Chapter 1

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The suitcase would not close.

Hadi sat on it with his whole body, his knees up near his ears, while his mother pressed the two brass latches with her thumbs. The latches slipped and sprang back and slipped again. His mother made a small sound in her throat that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh, and Hadi thought how his mother had been making that sound a lot lately, ever since his father had come home one evening in November and spread a map of the United States across the kitchen table and pointed to a place that looked, from where Hadi stood, like nothing at all.

"Jump," his mother said. "Harder."

Hadi jumped. The latches snapped shut. His mother sat back on her heels and pushed a piece of hair out of her face with the back of her wrist, and she smiled at him in a tired way.

"There," she said in Persian. "Your grandfather's records are safe."

The suitcase was full of vinyl records. That was all. Not clothes, not books, not the small wooden box in which Hadi kept his collection of Iranian coins going back to his great-grandfather. Only records. Seventy-two of them, his mother had counted, in paper sleeves that smelled like dust and old rain. They had belonged to his grandfather, who had said when he gave them to Hadi last summer, "Take them to America, daadaa. A record is a letter that sings. Every country needs letters."

Hadi had not wanted them then. He had wanted, if anything, to stay in Tehran where he knew the names of the trees and the taste of the water. But now, sitting on the suitcase in his empty bedroom, with the air smelling of packing tape and his mother's perfume, he was glad the records were coming. He was glad of anything that was coming.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Time to go," his mother said.

Outside, the taxi was already waiting.

The airport in Tehran had too many people in it, as it always did, and Hadi held his mother's hand even though he was ten years old and had told himself a hundred times that ten was too old to hold a hand. His father walked ahead with the big suitcases stacked on a luggage cart that kept veering to the left. The record suitcase rode on top, a small brown island on a gray sea.

At the security gate, his grandfather was waiting.

"Daadaa Khodadad," Hadi said.

His grandfather was seventy-four that winter and looked exactly as he had always looked to Hadi, which is to say like a small neat man with white hair combed back and a moustache that was mostly white but still had black in the center of it, as if it could not quite decide. He wore his good gray suit, which was the suit he wore for weddings and funerals and the airport. He held a paper bag in his hand.

"For the journey," he said, and he pressed the bag into Hadi's chest. It was warm. Hadi could smell the saffron.

"Rice cookies?"

"Three. Don't tell your mother. She thinks I gave you two."

His grandfather knelt down, which he did not do easily anymore because of his knees, and he put his dry warm hands on Hadi's face.

"Listen," he said. "In North Dakota there will be a great deal of sky. The sky will be different from our sky. Do not be afraid of it. The sky is only the ceiling of the same room."

"Yes, daadaa."

"And eat. Your mother says you have stopped eating. Eat."

"Yes, daadaa."

"And I will come to visit you in the spring. I promise. I will come with more records."

He kissed Hadi on both cheeks and then on the forehead, which was the third kiss, the important one. Then his grandfather stood up, slowly, holding onto the back of a plastic chair, and he pressed his hand to his own heart and bowed the smallest bow in Hadi's direction, and then he turned and walked out of the airport without looking back, because his grandfather believed that one should never look back at airports. It brought bad luck to the plane.

Hadi watched him go. He watched until the gray suit disappeared into the crowd, and then he watched the space where the gray suit had been, and then his mother's hand was on his shoulder and it was time.

"Come," she said.

They flew from Tehran to Frankfurt, and from Frankfurt to Chicago, and from Chicago to Minneapolis, and from Minneapolis in a small plane with propellers that shook the windows to a place called Minot, which Hadi's father pronounced "MY-not" and which was, he said, the last airport. After Minot there were no more airports. After Minot there was only the car and the road and the place where they were going to live.

Hadi slept for some of the flights and did not sleep for others. At one point, somewhere above an ocean he could not see, he woke up and found that his face was wet and he did not remember having dreamed anything at all. He wiped his face with his sleeve and looked out the window and saw only the black, and below the black a layer of cloud that looked like a frozen sea, and below that another black, and he thought how his grandfather had said the sky was the ceiling of the same room, and he tried to believe it.

Minot's airport was small. The car they rented was white. Hadi sat in the back with the record suitcase between his knees, because his father said the records must not slide around. His mother sat in the front with a map open across her lap.

"How far?" Hadi asked.

"Two hours," his father said. "Maybe a little more. The road is straight."

The road was straight. That was the first thing Hadi noticed about North Dakota. The road was so straight it was almost frightening, as if someone had taken a ruler and drawn it across the land and then forgotten to draw anything else. On either side of the road there was grass. Brown grass, because it was February and everything was dead or sleeping. Beyond the grass there was more grass. Beyond that, nothing. The horizon was a line so flat Hadi could not tell where the ground ended and the sky began.

And the sky.

His grandfather had warned him about the sky, but his grandfather had not prepared him for it, because there was no preparing for it. The sky in North Dakota was not a ceiling. It was a whole other country, much larger than the country of the ground. It went up and up and up, pale blue at the edges and then a colder blue as you looked higher, and then, where it should have ended, it did not end. It just kept going. Hadi pressed his forehead against the cold window and looked up and felt the way he sometimes felt on the edge of a very deep swimming pool, which was that if he was not careful he might fall in.

"Baba," he said. "The sky is too big."

His father, who had been quiet for an hour, turned his head a little to the right so that Hadi could see part of his face in profile.

"Yes," his father said. "It is."

"How do people live here?"

"They learn."

They passed a farmhouse standing by itself in a field. They passed another farmhouse. They passed a row of wooden poles with wires strung between them that went on and on along the road, matching the road stride for stride. Once, a very long train crossed the highway ahead of them, and they had to stop and wait. Hadi counted the cars. He got to sixty-eight before he lost his place and had to start over, and by then the train was still going.

"Why is it so long?" he asked.

"It's carrying grain," his mother said. "Or oil. This is where a lot of the country's food comes from. And oil."

"From here?"

"From here."

Hadi looked out the window again. He tried to imagine the country's food coming from this flat empty place, and he could not. In Tehran, food came from markets. Markets came from farms. Farms had walls and gates and dogs sleeping under olive trees. Here, everything was open. There were no gates. There were no walls. There was only the road and the grass and the sky, and the train rolling by slowly like a long brown sentence.

At last the train ended, and the crossing gates lifted, and the white car rolled on.

They turned off the main road onto a smaller road, and then off the smaller road onto a road that was just gravel. Gravel popped and pinged under the tires like popcorn. The road ran between two low hills, which were not really hills but more like wrinkles in the land, and then it came out into a wide flat place where, at the far end, Hadi could see a cluster of low buildings.

"That's the station," his father said. "That's where I work."

"That?"

"That."

The research station had three buildings and a water tower. The buildings were made of corrugated metal painted a pale tan, and the water tower was painted the same color, and everything looked as though it had been there for a long time and planned to stay. Behind the buildings there was a parking lot with four cars in it. Behind the parking lot there was a tall chain-link fence, and behind the fence there was more grass, and beyond the grass, far off, a single tall dark shape that Hadi could not quite make out.

"What's that?" he asked, pointing.

"What?"

"That thing. Sticking up."

His father glanced where he was pointing. "Oh. That's an old tower. It's not used anymore. Been out there for fifty years, maybe more."

"A radio tower?"

"Something like that. I haven't asked much about it."

"Can I go see it?"

His father looked at his mother. His mother looked at the dashboard.

"Let us get settled first, Hadi jaan," his mother said. "One thing at a time."

They drove past the station and up a short driveway to a house. The house was small and square and white, with green shutters and a porch with two wooden steps and a door that had a brass knocker shaped like a horse's head. In front of the house, a woman was waiting. She wore a long coat and a knitted hat. She waved.

"That's Mrs. Olson," his father said. "She has the keys."

Mrs. Olson had a round face and cheeks that were very red from the cold. She had a ring of keys in her hand and she jingled them as they got out of the car. Hadi's breath made a cloud in front of his face, and then another cloud, and he stared at the clouds because he had never seen his own breath so clearly before.

"Welcome, welcome," Mrs. Olson said. "Dr. Ghaderi. Mrs. Ghaderi. And you must be Hadi."

"Yes, madam."

"Oh, he's polite. Come inside, come inside, I've got the heat on. It was twelve below last night. We're having a warm spell."

Twelve below, Hadi thought. Below what.

Inside, the house smelled of new paint and old carpet. The living room had a woodstove and a brown couch and a window that looked out over the flat grass and, in the distance, the dark shape of the tower. Hadi put his records down by the door, very carefully, and walked to the window and pressed his nose against the glass.

The tower stood in the middle of nothing, the way one exclamation point stands in the middle of an empty page.

"Hadi," his mother said from behind him.

"Yes, mama."

"Help me carry these in."

He turned away from the window. There would be time for the tower later. There would be time, he hoped, for many things later. But just now there were suitcases to carry, and a bed to find, and a small white house in a place where the sky was too big, and somewhere in a suitcase a stack of records that his grandfather had pressed into his chest and said, a record is a letter that sings.

Hadi carried his records to his new room. He set the suitcase on the bed. He sat next to it. He listened to the silence of the house, which was different from the silence of his old house, which had been full of the small sounds of a city — cars, voices, a pigeon on the window ledge, the muezzin from the mosque three streets over calling the late afternoon prayer. Here there was none of that. Here the silence was the real thing, the silence that the silence at home had only been pretending to be.

He opened the suitcase. He looked at the records. He touched the top one with one finger.

Then he closed the suitcase, and he lay down on the bed beside it, and he closed his eyes, and he slept.

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Hadi woke in the middle of the night to a sound he did not recognize.

It was a low creaking, a slow complaint, as though the house itself were stretching. He lay very still under the blanket and listened. The creak came again. Then a soft thump. Then a long whistling that rose and fell.

He sat up. Through the window, which had no curtain yet, he could see the sky. The sky was full of stars, more stars than he had ever seen, so many stars that they seemed to crowd the black like rice grains on a black plate. The stars were not twinkling. They were burning, hard and clean, and they made the grass below them look almost blue.

The whistling came again. He understood, then. It was the wind.

He got out of bed and put on his slippers, which his mother had packed at the last minute in his father's suitcase, and he walked down the short hallway to the living room. His mother was there, sitting in front of the woodstove with a cup of tea in her hands. She was still wearing her coat.

"Can't sleep?" she said.

"The wind is loud."

"It is. I am told it is always loud here. We will get used to it."

He sat down on the floor next to her chair. He leaned his head against her knee. She put one hand on his hair.

"Mama."

"Yes."

"Why did we come?"

She was quiet for a long time. He watched the small red light inside the woodstove move behind the glass like something alive.

"Because your father was offered work he wanted very much to do," she said. "Because in Iran the work was becoming harder for him to do. Because we thought America might be good for all of us. For you, especially."

"For me?"

"So you could have opportunities."

"I had opportunities in Tehran."

"Different ones."

He did not answer. He watched the fire.

"Hadi jaan," his mother said. "It will be hard for a while. I know. It is hard for me, too. But we are together. And your grandfather will come in the spring. And you will make friends. And one day you will go to a school that is very good, and you will study, and you will be something that would have been more difficult to be at home."

"What will I be?"

"I don't know yet. That is for you to decide."

He thought about this. He thought about what he would like to be. He thought about the tower he had seen from the window. He thought about his grandfather, who had been an engineer when he was younger, before he retired, and who could fix any radio that had ever been built, and who used to let Hadi sit at his workbench and hand him the little screwdrivers.

"I would like to be like daadaa," he said.

"Like daadaa Khodadad?"

"Yes."

His mother smiled. "Your grandfather would be very pleased to hear that. But you must also be like yourself. You must be like Hadi."

"Who is Hadi?"

"I don't know yet," she said. "That is for you to decide, too."

She laughed a little, and he laughed a little, and the fire snapped in the stove, and outside the wind went on whistling and whistling, as if it had a long story to tell and no one to tell it to.

In the morning, his father took him to see the station.

They walked, because the station was only five minutes from the house. Hadi's father wore a heavy coat and boots, and Hadi wore the new heavy coat and boots his mother had bought for him in Minot the day before, and the coat was stiff and the boots were too big, and every step was an effort. The snow, what there was of it, crunched under his feet like broken glass. His breath made clouds that stayed for a second and then the wind took them.

The station was three buildings connected by short covered walkways. His father led him up the two concrete steps of the main building and pushed open a door that had a small sign on it that read simply GHADERI / ANDERSON / KOWALSKI / KRAUSE. Inside, the building smelled of coffee and electronics and, faintly, of pine cleaner. The walls were painted a pale institutional green. A bulletin board had a flyer for a bake sale and a flyer for a band Hadi could not read the name of and a piece of paper with someone's phone number torn along the bottom.

"Hello?" Hadi's father called.

"Back here, Reza."

They walked down a hallway to a large room at the back. The room had tables covered in equipment Hadi did not recognize — boxes with dials, boxes with screens, long metal cylinders with wires coming out of them, coils of cable hanging on pegs. At one of the tables, a tall man with a gray beard was peering into the open back of a computer.

"Reza. And this must be Hadi."

"This is Hadi. Hadi, this is Dr. Anderson. Dr. Anderson has been here the longest. He knows where everything is."

"Pleased to meet you, Hadi," Dr. Anderson said, and he stuck out a hand that was very big and very calloused. Hadi shook it. He had been taught that when he shook a hand, he should look the person in the eye, and he did this now, and Dr. Anderson looked back at him with pale blue eyes under wild eyebrows and seemed pleased.

"What do you do here?" Hadi asked.

"We measure things," Dr. Anderson said.

"What kinds of things?"

"Right now, we are measuring the way certain kinds of light fall on the ground. Not light you can see. The other kind. Cosmic rays, we call them. From far away."

"From space?"

"From space, yes. The earth is hit by them all the time. Your head is being hit by them right now. Mine too. We measure them so we can understand where they come from."

"Where do they come from?"

Dr. Anderson smiled. "That is the question. That is why we measure them."

Hadi looked around the room. The equipment did not look like much. It looked like junk, if he was honest. He had imagined a research station might have telescopes, or computers the size of refrigerators, or something shiny. This looked like a garage his grandfather might have set up in the back of a shop.

"Is there more?" he asked.

"More what?"

"More machines. Or rooms. Or..." He trailed off.

His father put a hand on his shoulder. "There is a second building with the main detector. And a third building with storage and the generator. That is all."

"That is all?"

"That is all."

"Oh."

Dr. Anderson laughed. It was a big laugh, too big for the quiet room. "Not what you expected, kid?"

"I am sorry. I did not mean to be rude."

"Oh, you weren't. Most people think science is a big shiny building full of men in white coats. It is almost never that. Science is mostly three guys in a shed in a field, wondering if the wire they just soldered is going to work or not. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

Hadi looked at Dr. Anderson. Dr. Anderson's flannel shirt was buttoned crookedly. There was a small hole at the elbow. His glasses were smudged. He looked exactly like a man who had spent forty years in a shed in a field, and he seemed very content.

"What's out there?" Hadi asked, pointing at the back window.

"Out where?"

"The tower."

"Ah. The tower."

Dr. Anderson set down his screwdriver and came over to the window. Through the glass, across the snowy field, Hadi could see the tower clearly now. It was taller than he had thought. It rose straight up out of the ground, a lattice of dark steel, and at the top it narrowed to a point like a long thin finger pointing at the sky. Halfway up, near a small platform, something was attached — maybe an antenna, maybe just a hook where an antenna used to be.

"That tower," Dr. Anderson said, "is older than I am. It was built in the fifties. The fifties or maybe the early sixties. I'm not sure. It was used for atmospheric research, originally. Then for other things. Then for nothing. Now it just stands out there and rusts."

"Can you go to it?"

"You can walk to it. You shouldn't climb it. The steel is no good anymore. The bolts are weak."

"Who used it?"

"Before my time, kid. There are some old records in a box in the storage building. I haven't looked at them in years."

"Are there stories?"

Dr. Anderson looked at him for a moment, as if deciding whether to say something. Then he smiled a small slow smile.

"There are always stories," he said. "Every old thing has a story. That tower has more than one. Some of them you'd have to ask around the town about. There used to be a gentleman in town, Mr. Albright, who worked up here in the sixties. He'd tell you. If you caught him on a day when he wanted to talk."

"Mr. Albright."

"Lives in the apartments behind the hardware store. Retired engineer. Sharp as a tack. Don't let him scare you. He scares easily himself, is the thing."

Hadi filed the name away. Mr. Albright. Apartments behind the hardware store.

"Come on," his father said. "I'll show you the other buildings."

They walked through the covered walkway to the second building, where there was a very large piece of equipment in the middle of the room that looked like a satellite dish lying on its side, and Hadi's father explained how it worked, and Hadi listened and did not understand most of it but liked the sound of his father's voice explaining things. His father's voice had been strained in the weeks before the move, and strained on the plane, and strained at the house last night, but here, explaining the detector, his father's voice was loose and glad and his hands moved in the air, shaping things.

In the third building, there was a small kitchen with a coffee maker, and a closet full of boots, and a storeroom in the back. The storeroom had shelves from floor to ceiling, and on the shelves there were boxes, and on some of the boxes there were labels written in marker. Some of the labels were faded. One of them, Hadi noticed, said simply TOWER — 1962-67.

He did not say anything about it. He only looked at it and remembered.

Back outside, the wind had picked up. The wind in North Dakota, Hadi was learning, was not a thing that came and went. It was a continuous condition, like the color of the sky. You did not notice when it started and you did not notice when it stopped, because it did not start or stop. It simply was.

Walking back to the house, he looked toward the tower one more time. It stood where it had stood all morning, black against the pale sky, patient as a tree.

Hello, he thought, in Persian. Hello. I am Hadi. I have come from Tehran.

The tower, of course, did not answer. But it did not need to. It was only a tower. And Hadi was a boy, and he had time.

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The school was called Greywater Elementary, and it was twelve miles from the station.

Hadi's mother drove him the first day. The car was still the white rental, because they had not yet bought their own, and the heater did not work very well, and Hadi sat in the passenger seat with his new backpack on his lap and his hands pressed between his knees for warmth. His mother had made him a lunch of bread and cheese and a small plastic container of olives, which he had protested was too Iranian, and which she had told him was food, and that food was food, and that he would eat.

"What if they ask me questions?" he said.

"Then you answer."

"What if I don't understand the questions?"

"Then you ask them to repeat. Your English is very good."

"It is not."

"It is. You have been studying for three years. You read books in English. You watch films in English. You will understand."

"What if they make fun of me?"

His mother was quiet for a moment. The road rolled on under the car. The sun was up, a pale thin sun that did not seem to have any heat in it.

"Then you come home and tell me," she said, "and we will talk about it together. And I will be angry on your behalf. But I do not think anyone will make fun of you. Not on the first day. On the first day people are curious. They will want to know you."

"What if I don't want them to know me?"

His mother looked at him. She did not answer for a long time. Then she said, "Hadi jaan. In every new place, there is a door. You can stand outside the door and look at it, or you can open it. Sometimes you are afraid of what is behind the door. But you cannot stay outside forever, because outside, it is very cold."

"It is very cold here," he said, and he meant it literally, because his feet were freezing.

His mother laughed. "Yes. Also literally."

The school was a single low brick building with a flagpole out front. An American flag was up, and below it, a flag Hadi did not know that he thought might be the state flag. There were yellow buses parked along one side. Children were getting off the buses. There were not many of them — fifty, perhaps, for the whole school, from kindergarten through fifth grade. Hadi watched them walk through the front doors in twos and threes, bundled in coats, their breath steaming.

"Ready?" his mother asked.

"No."

"Let us go anyway."

The principal was a short woman named Mrs. Harmon who wore a cardigan over a blouse and who shook Hadi's hand the way she would have shaken the hand of an adult.

"Welcome to Greywater, Hadi," she said. "Your mother told me on the phone that you like reading. That's good. We have a library. It's not a big one, but the librarian will find you whatever you need."

"Thank you, madam."

"You can call me Mrs. Harmon. We don't do madam here. Come on, I'll take you to Mrs. Peterson's classroom. She has the fourth and fifth graders. You'll be with the fifth."

"I am in fourth grade."

"In your school you were. Here, your mother and I think you're ready for fifth. We'll see how it goes. All right?"

"All right."

His mother hugged him at the door of the classroom, harder and longer than she usually did, and she kissed the top of his head and whispered something in Persian that he did not quite catch. Then she was gone, and Mrs. Harmon was gone, and there was only the classroom door, and on the other side of it, voices.

He opened the door.

Twenty-three faces turned toward him.

A tall woman stood at the front of the room. She had a long pale face and kind eyes and a wool skirt that went almost to the floor. She smiled when she saw him, and the smile made the room a little less terrifying.

"Hadi," she said. "We've been expecting you. I'm Mrs. Peterson. Class, this is Hadi Ghaderi. He's joining us from Iran. Let's give him a warm Greywater welcome."

The class clapped, politely, the way classes do when a teacher tells them to clap. Hadi stood by the door and held his backpack and tried to smile.

"Hadi, why don't you tell us one thing about yourself. Anything. Whatever you like."

He had been afraid of this. He had lain awake the night before rehearsing answers to this question. What to say. My name is Hadi. My father is a scientist. My favorite food is fesenjan. I had a cat in Tehran whose name was Shirin. I miss the sound of the muezzin at dawn. None of these seemed right. None of these were things a fifth grader in North Dakota would say.

He swallowed.

"I have seventy-two records," he said.

The class looked at him.

"Records?" Mrs. Peterson said.

"Vinyl records. From my grandfather."

A boy in the back laughed, not in a mean way, just in surprise. "Like, old records? That people play on those big old things?"

"Yes."

"That's cool."

"It is?"

"Yeah."

Mrs. Peterson was smiling. "That's a wonderful thing to share, Hadi. Thank you. Why don't you take the empty seat at the Vega table. Mackenzie, can you raise your hand so Hadi can find you?"

A hand went up at one of the desk clusters near the window. It was attached to a girl with short brown hair that was sticking up on one side, as though she had slept on it wrong and had not cared to fix it. She was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and a pair of overalls. She looked at Hadi as he walked across the room, and her look was not unfriendly, but it was not friendly either — it was the look a person gives to a new tool they have been handed and are trying to figure out the use of.

He sat down at the empty chair. The other two children at the Vega cluster — a girl with braids and a boy with a blue hoodie — smiled at him quickly and then looked down at their notebooks.

"Hi," said the girl with the sticking-up hair. "I'm Mackenzie. Mac."

"Hello, Mac."

"Where in Iran?"

"Tehran."

"That's the capital, right?"

"Yes."

"Neat." She chewed on the end of her pencil. "I've never been anywhere."

"Anywhere?"

"Well. Minot. And Bismarck once. My grandma lives there. But never anywhere for real."

"Tehran is... real."

"No, I know. I meant far." She made a face at herself. "Never mind."

Mrs. Peterson had started the lesson. It was about long division, which Hadi had learned two years earlier in Tehran, and so he let himself listen with only part of his brain while the other part of his brain looked at the classroom. At the posters on the wall. At the children in their desks. At the snow falling again outside the windows. At Mac, who was bent over her paper with her pencil working hard and her tongue sticking out slightly at the corner of her mouth.

At recess, Mac found him in the hallway.

"Hey," she said. "Do you want to come outside?"

"It is very cold."

"Yeah. That's why we go out. You warm up running."

"Oh."

"You don't have to. Some kids stay in and play board games in the library. But if you want, you can come with me and we'll go on the monkey bars."

He thought about it.

"I will come," he said.

Outside, the cold was the kind of cold that made the inside of his nose hurt. Mac did not seem to notice. She ran across the playground in her too-big boots and swung herself up onto the monkey bars and hung there by her knees, upside down, her hair falling. Her cheeks got red almost immediately.

"Come on," she called.

"I have never done this."

"Never?"

"Our school in Tehran did not have one."

"Seriously?"

"Yes."

"Wow. Okay. Come here. I'll show you."

She showed him. He tried. He fell. She laughed, and then she said sorry, and then she showed him again, and he did it better the second time. By the end of recess he had made it across three bars before his arms gave out, and Mac had applauded as if he had crossed a river.

"You're pretty good for a first-timer," she said.

"Thank you."

"What do you play? Like what games."

"Soccer. Chess."

"I'm bad at chess."

"I could teach you."

"Maybe. I'm also bad at spelling."

"I can teach you words."

"In Iranian?"

"Persian."

"Oh. Sorry."

"It is fine. You did not know."

She looked at him, and he looked at her, and then the bell rang. Mac grabbed his sleeve.

"Come on. You don't want to be late on your first day. Mrs. Peterson will make you stay in for recess tomorrow."

He had made his first American friend, or at least the beginning of one. And the friend's name was Mackenzie, and she called herself Mac, and she was bad at spelling, and she hung upside down on monkey bars, and she had never been anywhere.

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On Saturday, the wind stopped.

Hadi did not understand, at first, that it had stopped. He had grown so used to the whistling that he had begun to hear it as part of the silence, the way a person who lives near a river stops hearing the river. But on Saturday morning, when he woke up and lay in bed with his eyes closed, he realized that something was different. He listened. The house was not creaking. The windows were not rattling. The air in his bedroom was not moving.

He got out of bed and went to the window.

The field was still. The grass, bent and brown, did not stir. The sky above was pale and very high, and a thin fog hung in patches over the far hills, and even the fog was not drifting. It was as though someone had pressed pause on the whole of North Dakota.

"Mama," he said, coming into the kitchen. "It is quiet."

"I know," his mother said. "I have been sitting in it."

She was at the table with her textbook open in front of her. She was studying for the medical licensing examination that would let her work as a doctor in America, which she could not yet do, which was one of the reasons, his father had explained, that the family had needed to come now rather than later. The sooner she started studying, the sooner she could pass. Hadi had found her like this every morning he had been in North Dakota, her textbook open, her highlighter in hand, her tea steaming beside her.

"Can I go outside?"

"Where?"

"Just out. In the field. Maybe to the tower."

She looked up from the book. "The old radio tower?"

"Yes."

"Your father said it is safe to walk to, if you do not climb on it."

"I will not climb on it."

"And you will be back for lunch."

"Yes."

"Take your coat. And the hat with the earflaps. And the boots. And the gloves."

"Yes, mama."

"And take this." She handed him a whistle on a red cord. He looked at it.

"A whistle?"

"If you get lost or you fall, you blow it. Your father will come. Do you promise?"

"I promise."

"Fine. Go."

Outside, the cold was a different cold than the cold of the wind. Without the wind, the cold sat on his face like a cold hand, and stayed there, and was almost pleasant. He breathed out. His breath rose straight up in a column and did not blow anywhere. He laughed. The laugh made another column.

He walked.

The chain-link fence behind the station had a gate. The gate was not locked. He pushed it open and stepped through onto the field, and then he closed the gate behind him, because he had been told that a gate left open was an insult to a gate.

The field sloped very gently downward. In the summer, he imagined, it would be grass. In February it was stubble and patches of snow, and here and there a little dry weed sticking up like a fist. His boots crunched with every step. The tower stood at the far end, still, black, patient.

Twenty minutes, he thought. Longer than it looked.

He walked. He put his hands in his pockets and walked. He looked up at the sky and walked. He looked down at his boots and walked. Somewhere above him a bird made a long lonesome sound, and he looked up but could not see it.

As he got closer, the tower grew.

From the house it had looked like a stick. From halfway across the field, it looked like a tree. From the base of it, standing with his neck craned and his mouth a little open, it looked like a cathedral.

The tower was at least a hundred feet tall. Its four legs stood on concrete footings the size of car tires. The steel was crusted with rust in long orange stripes, but underneath the rust you could see the original silver-gray color, and you could see the care that had gone into the building of it — the rivets even, the cross-bracing neat, the cable guides still in place along one leg. Halfway up there was a small platform. Near the top there was a long horizontal bar where an antenna must once have been mounted. At the very top there was what looked like a lightning rod, thin as a pencil.

Hadi walked all the way around it, touching one of the legs with his gloved hand. The steel was cold, even through the glove. He could hear a faint humming, or thought he could — but it was probably just his own blood in his ears.

FEDERAL AVIATION ADMINISTRATION ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH STATION ERECTED 1952 RESTORED 1961

1952. That was — he counted on his fingers — more than seventy years ago. His grandfather had not even been born when the tower was built. Or had been very small. His grandfather was seventy-four. So his grandfather had been almost three. Somewhere in Iran, in a courtyard with a fig tree, a little boy named Khodadad had been running around barefoot while, in the middle of an empty field in North Dakota, men had been pouring concrete and raising steel.

The thought made Hadi feel very small and very large at the same time.

He sat down at the base of the tower, with his back against one of the legs, and he looked out across the field. From here he could see the station — the three tan buildings, the water tower — and beyond the station, the little white house with the green shutters. From here he could see the whole of his new life laid out in miniature, like a toy village. He could see his mother's car in the driveway. He could see the smoke from the woodstove chimney. He could see, very very small, the figure of his father walking from the main building to the generator building with something in his hand.

The thought did not frighten him. In fact, in some way he did not quite understand, it comforted him.

He sat there for a long time. He did not mean to. But the cold was not as bad as he had thought, and the silence was so deep that it was almost a sound of its own, and he found that he did not want to leave.

He was still sitting there when he heard the crunching behind him.

He jumped. He turned. Twenty feet away, where the field met the fence, a figure in a red coat was walking toward him. For a moment Hadi could not think who it could be — his father would have worn his brown coat, his mother did not own a red coat — and then the figure lifted a gloved hand and waved, and Hadi saw that it was Mac.

"Hey!" she called. "I thought that was you."

"Mac?"

"I live over there." She pointed vaguely past the station, to where the gravel road ran off between two hills. "My dad's farm is the next property over. I saw you from the kitchen window. What are you doing out here?"

"I came to look at the tower."

"Oh yeah. The tower." She arrived and put her hands on her hips and looked up. "I haven't been out here in, like, a year. I used to come all the time when I was little."

"You did?"

"Yeah. My brother and I used to dare each other to climb it."

"Did you?"

"I got to the first crossbar. He got to the third. Then our mom caught him from the kitchen window and we both got grounded."

"The steel is not safe," Hadi said, quoting Dr. Anderson.

"Yeah, we didn't care then. I care now." She kicked at a piece of frozen ground. "It's weird, isn't it? Just standing there. My dad says they should've taken it down thirty years ago."

"Maybe they will."

"Maybe. I'd be sad. It's kind of the only thing out here."

Hadi nodded. He understood this.

Mac sat down next to him, at the base of the tower, with her back against the opposite leg. She was close enough that their boots almost touched.

"How's your first week been?" she asked.

"It has been..." He tried to find the right word. "Long."

"Yeah."

"The people at school are kind."

"Most of them."

"Most of them."

"Garrett Molsen is not kind. You don't have to pretend."

Hadi looked at her. Garrett Molsen sat at the Betelgeuse cluster and had, during Thursday's geography lesson, asked Hadi if they had cars in Iran or if they still rode camels. Hadi had answered, calmly, that they had cars and also that they did not ride camels, because camels lived mostly in the south of the country near the desert, but that he had once ridden a camel at a festival when he was five. The class had laughed. At which of them he did not know.

"He asked me about camels," Hadi said.

"I heard. He's a jerk."

"I have never called anyone a jerk before."

"Well, try it. It'll feel good."

Hadi considered. "Garrett is a jerk."

"See?"

He smiled. He did feel better. Not much. A little.

"Mac," he said.

"Yeah."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"Do you know anything about this tower? Besides that your brother climbed it."

"Not really. I know it's old. I know my dad says it's ugly."

"Is it ugly?"

She tilted her head back and looked up. Her nose was very red.

"I think it's kind of pretty, actually," she said. "It's, like, skinny. And it has that sort of see-through-ness. Like it's not hiding anything."

"Yes," Hadi said. "It is honest."

"Honest?"

"Yes. It is only what it is. No paint. No lies. Only metal."

Mac looked at him sideways. "You talk weird, you know."

"I am sorry."

"No, good weird. Don't apologize. I like it."

They sat for another few minutes. Then Mac stood up and stretched.

"I gotta go back," she said. "My mom wants me to help with the chickens. But hey. Do you have a radio?"

"A radio?"

"Yeah. Like, one you can pick up stuff on. Not just music. Shortwave."

"I do not know."

"I have a kit. An old one, from my dad. He bought it for me two Christmases ago, but I never finished it. I kept getting the resistors mixed up. If you want, you could come over and we could try to build it together. Or you could just take it. It's collecting dust."

Hadi's heart did something small and surprising. His grandfather. His grandfather used to build radios. His grandfather had handed him tiny screwdrivers. If his grandfather were here, he would say, yes. Take it. Build it. A radio is a small church.

"I would like that very much," Hadi said.

"Cool. Come over tomorrow. Or next weekend. Whenever. My house is the one with the red barn. You can see it from your kitchen if you look south."

"South."

"That way." She pointed. "Away from the big water tower."

"I will find it."

"Good. Okay. See ya, Hadi."

"See you, Mac."

She crunched off across the field, her red coat getting smaller and smaller, until she reached the fence and climbed over it in one smooth motion and was gone.

Hadi sat a little longer at the base of the tower. He looked up one more time. He said, in his head, to no one in particular, I will come back. I will bring a radio.

Then he stood up, brushed the frost from his pants, and began the long walk home.

============================================================

Winter went on.

This is a fact that is difficult to convey unless you have lived through a North Dakota winter. Winter did not lift. It did not retreat. It did not even pause. Every morning Hadi woke up and looked out the window and it was the same white hard world he had looked at the morning before, and every evening the sun set at five o'clock and the temperature dropped and the wind rose, and they sat around the woodstove and drank tea and watched the fire. Some nights his mother read aloud to him from a book of Persian poetry, and some nights his father played chess with him, and some nights his parents listened to the radio in English and Hadi only half understood and did not mind.

He went to school every day. He did his homework every evening. He learned the American Pledge of Allegiance, which he did not say because his mother had explained that no one was required to, but which he learned because he did not like to be in a room where others were saying something he could not follow. He learned the rules of four-square, which was played at recess. He learned that Mac's full name was Mackenzie Jean Halvorsen and that her mother worked at the post office and that her father grew wheat and sugar beets and that her brother was in high school and was, according to Mac, "a dork."

He visited Mac's house twice. The first time, they spread the radio kit out on her kitchen table and sorted the pieces into piles. The second time, they started the soldering, although Mac was not very good at soldering and burned her thumb and said a word that Hadi had never heard before and that he suspected his mother would not approve of.

But the radio remained unfinished. Soldering was slow. The instructions, which had been printed in small gray type on a sheet of pink paper, were difficult to follow. Hadi did not know the names of half the components. Mac knew some but had forgotten others. And every visit had to end, eventually, with one of them going home to dinner or chores or homework.

"We'll finish it eventually," Mac said, the second time, shoving the pieces back into the kit box. "Before we die."

"That is optimistic."

"Thanks."

At the end of March, his grandfather arrived.

Hadi had been counting the days since February. He had a calendar on his bedroom wall with the date of his grandfather's arrival circled in red marker, and every morning when he woke up he crossed off another day. He had imagined the arrival many times. He had imagined his grandfather stepping off the plane in the small Minot airport, stretching his arms, saying in his rumbling voice, daadaa! I am here! I have brought three suitcases of records and a tin of saffron and a smaller tin of rosewater and I am very hungry.

The reality was not quite that.

The reality was that Hadi's grandfather came off the plane looking tired and small. He wore his good gray suit, which had become, after twenty hours of travel, a wrinkled gray suit. His white hair was flat on one side from where he had slept against the window. His moustache drooped. He carried a single brown leather suitcase, and he walked with a slight limp that Hadi had not noticed at the airport in Tehran.

"Daadaa," Hadi said.

"Hadi jaan."

His grandfather set down the suitcase and opened his arms. Hadi went into them. His grandfather smelled of airplane and cologne and, very faintly, of the smoke of the cigars he used to smoke years ago and had quit but whose ghost still lived in his clothes. Hadi held on for a long time. Longer, probably, than a ten-year-old in America was supposed to hold on to a grandfather. He did not care.

"Let me look at you," his grandfather said, pushing him back gently. "You have grown."

"It has only been four months."

"Boys can grow in four months. You have grown."

"You look tired, baba," Hadi's mother said, taking the suitcase.

"I am tired. But I am here. Tomorrow I will not be tired. Today I am tired but I am here."

In the car, on the two-hour drive back to the station, his grandfather sat in the front seat with his father, and Hadi sat in the back, and his grandfather asked a thousand questions, and his father answered. What was the station like? How many scientists? What was the measurement that they took? How long had the tower been there? How deep did the frost go in the ground? What did the people eat? Were the schools good? Were the roads safe in winter? Were the Americans kind?

His father laughed, for the first time Hadi had heard in a long time, and answered. The tower was from the fifties. The frost went four feet deep. The people ate hot dish, which was a sort of casserole, and meat and potatoes. The schools were good. The roads were paved only in the summer in some places. The Americans were very kind, mostly.

"Mostly?" his grandfather said.

"Some of them do not know where Iran is."

"They think it is the same as Iraq."

"Sometimes."

"Well. I will explain it to them if the opportunity arises."

"Baba. Please."

"I will be polite."

"Please."

Hadi's grandfather turned in his seat and looked at Hadi with one eye closed, as if sharing a secret. Hadi laughed.

When they got back to the house, Hadi's grandfather stood in the driveway and looked at the little white house, and then he turned slowly in a full circle and looked at the field, and the station, and the water tower, and the radio tower standing far off in the distance like a thin dark finger.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, oh."

"What is it, baba?" Hadi's mother said.

"The sky."

"Yes."

"It is very large."

"Yes."

"I did not believe it when Hadi told me on the telephone. I thought he was exaggerating. Now I see." He shook his head. "It is like the sky above the desert. But wider."

"Come inside, baba. You are cold."

"In a minute. In a minute, in a minute. Let me look."

He stood for another full minute in the driveway, and he looked. He looked at the sky and the field and the tower. He did not speak. At the end of the minute he said, in Persian, quietly, as if only to himself, "This is a good place for a person to think."

Then he went inside.

That evening, they ate a long dinner. Hadi's mother had spent the day cooking. There was saffron rice with barberries, and lamb stew with dried limes, and herbs from the one little plastic pot of herbs she had managed to keep alive on the kitchen windowsill, and flatbread that she had rolled and baked herself because there was no bakery nearby. Hadi's grandfather tasted each dish, and after each bite he closed his eyes and shook his head once, slowly, as if disagreeing with something.

"Narges jaan," he said.

"Yes, baba."

"You are a better cook here than you were in Tehran."

"You always say that about the first meal at someone's house."

"Yes. Because it is always true."

He took another bite.

"A house without a good meal is a house without a roof," he said. "You have given this house a roof."

He turned to Hadi. "Did you know that, daadaa? That a good meal is a roof?"

"No, daadaa."

"Remember it. Food is what keeps the weather out of a home. Not bricks. Not wood. Food."

"Yes, daadaa."

"Your mother is a doctor and a builder, then. She built us a roof tonight."

Hadi's mother waved her hand, embarrassed and pleased.

After dinner, his grandfather wanted to unpack. Hadi followed him into the small guest room, which was really Hadi's father's office converted for the month, with a narrow bed pressed against one wall. His grandfather laid the brown leather suitcase on the bed and opened it.

On top, wrapped in a soft cotton cloth, was a small prayer rug. His grandfather took it out and set it gently on the bedside table. Under the rug was a book — a small old book, bound in dark blue cloth, with gold lettering in Persian. It was a book of Bahá'í prayers. His grandfather had carried that book, or one like it, every day of Hadi's life. Under the book were clothes, neatly folded — trousers, shirts, a sweater, a second suit. Under the clothes were gifts. A bag of pistachios for Hadi's mother. A pair of knitted slippers for Hadi's father, which his grandmother had made before she died three years ago and which his grandfather had kept and now offered. A small wooden box for Hadi.

"For me?"

"For you."

"What is in it?"

"Open it and you will see."

Hadi opened it.

Inside the box was a radio. It was very small, no bigger than his hand, and very old. It had a brown plastic case and a dial with numbers painted in yellow, and a speaker covered in a woven cloth pattern that had faded almost to gray. A round knob on the side was for volume. A thinner knob was for tuning.

"It is from 1965," his grandfather said. "It worked when I last tried it, six months ago. Batteries are inside already. Two D batteries. You will need more eventually. In North Dakota I do not know where you buy batteries. You must ask."

"Daadaa."

"It is yours now."

"But this is your radio."

"I have others. I am an old man with many radios. You are a young man with no radios. It is time."

Hadi turned the radio over in his hands. It was heavier than it looked. He slid the volume knob with his thumb. There was a soft click.

"Shall we turn it on?"

"Please."

His grandfather clicked it on. There was a moment of silence, and then a low crackling filled the room, the sound of static, and then, as his grandfather turned the tuning knob very slowly, voices and fragments of music swam up out of the static — a man talking in English too fast to follow, a burst of country music, a weather report, a commercial for a car dealership in Minot.

"There," his grandfather said. "Listen. Every one of these voices is a person. In a building somewhere. Speaking into a microphone. And the signal travels through the air and comes here, to us, to this little box on a bed in North Dakota."

"I know, daadaa."

"It is a miracle. You must not forget that it is a miracle."

"I will not forget."

His grandfather turned the dial some more. The fragments came and went — music, talk, static, music.

"Did you know," his grandfather said, "that when I was a young man, I built radios from parts? My father taught me. His father taught him. I still remember the way a crystal feels when you solder a wire to it. The lead melts so quickly. A drop, a breath, a drop."

"Mac has a kit."

"Mac?"

"My friend at school."

"Ah. The girl with the chickens?"

"Yes. She gave me a kit. We are building it. We are not very good."

"Then I will help you. Bring it over. We will build it together. We will fix whatever is wrong. And then, Hadi jaan, we will see what is in the air here."

"What do you mean, daadaa?"

His grandfather turned the small brown radio so that the dial faced him, and he looked at it, and then he looked up at Hadi, and his eyes were dark and thoughtful and very old.

"In every place," he said, "there are signals in the air that no one expects. That is the thing about radio. You never know what you will catch. You throw out a net, you pull it in, and you see what has come."

He set the radio on the bedside table beside the prayer rug.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow we will catch."

============================================================

Hadi brought the radio kit over the next morning.

He carried the kit box carefully on his lap in the car while his mother drove him the short distance to Mac's farm. The box was battered, its corners taped with masking tape that had yellowed with age. Inside the box were little paper envelopes of parts, and the pink sheet of instructions, and a half-soldered circuit board with wires sticking out of it at odd angles like the legs of a crab.

Mac met him at the door. She was wearing the same overalls she always wore, or one identical to them, and a t-shirt that said GREYWATER LITTLE LEAGUE across the front.

"Is this the famous grandfather?" she said, peering past Hadi at the car.

"Daadaa, can you come?" Hadi called.

His grandfather got out of the passenger side slowly, leaning on the door. He straightened his gray suit jacket and put on his hat and walked up the gravel path to Mac's porch.

"Good morning, young lady," he said. "I am Khodadad."

"I'm Mac."

"Mac is short for Mackenzie, Hadi has told me."

"Yes, sir."

"And your parents are at home?"

"My mom is. My dad's out in the fields. Do you want to meet her?"

"Please."

Mac's mother was a short round woman with very red cheeks and she wore an apron over her jeans. She was delighted by Hadi's grandfather, and Hadi's grandfather was delighted by her, and within five minutes they were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and discussing the price of wheat, which Hadi had not known his grandfather had opinions about but which it turned out he did. Mac rolled her eyes and pulled Hadi into the next room.

"Come on. Let's set up."

The next room was a kind of den with a wood-paneled wall and a long low coffee table and a rag rug. Mac cleared the coffee table by sweeping everything onto the floor, and she laid out a white towel on the wooden surface. Hadi put the kit box down on the towel.

"Okay," Mac said. "Where did we leave off?"

"I do not remember."

"Me neither." She frowned at the half-finished circuit board. "I think I had put in the resistors, but I'm not sure if I got them right."

"Daadaa," Hadi called. "Daadaa, can you come now?"

His grandfather came. He took off his suit jacket and draped it over a chair, and he rolled up the white sleeves of his shirt to the elbows. His forearms were thin and the skin of them was soft and wrinkled, but his hands, Hadi noticed, were steady.

He sat down at the coffee table on the rag rug, with his legs crossed to one side because he could not easily sit cross-legged anymore, and he looked at the circuit board for a long time. He picked it up. He held it to the light. He squinted through his reading glasses. He turned it over. He hummed a small noncommittal hum.

"Mac jaan," he said.

"Yes?"

"This is fine work. Very fine. But the third resistor on the left is in the wrong orientation. And the second one, I believe, is the wrong value."

"Oh no. Really?"

"Do you have a small screwdriver? And a soldering iron. And a cloth for wiping."

"I have all of it somewhere."

"Find them."

While Mac rummaged in a closet, Hadi's grandfather set out the parts on the towel in neat rows, like soldiers before a battle. He sorted the resistors by color. He lined up the capacitors.

"Hadi jaan. Do you remember the colors?"

"Some of them. Brown is one. Red is two. Orange is three."

"Good. Yellow."

"Four."

"Green."

"Five."

"You see? You remember more than you think."

When Mac came back with the soldering iron, his grandfather plugged it in and waited for it to heat up and then he showed Mac how to hold it. Not like a pencil, he said. Like a small knife. With the flat of the tip, not the point. And the solder goes on the work, not on the tip. You let the heat draw the solder. You do not push the solder.

"Oh," Mac said. "That's why mine was always blobby."

"That is why."

He showed her by demonstrating on a scrap of wire. The solder ran like silver water. The connection turned glossy and smooth. Mac tried. Her first attempt was still a little blobby, but less. Her second was better. Her third was very good.

"You have steady hands, young lady," his grandfather said. "You have an engineer's hands."

"I do?"

"Yes. My father used to say it. He said there are two kinds of hands in the world. Hands that rush and hands that wait. Engineers' hands wait."

"I'm not very good at waiting."

"You are waiting now."

"Well. I guess."

For the next three hours, the three of them sat around the coffee table and built the radio. Hadi's grandfather did not do the work. He sat and watched and offered small corrections, and occasionally he picked up a piece and said, try here, not there, and occasionally he said, good, good, good, in the quiet voice of a man who has been saying good, good, good to apprentices all his life.

Hadi soldered the remaining resistors. Mac soldered the capacitors. Hadi wound the tiny coil of copper wire around a ferrite rod, which his grandfather told him had to be done slowly, evenly, with the wire pulled tight. Mac attached the variable capacitor to the front panel. Hadi attached the speaker. His grandfather crimped the antenna wire and showed them how to loop the ground wire around the back terminal.

At one point, around noon, Mac's mother brought them a plate of sandwiches. Hadi's grandfather ate two. Hadi ate one. Mac ate three. His grandfather said, "In Iran we do not eat ham. But in North Dakota I eat ham, because I am a guest, and a guest who refuses food is no guest."

"Sorry," Mac's mother said from the kitchen doorway. "I can make you something else."

"No. I am enjoying the ham. It is a very good ham."

"It's just the kind from the store."

"It is a good store."

At last, around two in the afternoon, the radio was done.

They stared at it. It sat on the towel like a small patient animal. Two D batteries went into the battery holder. The antenna wire trailed across the floor and out the back door, clipped to a fencepost by a little alligator clip.

"Ready?" Mac said.

"Turn it on," Hadi said.

Mac turned the dial, which was also the switch. There was a soft click. Then nothing. Then a very faint crackle.

"Is that it?" Mac said. "Is it broken?"

"No, no. Patience." Hadi's grandfather reached over and turned the tuning knob with his thumb and finger, very slowly, very carefully. The crackle grew. A thin thread of voice appeared, swam up, slid away. He kept turning.

A burst of music. A weather report, very faint. A fragment of a commercial. A square dance tune playing from somewhere far away.

"Oh my gosh," Mac said. "It works!"

"Of course it works."

"It actually works! We made it! We made it and it works!"

She jumped up from the floor and danced around the room. She hugged Hadi. She hugged Hadi's grandfather, and his grandfather laughed and patted her on the back and said, "You are a young engineer. You are a builder of small churches."

"A small what?"

"Never mind. It is a thing my father used to say."

They listened to the radio for the rest of the afternoon. They tuned slowly across the AM band, from one end to the other, and they wrote down every station they found on a piece of notebook paper. There were stations from Bismarck and Fargo and Winnipeg, and one all the way from Denver that only came in sometimes, and a country station that was so close its signal was loud even with the volume almost off.

At five o'clock, Hadi's mother came to pick them up. She was delighted to see the radio. She was delighted to see Hadi and Mac and his grandfather all sitting around the coffee table with flushed faces, like three conspirators.

"Baba," she said. "You have made a radio with the children."

"The children made the radio. I only watched."

"He's being modest," Mac said. "He's an amazing teacher."

In the car on the way home, Hadi held the radio on his lap. Mac had insisted he take it. "It's yours," she had said. "You did most of the soldering. And your grandpa did all the hard parts. I was just the one with the kit."

"But you gave the kit."

"Well. Yeah. But it was just sitting there."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. Take it. Use it. Tell me if you hear anything cool."

Cool, Hadi thought, as the car drove back to the station through the winter afternoon. Cool meaning interesting. Cool meaning unexpected. Cool meaning worth telling.

He held the radio with both hands.

Tell me if you hear anything cool.

He would.

============================================================

The first strange thing happened three nights later.

Hadi had set up the radio on his bedside table. He had run the antenna wire out the bedroom window and up to a nail his father had let him drive into the eave of the house. The ground wire was clipped to the radiator pipe, which his grandfather had assured him would work as a ground.

On the third night, at about eight-thirty, he heard the first thing he could not identify.

He had the dial at about 840 kHz, and he was sliding past a blank patch between a Canadian station and a station from somewhere in South Dakota, when the static thinned. A voice appeared. A man's voice, soft, reading something in a language that was not English.

Hadi sat up.

It was Persian.

Not exactly Persian. Persian with an accent he did not recognize. An older sort of Persian, slower and more formal. The kind of Persian you would read in an old book of poetry.

He listened. The voice was reciting. Not music. A recitation. The words flowed, stopped, flowed again. Hadi recognized none of the individual phrases, but he recognized the rhythm. He had heard his grandfather read Rumi in exactly this rhythm, late in the evenings in Tehran, with his feet up and his eyes closed.

"Daadaa," he whispered, though his grandfather was two rooms away. "Daadaa, come listen."

The voice went on for perhaps forty seconds. Then the static washed back in, like a wave over a small shell on a beach, and the voice was gone.

Hadi sat with his hand on the dial. He did not move. He tried to turn the dial back very carefully, but the signal did not return. There was only the hiss of the space between stations.

He got up. He went down the hallway to his grandfather's room, where a light was on under the door.

"Daadaa."

"Come in, Hadi jaan."

His grandfather was sitting in the chair by the little desk, reading the book of prayers in his lap. His reading glasses sat low on his nose. He looked up.

"I heard something," Hadi said.

"Oh?"

"On the radio. A voice. In Persian."

"Persian?"

"Yes. A man. Reading. I do not know what he was reading."

His grandfather closed the book. He set it on the desk. He stood up.

"Show me," he said.

They went back to Hadi's room. They sat on the bed together. Hadi turned the dial back to 840 kHz very slowly, very carefully. Static. More static. A thin trace of a distant music station. More static.

"I am sorry, daadaa. It is gone."

"Wait. Be patient."

They waited. Hadi moved the dial by tiny degrees. His grandfather leaned his ear close to the speaker. The radio hissed and spat. A faraway weather report drifted by. A burst of something that sounded like Spanish. Then for just a moment a snatch of a song. It was not a song Hadi had ever heard, but it was a song in a language he did not know.

"There," his grandfather said. "Wait."

The song faded. Static returned. Then, faintly, very faintly, the voice of the man. Reading. In Persian.

His grandfather put his hand on Hadi's knee. He did not speak. He listened. His eyes were closed. Hadi listened too.

The voice read for perhaps twenty seconds. Then it faded into the static, and there was nothing again.

His grandfather opened his eyes. He was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, "That was very old Persian. Classical. I could not catch the meaning, but it had the rhythm of Hafez. Or Saadi. One of the old poets."

"Where was it coming from, daadaa?"

"That is the question."

"There is no Persian station in North Dakota."

"I would be surprised if there were."

"Could it be Canada?"

"I do not think there is a Persian station in Canada that broadcasts on the AM band."

"Could it be from far away? Like, over the ocean?"

"Sometimes, at night, signals travel a very long way. When the sun sets, the sky opens to the AM band. A station in Cuba can sometimes be heard in Minnesota. But a station from Iran, that is the other side of the world. And the AM band does not reach so far."

"Then where?"

His grandfather was quiet. He took off his reading glasses. He polished them on the corner of his shirt. He put them back on.

"Hadi jaan," he said. "Sometimes a radio picks up signals that no one can explain. This is a fact. Radio operators have known about it for a hundred years. They call them ghost signals. Most of them have explanations, an unusual weather pattern, a reflection off a mountain, a plane flying overhead. Some of them have never been explained."

"But I heard it, daadaa. You heard it."

"Yes."

"It was real."

"Yes. It was real. Something was broadcasting. We only do not know what. Or from where."

"Is that scary?"

His grandfather smiled. He reached over and put his dry warm hand on the back of Hadi's neck.

"Daadaa jaan. In my life I have heard many strange things on radios. Some of them frightened me. Most of them did not. The air is full of voices. Most of them, we understand. Some of them, we do not. That does not make them evil. It makes them mysteries."

"A mystery."

"Yes."

"What should I do?"

"You should listen."

"Only listen?"

"For now, only listen. Write down what you hear. Write down the time, and the frequency, and what language, if you can tell. Write down everything. That is what a scientist does. A scientist collects. Later, when there is enough, a scientist looks at the collection and tries to see the pattern."

"I have a notebook already."

"Good. Then you are a scientist."

Hadi looked at the radio. The dial was still at 840 kHz. The static hissed softly, a quiet river of hiss.

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"Do not tell mama."

His grandfather considered this. "Your mother is a practical woman. She will worry that you are imagining things. Or she will worry that the house has a wiring problem. Yes. I will not tell her. For now. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

His grandfather stood up. At the door he turned back.

"Hadi jaan."

"Yes."

"You are doing something important. I feel it. I do not know what. But the hair on my arms is up." He held out his thin forearm. It was bare. The little white hairs on it were, in fact, standing.

Hadi laughed. His grandfather laughed. But under the laugh, in both of them, was a different feeling, a feeling of standing at the edge of something neither of them understood.

His grandfather went to bed. Hadi turned off the radio. He lay on his back under the blanket and stared at the ceiling. The wind had started up again outside. The window rattled a little in its frame. Somewhere far off, he thought he heard the sound of a train.

The air is full of voices, his grandfather had said.

He closed his eyes. He slept.

He closed the notebook. He slid it under his pillow.

============================================================

On Saturday, Mac took Hadi to the library.

Greywater had a library, though calling it a library was, Mac admitted as they walked up to it, being a little generous. It was a small brick building on the town's one main street, wedged between the hardware store and the pharmacy. It had one room. It had four tables. It had shelves along every wall, and a tall cart in the middle with books standing up in a rack like soldiers, and a desk near the door where a librarian sat. The librarian was an old woman named Mrs. Johanssen who wore her hair in a bun and had, Mac whispered to Hadi, been the librarian since the library opened in 1974.

"Mackenzie," Mrs. Johanssen said. "Back for more?"

"Yes, ma'am. This is my friend Hadi. He's new. He likes to read."

"Hello, Hadi. What kind of books do you like?"

Hadi thought about it. "Any kind. I read anything."

"My favorite answer. Come see me when you find something. I will give you a library card. It does not cost anything."

"Thank you."

Mac pulled him past the desk and over to a shelf in the corner. "This is the local history section. It's where I thought we'd start."

"Start what?"

"Looking up the tower. You said you wanted to know about it. This is where they keep the stuff about the town. Books and pamphlets and old newspapers and things."

Hadi had not told Mac about the Persian voice on the radio. He had not told her, because his grandfather had said not to tell his mother, and Hadi felt that if he was not going to tell his mother he should not tell Mac either, because a secret with the wrong people was not really a secret. But he had told Mac that he wanted to know more about the tower, and Mac had jumped on it, because Mac was a person who liked a project.

The local history section took up one and a half shelves. Most of the books were paperbacks with dated covers. Mac pulled out a thin orange book titled THE ATMOSPHERIC STATIONS OF NORTH DAKOTA, 1940 to 1980.

"This looks right," she said.

They took it to one of the tables and sat down. The book was about a hundred pages long, with black-and-white photographs on the center pages. Hadi flipped through. On page forty-seven, he found a photograph that made him stop.

It was the tower.

"That's it," Mac said. "That's ours."

"Read what it says."

She read. The book said the tower had been built in 1952 by the Federal Aviation Administration to study upper-atmosphere turbulence. In 1961 it had been taken over by a different agency and used for radio astronomy experiments. In 1967 it had been decommissioned and the equipment removed. In 1972 the land and the tower had been transferred to the new research station. No one had used the tower since.

"That's boring," Mac said.

"It is only facts."

"Yeah. Facts are boring unless they come with stories."

"Mrs. Johanssen," Hadi called.

Mrs. Johanssen looked up.

"Is there anything else about the tower? Anything with more stories?"

Mrs. Johanssen thought. "Well. We have some old issues of the Greywater Gazette on microfilm. From the sixties and seventies. Sometimes there were articles about the station. You could look through those, but it would take a while." She paused. "You might be better off talking to Walter Albright. He worked up there in the sixties. He comes in on Saturdays to read the paper. In fact, she glanced at the clock, he should be here any minute. He is always here at ten."

Mac and Hadi looked at each other.

At five past ten, the door of the library opened and a man came in. He was perhaps seventy, though it was difficult to tell; he walked with a stoop but his face was unlined. He wore a brown corduroy jacket and a cap. He walked to the newspaper rack, took down a copy of the Gazette, and sat down at the table nearest the window.

"That's him," Mrs. Johanssen whispered. "Go say hello."

Mac took a deep breath. She grabbed Hadi's sleeve and pulled him across the room.

"Mr. Albright?"

The old man lowered his newspaper slowly. He looked at Mac over the top of a pair of half-moon reading glasses. His eyes were a faded blue, almost gray.

"Yes?"

"Hi. I'm Mackenzie Halvorsen. This is my friend Hadi Ghaderi. He just moved here from Iran."

"From Iran," Mr. Albright said.

"Yes, sir."

"All right." He set down the paper. "Good morning, Hadi Ghaderi. My name is Walter Albright. How can I be of service to two persons who are missing a fine Saturday out of doors?"

"We wanted to ask you about the tower," Mac said.

"The tower."

"The radio tower. Out at the research station. Mrs. Johanssen said you worked there."

Mr. Albright was quiet for a moment. Then he folded his newspaper, carefully, and set it on the table. He gestured to the empty chairs across from him.

"Sit down," he said.

They sat.

"The tower," he said. "I have not been asked about the tower in, oh. Fifteen years? Perhaps more. Why are you interested?"

"It's close to where I live," Hadi said. "My father works at the research station."

"Ah. And what does your father do?"

"He measures cosmic rays."

"Does he. Then your father is a good man." Mr. Albright smiled, showing a row of small, even teeth. "And you want to know about our tower."

"Your tower?"

"I built part of it. In 1961, when it was restored. I was twenty-three. That was my first job out of the technical institute." He paused. "It was also my favorite job. I worked at the station for six years. From 1961 to 1967. Then I moved down to Texas and worked on bigger things. And then, when I retired, I came back here. Because a man returns to the place where he was twenty-three."

"What did you do at the station?" Hadi asked.

"I was the engineer. I made the equipment work. If a wire came loose, I fixed it. If a vacuum tube blew, I replaced it. If the cryostat on the receiver lost its coolant, I filled it back up. I did everything."

"What kind of research was it? The book said upper-atmosphere. And radio astronomy."

"The book is partly right. We started with upper-atmosphere. That is, we measured how the ionosphere behaved at different times of day, different seasons, different weather conditions. The ionosphere is the layer of the sky that bounces radio waves back down. AM radio, most of it, gets its distance by bouncing off the ionosphere. It is how a station in New York can, at night, be heard in Kansas."

"My grandfather said something like that."

"Your grandfather is a radio man?"

"Yes. In Iran. He used to fix radios."

"Ah." Mr. Albright's eyes brightened a little. "Then we have that in common. Good."

"You said you started with upper-atmosphere," Mac prompted.

"Yes. But by sixty-five we had begun to do other things with the tower. Radio astronomy, as the book said. Listening to signals from space. Stars give off radio signals. Galaxies give off radio signals. Even empty space gives off a very faint signal, the leftover from the beginning of the universe, though we did not know about that back then."

"You listened to stars?"

"We listened to everything. That is the honest answer. Most of what we heard was noise. Most of what a radio astronomer hears is noise. But sometimes," he paused, and looked out the window, "sometimes we heard things we could not explain."

"Like what?" Mac said.

"Like voices."

The library was very quiet. From the front desk, Mrs. Johanssen was stamping the due-date card of a romance novel. From the street outside, a car was passing, slowly.

"Voices?" Hadi said.

"Voices. Fragments of music. Broadcasts in languages we did not speak. Programs from stations we could not identify. One night, I remember this very clearly, we picked up what sounded like a prayer, in a language one of the other engineers, a man named Krishnamurthy, said was Sanskrit. Now we were on a very high frequency, several hundred megahertz. You do not get Sanskrit broadcasts on several hundred megahertz in North Dakota. Unless you live next to a temple. We did not."

"What did you do?"

"We did what scientists do. We recorded it. We wrote it down. We sent the recording to our bosses in Washington, and they sent it to someone else, and eventually the tape came back with a note saying no explanation had been found. They asked us to continue listening. We continued. We picked up other things. A woman speaking French. A man whistling a song. A few notes of something that sounded like a sitar. A Bible verse, read aloud, in English. We kept notes. The notes are probably still in a box somewhere at the station, if no one has thrown them out."

"I think I saw that box," Hadi said slowly. "There was a box labeled TOWER 1962 to 67."

Mr. Albright lit up. "You saw it?"

"It was in the storeroom. In the third building."

"Still there. After all this time." He shook his head. "You know, young man, I have wondered about that box for forty years. I have wondered whether anyone ever looked at it. Whether anyone ever will."

"Did you ever figure out what the voices were?" Mac asked.

"No."

"Never?"

"Never. We had theories. Someone said it was a Soviet jamming signal. Someone said it was a secret American experiment. Someone said it was reflection off meteor trails. Someone said it was a broken receiver. Someone said, quietly, that it might be something we did not have a word for. The chief scientist did not like that last theory. He shut down the program in sixty-seven, and the tower was decommissioned, and the box went into the storeroom, and I went to Texas."

"Did you believe any of the theories?" Hadi asked.

"No."

"None of them?"

"None." Mr. Albright looked at Hadi. His faded blue eyes were sharp now, focused. "Young man. You are asking me these questions for a reason. Have you heard something?"

Hadi did not look at Mac. He did not know what to say.

"Young man."

"Yes."

"Have you built a radio?"

"Yes."

"Have you heard a voice?"

Hadi hesitated. Then he nodded.

"In what language?"

"Persian."

"A song? A prayer?"

"Poetry, I think. Very old poetry."

Mr. Albright leaned back in his chair. He was silent for a long time. Then, slowly, he smiled.

"Forty years," he said. "Forty years, and the tower is still listening."

"The tower is not working," Hadi said. "I built my own radio."

"Where is your radio?"

"In my bedroom. In the house behind the station."

"Near the tower?"

"Yes. Maybe three hundred meters."

"Ha." Mr. Albright shook his head. "The tower is not listening. But the tower has nothing to do with it. Or the tower does have something to do with it. Something about that place. About the air there. Young man. Your radio is picking up what our radios picked up. Because you are in the same place. Because something about that field is a catcher. I always thought so. We all always thought so. We never said it out loud."

Mac was staring at Hadi with her mouth slightly open.

"You heard something?" she said. "You didn't tell me."

"My grandfather said not to tell. Not yet."

"Your grandfather heard it too?"

"Yes."

"Oh my gosh."

Mr. Albright looked back and forth between them, amused. "Perhaps I have caused some trouble between friends. I apologize. But young man. I must see your notebook. When you have one. I must see it. May I?"

"I have one. I will bring it."

"Bring it here, next Saturday. I will be at this table. I will bring coffee for myself and a root beer for each of you. Is that a contract?"

"It is a contract."

"Good." Mr. Albright picked up his newspaper again. He shook it straight with both hands. "Next Saturday, then. And in the meantime, young man. Listen. Listen as carefully as you can. Write down everything. What you are hearing, it is something I have wanted to understand for my entire adult life. If your radio can hear it, and I can help you make sense of it, then the forty years I wondered will have been, in some small way, repaid."

Outside, in the street, Mac grabbed Hadi's arm.

"You liar! You didn't tell me!"

"I am sorry."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because it sounded crazy. Because I did not want you to think I was lying."

She was quiet for a second. Her face was flushed, not from cold but from feeling. Then she said, "Well. Now I know. And you are not a liar. And I am going to come to your house tonight and listen to your radio."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. Ask your mom. Or your grandpa. I can sleep over. I have a sleeping bag."

"She will say yes."

"Good. Then I am coming. And I am going to hear a voice. And if I do not hear a voice, I am going to be very mad at you for a long time."

"Fair."

They walked home through the pale afternoon, and Hadi felt, under all the other things he was feeling, the nervous excitement, the embarrassment at having kept a secret, the small fear, a kind of quiet gladness. He had a secret. And now someone was sharing it with him.

============================================================

Mac did sleep over. Mac did hear a voice, though not until almost midnight, and the voice she heard was not Persian but Arabic, or at least Hadi's grandfather said it was Arabic, and what the voice was saying he could not entirely parse but he thought it might have been a passage from the Quran, read in the slow measured way that passages of the Quran are often read.

Mac sat on the floor of Hadi's bedroom with her sleeping bag half-zipped around her legs and her hair sticking up and her mouth open, and she did not say anything for a full minute after the voice faded.

Then she said, "Okay. I believe you."

"Thank you."

"I mean, I already believed you. But now I really believe you."

"Thank you."

"This is bananas."

"Yes."

His grandfather, who had come in from his room in his pajamas and a cardigan and was sitting on the end of the bed, nodded slowly.

"It is bananas," he said, tasting the word. "Yes. That is a good word. Bananas."

In the days that followed, they fell into a rhythm. Every evening, after Hadi's homework and dinner and the washing up, Hadi and his grandfather went to Hadi's bedroom and turned on the radio. Sometimes Mac came over. More often she did not, because she had her own chores and her own homework, but she came on weekends, and she brought cookies, and she brought her own notebook, which was smaller than Hadi's and had a picture of a rooster on the cover.

They heard many things.

They wrote everything down.

The notebook filled.

Hadi's grandfather was delighted. For the first week of the project, he insisted that they treat it like a scientific study. Then he relaxed, and began to treat it like something else, though Hadi could not quite put a word to what that something else was. It was like prayer, in a way. The two of them sitting in the dim light of the bedroom, the radio's small yellow dial glowing, his grandfather's hand sometimes on Hadi's shoulder, sometimes in his own lap, his grandfather's head tilted to catch the faint voice. Prayer, or listening for prayer.

One night, in the second week of April, his grandfather said, "Hadi jaan. Turn the radio off for a moment."

Hadi turned it off. The silence of the bedroom came in around them like water.

"I want to tell you a story," his grandfather said.

"Yes, daadaa."

"When I was your age, I lived in Yazd. You have been to Yazd. You remember."

"Yes."

"We lived in a small house in the old part of the city. The walls were mud brick. The courtyard had one fig tree. My father was a shopkeeper and also, in his spare time, he repaired radios. My mother was a seamstress and also, in her spare time, she sang. She had a very beautiful voice. Very high, very clear, not trained, just natural."

"You've told me about her."

"I have. Today I will tell you more. My mother died when I was twelve. A very short illness. Three weeks, and she was gone. I do not talk about it often because it is a sadness I have carried for over sixty years, and I have found that sadness is better carried privately than shared. But you are my grandson, and you are listening now to voices in a radio, and I feel that I must tell you some things before the month is over and I go back to Iran."

Hadi sat very still.

"My mother used to sing in the evenings," his grandfather said. "While she sewed. She did not sing anything in particular. Sometimes she sang songs from her own mother. Sometimes she sang prayers. Sometimes she made up little songs about whatever she was thinking. There was one song, I remember, that she made up about a pomegranate. The pomegranate was a king of fruits, she sang. Its seeds were jewels. Its juice was wine. I was eight years old, and I sat at her feet, and I listened, and I thought my mother was the most beautiful person in the world."

He smiled. His eyes did not leave the small silent radio.

"After she died," he went on, "I could not remember her voice. This is a thing that happens. The memory of a voice is fragile. A face, you can remember forever, if you have photographs. A voice, if it was never recorded, begins to fade the moment the person stops speaking. Within a year I could not remember exactly what her voice sounded like. Within five years I could not remember at all. Only the fact that it had been beautiful. Only the shape of the feeling."

He paused.

Hadi did not speak.

"Hadi jaan," his grandfather said. "When I was young I used to turn the dial of my father's old radio, late at night, and I used to hope — I have never told anyone this, not your grandmother, not your mother, not even my own father — I used to hope that I might pick up a broadcast of my own mother's voice. I knew this was impossible. My mother had never sung on the radio. My mother was not famous. My mother was a seamstress in Yazd. But I turned the dial, and I listened, and I hoped. Because a child who has lost a voice will hope for impossible things."

"Daadaa."

"Yes, my boy."

"Are we —" Hadi could not finish.

"Are we what?"

"Are we picking up —"

"I do not know."

"But you think —"

"Daadaa jaan. I do not know. No one knows. That is the whole point of a mystery. We are listening to voices that should not be there. I do not know whose they are. I do not know why they come. I only know that the air is full of voices. More full than any of us understand. I have believed this since I was a boy. I believe it more now."

"Is it..." Hadi hesitated. He was not sure how to ask.

"Is it God?" his grandfather said.

"Yes."

His grandfather considered this for a long time.

"I am a man who believes in God," he said at last. "You know this. I pray. I follow the calendar of the Bahá'í faith. I say the prayers that have been given to us. I believe that God is one, and that God loves people, and that God has sent prophets in every age, Moses and Christ and Muhammad and Krishna and the Buddha and Bahá'u'lláh, and that each prophet has spoken in the language of the people of that time, and that the prayers of one are not better than the prayers of another. I believe this. I have believed it since I was a boy of twenty when I first read about it. I have believed it through the deaths of my parents, and my wife, and my two brothers, and more than one grandchild who did not live to be born."

Hadi had not known about the grandchildren. He did not ask.

"So is it God?" his grandfather said. "Hadi jaan. If I tell you that what we hear on the radio is God, then we have named the mystery, and a mystery that is named begins to shrink. It becomes a thing you can put in a box and carry around with you. I do not want to do that. I do not want the voices to shrink. I think we should not name them yet. I think we should listen a little longer, and see what else they have to say."

"All right, daadaa."

"But I will tell you this. When I hear the voice of the woman singing the lullaby — the one last week, that we could not make out — I feel that I am listening to the voice of my own mother. Not as she was. Not exactly. But to something that carries her. To a sound that belongs to the family of sounds she used to make. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"A voice is a family. When you lose someone, you do not lose the whole family. You only lose one member. The rest are still out there, in other mouths, in other rooms, in other lives. And every so often, if you listen, you hear one of them, and it is like a cousin you have not seen in forty years, and you know at once who she is."

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"Is that a Bahá'í idea?"

"I do not know. It is my idea. But it may also be a Bahá'í idea. Bahá'ís believe that the soul is eternal and that all of us are one. Perhaps the voice, too, is a small eternal thing. Perhaps every voice that has ever spoken is still traveling outward, through the air, through space, through the body of the world. Perhaps a radio, in the right place at the right time, is a net that catches what drifts by."

Hadi sat with this.

"Daadaa," he said.

"Yes."

"I like that idea."

"I like it too. I do not know if it is true. I like it anyway."

He reached over and turned the radio back on. The hiss filled the room. Hadi turned the dial slowly. For a long time there was nothing. Then, faintly, very faintly, a single note. A man, humming. Just a single note held for perhaps four seconds, and then gone.

They looked at each other. Neither spoke.

============================================================

On the fourteenth of April, they heard the Lord's Prayer.

It came in clear for almost thirty seconds, in English, in the voice of a woman. Hadi had never heard the Lord's Prayer before. He recognized it only because the words sounded like a prayer, and Mac, who had been sleeping over for the weekend, gasped and sat up straight and whispered, "That's the Lord's Prayer! That's Christian!"

"What are the words?" Hadi asked.

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That's the beginning. That's what she's saying."

"What's a kingdom come?" Hadi whispered.

"It's when God's rule comes on earth. I think. My grandma taught me the prayer."

"You know this prayer?"

"Of course. Everybody in my family knows it. We say it in church."

"You go to church?"

"Lutheran. Every other Sunday, when my mom makes us."

"Oh."

The woman finished the prayer. The static returned.

On the seventeenth of April, they heard a Buddhist chant. They only knew it was a Buddhist chant because Mac's brother was in high school and was taking a world religions elective and had, earlier that week, played a recording of a chant to annoy his mother at dinner. When the chant came through the radio, Mac sat up and said, "Oh my gosh. That's the chant my brother had."

The chant lasted for perhaps two minutes. Hadi's grandfather, who had not heard the chant before, listened with his head tilted.

"This is a very old sound," he said, when it was over.

"Yes," Mac said. "It's from Tibet or someplace. I think."

"A thousand years old. Maybe older. Listen."

He rewound the — but of course there was no rewind, because a radio does not rewind. The chant was gone.

On the twentieth of April, they heard something Hadi's grandfather had hoped for without saying so. They heard a Bahá'í prayer.

The prayer was short, about forty seconds. It was one of the prayers Bahá'ís say for the unity of humanity. Hadi knew the shape of it; he could not have repeated it exactly, but he knew it. His grandfather had said it at the table on Sundays in Tehran, after dinner, when everyone was quiet and full.

When it ended, his grandfather did not move. His eyes stayed closed. Hadi thought, at first, that his grandfather was still listening. Then he saw that his grandfather was crying, very quietly, with two tears on his cheeks and no sound at all.

"Daadaa."

"I am all right. I am all right. Hadi jaan. I am all right. I am only —" he wiped his face with the back of his hand — "I am only an old man."

"Daadaa."

"It is only a prayer. I have said it ten thousand times. It is only a prayer."

"Yes."

"But to hear it in this house. In North Dakota. On a radio you built with your hands. That is a thing I was not expecting."

"I know."

They sat for a long time without speaking. The radio hissed. His grandfather wiped his face again and then he laughed, a small low laugh, and he shook his head.

"Hadi jaan."

"Yes."

"The world is very strange and very beautiful."

"Yes, daadaa."

"Write it in your notebook."

Hadi wrote. He wrote the time and the frequency and the words. At the end he wrote, in the margin, DAADAA CRIED.

He underlined it.

Over the next ten days, they heard twenty-three more signals. Hadi filled the rest of the first notebook and started a second. The signals did not follow any pattern his grandfather or Mr. Albright or his grandfather's old friends — he had begun writing to them, describing what they were hearing — could identify. They came at different times of evening. They came on different frequencies. Sometimes two would come in quick succession; sometimes three nights would pass with nothing but ordinary Canadian country music and weather reports.

Hadi brought the notebook to Mr. Albright the next Saturday, as promised, and the one after. Mr. Albright read the entries slowly, in the library, while Hadi and Mac drank their root beers. At the end of the second Saturday, Mr. Albright closed the notebook and set it on the table and said, quietly, "Boy."

"Yes, sir."

"I have lived a long time. I have read many books and heard many stories. I have worked on radios my whole adult life. What you are hearing, what I heard forty years ago, I cannot explain. I am a scientist. I am also an old atheist. I do not believe in ghosts, or in spirits, or in messages from the dead. I believe in electrons and radio waves and the ionosphere."

"Yes, sir."

"But your radio is catching something. Something that is not a conventional broadcast. Something that, if I had to guess, I would say is the whole human ache made audible. I do not know what that means. I do not know if it means anything. But I will tell you, Hadi Ghaderi, that listening to your voices — not even hearing them myself, only reading about them in your neat little notebook — has been the most interesting thing that has happened to me in thirty years."

"Thank you, sir."

"Thank you. And keep listening. And when the tower comes down — did your father tell you?"

"About the tower?"

"The station's going to demolish it. This spring. I heard from a friend."

"He did not tell me."

"He will. Don't be angry with him. It is old and rusted and it is a liability. Insurance, you see. It has to come down. But I will go with you, when they do it, if you want. I would like to be there."

"Yes, sir."

"And Hadi."

"Yes."

"I have a feeling the signals will continue. The tower has nothing to do with them. I told you that before. They will continue after the tower is gone. Do you believe me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Then keep the radio. Keep the notebook. And when you grow up, if you ever want to become a radio engineer, I will teach you what I know. All of it. I will teach you for free. It would please me."

"Thank you, sir."

"Good."

He finished his coffee in one long swallow and stood up stiffly and left, leaving the newspaper folded neatly on the table.

Mac watched him go.

"He's weird," she said.

"Yes."

"Weird good."

"Yes."

"I like him."

"I like him too."

============================================================

The fight happened on a Tuesday.

Later, looking back, Hadi was not sure how it had started. It had started from a small thing. Mac had come over after school to work on a science project with him — they had been assigned to make a model of the solar system together, which was a common fourth- and fifth-grade project in America — and they had spent two hours cutting styrofoam balls in half and painting them different colors on the kitchen table. Hadi's grandfather had come in and out. Hadi's mother had given them snacks. Mac had spilled red paint on the newspaper and then got it on her hands and then accidentally on the back of Hadi's chair, and everyone had laughed about it.

Then, around five o'clock, while the paint was drying, Mac had wandered into Hadi's bedroom and picked up the notebook.

"Can I read the new stuff?" she had called.

"Sure," Hadi had called back.

She had read. Hadi had kept working on gluing Saturn's rings onto a toothpick. For a while he had not thought about it. Then Mac had come back into the kitchen with the notebook in her hand, and she had sat down across from him, and she had looked at him with a face he did not at first recognize.

"Hadi."

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Are you making any of this up?"

Hadi put down the toothpick.

"What?"

"Are you making any of this up. The signals you wrote about this week. I wasn't there for any of them."

"I am not making it up."

"Because some of these..." She turned a page. "This one where you heard a voice speaking Latin. Since when do you know Latin?"

"It sounded like Latin. I wrote, it might have been Latin. Or it might have been Italian. I wrote both things."

"And this one, where you heard someone calling your name."

"I did."

"Calling your name?"

"In Persian."

"And it said, 'Hadi, Hadi, Hadi.'"

"Yes."

"Come on."

"Mac. I did not make it up."

"I don't believe you."

The kitchen was very quiet. His grandfather, who had been reading in the other room, had set down his book. His mother, who had been studying at the other end of the table, had looked up.

"Why don't you believe me?" Hadi said.

"Because, Hadi. Because I come over a lot, and when I'm here we hear stuff sometimes but not every night. And then you show me your notebook and every night you heard something. And some of it is stuff that is suspicious. Like the Latin. And the voice calling your name. And the song that sounded like your grandfather's voice."

"I did not write that last one."

"You wrote, 'The man's voice reminded me of daadaa.'"

"That is not the same."

"Hadi. I am not saying you are a bad person. I am saying maybe your mind is — maybe when you listen really hard, and you want to hear something, you hear it. Maybe it is a little bit true and a little bit made up. I read about that in a book. It's called —"

"Confirmation bias."

"Yes."

"I know what it is. My father is a scientist. I am not stupid."

"I didn't say you were stupid."

"You said I am making things up."

"I said maybe. Maybe a little."

"That is the same."

"It is not the same."

"Mac."

"Hadi."

They glared at each other.

Hadi's mother stood up, very gently, and said, "Hadi jaan, Mackenzie jaan, perhaps you should take a break. Perhaps Mackenzie should go home, and you can finish the project tomorrow. It is almost dinnertime."

"I will go home," Mac said. "Yeah. I will go."

She stood up. She put on her coat. She did not look at Hadi. Hadi did not look at her. She left.

The door closed behind her. Hadi sat at the kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood and his face hot. He could feel tears coming up in his eyes and he blinked them back, hard, because he did not cry in front of his mother anymore. He had decided not to, at the age of nine, and he had held to it.

"Hadi jaan," his mother said.

"I am all right."

"No, you are not."

"I am."

She came over and sat down next to him. She put her hand on his shoulder. He did not shrug it off.

"Hadi jaan. What are you hearing on the radio?"

He had not told her. Because his grandfather had said not to. Because his grandfather had said she would worry. But now his grandfather had come into the kitchen from the other room, and his grandfather was standing in the doorway, and his grandfather was nodding at him.

"Tell her, daadaa jaan," his grandfather said. "It is time."

So Hadi told her.

He told her about the first Persian voice, and the Arabic recitations, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Buddhist chant, and the Bahá'í prayer. He told her about the notebooks, both of them. He told her about Mr. Albright and the old studies and the fact that the scientists in the sixties had heard similar things and had never explained them. He told her that Mac did not believe him anymore, and that he did not blame her, because the list was very long now and some of the items on it were, yes, a little wild.

His mother listened. She did not interrupt. When he was done, she looked at his grandfather.

"Baba. Is this true?"

"It is true."

"You have heard these voices yourself?"

"Many of them."

"And you do not know what they are."

"I do not."

She was silent for a long time. She got up. She went to the kitchen window. She looked out at the flat field, at the station, at the tower far away in the distance. The sun was low on the horizon, a tired yellow-pink.

"Narges jaan," his grandfather said.

"Yes, baba."

"I know this is not what you came to North Dakota for."

"No."

"I know that you have been studying. That you have been working to pass your examination. That you have been managing your son and your husband and your house, and you do not need a radio mystery."

"Yes, baba."

"I am sorry. I encouraged him."

She turned around. She was smiling, just a little.

"Baba. You have always encouraged him. That is your job."

"I will stop if you ask."

"No."

"No?"

"No. I will not ask you to stop. I will only ask —" she looked at Hadi — "I will only ask that you include me. That you do not keep secrets from me. When you hear something, tell me. When you write it in the notebook, let me read it. When you have a theory, share it. I am your mother, and I am a scientist in my own way. I will help you."

"Mama."

"Yes."

"You will listen with us?"

"Sometimes. When I am not studying. Yes. I will listen."

Hadi felt something lift inside his chest, a thing he had not realized had been heavy. He got up from the table and hugged his mother. She laughed and hugged him back.

"Now," she said. "Mackenzie."

"I do not want to talk about Mackenzie."

"You must. She is your friend."

"She called me a liar."

"No. She said she was unsure. Those are different."

"They felt the same."

"I know. But they are not. A person who is unsure is a person who still wants to be convinced. A person who calls you a liar does not. Tomorrow, at school, you should tell her you understand. And you should invite her to listen with us again. And you should ask her to bring her notebook too. And maybe, if she listens with her own ears, over and over, she will trust what she hears."

"What if she doesn't?"

"Then she doesn't. That is her choice. But you will have done your part."

Hadi nodded.

The next day at school, at recess, he found Mac by the monkey bars.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"I am sorry I got angry."

"I am sorry I called you a liar."

"You did not call me a liar."

"I kind of did. I'm sorry."

"It is all right."

"Can I come over tonight?"

"Yes."

"I'll bring my notebook."

"Yes."

She did come over. She sat with Hadi and his grandfather and his mother in the bedroom, with the radio on the bedside table and all four of them crowded around it, and they listened for an hour. They heard nothing strange. Only the ordinary stations and the ordinary static and, at one point, a very boring agricultural report from somewhere in Manitoba.

"Figures," Mac said, when it was nine o'clock and time for her to go home. "The one night I'm here, nothing."

"It is like that," Hadi's grandfather said. "Often. We listen for hours and hear nothing. Then one night, three in a row."

"I'll come back tomorrow."

"Come back always."

"I want to believe," Mac said. "I just want to be sure."

"That is a good thing to want," his grandfather said. "Be sure. We are waiting for you to be sure."

Mac went home. Hadi and his grandfather turned the radio back on. They listened another hour. Nothing came through. They went to bed.

He stared at it.

A voice was coming out of the small speaker. A woman, singing, in Persian, a lullaby. Very faint. Very slow. The melody was one he thought he had heard somewhere before, long ago, in some other room, in some other year.

He sat up slowly. He did not turn on the light. He listened. The lullaby went on for perhaps a minute, and then it faded, and the static rose, and the radio clicked itself off with a small mechanical sound, as though a hand had turned the knob.

Hadi sat in the dark for a long time.

He did not tell his grandfather, in the morning. He did not tell his mother. He did not tell Mac. He wanted to keep it for himself, for a day, for a small private day, before it became anyone else's.

============================================================

The blizzard came on the first of May.

Nobody had expected snow in May. Hadi's mother had, just the day before, put away the heavy winter coats into the closet at the end of the hallway, the way people do when they believe that they have survived a long winter and may at last put away its tools. The day had been mild. The grass in the field had begun to show, in places, a faint suggestion of green. Even Mac had come to school without a hat, which was, Hadi understood, an important local sign.

But that night, around six o'clock, the wind rose. It rose the way it always rose in North Dakota, without warning, as though the land had decided to exhale. Within an hour, snow was coming sideways past the kitchen window. Within two hours, Hadi could not see the station from the house. Within three, his father came home from work with ice on his eyebrows and announced that everyone else at the station had gone home early and that he could not see to drive any farther than the driveway and that the house, for the night, would be cut off from the world.

Hadi's mother made tea.

This was her response to most crises. Tea, and a large pot of rice, and something simple on top of the rice — eggs, or yogurt, or fried potatoes. She made all of these, while his father shook the snow off his coat and his grandfather sat in the chair by the woodstove and rubbed his hands together, and outside the wind moaned in the eaves like something alive.

"Baba," Hadi's mother said. "Are you cold?"

"I am always cold. I am seventy-four. I was cold yesterday. I am cold today. Tomorrow I will be cold. Do not concern yourself."

"I will bring you a blanket."

"Thank you. And tea."

"Tea is coming."

Hadi helped his father put the shutters on the kitchen window, which kept the snow from rattling so loudly. He helped his mother set out the plates. He helped his grandfather move from the chair to the couch, which had a better blanket. He did not, in any of this, feel cold, because the house was warm from the woodstove and the oven and the four of them being inside of it.

They ate around seven. They listened, through the walls, to the wind. They talked about small things — about the science project Hadi and Mac had turned in the week before (they had received an A-minus, and Hadi had taken offense at the minus, and his mother had told him that an A-minus was a fine grade and that he should not be a perfectionist), about his mother's next exam, about his grandfather's flight home, which was scheduled for the following Thursday.

"Thursday," Hadi said. "That is in six days."

"Yes."

"Only six?"

"Six is not few."

"It feels few."

"I know, daadaa jaan. Time always feels few at the end of a visit."

Hadi pushed rice around on his plate.

After dinner, his father turned on the shortwave radio in the living room — his father had a larger, nicer radio than the one Hadi had built, and sometimes he liked to listen to BBC World Service at night before bed — but in the storm, there was no BBC. There was only static. There was static on every band they tried. His father laughed and turned it off.

"Nothing tonight. The storm is too thick."

"What about mine?" Hadi said.

"Mine what?"

"My radio. Is it working?"

His father looked at Hadi's mother. His mother looked at his grandfather. His grandfather shrugged.

"I do not know," his father said. "Probably not. The storm interferes with every radio. But you could try."

"Daadaa, come with me."

"I will come."

They went to Hadi's bedroom. Outside the window, the snow was a gray-white cloud. The window rattled with each gust. Hadi turned on the bedside lamp, sat on the bed, and flipped the switch on the small brown radio.

It hissed. That was all.

He turned the dial slowly. Hiss, hiss, hiss. Sometimes a dip in the hiss, but no voices. Not even the country station that usually came through loud. The storm had washed the air clean of everything.

"I am sorry, daadaa. Tonight there is nothing."

"We will listen anyway."

"All right."

His grandfather sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. He pulled the blanket around his shoulders. He closed his eyes. Hadi kept the dial moving, slowly, because there was nothing else to do.

Five minutes passed. Ten. The hiss did not change.

Then, somewhere around 1200 kHz, the hiss thinned. It thinned the way a fog sometimes thins in the early morning, letting a landscape appear piece by piece. Hadi stopped moving the dial. He held his breath.

A voice came in.

A woman. Singing. In Persian. Soft. Unaccompanied.

His grandfather opened his eyes.

Hadi did not turn around to look at his grandfather. He could not. He could only listen. The woman sang for perhaps twenty seconds, and then she sang something else — a second phrase that Hadi did not know. Then the first phrase again. The lullaby repeated. Three times. Four times. Slowly, steadily, the way a woman sings when she is trying to soothe a child to sleep.

"Yes, daadaa."

"That is my mother."

Hadi turned. His grandfather was not crying this time. His grandfather was sitting with his hands in his lap, and his back straight, and his eyes wide open, and his eyes very dark in the lamplight.

"I do not mean that her voice is like my mother's voice," his grandfather said slowly. "I mean that it is my mother's voice. I am hearing my mother. The melody is the one she used to sing to me when I was small. She made it up. It was her own melody. She sang it to me every night for the first eleven years of my life. It is not a folk song. It is not a lullaby that anyone else knows. It is not in any book. It is not written down. She made it up. She sang it only to me. And I have not heard it since she died."

Hadi did not know what to say.

The woman was still singing. The radio hissed around her voice, the storm trying to push her out, but she stayed. The melody went on.

His grandfather got up from the bed. He walked very slowly to the window. He looked out at the snow. Hadi could not see his face. He could only see the back of his grandfather's white head and the shoulders of the cardigan.

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"Are you all right."

"I am all right. I am. Yes. I am all right."

The lullaby came to an end. The static rose. His grandfather stood with his back to Hadi for a long time. Outside the window, the snow moved in waves, great slow sheets of it, and occasionally something dark could be seen out past the edge of the porch — maybe a fencepost, maybe nothing.

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"Is it really her?"

His grandfather turned. His face in the lamplight was soft and tired and something else — something Hadi did not have a word for. Not joy. Not grief. Something on the border between them.

"I do not know, Hadi jaan. I do not know how to know. But the melody is hers. The melody that she made up alone, for me alone. I have heard no one sing it for sixty-two years. And tonight I heard it."

"Do you think she is... somewhere?"

"She is somewhere. Yes. I believe she is somewhere. I have always believed that. But I cannot tell you whether she is in the radio. I cannot tell you whether she is in the air. I cannot tell you whether the radio has reached back along the path of time and pulled her out of 1960 and given her to us. I do not know. I only know that I heard her. And I am grateful."

He came back to the bed and sat down. He put his arm around Hadi's shoulders.

"Thank you, Hadi jaan. For building this radio. For the notebook. For listening. I have been an old man waiting for something, without knowing what I was waiting for. I think tonight perhaps I am less of an old man waiting."

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"I love you."

"I love you, my boy. I love you more than I can say. I am proud of you. I am proud that you are my grandson. I am proud of the person you are becoming. And I want to ask you one thing."

"Anything."

"When I am gone —"

"Daadaa."

"No, listen. When I am gone, someday, not tonight, not this year, but someday — keep listening. Keep the radio. Keep the notebook. Some voice may come through for you, one night, that is mine. If it comes, know that I was glad. Know that I was not afraid. Know that the air keeps everything, and that love is a signal that does not fade, even when the body that spoke it is no longer in the room. Will you remember?"

"I will remember."

"Promise me."

"I promise, daadaa."

He held Hadi for a long time. The radio hissed in the background. The storm went on. At some point, Hadi did not know when, they both fell asleep half sitting up, and his father came in quietly and unfolded the blanket over them, and his mother turned off the lamp, and the small brown radio sat on the bedside table with its dial still at 1200 kHz, waiting.

In the morning, the storm was over.

The world outside was white — not the dirty half-white of February snow, but a new clean white that made Hadi squint. The field glittered. The station, seen from the kitchen window, looked like a toy set out on a tablecloth. The tower, far off, stood up out of the white like a black pencil mark. His father went out with a shovel.

"It is a very good morning."

"Yes, baba," Hadi's mother said.

"I have slept better than I have slept in a year."

"Good, baba."

"When I go home to Iran. Thursday."

"Yes."

"I will take something with me that I have needed for a long time."

Hadi's mother put her hand on her father's hand.

"I am glad, baba."

"So am I, Narges jaan. So am I."

============================================================

The week passed in a rush, the way all last weeks do.

Hadi's grandfather spent his mornings with Hadi's mother at the kitchen table, helping her drill on her medical questions — his grandfather did not know medicine, but he was a good quizzer and a good listener, and he would read her the questions from the book and she would answer and he would say yes or no and they would go on. He spent his afternoons walking, very slowly, around the fields outside the house, looking at the sky. Hadi's father offered to drive him into town, to Minot, but his grandfather said no, he had come to see the open country, and he would see it, and Minot could wait for another trip.

On Monday evening, he came to Hadi's room with an old brown envelope in his hand.

"Daadaa jaan."

"Yes, daadaa."

"This is for you. Do not open it until I am on the plane."

"What is it?"

"It is a letter."

"Why can I not read it now?"

"Because if I saw your face while you read it, I would not be able to leave on Thursday. I would stay. And I cannot stay. So you must wait."

"Where should I put it?"

"In your notebook. With the other things."

Hadi put the envelope in the back of the second notebook. He made himself not look at it. He put both notebooks in the drawer of the bedside table and he closed the drawer.

On Tuesday evening, Mac came over. She brought a homemade card and a plastic bag of homemade peanut butter cookies and a small gift, wrapped in white tissue, which she pressed into his grandfather's hands.

"What is this, Mac jaan?"

"Open it and see."

Hadi's grandfather looked at it for a long time. Then he laughed, the big old laugh of an old man who does not laugh loudly very often. He held the resistor up and showed it to Hadi.

"Do you see? Do you see how much thought?"

"I see, daadaa."

"Mac jaan." He took her hand in his. "I will carry this to Iran. I will put it on my desk. I will look at it every morning. And when anyone asks, I will say, this was given to me by a young engineer from North Dakota. Her name is Mac. She has engineer's hands. She made me a very fine sandwich."

Mac laughed. Her cheeks were red. "Okay, well."

"I will miss you."

"I will miss you."

"I am going home. Do not be sad. I had a wonderful time."

"I know."

"Come visit me in Iran. Someday. Your parents permitting."

"Okay."

"And take care of my Hadi."

"I will."

His grandfather hugged her then, which was not a thing he did with people he had only known for seven weeks, but he did it, and Mac, after a moment of stiffness, hugged him back.

On Wednesday evening, they listened to the radio together for the last time — his grandfather and Hadi and, for the first hour, his mother. They did not hear anything strange. They heard ordinary country music and a weather report and a commercial for a grocery store in Minot that had a sale on tomatoes. At one point his grandfather turned to Hadi and said, "Tonight the air is only business. Tonight the air is only the ordinary people going about their day. It is good. The air is theirs too."

"Yes, daadaa."

"The voices come when they come."

"Yes."

"Keep listening."

"I will."

On Thursday morning, they drove to Minot.

Hadi sat in the back seat with his grandfather, because his mother was driving and his father had to stay at the station. Hadi held his grandfather's hand. He did not speak for the first half hour. His grandfather did not speak either. They only watched the fields roll by — pale green now, most of the snow melted already, small patches still clinging in the low places — and beyond the fields, the wide flat sky.

"Daadaa."

"Yes."

"I will miss you."

"I will miss you too."

"When will you come back?"

"When your mother invites me."

"Mama, can you invite him again?"

His mother laughed a little from the front seat. "I have already invited him back. He said he would come in September. If he is well."

"If I am well," his grandfather said.

"You will be well."

"I hope so."

At the airport, the goodbye was shorter than Hadi had expected. His grandfather had a bag to check and a boarding pass to get, and there were security lines and people and announcements, and in the rush of all of it, the goodbye arrived suddenly. They stood together outside the security checkpoint.

"All right, daadaa jaan."

"All right."

"You will be a good boy."

"I will try."

"You will listen to your mother and your father."

"I will try."

"You will write to me. By email, if your mother will help. By letters, if you want. I will write back."

"I will."

"You will keep listening."

"I will."

His grandfather put his dry warm hands on Hadi's face. He kissed both cheeks. He kissed the forehead — the third kiss, the important one. Then he stood up straight. He pulled his suitcase onto its wheels. He walked to the security line without looking back, because his grandfather did not look back at airports, because it brought bad luck to the plane.

Hadi watched him go.

He watched the gray suit jacket disappear into the crowd. He watched the space where the suit had been. He kept watching, because he was not ready to stop.

His mother put her hand on his shoulder.

"Come, daadaa jaan."

"Wait."

"We cannot wait long."

"Wait only a minute."

They waited. A minute passed. Two. Hadi took one long look at the empty space where his grandfather had been. Then he turned and followed his mother back to the car.

He cried all the way home. Not loudly. Just a slow small weeping that he did not try to stop and that his mother, wisely, did not try to stop either. She put a hand on his knee from the driver's seat when the road was straight. She did not speak. She let him cry. The fields rolled by. The sky was huge and pale. Somewhere above them, his grandfather was in a plane, going east, going home.

At the house, Hadi went straight to his room. He closed the door. He sat on the bed. He opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out the brown envelope.

He opened it.

Inside was a single piece of paper, folded in thirds, and a second smaller piece of paper behind it. He unfolded the first one.

My dearest Hadi, the letter began.

I am writing this on Tuesday evening, after you have gone to bed. I am at the kitchen table. Your mother is asleep. Your father is asleep. I am the only one awake, and the wind is the only other thing.

I want to tell you a few things. I want to tell you them on paper, so that you can keep them, and look at them again when you need to.

The first thing is that I love you. You know this. I know you know. I write it anyway, because some things must be written.

The second thing is that you are a good boy, and you are becoming a good man. I say this as someone who has been a man for a long time and has seen many become men. I see it in you. The radio is only one sign. The notebook. The way you speak to Mac. The way you look after your mother. The way you looked after me, the whole month I was here, without ever being asked. You are a person who pays attention. This is the main virtue of a good man. Not strength. Not cleverness. Attention.

The third thing is about the voices. I want you to remember what I said. We do not know what they are. We do not need to know. The mystery is a gift. Do not name it too quickly. Do not close the box. Let it stay open. Listen, and write, and share what you hear with the people you love. The voices are not a private treasure. They are a public gift. Every voice that comes through is a reminder that the world is full, not empty. Every voice is a member of the family.

The fourth thing is about your heritage. I know it is hard to be Iranian in America. I know it will sometimes be harder. I know there will be days when you will wish you were only American, or when you will wish you were only Iranian, or when you will wish you were anything except a boy with two countries. But you are a boy with two countries, and in time, you will find that two countries is richer than one. You are not divided. You are doubled. Remember this.

The sixth thing is about me. When I die — which I hope will be many years from now, but may be sooner, because I am an old man and old men sometimes go without warning — I want you to know that I was glad. I was glad of my life. I was glad of my wife and my children and my grandchildren and my friends. I was glad of the radios I fixed and the cups of tea I drank. I was glad of Yazd and Tehran and the month I spent in North Dakota. I was especially glad of you. I am glad of you now. I will still be glad of you when I am gone. Remember this too.

With all my love, Your daadaa, Khodadad

Hadi read the letter twice. Then he folded it back up. He looked at the second smaller piece of paper.

Hadi held the photograph.

He sat on the bed, in the small white house in North Dakota, with the photograph of his great-grandmother in his left hand and the letter in his right, and for a long time he did not move.

Then, slowly, he put both of them in the second notebook. He closed the drawer. He lay down. He closed his eyes.

He did not sleep. But he rested.

And somewhere, outside the window, the wind was blowing, and carrying, he thought, the voices of all the people who had ever loved him and who loved him still, across the field, across the fence, across the distance that had opened up when the plane took off that morning.

============================================================

Spring came slowly. The snow melted. The grass greened. The field behind the station turned a pale, shimmering green, and little yellow flowers appeared at the edges of the gravel road, and one morning Hadi saw, from the kitchen window, a deer. A real deer, with long thin legs and a white patch on its throat. It stood in the middle of the field, not far from the tower, and it looked toward the house, and then it walked on.

In late May, his father came home one evening and said, "It is scheduled."

"What is?" his mother said.

"The tower. The demolition. Next Saturday."

Hadi looked up from his homework.

"Saturday?"

"Yes. The company came and inspected last week. They will bring a crane and some workers. They will cut the supports and lower it down in one piece. It will take a morning."

"Can I be there?"

"I was going to ask you. Yes. You should be there. Mr. Albright wants to be there too. I spoke to him. And Mackenzie, if her parents say yes."

"They will say yes," Hadi said.

"Thank you, baba," Hadi said.

"You are welcome, daadaa."

Saturday morning was warm — warm for North Dakota, which meant the high fifties — and Hadi wore only a sweatshirt. Mac came over at eight with her own notebook and a pocket full of gum, which she shared. Mr. Albright drove up at eight-thirty in his old pickup truck. He was wearing a brown jacket and a newsboy cap and boots that looked as though they had been working boots forty years ago and had since been retired to ceremonial use.

"Good morning, young persons."

"Good morning, sir."

"A good day for it."

"Yes, sir."

"I brought something."

He had a small cardboard box in his truck. He pulled it out and set it on the porch. Inside were a thermos of coffee, three paper cups, a bag of donuts, and, at the bottom, a small framed photograph. He took the photograph out and handed it to Hadi.

"That's us in 1964," he said. "The crew at the station. I am the tall one on the far left. Krishnamurthy is the one in the plaid shirt. The others are Jenkins, MacDonald, and Williamson. All of them are gone now. I am the last one."

Hadi looked at the photograph. Five men in their early thirties stood at the base of the tower, smiling. The tower behind them was polished silver in the sun.

"You were young," he said.

"I was young once. Yes."

"You look like you were happy."

Mr. Albright took the photograph back, looked at it, nodded.

"I was. I was happy. I was happy standing under that tower. I am happy standing under it today. There are many ways to be happy, Hadi Ghaderi. One of them is knowing you once built a thing that mattered. Even if the thing, now, is coming down."

The demolition crew arrived at nine — a crane truck, a flatbed trailer, and four men in hard hats. Hadi's father walked out with them into the field to explain where the supports were, and they walked around the tower and pointed at things and talked in the careful, bored voices of men who had dropped a hundred towers and were about to drop one more.

Hadi and Mac and Mr. Albright stood behind the fence and watched.

"Hadi," Mac said, after a while.

"Yes."

"Did you bring your radio?"

"I brought it."

"Are you going to turn it on?"

"When they start cutting."

"Why then?"

"Because my grandfather said that the tower had nothing to do with the signals. And Mr. Albright said the tower had nothing to do with the signals. And I want to see if they are right."

"Fair."

Mr. Albright smiled.

The crew started work at ten. The crane was positioned. A cable was attached to a point high on the tower. Two men climbed partway up, on a ladder against one of the legs, and marked the places where the support members would be cut. They climbed back down. One of them picked up a heavy orange saw with a long blade and began to cut.

The tower did not fall immediately. It was cut in three places. Then the crane slowly, slowly took the weight, and the whole hundred-foot structure lifted, tilted, and came down on its side with a long slow groan of bending steel, and it landed on the grass with a muffled thump that Hadi felt through his feet.

Dust rose.

The men clapped each other on the shoulder and lit cigarettes.

The tower, lying on its side in the grass, looked much smaller than it had looked standing up. It looked almost sad. A long thin bone of a thing, the hundred feet of it stretched out across the field, each rivet and crossbar and guide suddenly visible and human-scale.

Mac put her hand on Hadi's arm.

"You okay?"

"Yes."

"I thought you might cry."

"I did not want to."

Mr. Albright coughed. "I would have cried. I almost did."

They walked down into the field, through the open gate, across the grass that was dotted with little yellow flowers. Hadi carried the small brown radio in his pocket, where he had put it that morning. When they reached the place where the tower had fallen, he took it out. He switched it on.

The hiss was quiet in the warm spring air. They walked along the length of the fallen tower, the three of them, and Hadi held the radio in front of him like a small lantern. He tuned slowly. Past a country station. Past weather. Past a commercial. Past —

A voice.

Then the voice faded. The static rose.

Mac stopped walking. Her face was pale.

"What was that."

"That was a voice," Hadi said.

"I know it was a voice. What did it say."

"Something about every child."

"I heard it too."

"I know. I heard you hear it."

Mr. Albright was standing very still. He was looking at the fallen tower. He was looking at the sky above the fallen tower.

"Boy," he said softly.

"Yes, sir."

"Your grandfather was right."

"He was."

"I was right too."

"You were."

"The tower had nothing to do with it."

"No."

"It is something else entirely."

"Yes."

"I do not know what it is."

"I do not either."

"And we may never know."

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Albright took off his cap. He ran a hand through his gray hair. Then he put the cap back on. He turned to Hadi and said, "Thank you, Hadi Ghaderi."

"For what?"

"For giving an old man a good morning. For letting me hear, one more time in my life, what I heard when I was young. For proving that a thing we could not explain is still unexplained. Some old men want to be right. Old atheists like me — we want to be right about the mechanism. But sometimes, at the end of a life, we want to be humbled. We want the world to still have something in it that we cannot fit in a box. You have given me that today. I will carry it with me."

Hadi did not know what to say.

He shook Mr. Albright's hand. Mr. Albright shook back. Then Mr. Albright walked slowly back toward the fence, leaving his half-full thermos on the ground beside the tower. Mac watched him go.

"He's cool," she said.

"Yes."

"Do you think he will visit again?"

"Yes. He comes every Saturday to the library."

"I know. I mean here. The field."

"I think so."

They stood a while longer by the fallen tower. Hadi turned the radio off and put it back in his pocket. The wind came through the grass and bent it in waves. A hawk, or something like a hawk, moved across the sky far above them, black against the blue.

"Hadi."

"Yes."

"I'm glad I met you."

"I am glad I met you too."

"Don't move away."

"I will not. My father has a three-year contract."

"After the three years."

"I do not know."

"Try not to."

"I will try."

They walked back to the house together, through the yellow-flecked grass, past the fence, up the driveway to the small white house with the green shutters. Hadi looked back once at the field. Where the tower had been there was now only sky, a great piece of empty sky that reached from the fence all the way up into forever. It did not look wrong, exactly. It looked like a place where a thing had been for a long time and had, at last, let go.

============================================================

The letter came in July.

Hadi was at the kitchen table, helping his mother practice her oral examination responses, when he heard his father's voice from the front of the house.

"Narges."

Hadi's mother went to the door. She was gone for a long minute. When she came back into the kitchen she was holding a thin blue airmail envelope, and her face was still and she was not crying, but her mouth was pressed in a way Hadi had never seen.

"Hadi jaan."

"Yes."

"I must tell you something, daadaa. Come and sit with me."

They sat on the couch in the living room. She put one arm around him. She held the envelope in her other hand.

"Your grandfather has died."

Hadi heard the words. He did not say anything.

"It was very quick. This morning. In his sleep. My uncle called. There was no pain, daadaa jaan. He went as he wanted to go. Quietly."

"When will the funeral be."

"Tomorrow. In Yazd. We cannot go. It is too soon."

"Oh."

"I am sorry."

"Oh."

"Hadi jaan. Hadi jaan."

She held him. He did not cry, at first. He sat very still. He looked at the wall. The wall had a picture on it of a mountain his father had climbed when he was young, long before Hadi was born.

"Mama."

"Yes."

"He said he would come again in September."

"I know."

"He promised."

"I know. He believed it. He would have come."

"It is not fair."

"No. It is not fair. But it is what happened."

Hadi was quiet.

He got up, slowly, and walked to his room. He sat on his bed. He looked at the small brown radio on the bedside table. He looked at the drawer where the letter and the photograph were. He did not open the drawer. He did not touch the radio. He only sat.

Outside, it was summer now. The field was high green grass. The space where the tower had stood was only a patch of slightly different grass, a little paler than the rest. A breeze moved the tall stems so that they lay down and stood up and lay down.

After a long time — he did not know how long — he got up. He took the radio off the bedside table. He walked out of the bedroom, through the living room where his mother was now sitting with his father and both of them were looking at him with careful faces, and he walked out the front door, and down the porch steps, and across the yard, and through the gate in the fence, and into the field.

He walked to the place where the tower had been. He sat down in the grass. He put the radio on his knee. He turned it on.

The hiss filled the summer air.

He tuned the dial slowly.

There were stations. A weather report. Country music. A commercial for a pickup truck. A Christian hymn. A talk show where a man was answering questions about gardening. All the ordinary voices of the ordinary summer.

He kept tuning.

At 880 kHz, the hiss thinned.

A voice came in.

He did not recognize it. It was a man, or maybe a boy; the voice was not quite deep enough to be sure. It was speaking, softly, in a language Hadi did not know. Not Persian. Not Arabic. Not English. Something else, something older perhaps, or something he had simply never heard. The voice spoke for perhaps twenty seconds. It sounded, to Hadi, like the voice of someone trying to reach him. It sounded like someone leaving a message for a person they loved very much.

Then the voice faded.

Hadi did not try to find it again.

He sat in the grass with the radio on his knee. The sky above him was huge and blue and empty, and yet not empty. The grass around him stirred. Somewhere a bird called, very faint, very far.

"Daadaa," he said, aloud, to no one in particular, except, perhaps, to the air. "Daadaa. I am listening."

The air did not answer. It did not need to.

It only went on, and on, carrying, as it always does, the voices of everyone who has ever loved anyone, all of them at once, all of them forever, the whole long song of them, turning and turning in the space above the grass.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

This is a book about heritage, and about sound.

We are often told that memory lives in the eyes — in photographs, in faces, in the small image of a grandmother tucked into the corner of a wallet. But memory also lives in the ear. A voice, a lullaby, the rhythm of a prayer, the particular way an uncle used to clear his throat before telling a story. These sounds belong to us as deeply as any face. And when we lose the person, we lose the sound, and yet somehow — strangely, stubbornly — the sound remains. It lives on in us. It becomes part of the way we speak to our own children, years later, in a country far away.

And finally, this book is for anyone who has lost someone. Love is a signal. It does not, in the truest sense, ever fully fade. It travels outward, through us, through our children, through the voices we speak into the world. Somewhere, long after we are gone, someone will hear us, and lean closer, and listen. That is all the book is trying to say.

Crimson Ark Publishing