ISBN: 978-1-941681-90-9

E-ISBN: 978-1-941681-91-6

LCCN: 2014943961

Distributed by Itasca Books

orders@itascabooks.com

© Pat Rushin, 2015. All rights reserved

Published by Burrow Press

Book Design by Tina Craig | tinacraig.com

Cover Art by Plinio Marcos Pinto | pliniopinto.com

Title Page Illustration by Terry Gilliam

Acknowledgements

The Call was the winner of the 2009 Blodgett Waxwing Literary Prize awarded by The King’s English. Parts of The Call appeared, in a different form, in Zoetrope All-Story. Prior to publication, The Call was adapted for film by the author and became The Zero Theorem, directed by Terry Gilliam.

for Mary

my guiding star

null-com

The phone rings. We answer. “Hello?” we say, and we say this hopefully, hoping beyond hope that this call is the call we’ve been waiting for all our lives. We listen. “Fine,” we say, “and you?” We listen further. “Oh,” we say, “no,” we say, “we live in an efficiency apartment, and we doubt that Management would authorize the sort of installation you wish to install. However, although we are frankly disappointed by the nature of your call, we thank you just the same for calling.”

We take our dinner out of the freezer. We are not at all interested in our dinner, but we have chosen to prepare and eat it nonetheless. We place our dinner in our microwave oven and set the timer. We lay out dishware, glassware, cutlery, and disposable paper napkin on our galley kitchen countertop. We stare at our galley kitchen wall where a window might be were we not ensconced in a discounted interior unit, idly tintinnabulating our fingers on the stainless steel kitchen sink. Our view neither inspires nor deflates us.

The phone rings.

The microwave beeps.

We suffer a moment’s quandary before we pick up our phone, which is portable, and answer it on our way to the microwave oven. “Fine,” we say, spooning our microwaved dinner from its microwavable container onto our dishware, “and you? Oh,” we say, “no,” we say, “we are not at all interested. Yes,” we say, forking a forkful of dinner into our mouth, “you have indeed caught us at an inconvenient time. We were just eating our dinner. We are, in fact, continuing to eat our dinner even as we speak around it, and will presently continue continuing to eat our dinner. Our dinner does not especially please us, but we are presently watching our weight—at present, we meant to say—” we say, “and we understand that weight watching requires the regular intake of calorically monitored meals, especially pleasing or not… No,” we say, “there is perhaps no better time for you to call, since the past is finished, the future remains a cipher, and the present presently continues to be as inconvenient as it was when first you called, now some time past.”

The phone beeps.

“Excuse us momentarily for a moment,” we say. “We subscribe to a Call Waiting service, and an irritating beep audible only to ourselves has signaled another caller’s call waiting for our answer. Coincidentally, we ourselves have been waiting for a certain call all our lives, and the caller waiting for us to answer may, in fact, be the source of that call. We have some hope,” we say, “so that we must presently—and we do mean presently at present—push our flash button which will consequently put your call on Call Waiting and connect us with our Call Waiting caller’s call. Of course, you’re familiar with the technology,” we say. “We intended no condescension. One moment, please.”

We press flash.

“Hello?” we say, hopeful yet understandably wary. “Yes, this is we,” we say, wary yet unable to resist wading through the shallow puddle of hope shimmering in our heart. “We have felt finer in the past,” we sigh, resigned, “and in that past we may have expressed more civil concern in return for how you are feeling this evening yourself, but at present we are trying to eat our dinner, a dinner which, with its thickly ichorous consistency whose flavor defies definitive describability, we are not especially pleased by. By which we are not especially pleased, we meant to say,” we say. “But a dinner which needs to be eaten nonetheless. We should also mention that we interrupted a previous call to answer your Call Waiting call, hoping beyond hope that yours might be the call we have waited—”

We find ourselves interrupted.

“We understand that you have a job to do,” we say, “since we ourselves are employed and have our jobs to do each day as well. We are a cruncher of entities by profession, and, occasionally, as we crunch our various entities, we find ourselves growing a tad impatient, and we see our entities as nonsensical units of no inherent value, but yet and still and all—”

We find ourselves interrupted again.

“It has become apparent to us that you consider the making of your livelihood more crucial than the objections we might raise to your making your livelihood at our disinterested expense while a caller on Call Waiting awaits—”

We find ourselves interrupted a third and final time.

We press flash.

“Hello?” we say, and we hang up.

We finish our dinner. Our dinner, in the final analysis, has neither pleased nor especially displeased us. We wash and towel dry our dishware, cutlery, and galley kitchen countertop. We enter the main room of our one-room efficiency and ease ourselves into the swiveling easy chair in front of our computer work station. We find a certain irresistible logic in this move.

The phone rings.

We eye the phone quandawarily. We have been waiting for a call all our lives, and, although the nature of the call we have been waiting all our lives for, for which we’ve been waiting all our lives, remains by its very nature both essentially and quintessentially a mystery to us, we cannot help but hope that said call will somehow change our lives in indescribably delicious ways. And yet, still swiveling uneasily in our easy chair, we find that hope metaphorically dampening, so that we decide to let the phone ring. The phone stops ringing, we sigh with a mixture of regret and resigned relief, and the phone begins ringing again.

We are beginning to perceive a pattern here. We have perceived patterns previously in our lives, and we have adjusted our paradigms accordingly to fit the parameters of the several patterns we’ve perceived.

We rise from our chair, go to our tool drawer, withdraw and reject a variety of tools. Screwdrivers, both straight slot and Phillips-head. Pliers, needle-nose and channel-lock. Wrenches, socket and box, crescent, metric, and standard. Finally we select a tool we’ve never found a use for, our ball-peen hammer, a former anniversary present from one of our ex-spouses. We heft it by its handle, feel its reassuring weight cantilevering in our tightening grip. Patiently, expertly, and not precisely without a certain measure of joyful dissatisfaction, we smash the phone until the ringing stops. We continue smashing for a time thereafter.

We work up a sweat.

•

Our intercom buzzes. We rise from our computer and answer. “Phoneman,” a burly voice announces. “Management says you got a problem.”

“No problem,” we say. “We fixed it ourselves.”

“Management says take a look. Let me up, man.”

We buzz the ground floor door and open our apartment to the kind of massively swarthy and hirsute brute who, in our previous lives, might have wooed several of our eventual ex-spouses into trembling acts of sweaty intromission, grunting emission, languid remission, and unhealthy inhalation of a shared filtered cigarette.

“Hell-o,” phoneman says, glancing at the shattered plastic on our galley kitchen countertop. “You do this all by yourself?”

“Selves,” we amend. “We were having trouble with our phone. We endeavored to ameliorate the problem.”

“Using this?” Phoneman picks up our ball-peen hammer by its head, pokes at the phone rubble with its shaft. “Not the proper tool, sir, if you don’t mind a word of constructive criticism.” Phoneman shakes his shaggy head. “Your ball-peen’s used for hammering out dents and dimples in sheet metal. Fender-bender on the old jalopy, say. In a pinch you can hammer a nail with a ball-peen, though I wouldn’t recommend it. An acceptable third use, depending on your strength and temperament, is as a personal security device, the hemispherical peen end leaving a dandy dent in the skull of even the most hardheaded of your garden variety antagonists. Concussion. Bleeding from the ears. A loud knock at death’s door. But the ball-peen is not your tool of choice for a close-tolerance job like fixing phones.”

Phoneman frowns, wags his shaggy head, hammer gripped tight in his sweaty hand. “If I may speak candidly, sir…”

We shrug. We have no feelings one way or the other.

“People like you, people who don’t show sufficient respect for protocol to select the proper tool for the proper job, those kind of people make me sick.”

“Then leave us,” we say.

“Who’s us?”

“We, ourselves.”

“But there’s only the one of you.”

“So it would appear. Allow us to show you the door.”

“Not until I’ve done my job.”

“We won’t pay for your services.”

“Management’s paying. They’ll bill your security deposit. You’re extraneous, except as a buzzer-upper of service callers. Try to keep yourselves out of my way and let me work.”

He hunkers in front of the phone, poking and prodding, muttering.

“Unfixable,” he proclaims finally. “I’ll have to hook up a new one, soon as I rewire the jack you thoroughly took the business end of the wrong tool to.”

“To which we thoroughly took etcetera,” we say. “You dangled your preposition.”

“Dangle this,” phoneman says, grabbing his crotch. “What’s wrong with people like you who destroy beautiful circuitry, correct my grammar, and make me sick?”

“We subscribe to your company’s Call Waiting service,” we explain. “We have been waiting for a call all our lives. Your service did not provide that call. Instead, it provided a host of other callers access to our initially hopeful yet increasingly more impatient ear. We could no longer stand the ringing, ringing, ringing of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells. We schized.”

“That explains a lot,” phoneman says. “I wish people like you would explain themselves to people like me more often. Now I understand, so now I can help you.”

We breathe a sigh of not completely credulous relief.

“Once upon a time, the system was the solution,” phoneman goes on. “That’s no longer true—not since the D-d-d-d-divestiture—I generally tell people like you not to flush the diaper with the doo-doo. The system is certainly still a preferable alternative to the more radical solution of hammering your phone to smithereens. I can fix you up pronto. Wait a sec while I visit my van.”

We wait considerably more than a sec but spend those excess secs fruitfully crunching entities at our computer.

“Here we go,” phoneman says when we buzz him up to install our shiny new and, he promises, improved phone system that will make it possible for us to communicate without ever having to answer the phone again. “Voice mail,” he says, “custom tailored to satisfy the special individualized needs of people like you. We can program it now if you like.”

We like.

Phoneman produces a clipboarded survey and spends the next several hours asking us highly personal questions concerning our past and present lives. We answer as truthfully as is humanly possible. Finally, phoneman goes to work programming, and before we know it he has personally set up our new Call Filtering system.

“Your main line screens your calls through Caller ID, matching the caller’s origination number against the digitally updatable list of numbers you’ve provided, and routing known numbers each to its proper voice mailbox. Let’s test it. I’m really eager to show off. Say one of the ex-spouses you referred to calls.”

He pushes a series of numbers on a hand-held receiver hooked between our wall jack and telephone. “Thank you for calling,” a digitally officious recorded voice announces:

If you have not received our monthly check, be assured that we either have or will have posted it by mail in time to reach you within strict court-sanctioned time constraints.

“Or suppose one of your many children calls,” phoneman says.

Thank you for calling. We love you and are proud of you and are here for you at the sound of the beep and will get back to you at our earliest convenience. We love and miss you so. Don’t for a moment believe what your mothers claim with regard to us.

“With similar specialized lines for business calls…”

“We don’t do business by telephone.”

“Just the same, you have the option. Another line for friends and acquaintances…”

“Not a burning need.”

“Still an option. You never know when some old school chum, drunk late at night and tripping down Memory Lane with the old yearbook, might try to disturb your sober slumber… And my personal favorite, the Phone Solicitation Courtesy Acknowledgment Mailbox Loop #67, which thanks your so-called Courtesy Callers for calling and directs them to press 6 to reach you, with 6’s message thanking them again for calling and directing them to press 7 to reach you, with 7’s message once again thanking them for calling and directing them to press 6 to reach you, leaving them at sixes and sevens, a stroke of genius I plan to file a patent on just as soon as I leave here.”

“Test the mailbox for the call we’ve been waiting all our lives for.”

Phoneman grimaces, punches buttons.

This is we. If your call does not fit into one of the voice mailboxes previously listed, your call may be the call we have been waiting for all our lives. For which we have been waiting etc. If so, please stay on the line, and we will answer at the very first ring.

“Perfect,” we say.

“If it makes you happy.”

We withdraw a credit card from our wallet. “How much do we owe?”

“Put that away!” phoneman barks. “Never, ever, show anybody your credit cards. People can conjure with them.”

We put our wallet away.

“Besides, I told you,” phoneman says, slouching shaggily to the door. “I only deal with Management.” He touches the doorknob, hesitates. “Are you by any chance albino?”

“No.”

“Then if you don’t mind some constructive criticism,” he says, opening the door, “you really should think of getting out more. Any problems, give me a call.”

And with that he’s gone, leaving us blissfully alone.

tele-lude

The phone doesn’t ring. We call.

“I was afraid of that,” phoneman says. “Feast or famine. From too many calls to none at all. I’m guessing from your whiny tone you’re dissatisfied.”

“We are satisfied that we no longer receive calls from phone solicitors and ex-spouses,” we explain, “and we can live with the fact that our children generally refuse to call, let alone leave messages, aside from a single exception assuring us that it will be, and we paraphrase, a chilly day south of Purgatory before he or she digits his or her way through our baroque voice-mail menu to request an audience with an expletive-deleted machine, end of paraphrase.”

“Sharper than a fucking serpent’s tooth. Sad, really. But you can take some comfort in the fact that this child was actually speaking to a voicemail simulacrum of you and not to you yourself.”

“As we’ve said, we can live with such non-calls, as we can live with the non-calls of telemarketers and the non-calls of our many non-friends. However, we still have yet to receive a call from the caller whose call we have waited all our lives for.”

“Fill me in again?”

“The call we feel assured will change our lives in indescribably delicious ways.”

“Oh. Yes. That call. I had my doubts all along.”

“Can you help us further?”

“Afraid not,” phoneman says. “I’m not a phoneman anymore. I’m an entrepreneur now. I patented that 67 Loop, made a bundle, and served notice as of today. I should thank you. I do thank you. And I will thank you further by putting in a call to a person I know who shoots trouble for a living. Will you be home today?”

“All day, every day, as usual,” we say.

web-com

Troubleshooter,” a coy and lilting voice assures us when we press our buzzing intercom’s button. “Buzz me up, babe… Oh!” she continues, drawing back a step when we open our apartment door. “What’s with you, poor sofa spud, hanging all void and shroomy?”

“Phoneman says we need to get out more.”