WOWO is a clear channel station, 50,000 watts. At sunset smaller stations on nearby interfering frequencies stop broadcasting and the signal can be picked up as far south as Florida and out west to the Rockies. Just north the iron in the soil damps the power, soaking up the magnetic waves before they spread into Canada. Listening, I felt connected to the truck drivers in Texas and the night auditors on the Outer Banks who called in to Listo Fisher and told him they were listening. Often they would ask, “Where is Fort Wayne?” as if they had tuned in to a strange new part of the planet. Listo Fisher would take requests, explain patiently the physics and the atmospheric quirks that allowed the callers to hear themselves on the radio they were listening to broadcast by a station days of travel away from where they were. “It’s a miracle,” some yahoo in a swamp would yodel.
One night in the middle of a beguine, a voice came on the radio speaking what I found out later was Spanish. For a moment in my sandbag state, I thought it must be part of the song, a conductor or an announcer turning to a ballroom full of people in a hotel, both the people and the hotel now long turned to dust and the evening just charged molecules on magnetic tape, saying to them good night and good-bye. Thank you for the lovely evening. We’ve been brought to you by United Fruit and now are returning you to your local studios. But the voice kept talking, rising and falling, the r’s rolling and the k’s clotting together. Every once and again I would recognize a word, its syllables all bitten through and the whole thing rounded out by a vowel that seemed endless, howling or whispered.
The telephone rang. It was three in the morning.
“What the hell is that?” my father asked. The words were in both my ears now. I could hear the speech in peaks playing on his radio across town, like a range of mountains floating above clouds.
“Dad, what are you doing up?”
“Listening to the radio when this blather came over it.”
I asked him why he wasn’t asleep instead. The radios continued to emit the speech, a rhythm had begun to emerge beneath the words not unlike the beguine it had preempted. Just then there was a huge crash of static. I heard my father say, “What the —” but it wasn’t static it was applause, and as it trailed off, I heard the voice say the same phrase over again a few times, starting up again, as the cheering subsided.
“Oh,” my father said, “you’re awake then.”
“Of course, I’m awake,” I lied to him. “You woke me up.” I asked him again why he was awake.
“I haven’t slept in years.”
“Well, go to sleep, Dad.”
“You go to sleep then.”
“I am asleep. I’ve been asleep,” I said.
“What’s that crap on the radio?”
“Change the station, Dad. Maybe it’s the station.”
“But I always listen to WOWO.”
I hung up and listened to WOWO. The speech continued for two more hours, punctuated by bursts of applause, the sound then breaking into a chirping chant, steady at first then going out of phase, melting back into itself and the rising hiss of more applause. The voice would be there again. It seemed to plead or joke. It warned, begged. It egged on. It blamed and denied, sniffed its nose. It sneered. It promised. I could hear it tell a story. It explained what it had meant. It revised. It wooed. Toward the morning it grew hoarse. It grew hoarse and dried up. It wound up repeating a word, which seemed too long to me, again and again until that word was picked up by the listeners on the radio, who amplified it into a cloud of noise that this time was static. Then Bob Sievers was on the radio and his theme song was playing.
There are so many secrets in this world. About the time my husband, who I’ll call David, and my best friend, who I’ll call Linda, started sleeping together, two silver blimps were launched in a swamp south of a city I’ll call Miami. They were tethered there to slabs of freshly cured concrete a thousand feet below. I think of those balloons floating there, drifting toward each other, perhaps bumping together finally, and rebounding in excruciating slow motion. The wires connecting them to the ground shored them up, I imagine, so their nuzzling was reigned in, the arc of rotation proscribed. They moved hugely, deliberately, like whales in a tropic bay. Their shadows shifted on the spongy ground below. I am almost asleep, dreaming, when the nodding blimps turn into the slick bodies of my husband and my best friend sliding beneath a skin of sheets, moving as deliberately and as coyly until they are tangled up in each other’s embrace and then that zeppelin in New Jersey bursts into flames and melts into itself, the fire spilling from the night sky. There is a voice on the radio crying how horrible, how horrible to see the skeleton of the airship support, for an instant, a white skin of flames.
The curious in south Florida were told that the bobbing balloons were part of a weather experiment, a lie. Their real purpose was to hold aloft a radio antenna aimed at Cuba. It was propaganda radio. The voice I had heard was Castro’s, Cuban radio’s response, jamming the signal spilling south from the balloons, overflowing on the clear channel all the way north.
For a long time our government denied what was going on and the speeches continued through the night. I bought a Spanish to English dictionary and translated one word I’d catch out of the one thousand perhaps that flashed by, leafing through the book until I found something I thought sounded like what I had heard. He’s talking about a ship, I’d think. And he is sitting or he sat once. Overlooking the sea specked with ships. Now there are roosters. Ships, the holds filled with roosters, who crow out the watch. Mothers waiting for the ships, I thought, at the clocks, shielding their eyes in the sun, empty baskets balanced on their heads.
WOWO’s ratings went up as people stayed awake late into the night to listen to the interruptions, the speeches with the static of applause. And, as if they realized they now had an audience, the programmers in Havana began to salt the broadcast with cuts of Latin music, bossa novas and sambas, anthems and pretty folk songs plucked out on guitars with squeaky strings. Downtown, during the day, I began to see people napping at their desks, sleepwalking to the copying rooms and the coffee machines. More men smoked cigars. High school Spanish classes were assigned to listen to the station at night, meeting at their teachers’ houses for slumber parties. So tired, we were infected by our dreams. The days grew warmer. I had been unable to sleep for so long the measured pace of the people around me matched my own endless daily swim through the thick sunlit air. We moved like my cats, lounged and yawned, stared at each other with half-closed eyes.
I listened for Fidel at night. Over time, I counted on him. I translated his rambling monologues in my own dreamy way as he talked about his island with its green unpronounceable trees, the blooming pampas where butterflies from the north nested in the fall, lazy games of catch performed by children in starchy white uniforms chattering in a dialect that predates Columbus. You see, I was ready for someone to talk to me, to explain everything to me. How I looked like a movie star in those sunglasses I wore continually. How fires smell in the cane fields as the sugar caramelizes. I thought I understood romance for once and martyrdom, maybe even revolution. This ropy language, the syrup of its sound, an elixir, was on the air now all the time, crept into my bed each night.
What would my father say? It filled me up, crowding out the mortgaged furniture, the old sad music, the phone calls to the police, and all the names, especially the names I’ve now forgotten were ever attached to those other frequencies through which I drifted.