He keeps a list wadded in the depths of his front, left pocket: where he holds his keys, and the forgotten/abandoned shell of a lone pistachio. The list is his biography, written in the shape of Argentine Spanish: Yo vivo. Trabajo. Me gustan los tomates en verano. Yo amo a mi novio. Nos besamos. (Mi novio chupa mis dedos de los pies.) Las estrellas cantan sus canciones. Escucho. Mi nombre no es Eduardo. Vivo con Jacobi ahora. His pants are wadded, now, on summer-warmed hardwood; his shirt is draped over the back of a cane-back chair, the most incongruous of antiques in Jacobi’s tech-nerd lair. Headphones clamp his ears, and fill his head with the lisping whisper of interstellar hydrogen, broadcasting itself at a neat 1420 MHz. Bedroom is the wrong word for a place like this, despite the sorts of furnishings one might expect. There is a bed, a dresser, a bookshelf and two nightstands cramped with magazines, graphic novels. An alarm clock gives the arrangement a touch of asymmetry. One corner of the room is cramped with a mad-scientist’s array hardware: scopes and recorders…science lab surplus gleaned from more than a dozen eBay auctions and dumpster dives. It is the bedroom of a listener, and Valencio has dipped his toe in the strange sea of Jacobi’s arcane hobby. There are times, he imagines, when Jacobi sits in the old cane-back chair, reading data from laptop and desktop screens: pale blue/white shapes (like voiceprints) on an indigo background, scored with the lines of a grid. Alien voices lurk within the data, even if alien is nothing more than the sound of hydrogen, the synchrotron wail of some distant black hole, or the tide-flexed dyspepsia of Io, tracing its orbit around Jupiter, trailing vaporous sulfur. Valencio thinks of a simplified honeycomb as he reads the near-occult data-shapes on what Jacobi calls his Number-One screen. An errant tune wafts through the background of his thoughts— Ground control to Major Tom… —as he swims through the sudden realization that one wall of Jacobi’s bedroom (and his own bedroom, now) looks like the control module of some old, NASA moon-rocket. He’d met Jacobi at random, on the way somewhere else. He smiled during that first meeting and returned Jacobi’s probing, inquiring gaze. Their first night (with snow wafting down on brittle currents of late-winter air) carried the scent of sweat, their own bodies, an acrid doodle of Monoxynol-9, latex, and amatory friction. They’d been strangers before that first night, and after, they carried the taste of one another in the meat of their tongues. They’d been careful in the way that they did things, and it was three months before Valencio had even seen the collapsible Moxon antenna that Jacobi carried (in secret, and at some risk to himself) to the roof on nights when the need to hear things drove him to seek out Earth’s companion planets, or the radio-noise of trees in some distant park. There were ways to hear the radio noise of people as well: the infrared signatures of body heat, but Jacobi’s concerns lay in what he called the deep sky. Out past Earth halo of debris and satellites. Out past the moon. It was a year before they moved in together. Control de tierra al Major Tom… He laughs at the instinctive translation unspooling in his mind: the words carry a different, rakish poetry in the language he has spoken, at his childhood home in Córdoba. But it fits—now—in the cane-back chair (his shirt draped behind him) as his eyes scan the images that Jacobi has taught him to read. When the spaceships come, he’d said to Jacobi months ago, we’ll see them here, won’t we? We’ll see spikes on this graph. Space is big, Valencio. It’s more likely that we’d miss them completely. So you aren’t looking for spaceships. You don’t care if you never find ET. It might have been a question. He cannot remember. But Jacobi’s answer caresses the inner edges of his memory, as clear and as real as Jacobi’s presence beside him: I looked…I listened, when I was younger. I’d be a liar if I said that I don’t care if we never find them. I’d like to find them now; but it’s more important, I think, to listen to what’s actually out there. Hydrogen…hydrogen everywhere, whispering at 1420 MHz; it’s the name of the universe, written across itself. We’re in that sound, somewhere, and maybe that’s why I listen. You can hear Io, orbiting Jupiter and modulating the noise of Jovian radio storms. And maybe you can hear something similar: the whole Milky Way Galaxy, shaping the radio noise of local space, telling anyone with ears enough to listen that there is a galaxy and in that galaxy is a world, and on that world are people. I can’t say how it might work, or how we’d pick it up, if it worked at all; but I’d like to find a reflection of ourselves in that constant, lisping noise. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll find myself there…and you standing next to me: little-bitty infrared signatures, swamped in the fugue of existence itself. If I’m lucky, I’ll find every human story ever lived, reflected in the shape of the universe itself. I wanted to be an astronomer, when I was younger; but things changed. Life turned in other directions and I write code, instead. I still love astronomy, and maybe it’s because I’m looking for something else…a signpost a beacon, not of an alien society, but of our own place in the largest and most unexpected of homes. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense to anybody but me, but it’s why I listen, and I’m glad, Valencio, that you’re willing to listen with me. I’m glad that I don’t scare you, and I’m glad—damn glad—that you sleep with me every night. The cane-backed chair creaks with his motion; the sizzle of intergalactic hydrogen wafts through the headphones: the intergalactic lullaby Jacobi has saved in .wav format. Pale toes curl under and scrape the crests of their nails against age-darkened hardwood. He feels the presence of protective varnish, faintly scuffed. The air is thick with the redolence of incense. Sandalwood. Or was it ambergris? It was something Chinese: jos sticks in a small, red box with brush-stroke calligraphy on its face. Ground Control to Major Tom… David Bowie provides the night’s incongruous refrain; a visual echo of that song lives in the data-shapes on monitor screens, in blinking telltale lights in the colors of burnished ruby, emerald, and cobalt. Valencio doesn’t touch either of the keyboards, the toggle switches, or the old-fashioned knobs like the kind he remembers from his grandparents’ radio. He simply listens to recorded noise, as if some alien code might lurk within the hiss and occasional, warbling squawk. Jacobi is in bed, behind him. Alseep. A clock in the lower right corner of the laptop screen announces the time. 3:38 am at the beginning of a rainy Saturday. He has listened, long enough, he thinks, to the whisper of deep, deep space, and so he silences the rakish siren song and sends the laptop into sleep mode. The hint of an ache whispers through the flesh of his left calf. He has kept one position for far too long, and he shifts, now, removing the headphones and leaving them at rest beside the laptop. He stretches, glances around. There is a haze just beyond the window, an odd, light night-fog recalling a London he has never seen. “Sleep,” he says to himself, stretching, pushing the cane-back chair closer to the jumble of equipment. He pads to the foot of the bed and crawls in as softly and as quietly as he can. Jacobi is awake, however, a faint smile on his face. Valencio returns the smile as Jacobi extinguishes the bedside lamp. The night is momentarily alive with a prolonged caress, kiss, and purring sigh of erotic affection both given and received. It burns slowly, turning itself into a warm, soft cuddle. There will be sex: later, when they’re both more awake. Now it is enough to simply spoon with Jacobi and to listen to Jacobi’s breathing. The sound differs in its softness and its intimacy from the whisper of intergalactic space. The sound is comforting. Warm. Valencio snuggles back, brushing his foot over Jacobi’s shin in the one gesture that is theirs alone, and for a short time, Valencio hears only the silence of the night and the rhythmic, oarsman-stroke of his own heartbeat. Neither of them says anything. There is no need, and silence is an easy language between them. Valencio closes his eyes… …and listens to the sound of Jacobi breathing. * Upon finishing the short, story “Deep Sky Radio,” I discovered that there were more elements of that particular story thread to follow. After completing “1420 MHz,” I realize that there is still more to write. Perhaps I’ll do it soon: perhaps not. Amateur radio astronomy is one of those fields of study that doesn’t get much attention; until recently, I wasn’t even aware that there were actually amateur astronomy groups. I assumed that like the scientific discipline itself, radio-astronomy hobbyists were solitary: a bit like writers, and I suspect that they are—to a degree. I’ve certainly seen no Amateur Radio Astronomer parties listed on MeetUp, or in Chicago-local newspapers. A bit of research shows that there are amateur radio astronomy clubs, and all sorts of nifty papers, tutorials, and in-person discussions covering topics like building your own radio telescope out of cardboard boxes (not advisable for rainy days) or how to get a feel for your home-brew telescope by counting the number of hot plates people might be using in any given area. Fun stuff, actually. The account of amateur radio astronomy (listening to recorded hydrogen noise at 1420 MegaHerz) is a bit stylized, with some of that romance-kind-of-stuff thrown in, but there is some truth in the tale. One can pick up quite a lot using a Moxon antenna, or even a satellite-dish purchased on eBay. For the more hands-on sorts, it’s possible to build your own radio telescope using a surplus dish (they’re cheap) a garbage bin, and the assistance of a dog. I don’t quite know how that works, but a dog figured prominently in the how-to photos I saw posted on…you guessed it…an amateur radio astronomy site. None of that figures prominently in this story, and yet it is all a part of this tale. Jacobi doesn’t use a dish telescope, as far as I know, but he does have a collapsible Moxon antenna. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.