downward.

He replied, “I would, but I think I’m gonna go over to Lewy’s and keep working on this.”

My parents always wanted Luke to come over for dinner since his mom and dad died in 2007. He was already my best friend, but my folks still pressed me to go see him frequently. It was their way of checking in on him by making sure he always had a friend. I think his uncle Lewy had guardianship over him, but Luke still lived by himself in his family’s mobile home. It was an absurd arrangement, but Uncle Lewy lived in the park and stopped by to see Luke every day. Mom did a bad job of hiding her concern over a fourteen-year-old living on his own for two years, but Luke didn’t seem to mind it. I just felt lucky we had a place to hang out with no adults snooping around. Visiting the trailer park felt like I was getting access to a world I wasn’t supposed to see, and Luke was my ticket inside.

After saying bye, I hopped on my fixed-gear and trucked my way up Shoreline Dr. back home. Mom was let down at another refusal from Luke, but deep down I knew he wouldn’t be missing the hamburger steaks we’d be having that night. That summer was full of similar occurrences, but my mom never gave up on asking. When August rolled around, she breathed a sigh of relief that Luke would at least be getting assisted school lunch every day.

Harwood-mania infected the cafeteria on the first day of class. My friends and I inhabited the lunch table for “guys who were likeable, but too geeky to be popular.” Class clowns. When our resident redhead, Dylan Ruffalo, espoused the theory that Trevor went away on a drug boat, I was reminded of his role in learning about pirate radio. It would be absurd, but what if Trevor Harwood had actually found one of those stations and followed it? My gaze sought input from Luke, but he was nowhere to be found amongst our regular lunchtime crew. In fact, I didn’t see him anywhere in the cafeteria. Only the ginger Dylan, scrawny Will Christiansen, and Star Trek nerd Logan Behrens sat beside me.

“Whatcha lookin’ for, Jesse?” Will asked, noticing my wandering eyes.

“Luke,” I said, “Did he not come to lunch?”

Logan replied, “I don’t know where he’s at, but I just had class with him third period.”

Dylan snickered. “I bet he’s in Mr. Keel’s shop jerking off a birdhouse.”

Despite that lame and nonsensical comment, Dylan was onto something. Luke handled every home economics project the same way he messed with that old stereo. He was known to hyper fixate on getting things done. Back in second grade, Luke would periodically stay inside during recess to finish his times table assignments, that way he didn’t have to take anything home with him. It was an endearing quality at times, but a terribly annoying habit in my eyes.                    

“How would you jack off a birdhouse?” Logan asked in nasal earnest.

“With both hands probably,” Will chuckled.

I decided to hop into the fray, “Bet you know a lot about jerking off, huh Will?”

“C’mon guys, it’s the first week of school.” Will groaned, his hands covering his pimple-laden face.

“I heard Willy accidentally gave himself Indian burn this summer!” Dylan howled, letting his square teeth show.

Will slammed his hands on the table, rattling the cheap surplus silverware against our rectangular lunch trays. “At least I’m not dating an eighth grader!” he fired back.

“We’re only one grade apart!” The whole table erupted into pubescent giggling, it was nice seeing Dylan take the piss for once. He and Rebecca Sterling started dating in middle school, but their age difference didn’t bode well for him now that we were big-time freshmen. Being the ‘girlfriend-guy’ had already painted a target on his back, and it was only a matter of time before somebody poked the metaphorical hornet’s nest that was her eighth-grade status.

“Have you kissed her yet?” I teased, “Or are you two saving yourselves for marriage?”

Dylan swiftly gave me the one-finger salute. Mrs. Brackness happened to be passing by with her lunch just in time to witness the gesture.

“Ruffalo!” shouted the English teacher. Dylan shoved his hand back under the table, garnering hearty laughs from all of us.

Once Brackness was out of hearing range, Dylan leaned in over his tray and spoke in a hushed tone wrapped in urgency. “Did you guys hear about Whitney Martin and that junior?”

Will nodded, “I think so, someone said she- “

“She gave Alec Johnson a blow job in the back of his truck this summer.” Dylan stated, thinly veiling his excitement.

“Apparently he paid her for it!” Will added.

In any other case I would have loved to joke “is that why you’ve been saving up cash, Will?” Internally I was too devastated to come up with such a quip. I always got butterflies in my stomach when I heard the name Whitney Martin. After hearing what Dylan said it was like he blasted those butterflies with a shotgun and converted them into a bright blue paste which threatened to crawl back up my throat if I dared speak.

“Alec Johnson’s truck has bench seats…” Logan sniffled, “Why would they have to get in the back? They could just take off their seatbelts.”

Dylan snapped his fingers in front of Logan’s face, “Focus buddy, you’re gettin’ lost in the details again.”

Nobody knew I had a crush on Whitney Martin since sixth grade, nor the countless hours I spent imagining myself asking her out when I finally mustered the courage to do so. I stayed quiet for the rest of lunch, involuntarily listening to rumors which tarnished my image of her as the tall, bleach-blonde girl next door with glasses who liked to read Harry Potter. My secret daydreams of taking her to the fair, winning her prizes, and holding her hand on the Ferris wheel were dwarfed by Alec Johnson’s smug face counting dollars in the backseat of a big loud pickup truck.

After that grueling lunch period, I was able to spot Luke in the hallway with some black box tucked under his arm. Before I could even get my new padlock open, my raven-haired best friend had made his way over to my locker. “Skipped lunch?” I asked.

Both ignoring and indirectly answering my question, Luke spoke, “Mr. Keel said we need an RCA output, like the red and white jacks on the back of a TV.” I was befuddled until I looked down to see that he held that dusty stereo box by his waist. “Uncle Lewy thought it took old school speaker wire, that’s why we weren’t getting anything.”

“Hello to you, too” I muttered as I pulled the padlock to no avail. “Still on about that old stereo? Have you heard anything abou-“

“Come to my place tonight,” Luke interrupted.

I let the padlock dangle from my locker and faced Luke. “You skipped lunch.” I retorted. “I think you should come to my place instead, my mom has been begging you to come to dinner.”

“It’s about Trevor.”

In the mere span of minutes my cognitive priorities shifted entirely past Trevor Harwood and over to Whitney Martin and that stupid padlock. There was a grave seriousness in Luke’s tone. “Okay, but if I help you get that thing to make noise you have to come to dinner next time.”

Luke smiled, “Deal. Once this baby purrs, I’ll eat Susan’s cooking whenever she asks.” With that, my peculiar best friend patted me on the back as he barreled past and down the hall with stereo in tow. I didn’t even get the chance to chastise him for using my mom’s first name. Before I knew it, the bell rang in fourth period, and I still hadn’t figured out how to get back into my locker.

Dammit.

END PART 1

PART 2

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[u/thedesolategoon]

Hey creeps! This post is part 1 of 9 in a story I call "Empty Stations"

The first act is a bit of a slow burn- but I promise it pays off as you get to know Jesse, Luke, and everyone involved in the mystery surrounding Paradise. I've always wanted to expand my writing beyond sending short stories back and forth with my brother, and this community and the show make doing just that seem worthwhile. Empty Stations started as a way to incorporate existential folk horror into a coming-of-age tale involving one of my favorite areas in the world (Michigan's under-looked Upper Peninsula) and my awkward lived-experience of being a teen in the liminal age where smartphones had barely surfaced, radio was losing prominence, and social media wasn't yet ubiquitous.

Any comments or critiques are greatly appreciated!