I felt sorry for it, I really did. The phone: the phone, as in “The phone’s ringing!” and “I’ll get it!” Remember that? Fewer and fewer people do. I’m fond of my phone, an elegant little brushed-silver device with a cheery chirp of a ring tone, made by a company with an obscure name, probably long-defunct. Even now, it sits beneath the lamp on the coffee table in the den, its little red message light glowing reassuringly, looking completely at home, comforting, even. The world at my fingertips.
But the world isn’t calling much these days. Only recently it was communications central, ringing happily through the day and evening with messages and greetings from friends and relations, fellow musicians and editors, and people with questions about one of my books or articles. Then came a long diminuendo as the fraying threads of professional music finally snapped, my books were remaindered, editors fell silent, friends drifted away, and I was left with the telemarketers. Now, even they have dwindled, and I’m glad enough of that, except now the little red light remains unblinking for days on end, waiting, waiting.
What is “communication,” really? We debate communication, agonize over communication, and refine and redefine communication in ways constantly evolving. But are we any better at it? I wonder; I’m always amazed at how little of what I send by email actually seems to get through. Then again, maybe they’re just ignoring me. Hard copy: there’s something you can take to the bank. Letters got there (unless they didn’t) and were taken seriously (unless they weren’t). Nothing is perfect, ever. Still, I view the I-phone, around which all of modern life revolves, as a hydra-headed monster that has in many ways lessened and not improved true communication. There, that’s my old-man rant done.
Well, I may be old, but I don’t wish to be odd. In my hermetic, old-man way, I like to keep up with things. And so, I’ve been thinking of actually taking the plunge into modern life and getting an I-phone, and letting the land line go. Thinking is not doing, however, and in fact I’m rather enjoying taking it slowly and savoring the odd sensation of standing on the threshold. These thresholds, these brinks, these cusps: This is how man evolves, how history is made, how eras succeed eras. And frankly, I’m still not entirely convinced that terminating the land line would be entirely desirable. Or, even possible, if it comes to that.
Nature has its own ways of communicating, one of the most effective being weather. Last month, several days of steady rain drummed into me the reality of man’s pitiful puniness, a message that threw me into a deep and torpid melancholy. One day dragged into the next, wearing me down until all I wanted to do was sleep. Early in the evening of the third (or was it the fourth) desolate, desultory day, I was reading on the sofa in the den the when the phone rang. Shit, I thought, another telemarketer. I squinted at the caller ID window and saw an odd-looking string of numbers. No area code, no hyphen. What the hell? I plucked it off its base and said in my upbeat phone voice, “Hell-ohh” In one my earliest and most important lessons in communication, my mother taught me to be polite and cheerful on the phone. “There’s enough craziness in the world,” she told me. “People should always hear a friendly voice on the other end.”
In response to my cheerful, motherly greeting, I got no words at all. I listened for several seconds, repeated my hello, and was about to hang up in disgust when I heard a static hiss. Somewhat like a fax number, but softer, distant-sounding, like the ocean from behind dunes. “Hello,” I said again, curt and businesslike. The static continued, then gave way to a succession of muted clicks. A wrong number, no doubt, or somebody trying a fax. I replaced the device in its cradle and returned to my book, letting it and the rain take me far away from the world and its nasty little problems.
I was in the kitchen at seven the next evening when the phone chirped. I had nothing better to do, so I went and plucked it from its stand and checked the caller ID. Another string of odd numbers. What the hell? I was curious, not annoyed. Was somebody trying to reach me—somebody hesitating, unsure, yet persistent? An old schoolmate, perhaps, or maybe even someone calling with a gig.
I said Hello and got silence, followed again by the faraway static and clicks, Hsss…click, click, click…hsss…click, click… Either it was a malfunction, somewhere, or someone was fucking with me. Had to be: some damn hacker kid or cyber geek, a lost soul like me, only much younger, probably, and more inclined toward low-level mayhem. “Okay, friend, have a nice night,” I said, and hung up.
Several days passed with nothing more than two or three telemarketers. Then, one night around eight, the phone rang. The numbers looked more like a phone number, one I might have known, once. I answered.
Hssss, it said.
“Yes,” I said. I would play it cool.
Click.
“Okay. I’m here.”
Hsss…
Who was I talking to? A somebody, a person, I was now certain. Somebody weird. “So, what’s going on?”
Click.
“Everything’s okay on my end. Everything okay on your end?” Did I really want to get into it with some psycho? Did I have a stalker?
Click, click.
Okay, fine. “What’s your name?”
Click, hsss…Dial tone followed. I depressed the receiver and punched zero. “Help you?” said a bored voice.
“Operator, I’ve been getting calls with nobody on the line, only sounds.”
“Sounds? What kind of sounds?”
“Static, then clicking sounds.”
“I’ll try your number, sir,” she said, almost audibly sighing. “Go ahead and hang up.”
I did as directed and seconds later the phone rang, I picked up, and it was the operator. She said my “equipment” showed as working properly and hung up before I could say anything more. I waited a few minutes and tried again, with a different operator but the same result: equipment in order. Except it wasn’t.
What is “order,” anyway? Another word for expectation. We expect things to be a certain way, and everything outside that expectation is disorder, confusion, chaos: broken. What defines successful, i.e. unbroken, communication? Call, response, resolution. That’s all we want, and when communication comes up short, we are disappointed, frustrated, and often angry. Was this person angry? Were they angry at me?
I’ll be the first to admit that I have contributed my share of broken links. I’ve never liked talking on the phone; something about being stuck talking to a disembodied voice irritates me, particularly when that voice has nothing particular to say. Pointless, desultory conversation makes me a fidgeting, squirming wreck. My former wife would ramble on forever, saying absolutely nothing, until I was reduced to curt monosyllables and she’d snap, “Got someplace else to be?” I still don’t know why I married her, and I still don’t like talking on the phone. So I cut loose of her, and one or two other people since, and then something funny happened: the calls started getting scarcer and scarcer. It took me awhile, but it came to me, probably as I was lying in the den next to a silent phone, that I had crossed some undetectable line in my existence—had tipped over one of those points we don’t notice at first, but which turn our lives in wholly new directions.
At seven two evenings later, the phone rang. It was only a telemarketer, now so rare that I’d lost any sense of wariness. In fact, I was almost glad. I politely rang off—“You have a nice evening”—and sat back, waiting. Seconds later, it rang again, and the mystery digits winked on.
I picked up and said a cheery “Hi.”
Clickclick. Strange, but the clicks sounded almost cheerful.
“Yep,” I said, “it’s me, right here, as always.”
Clickclick. Definitely cheerful.
“Well, good of you to call. How’s your day been?”
Clickclick.
“Okay–good. So, do you like to read?”
Click.
“Right now, I’m reading ‘The Three Sisters’, by Chekhov. I love Chekhov, he was brilliant.”
Click, click.
“You’ve read him?”
Click.
My mystery caller liked to read, and has read Chekhov. “Can you talk?”
Dial tone. Okay, fine, have it your way, dude or whoever.
Next night, same time, same ring, same numbers.
“Hi.”
Click.
I wasn’t going to waste any more time being nice. “So, talk to me. That’s what phones are for.”
Clickclickclickclick. Annoyance? Hostility?
“Ooh, touchy!”
Clickclick.
Right then it hit me that the pattern of the clicks seemed to be echoing my words, like some kind of sonic mirror, a technical glitch that was simply bouncing my voice back at me. I heard no breathing, nothing to indicate a human on the other end, but there was something oddly vitreous in the sounds, as if they were being reflected off of something. Was that something me? Cripes. Well, whoever or whatever this was, they had called me. I would have to set limits. “Okay, I’m going to hang up now. Call me tomorrow at seven, we can talk some more.”
Clickclick. Okay.
Next morning I called the phone company, and got no more satisfaction than with the first bored operator. “Sorry,” the guy said, after keeping me on hold for almost fifteen minutes, “we can’t find anything wrong.” Well, judging by odd clicks and short bursts of static, at least he’d tried.
Wonderful. I have an unknown admirer of a possibly predatory, unstable nature. Should I call the cops? Google up and see what people did in this kind of situation? Maybe, I thought. But I didn’t. And still haven’t.
The next call came not the next evening, but several days later. It’s funny, too, but I was actually pissed when they didn’t call. Eventually, though, they did. I knew they would. I answered neutrally.
“Hey.”
Click.
“How’s it going?”
A pause, then static, but different from the earlier static. Softer, with a slight oscillation, like someone whistling through their teeth. Hmm. I continued: “I’m sitting here by the phone. I often sit here, in the den, by the phone. Where are you?”
HSSsss. What did that mean?
“You’re at home?”
Click.
Ah. “Do you live here in town?”
Click.
I wasn’t about to volunteer any more about where I lived. “I’m still reading Chekhov.”
HsssSSss.
“What are you doing?”
Clickclick.
“Nothing?”
Click.
“How can you just do ‘nothing’?”
HSS-CLICK. Had I pissed him (?) off?
Tough shit. “You sound pissed.”
CLICK.
“How come?”
Hsss-hsss-sssss….
“Don’t know?”
Click.
“Are you angry? Mad at the world.”
Click
“Why?”
Hsss-hsss-hsss.
“Well, better finger it out, or be miserable.” I had a flash of inspiration: “You know, an angry man drinks his own poison.”
Clickclick—clickclickclickclick. Was that laughter? I thought it could be. Why not?
“Yeah, it’s an old saying. Pretty good, huh?”
Click. Clickclick. A chuckle. It was warming up to me. Had to be.
I decided to try something. I hummed a note, medium pitch, softly: “Hmmmm.”
Hsssss.
Christ!
I hummed again, longer: “Hmmm, hmmm.”
Hsss, hsss.
“Hmmmm—mm-mm-mmmmm.”
Hssss—ss-ss-sssss.
Yes: either we had some serious acoustic reflection happening here, or some maybe even more serious mind fucker breathing down my neck. I mean, of course the thing—the phone—didn’t actually understand me, itself. No, those things don’t happen. But what if it was mechanically, electronically responding to vocal frequencies? Yes. Had to be. Frequency modulation = communication, pure sense.
I hummed another note, medium pitch, “hummmmm.”
Hmmmmmm.
I went higher.
It followed.
Yeah, okay, this was some hacker having fun, ha-ha, playing techie games with some old land-line fuck. He’d gotten some idea from an old “Twilight Zone” episode, the one with the dead people calling, and figured out how to tap in to people’s land lines. Fuck you, stupid old land line fucks! Yeah, okay, dude, I get it. ‘Bye.
Three evenings later, I took the next leap. “My name’s Jon. Spelled ‘Jan.’ What’s yours?”
Silence. The phone felt warm in my hand. “Come on, I told you my name, it’s only fair.”
Hss, click, click, hsss. The pattern was wavelike—almost like human speech. I listened, and then, I spoke.
“So, gonna say any more about you?”
Silence.
“So, what—are you bored?”
Click.
“Hmm. Me, I think boredom is mostly laziness.”
HSS-SS.
“Yep, laziness. Doing nothing—how can anyone just do nothing?”
Click, clickclickclick.
“Well, whose fault is that? You have to put something in, to get something back. Right?”
Right? Where the hell did that come from? I’d never “put something in” or “given back” in my whole damn life; my life has been about nothing but self-gratification and self-fulfillment. This thing of “giving back”—that’s for successful people who’ve made their pile. That would not be me.
That was enough for now. “Okay, talk to you later.”
I hung up and sat silently, staring at the red light, trembling slightly. Why was I trembling? I hate confrontation, always have. But I also hate non-reciprocation. I tell you something, you tell me something. Otherwise, we have no relationship. Wait. Relationship? Was this—? Yeah, I guess it was.
The realization startled me. I went into the kitchen and made a cheese sandwich. I like cheese sandwiches at night, they soothe me, and even just making it, I calmed down. I sat and ate slowly, flipping pages of The New Yorker, which also helps me relax because there is so mind-blowingly much in The New Yorker that a person can never hope to penetrate even a tiny fraction of it, and so I feel less left out and alone after I flip through some of it and see this reality staring right at me.
I left off flipping pages and stared out into the night. I was beginning to make up my mind: this really was an acoustic reflection, an echo. My voice, the voice I could never stand, bouncing back to me. But, why? I felt like I was slipping, sliding down into a dimly-lit hole, down into some new plane. Okay, well, why not? Who says human existence has to be on one plane. Lying on the sofa in the wee hours, it made perfect sense. After all, didn’t all relationships go through many phases? And I knew I must now be in a relationship because, thinking about my mystery caller, I started remembering things, things I had forgotten long ago: random thoughts about my position in time and space. I had once considered that I didn’t exist at all, except as a sine wave or ley line, a vector of electromagnetic force, one of billions. And now, my voice, or a vitreous reflection of it, presumed lost in space, gone forever, was now coming back. Why was it doing this to me? It being the phone. Yeah, the phone. The phone, telling me: don’t retire me. Please. Go ahead: call somebody. I can handle it. Please.
No. That’s absurd. I’m a rational adult who knows that there are rational and very mundane explanations for what initially appear to be fantastic and perhaps extraordinary interventions in our daily lives, from crop circles to Area 51. Telephones do not think, telephones do not talk, and telephones do not live.It is I who live, dammit! It is my mind that is filling in these apparent blanks and holes with the conceit of a telephonic correspondent. My conversation-starved brain is filling in, taking command, and making the phone my friend. My voice was echoing over the line and bouncing back, by some odd acoustical phenomenon, as clicks and hisses. That’s all. Because, I’m fucking lonely.
Yeah, if this is not an echo of my own voice, and if it is not some prankster, then what else could it be? I pick up the phone, study it, turn it around. What if I take out the battery? I slip them out, replace them, close the cover, put the phone back in its stand. The red light comes on. The phone looks peaceful, content. Content in our relationship.
The following night, late, the phone rang. I picked up and heard the hissing immediately.
Hssss, hss, hss, hsssss. Hi, how are you?
“Fine, thanks.”
Click, clickclickclick, click, click, clickclickclick.
It—he—was clearly trying to tell me something. But what?
I asked, “Are you talking in Morse Code?”
Clickclick.
“Some other kind of code?”
Clickclick.
“Okay, you’re just talking.”
Click.
“Yeah, okay, I think I get it. I’ll just hang out, here, and we can talk like this, and that’s cool.”
Click.
Yeah. Click yourself, pal. Well, okay. But did I have any better offers, myself? Nope. That being the case, I have decided to postpone my plan to eliminate the land line. At present, I would prefer not to make a change. What would I gain? I’ve priced it out, and the cost saving would be negligible In the end, a phone is just a phone, right? And really, the coffee table in the den just wouldn’t look right without the land line. Naked, in fact.
So now, I sit beside it in the evening, waiting, for evening is our time. Sometimes, I wish it would ring, but I’m not disappointed when it doesn’t. Because I know it will ring. Because it knows I’m here, waiting. I’m sure of it. The little red light will turn green again, and the phone will come to life, warm in my hand. Warm and alive, good company on those evenings that seem to go on forever when it’s just the two of us, alone.