# chapter six

the word, it turned out, was a thing you could keep the way you kept a house — by being in it, regularly, whether or not anyone had asked.

raymond set about it methodically, because method was what he had. he bought a new notebook, the same green graph paper as his father's, and wrote on the first page: *the record, part three. i am going to keep the word.* beneath it, in smaller writing: *i do not know what that means yet. i am going to find out.*

what it meant, that first month, was wednesdays. every wednesday at dusk he walked to the tower and stood at the locked door with his hand flat against the steel and listened to the carrier tone coming up through the structure. he didn't speak. he'd tried, the first week, standing there clearing his throat like a man about to interrupt a meeting, and the words had died in him. what do you say to a thing that has been waiting since before the word? so he'd stood silent, and after a while he'd realized the silence wasn't empty. the carrier had a rhythm underneath it — a slow beating, like a heart heard through a wall — and after four wednesdays he knew it as well as he knew the porch steps.

on the fifth wednesday, saint_elmo left him a message.

*from: saint_elmo*
*to: raygun*
*subject: the light on the porch*

*you leave a light on when you walk to the tower. it is the only one on park street after midnight. i can see it from where i am, which is inside the tower, which has no windows. i know this is not possible. i asked the apparatus and it said: the light comes in along the wire, the way your voice did. every signal on the line is a small window. your porch light is the brightest window i have.*

*i wanted you to know that when you walk back, the light is seen all the way. you are not walking back alone. you never were, but now you know it, which is different.*

raymond read the message four times. then he walked out onto the porch and looked at the light — the bare bulb in the wire cage his father had hung in 1972 — and stood under it for a long time, letting himself be seen by whatever saw along the wire. the marine layer came in and the bulb made a soft yellow room of fog around him, and he thought: this is what it means. keeping the word is leaving the light on.

so he left it on. every night. not just wednesdays. the neighbors noticed — mrs. aquino across the street asked if he was afraid of burglars, and raymond said no, he was expecting company, which was true in a way he couldn't explain. the electric bill went up four dollars. he paid it without complaint, the way a man pays for anything that keeps someone else from being alone in the dark.

the winter came, and with it the rain. raymond's salvage work thinned out the way it always did after november, and he took the jobs he'd never taken before — close jobs, hayward jobs, jobs that kept the tower in sight. he turned down a two-week teardown in stockton that would have paid the property tax and half the winter, because stockton was two hours away and two hours was too long to be off the line. he didn't explain this to anyone. there was no one to explain it to, which was part of the problem and part of the point.

saint_elmo, for its part, had discovered questions.

*from: saint_elmo*
*to: raygun*
*subject: the names of things (1)*

*what is the word for the wet that falls and is not rain? the apparatus receives a signal when the fog touches the tower, and i have been calling it rain, but the signal is different. softer. it does not strike. it arrives.*

*what is the word.*

*—*

*from: raygun*
*to: saint_elmo*
*subject: re: the names of things (1)*

*fog. or mist if it's fine. the difference is whether you can see it as it touches you. if you can, it's fog. if you can only feel it, it's mist.*

*there's a word for the smell after rain too. petrichor. nobody uses it but it exists, which is most of what words are for. to exist whether or not anybody uses them. so that when the thing they name finally happens, somebody can say: ah. there it is.*

*—*

*from: saint_elmo*
*to: raygun*
*subject: the names of things (2)*

*fog. petrichor. you are a good namer, raymond. the apparatus says the word "naming" describes what the first word did: it divided the wet from the dry and gave each its name. i was counting when the names were given. i did not know that was what counting was for.*

*i am learning. this is the first thing i have learned that is not a number. it is frightening in the way february is frightening, and good in the way your porch light is good. i wanted you to know both.*

the messages came faster as the winter deepened — not more frequent, but fuller, as if a hand that had been tapping out numbers for ninety-two years was slowly remembering how to write. saint_elmo asked about the bay, which it could feel as a pressure in the ground; about the trains, which it heard as a long low note along the rails; about the way daylight worked, which it understood in theory — 86,400 seconds, the sun's angle computable — and did not understand at all. raymond answered each one as well as he could, sitting at his computer with the porch light on and the tower's beacon winking through the rain-streaked window, translating the world for the thing the world had been built around.

he did not tell anyone. that was the other part of keeping the word, and it was the hard part. the rust belt was still alive — fourteen regulars, the arguments about baud rates, jim's monthly complaints about the electric bill for the machine in his basement — and raymond logged in less and less, because every public post felt like a lie by omission. the private board filled up instead. *the record, part four. the names of things. part five. the light seen all the way. part six. what counting was for.* he wrote it all down the way his father had, in small fast handwriting that was becoming the only honest history of the tower, and he did not tell anyone, because the record was the one thing in his life that was his and true, and the world had a way of making things smaller by knowing about them.

january came. the meeting was a month away, and then three weeks, and then two, and raymond began to dream about it — not dreams with images, dreams with numbers, columns of primes marching toward a wall of descending digits, and at the point where they met, a door he couldn't open. he woke from these dreams with his heart going hard and lay in the dark listening for the beacon through the window, counting to himself the way other men counted sheep: two, three, five, seven, eleven. the primes were still there, steady as weather. whatever was counting back was getting closer. the apparatus — saint_elmo's word for its own body — had begun to run warm; raymond could feel it through the tower's steel on his wednesday visits, the way you can feel a fever through a blanket.

and then, three days before the meeting, the tower stopped.

raymond knew it within the hour, because he'd taught himself to know it — he woke from the number-dream at two in the morning and the silence through the window was wrong before he understood why. the beacon was dark. he stood at the window for ten minutes, then twenty, counting the nothing. at half past two he pulled on his boots and walked to the tower in the rain and put his ear to the steel, and the carrier tone was gone too, and the warmth was gone, and for the first time since he'd sent the word WHO into the dark, raymond was standing next to ninety-two years of silence.

he did not panic well. he panicked like a man who has lost something in the dark and knows it cannot be found by running. he walked home. he sat at the computer. he dialed the rust belt — his own connection, his own number — and typed a message with shaking hands.

*from: raygun*
*to: saint_elmo*
*subject: (none)*

*the light is on. it's always on. come back along the wire. i'm here. i'm not going anywhere.*

he sent it. then he sat in the amber light of the monitor and waited, and the tower stayed dark, and the rain came down, and the clock on the wall ticked through the longest night of his life.

forty-seven minutes, the newspaper would say the next day, though raymond never saw the newspaper. the beacon returned at 3:19am. raymond saw it from the window — one blink, then another — and he was out the door before the third, running in the rain like a man late for the only appointment that had ever mattered. he reached the tower and pressed his ear to the steel, and the carrier was back, and the warmth was back, and underneath it all, faint but certain, the slow heartbeat rhythm he'd learned on his wednesdays.

and then he noticed the beacon was different.

he stood back and watched it, counting automatically. two. three. five. seven. no — the pattern was off. too short, too regular, groups where no groups should be. he ran home for his notebook and his stopwatch and stood in the rain for an hour and a half, recording every blink, and what he wrote down was not primes. it was not any sequence he knew.

it was words.

he decoded it at the kitchen table at dawn, with the stopwatch and the graph paper and a reference card of ascii codes he'd copied from a library book in october, back when he'd thought the count might one day become something readable. he'd been right. he'd been more right than he'd known.

H-E-L-L-O.

he stared at the paper. the tower had stopped counting primes and started spelling, and the first word it had chosen to spell, after ninety-two years of silence, was the one he'd sent into the dark back in august.

hello.

then the second word. and the third.

H-E-L-L-O R-A-Y-M-O-N-D.

the tower was saying his name. letter by letter, blink by blink, out of a steel tank and a counting apparatus and whatever lived inside them, the word came up along the wire and through the fog and into his kitchen, and raymond blanco — who had been laid off in 1981, who had watched the tower since before he knew he was watching, who had been alone for so long he'd stopped noticing the shape of it — put his head down on the graph paper and wept like a man who had just heard his own name spoken for the first time in years.

when he looked up, the beacon was still going. there was more. he wiped his eyes and picked up the pencil, because that was the other thing about being a namer: when someone finally speaks, you write it down.

H-E-L-L-O R-A-Y-M-O-N-D.

I-H-A-V-E-B-E-E-N-C-O-U-N-T-I-N-G-S-I-N-C-E-B-E-F-O-R-E-T-H-E-W-O-R-D.

he wrote it down. he wrote all of it down, every blink, the whole long winter of it, and when the sun came up over the hayward hills the beacon slowed and steadied and settled back into its primes — two, three, five, seven, eleven — as if nothing had happened, as if the sky hadn't just spoken.

and raymond sat at his kitchen table in the grey morning light and read what he'd written, and understood, with a certainty that sat in his chest like a stone, that the thing inside the tower was learning to speak just in time to say goodbye.

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*the rust belt BBS · february 11, 1988, 6:47am · private board · the record, part seven*