73: “That’s good, Peter, . . .”
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres,” Chapter 4 concludes
[Because ten days have passed since I posted the beginning of Chapter 4, you may want to reread that post before continuing the chapter here. EK]
“That’s good, Peter,” said Mr. Beaker, beaming. “Now you have a goal. Of course, a radio like this is a little beyond your reach, but it is a good sign, I think, that you set your goal high. Now let’s see if we can bring it down to a point where you can, if you extend yourself, if you really stretch out, grasp it. How would you like a small radio that you could keep on a bedside table at home? If you were to begin working at odd jobs—”
“I already have a radio on my bedside table at home,” I said. A great many emotions had run through me while Mr. Beaker had been talking. First, there was passion, a passion that I could not express because there was no acceptable object for it. Then there was fear, the fear that the passion would be discovered if I didn’t hide it somehow. Next there was pride, pride that arose when Mr. Beaker told me that a radio like Gumma’s was a little beyond my reach, as if he were saying that a woman, a grown woman like Eliza, was a little beyond my reach. And then there was surprise, for I discovered after I had said it that I really did want a radio like Gumma’s. I now burned with a desire for such a radio, so passionate a desire that it surpassed anything I had felt for Eliza.
“Ah,” said Mr. Beaker, “but suppose that you were to build a radio yourself. That would be something quite different from the radio that you have at home.”
If I were responding to that remark now, I would say, “No, it wouldn’t, Dudley. It would be essentially the same: it would be the same in purpose and in function. It would pull in the same frightening programs about shipwrecked boys, the same music, the same comedy programs, and I have no doubt that it would pull in the same annoying static. I know why you said what you did, Dudley, and I’m surprised, surprised and disappointed, for I know that what made you make that remark was the same crazy idea that inspires those people who praise a thing—a dining-room table, say—simply because someone has made it himself, attaching to it a value that is not derived from any improvement in form or function over any other dining-room table, a value derived merely from the way in which it was made. What did you take me for, an idiot? I may have been just a kid, but I could see, even then, that any radio that I would build for myself, if I could even imagine building a radio for myself, would differ from the little Philco at home only in being a sloppier job.”
At the time, however, I said, “I want a radio that gets different programs.”
Mr. Beaker began an elaborately simple explanation of the way a radio works, apparently thinking, from my remark, that I imagined that the programs I heard on the radio came from within the radio, and that a different radio would, simply because it was a different radio, play different programs.
“Dudley,” interrupted Eliza, “I think you misinterpreted Peter’s remark, and I think you’re underestimating his understanding.”
“Oh?” said Mr. Beaker. “Am I, Peter?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What I meant is that my radio at home can’t get all the programs that this radio can get.”
“Oh, well—” said Mr. Beaker.
Ah, Beaker, I wish I had you here now. The conversation would be considerably different today from what it was then.
“As I see it, Dudley,” I would say, “a radio is a lot like a pair of ears. With my ears, I can’t hear everything that there is to hear. For one thing, my ears aren’t sensitive enough. Some things are too quiet for me to hear most of the time—for instance, the cat’s stomach. Usually, I don’t hear the cat’s stomach at all, but if I lie on the floor and put my ear right against the cat’s stomach, I can hear a sort of wheezing and rumbling.”
“That’s not a good idea, Peter,” you would say. “Cats generally have fleas—”
“There’s another example,” I’d interrupt. “Fleas make noise too, but we don’t hear them. Little bits of dust crashing into each other when they float in the air would make a hell of a racket if we could hear them.”
“I see what you—”
“Other sounds,” I’d say, firmly, “are too far away to hear. My equipment—my receiving set of ears—is not powerful enough to pick them up. You and I and Eliza, while we were sitting in the living room that New Year’s Eve, knew that Gumma and Guppa were probably laughing and telling stories or playing bridge at the same time, but we couldn’t hear their laughter or their stories or the snap of the cards, could we?”
“Of course not. We—”
“And in the farthest reaches of the heavens, in distant galaxies, stars were exploding, but we couldn’t hear those either, could we?”
“No.”
“And, more important than any of that, something was happening to Albertine at that time, at that very moment when you and I were going on about the radio, someone was talking to her, or she was thinking about something, or dreaming about something—something was happening to her, Dudley, that would contribute to making her the sweetie she is today, and we didn’t know anything about it. There was no apparatus that would allow us to tune in to the Albertine Show and find out what was happening to her.”
Heh-heh-heh. Oh, I am rolling now, Dud. I can feel myself taking the upper hand, I can feel your grip loosening with each word. Where was I? I did sensitivity. I did power. Range. Range.
“Finally, Dudley,” I would say, “some sounds are outside the range of frequencies of sound that my ears can pick up, just as—”
“Calm down, Peter—”
“—just as some stations were outside the range of the little Philco. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
But at the time, Mr. Beaker just went on and said, “—then what you want is a shortwave radio.”
“I do?” I said, playing the part of naive child as well as it has ever been played.
“Yes, of course,” said Mr. Beaker. “With a shortwave radio, you will be able to pick up conversations among people all over the globe. You’ll hear the babble of many tongues. You may even pick up a few useful phrases.”
He was right, and I knew it, and the prospect of making contact with all the mysterious people out there sold me at once on the idea of a shortwave radio, a radio that would allow me to eavesdrop on the conversations of people in all the quaint countries I had heard about, people whose habitual preoccupations I had come to understand from the phrases that I had heard repeated about them, phrases that classified them according to their national passions: Japanese beetles, French bread, Irish coffee, Spanish fly, Mexican jumping beans, Chinese checkers, British steel, German beer, Russian roulette, Canadian sunsets, Turkish taffy, Swiss cheese, Italian loafers, Polish jokes, Hungarian goulash, Cuban cigars, Siamese twins, Panama hats, Greek statues, Dutch uncles.
[to be continued on Tuesday, August 24, 2021]
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