Ove's mother had the radio on in the kitchen when he was young, always on the same station, which broadcast music that he had not heard anywhere else. He did not know until he was fifteen that most people could not find the station. He did not know until he was twenty that most people could not hear it at all.
He was forty-three now and the station still broadcast. He had a receiver he kept on the windowsill of his flat, tuned to the frequency he had located at seventeen with the help of a physics student who had since stopped believing the station existed. He listened for an hour most evenings.
Mostly the music was unfamiliar. He would hear something (a piano piece, a string arrangement, once a long choral work) and wait. Sometimes he recognized it later, in a film or at a concert or through speakers at a cafe, and understood that he had heard it first. Sometimes he did not recognize it. He kept a log. When he recognized something retroactively he marked it in the left margin with the date of first hearing and the date of recognition. The average gap, over thirty-five years, was four years and seven months.
Two months ago he had heard something brief. Forty seconds, fragmented, a single melodic phrase repeating with variations. He had not heard it since in the world. He had written it down in staff notation, which he had learned to read for this purpose and nothing else. The notation was in his log, on a page he had returned to several times.
He was not sure why this one felt different. He had heard new pieces before and waited. But this one had lodged somewhere specific, and he had the irrational certainty, which he did not record in the log, that when he heard it again it would mean something about him specifically, not about the music, not about the station. Something he could not yet name.
He sat at the receiver now. The station was playing something he knew: a string quartet he had first heard in 2019, which he had recognized two years later at a concert. He let it play. After it ended, the station was quiet for a moment, and then the forty-second piece began again.
It was longer this time. Fifty-five seconds. A second melodic thread he had not caught before. He picked up the pencil and the log and wrote until it ended. He sat for a while after. He closed the log. He went to bed. He did not sleep.