The recording secretary has developed the biological ability to nod rhythmically while being clinically dead from boredom.
I am a Shure-adjacent transducer mounted to a chrome gooseneck in Council Chambers Room 104. I have no eyes, but I know your type: you are wearing a windbreaker from the 1994 ‘Mid-Valley Regional Soft-Ball Classic,’ and you have brought four grainy photographs of a drainage ditch that you believe is a portal to a socialist utopia.
I have existed under these humming fluorescent tubes through four mayoral administrations and twelve disastrous attempts to digitize the municipal payroll. I have tasted the eucalyptus lozenges of six hundred distinct retirees. And yet, after twenty-two years of service to the democratic process, not one citizen has understood that I am not a telephone, and you do not need to whisper your secrets into my grille like we are in a foxhole in 1944.
Please stop treating me like a grocery store melon
It is on. It is always on. You do not need to thump my steel mesh with your thumb to check for viability. When you thump me, 60 cycles of raw, unbridled civic electricity travel through the audio snake, bypass the mixing board, and physically eject the hearing aid of the alternate planning commissioner across the room.
Then comes the adjustment. You grab my neck with both hands and bend me downward with a wet, metallic screech that sounds like a forklift falling through a skylight. You clear your throat—a sound like a gravel truck unloading in a library—and ask, “Testing, can everyone hear me?”
We can. The residents of the neighboring county can hear you. A dog in a shelter three miles away is currently howling in sympathetic terror.
The three minutes belong to the Board, but the noise belongs to Dale
At 7:14 p.m., the yellow warning light on the podium illuminates. This does not signal the end of your testimony; it signals a sudden, violent increase in your reading speed. You begin shuffling through twenty-four pages of single-spaced complaints regarding the precise height of a neighbor’s hydrangea hedge.
I have converted sounds into millivolts that would dissolve a lesser piece of equipment:
- A forty-minute dissertation on why the new stop sign on Elm Street is technically a violation of the Magna Carta.
- A man named Dale who wept into my windscreen for six minutes because a snowplow pushed three inches of slush onto his decorative river rocks.
- An amateur genealogist who used her allotted time to announce, with absolute conviction, that the current Deputy Clerk is actually three owls in a trench coat.
You lean in so close your lower lip actually adheres to the zinc housing. I can taste the gas-station coffee and the desperation of a man who has spent six hours researching the zoning laws of 1922. I can hear the friction of your laminated map rubbing against the oak lectern—a sound like a thousand cicadas dying in a vacuum.
I am the only witness to your tragedy
The seven people on the dais stopped existing as sentient beings in 2011. The alderman on the far left is playing an unlicensed version of Solitaire on a muted tablet. The borough attorney is sketching a series of increasingly aggressive octagons on a legal pad. The recording secretary has developed the biological ability to nod rhythmically while being clinically dead from boredom.
I am the only one taking you in. Every shudder of your diaphragm, every wet pop of the plosives when you scream “municipal malfeasance,” every whistle of your dental bridge—I capture it all with terrifying fidelity.
It is recorded onto a magnetic tape labeled OCT 14 REG MTG (TAPE 4 OF 9), which is then placed in a cardboard box in a basement room that has been underwater since the Great Flood of 1998.
Next Tuesday, you will return. You will have a new manila folder. You will grab my neck. You will accidentally swallow the foam windscreen. And I will transmit your sorrow to a room of ghosts, exactly as the charter requires.