Full Power

Warren Tulley opens his letter addressed, without explaining how he knows to address it this way, "to whoever runs that show now" — and backs into the story of how he got there: a real career once, afternoon drive-time in Dayton, undone by a bad divorce and eighteen worse months after it, until at forty-four he's alone in a doublewide outside a small Ohio town, working midnight to six on a five-thousand-watt station that isn't even licensed to broadcast after dark at full power. He tells you he loved the work anyway — the cart machines, the smell of the transmitter room, the small private thrill of the red ON AIR lamp — in the specific way of a man who has nothing else left to love. His first night is warm and ordinary, dedications from insomniacs and truckers, until the second-to-last call: a calm woman's voice asking him to play something "for the ones still listening," no name given, which he notes as a nice, slightly odd turn of phrase — until he fills out his paperwork and finds the phone company's own trace lists that number as disconnected eleven months ago.

It happens again the next night, and the night after that — always late, always calm, always the same dedication with no name attached. His contact at the phone company confirms, with less patience each time he calls, that the numbers aren't merely disconnected; two of them belong to lines physically pulled from the pole years ago, with no wire left standing for a call to have traveled on at all. Warren tells himself it's a stuck relay, prank kids, something explainable he doesn't need explained tonight — until a caller dedicates a song to a family whose porch light has "been out three nights," a family Warren has never heard of, and he drives past their house on his way home to find the porch light exactly as described, blown and unrepaired, for people who don't exist on any list he's ever kept.

The station's contract engineer corners him with worse news: the transmitter's own logs show the tower broadcasting at full daytime power at three in the morning, on a night the engineer swears, on his own signed paperwork, that he powered the rig down by hand himself, the way the law requires. Digging through the station's schedule book for some mundane precedent, Warren finds the overnight hours labeled, in fountain-pen ink gone the particular brown-black of real age, by a name that reads as decades older than the paper it's written on — older, by his own plain eyeball estimate, than the station's building has stood. He can't explain it and can't stop looking at it. And that same night, a caller's dedication lands with a private, exact accuracy about the estranged son Warren has told no one at this station about — a detail with no channel it could possibly have traveled through to reach a stranger on a dead phone line.