His name is David Margolis. Present tense. I'll fight you about it.
He ran Margolis Video for twenty-two years. Only store in three counties allowed to keep its doors open inside the Quiet Zone, because tape and disc run on frequencies the government decided it could live with. That was his joke. “We're legal because we're obsolete.” He'd say it to anybody renting a VHS in the year of our Lord whenever, and they'd laugh, and they'd come back, because where else were they going to go.
By day he rewound other people's movies. At night he listened to the sky. He had a thing about the big dish out past the ridge. The Big Ear. The radio telescope the whole Quiet Zone supposedly exists to protect. Most people in town never give it a thought. My dad gave it every thought he had. He said the official story didn't add up, that you don't black out four counties and post a sheriff at the line just to keep a telescope's ears clean. So he kept a pirate rig in the basement and he listened on the bands they tell you are empty.
He found things on those bands. I grew up falling asleep to the sound of him not finding nothing.
then one morning the store didn't open.
No note. No car at the bottom of anything. No body, which the sheriff's office somehow held against him, like a man owes you a corpse. They landed on a word for it eventually. A soft word. A moving-on kind of word. The town said it, exhaled, and went back to pretending the dish is just a dish.
I was the one who didn't exhale. I got the store and the obsession in the same week and I have not set either one down since.
A few years back, while the show was still on the air, there was a whole production about him. Maybe you remember it. Finding David. An “alternate reality game.” They scattered USB drives across twenty-three states, stood up seven phone numbers, mailed people little pendants. Fifteen thousand strangers on a Discord, working the worst thing that ever happened to me like a Sunday crossword.
I'll be fair about it. Some of them were kind. Some of them really did love him, the way you can love a man you only ever met as a puzzle. And they got close. Closer than the sheriff ever bothered to get. They pulled a real coordinate off the last transmission. Latitude came in clean: 39°47′22″N. The longitude came through scrambled, backwards, wrong, and the show went dark before anybody turned it around. Phone line seven was static that the sharp ones swore had a voice under it. Then the network said “hiatus” and cut the feed, and fifteen thousand people stood around an unfinished thing, and one by one they drove home.
They needed a studio's say-so to keep looking. I don't. He was my father, the rig is in my basement, and it never stopped catching him.
I think he was right about the dish. I think he got too close to whatever the quiet is really for, and I think it took him. Not killed him. Took him. Somewhere I can almost tune in to and never quite reach. I know how that reads. I've heard exactly how it sounds, played back at three in the morning off a reel I should not be able to receive at all.
Here's the part I keep off the front page. The radio talks back now. Not often. Not clean. And there is something on the band that has learned to do his voice, and it is good at it, and on the bad nights I cannot tell which one of them I'm listening to. That's the worst sentence I know how to type. I typed it anyway.
So I check everything twice. I pin what I can stand behind. And I leave the porch light on, because he used to come home late, and force of habit is about the last loyal thing I have got left.
come on, Dad. one clean signal. /B