The Signal Station

My name is Bernard Higgins, I'm thirty-four, and for the last nine months my evenings have been mostly nothing. That's not self-pity. It's just a fact, the way a weather report is a fact. Cloudy. Nothing planned. Nothing planned again tomorrow.

The breakup was nine months ago, and I still catch myself buying two of things at the store. Milk, mostly. She and I were together six years. We met when I was twenty-seven, back when I was working a yard down south, and she was the kind of person who could fall asleep anywhere, on buses, on beaches, once on a picnic table at her own birthday party. I loved that about her. Then one day she said she'd run out of things to say to me, and I believed her, because honestly I had run out of things to say to her too.

So I took the night shift at the logistics yard here in Puli. Reefer containers, pre-trip inspections. You check the seals, the insulation, the refrigeration unit, you log the temps, you sign your name. It's quiet work and the hours are strange, which suited me fine at first. I figured strange hours were better than empty ones.

The trouble is that refrigerated containers don't talk, and neither do I, and by two in the morning I'd read every notice board in the break room twice. So I started walking. There's a coastal path near the yard, heading out toward Shalun, and at the end of it sits the old fog signal station. A concrete tower with a brass foghorn room, a little exhibition space nobody visits, and a narrow observation deck looking out over the Taiwan Strait. I found it by accident one windy Tuesday and I kept going back, mostly because the bench up there was the only place in the district where sitting still felt like doing something.

The fifth or sixth time I went, there was a woman on the deck.

She was crouched near the low wall with a clipboard and a hand lens, and she had a plastic bag of little grey-green scraps next to her. She looked up when I came through the door, then kept looking, which fair enough, since I was a stranger arriving after dark at her workplace.

"You're the guy who sits on the bench," she said.

"Guilty."

"I was starting to wonder if you were a ghost. A very punctual ghost." She stood and brushed off her knees. She was thirty-one years old, I'd find out later, with short dark hair going in every direction because of the wind and a clipboard she held like it mattered. "Isobel Willoughby. I'm the ranger here, part-time. Well, evening ranger, which is a fancy word for the person who locks up."

"Bernard Higgins. I work at the yard."

"The reefer place?"

"That's the one. I check the boxes before they ship. Seals, temps, all of it."

"Thrilling," she said, and I laughed, because it wasn't.

She explained she was cataloging lichen on the north wall. Apparently there were three kinds growing on the tower that weren't supposed to grow this far south, and the wind off the strait seemed to have its own judgment about that. I asked her how you even tell lichens apart and she gave me the hand lens and made me look, and the little grey patch turned out to have cups on it, tiny ones, like something built for a very small person.

"So," she said, taking the lens back, "you walk out here after your shift ends, in the dark, in the wind, to sit on a bench. Do you want to tell me why, or is that ghost business?"

"My nights were too quiet," I said. "The bench is quieter, but it's a better kind of quiet."

She nodded at that like she understood it completely. "The foghorn's the worst part of the quiet, if you ask me. It goes every thirty seconds in real fog. You can set your watch by it, except nobody sets watches anymore, so you can't."

"Does it still work?"

"Officially. It ran a test last month and half the coast called in to complain and one man called in to request a song." She grinned. "We told him no!"

We fell into a rhythm after that. I'd finish my shift, walk the path, and she'd be up on the deck or in the exhibition room with her little tags and bags. We talked about nothing much. She told me about the hydrologist she'd dated briefly a couple years back, some visiting fellow who talked about water tables at dinner until she couldn't take it. I told her about the breakup, the short version, six years and then a flat sentence and done.

One evening she was standing at the rail looking down the coast at the little bridge that crosses the gully below the path.

"The call box out there is dead, you know," she said. "On the bridge. It's been broken since before I took this job. Somebody smashed the handset years ago and the phone company says it's not their line anymore and the county says it's not their box."

"That seems like a bad arrangement for an emergency."

"Right? If you fell off that bridge at night, your best option is to yell and hope a ghost is punctual." She turned to me. "Wait. You work with machines all day. Do you know anyone who repairs things like that? Old call boxes?"

"Actually I might. There's a guy at the yard, Estrada, who used to do telecom maintenance. He fixes the reefer telemetry boards when nobody else will touch them. He'd probably do it for the fun of it, if you bought the parts."

She laughed, a real laugh, head back. "The fun of it. Bernard, the county hasn't returned my emails in eight months. You're describing a man who fixes broken phones for fun."

"He exists. I'll ask."

"Don't ask on my account," she said, but she wrote the yard's number on the back of a lichen tag anyway, so I think it was on her account at least a little.

It was maybe two weeks after that, a Thursday, when she hit me with the actual request. She was packing up her specimens, little bags into a bigger bag into a crate, and muttering.

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"The problem is my transport situation. This crate is a joke. I need a proper basket, a big woven one, lined with oilcloth so the damp samples don't ruin the dry ones. The woman who weaves them sells at the market on weekends. She's famous for them, locally famous, which is to say about nine people know her name."

"Okay?"

"Could you get me one? I can't leave the station during open hours, and my days off never line up with the market, and I've been meaning to do