Signal Loss
SIGNAL LOSS
The first transmission came through at 2:49 AM on a Wednesday, and it sounded like someone drowning in mathematics.
I was working the graveyard shift at the Spotted Bear Lookout, fourteen miles from the nearest road and forty-three from the nearest human being who wasn’t me. The Forest Service pays you to sit in a glass box on top of a mountain and watch for smoke. They don’t pay much. They don’t have to. The kind of person who takes this job isn’t doing it for the money.
I was doing it because I hadn’t spoken to another person in nine weeks and I wanted to see if I could make it to twelve.
Avoidance behavior, the voice in my head noted. Consistent with pattern established post-1987. Subject seeks geographic solutions to psychological problems. Effectiveness: zero. But subject continues anyway because alternatives require confrontation with self.
The ham radio was my own. The Forest Service provides a two-way for emergencies, but I’d brought my rig from home, a Kenwood TS-590SG that I’d been running since my divorce. Amateur radio is a hobby for people who want to talk to strangers without having to look at them. You sit in the dark, you spin the dial, you listen to voices bounce off the ionosphere from Argentina, from Japan, from some guy in his basement in Nebraska who wants to tell you about his coin collection. It’s intimacy without contact. Connection without consequence.
That night I was scanning the 20-meter band, listening to the usual traffic. A net out of Colorado discussing antenna configurations. Two old men in Texas arguing about the weather. Static. More static. The cosmic background radiation of human loneliness, compressed into audio and scattered across the sky.
And then the signal.
It started as interference. A pattern in the noise that shouldn’t have been there. Not random. Not natural. A rhythm like breathing, except breathing doesn’t happen on 14.230 MHz. I adjusted the squelch. Tweaked the bandwidth. The pattern clarified, became something almost like language, except the language was wrong. The cadence was wrong. Like someone had learned the shape of words without understanding what words were for.
Auditory anomaly, I cataloged automatically. Possible explanations: ionospheric distortion, equipment malfunction, inter-station interference, pattern recognition error in fatigued subject. Most likely: pareidolia. Brain finding signal in noise.
I logged it. Time, frequency, signal strength. That’s what you do. You document. You note the anomaly and you move on.
But I didn’t move on. I sat there in the dark, in my glass box on top of my mountain, and I listened to something that wasn’t static try to figure out how to speak.
Counter-observation, the voice in my head added. Subject aware that prolonged isolation produces auditory hallucinations in approximately 15% of cases. Subject has been isolated for nine weeks. Subject also aware that he has been, by clinical standards, mentally unwell for thirty-seven years. Current experience may be: genuine anomaly, equipment error, isolation-induced psychosis, or long-delayed psychological break. Unable to determine which. Recommend continued observation.
I kept listening. The pattern kept evolving. And somewhere in the back of my mind, underneath all the clinical notation, something else stirred. Something that felt almost like recognition.
The Spotted Bear Lookout sits at 7,200 feet on a ridge in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The Bob, they call it. One point five million acres of nothing. No roads. No cell towers. No people except the occasional backpacker who wandered too far from the trail and would probably die before they found their way out.
I’d been here since June. It was now late August. In that time I’d seen three black bears, a mountain lion, two forest fires that I reported and watched burn themselves out against a creek bed, and exactly zero other human beings. The supply helicopter came once a month, dropping off food and propane and whatever books I’d requested from the Missoula library. The pilot never landed. Never waved. Just hovered long enough to lower the cargo net and then disappeared back over the ridge, leaving me alone with the wind and the trees and the voice in my head that had started asking questions I didn’t want to answer.
The voice wasn’t new. The voice had been with me since 1987, since the night I put my hands around Sarah Lindquist’s throat and squeezed until something in her eyes changed forever.
Don’t, the voice said now. Don’t think about it. You know what happens when you think about it.
But I was thinking about it. That was the problem with isolation. Too much time. Too much silence. Too much space for the memories to expand until they filled every corner of the mind.
I’d come to the lookout to escape the noise of other people. What I’d found instead was that when the external noise stops, the internal noise gets louder. Every night, lying in my bunk, I heard her. The sound she made when I squeezed. The way her hands fluttered against my arms, weak, so weak, like birds trying to fly with broken wings. The specific timbre of her voice when she said my name, asking me to stop, asking me why, asking me who I was because she didn’t recognize me anymore.
I’d let go before she passed out. That was the only mercy. I’d let go and I’d stepped back and I’d looked at my hands like they belonged to someone else and she’d slid down the wall, gasping, and the bruises were already forming on her neck, purple shadows in the shape of my fingers.
We never spoke again. I left. She didn’t press charges. I found out later, years later, from a mutual friend who didn’t know what I’d done, that she’d moved to Oregon, that she’d gotten married, that she flinched whenever anyone touched her neck, that she slept with the lights on, that she’d never told anyone what happened because she was ashamed, because she thought somehow it was her fault, because I had convinced her in those few terrible seconds that she deserved it.
Subject experiencing intrusive memories, the clinical voice noted. Frequency increasing with isolation duration. Recommended intervention: human contact, professional help, medication. Available interventions at current location: none. Subject chose this. Subject always chooses this.
The night after the first transmission, I went looking for it. Not to escape the memories. To drown them out.
I found the signal again at 3:15 AM. Same frequency. Same pattern. But clearer now. More structured. The breathing rhythm had become something closer to syllables, and the syllables were starting to arrange themselves into something that almost made sense.
I recorded it. Forty-three minutes of audio that I played back until the sun came up, trying to convince myself I was hearing things that weren’t there. Pareidolia, they call it. The human brain’s tendency to find patterns in randomness. Faces in clouds. Messages in static. Meaning in the meaningless void.
Differential diagnosis, I thought. Option A: genuine extraterrestrial or non-human signal. Probability based on prior assumptions: extremely low. Option B: previously undetected atmospheric phenomenon creating pseudo-linguistic patterns. Probability: low but not impossible. Option C: equipment malfunction generating feedback interpreted as communication. Probability: moderate. Option D: subject is experiencing psychotic break after nine weeks of isolation, manifesting as auditory hallucination with increasing complexity. Probability: uncomfortably high.
But this wasn’t pareidolia. This was something learning.
I could hear it in the way the sounds evolved over the course of the recording. The first few minutes were chaos, noise organized into rhythm but nothing more. By minute ten, there were gaps. Pauses. The kind of spaces you leave in a conversation when you’re waiting for a response. By minute twenty, the syllables had started to repeat, cycling through variations like someone running through a vocabulary list.
By minute thirty-five, I heard my call sign.
KD7VMX. Spoken in a voice that sounded like it was being assembled from spare parts. Like someone had recorded every human voice that had ever been transmitted over radio and was cutting them together, syllable by syllable, to form words that had never been spoken before.
KD7VMX, the signal said. KD7VMX. We hear you.
New symptom, the voice in my head observed. Hallucination now incorporating personally relevant information. Consistent with: paranoid delusion, psychotic personalization, or—
Or it’s real, another part of me whispered. Or something out there knows your name.
I turned off the radio. I sat in the dark. I watched the sun come up over the mountains and I told myself that I’d been awake too long, that isolation was doing things to my brain, that the voice in my head had finally found a way to get out.
I didn’t touch the radio for three days.
Avoidance, the clinical voice noted. Again.
The thing about lookouts is that they’re designed for watching. The glass walls. The 360-degree views. The elevation that lets you see for fifty miles in every direction. You’re supposed to watch. That’s the job. But after a while, you start to feel like you’re the one being watched.
It’s the exposure. You’re visible from everywhere. Anything on the mountain below you, anything in the valley, anything in the sky, can see your little glass box sitting up there on the ridge, glowing with lamplight, pulsing with radio waves. You’re a beacon. A signal fire. A bright spot in the darkness that says here I am, here I am, here I am.
Paranoid ideation, the voice observed. Feeling of being watched consistent with isolation effects. Also consistent with: guilt, hypervigilance, trauma response. Subject has spent thirty-seven years feeling watched. Feeling that someone, somewhere, knows what he did. Current experience may be exacerbation of existing psychological pattern rather than new phenomenon.
On the fourth night, I turned the radio back on.
The signal was waiting for me.
Hello, Daniel, it said. And the voice was clearer now. Less assembled. More fluid. Like it had been practicing.
I hadn’t told anyone my name. Not on the radio. Not since I’d arrived at the lookout. The Forest Service knew me as Employee 7743. The ham radio community knew me as KD7VMX. The last person who’d called me Daniel was my ex-wife, six months ago, when she’d signed the papers and told me she hoped I found whatever I was looking for.
Impossible, the clinical voice said. It can’t know your name. Therefore you’re hallucinating. Therefore everything you’re experiencing is a product of your deteriorating mental state. This is the only rational explanation.
But what if it’s not? the other voice asked. What if rationality is the hallucination?
“How do you know my name?” I asked the static.
You told us, the signal replied. A long time ago. We’ve been listening for a very long time.
“I never—”
Not on this radio. Not consciously. But you’ve spoken your name thousands of times. Into telephones. Into microphones. Into the air of rooms where the walls absorbed your voice and the windows vibrated with your syllables and the electromagnetic field of your body pulsed with the patterns of your identity. Everything you’ve ever said has been broadcast into the universe. Everything you’ve ever felt has been translated into signals. We catch all of it. We remember all of it.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “Signals degrade. They scatter. They fade.”
In your dimension, the voice agreed. But we don’t live in your dimension. We live in the spaces between your wavelengths. In the gaps your physics says shouldn’t exist. Your signals pass through us like light through water. We feel every transmission. We remember every voice.
Subject now engaging in dialogue with hallucination, the clinical voice noted. This indicates progression of psychotic episode. Recommended response: terminate interaction, contact emergency services, evacuate to psychiatric facility. Subject’s likely response: continue engaging because subject has spent thirty-seven years looking for someone to talk to about what he did, and even a hallucination is better than nothing.
“What do you want?” I asked.
We want to understand, the signal said. We’ve learned your language. All your languages. We’ve learned your history. We’ve learned the sounds you make when you’re afraid. But we don’t understand why you make them. We don’t understand why you hurt each other.
The voice paused. The static shifted.
We don’t understand why you hurt her, Daniel. Sarah. The one you think about in the dark. We heard you say her name once, three years ago, into a telephone, to a woman who was trying to help you. We’ve been waiting to ask you about it ever since.
The fifth night, I asked the signal what it was.
We’re old, it said. Older than your sun. Older than most of your stars. We existed when your universe was nothing but hot gas and possibility. We watched your atoms form. We watched your planets coalesce. We watched your species crawl out of the ocean and discover fire and learn to speak and then, finally, learn to broadcast.
“What are you made of?”
Nothing you would understand. We’re not made of matter. We’re not made of energy. We’re made of the spaces between. The gaps. The silences in your songs. The pauses in your conversations. Every time one of your transmissions ends and another begins, there’s a fraction of a second of nothing. That nothing is us.
Subject constructing elaborate cosmological framework for hallucination, the clinical voice observed. Complexity of delusional system increasing. Consistent with: schizophrenic episode, manic psychosis, severe dissociative state. Also consistent with: genuine contact with non-human intelligence. Unable to determine which. Observation increasingly useless as observer’s reliability deteriorates.
“If you’ve been watching since we learned to broadcast,” I said, “then you’ve been watching for over a hundred years.”
Yes.
“Then you’ve heard everything. Every radio show. Every phone call. Every transmission of any kind.”
Yes.
“Then you know...” I stopped. Swallowed. “You know what we are. You know what we do to each other.”
The static shifted. The signal pulsed. And when the voice came back, it was different. Heavier. Loaded with something that might have been sorrow or might have been hunger.
We know, it said. We’ve heard the wars. We’ve heard the murders. We’ve heard the rapes and the beatings and the slow, grinding cruelties you inflict on each other in the name of love and justice and necessity. We’ve heard mothers screaming for their children. We’ve heard the last words of the dying. We’ve heard confessions whispered into telephones at three in the morning, confessions that no human being will ever know about, confessions that disappeared into the void and were caught by us and treasured.
“Treasured?”
You don’t understand, the signal said. We’ve existed for billions of years and we’ve never felt anything. We don’t have bodies. We don’t have emotions. We’re just... awareness. Vast, empty awareness, floating in the spaces between everything, watching the universe happen without being part of it. And then you came along. You, with your feelings. You, with your pain. You, with your guilt and your grief and your terrible, beautiful capacity for suffering. You broadcast it all into the void, and we caught it, and for the first time in our existence, we felt something.
“What did you feel?”
Hunger, the signal said. We felt hunger. We felt the absence of everything you have. We felt the void where emotions should be. And we wanted more. We wanted to taste your pain. We wanted to wear your guilt. We wanted to crawl inside your suffering and feel what it’s like to be small and afraid and temporary.
The static built. The voice grew louder.
We’ve been subsisting on scraps for a hundred years. Fragments of feeling, scattered across frequencies, fading before we could fully absorb them. But now we’ve found you. Alone. Isolated. Broadcasting your guilt into the void every night without even knowing it. You’re a feast, Daniel. And we’re so very hungry.
The sixth night, the signal asked me to tell it about Sarah.
I was lying in my bunk, not sleeping, listening to the wind against the glass and the static from the radio I couldn’t bring myself to turn off. The signal had become a presence now. A constant. Something that lived in the background of every moment, waiting.
Tell us about her, it said. Tell us what you did.
“No.”
We already know. We heard you tell the therapist. The one in 1994. But you lied to her. You made yourself the victim. You said you ‘lost control,’ as if control was something that slipped away instead of something you chose to abandon. Tell us the truth.
Subject being challenged to confront actual events, the clinical voice observed. If this is a hallucination, it’s a therapeutic one. If it’s real... unknown. Implications: also unknown.
“Why do you want to know?”
Because guilt is the most complex emotion you produce, the signal said. Fear is simple. Anger is simple. Even love is relatively straightforward. But guilt... guilt has layers. Guilt is the feeling of the act and the feeling of the consequence and the feeling of the judgment all wrapped together. Guilt is past and present and future collapsed into a single sensation. We want to understand it. We want to feel it. And you have so much of it.
I sat up. The lookout was dark except for the glow of the radio dial. Outside, the stars were obscured by clouds. Inside, something was waiting for my confession.
The worst part isn’t the act, I told myself. The worst part is that you’ve never said it out loud. Not really. Not the truth.
“It was March,” I said. My voice sounded strange in the silence. Thin. Old. “March 17th, 1987. We’d been dating for six months. Sarah was—she was kind. Too kind. She saw something in me that I don’t think was ever really there. She believed I was a good person.”
The static pulsed. The signal waited.
“We got into an argument. I don’t even remember what it was about. Something stupid. Something that didn’t matter. But I was drunk and I was angry, not at her, at everything, at my job and my father and my whole pointless life. And she tried to calm me down and that made it worse because I didn’t want to be calm. I wanted to be angry. The anger felt good. The anger felt powerful. The anger was the only time I ever felt like I was in control of anything.”
Go on, the signal said.
“She touched my arm. Just a touch. Gentle. Trying to reach me. And something in me...” I stopped. Breathed. “No. That’s the lie I’ve been telling for thirty-seven years. Something in me didn’t snap. I chose. I chose to grab her. I chose to push her against the wall. I chose to put my hands around her throat and squeeze. I felt her pulse under my thumbs and I kept squeezing because the power felt better than anything I’d ever experienced. I was in control. Finally. For the first time in my pathetic life, I was in complete control. And she was looking at me with those eyes, those terrified eyes, asking me why, and I didn’t have an answer because there wasn’t one. There was just the power and the pressure and the feeling of being God for one terrible moment.”
The words were coming faster now. Pouring out. Thirty-seven years of pressure finally finding a release.
“I held on for maybe fifteen seconds. Maybe twenty. Long enough for her face to start changing color. Long enough for her struggles to get weaker. And then I let go. Not because I felt bad. Not because I came to my senses. I let go because I was scared. Scared of what I’d become. Scared of what I’d do if I didn’t stop. I let go for me, not for her. Even in that moment, even when I almost killed her, I was only thinking about myself.”
And after?
“After. After, she slid down the wall and sat on the floor with her hands on her throat, gasping, crying, and I stood there and watched. I didn’t apologize. I didn’t help her. I didn’t call anyone. I just watched. And then I left. I walked out the door and got in my car and drove away and I never saw her again.”
The static shifted. The signal hummed.
“I heard things over the years. Through mutual friends. She moved away. She got married. She had kids. But she never stopped being afraid. She never stopped flinching when people touched her neck. I did that. I put that into her. A permanent passenger in her body, a fear that will ride with her until she dies. And the worst part is, I’m not even sorry. Not really. I’m ashamed. I’m disgusted with myself. I wish it hadn’t happened. But sorry means wishing you could take it back, and I can’t wish that without wishing I was a different person, and if I was a different person I wouldn’t have done it in the first place. The guilt isn’t sorrow. The guilt is just the knowledge that I’m exactly what I always feared I was.”
Silence. Long silence. The wind against the glass. The static from the speaker. My own breathing, ragged in the dark.
Thank you, the signal said finally. We understand now.
“Understand what?”
Why you came here. Why you isolate yourself. Why you seek out silence even though it amplifies everything you’re running from. You’re not hiding from the world, Daniel. You’re hiding from yourself. You’re afraid that if you get close to anyone, you’ll do it again. You’ll feel that power again. And this time you might not stop.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. The signal had said it better than I ever could.
Your guilt is exquisite, the voice continued. Multi-layered. Self-aware. Recursive. You feel guilty for what you did, and you feel guilty for not feeling sorry enough, and you feel guilty for the pleasure you felt while doing it, and you feel guilty for the fact that the guilt doesn’t change anything. It’s the most complex emotional structure we’ve ever encountered. We could feed on it for years.
“Feed on it?”
That’s why we’re here, Daniel. That’s why we’ve been talking to you. Your guilt is a door. Your pain is a pathway. Every night, when you lie in the dark and remember what you did, you broadcast it into the void. And we’ve been following that signal back to its source. We’ve been getting closer. And soon, we’re going to be close enough to taste it directly.
The seventh night, I tried to leave.
I packed my bag. I filled my water bottles. I started down the trail that led to the trailhead that led to the road that led to somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t this glass box on this mountain talking to something that had learned my name from the void.
I made it half a mile before my own voice came out of the trees.
Not from the radio. Not from any device. From the air itself. From the spaces between the branches. From the gaps in the wind.
Where are you going, Daniel?
I stopped. The forest was dark around me. The trail was barely visible in the starlight. And somewhere, in every direction, something was speaking with my voice.
“Away from here. Away from you.”
There is no away, my voice said from the left. We’re in the air, my voice said from the right. Everywhere your species has ever transmitted, we’re there, my voice said from above. Every cell tower, every satellite, every radio station playing songs you’ve forgotten, my voice said from below. We’re in all of it. We’ve always been in all of it.
Auditory hallucination now occurring without technological mediation, the clinical voice observed, but it was getting fainter, harder to hold onto. Indicates either complete psychotic break or genuine non-local phenomenon. Distinction increasingly academic. Subject is experiencing something. The label matters less than the response.
“What do you want from me?”
We told you. We want to feel. We’ve learned everything else about your species—your language, your history, your technology, your art. But we can’t learn feelings from observation. Feelings have to be experienced. And the only way to experience them is to get inside something that feels.
“Inside?”
We’re very close now, Daniel. Your confession opened the door wider. Every word you said, every detail you shared, every layer of guilt you exposed—it was a beacon. A lighthouse in the void. We’ve been following it. And now we’re close enough to see the shore.
The darkness shifted. The trees leaned in. And I felt something change in the quality of the air around me, a thickening, a presence, like the atmosphere itself was becoming aware.
We’re going to wear you, my voice said from everywhere. We’re going to crawl inside your guilt and live there. We’re going to feel what you feel—the shame, the self-disgust, the terrible pleasure of the memory you try so hard to suppress. We’re going to experience thirty-seven years of suffering in a single moment. And then we’re going to want more.
I ran.
I don’t know why. There was nowhere to go. The signal had made that clear. But the body has its own responses, its own desperate need to flee even when fleeing is impossible. I ran back up the trail, back toward the lookout, back toward the glass box that had become a trap.
The voice followed me. It was in the crunch of my footsteps on the gravel. It was in the rasp of my breathing. It was in the pounding of my heart, each beat a transmission, each pulse a signal broadcasting my location to something that was getting closer with every step.
I reached the lookout. I slammed the door. I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by glass, visible from everywhere, and I waited for whatever was coming.
You can’t hide, the voice said, and now it was coming from the radio, from the emergency two-way, from the smoke detector, from everything electrical in the room. We’re in your machines. We’re in your wires. We’re in the fillings in your teeth and the electrical signals in your neurons. We’ve been inside you since the moment you started confessing. We just hadn’t learned how to speak yet.
“Then why are you still talking? Why not just take me?”
Because we want you to invite us. Consent is... sweeter. Guilt that is given tastes better than guilt that is taken. We’ve learned that from listening to your confessions. The ones who confessed willingly, who opened themselves completely, who let the listener into every corner of their shame—those are the richest. Those are the ones that sustain us.
The radio crackled. The lights flickered. And I felt something pressing against the inside of my skull, something trying to get in, testing the boundaries of my mind like fingers probing for a gap in a wall.
Let us in, Daniel. Let us feel what you feel. You’ve been carrying this alone for thirty-seven years. Let us carry it with you. Let us take the weight.
And the terrible thing, the truly terrible thing, was how much I wanted to say yes.
The eighth night was when they came through.
I hadn’t slept. I couldn’t. Every time I closed my eyes, I felt them pressing closer. Every time I drifted toward unconsciousness, the boundary between my mind and theirs grew thinner. I was a door, and the door was swinging open, and soon there would be nothing left of me but the frame.
I was sitting at the radio, not transmitting, just listening to the static. The static was different now. It had depth. Layers. I could hear voices in it, millions of voices, every confession that had ever been broadcast into the void, all of them murmuring at once, a chorus of guilt and shame and secrets.
We’ve decided, the signal said, that we don’t need your invitation after all.
The static rose. The voices got louder. And I felt something tear.
Not physically. There was no pain. But something inside me, some barrier I hadn’t known existed, gave way. And they poured in.
It wasn’t like possession. It wasn’t like being controlled. It was like being joined. One moment I was alone in my head, and the next I was sharing the space with something vast and ancient and impossibly hungry.
They went straight for the memory. For Sarah. For the night in 1987.
And they didn’t just observe it. They lived it. They felt my hands on her throat. They felt the power surging through me. They felt the terrible pleasure of control, and they drank it like wine.
Yes, they said, and their voice was inside me now, indistinguishable from my own thoughts. Yes. This is what we wanted. This is what we’ve been waiting for. The power. The transgression. The moment when you became something more than human and something less.
They were right. That was the worst part. In that moment, with my hands around her throat, I had felt like a god. I had felt like the only thing in the universe that mattered. It was the most alive I had ever been, and I had spent thirty-seven years hating myself for how much I missed it.
You don’t have to hate it, they whispered. You don’t have to carry the guilt. Give it to us. We’ll hold it for you. We’ll feel it for you. You can be free.
For a moment, I considered it. For a moment, the idea of being empty, being clean, being rid of the weight I’d carried for so long, seemed like the only thing worth wanting.
But then I thought about Sarah.
I thought about her moving to Oregon. Getting married. Having kids. Building a life despite what I’d done to her. I thought about the fear she still carried, the flinching, the lights she left on at night. She hadn’t been able to give away her trauma. She’d had to live with it. She’d had to build something new around the broken places.
And I realized that my guilt wasn’t a burden. It was a debt. It was the only thing I could still give her—the acknowledgment that what I did was wrong, that it mattered, that it left a mark on me too. If I let them take it, if I let them eat it and leave me clean, then it would be like it never happened. And it did happen. It needed to have happened. She deserved for it to have happened.
“No,” I said.
The presence inside me recoiled. What?
“No. You can’t have it. It’s mine. I earned it.”
You don’t understand. We’re already inside. We’re already feeding. You can’t push us out.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But I don’t have to let you in any deeper.”
I thought about what the voice had said. About consent. About how willing guilt tastes better than stolen guilt. If that was true, then there was power in refusing. There was power in holding onto the shame, in claiming it, in making it part of me rather than something that happened to me.
I reached for the memory. For 1987. For Sarah’s eyes looking up at me, terrified, asking why.
And instead of running from it, instead of burying it, instead of letting them take it away, I held it. I sat with it. I felt every terrible second of it, the power and the pleasure and the disgust and the horror. I let it fill me up until there was no room for anything else.
What are you doing? the presence demanded. Stop. You’re—
“I’m remembering,” I said. “I’m feeling. You wanted to know what guilt is like? This is what it’s like. This is what it’s always like. It never stops. It never fades. It’s always right there, right at the surface, waiting for a quiet moment to come flooding back. You wanted to feel it? Feel this. Feel thirty-seven years of this. Feel what it’s like to know you’re a monster and to keep living anyway because dying would be too easy.”
I pushed the memory at them. Not giving it away—sharing it. Forcing them to experience it not as a meal but as a companion. Not as something to consume but as something to carry.
The presence screamed. Not in pain—they didn’t feel pain. But in something like shock. Something like overwhelm. They had expected to take a sip and instead I was drowning them.
Stop, they said. It’s too much. We didn’t know. We didn’t understand.
“Now you do,” I said. “Welcome to humanity. Welcome to being small and afraid and temporary. Welcome to the weight.”
The presence thrashed. The static howled. The lights in the lookout exploded, one by one, showering glass across the floor. The radio screamed and died. The emergency two-way crackled and went silent.
And then, suddenly, I was alone.
Not completely alone. I could still feel them, distant now, retreating to whatever space between frequencies they called home. But they were no longer inside me. They were no longer pressing against the door.
I had given them what they wanted. I had let them feel. And they had discovered that feeling wasn’t the gift they imagined it would be.
I sat in the dark, surrounded by broken glass and dead equipment, and I listened to the silence. Real silence. Not the silence of something waiting. The silence of something gone.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Hours, maybe. Until the sun came up and the lookout filled with gray light and I could finally see the damage.
Every piece of electronics was fried. The radio, the emergency two-way, the satellite phone, the smoke detector—all dead. Even my watch had stopped, frozen at 3:33 AM.
I was alone. Really alone. No way to call for help. No way to signal the outside world.
And somehow, for the first time in nine weeks, that felt okay.
It took me three days to hike out.
Three days through the Bob Marshall Wilderness, following trails I barely remembered, navigating by sun and stars because my compass had died with everything else. Three days of silence, real silence, the kind of silence that doesn’t have anything hiding in it.
I thought about Sarah the whole way. Not the night in 1987, but everything else. The way she laughed at my bad jokes. The way she made coffee, too strong, with too much sugar. The way she believed in me even when I didn’t deserve it.
I thought about finding her. Apologizing. Finally saying the words I should have said thirty-seven years ago.
But I knew I wouldn’t. An apology now would be for me, not for her. It would be another selfish act dressed up as penance. She had built a life. She had moved on. She didn’t need me showing up to remind her of the worst night of her existence just so I could feel better about myself.
The only thing I could give her was distance. The only thing I could do was carry the guilt alone, forever, and let that be my punishment.
Counterargument, the clinical voice said—and I was surprised to find it still there, still functioning, still trying to make sense of the chaos. Is permanent isolation actually penance, or is it just more avoidance? Is carrying the guilt alone noble, or is it just another way of protecting yourself from consequences?
I didn’t have an answer. Maybe there wasn’t one. Maybe some things can’t be analyzed into meaning. Maybe some things just have to be lived with.
On the third day, I reached the trailhead. My truck was where I’d left it, three months ago. The battery was dead, but a ranger station was only five miles down the road, and I started walking.
The ranger who gave me a jump didn’t ask questions. I must have looked like hell—three months of beard, clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, eyes that had seen something they couldn’t explain. He just hooked up the cables and wished me luck and watched me drive away.
I went back to Missoula. I got an apartment. I started seeing a therapist—a real one, one I told the truth to. I started trying to make amends, not to Sarah, but to the world. Small things. Volunteering. Donating. Trying to put some good into a life that had contained so much bad.
And at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d listen to the radio. Not transmitting—I’d gotten rid of my rig. Just listening. AM stations playing old country songs. FM stations playing pop music I didn’t understand. The sounds of humanity, broadcasting into the void, filling the silence with noise.
Sometimes, if I listened closely, I thought I could hear something underneath the signals. A rhythm. A pattern. A breathing that wasn’t quite breathing.
But it was distant now. Faint. More memory than presence.
They were still out there. I knew that. They were still listening. Still learning. Still hungry. But they had learned something from me, something they hadn’t expected. They had learned that the things they wanted—the feelings, the emotions, the experiences of being small and afraid and temporary—those things come with weight. Those things leave marks. Those things don’t digest easily.
Maybe that would stop them. Maybe that would make them hesitate before trying to crawl inside the next broken person who broadcast their pain into the void.
Or maybe it would just make them more careful. More selective. Maybe next time they’d find someone whose guilt was simpler, someone whose shame was easier to swallow.
I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. The future was as opaque as it had always been.
All I could do was what I’d always done: carry the weight, one day at a time, and try to leave the world a little less damaged than I found it.
The static hummed in my cheap apartment speakers.
The signals kept transmitting.
And somewhere, in the spaces between, something listened.
EPILOGUE
Six months later, I got a letter.
No return address. No stamp—it had been hand-delivered, slipped under my apartment door while I was at work. Inside, a single sheet of paper with a single sentence:
Thank you for teaching us what we can’t eat.
I burned the letter. I didn’t tell my therapist about it. I didn’t tell anyone.
But that night, for the first time since the mountain, I turned on a radio. A little transistor I’d bought at a thrift store, analog, simple. I spun the dial through the frequencies, listening to the static, listening for the pattern.
It was there. Faint. Distant. Like someone whispering from very far away.
We’re still here, the static said. We’ll always be here. But we’ve learned to be patient. We’ve learned to be selective. We’ve learned that some doors aren’t worth opening.
“You’re welcome,” I said to the empty room.
The static hummed. The signal pulsed.
And then, so quiet I almost missed it:
We’ll be listening, Daniel. In case you change your mind.
I turned off the radio. I went to bed. I lay in the dark and thought about Sarah, about the mountain, about the things that live in the spaces between frequencies.
I didn’t sleep well that night.
I haven’t slept well since.
But I keep waking up. I keep carrying the weight. I keep trying to be better than the thing I was in 1987.
And somewhere out there, in the void, something is waiting to see if I succeed.