Mysterious Numbers

Being a kid is exhausting, especially when you are hanging with your best friend. As the sun set, Mark and I settled down in his bedroom for a sleep-over. We got our pajamas on, and I hopped up on the top bunk of his bed.  Looking down, I pointed to what I thought was a radio on his nightstand.  It was about the size of a Merriam-Webster dictionary.

“Mark, what’s that?”

Mark picked up the sizeable leather-wrapped radio from his nightstand and put it next to himself on the bed.  “It’s my dad’s shortwave radio. You wanna see how it works?”

My eyes widen as I answered, “Yeah, what does it do?” 

“It gets radio stations from around the world. Just the other day, my dad got some radio stations from Japan or China.  It was so cool!” 

No longer interested in sleeping, I ask, “Can we try it?” 

“Sure.” Then Mark pulled out the radio’s three-foot antenna and turned it on. 

Under the shadows of the bunk bed, you could see the radio dial started to glow. Mark slowly turned the dial with the deft hand of a safecracker. Eventually, his diligence produced feeble voices rising up and over the steady static. 

We heard French, Spanish, Japanese voices stream out of the large speaker and directly into our imaginations.  In wide-eyed wonder, we listened.  After a while, we adlib the foreign voices we heard with contorted faces and exaggerated movements.

We keep dialing.  Laughing and kidding each other until our casual dialing uncovered something unexpected.  Something ominous. Maybe something even dangerous.

With the intonation and accent of a proper British butler, a methodical voice called out numbers.  That’s all, just number after number, “One, thirty-nine, forty-two…”, and on and on.  At first, we found this humorous, creating caricatures of the English aristocracy in sync with the reading of these numbers.  But we keep listening, waiting to catch the punchline. We listened and waited and waited. The mysterious gentleman never altered his tone or pace; “sixty, twenty-nine, seventy-three,…”

Our giggles receded into puzzlement.  “Mark, have you heard this before?” I asked.  

“Nope, this is weird, really weird!” 

A silence of thoughts raced over our faces as our imaginations sizzled like a fuse.  Was it a secret code?  Had we tapped into a spy network? Were we receiving numbers directly from outer space?

“Mark, maybe we should write these numbers down?” 

He gathered paper and pencils and began to transcribe the endless string of numbers.   As his hand started to cramp up, I took over.  Pages and pages of blank paper filled up with quickly jotted numbers.  Eventually, both our hands gave out, but that voice continued and on and on.  “Sixty-six, eleven, eighty-nine,….”

We went over the reams of notes to see if we could decipher what we had written.  To see if we could find a pattern.  All the while, the mysterious stranger’s voice continued.  “Fourteen, seventy-seven, fifty-four” …..  Would it ever end? 

It never ended.  Eventually, we turned the volume down and settled in for the night. 

We laid in our beds, looking up into our dark room.  Our minds were percolating, and our ears perked to the endless stream of numbers emanating from the shortwave radio.  Our eyes grew heavy under the faint glow of the dial light. 

We dreamt of a vast ocean of numbers rhythmically lapping the shores of our minds, surging then receding, leaving only a puzzle piece or two on the shorelines of our consciousness. 

When we awoke, the shortwave radio sat silently on the nightstand, its batteries expended.  The normality of that Sunday morning contradicted the strange event that had occurred the night before. If it wasn’t for the reams of pencil scribblings, we might have convinced ourselves that it had never happened.

All that Sunday, Mark and I worked hard to decipher the numbers. We transposed the numbers into letters. 

Nothing. 

We arranged them into columns like we had seen in the puzzle book to see if some answers would present themselves.

Nothing.  

We put our scribbled sheets onto a dartboard and took random shots to see if chance would lead us to a solution. 

Nothing!

We rode our bikes to the drug store to purchase more batteries for the shortwave radio and then carefully loaded the new batteries not to disturb the dial.  We turned the shortwave radio back on. 

Static. 

Try as we might, we could never reach the mysterious gentleman again. He was gone forever.

We attempted to duplicate every detail, the day of the week, the time, and dial settings.  But the message was gone.     

In time, life intervenes, and mysteries fade but are not forgotten. We could never look at that shortwave radio again without hearing the perfect voice repeating those random numbers and wondering, always wondering.   

There is beauty in a mystery.  Mysteries encapsulate the excitement of an unopened gift. A secret is like a dark doorway that holds either nothing or everything.  That night taught me that life covets many truths and simultaneously poses an infinite number of unanswerable questions. 

Let me ask you, how many times have you looked upon the world around you and ask “Why?”. 

Does the futility of seeking and never finding brings a smile to your face? If so, you are an intrepid traveler who finds surprise and wonder around every corner.

Upon the troubled seas of questions and answers,

only the arrogant believe

that for every hook,

there is a fish. 

On that night long ago, Mark and I went fishing and caught nothing, caught “no thing” but landed the joy and power of eternal curiosity.  

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