Greenland or Indonesai
Stephen Hastings-King

What I remember is that sometimes I woke before dawn to hunt for Greenland or Indonesia. I listened through ceramic World War II headphones to my shortwave radio, moving a vertical line in tiny increments between the numbers that were arrayed along the glowing arc of the world, trying to locate the space where Indonesia or Greenland would hide in a landscape of static.
I listened with a continuous expectation of a moment of audio voyeurism. I imagined myself a hidden participant in all the rituals, intimacies and spaces of people who lived in tomorrow morning or three hours from now. I waited to slip away from my bedroom across a pathway made from fragments of pop songs and traffic reports into another world by merging with what shaped that world’s sense of simultaneous being.
So I would reach my attention into landscapes of static. I searched for something in the background that might become audible through a transient opening in the tight plane of black lines in motion shot through with Morse code, speeding clusters from telex machines and an ambient roar like waves or the wind. I searched for an opening that would admit of distance. When I found one, I filled it with imaginary traces of voices in Danish mingling with the sounds of automobiles on Sarawak.
I never found Indonesia or Greenland. I only found impenetrable walls of noise that were periodically interrupted by the sideband voices of lonely men that repeated like beacons in the night:
"Hello. Hello. I am here. Can you hear me? Are you out there? Hello. Hello."

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