Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Cynthia Ozick about her writing process.

Do I have rivals? Competitors? Certainly: the sports blatherers with their outer-borough accents, the medicine men and their elixirs, the partisan boosters who stir up primitive rage, the DJs peddling their caterwaulings. From one end of the dial to the other, clamor and cacophony. My mode is otherwise: seduction, consolation, the whisper, the voice that caresses and heals. The voice of a lover. And sometimes of a skeptic.

The middle of the night is mine. From 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. I am sovereign here in my windowless cubicle. My desk with its scattered papers and corn-muffin crumbs, my electric coffee pot, my chair, my mic, the ancillary mic that connects me to the tech interior (and to Peter, the screener who weeds out the nuts and the cranks), the extra chair that is never used, the door that leads to my personal W.C., the time signal on the clock on the wall.

And out there in the invisible dark, the sleepless, the solitary old with their decrepit hearing aids, the unknown tormented who lie awake in their hundreds of thousands—those unpredictable callers to call-in shows, the braggarts, the know-it-alls, the timid stutterers, the unassuaged sufferers of unforgiven family quarrels, the enraged, the bitter, the lonely, the hopeless, the jilted, the sacked. The masses of racked human roil.

I sleep during that daylight I rarely see, except as it seeps in the advancing hours under the threshold of the door to my cubicle, which during broadcasts is always shut. The tech interior incessantly keeps track of audience ratings, but they mean nothing to me; I am, after all, on the leaner side of 74, and have had my steady following for years. I cut off the feed when the commercials take over and during those so-called musical intervals (drums tearing into the brain). Almost always I can predict what is to come—someone’s nocturnal cry in a parched tract of wilderness peopled only by the unlucky. And by me, their intimate, their confidante. Their trustworthy tryst. And sometimes their disloyal doubter.

Nicky at Night is how I am featured. And here, in this no-man’s-land of secrecy, is where I am confounding. My radio voice is, in fact, my primary toolbox, and can travel as it pleases into both high and low registers. Am I Nicholas or Nicole? Whichever suits the need. Whatever your hunger, I am the sustenance. Name your belief, and I am your god. But I can be impatient too. I can reprimand, I can correct the self-pitying. Some say I am a charlatan, a deceiver, a shaman; but never mind, this only increases my popularity; in the land of video, I would count as a showpiece. And show is the key. Nothing on radio can be shown. All the world is drawn to screens, to faces, to seeing. Radio is obsolete. It ought not to exist. An illusion. If you call me, you hallucinate. I am not meant to be seen.

Yet here was a figure sitting in my unused chair.

“How did you get in here?” I said.

“Saw your name on the door, took a chance it wasn’t locked—”

“I’m on in five minutes, so get out, go.”

“But I’ve been waiting for you, and you know me, you’ve known me forever. I’m not just any random nobody.”

I did not say Of course you are. You all are, every one of you. Aloud I said, “I’ll call security if you don’t get out right now.”

“You don’t understand. You saved my life.”

One of those, I thought. The ones in pursuit of a savior. The ones mostly winnowed out by Peter.

These invasions occasionally happen. The seekers (so I’ve privately named them) usually ask for money. Once I’ve mentioned security and hand them some cash, they disappear. This one did not.

“I just want to sit here awhile and watch how you do it, see if you mean what you say.”

“Please leave. I need my privacy when I’m at work.”

“I won’t be in the way, and I’ll even set up the coffee. Well look, you’ve got only one cup, but it’s all right, I should stay away from caffeine anyhow.”

The on-air light on the wall went on. Two minutes.

Into the ancillary mic I shouted, “Music!”

Horns, clarinets, and a raucous nasal chorus swelled, crowding the air, followed by security with their badges. Before she fled, the intruder—the seeker—threw out, “Impostor! Fake!”

This incident, brief and harmless though it was, left its mark. I felt scathed and unsettled: It is true that I am an impostor, and what performer isn’t? Still, the word stirred an unexpected longing. The impostor is a puppeteer whose marionette is the self, an unfulfilled living actor turned wooden. At heart, buried and undisclosed, didn’t I hope to be a seeker myself? To break out of the prison of pretense into the freedom of … what? Feeling. Pure feeling.

And once I did. The caller’s story—they all have stories—was preposterous. He claimed he was 19 and already a widower. He pronounced this in separate syllables: wi-do-wer, as if he had still to get used to it. His wife had died tragically and unexpectedly, from fast-acting leukemia. This expression alone, fast-acting leukemia, appeared to be lifted from an all-night cancer barker. He said he had fathered an infant, and that his former wife’s mother was caring for it, and that he was barred from ever seeing his own flesh and blood, not that he cared. This was all so absurdly melodramatic, and all of it in some newly ripened boyish timbre, that I half-believed he was a brazen brat up well past his bedtime on purpose to lampoon. He said he saw right through me, and was ready to offer some advice.

“You could use a partner,” he said. “You’re getting tedious, all on your own.”

Voices are what I know, and he was not 19.

I said, “How old are you really?”

“So why don’t you see for yourself? If you invite me, I’ll come.”

“Sorry, I don’t have visitors.”

“I’d come as a collaborator.”

Here was a smart aleck whom Peter ought to have sent packing. And when Peter fails me, I have my cutoff switch. I use it sparingly, though, so as not to seem brutish. I maintain my auditory smile.

But I used it now.

Less than a week later I discovered him—the purported widower—at ease in my extra chair. I had arrived early, but he might have been there for half the day. I knew him by his boy’s voice, yet now it carried a different syrup: He had cajoled security into trusting that the talk-show host had summoned him. He was surely much younger than 19. And because I had scolded him with my gruffest inflections, he had supposed the host to be Nicholas, but here was Nicole instead. I caught the spasm of surprise in his eyes. They were very black eyes; the pupil and the iris made a single oval of lightless dark. His head was all Mediterranean, Italian or Greek or Levantine: the curly black hair, winding wild over the ears, the earth-carved nose and mouth. The nose, the source of life’s breath … but that mouth!

What I saw—what came over me, in the way of instinct, of unwilled sensation—was that the boy was beautiful. His hands were beautiful. The throat with its Adam’s apple (the name itself a hint of Eden), the bare uninnocent nape. This was distracting; it was unnatural, as much as if he had been acutely disfigured. I was forced to stare. I was unable not to look and look.

I said, “Go home and go to bed. Don’t you have school in the morning?”

“I’ve listened to you every night for months. Every night when you’re on. I’ve got one of these transistor radios, fits into a pocket. I can keep you like a secret.”

“And when I’m not on?”

“Mostly I spend the night in the library. The big one with the lions. I go in just before closing, and afterward they can never find me. The best place is periodicals. That’s how I get to keep up.”

A drawer in my table was partly open. He had sniffed out the box of corn muffins. A random circle of yellow crumbs was spread around his feet. But he had no shoes. Instead, here was a row of flawless little toes in plastic sandals, and then the pathos of a boy’s lone big toe.

Was he a runaway, a truant? A busy thief? A chronic master of stealth? Was there a parental search under way? Or was he a mote among the abandoned homeless, with no one to miss him? Was it his intuition to conceal himself in fantasy (the forbidden infant, warm nights among the stacks)? Had he come to me as a protector, to hide out?

“You should put me on the air,” he said.

The air: a raft that rode on the wind.

But something was breaking out, a disruption, an unruly directive—a decree—I had never before heeded, or taken to heart. His beauty was terrifying. It looted, it deprived me of my own secrets. I looked and I looked, I saw and I saw, but fitfully. Furtively. I didn’t dare hold my gaze; he was a child, not an exhibit. He could not have been more than 14. A septuagenarian staring at a vagabond boy. A stupidity and a perplexity.

And I all at once took in that I would, in fact, do it—put the boy on the air. There was no logic to it, no reason, a kidnapping, an exploitation of a minor, and thousands would know. The station manager would know. The station owner would know. I might be sacked for underhandedness. For an unannounced turning, for running wild.

“Come here,” I told the boy. “Sit next to me. Bring over that other chair. We’ll share the mic.”

His closeness dizzied me. It was as if I had inhaled a drug. Or was the boy redolent of some faint narcotic that, so suffocatingly near was he, was leaching through my skin?

And so it began. The signature opening, that choir of tumult I so much despised; but I had neglected to ask him his name. There was no need to put questions, or to explain. His voice alone carried the hours. The widower was nowhere. The boy was an instrument of fabrication. He led from disbelief to disbelief. New implausibles swarmed. The somnolent woke; the boy’s voice roused them to the long-ago children they once were, or fathered, or mothered, or lost, or mourned, or were estranged from. He animated them, they were drawn to him like the millings of shadowy moths, they seemed to see what he made them see, he was visible in his voice. The boy’s voice, the look of the boy, an unfolding, an unnerving, an undoing that made me afraid of the very thing it was: a visitation of feeling, pure feeling.

Daylight crept under the doorsill.

“Thank you,” the boy said then. “I hope you think I did well.”

He swiped the last of the corn muffins and left. There were no repercussions. Whether the ratings thickened or shrank I was never told. The audience returned to its usual configuration: grief and grievance, lamentation and despair. Those end-of-life larynxes scratching out their woes were sickening me; at 75, I retired. My slot was instantly replaced by a chiropractor hawking his surefire panacea, and I was just as instantly forgotten, never mind that he and I were equal saviors. What is more evanescent than a voice on the radio?

In my newly freed leisure I went often to the movies, though I disliked being made to see what in novels I could otherwise see for myself, how a room was replicated, the carpet, the vase on the windowsill, the large sofa, the small sofa, five figurines on a shelf. All of them falsifying shadows, specters declaiming reality. I had the notion that beauty, supernal beauty, would not go to waste, and could be captured and somehow disseminated, as it had been one night on the radio. Maturity must somehow abrade or deform it; for this I was prepared. But the boy could not have become what he already was: an actor. An impostor.

Still, it is indisputable that a boy grows into a man. I explored the reading tables in the periodicals room of the library. The boy had hidden in the midnight stacks; the man was missing from the tables.

I listened to the radio at night. I still do—what elderly insomniac does not? I tune in to the pundits, the show-offs, the hucksters, the healers, the howlers, the ringmasters, the weather forecasters, the traffic reporters, the inescapable musical intervals that screech. I search through the dial, from highest to lowest, until tedium and fatigue overcome naked hope. And all who are sleepless must ask—what is more fleeting than feeling, pure feeling?