Tuesday, March 15  

Signal

Vic’s birthday is a thing she rarely celebrates unless forced to do so by the covert efforts of insistent friends. She’s not reluctant about her age. She just thinks we’ve got it backward when it comes to who did the bigger, braver thing in the delivery room. Vic thinks that mothers should be celebrated on the birthdays of their children.

At the moment she turns 31 (on a birthday which she has not celebrated except by the eating of cake), she is in her daughter’s darkened bedroom keeping watch as the little form under the blanket settles back to sleep. Vic is worrying, as she has been for the past few days, about signals.

Signal noun 1. An indicator, such as a gesture or coloured light, that serves as a means of communication. 2. Something that incites action 3. An impulse or a fluctuating electric quantity, such as voltage, current, or electric field strength, whose variations represent coded information.

Signals, specifically the vast number of them pulsing through the air and, by necessity, through the very space our physical selves are occupying at any time, first appear on Vic’s “things to be concerned about” list when she drives into her underground parking without losing the radio signal in her car. As she rounds the levels, circling deeper into the earth, putting more concrete between herself and the outside world, she begins to wonder at the strength of the signal that must be delivering the retro-80s pop music from across town down to her car radio.

When she puts the concern together with the idea that signals of this strength are probably gliding through her body at a regular rate of millions per second, she gets mildly sweaty-palmed with distress.

How are we affected by all these signals, frequencies, transmissions that slice into our physical structures? Is there anywhere in the world that a body could be free of these whipping, hurtling signals?

This thought turns over in her head for several days. When she confides her concern to Jon, he gives her the cockeye and says “I wouldn’t go around telling people that you feel signals.”

She rolls her eyes at him, signalling “it’s no big deal”. Still, she worries.