The lore of a certain Great Plains town includes the tale of an enigmatic and disappeared public radio personality called only Vasily. But let us start at the beginning. The town in question hosted a college whose students, as well as amateur disc jockeys from the town’s greater community, operated a rather low-power FM radio station. But given the flat terrain and, at least relative to more populous areas, the lack of competing signals on their 89.3 FM bandwidth, its broadcast radius stretched 40 miles in any direction from the tower. The station’s programming at this time consisted of that eclectic and unpredictable mix of music and talk content somehow common to public and university radio stations across the country in the very late 1980’s. Consider the Thursday schedule: two older gentlemen came in for their long-standing bluegrass and country block from six to eight in the morning, followed by two students airing contemporary country until ten. Then a local horticulturist and her husband arrived to broadcast selections from their vast collection of free jazz recordings until one in the afternoon, when the daily rock block began and its DJ’s, mostly students, helmed two-hour shifts playing their favorite cuts from the station’s collection of promotional and donated independent rock and roll music. At seven, students aspiring to careers in journalism provided an hour’s worth of news programming, commenting on national events received from the AP wire alongside local items of interest to the region and the school. After that, one of the town’s elder statesmen, a noted philanthropist and man-about-town, aired his renowned classical music hour in the premium 8-9 p.m. block. Then a student came in for his “House With Many Mansions” program; he used the turntables to mix House records from Detroit and Chicago while a friend intoned Biblical verse into the microphone (‘MIC1’ on the mixboard). At eleven p.m. the broadcast went under charge of a few students who used multiple feeds to mix and collage instructions from VHS home workout videos, that changed every week, and a recording of The Theatre of Eternal Music, which they theorized as the anchor of their show, unchanging week-to-week, and being, as it were, eternal.
Things became even more collegiate after “Endless Reps,” when at midnight two undergraduate men took over the studio for their show, “30,000 Witnesses Can’t Be Wrong,” a reference to an approximation they’d come across for the number of Americans who have reported UFO sightings since Roswell happened in 1947. Andrew Betancourt and Mike Gantz provided second-hand reporting on and discussion of paranormal happenings, from things they’d heard on other late-night spooky talk radio shows or else read in the tabloids; these chats were interspersed with Elvis Presley records played back at half-speed or even slower. Enjoying one another’s company and gossiping about their social scene, it would not be uncommon for listeners in the show’s early days to hear “Heartbreak Hotel” recede at a glacial pace to a static silence, which might last as long as two or three minutes before the friends remembered their duties to the audience and broke from their private conversation to reactive their microphone channels and speak, or at least just put on another record. Competing with the signals of a few commercial stations from the state capital 100 miles south of them, station management figured less than fifty radios tuned in for Andrew and Mike: some of their friends and classmates, some devices left on as coed revelers paired off or passed out at parties, and perhaps some motorists and truckers passing through the region, and for this reason the amateur hiccups of the station’s overnight programming did not raise any eyebrows. However, had these instances of on-air negligence continued into the second semester, into the show’s Vasily era, then certainly station management may have been compelled to respond to more than a few angry calls and letters from the growing audience of nocturnal seekers tuning into 89.3 FM.
Indeed, some early appearances of Vasily in late January 1989 were discussed feverishly, at least around campus, especially after Mike made a dozen (none surviving) cassette tape copies of the broadcast and allowed them to be passed between his friends. Speculation regarding continued Vasily appearances drove listenership up to perhaps 500 devices each broadcast. By April people from across the state were driving to this college town because on early Friday mornings a thickly accented Slavic DJ on WKPX narrated to each and every listener his or her own private dreams. I am again getting ahead of myself.
As the story is usually told, one Sunday in January Mike met Andrew for lunch. He told his friend about an encounter he had while walking home from the party they had both attended the night before. Mike left fairly drunk and earlier than most of his peers; by his own account it was around midnight when he passed the viaduct carrying the cargo rails over 7th Street. From under the structure a man emerged in unclean clothes and sporting a long beard. Anyone familiar with American society would recognize this as a fairly unremarkable event. But this man in particular, Mike said, had a solidity and seriousness about him. A gravitas accompanied this presumably homeless man who approached our student DJ. He made it clear with his upright posture and steadfast gaze that he intended to get Mike’s attention and discuss something, not merely to ask for a donation.
Andrew, at this point, reminded his friend that he was far from sober during his walk home, but this only agitated Mike, who insisted that the man he met had special gifts. This person allegedly informed the student of an ability that he would like to practice with Mike, and that he went by the name ‘Vasily.’ Mike said that he then consented to a “dream divination,” and that the tramp began describing the events of a dream he had dreamt the night before.
“Well, no, not really,” said Mike, in response to Andrew who asked if his friend usually remembered his dreams, or at least in this case remembered the contents of his dreams. “But I did as soon as he told me. It was like deja vu.”
Incredulous, Andrew asked if his friend meant to say that on Saturday night a homeless man narrated exactly the dreams Mike had experienced Friday night, which he himself did not recall on Saturday morning, and that Mike believed him totally.
“Yes. And you will too,” said Mike. “I invited him to come on this week’s show.”
He did appear on their next broadcast late one night in early February. Andrew doubted, and to a lesser extent even Mike doubted that this vagrant would show up to the studio in the middle of the night. Buzzed in from outside Lewis Hall and escorted by Mike through the building’s lobby into the On-Air Control Room, Vasily presented as quite a bit less friendly and forthcoming than he had been outside under the viaduct the previous weekend. Again dressed shabbily, wearing the same dirty black pants, brown boots, and an oversized brown jacket over a beige sweater cross-hatched with grime and grit, unshaven and with wild hair, the Eastern émigré of unknown origin reluctantly made his introductions with Andrew before clamming up when, still off-air, the latter tried to make simple conversation about the former’s occupation, his day-to-day activities, his opinion on the likelihood of covert Martian occupation already occurring in the United States. Andrew, in his defense, was only trying to make their guest feel at ease before he joined their amateur radio show. Noticing that his efforts went nowhere, he and Mike proceeded with the planned segment and asked Vasily if he was ready to perform his dream divination on Andrew, and if he could do so into ‘MIC3’ for their meager listenership to enjoy. Vasily nodded his agreement, and even pulled closer to his mouth the Shure microphone on its swiveling arm.
Mike allowed the half-speed Roy Orbison record to finish, then deftly stopped the turntable rotation and simultaneously activated all three microphone channels. “Yoooouu’rreee listening to ‘Thirty-Thousand Witnesses Can’t Be Wrong’ on your one and only WKPX eighty-nine-point-three FM, I’m Mike and I’m with my co-host Andrew.”
“Yes indeed Mikey, that track you just heard was our own paranormal edit of Orbison’s ‘Only The Lonely,’ but I’m more excited for a special bit of programming we’re bringing to your eardrums this evening, right Mike?”
“It’s true! Andrew believe it or not, my new friend Vasily here has agreed to join us on the air to share his talents with us. Now let me ask you a question, Andrew: do you recall any dreams that you had last night?”
“Can’t say I do Mike.”
“No need to fret, no none at all, Mr. Vasily can tell you all about that. He did it to me. Vasily, would you mind?”
Abruptly and almost before Mike could finish his prompting, Vasily spoke: “There’s two drill bits, spinning opposite directions, they are close, getting closer, they are approaching each other- NO! it’s airplanes, they are airplanes, propeller planes whose noses are going to collide, but they’re moving slow, so slow, but it will be horrible, you know deep-down, bone-deep, you know that it’s over when they meet, everything will be over. You look around, you want to yell for help, someone needs to stop these lazy hulking biplanes from colliding and you’re in a hangar, big open hangar with exposed metal cross beams supporting that big roof up there, up so high, way up there, and then- WAIT! no, not a hangar, it is now a soccer stadium, it is a football arena where you saw a British team play a match as a child on vacation, and the ceiling’s still so high with its lattices of iron, and the planes are on the field and they are still approaching one another in slow motion, and your father is there, he’s on the field and he’s waving his arms around wildly. He wants YOU to make the planes stop because he knows, like you know, that should they meet, it will all be over, but you cannot move, your feet like lead, and you yell but hear no scream. The planes collide and continue colliding, their propellers shredding one another and you look back at your father to beg his forgiveness with your face but he’s gone and the airplanes are tearing each other up and it’s so loud and then it’s quiet. The planes have stopped their violent mutual evisceration and stand together in a twisted sculpture of iron that you contemplate as the stands of the stadium recede so far away and the grass becomes so much sand beneath your feet and you are free to move now, you can walk again. You approach the brutal metal monstrosity; it is gleaming because the ceiling has given way to an open sky whose brightness makes that sculpture glow like diamonds and it’s so beautiful you know that if you could merely get close enough to touch it everything would be okay and your father would return and the desert would revert to a stadium and you could enjoy a football game with your family but its so bright it hurts your eyes so you shut them tight and walk forward.”
Vasily stopped orating just as suddenly as he had begun.
“Do you feel I have been accurate in my descriptions?”
Andrew stammered a reply: “Uh… yes.”
I assure you if I could describe with greater confidence what happened next, then, dear reader, I would happily do so. What is said is that a few seconds of radio silence passed before Mike, who had meanwhile cued up an Elvis CD, played another song and took all three microphone channels off-air. Andrew reportedly became offended that Vasily either would not or could not disclose how exactly he had come upon this information, these images so private to Andrew’s psyche that he himself had not even been aware of them. Mike, some say, smiled rather smugly at his doubting friend’s dumbfounded reaction to Vasily’s performance. Either way, the vagrant left the studio without affect, neither pleased nor displeased, and the two undergraduate students finished their show in a more-or-less normal fashion, touching on, between musical offerings, reports from the Weekly World News that a merman had risen to power in the uneasy Cypriot political scene.
After sobering up (after all, it was not unusual for late-night DJ’s at WKPX to indulge in recreational substances before, or even during, their programs) and talking with some friends, Andrew became disillusioned, or perhaps he simply renewed his initial healthy skepticism towards the abilities of the guest on their radio show. After all, he thought, everyone has fathers, plenty of tourists have attended Manchester United games, and might not Vasily have simply convinced me of a false dream that I may well have had but did not truly have? It occurred to Andrew that Vasily had spoken in a way somehow both calm and hurried, he did not gesticulate, he seemed entranced. And he looked at Andrew with such piercing intensity from unblinking eyes that the young man simply could not look away. “If I had broken eye contact would that have destroyed the whole act?” he wondered. “Charlatan!”
For investigation’s sake, Andrew asked Mike to invite his transient acquaintance back to their next broadcast where he would be joined by Andrew’s friend Janet, who for her own consciousness-expanding reasons had developed the habit of keeping a dream journal. Vasily again astonished his hosts by re-creating the exact dream that 16 hours prior Janet had scrawled down in her pretentious hidebound journal. Of course, his incantation did not constitute an identical transcription of Janet’s entry, which would only invite further suspicion of trickery, but rather it was isomorphic, an alternative reporting on the very source material Janet had used for her summation: the dream itself. Moreover, Vasily performed his divination technique on a different friend Andrew had brought to the studio for back up (at five people the OACR was crowded indeed!) on this particular Thursday night. In his characteristic manner of speaking, animated yet staid, the Eastern genius elaborated Charlie’s nocturnal fantasies about Eva, the roommate of Charlie’s girlfriend Nancy. As word of the strange radio guest and his talents was spreading across campus, it is a small miracle for Charlie’s sake that both women were asleep as Vasily described Charlie’s vigorous ménage à trois with Eva and a chiseled sailor in clichéd 50’s Naval garb.
The following week, Vasily returned uninvited. Both radio hosts refused his offer to divine their dreams, and, “anyways,” they asked him, “how did you get in here? Don’t the front doors lock automatically?” That’s not to say there weren’t scores of copied keys floating around, given the constant rotation of student and community DJ’s, but as the students discussed this new security concern something unprecedented happened. In their months of lonely broadcasting the studio phone had not once rang during the Thursday night (technically Friday morning) “30,000 Witnesses” program. Mike answered the telephone, “Hello, WKPX.”
“Where’s the Russian?”
“Excuse me?”
“They told me y’all had a Ruski that was telling people about their dreams.”
Lightnin’ Hopkins sang out over the airwaves and in the On Air Control Room.
“We had a guest that did something like that.”
“Where’s he at? I want to see if this feller knows about my dreams. Fat chance! Prankster kids, let him try me…”
Smokestack Lightning had finished.
“Sir, do you mind if I put you on-air?”
“By all means do so.”
“Folks that was Smokestack Lightnin’ by the one and only, and we have on the line here… what was your name sir?”
“Well I’m Ro-”
Before the caller could get out his first name Vasily was on the microphone intoning in laborious detail about a terrified man traversing a labyrinth with impossibly high and ivy-covered brick walls, to Robert’s utter amazement. Only moments after disconnecting with the stammering caller, and during the boys’ attempt to return to their usual wheelhouse with comments on a story about a supernaturally brilliant bullfrog in Germany, the phone rang again: Dorothea, from the next county over, was calling in to ask after her dreams, hoping for a message from a recently deceased brother. Or at least that seemed to be the desperate thrust of her request from the amount of information she was able to provide before Vasily took over the airwaves.
At roughly this point in our tale, as the earth thawed and the days grew longer, two notable things happened. Listenership to WKPX’s hitherto sideshow late-night Friday 12am-2am block exploded. Lacking the technology to determine how many vehicles, walkmen, boomboxes and living room sets had dialed in to 89.3FM at any given time, we can nonetheless say with great confidence that word of Vasily spread across campus, town, county, and, yes, the entire state. The second item to note is that, some say gradually, some say suddenly, Mike and Andrew disappeared from their own broadcast, giving away more and more airtime to Vasily’s verbal conjurings. What is certain is that by April not a word was heard on 89.3FM from either student during the very show they ostensibly hosted (or, for that matter, at any other time…) Instead, Vasily divined. The mystic, as some have described him, helmed the OACR for the entirety of the program and recalled with alarming detail the dreams dreamt by the show’s exponentially-increasing audience. They did not even need to call in! Indeed, two listeners riding in the same vehicle with an appropriately tuned radio set, were they to cross into the seemingly enchanted radius of the WKPX broadcast, would ride together and hear two perfectly distinct broadcasts, corresponding to their own unique subconscious imaginings from their previous slumber.
Here, reader, I must recount the only extant documentation for these phenomena. Gregory Skuld, intrepid journalist and noted grouch, decided to simply enter the studio’s on-air control room. In an article for the school’s newspaper he reported that while attempting to investigate just what exactly was going on during this radio program, he entered the notoriously accessible locked academic building that housed the radio station (after all, to gain entry one needed to merely lift the doorjamb in, while jiggling the handle and turning) and discovered an empty studio booth. He allegedly heard no sound, despite noticing that the levels reading from ‘MIC1’ suggested a human were speaking into its device. This aspiring newsman, a future two-bit correspondent at best, decided to turn off ‘MIC1.’ The moment he did so corresponds precisely with thousands of listeners snapping out of a trancelike somnolescence, looking at their radios in anger, pleading “what happened?” and begging “where’s Vasily?” They now only received static on the 89.3FM channel, while moments before they were re-indulging in private fantasy exceeding their conscious powers of creation, and this even though the person in the studio, Gregory Keskuld, who after all was merely a curious young gumshoe, had now turned ‘MIC1’ back to its on position, and noticed, as reported in his article, that it apparently no longer received the ghostly inaudible input signal. The levels remained flat. He coughed and watched the levels rise, then fall. He spoke, “testing,” and a collective groan filled the air of the 80-mile-in-diameter bubble around the station’s tower, artificially crowded as it were with travelers seeking Vasily.
Decades later few can agree on every detail as to just what transpired in the winter and spring of 1989, when an entire college campus and its surrounding town fell under Vasily’s spell. Some argue the whole affair was a hoax perpetrated by Mike and Andrew, given that they came to school from big cities in other parts of the country and so, at least to some locals, already radiated an air of deceit, malevolence and snobbery. These will deny their own memories of having tuned in during the wee hours of a Friday morning and hearing their subconscious fantasies explicated to them in the voice of the mysterious foreigner. Others of a more religious persuasion allege that Vasily never existed in the standard corporeal, biological way that most humans exist, and that rather he was an angel or demon (not all dreamers, ignorance being bliss for many, are pleased to have their most interior of psychic functions laid bare before them) who had used the undergrad men as a vehicle for a heady Christian project of revelation. Still others, keyed into the Slavic angle during these waning days of the Cold War, assert that Vasily was a flesh-and-blood agent of KBG interests, sent to perform a paraphysical experiment that the Soviets considered too dangerous for performance upon their own populace. Rather conveniently for all these theorists, Mike and Andrew themselves refuse to comment one way or the other, or to even so much as acknowledge their collegiate forays into broadcasting. They are said to have quietly completed their coursework in May; they have not returned to the area since their graduation ceremony. Of no dispute is the fact that the school’s entire student body and almost every adult resident of town, along with thousands of pilgrims from all corners of the state, and at least three other states, around 30,000 people in total, agree that their own dreams had been narrated to them clearly and distinctly on WKPX in early 1989 by the man called only Vasily.