Somewhere, the Javelin Still Flies

It was two in the morning, during a break in a live recording, when a call came in from a listener. The voice was a man’s, perhaps in his forties. I work the staff desk of a late-night radio show, and I lifted the receiver and listened to what he had to say.

The story went like this: a javelin thrown by an athlete had never been found where it landed. It had happened at an international meet the month before, he said. The record was certified. The distance was measured. But the javelin itself, it seemed, had been seen by no one.

“Well, I suppose it just got lost,” I said.

“Maybe. But it’s been three weeks now, and it still hasn’t turned up. They say they searched behind the stadium stands, beyond the fence, all the way down to the riverbank.”

I looked out the window. The late-night city lay sunk in the valley between the buildings. The traffic lights blinked at regular intervals, counting something.

The calls kept coming after that. Not from the same man. Different nights, different voices. A college student who had flipped a coin in a parking lot and watched it never come back. A housewife who, mid-argument, had hurled words that never reached the other person’s heart — words that had wandered off somewhere, lost. An old man with a low voice whose sigh, released inside an elevator, still drifted there, never having fallen to the floor.

“Things that don’t fall,” I said into the receiver. “I’ll add them to the list.”

That night’s live broadcast had, unusually for late-night radio, drawn a large audience. The show was a flagship called “For Those Who Can’t Sleep,” thirty years on the air, hosted by a veteran actress. Her voice sounded parched on television, but in front of a microphone it had a strange, stubborn suppleness.

A live recording in front of an audience is a hollow affair. The crowd is housewives and students gathered by lottery, and their applause is always a beat late. Gazing at the mixing console on my desk, I found myself thinking: every mechanism in this country is built on throwing and getting back. You invest, and collect the return. You work, and your salary comes back. You try hard, and recognition comes back. Like a javelin thrower hurling his spear, everyone throws something, trusting in the parabola it will trace.

What happens, I wondered, if it stops coming back?

When the break ended, the old actress stepped up to the microphone. It was a segment that wasn’t in the script. “Tonight, I’d like to share some of the stories that have come in from our listeners. About things that don’t fall.”

My hands stopped over the console. No such segment had ever been discussed.

The actress began telling the listeners’ stories without glancing at a single note. The coin. The words. The sigh. Her voice carried a warmth I had never heard in it before. The audience fell utterly still, and I could feel the air in the studio slipping, by degrees, away from the color of the broadcast booth’s fluorescent lights.

And at the end, she said this: “But please, don’t worry. Things that don’t fall haven’t disappeared. They’re still flying, somewhere in the sky. Passing quietly above our heads, still on their way to somewhere.”

On an impulse, I took off my glasses and looked up at the ceiling. Beyond the black grid of the acoustic panels, I had the feeling something had just passed. Not a sound. Not a shadow. Only the trace of something in flight, passing through.

As the broadcast was ending, I noticed a paper bag someone had left in the corner of the studio. Inside were several dozen listener postcards and a single ballpoint pen. The usual sight. As I gathered up the postcards, I noticed one with no address on it.

On it, in neat handwriting, was this: “Please throw this. Someone will come to receive it.”

Three in the morning. In the valley between the buildings, the traffic lights were still blinking with mechanical regularity. Holding the postcard, I opened the studio window. A cold wind rushed in, sending the scripts on my desk fluttering upward. I raised my arm — the throwing form I’d honed thirty years ago on a cheer squad, now half-forgotten.

The postcard was hurled into the night sky.

Would it ever reach the ground? Or would it ride tonight’s wind and fly on forever? I stood at the window and did not wait for the answer. There was no need to wait. Either way, the world is no longer built on the assumption of return.

In the distance, I heard the sound of something being received. Perhaps it was an illusion. But before I switched off the mixing console, I added a single line to the schedule for the following night’s broadcast: “Inventory of things that don’t fall — additional recording.”