SubscribeSomewhere, far back-a-bush, “Mmm Bopp” squeaked out of an old short wave radio into the humid night. The radio sat in one corner of a thatch hut, on a knock-an’-stan’-up table, its antenna broken crudely and splinted back together with a thick coating of flimsy scotch tape and an emery board. In the other corner a small pile of coal smoldered, billowing thick white whips of pungent smoke. The coals consisted of bits of coconut husks mixed with chunks of white oleander bark, creating a lightly poisonous smoke that drove off the mosquitoes.
“It is now 24 hours universal time and you are listening to the billboard top-forty on The Voice of America. Coming up, ‘The World Hour’."
Using the tuning knob, he scanned the airways very intently….there must be something on the short wave worth listening to at 24 hours universal time.
“Next on BBC radio news: will Butros Butros Ghali serve a second term?”
“Will Botros Butros Gahli get a second name?” Jan grumbled at the radio as he got up to re-light his pipe in the coals. “Butros Butros Butros—.”
The short wave was an auditory window to the world he had escaped from years ago.
Jan thought his childhood had been confusing…until he grew up and got a look at the world. The summer he turned eighteen he spent most of his time in his friend Peter’s flat watching him build funky sculptures out of wax and barbed wire as they both split a joint. Then his parents threatened to take away his allowance so he applied to college. After college they threatened to take away his allowance…so he cut his hair...which was, in his own words, “the straw that broke the camels back.”
So he packed a bag full of necessities (those which he thought were necessities at the time) and backpacked through Central America…
Days got warmer, his hair got longer…his allowance got shorter, until one day, he found himself in a Guatemalan Prison, and it no longer came at all. Peter was the one who bailed him out.
“You've got to snap out of this you bloody wanker.” Peter scolded jokingly over the phone to a newly released Jan. “I did.” He did, all right. The words, “aspiring artist” might substitute his name in a local newspaper. What was more, Peter still got an allowance.
Years had passed since his traveling days. Now Jan spoke to his short wave on the quiet nights before the rains when frogs went silent, and sometimes it sang him songs. His favorite was BBC, it gave his the most entertainment, and his second favorite was CBC. The VOA seemed to sound a lot like the V.O. the Hanson brothers, and if nothing else, made him smile.
It got fuzzy sometimes when the splinted antenna got temperamental. Jan ignored the static. It seemed that every evening on Radio Sweden, reports of groundbreaking studies linked something new to cancer. Last evening it had been fluoride; tonight it was cell phones. He ignored those too. Funny, he thought, how he had spent half his life away from all of these cancerous things yet still managed to developed skin cancer. I guess wherever you go in the world you can’t escape the sun. Not that it was the sun that Jan had been running from.
When I first met Jan I was working at a corner store on the outskirts of St. Ann’s Bay Jamaica. Once a month he came into town, making a spectacle of himself: a forty year old white man in a bright red Hawaiian shirt and tight flared jeans from the seventies. Jan never hesitated to shake a hand or crack joke. Everyone knew him; no one disliked him.
He came into my store one day looking to buy some tape and two emery boards. I asked him why, so he told me. I suggested a long piece of wire, explaining how it might help. The next time he came into my corner store he wasn’t looking to buy anything.
Years later, Peter and I sat at Jan's bedside in the Hospital listening to Radio Sweden: “a new study linked radio waves to breast cause cancer.” He smiled and weakly turned the little knob all the way to the left: CLICK.
The radio shut off, and minutes later, so did he.
Peter’s cell phone rang as the sun shone through the window, and radio waves danced all around us.
The year, 2004. The time, universal.
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