LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A and Passage B both address the topic of “Voices in the Booth.”
By the time I arrived at WNBR on Saturday
morning, the rain had blurred the
station’s painted call letters into gray
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shadows on the window. I had volunteered
to digitize old recordings for the
neighborhood history project. I expected
to sit alone feeding tapes into a machine.
Instead, Ms. Alvarez handed me a clipboard
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and pointed toward Studio B.
The lobby smelled of wet coats and old
coffee. Cardboard boxes labeled by decade
waited outside the archive room, where I
had meant to spend the morning.
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“Your reader canceled,” she said. “You're
on at ten.”
The script was a two-minute announcement
about a street-tree survey. I knew every
word on the page, but the microphone made
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the words look oddly arranged. Through the
glass, Ms. Alvarez lifted one finger. I
began too quickly, stumbled over canopy,
and stopped. She did not switch off the
microphone. She waited.
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In that pause I heard the station: rain
ticking against the vent, a chair rolling
in the office, the low fan beneath the
control board. None of it sounded
embarrassed. I started again, leaving room
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after each sentence, as if the survey were
a favor I was asking of one neighbor
rather than a notice flung at a crowd.
This time Ms. Alvarez lowered her finger
only when I had finished. “Now it sounds
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like you're talking to one person,” she
said.
Afterward I returned to the archive room.
The oldest tape I digitized held an
interview with a grocer named Mr. Nwosu,
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recorded decades earlier. He described
extending credit to families during a
factory strike, keeping a notebook of what
was owed so that no one had to argue about
bread in front of other customers. His
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voice wavered, and a bus sighed outside
the studio, but those imperfections made
the recording feel inhabited. I could
picture the grocery’s narrow aisle and the
radio on the counter already tuned to this
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station.
Listening, I understood why Ms. Alvarez
had not treated my stumble as a disaster.
A voice that never caught or never shared
the room around it might sound finished,
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but it would not sound as if it had come
from a wet morning on Holt Street. My
announcement would vanish after the survey
ended; Mr. Nwosu’s story had waited years
for someone wearing headphones to meet
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him. The two tasks no longer seemed
separate. Digitizing was not only storage,
and reading on the air was not only
performance; both were ways of handing a
local voice to a listener who might need
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it. Before leaving, I asked Ms. Alvarez
whether I could read again next week.