Susan and I spent an hour yesterday morning in the waiting room at St. Vincent’s East Outpatient Surgical. It wasn’t our first visit, and likely not our last. The place was clean, quiet, and comfortable—the kind of quiet that feels padded, as if someone wrapped the world in cotton.
Most of the people there were around our age, a few perhaps younger. Some sat with spouses, others alone, but every single one was hunched over a cell phone. The entire room glowed with that cold blue light that makes faces look ghostly.
Nobody spoke. Not to their neighbor, not even to the receptionist. The only sounds were the buzz of the fluorescent lights and the soft tap-tap-tap of thumbs on glass. I’ve sat through my share of silences in my life—in hospitals, on fishing docks, at funerals—but this one was different. It felt hollow.
Susan was filling out a form, her reading glasses sliding down her nose. I leaned back and shut my eyes for a moment. That’s when I heard it—a faint murmuring, like someone whispering through an old radio just below the range of ordinary hearing.
I looked around. The television in the corner was muted, the receptionist busy at her computer. Nobody else seemed to notice. I tugged out my hearing aid, thinking it might be feedback, but the whisper grew clearer when I did.
It wasn’t one voice, but many. A shimmer of overlapping conversations, every syllable half-formed, as if words were trapped inside a storm. When I put the hearing aid back in, the sound vanished. I decided not to mention it to Susan. She’d only give me that look that says, You’ve been tinkering with too many old radios again.
When they called Susan’s name, a nurse led her back for her procedure, and I was left alone among the phone people.
The whispers started again almost immediately. I got up and walked toward the vending machine. In its polished metal front, I caught a reflection—not my own, but the faint outline of someone standing behind the row of chairs, watching. I turned around. Nothing there.
The reflection vanished too, replaced by the warped image of my own face. I felt that old tingle in my fingertips—the same one I used to get when a radio signal was about to come through. Back when I worked at the station, I could always tell when a frequency was right. The air had a certain pressure to it, like the world holding its breath. That’s what the waiting room felt like now.
I stepped outside to the car and dug through the glove compartment until I found my little portable AM radio. It’s been with me for decades—black plastic, half the buttons worn smooth, but it still picks up a signal like a charm.
When I turned it on, the dial hissed with static. Then the whisper came through stronger than before—a jumble of human noise, like dozens of people talking at once, each too soft to make out. I turned the knob slowly, and every frequency was the same: no music, no talk shows, just those whispers.
That’s when I realized the voices weren’t coming from the radio. They were coming through it.
Back inside, the waiting room was just as I’d left it, except maybe quieter. The nurse who’d taken Susan back was staring at her tablet, mouth slightly open, eyes blank. For a moment, I thought she might have stopped breathing. Then she blinked and looked up at me, dazed, like someone waking from a dream.
I tuned the radio again. The static built, rising to a low hum. The lights overhead flickered. A man across the room dropped his phone and rubbed his eyes. A woman near the window looked up, startled, as if hearing sound for the first time in years.
The whisper grew sharper, hungrier. I could feel it feeding on attention like oxygen.
So I did the only thing I could think of. I tuned the radio to a dead frequency—one often used to calibrate antennas—and began to hum. A low, steady note. The sound spread through the room like a ripple in water.
That broke the spell. A few others laughed quietly, embarrassed. Someone coughed. The sound of real conversation returned—hesitant at first, then natural, like a muscle remembering how to move.
A few minutes later, the nurse called my name. “You can come back now—she’s in recovery.”
“Oh,” I said, “quiet as a tomb. But I made a little noise.”
She laughed and squeezed my hand. I kissed her forehead and helped her get dressed. Before long we were driving home through the late-morning sun.
I kept the radio on low volume. For a while, all I heard was static. Then, faintly, a voice whispered—soft and far away:
“We hear you too, Listener.”
I smiled, shook my head, and turned the dial until I found a gospel station. The choir’s harmonies filled the car—rich, imperfect, and human.
Out the window, cell towers lined the highway like iron cathedrals, their red lights blinking in rhythm with a world that never sleeps. Susan dozed beside me, her hand resting on mine.
And for the first time in a long while, I felt the silence between us wasn’t empty at all—it was alive, and listening.
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