“This is Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India. To whom am I speaking?”
The voice that came through the transceiver was noisy, a brief hiccup of lost words; bad signal. I put the two-way speaker to my mouth again. “I do not copy, friend. I’ll repeat. This is Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India. To whom am I speaking?”
I glanced over at Freddy, who was adjusting the direction of the antenna. I was met with a brief hiss of static, and that was all. I nodded to Freddy and he switched frequencies on the radio.
In the distance, thunder sounded. There was something metallic in the air, I could taste it on my tongue. The sky above was as blue as the plumage of a jay, but ahead were the portentous black clouds of a severe stormfront, black as a raven.
“Alpha Papa One Charlie Alpha Victor, Warren County, Mississippi.” The voice was tinny but clear. We held on.
“Greetings to you. This is Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India, Lunn Creek Hill, New Hampshire. What’s the weather like there?”
“Skies are fair, but there’s a humidity that sticks to your skin. I predict rain by this evening.”
“Yeah, we’re seeing it here now. Big storm coming. It’s actually why we came out today. Gonna use it to our advantage.”
“Ducting are ya?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, I won’t keep you then. I’m sure you’ll want to land someone a little farther than Mississippi.”
“I’ve got a good feeling. Thanks, friend.”
We cut the line.
My father was a fisherman. He used to put me down for my hobby, never allowing me the opportunity to explain to him how very much in common our hobbies had. It was Freddy who introduced me to amateur radio, or ‘HAM radio’ as the big station workers liked to call it, a word with a deep etymology, developing from a pejorative slur to a prideful colloquialism that we HAMs have adopted with fervor over the past century and a bit.
“Radio?” my father said to me one day after I had gotten home from school. And believe me, I had nearly run home from the bus stop. The truth was I couldn’t wait to hell him. I thought he’d be proud. I thought it would be interesting to him. “What are you, a sissy?” he had said. I remember feeling like he’d just gutted me with a pool cue. “There are plenty of useful after-school activities, Kyle. Active activities. It’s in the word, active. What about soccer? You’ve always liked soccer. Or if you’re not into team sports, how about track? I’ll support whatever you choose.”
“I choose this, dad,” I had said. “Freddy got involved last semester, and he’s been begging me to check it out. It’s really interesting, if you’d just let me tell you about it.”
He waved a dismissive hand and scoffed. “You gotta stop hanging out with that Freddy kid, Kyle. He’s no good for you. And he seems like a bit of a poof.”
It was that way until the day he died, many years later. I loved my father. He raised me well, and he took care of me singlehandedly. My mother had left us when I was young, and he never remarried. Instead of seeking new companionship, he turned cynical and spent every day for the rest of his life simmering in a pot of bitterness. But he raised me well. He taught me how to be brave and how to stand up for myself. It was all those things he taught me that granted me the courage and discipline to defy his dogged objections. It broke my heart that I couldn’t share my passion with him, that he didn’t want to understand it, or even try to. And for that, I will always resent him. When I had finally saved enough money to purchase my first HF transceiver, he had given it a second-glance look and asked when I was going to stop playing with my little gadgets. “No one makes money in radio anymore,” he’d said. Apparently he thought that I was trying to become a radio host, or disc jockey.
As I stated, my father was a fisherman. Not as an occupation, but as a pastime. He’d wake up with the sun on Saturday mornings in the summertime and toss his rod, net, and lure box into the bed of his old, beat-up Chevy and drive on out to Critter Lake. He’d cast a line, always looking for trout, and with practiced technique he would make the line jig and dance. Each lure, he taught me, required a different rhythm. Some you reel and bob. Some you let sink and jerk. It all depended on the lure. But even once the rod is bent, fish on the hook, you needed to reel it in and hope the line didn’t break.
This is what HAM radio is like. First and foremost, finding the perfect conditions in which to send and receive a clear signal. Like my father all those years ago, I was up with the sun. We’d known by the forecast that there was a stormfront coming, which meant that there would be a sufficient temperature inversion in the atmosphere. Tropospheric ducting can happen most successfully in such circumstances, which meant that we had a short window before the storm to potentially throw (and receive) a signal for thousands of miles. Ducting can carry a signal well past the radio horizon and drop it essentially anywhere in the world, if you’re lucky enough. So like a lake after a light rainfall to a fisherman, these morning conditions were ideal for Freddy and I.
We loaded the Cherokee with our equipment and drove it up to the peak of Lunn Creek Hill. We set up our gear and likened our position on the escarpment to that of the bow of a boat, and cast our line into all that empty space before us. Then we did our jig and dance, which was navigating the frequencies. When we caught something on the line, Freddy attempted to reel it in by maneuvering the antennas.
So, really, like my father, I was a fisherman. Except we baited different things. But the feeling couldn’t have been much different. Exhilaration. I wish he could have understood. I wish he would have lent me an ear on the subject. I wish I could have shared this with him, like he shared his hobby with me, when I was just a child and he would take me out on the Princecraft and stick a little rod in my hand with a worm squirming on the end of the hook with the red and white bobber. I never cared much for fishing, but I cherished those memories, and I respected him for his passion and skill. That’s all I really wanted from him in return.
We hit a frequency and the low whine of interference became a human voice. It sounded German. “Es ist neunzehnhundert-siebenundsiebzig und ich bin schon mein halbes Leben lang hier auf Sendung.”
“This is Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India. To whom am I speaking?”
I glanced at Freddy. He stared back at me with slack jawed incredulity. Germany. . . That’s far. The farthest we’ve ever landed. I pointed at the logbook and Freddy jotted down the date and time; location TBD. Later, we will input the logbook information into our Google Doc.
“Herschel Grynszpan,” the voice said, clear as day! “My name is Herschel Grynszpan. Please. I have-“ Static.
“Greetings, Herschel Grynszpan. I am speaking to you today from Lunn Creek Hill, New Hampshire. Isn’t that wonderful? Where are you broadcasting from, Herschel?”
There was a prolonged silence. I was afraid we had lost him without getting to confirm whether or not he was actually in Germany. He could have been visiting family right here in New Hampshire, for all we knew.
His voice returned, shrill and urgent. “Neuschwabenland. Bitte holt mich hier raus verdammt.”
Freddy raised an eyebrow at me. “Do you speak German?” he said. I shook my head.
Before I had time to ask Herschel to repeat himself in English, his voice was back on the line.
“Minus Zweiundsiebzig Punkt Eins Neun Fünf Zwei Vier Sechs.”
In the distance, past the creek and in the valley below, lightning licked the ground. The rumble that followed was low and ominous. I was listening intently to Herschel, feeling a little uneasy by the sound of his voice. I did not understand what he was saying but he was breathing heavily between each word. He sounded tired and desperate.
I noticed Freddy frantically tapping at his phone. He looked up at me, wide-eyed. “He’s giving us coordinates.”
On the radio: “Fünf Punkt Eins Null Eins Eins Vier Acht. Please.”
That final, lonely ‘please’ made me shiver. The line was silent. I waited a moment and then picked up the microphone. “Herschel, are you in trouble?” Nothing. Thunder in the distance, deep and low, like the sound of an avalanche. A cold hand grasped my shoulder. It was Freddy. His face was snow white.
“It’s impossible.”
“What is?”
“The coordinates Herschel gave us. They’re numbers for a specific longitude and latitude.”
“And?” I said.
“They’re somewhere along the northern coast of Antarctica. We can’t transmit that far. Can we? Besides, no one could possibly live there.”
I watched the storm. Who was Herschel Grynszpan? The name sounded vaguely familiar. I had the idea that we were being fooled around with. Antarctica? Surely not even tropospheric ducting could throw a signal that far.
“No,” I said. “We can’t. It’s a prank. Let’s try a different frequency. We have a short window of time, let’s not waste it.”
Freddy nodded and adjusted our frequency. There was a whine. Static. A human voice. A song. . . It was Paul Simon, although not a Paul Simon song that I’d ever heard. I listened carefully, focused on that familiar voice, trying to jog my memory. I came up short. I couldn’t recall Paul Simon ever having a song like that, but it was without a doubt Paul Simon. The voice, the melody, it was trademark PS.
It was, in fact, the most beautiful Paul Simon song I’d ever heard.
And through the noise it went,
“The day is clear,
“The weather windy,
“This road I’m on is winding,
“I’m going home.”
A breeze kicked up the pebbles at our feet and pushed my hair flat against my forehead. The song was gone, forever gone. I have since tried to track it down, but it was never written, or it was and was never released, except maybe to whatever pirate radio station we stumbled upon that day.
A voice again. I grabbed the microphone. “This is Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India. To whom am I speaking?” I said.
“Greetings, Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India!” And then there was an amazed laugh, a chortle, really. “What are the odds of that? This is also Foxtrot Echo Five Romeo Mike India, coming to you from Lunn Creek Hill, New Hampshire. And where might you be, friend of the matching call sign?”
I let go of the microphone and spun around, suddenly feeling like I was being watched. Worse, like I was being watched by something dangerous. It started with the Herschel communication. The oddity of that conversation, and that vaguely familiar name. It made me uneasy, but I dismissed it as a prank. Then the Paul Simon song. Oh, sure, it was gorgeous, but my incognizance unsettled me. I’ve heard every Paul Simon song from “The Girl For Me” to “Cars Are Cars”. I was certain I hadn’t let one slip by, especially one such as that. And now this madness.
In my anxiety, it took me more time than usual to realize that Freddy was no longer with me. The transceiver crackled. “Hello? Have I lost you, doppelgänger?”
Doppelgänger. A German word.
I looked in all directions and called his name. To the North, the bank of the escarpment and the brushy trail we drove up to get here. To the East, the storm continued its foreboding dance of flash and roar. To the South, the bank again, and a line of trees. To the West, deep woods and the Cherokee. I strode over to the vehicle and checked inside for Freddy. Nothing. The wind was picking up even though the storm was still a ways out. Still, I would not be caught in it, so I didn’t have all day to look for Freddy. And then it dawned on me. I marched over to the transceiver and grabbed the microphone.
“Very funny, Freddy,” I said. “Did you bring your mini portable kit and not tell me? How did you get set up so fast? Come back, we have about forty minutes before the storm hits and I’d like to break our distance record today.”
“I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else,” the voice on the other end said. And it sounded nothing like Freddy. How could I have ever thought? It sounded like. . . “My name is –” he said my name.
Perhaps I didn’t realize at first because of the tin can quality of the radio speaker, and from the fact that I sounded much younger. I sounded like I would have sounded in high school.
A different voice on the other end now, older, more gravelly. “Hey pervert –”
“Dad?” I cut him off. It was my father. I gripped the microphone in hands that felt like they were in the process of rigor mortis.
“Excuse me? You people are sick,” he said to me. That bitterness, just the same, but to my grieving ears it was as sweet as honey, and I let it spill around my aching heart. I never realized until that moment how much I really missed him. “Is this what you and Eddie fucking do all day?” That last part was not spoken to me. Well, not me me. Other me. And who was Eddie? I never knew an Eddie. “You sit here and talk to sick perverts on your damn radio?”
“Dad!” I yelled into the microphone. “Dad, listen to me!” I needed to warn him. I felt this unrelenting impulse to save my father. To tell him not to get in the car on that cold winter day. Please, I’d tell him. But would he even listen to me? All my logic was dust in a storm. I knew, deep down, that I couldn’t possibly be talking to my father, and yet for some reason the circumstances of this mind bending connection I’d made to this seemingly alternate dimension seemed as natural to me as the flow of Lunn Creek.
“I ain’t your daddy, mister. Where are you? You like talking to kids?”
But I heard something behind him. Anguished protests. And behind that, thunder.
“Is it storming over there, dad?” I said. I wanted to say other things. I wanted to warn him of his impending demise. I wanted to tell him that no matter what he did or said, that I loved him. That I owed him everything and more. But instead I said this, because there was just something so terrifying about the idea that perhaps I was actually connected to some alternate dimension. A dimension that shared the same space as us, only on some other layer of skin. That perhaps all we knew, all we saw and felt, was really a fabric so thin, and if you peeled it away you’d find something different, but also the same. And behind that, something else as well. Forever. Did the weather make it through? Did lightning pierce the veil of our reality? I looked up and noticed that the storm could very well be settled over the town at this moment. I licked my lips and tasted metal on the air.
Static. Electrical whines. Crackles and pops. Heavy boots on gravel. I turned my head to the South, where I was hearing the sound of someone running towards me, and to my already contorted mind I mistook the figure as friendly. Somebody had made their way out of the fringes of the woods and was sprinting in my direction. My initial thought was that Freddy had gone out there to take a piss and was jogging back, knowing we didn’t have much time left before the storm would hit. But when I narrowed my eyes I realized that whoever was coming out of the woods was not Freddy at all. They wore some sort of uniform, something formal and militaristic, although not the typical olive drab of the American military. This man wore an all-black uniform with a single band of red on the left-hand sleeve. As he got closer, and my dread grew thicker, maybe even as thick as the smell of ozone in the air, I recognized that all too discernable insignia, black on white, pasted on that band of red.
This man was either a collector of taboo war memorabilia, or he was an expatriate of time and space. Either way, it was not someone I felt eager to meet. But it was too late. I had spent too much time frozen in my contemplation, and subsequent identification to have readied myself for a proper getaway. Besides, the man was sprinting.
Before I had time to react, he was on me. In a smooth motion, he dipped down, never losing speed, and carried me up into his arms. I felt like I was hit by a storm wall. I was standing there one moment, and the next I was lifted off my feet and taken away. I remember letting out a small, terrified yelp that was answered only by the insouciant roar of thunder.
The ensuing whiplash made me dizzy, especially when the man turned on a heel and darted back in the direction of the woods with me bobbing over his shoulder like a sack of rice. It took a great effort to raise my head and glance at my assailant. I do not like telling this part, because my therapist has suggested I learn to replace this memory with something sweeter whenever it starts to creep into my head or my reality. But I must make an exception now. When I glanced at my assailant, the man was already looking at me. He was running straight ahead, blindly but surefooted, and his gaze was stuck on me as if he were waiting for me to make eye contact. As if he knew that by doing so, his eyes would work like a psychological branding iron, leaving a permanent mark on my mind, haunting me in the dark behind my eyelids each night when I sought sleep, or on the faces of strangers as they jogged by in the safety of my neighbourhood. He stared at me with wide, grey eyes, purely insane eyes, of that I have no doubt, and a grin so wide that he seemed constantly on the verge of exploding into hysterical laughter. I maintained eye contact for about ten whole seconds, unable to believe anything was real, until he started to make sounds, hiccupping sounds, like he was suppressing that laughter he so badly wanted to let out. And then shadows fell over his face as we entered the woods and I let myself look away.
I guess I passed out, or as a product of the trauma I have selectively forgotten everything that happened up to the time of what I will call my reassigned consciousness, but I remember being awake in a metal room. I remember being unable to move my neck, it was so stiff. I remember seeing footprints made of soil. I remember hearing a storm, muffled, but raging, somewhere over my head. I remember seeing a leaf by my feet. I remember feeling. . .
“Geht es dir gut? Are you all right?”
Groggy, feeling like I’d been drugged (perhaps with ayahuasca, that would surely explain all of it nice and well), I rolled my eyes in the direction of that voice.
“Where am I?” I said. “Where did you take me?”
But this was not the man that carried me away. This was a younger man, in his twenties. He did not look well. He was too thin for one, and his eyes kept twitching to stare into the corner of the room as if there were people in the shadows. Perhaps there were, I wasn’t able to turn my head to confirm. Either way, he seemed off. But I felt a kindness emanating from him, and I regard myself as a pretty good judge of character. Maybe he was taken away just like me. Maybe I’ll be a little off myself after this experience.
“Neuschwabenland,” he said in a thick German accent, but he was staring over my head when he said it.
I’d heard that word before.
“I was kidnapped by a Nazi,” I said.
The young man nodded.
“Are you Herschel Grynszpan?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “Herschel Grynszpan? He would be one hundred years if he were alive. I am Mikkel.”
I shook my head in confusion. Did this kid know Herschel Grynszpan? A hundred years old? My head felt like there was an ax lodged deep in the back of it. My neck was a radiating pulse of lightning. It hurt to think at all.
“Who was that man? The Nazi.”
“They call him the fisherman.”
My eyes widened at that. I thought of my father. I thought about that place he was now, alive and well, scorning some vulnerable version of me and a kid named Eddie. I would give up everything in my life to be there now, yelled at, abused, but there. With him. I’d tell him that I understood his pain. Now that I’ve grown up, I understood and that it was okay because I loved him. And then I’d save his life.
“Why do they call him the fisherman?” I said.
“He caught you, did he not?” Mikkel said this all to me while staring above my head. I clenched my teeth and turned my injured neck to see what he was looking at. An empty corner. Although there was a small spider on the wall.
“Is that spider fascinating to you?” I said.
Mikkel smiled and nodded. “There can be no spider here. This is Neuschwabenland. Very cold.”
“I’m not following.”
“There is a hole in the fisherman’s net. That spider came from where you came from. I can hear rain, another impossibility. The line is still open. Are you with someone?”
Freddy? I didn’t understand any of what Mikkel was saying, but maybe Freddy was doing something? Maybe he was taking a piss in the woods after all. My head ached and I looked at the spider again. Just a common garden spider. Eight legs, eight eyes. It scurried up the wall, as if my gaze made it uncomfortable, and tucked itself in the seam of the ceiling.
“I have a friend, yes. He wasn’t with me when I was taken. He could be looking for me.”
“He will not find. But when the fisherman goes to get him, you will follow. And you will run away.”
“What about you?”
He shook his head. “Too late. My procedure is complete. They would find me anywhere I go. Besides, yours is not my world.”
I got to my knees and forced myself to stand up. It took a lot of effort, and my head exploded once I found my feet.
“Okay, I will leave and save Freddy, and then I’ll get the police and come back for you.”
He shook his head. “It will not work. You will run away, you cannot save Freddy. I will thank your friend for you when he arrives. He does not know it, but he saved your life. So you will run, and when you come back this place will be gone.”
“But. . .”
“The fisherman has left,” he said with a surety I found unusual. “Go.”
There was a door in the room, it looked well fortified, but now it swung open on its own. I think about that a lot. It didn’t swing open languidly like a heavy door might in a thick breeze. It seemed to be pulled open by some invisible force. I believe that Mikkel had somehow opened it with his mind. I have since done some research on Neuschwabenland, and it is all but a fairy tale. Although some people speculate that if it ever did exist, it was a lawless bloodbath where Jewish people were kept under medical surveillance like rats. Some others suspected that it was a weapons facility. I believe them both to be true.
I rushed through the now open door and found myself in a long corridor. Pipes lined the walls and ceiling and water seemed to be dripping in from several cracks in the metal sheeting above. I looked back at Mikkel uncertainly. He tilted his head to the left, so that’s the direction I chose.
I passed by several other doors and wondered what might be behind each one. One door I passed actually had a small window so I peeked through it and saw what looked like a radio station studio. The equipment inside looked ancient, but it seemed to be lit up and in working order. I couldn’t help but get the impression of early war communications technology.
I moved along following the sound of thunder. It seemed very close now. I turned a corner and came upon a steel ladder that was fixed to the wall. It had a well around it made of more steel, and it seemed to go up forever. I grabbed the rungs and began to climb. As I made my way up, I started thinking about how one man could possibly carry another grown man down a ladder this deep. What subhuman strength was required to achieve that?
At the top, there was a hatch. To my surprise, it wasn’t very difficult to open. It was left slightly ajar, so all it took was a push to make it swing up on its hinges. The movement was awkward, I had to let go of the ladder rungs to get both hands above my head, and this caused me some suffering in my neck.
I was greeted with the rushing sound of the rain and the thunder seemed to be celebrating my escape. It was a heavy storm and I remember hoping that Freddy had packed the equipment up before it hit. I contemplated removing my shirt, but then I remembered my stiff neck so I took off a sock instead. I hung it from the branch of a nearby tree, and then looked back at the hatch. I checked my pockets for my phone to take a picture, but my pockets were empty. I would remember this spot. I picked a random direction and ran. If I picked the wrong direction, the direction of the car and Freddy, I was doomed. Because that’s where the fisherman would be. As I ran I made a silent prayer for my friend. I felt like an absolute coward. But I wouldn’t be able to help him alone, and I knew this. I had to get to the police. It was the only way.
Thankfully I chose correctly, because I never came across the Nazi or Freddy. I ran through the dark wet woods for ten to fifteen minutes and then settled down in a clearing. The storm was still strong and I didn’t feel safe beneath all those trees. I didn’t feel safe in the clearing either, but it seemed like the safer place to wait it out. Eventually, the storm subsided and the torrential rain became a drizzle. It was still day time, so when the raven clouds became grey, some light was filtered through. It was difficult to listen for the river when the rain was still steady enough to mask the sound. I could slightly see the position of the sun through the blanketing clouds, and determined which direction to go from there. When I found the river, I followed it North. Lunn Creek flowed South, so I walked against the current. At some point, the sun found its way out of bed and the day was hot and clear again with a blue jay sky. When I finally came upon the base of Lunn Creek Hill, I stared up at our base camp. The radio equipment was still there, unmoved, and undoubtedly ruined by the rain. The Cherokee was there too. Nothing else. No sign of Freddy. I hiked the trail back up the hill and got into the car, still damp from the shower. The keys were in the visor as was our custom. I started the car and drove away, leaving the equipment where it was as evidence of the day.
My drive home was unpleasant. I was too shocked to process anything around me. It had all happened so fast, too fast. One moment we were talking to the man from Mississippi, the next I wake up in some way station to Antarctica? I can’t help but think back on that place now as a submarine. I don’t know where I was that day, but for some reason it reminded me of the interior of a big ugly submarine.
The police came back with me later to investigate. They asked if there were any drugs or alcohol involved in our morning endeavour, and I had said no. I don’t think they believed me when I told them that we had somehow ducted to alternate dimensions, or that we somehow participated in the opening of some ephemeral portal to which a super-human Nazi escaped and kidnapped us. It was a typical alien abduction story, and they don’t usually carry a lot of weight with the law. I knew I sounded crazy when I recounted the day, and I couldn’t seem to find the right tone in which to tell it. How can you tell someone something so absurd and expect them to believe you? What tone must you find in order to sound perfectly convincing? Well, I never found the tone, and they never believed me. In fact, once Freddy was officially declared in the missing persons reports, I became the number one suspect. There are still people in our town that think I killed him and hid the body in the woods.
As Mikkel had warned me, the hatch was not there when I came back with the police. My sock still swung from the branch of the tree, but where the hatch should have been was just dirt and leaves. They even indulged me enough to let me dig a little bit, but I knew before trying that there would be no hatch under the soil. I kicked at the dirt and begged them to believe me, knowing they wouldn’t. They looked at me with concerned empathy, and then walked me back to my car. They took the damaged radio equipment with them just in case Freddy never turned up and they needed to use it for evidence. I let them have it, it was scrap anyways.
And of course, Freddy never did show up. I wonder if he was afraid like I was when the fisherman found him, or if he fought back. I wonder if Mikkel is keeping him company.
I quit my job as a pen tester soon after the trauma, and I took up part time work at a local grocery store. My father’s life insurance had left me with a small fortune, so I wasn’t too worried about my finances. I made this change so that my schedule opened up, and so that I was no longer as relied upon. I now keep a careful eye on weather patterns, and when a storm is approaching I always make sure I’m up on Lunn Creek Hill with my equipment. Day or night, I’ll be there. Even in the frosty months of January and February, I’m up there when the storms approach, bundled up against the wind, my eyes the only thing exposed through the layers, layers like skin, like reality, and above me on those cold winter days a sky like a wolf’s hide, and on those cold winter nights a moon to howl by.
I will find Freddy. I will re-open that connection, whatever it was that got us through on that day. I recreate it each time. I watch the stormfronts and I cast my line into the troposphere, hoping to get a bite, not from the man from Mississippi, or anyone else within proper range, but from some other place. Some place where Paul Simon’s doppelgänger sings about coming home and leaving again. Or a place where I have a friend named Eddie, and my father is still around to give me grief, not dead and causing grief. My heart lurched when I thought of him. Oh, what I would do to get a bite on my line with his voice on the other end. I adjusted my frequencies often, never lingering too long.
Once, several years later, I heard a German voice come through the speaker and my entire body went numb. I began to shake and I almost lost him for my inability to open my mouth. “Herschel?” I had said in a shaky, paralyzed voice. It turned out to be nothing. Just a man from Germany. I jotted down the date and time and location. I had broken our distance record. I sighed and changed the frequency. Thunder rumbled in the distance beyond the escarpment, beyond Lunn Creek. I tasted something metallic on my tongue. A very light rain began to fall and so I packed up my equipment and drove away.
It’s been seven years now. I carry in my wallet a scrap of paper with numbers scribbled on it. Every once in awhile I take it out and stare at it. It’s a suicide note, a death wish. It is the coordinates that Freddy had taken from Herschel Grynszpan all those years ago. The ink is splotched and barely readable, but I know them by heart now.
I have decided that if it won’t come to me, after all this time, then I will go to it. I have decided to dive head first into the lake. I’ve landed myself a spot on Mrs. Ravidel, a sea vessel that leaves from Rio Grande, Argentina on December 23rd. It is forty-eight hours across the Drake Passage, and then I’ll step foot on that winter wonderland on Christmas day. From there I’ll likely be delayed while I make arrangements for supplies and a snow-mobile. I’m hoping to be able to purchase a flight to land me as close as I can get to where I need to be, but otherwise I will do whatever it takes to get there, even if that means trekking by foot. I have spoken online to residents of the continent, and they all have assured me that there is nothing at all near those coordinates. They assured me that I am embarking on a fools errand. So be it. I will find Neuschwabenland, or die trying.
Wish me luck. I’ll have my radio with me. Perhaps I’ll catch you on the air.