On The Radio by James Reed

The wind found itself approaching a massive City, towering hundreds of feet in the air and burrowing thousands of miles into the earth. The above-ground layer of the City was overbearingly beautiful: it was called the Upstairs, and it was perfect in every way. Below that was the Floors – the endless levels where the residents of the city lived and worked and did whatever else they did. Below even that was the Downstairs.

The wind whistled around the lofty glass towers of the Upstairs and soared through the great sprawling parks with their austere monuments.

The Upstairs was a miracle in every way; every part of every structure for as far as the eye could see was designed to perfection  to be left forever as the ultimate testament to the majesty of the City. No piece of glass in all the Upstairs had any crack, blemish, or bend to distort its luster; it wasn’t allowed.

The monuments in the parks were dedicated to the architects and the engineers of the City, the stern-eyed heroes who had created this flawless perfection, to dazzle residents with its beauty for generations to come.

The wind arrived at the Palace in the very center of the City, massive even relative to the rest of the Upstairs. Here, if legend held true, lived the Chancellor.

The wind turned down through the openings in the grounds in front of the Palace, rustling the leaves, spiraling down into the gaping maw called “The Stairs.”

“The Stairs,” named in honor of the classical and now obsolete technology, was actually a smooth, silver grey pit containing a translucent elevator shaft flashing with lights and hundreds of elevator cabins carrying multitudes of people; it was the only way to go between the Upstairs and the Floors.

The wind finished its spiral down the Stairs to the top level of the Floors and into the Elevator Terminal at the Stairs’ base. 

It whipped through hordes of people, some waiting to ascend to the Upstairs, some beginning their journey through the Floors, and others - hawkers, peddlers, merchants, and whatnot - making a livelihood in the bustling traffic of the Elevator Terminal.

The Floors were a vast network of tunnels, divided into hundreds of levels. The top level was accessible by the Stairs; one could descend further down, on foot or by makeshift vehicle, through jumbled collections of openings and passageways that had formed over the millennia. The houses and buildings of the Floors were so close together that one could, and most did, use their combined roofs as a foundation, building new buildings on top of them in turn.

The wind swept outwards through tunnels beyond the Terminal and filled every nook and cranny, ruffling tablecloths and elaborate dress in the high-end restaurants built right under the base of the Stairs.

It swept down and around hawkers hawking their wares.

It blew down through the thousands of miles of tunnels that made up any one level of the Floors.

It blew through massive caverns held up by metal poles 30 feet thick.

It blew through thousands of levels lit only by massive flood lights attached to the ceiling.

It blew past every type of person from every walk of life doing every possible job.

It blew and it blew and it blew in an endless rush through the Floors of the City.

At long last, it reached a fence cloaked with an ambiance of finality; made of black cast iron, it seemed to loom far more than its height would suggest, reaching up and over those who approached. Beyond this menacing palisade lay a large warren of houses and a hole in the ground, not unlike a scaled down version of The Stairs, save the notable absence of anything or anyone in the returning elevator cabins.

If the designer of the City had any sense of creativity or drama, there would have been some foreboding message written on the gate: something along the lines of ”Woe unto ye who pass these forsaken gates,” perhaps. It was the land of the hopeless and unfortunate.

The wind barely reached the Downstairs, as its strength nearly petered out, but with its dying breath it did reach some things.

It reached people, cast off and discarded, who built an empire of bent and broken steel.

It reached people who lived in darkness.

It reached people who worked with what little they had.

It reached people who had been given up on, tastefully removed.

It reached people who had given up, and people who still fought.

*****

The remnants of the once mighty wind fluttered dejectedly into a small room somewhere in the Downstairs. The sounds of glasses clinking, feet stepping, chairs scraping, and people talking filled the room, not unlike many other rooms in the Downstairs. It was not a glamorous room, by any stretch, and nobody pretended that it was. An outsider would have called the room dingy or drab, but, to the people there it was something special, like a resting place or a home. It was far more spacious and pleasant than their actual home, though.

The people talked and the radio chatter burbled through the crowded room and into eager ears. They sat around the radio and its seemingly endless stories, like children around a wandering storyteller.

The radio, tuned to one of the Upstairs stations (the only types of stations there were), was one of a scarce handful in the entire Downstairs, arriving here by some stroke of luck. It allowed the people in the room to glance into a fantastical place, like a wardrobe to Narnia or a rabbit hole to Wonderland.

On the radio, the weather was good: it was warm with a high of 77 degrees Fahrenheit, a light breeze, just partial cloud cover, and pleasant sunshine all day. The weather was always good in the stories on the radio, and the news anchor always remarked about what a great day it would be to go on a walk or have a picnic.

But the weather outside, in the Downstairs, the real weather — at least for the people inside the room — was sadly not at all like that on the radio. It was dark, as it always was, in the Downstairs of the City. It didn’t matter if it rained or not, because the Upstairs’ and Floors’ drainage systems were such that, regardless of how much it was raining or if it was raining at all, the Downstairs would continue to get the runoff from last rain, or even the rain before that one. Really the only thing that changed much was the temperature. It ranged everywhere from “Slightly Cool” to “A Little Cold” to “Just Cold”

In fact, there was an entire economy surrounding betting on whether or not it was raining Upstairs by the amount of drainage Downstairs; this was, for some, a popular way of accumulating their wealth in terms of small change, favors, or whatever people happened to have about their person at the time. And, of course, there was — as there always is — the one person who built their fortune by conning the conmen, saying “ha!” everytime he won.

It brought down all sorts of things, the rain. Like a massive broom, the rain brought anything from your everyday trash to passably functional machines into the dustpan that was the Downstairs of the City. It brought all sorts of filth and dirt, but every once in a while there would be some ring or gem swept out with the rest of it all.

The ambient environment Downstairs, here and now, was wet and cold. There was a frigid, bone-chilling draftiness, exclusive, as some of the more lighthearted residents joked, to areas with unusually high concentrations of misery and despair.

It didn't matter what the weather was outside, though, because the weather here, in the room, in the story, was excellent, so to speak. The men and women and children, listening to the radio tuned to Upstairs, were warmed by the all-day sun and smiled at the pleasantly light breeze; they laughed at some small joke their fellows had made.

It didn't matter that the cold air wriggled underneath the door, through cracks in the woodwork, and into the room; it didn't matter that it really was quite dark if you took the time to look around; it didn’t matter that there was only a very slight chance that the shopkeeper would have what you wanted. None of that mattered to the people in the room, because in the story, the story on the radio, the story that every single person in the room wove together into a beautiful, intricate, and most importantly warm, quilt, was — to them — so much better than any other room in the entire City. Though no ray of light pierced the Upstairs and the Floors to shine upon the Downstairs, somehow the room created its own sun, its own pleasant weather. Coats held tight against the wet cold fell from shoulders and were left forgotten, for the time, on the coat rack.

It was the table, upon which many a drink was shared. It was the floor, where a hundred dances were danced. It was the bar, where many a coin, fought for with tooth and nail, was happily spent, both on the spender and on his friends. It was the room, most of all, in which all this magic was performed, where the sound of the radio accompanied the laughter to create a symphony heard by all the room's patrons and in no other place. The low, slow monotone of the Downstairs was forgotten, left as a mere trace upon the mind, replaced by full and joyous harmony, which was held, like a torch, near at hand and near to heart, to ward off the darkness.