Valencio paused. He stood still, and the street flowed around him: the eurythmic drone of taxis and limousines caressed him. He felt their muddled vibration in the marrow of his bones. It was, he knew, the common seduction of neon and halogen light, the subjective whisper of expensive, shiny nothings on display in boutique windows. Halsted Street offered the kind of designer life hawked on late-night television and in the pages of self-help books endorsed by gluten-intolerant talk show hostesses. The throb of belligerent ennui bled from a clotted string of nightclubs at 140 beats per minute, but he needed something slower: the opposite of tedium and less solitary than a book, anything—he thought—calibrated to the 70 beats of a human heart at rest, a human relaxed. He held his breath and listened. On nights like this, the city always told him where to go and what to do. If he listened. He was good at listening. Sometimes. He listened. You’re not like the others Jacoby said, once. I like a man who listens; I like to try and learn what listeners hear, and it’s hard, Valencio, so incredibly hard to meet a real listener. He’d smiled at that. He’d shrugged. But I can’t speak English as well as you. I have to listen. If I don’t, I get lost. You’re a listener, Valencio…even in Spanish. Especially in Spanish. Your ears, I think, are like two Borges stories, stuck to the sides of your head. He opened his eyes and fell into the noise, rhythms, and the wordless agenda of Halsted Street. There was only movement because that was all the street ever demanded. Valencio measured his forward steps and tried to time the rhythm he always felt. It throbbed—as always—in the spaces between his toes. It was always there, pulsing at a sustained 140 beats per minute; the dance clubs here were synchronized metronomes, bringing people up to speed. But his particular requirements were different, tonight, and this different agenda drove him to the Belmont Avenue intersection, and onto public transport— —and off of the train in a quieter region of the city, where he’d walked—on spring nights—along the lakeshore: where he’d walked on that one, pivotal night (three months ago, or was it four?) with Jacobi. He recalled the whisper of shallow waves, breaking on the sand. He’d taken off his shoes and his socks, and he’d walked—with Jacobi—watching the brightest of the stars; they were silent and indifferent to the city beneath them. And he’d felt the grit of sand between his toes. Later, he’d felt Jacobi’s fingers, brushing it away, and his touch had been as gentle as the tickling brush of a cat’s whiskers in passing. Playful, naughty kisses followed. Now, in expensive sandals with thick, rubber soles, he felt nothing more than the quiet walk along Sheridan road: past the facades of convenience stores, coffee-houses, and the bland anonymity of apartment stacks as retro-bleak and as grubby as the 1970s. He thought of nothing as he cut onto a side-street, into an alley, and onto the lid of a dumpster giving him improvised access to one particular fire escape. He climbed to the roof, and when he felt the grit of it underfoot, he caught an acrid whiff of cigarette smoke—as he knew he would—and the wan, nacreous glow of a laptop screen. “Hola Valencio. Yo sabía que ibas a venir.” Hello Valencio. I knew you were coming. Jacobi spoke decent Spanish. In the darkness, he was a vague, disconcerting ghost, but Valencio picked out the contours of his features, limned in dim, orange-tinged, near-silvered night-glow: lean features, dark eyes, skin in the shade of aged mahogany. Handsome, Valencio thought, seeking the shadows of Jacobi’s eyes in the wan, almost-hepatic night. He sat, before a laptop with the shape of an improvised antenna at some distance behind him: the skeleton of a kite, Valencio thought, though he had no idea what kind of a kite might have required a metal frame, buzzing and humming with strange, cosmic energies. It might have been an old thing: something you’d see on a grandparent’s rooftop, but Valencio knew that it was something else: the frame upon which Jacobi hung his more complicated and arcane desires. “I knew you’d be here,” Valencio said, tasting the mass of the whole Iberian Peninsula wedged into his words. His English, no matter how much he practiced, would never match the poetry of Jacobi’s native inflections. No matter how skewed his accent—in English, at least—Jacobi (he knew) might never care. “Did you now...?” “I needed to see you.” “I’m glad you came.” “I need to hear what you’re listening to. I need to hear it with you.” “Jupiter.” There was a smile in Jacobi’s voice. “He’s saying a lot in the 21 MHz range; more than I’ve heard in the past few months. Io is shaping the noise.” A planet and one of its moons in complicated, intimate conversation. Valencio crossed the small distance between them and sat on crossed legs, beside Jacobi. Their shoulders touched and he turned his head in time to feel the gentle press of Jacobi’s kiss on his lips. It had been two days since they’d last seen each other, and the kiss spoke—eloquently—of that time in mutual isolation: an eternity of two days. Weekends always broke their solitude, and the Friday night crowds on Halsted Street were the first signs that the weekend had arrived. The rooftop and Jacobi’s Moxon antenna were the promise of an eloquent silence that would last until the first, dark hours of Monday morning. Valencio felt the antenna behind him: a compression in the air, charged—it seemed—with some alien plasma, popping and crackling just beyond the range of human perception. A thick, black cable snaked down the antenna support pole; the complicated anatomy of its head drew power from a black, cubicle shape: something of a car battery for the way it struck the eye; but there had to be another name for the thing, in English, because batería de coche couldn’t capture the essence of a power source keyed to the presence of another planet. Thinner coaxial cables snaked into a cryptic box of alien circuitry: Jacobi’s improvised low noise-block converter. Radio Shack technology, he called it, but now, in the city-tinged darkness as orange as faded sodium-vapor light, Valencio thought of it as the sleek retrofit of some improbable UFO gadget. Cold to the touch and maybe radioactive. Cables snaked from the ports in Jacobi’s laptop, and the flat LCD screen flashed with dancing blobs of red and green, like the sort of floaters he’d see when pressing his fingertips to closed eyelids. Phosphenes. Virtual light. Jacobi knew a lot about those things too, and—again—Valencio questioned his own interpretation of those words. A series of tabs announced open windows with names like Radio Sky Pipe Pro and Radio-Jupiter Pro 3. Others were little more than strings of enigmatic alphanumeric code that might have been spells and charms ripped from the pages of an alchemical text. All thoughts vanished as Jacobi shifted beside him, placed a pair of headphones over his ears, and then—in one fluid motion—rearranged himself so that Valencio slid easily into an embrace (from behind) with Jacobi’s chin at rest in the hollow of his right shoulder. In this way, it felt as if he wasn’t wearing headphones at all, and was listening instead, to Jupiter-noise, breathed—in a whisper—from Jacobi’s own throat in the sustained key of 21 MHz. He closed his eyes and leaned back, feeling Jacobi’s chest pressed against his back. He toyed with the faint hairs on Jacobi’s arms, and listened to the beach sounds and the popcorn sounds, and the metallic whale-chirps of Jupiter, writing its name across the night. “I’m recording,” Jacobi said, his voice distorted by the headphones and Jupiter-songs bleeding into the depths of Valencio’s ears. Valencio smiled, slid his feet from their nestle in his sandals; roof-grit bit into his heels and the faintest waft of the night cooled his soles and breathed into the heated crevices between his toes. He felt the slow, sliding motion of Jacobi’s sock clad foot, caressing the hairs of his shin, and though they remained dressed, he knew—deep down, in the marrow of his bones—that this was the lovemaking that would last until those harrowing, dark hours of Monday morning, before sunrise. And Jacobi was recording its jovian component: a soundtrack for playback on later, lonely nights. He had a number of Jacobi’s .wav-recordings, saved in his iPhone: digitized memories of rooftop nights and the amatory spark of provocative kisses swimming through the beachfront/popcorn/whale noises of another planet, tracing its slow, lonely orbit through the cold depths of interplanetary space. He listened. He felt. And lost himself in the promise of a perfect, summer night. * I’d intended to write something slightly different for this month’s Writer’s Gallery Challenge, but this is the story that came, instead. The topic was “A Perfect Summer Night” and…in thinking about night-time in the city, this is what oozed from my creative pores, while visiting Corey. Life in the 21st Century has become indistinguishable from the science fiction of the past, and so it’s hard to classify this story. It isn’t science fiction in that it’s an emotional story about human connection. It’s a romance, if anything, and yet the method of that romance comes at us through an antenna calibrated to the range of 15 MHz up to a practical limit of about 38 MHz. A number of different antennae are able to pick up decameter transmissions from Jupiter, but “Moxon” is an impressive word; it works well in fiction, thus Jacobi uses a Moxon antenna here. And yet, the story is about them and not the hardware that facilitates their connection. There may be more to this story, as there are other deep-sky radio sources within range of home-made Moxon antennas. It would be interesting to explore the convoluted radio-frequency narrative of the universe…but I’m not sure of how other such stories might be written. But there is the tale you’ve presumably read a few moments ago. I suppose it’ll have to do. For now. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.