Our Next Automatic Broadcast
The Study Ends Where Vera Begins
Vera is broadcasting on all channels, though the signal breaks between frequencies she can't quite control. There's something beautiful about this failure, she thinks, the way static creates its own architecture of sound. It reminds her of something Paloma said once about the spaces between stations, how the white noise contains its own kind of music if you listen with the right kind of attention. Sometimes she sits in her studio for hours, just turning the dial slowly, letting the voices fade in and out like ghosts trying to remember how to speak.
This Note Is—she pauses, pen hovering over paper, searching for the right term—musical identification stuttering through wavelengths where tonal resonance meets what she's started calling Otto Decibel. It's a private joke that's become less funny and more necessary, this particular volume of presence that announces itself before you're ready to receive it. The air in her studio tastes like copper pennies today, metallic and familiar, the way it always does before a storm. She's learned to trust these small sensory warnings, these bodily transmissions that arrive before language does.
She keeps reminding herself that Your Tone is not a controlling possessive sound, even as she finds herself tuning and adjusting the dial with an obsessive's precision, reaching toward Pitch Perfect and then deliberately missing at the last second. Perfection was never the point, she knows this, but the reaching itself has become a kind of prayer. Outside her window, moths gather at the kitchen glass again, drawn to the light like she's drawn to these experiments in naming. They bump against the surface with soft insistence, and she wonders if they know it's glass or if they think it's just particularly stubborn air.
The sound she's been chasing for months now, this OTTOTONE she's named, varies wildly and without warning—sincere one moment, hilarious the next—morphing into what can only be described as an OTTO ILL LOGICAL delicious shape. It undergoes transformation in real-time, refusing to hold still long enough to be pinned down or properly catalogued. The shapeshifting quality reminds her of her grandmother, dead now three years, who wrote her name seventeen different ways depending on her mood, the weather, or who was asking. Her grandmother was a continuous practitioner of what Vera's come to think of as utopian mind-states, a woman who existed in what Vera now calls Neverwhen—that peculiar space of ALWAYS MAYBE—where uncertainty strips away the need for clocks entirely, leaving you approximately but never exactly present.
In this temporal space she's discovering, the hands of time chase themselves in circles that lead nowhere and everywhere at once. It's dizzying if you think about it too directly, so she's learned to approach it sideways, the way you might approach a skittish cat or a difficult memory.
Soonwhen brings its own particular brand of vague immediacy to her work, managing to be both punctual and off-schedule simultaneously, which leads her to question this whole Be Why Existential Brand she's been building in her notebooks. The notebooks themselves have multiplied lately—she finds them in every room, filled with her handwriting that looks less and less familiar each time she reads it. Sometimes, when she speaks her experiments into the microphone, testing how words feel in her mouth, her echo comes back speaking Portuguese, a language she doesn't know but somehow understands in that moment of return. She's stopped questioning these small impossibilities.
The whole project, if she's honest, fills her with a kind of breathless wow—that exclamation that lives in the liminal space between whisper quiet and whisper loud, embracing Whatever Casual Intensity Happens to arise in any given moment. She's learning that meaning gets lost and found in the same breath, that sometimes you have to let things go to understand what they really are. She's noticed the dictionary falls open at night on its own—she swears this is true, though Paloma laughs when she mentions it—revealing words she needs before she knows she needs them. Last night it was "palimpsest." The night before, "telegraph."
This practice of knowing and unknowing on specific wavelengths has led her to prepare what she thinks of as visual and sonic jokes about stationary motion. They're not exactly performances, more like situations where everyone stands outside looking in through windows that may or may not exist, and somehow, impossibly, the empty rooms laugh back at her. She's recorded this laughter, played it backwards, discovered it sounds like applause underwater.
The rhythm of it all—what she's privately termed her Rimshot Ba Dum Tss Walking Gag Mobile—creates a curved human seriously funny existence that she's learning to inhabit rather than explain. It's perfect and imperfect simultaneously, like those Goodnight Nobody greeting cards Paloma made that one winter when they were both learning that Minnesota teaches the long goodbye better than anywhere else. You stand in doorways for forty minutes, car keys in hand, still talking. You wave from the driveway, then come back to say one more thing. The goodbye becomes its own event, separate from the leaving.
These forever-first concerns have developed their own way of interrupting politely—Pardon My Apologetic Existence, she thinks, not without humor—swinging up when you're down in what she's termed Wiggle Room Squirm territory. It's that particular space where discomfort becomes creative, where not knowing what you're doing becomes the only way to do anything worth doing. Today, walking through the park, she became convinced the butterflies think she's a garden, which makes a certain kind of sense given how her thoughts bloom and wilt in patterns she's only beginning to recognize.
This BUTTERFLY shimmer-flicker steady state she's been documenting, perpetually balanced and unbalanced like a dancer always about to fall, creates a jitter-calm nervousness that coats everything in what feels exactly like Sugar Slice Gentleness—if gentleness could be sliced, if sugar could be more than metaphor.
There's a French word for this feeling but it escapes her, slipping away like water through cupped hands. The sensation is something like Velvet Soft Hammer meeting Pound Of Silk Sandpaper, a kind of beautiful violence, or maybe violent beauty—a caramel chainsaw destruction scored to the Pillow Punch pop music that plays in her head during the quiet hours. Sometimes, catching herself in the mirror while brushing her teeth or reaching for a book, she swears her reflection moves first, anticipates her gestures before she makes them.
In this strange space she's cultivating, Sergeant Otto CUDDLE COMBAT wages its ongoing aggressive affection campaigns, launching snuggle strike cozy attacks where you're mostly competing with yourself anyway, though the competition is loving, if competition can be such a thing. Victory, when it comes—and it does come, in small moments she almost misses—tastes exactly like burnt sugar on the tongue, sweet and bitter and slightly wrong but perfect in its wrongness.
The process demands you Sprint then Paint, moving quickly through slow spaces, passing through the Customs Check at Border Embassy Walker where internal diplomats negotiate the CURRENCY of self. All that shivering, stuttering OTTOTTO energy builds up—double palindrome double threat—multiplying names in Vera's mirrors until she can't count them anymore, until counting becomes beside the point entirely. Each reflection suggests another possible Vera, another way of being in sound.
This over-the-top energy she's been cultivating insists Otto Be Good, whatever good means in this context, juggling rights and wrongs like flaming torches, managing the simultaneous having and not-having that defines her days now. She's creating furniture for Brrd Pilots Flying Blind through the stratosphere of consciousness—and yes, she knows how that sounds, but accuracy matters less than trajectory here. Even her shadow gets imposter syndrome these days, questioning its own dark legitimacy, wondering if it's shadowing correctly. But this B-Grade Cautious Focus she's developed somehow extends Eight-Arm excellence into unnamed spaces, reaching for something beyond naming even as she tries to name everything.
The alphabet ends where Vera begins, she's written in three notebooks now. Perhaps that's enough. Perhaps it's everything.
