Numbers stations are high powered low frequency radio stations that broadcast repetitive messages consisting of strings of digits and letters. They are thought to be tools of the spy agencies of world powers, and some countries have obliquely acknowledged this fact. Listening to them is illegal in the UK. Some of them have been located by enthusiasts, and found to lie inside military garrisons. At least two of them are unofficially named after popular folk songs, because bars of the corresponding melody proceed the transmissions. The transmissions occur at regular intervals, and hobbyists have produced schedules.

Low frequency radio reflects off the upper layers of the atmosphere, and consequently a signal produced by a single ground based station can theoretically traverse the globe.

The whine of my kitchen light is a thin straight chain, cold and hanging heavily downwards. It vibrates unsettlingly, but with a very short range, like a cricket chirp prolonged for minutes on end. My right ear is suffering, is pained by the sound, and my right side is turned toward the kitchen.

I am munching rice dry, which I understand is sometimes used as a training technique by sumo wrestlers. The toughening of my intestines is an exciting possibility. On the other end of the equation: appendicitis.

Why is it that lately, I can't get out of my mind the cliffs along the Tennessee river, and the waterskiing trips my friend's father would take us on, so agonizingly early in the morning? We tried always to arrive while the water was still smooth. It was almost like red eye gravy in the mornings, thick and fragrant, hot from the hot august nights, and still as flat glass. The flatness would carry sounds far sometimes, and when the engine was still you could hear the lapping of the small waves on the red clay shores, or the guffaws of distant fishermen. There were other sounds unaccountable, caused by the unobservable actions of the timid water, which was surreptitiously occupied on all sides of the boat, into the far distance.

The worst part ( I am forgetting about the cliffs ) were those moments when you were in the water alone, waiting to be pulled up. Then you were helpless, and you had all the anxiety of your vulnerability summed with the impending roar of the boat engine, and the eyes of those in the boat, watching you rise or fall. The rope would go tight, and the power of the river would be felt all around you, inhumanly strong. The only escape was to slide upward, to stand aright on the sliver of wood beneath you, to somehow slide through the resistance, and gain balance above it. Then the water became progressively harder beneath you as the boat sped up. If the driver were inexperienced he would accelerate for too long, and the churning spume beneath you would solidify into limestone, and shake you mercilessly down, back into the foam, striking you as you came, as if in punishment for your arrogance.

The cliffs were slices out of the mountains, as if pieces of them had been removed like pieces of cake. The deep verdancy of the outside of the mountain would seem as skin, alarmingly different from the stone interior of the suddenly real geology beneath it. It looked like a grievous wound. The strangeness of it seemed absolutely alien when put together with the tableau of water on which we insecurely rested. The cliffs came down into the water, and conspired in weirdness with it, two occult forces in parlance in the always just-away distance, inaudible and suspicious.

The saddest man I know works down the hall from me, on the fourth floor of a very old academic building. He's a lecturer in mathematics, a privatdocent in the modern sense, which is to say, the title retains its suggestion of low salary, but doesn't confer the old sense of intellectualism. The lecturers at the college where I'm a graduate student are generally a sad lot, stillborn academics or educated housewives looking for a diversion. They are essentially professional TA's, teaching low level math classes to the slackjawed, and enjoy neither the respect of the faculty nor the glint of future brilliance which shines from some of the graduate students. The men among them are particularly strange for their acceptance of their lower caste position, politely ignored in superficial conversation with other members of the department. It is, in short, a pathetic job.

What's funny is that the saddest man is on the surface the most depressing representative of the class to which he belongs, moping slumpshouldered down the halls, and riding the elevator with downcast eyes, a copy of Math 101 pressed under one well chalked arm. But lately in the instances where he meets my eye, I've begun to notice something else. He has a certain precision of speech which he summons on demand to season certain points he wants to emphasize, and this version of himself--the version lost in high speech--seems completely separate from the man as a math instructing drone. Here he has penetration, which one sees is repressed, like a knife sequestered in a coat pocket, during his day to day affairs.

He loves a woman who works downstairs, an Audry Hepburn type, aging as he is, though still desirable. It's hard to say if his unrequited passion for the aging vixen, you'll have to take my word that's a fair description, increases or diminishes him. Part of what I suspect is that he is a deliberate romantic, that he has thrown himself upon the drudgery of his life as an act of deliberate sacrifice. His vocabulary and strange phrasings bolster the theory that his career means little to him, that it's just a shield for a passion that lies somewhere hidden. The averted eyes and faculty snubs do not touch him, because the world inside the old building is not the real place he lives and works; it represents nothing of him and he wears it like a cowl, an inverse Scarlet Pimpernil. I think he looks out from behind his bleared blue eyes with the knowledge that he is a child with his face pressed against the inner surface of a transparent cell, and I think even as the old face sags, he smiles.

my enemies

It's an absurd thing about the world that a person, however harmless, accumulates enemies. For me, the last two weeks have been a bumper season of new additions to my enemies list. It seems like new ones accrue every day, like pollen falling on the windowsill, or boxelder bugs congregating on my door this November. In fact there may be some gothic connection with the boxelder infestation and my new enemies.

This morning I was walking, alone, in a transition area between the bucolism of a suburban neighborhood, and the hell-like strip of a busy street. I have an embarrassing tendency to walk in the very center of the road. It's not something I mean to do, I just find myself there--I suppose it's the place to walk that I enjoy the most, if there are no fresh fallen leaves to drag my feet through along the sides. Occasionally I was passed by a car of some sort, usually one of a gentle, meandering disposition.
Whatever can influence an individual in the apparent sanctum of their vehicles seemed not to be present in any of the drivers I had observed heretofore. But abruptly, this rule was violated, when a black pathfinder appeared behind me, and drove by me in a strange way.

I was reminded of SUV commercials in which the driver must quickly avert some emerging danger, usually caused by lightening. The driver of the black pathfinder drove in just such a way this morning as one might use to avoid a boulder, or a deer, crashing or leaping unexpectedly into the roadway. But I had been plainly walking in the road, in its very center no less, for hundreds of yards. It was hard for me to understand how the nearness of the truck as it passed could have been anything but intentional. Then it occurred to me, even before my pulse rate had regularized, that I probably had another enemy on my hands.

As things happened, traffic was congested enough that I eventually passed the truck again on foot. The model was new, and clean, and the windows had some kind of platinum tinting like one sees on the visors of certain vintage model space-suits. It was simultaneously nauseating and pleasing, a very neat job of something I associate with crushing banality, and poor aesthetics. Inside the cab there was an unbathed woman, or so it appeared at a glance. She was abusing sportswear, in the sense that she was patently unfit, but was nonetheless wearing sweatpants, as though they could be worn for the purposes of fashion.

I think she had been dreading my approach, and when I arrived, she wasn't totally unprepared. Her face turned towards mine, and her lips manifested a Pressly-esque snarl, which I intuited was meant to be dismissive, indicating that she knew just what I was about to say. That she might have known was entirely possible, but I was baffled as to how she could act wrongly with such idiotic insouciance. Her radio was blaring, so I was in the position of needing to speak very loudly and distinctly-- I ended up sounding like one of the MC's at a boxing match. At first I only offered only advice. But as she refused to entertain my comments, turning her head away, my suggestions became less reasonable, and more vitriolic. By the time traffic shifted and we parted ways, we had indubitably become true enemies. My heart sank slightly as I realized that this was the case, since everyone wants to keep their enemies to a minimum.

Every time I make a new enemy, my mind is unsettled. This is disturbing for anyone, but for me it is especially irritating, because it prevents me from being able to do my job--mathematics--while walking. For me to calculate in my mind I need a very relaxing setting, one in which my conscious awareness of the real world fades to black, and brightly colored symbols can be manipulated. Any kind of confrontation freezes me in the real world, and it can before hours before I'm able to slip back into my little black domain.

Later, I was reading The Sheltering Sky, the scene where Port dies of typhoid. I was affected by the descriptions, and the stress of acquiring my new enemy, and I started to experience a twisting feeling in my own entrails, weirdly similar to what the character was experiencing. This became steadily more painful, and eventually I was actively controlling myself to prevent others, seated around me, from noticing my discomfort. It seemed like someone was tossing my intestines with salad tongs, and the pain would come so suddenly and with such unexpected ruthlessness that once or twice I grimaced and flinched before I could steady myself. I began to visualize tendrils of cancer spreading out into my viscera and coiling around my lower spine like wands of hemlock.

What this episode means, I have no idea. It was one of those situations in which I was feeling no anxiety that I was conscious of, but anxiety was still present, as if it were an objective property of my body of which I could be unaware, like its specific hardness, or precise temperature. It attends me in a different aspect, this physical response, every time the register of my temporal foes increases, as if it were a daemonic warning against making adversaries. Still I seem unable to stem the flow, and experience suggests I could make a new enemy at virtually any moment.

This relates only my most recent enemy; there are others, much worse, who I have to encounter on a daily basis. Cheating students. The guy from the cafeteria, who performs a taunting dance akin to the Locomotion when I come into view. All of these things make my life more difficult, and I wish they could be changed.