Chapter 6 — Late Night Radio

Three weeks had passed since the second White Night called back, and during that time, a new rhythm had quietly formed in Vy's life - a rhythm she hadn't dared to name, but had begun to organize her entire day around it without even realizing it. He doesn't call every night. Some weeks he called twice, some weeks only once, sometimes for six or seven days in a row the anonymous line was so quiet that Vy had to remind herself not to look at the landline too often, to not let Hai Duong realize what she was waiting for. But every time the words "Anonymous Number" appeared on the screen, her heart still skipped a beat just like the first time, as if her body had memorized that reflex a long time ago without her permission.

His calls no longer had the urgency and urgency like the first rainy night. They were slower, sometimes lasting just a few minutes, sometimes nearly half an hour if his shift allowed. One night he told about a stray cat that often lingered around the area where he worked. At first it was afraid of people, but later it ate the food he left on the steps every night. One night he just asked Vy how the weather in Cam Duong was today, because where he worked, he couldn't see the sky clearly, only a small concrete yard and a strip of high-pressure lights that covered everything in a pale orange color. Vy realized that she had begun to set aside a separate corner in her head, a small drawer where she silently kept those small details - the stray cat, the concrete yard, the way he always said "Vy" at the beginning of a sentence before continuing, like a small ritual that only the two of them understood.

That afternoon, about three hours before the broadcast, the editing room on the third floor of the station was bustling with the sound of typing on the keyboard and the familiar shrill voice of Dinh Thao Nhi. She is the youngest editor in the content department. She has only been at the station for less than a year, but has already become indispensable in synthesizing letters, messages, and comments from the fanpage for "Sleepless Waves" every night. Thao Nhi is the same age as Vy, graduated from journalism in the same class at another school, and right from her first days on the station, she declared herself a "big fan" of the show since she was a student, often staying up late studying for exams and turning on the radio to listen to sleep.

"Vy, I just finished sifting through this week's mail list, there's one I think you'll like." Thao Nhi turned her chair around, pushed her thin-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose, her laptop screen lit up with parallel open tabs - the fanpage admin page, the listening statistics table, and a short video cutting application she often used to make highlight clips from old shows. "Besides, I have an idea that I can tell you about when I have free time. My fanpage has a lot of young followers these days. They often comment asking to listen to the part where you read the letter again. I think we can cut a few short segments and post them, maybe we can attract more people to listen directly during the broadcast time."

"That's a good idea," Vy replied, flipping through the stack of printed letters Thao Nhi had arranged in order, while glancing at her colleague's colorful screen. "But let's take it slow, I'm afraid we don't have enough people to do it, and Mr. Binh probably has to approve it first."

"I know, I just told you in advance to give you time to think." Thao Nhi shrugged, her familiar mischievous smile. "You're always so cautious, it makes me angry sometimes for you."

Hai Duong walked over from the technical room next door, holding a cup of tea. When he heard the last sentence, he chuckled softly. "It's good to be cautious. Vy's father was like that in the past, he had to listen for a few weeks about anything new before deciding, but once he decided, he followed through." He put the cup of tea on Vy's table, sat leaning against the door, his gentle eyes observing the two young girls working hard. "The two of us are compatible in that one always wants to step on the accelerator, the other always wants to step on the brake. Just enough so that the program doesn't run off the road, nor does it stand still."

Vy laughed, the familiar warm feeling of afternoons like this - the atmosphere of the editing room before going on air, the hum of the air conditioner, the smell of coffee from the thermos Thao Nhi always carries, the constant ringing of text messages from her colleague's phone - has become an indispensable part of Vy's day, a soft buffer between the silence of the studio at night and the busy noise of the world during the day.

"Ah, there's this too," Thao Nhi said, pulling out a printed copy of the forwarded email from the stack of papers. "There was a night worker at the inter-provincial bus station who sent a letter. Her name is Bong. She told a pretty good story. I put a priority star on it. Please read it."

Vy picked up the paper, skimmed it, then read it again more slowly. The letter was written in a simple, unpretentious tone, telling about her night shift at the bus station ticket counter, where Ms. Bong had to stay up all night to sell tickets for early buses, answer questions for passengers who missed their flights, and sometimes have to comfort a child who was crying because his mother fell asleep on the waiting chair. She wrote, with clumsy but sincere words: "No one cares about my job, people only remember the driver, miss the garage, but no one remembers the person sitting behind the cold glass counter at three or four in the morning. But I still like this job, because I know, if I don't stay awake, someone will miss the flight, someone will stand alone in the middle of the bus stop not knowing who to ask. Ms. Vy's radio is my friend every night, listening to her talk makes me realize that I'm not the only one awake in the city. hey."

After reading, Vy was silent for a moment, feeling that some invisible thread had just been added to the network of sleepless people of Cam Duong city that she still imagined every night before going on air - drivers, night shift workers, nurses on duty, street vendors, and now even a bus station ticket seller named Bong, whom Vy had never met but felt a strange closeness through just a few lines.

"Reading this letter tonight," Vy said, folding the paper carefully, "I will play Ms. Bong a gentle song as a thank you gift for sharing."

The broadcast that night went smoothly like most recent nights - Vy read Ms. Bong's letter in the middle of the program, her voice was slow and warm, trying to fully convey the rustic spirit in that letter to the thousands of listeners who were awake with her. She mentioned the intercity bus station, the cold glass ticket counter at three or four in the morning, and the image of a young girl sitting alone under cold white fluorescent lights, waiting for buses that never stopped coming. "Thank you, Ms. Bong, and thank you to all those who are doing the work that no one pays attention to, but are the links that keep this city running smoothly every night. Sleepless Wave always remembers you, whether you say your name or not."

That night White Night didn't call. Vy realized she was a little disappointed, but no longer felt as confused as the first time - she began to learn how to let that waiting exist in parallel with her work, not letting it overwhelm her, not letting it turn the broadcast into a meaningless wait. The program is still round, still warm, still itself with or without him on the call list.

Nearly one o'clock in the morning, when the program was about to end, Thao Nhi suddenly knocked on the studio door, waited for the "ON AIR" light to turn off, then pushed the door open and walked in, holding an old, ivory-white envelope with no stamp, no sender's address, only neat handwriting on the front: "To the program Waves Without Sleep — please forward it to Ms. Vy."

"I saw this in the station's post office box this afternoon, mixed in with a pile of advertising letters," Thao Nhi said, her voice a little bit curious. "It's strange that there's no stamp, no postmark, someone probably put it in the mailbox in front of the station gate by hand, and didn't send it by post. I was going to open it first and read it like usual, but the handwriting felt strange, so I left it as is and let you open it yourself."

Vy picked up the envelope, feeling its thickness through her fingers — not as thin as a short letter, nor too thick. She turned over the back, there was nothing more to it than a careful fold, as if the writer had folded it over and over again before deciding to put it in the station's mailbox. There was a vague but certain feeling rising in her heart, a premonition she hadn't dared to put into words, but her hand was shaking slightly as she gently tore the edge of the envelope.

Inside are two pages of handwritten paper, evenly italicized, the pen strokes are firm but not ornate, the font style of someone more accustomed to writing technical reports than prose, but each sentence and each word is surprisingly carefully selected. Vy read the first line, and immediately recognized it, even though there was no signature, even without a word of self-introduction.

"Sister Vy, there are things I can't say over the phone, because the line only gives me a few minutes before I have to go back to work. I'm writing this letter in the middle of a long shift, sitting in a small control room with only flashing red and blue indicator lights and the steady sound of a machine running like a giant heartbeat that I have to guard all night. I want to tell you about my job, not its name, but the feeling of doing it - the feeling of standing in the middle of a room full of copper. meter, knowing that if just one wrong number jumped, an entire neighborhood behind me would suffer the consequences the next morning, even though none of them knew I existed."

Vy read slowly, word by word, as if afraid that reading quickly would break something fragile flowing from the page. Thao Nhi standing next to her, realizing the atmosphere had changed, quietly retreated to the door, closing it behind her, leaving Vy alone with those words in the soft yellow light of the turned-off studio.

She continued reading, and her heart began to beat slower and heavier, as if each word was sinking deeper into a very private place in her heart that no one had ever touched before, even through the short calls before.

"Have you ever noticed," the letter continued, "that the city at four o'clock in the morning has a very unique beauty, a beauty that only those who are awake can see? I often get off duty at that hour, take a short walk before getting in the car to go home, and I often stand for a few minutes on a street corner, watching the city transform — the first shops have just pulled up their iron doors, the smell of baking bread begins to waft from a small oven somewhere, a few people ride bicycles to the market Early in the morning, the street lights were still on even though it was dawn. I always felt like I was standing between two worlds that never really met each other - the world of people who had just woken up, full of energy for a new day, and my world, where a working day had just ended, my body was tired, I just wanted to find a bed to sleep in. They didn't know that I had been up all night to keep the pipes, the machines, the pressure numbers they had never thought about still running smoothly. safe, so that when they turn on the faucet in the morning, everything is as normal as if no one ever had to wake up because of it."

"I don't write this to make you feel sorry for me," he wrote in the next paragraph, his handwriting slightly tilted to one side as if his hand was tired. "I write because I want you to understand, when I call into your program, I'm not looking for a place to complain. I'm looking for a place to remind myself that, in the midst of that repetitive, lonely, unseen work, there is still something beautiful happening in parallel - a voice speaking at the same time every night, knowing that somewhere out there someone is listening, awake, even if not for the same reason. I think you and I, in a way, are doing the same thing. one thing - you keep lonely people from feeling lonely, I keep machines from betraying their sleep, the only difference is that you get to talk, and I just get to do it silently."

At the end of the letter, there was no signature, no name, just a short line written separately, the ink darker than the previous lines, as if he had stopped writing a long time before writing it: "If one day you read this letter on the air, please don't read all of it. There are parts that I only want you to know."

Vy sat quietly for a long time after finishing reading, two pages of paper placed lightly on her lap, the soft yellow light of the studio casting a warm but lonely halo on her face. Outside, the lobby was completely deserted, only the sound of the air conditioner humming and somewhere in the distance the sound of the iron door of a late-night restaurant being rolled down. She folded the letter in the same fold, carefully as if folding something fragile, then put it in a separate drawer of her desk - the drawer she still used to keep her father's keepsakes, now there was a new item, unrelated to him, but important to her in a way she had never anticipated.

She thought about the last sentence he wrote — "if one day you read this letter on the air, please don't read the whole thing" — and wondered how she could both respect that and not betray the trust he placed in her when he decided to write these lines, sending them to a place he wasn't sure he had the courage to return to again. She turned off the desk lamp, slung her bag over her shoulder, walked out of studio B with the letter still in the drawer, but its words followed her out into the dark hallway, followed her to the door of the house, and stayed awake with her long after she had laid down on the bed, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling, thinking about a man she had never met, standing on a certain street corner of Cam Duong at four in the morning, watching the city wake up without belonging to the moment. that.