Playlist for the Dead Air

Ray Mata got out of his Corolla outside the warehouse on Wythe Avenue and checked his teeth in the rearview mirror. He was forty-four years old and about to audition for a machine. He figured he should at least have clean teeth for it.

The text from David Lazarus had come in three days earlier. "Need a voice for a pilot station. Real human, real voice, one hour on air. You in?" Ray had read it four times. He did bar mitzvahs now. He did dental conferences, where the client wanted ambient spa music and a man to announce raffle prizes without any personality at all. A voice for a pilot station sounded like the old life calling him back.

He locked the car and walked to the door. The building was huge, black brick, and the only light came from a sign that said SYNESTHESIA in lowercase letters that glowed a soft purple. Ray thought it looked like a yoga studio that sold juice cleanses.

The door was unlocked. Inside was a converted warehouse, exposed brick everywhere, long desks with monitors on them, beanbag chairs nobody had sat in for months. It was 10:47 on a Tuesday night and the whole place was empty except for one desk lamp near the back, and under that lamp sat David Lazarus.

David had gone gray at the temples and thick around the middle but he still had the same crooked grin he'd had at NYU, back when they were nineteen and splitting a pizza three ways and arguing about whether the Ramones mattered.

"Look at this guy," David said, standing up. He came around the desk and hugged Ray, and Ray smelled coffee and printer toner. "You look good, man."

"I look old."

"You look old good. There's a difference." David pointed him to a chair. "You want a LaCroix? We got about forty flavors, it's kinda our whole culture now."

"Sure."

David tossed him a lime one. Ray cracked it and looked around the office. Somewhere deeper in the building there was a hum of servers, a low steady drone like a refrigerator in another room.

"So tell me what this actually is," Ray said. "Because I googled you guys and I still don't get it."

"AI radio stations. We build a station per listener. The music's generated, the DJ patter is generated, the whole thing. Except." David rubbed his eyes with both hands, and Ray remembered him doing that before orgo exams. "Except the FCC stuff, and the ad reads, and honestly the whole soul of the thing. The generated voice is fine. Nobody complains about the voice. But listeners can tell there's nobody home. Retention drops off a cliff at minute six. So Meera wants a real human for the pilot."

"Meera."

David winced. It was a full-body wince, the kind a dog gives hearing a thunderstorm two counties away.

"She's the CEO," he said. "Obviously you know that, you'd have to live in a hole not to know that. She signed off on reaching out to you. Sort of. She signed off on me reaching out to a bunch of people and your name was on the list."

"David. Is this a job interview or is this something else?"

David took a long drink of his own LaCroix. He looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at Ray, and the crooked grin was gone.

"Okay. Full fang mode. That's the phrase the engineers use. Meera's in full fang mode about this pilot. The board is on her about retention numbers and she's been here till midnight every night this month. And you, man, you gotta understand, you're not exactly a neutral topic in this building."

"Because we dated."

"Because you ghosted her at the worst possible moment a human being can ghost another human being, and now you're gonna stand in her booth for an hour." David held up both hands. "I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying know what it is. This is not a job interview. This is Meera getting to see with her own eyes whether you've got anything left, and if you don't, she's gonna enjoy watching it happen."

Ray sat with that for a second. He cracked his knuckles, one hand and then the other, an old habit from the college station.

"Sixteen years, Dave."

"Sixteen years. And she still has opinions. Strong ones. She doesn't say your name, she says 'that DJ.' Like you're a category."

"Great."

"But hey!" David's grin came back, a little. "The booth is soundproof and the glass is one-way from her side, so she can watch you. If you bomb, nobody else ever has to know. And if you don't bomb, you got a gig that pays more than every bar mitzvah you'll do this year combined."

"Okay," Ray said. "Okay. Where's the booth?"

* * *

The booth sat in the middle of the floor like an aquarium someone had dropped in the wrong room. One wall was glass, smoked dark from the outside, and Ray knew that from the other side Meera Walsh could see every twitch of his face. The desk inside had a broadcast console, a microphone on a boom arm, two monitors, and a talkback speaker. A strip of tape on the console said PILOT 1 in somebody's handwriting.

David walked him in and showed him the board. Levels, faders, the automation rack, a phone socket for call-ins that wasn't hooked up yet.

"Clock starts when you flip the mic live," David said. "One hour. She'll send notes. There's a screen in the corner that'll show them, but she also likes the talkback, so, you know. Wear earplugs. Mentally."

"You're not staying?"

"I'm gonna be right over there." David pointed at his desk forty feet away. "But not within arm's reach of either of you. That's a survival strategy I learned in college, actually. Rooming with you taught me it."

"Thanks a lot."

"It's a gift." David squeezed his shoulder. "Just do the thing. The old thing. Whatever it was."

He left. Ray sat down in the chair. The chair was very expensive and very cold. Through the one-way glass he could see a faint reflection of himself, and past that, if he stared hard, the dim shape of the office beyond.

Then the office lights came on, section by section, and Meera Walsh walked out from behind a row of monitors and stood with her arms crossed.

Ray's stomach did a thing. He was forty-four years old and his stomach did the same thing it did at twenty-eight, which annoyed him more than anything else that had happened tonight. She hadn't changed as much as he'd expected. Dark hair shorter now. Reading glasses pushed up on her head. Black blazer over a t-shirt, like she was the only one in the building who'd dressed for work and against it at the same time. Her arms were crossed and she was looking at him the way you look at a car that's already failed inspection and just hasn't been told yet.

He raised a hand. She did not raise one back.

The talkback speaker crackled.

"Whenever you're ready," Meera said. Her voice was flat and professional. "The clock is on the console. Eleven to midnight. Treat it like a real shift."

Ray put on the headphones. He checked the mic, checked the levels, watched the meter jump when he said "check, check." He had done this ten thousand times in a cinderblock studio at NYU with a bong somewhere out of frame and the whole city asleep. It came back to his hands first, the way riding a bike does.

He flipped the mic live at 11:00 exactly.

"Good evening, New York. You're listening to the pilot hour on Synesthesia. My name is Ray Mata, and for the next sixty minutes I'll be sitting up with you. It's a Tuesday night. If you're awake right now, you're my kind of people."

Clean. Warm. Professional. He segued into a slow-burn track, let it run, came back over the intro of the next one with a line about the weather and the hour and how the city felt at this weight. It was good. He knew it was good. It was the dental-conference version of good, smooth as glass and twice as empty.

The talkback buzzed.

"Stop," Meera said.

He killed the mic.

"You sound like a GPS for insomniacs," she said. "Recalculating route. Try again."

"Meera, I've been on the mic forty seconds."

"And I've heard forty seconds' worth of a man doing a bad impression of a DJ he used to be. Again. Or don't, and we're done at 11:03."

The talkback went dead. Ray stared at the console. On the corner screen a note appeared in a clean sans-serif font: WARMER. LESS SCRIPTED. YOU ARE NOT A GPS.

He could feel her through the glass. Arms crossed, probably. Already decided, definitely.

Ray looked down at his phone. It sat on the console next to the coffee he hadn't touched. He picked it up, more to have something to do with his hands than anything else, and scrolled, and that was when he saw it.

He had transferred every phone to a new one every couple of years and he had never once gone in and cleaned out the old voicemails. There they were. A graveyard of audio. Dentist reminders. A message from his mother from 2014. And there, dated a Tuesday in April sixteen years ago, saved in a folder he'd labeled M, a voicemail two minutes and eleven seconds long from a twenty-seven-year-old Meera Walsh, left at 6:14 in the morning, in which she screamed at him until her voice broke.

He stared at it. The clock said 11:07.

He looked up at the one-way glass. Somewhere on the other side, she was watching him, waiting for the second take.

Ray tapped the voicemail. Then he reached over and dragged the audio file into the broadcast queue, and his hands were almost steady, and the light on the console said the mic was still live.

The file sat there in the queue, two minutes and eleven seconds of 2009 sitting next to the track he'd just cued. Ray looked at it the way you look at a text you sent at 2 AM. Too late to unsend.

He hit play.

The studio speakers filled with her voice, sixteen years younger, cracked down the middle. "You didn't come. I called you at three in the morning and you didn't come, Ray, my father died yesterday and you didn't come." The funeral was that morning. He'd had a flight to Ibiza that evening. A club wanted a resident DJ for the summer and he'd said yes to the flight before she finished the sentence about the funeral home.

He remembered exactly what the apartment sounded like when she hung up. He remembered the flight, too. He'd gotten a comped room with a view of a parking lot.

On the air, past Meera's recorded voice, dead air. Twelve seconds of it. Fifteen. Dead air on a broadcast is a cardinal sin and Ray had never once committed it in his life, which is how he knew, somewhere under the panic, that this was the first honest thing he'd done in the booth all night.

Then the booth door banged open.

Meera Walsh came through it like weather. She crossed the small room in four steps, snatched his phone off the console, and the audio cut off mid-scream.

"Turn it off," she said. "Turn it off right now!"

"The mic is live, Meera."

"I know the mic is live. Turn. It. Off."

"I can't reach the fader with you standing on my arm."

She was standing on his arm, sort of. Her hand was on the console between him and the channel