Alison Littman - Radio Underground

“I’m solely a person in jail who will not get the delivery of justice,” the voice said. It belonged to a female, I gesticulated from the supple contours of her tone. I think she reached the age of at least my mom’s.

“I am bemuddled by the procedures here,” I told her. “Will I survive?”

“I know what I did,” the woman voice said. At this point, I pondered the potential that she was unhearing. I also pondered maybe she had surrendered to psychosis.

“I do not know how long I’ve lived here, but I am certain I will remain,” she said.

This was someone who evaporated from her mind how to converse. She stored up her time conversing with herself or the wall. Never under-esteem the power of isolation. I persevered to unlock her phrases, so that they could further me toward freedom.

“It’s been nine years,” her voice took on the most calm warmth that had emitted from her yet. It was so strange, Uncle Lanci. “The day the secret police arrived at my doorstep, I endeavored to become nothing.”

I surmised she was telling me her story and she wouldn’t halt.

“That’s all I aspired for. To melt into the nothingness and become it, without ever seeing the disaster I made. When I did it, when I melted, that’s the junction in time they came for me. I lost my weight in resistance when my husband realized I was nothing, and he threw me at them.”

I scarcely comprehended the breadth of her words. I understood though, which meant the more improved part of her brain had spoken. When I peppered her as to the explication of why her husband gave her to the police, she informed me he pretended for too long she was someone else. But, in truthfully, she never altered her state. Not even for one hour. He finally saw her for herself, which was nothing. This is what she endeavored, however, if you reminisce. I was following in a circle with her, but she was leading.

I asked her how it is she became a person who created amends with her stay in that petite capsule.

She said, “I am secured when no one else can view me. I belong where no one else lurks. To yield pleasure from others would only be taking because I have furnished them with nothing. I inhabit this planet of capsules, where I can grow nothing. I can be nothing.”

Not in one single moment did her husband or daughter approach her in jail, she said. She said the people who accustomed to thinking about her no longer foster her in their heads. They adapted into busy people whose brains contain sparse room for the person underground who has no one, is nothing.

It was that junction that saved me. That junction when I informed myself that I am mandated to reemerge from beneath this surface so that I can be in Adrienne’s life. I became aware of who I was, and it determined who I would become. I will become only the most superior deliverer of everything Adrienne wanted. That’s precisely what I desired. In my immediacy to commence my life, I peppered the woman voice with questions regarding my fate.

“Are we stationed here forever?” I asked her belovingly.

Drifting toward me was the most brutal inhaling and exhaling that has ever corrupted my ears. She was laughing. But this laugh was composed of one hundred percent vinegar, the honey joy completely depleted from it. I predicted she was trying to elevate herself above me with her laughing. But, she could not deceive me. I knew how hollow her inwards must be.

“No,” she said through the horrid effluence of icy, shrill laughter. “You, not forever.”

At the very outskirts of hope, I was thrilled she responded to me.

“They will fail to obtain you for a long amount of time. Those in your capsule revolve in and out. No point in staying.”

Oh! Was that the news my petite heart pounded for? Oh, I became so immediately enamored in those words. How is it I placed my trust in this woman, you are wondering, Uncle Lanci? Because, if I didn’t, I would have assumed I would sludge away my life in that capsule forever. It would be a life without life. Adrienne would transform her heart into the hardened pavement that is mine. So, I informed the woman voice I elected to believe her.

“You’ll remain for a day, maybe twice,” she informed me. “Night helps.”

“Why does night help?” I inquired.

You cannot even envision what night is for the woman, Uncle Lanci. She informed me that at night, she hears your radio station playing from the ground above her.

I realized I was conversing with the person whose maneuverings sent Andras and I flittering away like petite babies from the ministry. At this junction, Uncle Lanci, everything appeared before me, and then it started to choke me. I became powerful and meek simultaneously.

“It’s my radio show… the one you listen to,” she said.

“Oh, our radio show. We all own it,” I told her, instantly taking back in my mind the communist sounds of that genius line.

“No, you mistook me. It was my show,” she said.

Isn’t that obscure, Uncle Lanci, she could be saying this when I was quite aware of you taking the role of voice on Radio Free Europe?

I informed her of my bemuddlement and that you, Uncle Lanci, were the DJ of Radio Free Europe. Not her. Maybe she would heed the authoritarian notes of my declaration.

She said further: “Your Uncle Lanci is Laszlo Cseke, and he subsumed the role after everything happened, after what I did transported me here. And it transported him to Munich.”

She harrumphed. It resembled a thud, but it came from her interior. She is aware of your existence, Uncle Lanci! What a nebulous connection I had formed between myself and you. But, then she said something that incited me into more bemuddlement. She said:

“Laszlo is the reason I am in here.”

If you are viewing these words, you may choke back on the piece of sandwich you are undoubtedly devouring. So when you surely hark up a piece of that sandwich, understand I tell you this because now you must tell me what you can. Are you really responsible for this person? Please explain to me what is happening, if you can make that possible.

I wanted to learn more of her, but another word failed to emit from her lips that night, and I soon fell asleep to the tinkering of my brain as it made out all the possibilities, hopes, and horrors my life would now assume. At some junction (my capsule was minus windows, so timing is murky), the guards altered and the new ones skid through. I had sunk asleep, and now they awoke me.

I picked up the guards’ noises as they invaded her (the woman’s) capsule. They conversed with her like she was a petite baby, informing her of their power to compassion her. They’ll feed her, but I heard no food happening. They spit on her, because I heard fluid bursting forth from their teeth. At the height of their taunts to her, they asked her what she possessed for them and if they would like it.

They dragged her past my cell, and I closed my eyes pretending I slept so I didn’t have to be part of it. They went only three capsules down, and when I peered my head around the corner, I could tell they had entered the cell with the big window. Light flickered through the entrance of the capsule, and I wondered, for one miniscule second, if perhaps they were donning upon her the opportunity to look outside. And then the most worse noises that have ever entered my ear did so, no matter how persistent I had been to stop it the entirety of my life. Belts flipped outward and juggled to the floor. Boots skudded and skin skudded and things skudded… the sounds of forcefulness. Of horridness.

I heard a wheeze-full sigh, and a large thud encountered the wall. Another thud happened, but with another sound , you withstand… the sound that is similar to boots, after it rains, squishing against a wet floor. The noise proliferated the atmosphere. It labored forth for three minutes like someone trudging through a puddle and belaboring something against the wall simultaneously. I heard clinching, whimpering, wincering, groaning, and another thud.