private show.

She doesn’t know why she keeps the mic on. No one is listening. ​ Outside the window, the gray sky rests heavy on the buildings. Suffocating. Like the final gasp of each casualty has stayed in the atmosphere. She can’t imagine anyone listening amid all this. She must be keeping the mic on for herself, then. So she’ll stay sane. So she can pretend there are people left to listen. ​ The commercial break is ending. The countdown on the last ad slips from six seconds to five— She doesn’t know why she keeps playing the commercials either. —to four to three— Maybe for a sense of normalcy. Nothing says normal like O’Reilly Auto Parts. —to two to one— ​ “Welcome back,” she says into the mic. She’s perfected her on-air voice. Low but not too low, gentle but assured. She used to think of herself as an auditory lighthouse, her voice guiding the partiers and late-workers home in the night. That was when her show spanned across the midnight hours. She picked up the shift despite her friends telling her it was crazy—maybe because they told her it was crazy. There was something romantic about predawn radio, though, she thought. Broadcasting to nothing except maybe, possibly, perhaps a person also afflicted with insomnia, or coming into the city from a long trip, taking a drive and searching for some music, stumbling onto the college radio station at the left end of the dial and hearing a real person that was also awake. Sharing that moment without ever meeting. She liked to imagine her lighthouse voice giving them comfort in the dark. ​ Now she has all the hours, day and night, to herself. She still has her lighthouse voice, but she doesn’t think there’s anyone left to guide home. Not after this long. ​ “You’re listening to 88.9, WERS, at Emerson College,” she says, because it’s the top of the hour, and the station heads make it seem like the FCC will personally bite her head off if she doesn’t recite the legal ID every hour. Hours don’t really matter anymore—neither does the FCC, or the station heads—but, like the mic, like the commercials, she does it anyway. To pretend things have order. ​ “If you have any requests, give us a call.” ​ She recites the phone number by rote. It’s lost the jaunty excitement that someone might call. No one has called in weeks. Just silence ever since the news announced that the country’s population had been halved only two months after the first confirmed case. ​ “Coming up, I’ve got ‘Private Show’ by Black Marble, and next—” ​ Her words hook in her throat. What is next? What could possibly be next? She was about to list the tracks she queued up in the CD player, a big boxy thing that holds three discs at once. The track timers blink at her. She had carefully added the minutes and seconds together, so the songs will bring her to the quarter-hour, and then she’ll play the pre-recorded PSAs, right on time. That’s the way her shows are: planned to the second. Does that matter anymore? Does she need to do it? ​ Maybe not. But it’s all she can do. If she doesn’t do something, she’ll go crazy with the sheer emptiness of life now. She’s finished what schoolwork was available, even after her professors stopped emailing back. The campus closed months ago, but there was nowhere for her to go. No one noticed when she moved into the station. No one was left to notice. The cafeteria kitchen in the building is stocked, the plumbing and electricity still work, so she’s physically able to survive, if the loneliness doesn’t consume her first. ​ The phone line lights up. ​ Her eyes snap to the flashing light on the left side of the board. It winks at her, once, twice, and she can’t move. It doesn’t feel real. Three flashes. ​ Four. ​ Autonomy returns to her and she lunges for the switch that places the call on-air. She’s supposed to warn a person that they’re speaking live, but the prospect of hearing another human voice—real, alive—other than her own is enough to make her forego the process. She switches the phone line on and shoves the fader up as high as it will go, wanting to hear each word as loud as possible from the studio speakers. ​ “You’re on WERS,” she manages to say into the mic, despite her throat being drier than plywood. She wants this to sound normal, like any call into the station on any day, because if she treats it like it’s normal, maybe everything will follow suit. Maybe the cities will come alive again, maybe stores will open, maybe she won’t be holding her breath to listen to the only real voice she’s heard in weeks. “Hello?” A gasp shoves its way from her chest. “Hello,” she says. It’s such a beautiful word. “Hello.” ​ The voice is low, male, though a pitchy crack turns his first word into two syllables when he says, “Oh my God.” It’s low, male, though a pitchy crack turns his “oh” into two syllables. A short, rasping breath over the speakers, and it fills the studio with static but she doesn’t care. She closes her eyes as he repeats: “God. Christ. Hi. I thought the station was automated until I heard you, and I didn’t even know if I’d get a signal anymore but—” ​ He coughs, a horrible, raking sound. ​ She reels back from the mic on instinct, even though she can’t be infected through the speakers. Panic raps on a snare drum in her chest. He’s got it. He’s got it. The thing that’s been felling populations. The thing that’s brought the world to its knees. She doesn’t know what to say. Her father died faster than they could quarantine him, and even if he had been in the hospital, she wouldn’t have been able to visit him. Not even family are allowed in to see patients. There would be no funeral. That brought too many people in one place, the notifier said, sounding distracted by the hospital ambiance in the background, the echoed coughs behind him. She didn’t have money to fly home, and traveling was a suicide mission by then, so she asked that he be cremated and held her own service. Quietly. Alone. She’s gotten good at grieving alone. Her mother has been gone for years, her friends aren’t answering her texts or calls. She knows they’re gone too, and she knows this man will be gone soon enough as well. ​ “I don’t know where,” the man says, filling in her silence. “I mean, no one knows where they got it, right? But once I realized, I, uh, I started driving. I wanted to see the ocean again.” ​ One second. ​ Two. ​ Three. ​ “Please,” he says on the fourth. “Please, can you say something?” She tries to keep her voice from trembling. “Yes. I’m here.” “I just—” His breaths come high-pitched and sharp, like quick violin strokes. “There’s no one else. I haven’t heard anyone in weeks and now—now you.” “Now me,” she repeats quietly. “I just wanted to talk to someone. I don’t have—I’m not—I...” ​ They both know. They saw the headlines. The progression of symptoms, how much time a victim has. First the fever, then the chills. Uncontrollable shaking, difficulty breathing. Coughing up blood and bile and eventually choking on it. He sounds close to the last one. ​ “Do you want me to play a song for you?” she asks, praying he’ll say yes and she can stop listening to his lungs fall short of their purpose. “No,” he says, fast. “I just want to talk to someone. Please.” ​ She almost says she can’t. Almost cuts the line. She doesn’t want to hear someone die. But she wants to leave a man to die alone even less. Her father died alone. She couldn’t make it to him, be there when he needed her, but she can be here for this man. Can’t she? So she swallows and asks: “What do you want to talk about?” ​ “Anything. Anything but this.” “Okay.” She keeps her eyes straight ahead, staring at the freshly painted studio walls. People started wearing masks before the chemical smell faded. “Did you get to see the ocean?” “Staring at it right now. Parked by a wharf.” “Good. Why...why is it so important to you?” He laughs, which turns into a cough. “I grew up on the water. We had a sailboat, but had to get rid of it when we moved.” “Did you go out a lot?” “All summer. You ever been sailing?” She shakes her head even though he can’t see. “No.” ​ He sighs, and it almost sounds happy. “You can stand at the very end of the bow and grab the railing, ‘cause if the waves are big enough and you time it just right, you can jump when the bow goes up over a swell. It feels like you’re floating for a second. Like zero gravity. But it’s only a second. And you just wait for the next wave and the next, trying to feel that forever. I spent hours up there, until my hair was all stiff from the salt spray.” “That sounds nice.” “It was,” he says. “You know, it really was.” ​ She tries to say something else, but coughing drowns out her voice. Deep, aching coughs, and the sound of something wet coming up his throat. Choking. She has to pull the slider down just to hear herself think, though she’s not thinking much. She’s just trying not to cry. It’s taking everything she has not to hang up, but she can’t let him die alone. ​ “I’m here,” she says, then louder, trying to rise above the hacking: “I’m still here, you—you can tell me more about the ocean! How old were you then? What was the boat’s name?” ​ She keeps asking questions, keeps shouting even though there’s silence and all that rings out is her tinny voice from the headphones discarded on the table. She swipes away tears that make her fingers slip on the fader as she tries to turn it off, until finally the button goes red. ​ “I’m sorry,” she whispers. The foam mic cover itches at her skin as she touches her forehead to it, eyes closed. Tries to find herself again amid the chaos. ​ What else is there to do? She raises her head and looks at the clock. She still has four minutes till the quarter-hour. Enough time for a song before the PSAs. ​ She turns back to the mic. ​ “I don’t know if anyone’s listening,” she says. “But I’m here. I’m still here.” ​ A deep breath. ​ “Here’s ‘Private Show’ by Black Marble.”