Harlan: Good evening, Riverside.
Harlan: Eleven o'clock of a Friday night. If you found your way here, you found your way here, and I ain't gonna make you explain how.
Harlan: I used to run pictures in this house. Real ones. Four cans to a feature, and you carried 'em up them stairs one at a time, because a fella who carries two is a fella who drops one.
Harlan: Best of the job was never the picture. It was the ten seconds before. Lamp comes up, and you've got a white screen and a room full of people, and not one of 'em knows yet what they're in for.
Harlan: Now what I've got tonight ain't a picture. Nothing was shot, there's no can on it, and if you went lookin' for a poster you'd come home with your hands empty.
Harlan: It's a tape. Somebody talkin'. That's the whole of it.
Harlan: I don't know who. I don't ask that, and I'd tell you if I did. It come in, and it's my job to put it up.
Harlan: I'll tell you the one part that got me, and then I'll hush and let her talk.
Harlan: She ain't performing. She thinks there's nobody on the other end of it.
Harlan: So settle in, and let's you and me lose ourselves in another story.
Janet: Okay. So — this is a test, I guess. Of the — of this.
Janet: I found it downstairs in the equipment room under a tarp with about nine years of dust on it, and it works, which honestly I did not expect. Nothing else in this building works.
Janet: I've been here a year. In November it'll be a year.
Janet: I'm not allowed to talk about any of this. That's the first rule and they were extremely clear about the first rule.
Janet: So. This isn't talking to anybody. This is a machine in a room. I've thought about it a lot and that's where I landed.
Janet: Things I'm allowed to say to a machine in a room. My name's Janet. I'm twenty-three. I didn't apply for this.
Janet: I'd never heard of it. There's a — it's a lottery, is what I understand. You get told. That's the whole process, you get told, and then somebody explains what happens if you don't.
Janet: I'm not going to say what happens if you don't.
Janet: Second rule's the Fridays.
Janet: Eleven o'clock, I'm up here, door locked, and I stay until it's finished. Every Friday. That one they didn't explain at all, they just — that was on the sheet.
Janet: I don't know what happens downstairs. I've never seen it. I hear it a little, through the floor, I think — I might be making that up, I've thought about that too.
Janet: It's not a scary building most of the time. That's the thing nobody would believe. It's mostly just a big empty building and I'm the only one in it.
Harlan: There's a particular sound a person makes when they've decided nobody's listening.
Harlan: You've heard it. Somebody in the car next to you at a light, singin'. Fella in a hardware aisle workin' out loud what he come in for. They ain't putting on a thing, 'cause what would be the point.
Harlan: I've spent my whole working life putting things in front of folks who came to be put in front of. This is different, and I want you to know I know that.
Harlan: She's careful with it, though. You caught that. She's got her levels set and she ain't rambling. She's making it good for somebody.
Harlan: Couldn't tell you who she thinks that is.
Janet: So I found something and I've been going back and forth on whether to put it on here.
Janet: There were people before me. Obviously — I knew that, they told me that. But they left stuff.
Janet: Downstairs, in the — there's a room off the old newsroom that's just filing. And in the bottom of a cabinet there's journals. Handwritten. Eleven of them so far, I haven't been through the whole cabinet.
Janet: This one's Alma. Alma Petrie. She's got her name in the front in ballpoint like a kid does a schoolbook.
Janet: So I'm going to read some of these onto here. Because they're falling apart, the paper's — and also because —
Janet: Because nobody else is ever going to. That's just true.
Janet: Okay. Alma's got the same rules I've got. Same two, word for word, which I found — I don't know what I found that. And then about a third of the way in she starts writing about the radio.
Janet: There's a receiver in the equipment room she kept on for company. Most nights it's nothing, it's static and the Longview station bleeding in.
Janet: And then she says every so often, in the middle of the static, a station identification plays. Clean. Professional. Full announcer, the whole —
Janet: Like a real one.
Janet: For a station that doesn't exist. She says she wrote the call letters down and checked them against the FCC listings at the library in Marshall. Twice. Years apart.
Janet: She doesn't put the call letters in the journal. She just says she checked them.
Janet: I've been up here two days trying to decide if that means she was scared of them or if it means she forgot to write them down.
Announcer: We'll return to tonight's presentation after these messages.
Announcer: The Riverside Grange pancake breakfast — Saturday morning, eight o'clock.
Harlan: I want to stop a second, 'cause there's a thing you can't hear and I don't want you working at it in the dark.
Harlan: The reel don't run straight through. There's a stretch after this where it goes quiet for eleven minutes.
Harlan: Not blank. It's recording. You can hear the room in it. Nobody says a word for eleven minutes.
Harlan: I've listened to that stretch more than once and I've got nothing for you. I don't know what she's doing. I don't know if she stepped out or set there.
Harlan: Anybody sells you the answer to a thing like that, count your change on the way out. I'm gonna run past it, same as I would a leader, and we'll pick her up where she starts again.
Janet: I need to put this on here in order or I'm going to get it wrong.
Janet: Tuesday I recorded about ninety seconds. Nothing — the roof, the guy who leaves the boxes, that's it, it was nothing. And then I rewound to check the level and there's forty seconds on there before it that I didn't put down.
Janet: It's me.
Janet: It's my voice, it's this machine, it's this room, I can hear the — the hot plate's on in it, you can hear it clicking. It's this room.
Janet: And I'm saying a thing I have never said.
Janet: I've had it four days now and I've listened to it, I don't know. A lot.
Janet: I know what it sounds like when somebody splices a tape. My uncle had a — I know what that sounds like. This isn't that. There's no seam. The room tone runs straight through it, it's one continuous —
Janet: It's forty seconds of me talking to somebody, in a room where I have not spoken to anybody in a year.
Janet: I'm going to put it on here. Both machines running, straight across.
Janet: I don't want to be the only one who's heard it.
Janet On Tape: — no, he's very kind. He's been kind to me the whole time.
Harlan: And that's the end of the reel. Not the end of anything else, I don't imagine. Just where it run out.
Harlan: I'd have liked to give you the rest. The part where somebody tells her what it was, or she works it out, or somebody comes up them stairs and sets with her a while.
Harlan: I don't have that. It didn't come to me.
Harlan: What I've got is a young woman making a good clean recording for nobody, in a room, being careful about her levels.
Harlan: First Friday. There's a house of seats out there and I couldn't tell you how many are full, and I'll be straight with you — I never have much cared. It runs at eleven whether or not.
Harlan: I'll be right here next week. Same hour. And we'll do the only thing worth staying up for.
Harlan: We'll lose ourselves in another story.
Announcer: This is TV 17 Riverside. That's all for tonight. Drive safe, and we'll see you next Friday.