STATION TO STATION

When you were in your early teens, decades ago, you would stay awake long after everyone else was asleep, long into those still hours when the house was full but felt empty, its bones ticking and creaking, and outside your windows the night pressing in.
You’d listen to music or radio, worn orange foam over your ears, hand holding your Walkman, thumb poised ready to fast forward or rewind, or to roll the tuning wheel from station to station.
Sometimes you’d get interference, and you were never sure if it were a distant station on AM or your headphones acting like an aerial and picking up a stray signal from somewhere far away. Orchestral music, ghosting in and out, voices in languages you couldn’t understand, harsh electronic tones that whined and faded. In those early hours in those confused, painful years, you took comfort in this world outside the boredom of your home, the confinement of your village, the horrors of your school.
Then one night, a little ident tune, Radio Moscow’s broadcast out to the world, static, a sighing sound, silence, voices talking in another language, and then one saying your first name, over and over, with urgency. You sit up, then laugh at the coincidence, and then it says your full name and you stop laughing.
The voice tells you to watch out for a red door with a yellow number on it that is a multiple of seven, and tells you to never ever walk through it. Then it fades into static and is gone.

Decades later, you have not encountered such a door. But you are convinced that one day you will, and you know that no matter what, you will not go through it.