The first short story I ever wrote (or at least finished). Maybe the only one for that matter. This is an early draft. Subsequent drafts had their points, but I am prone to over-writing when I re-draft, and this one still has the immediacy and intimacy the others partly lost. For what its worth.
End.
The Call
Hello. Hello?
Silence greeted him from the other end of the line. His impulse was to hang up, of course, his finger already falling into position above the receiver for a quick retreat. Solicitations or wrong numbers typically were the only calls he ever received. Both were awkward, but wrong numbers at least were brief. His trained ear scanned for the telltale click of an automated call distributor switching his line to an operator, that one narrow margin of escape before the onslaught began. Normally he was not callous enough to hang up on telemarketers, especially not once they began; they were just doing their job. Instead he would listen to their monotone voices, asking the occasional question as a show of interest, commenting affably on the usefulness or affordability of whatever they were selling. Some times their voices picked up and he would divert the conversation, asking about their jobs, how long they’d worked for their present employer, where they were calling from. In his mind he put faces to their voices, imagining where they lived, what they were like. He was always pleasant, adding a personal touch to their impersonal work, giving them the rare opportunity to take their pitch all the way to the finish. But by the end they always pressed for a credit card number and in the awkward silence that invariably followed he never bought a thing. By the end they were usually more upset he hadn’t just hung up, as though being given the opportunity to do their job was a waste of time. So now, more often than not, he just did just that.
Yet still there was no click, no sound. His finger held its ground.
Perhaps it was an operator’s first day on the job. They couldn’t work the handset or were foiled by some technical difficulty. Maybe it was a false connection, some random electrical impulse connecting his number to nothing at all. He’d had such calls before, or so he had concluded, hanging up on them with disappointment when the line finally went dead or switched to an automated response. So he waited for the system to correct itself or a voice to break the silence.
The volume from the television spilled brashly into the room, growing louder the harder he listened into the phone. His finger wavered over the receiver in the whitewash light of the TV before drifting slowly over to the remote, dropping the sit-com laughter into the stifling stillness around him. He pressed his ear harder into the firm plastic as though the proximity would make a difference, the silence on the other end of the line growing bolder, almost tangible. After a minute, the curved contour of the phone filling his ear, there was still nothing but a lingering silence.
Outside his window the sky was bruising, the busy skyline smoldering like embers, bronzing his small cluttered room in its dying orange glow. In the mounting quiet his eyes disengaged from the light of the TV, drifted absently across the ceiling, down a wall and into the dark canopy of his carpet, lingering for a moment—his mind of void of thought—until he was drawn back by the harsh flicker of the syndicated program he had been watching for no other reason than it was on. Reaching for the remote he heard it: a muffled movement from the other end, the brief fluctuation in volume of something passing over the mouthpiece.
He was curious now, sitting at one end of a long and invisible wire connected to another person. He shifted the phone to his other hand so he could stretch his arm and shimmied further into the creaking leather chair that knew him more intimately than any lover, and lie in wait: entrenched, waiting for another clue, wishing he had been more careful not to make so much noise himself. The listener had no doubt by now heard enough to know he was still listening curiously on his end. He would not make the mistake again.
The sun bowed below his window, drawing a long slow curtain of shadow up the wall. The phone warmed, softened, and melted into the deep contours of his ear until he could no longer feel it. The muted pulse of the city throbbed low in the naked silence of his room, so constant and subtle a presence that, like the caller, it almost wasn’t there. Without its noisy chatter the television quickly soured on his eyes and he flicked it off, a spot of light collapsing into blackness, the TV crackling as silence and darkness fell upon them. In the dying light, his ears turned keenly toward the vague presence at the end of the line, he finally found what he was searching for—breathing. It was not his own breaths he heard—he already had accounted for that common blunder, keeping the mouthpiece away from his face when he first picked up—this was the unmistakable evidence he was looking for: someone on the other end listening in silence as even he was now.
His heart pounded in his ear, threatening to alert the caller like a panicked war drum, struck in the dead silence of night. His mind raced, fumbling to find a face, a person, a reason for calling—but then all went inexplicably silent—the breathing stopped dead in its tracks as though suddenly aware of itself, and the caller withdrew into the protective cover of silence.
The act disturbed him more than he thought—angered him. It was a violation, a declaration of war. Better it be a prank—to hear ridicule, laughter, then the sting of a severed line than to be taunted like this in the sanctuary of his home. Still he could not hang up—would not—until he knew more. If it were just another prank like all the rest, he would not give them the satisfaction of admitting defeat and hanging up himself. He would force them to finish what they began, drawing them out until they grew so bored or so threatened by the price of their call that they eventually withdrew to the sea of anonymity from which they came. He would rob them of their satisfaction, starve them, let them rot in his silence.
The absence between them grew tense, neither betraying a sound, not the slightest movement or exhalation. Time passed in bouts of careful breaths and he barely afforded himself glances at the clock lest even the movement of his eyes betray his position. As his senses adjusted to the gloom the walls of his room did not press in around him in the mounting darkness as they did every night, falling on him like the sides of a coffin. Instead they seemed to slip away into the distant night as though their absence would not be noticed, and he found himself lost in a space he could not define.
Unmoving, he was fortified into position—his body hardening, the tingling of needles turning into nails, cementing him into place so that he could no longer move or even feel. The chair absorbed him, becoming an extension of his own skin and body that spread outwards, merging into the walls, floor and ceiling until he no longer knew where his body stopped and the room began. As the vision expanded, time collapsed and he could feel himself spreading through space, the distance between caller and himself diminishing as though the world between them were merging into a single body. He could imagine, feel, the caller’s breaths rising and falling in tandem with his own and wondered if they were going through the same metamorphosis.
Night stretched on, minutes becoming indistinguishable from hours, hours from days, until time no longer passed at all, until without knowing why, consciousness came back into him and the remembrance of the body he could no longer feel. Not a sound had passed since war was declared, and the phone hung dead in his ear. How long had it been? The silence around him was now absolute—even the city had nodded off, some time ago tiring of their private war. By now the caller surely had abandoned the phone or fallen asleep as he, himself, almost had. He noticed faint shadows leaning timidly from the window and the sudden chirp of a bird piercing the night like a stone. Not a sound on the other end: the victory was his.
He had to signal every muscle in his body to separate himself from the walls, chair, and phone, like a conductor leading an orchestra. With great effort he angled his body so that it peeled from the moist cocoon at his back, giving himself and the chair space to breath into a new shape. A groan escaped from his lips before he could catch it, and he froze, his body stalled in agony, his heart racing for fear of what was to come, and he waited for it: the rise of enemy troops over the hill, the waiting ambush deep in the jungle, the final battle he would now lose.
When he heard it, he was doomed—the laughter rising like a wave, surrounding him, overtaking him, drowning him—knowing there was no escape from it because even if he took it now, even if he slammed the receiver down and threw the phone out the window and shouted out his anger in the tightening room, it would still be with him, revealing him for what he was—someone so alone they would stay on the phone all night listening to the silence of a stranger.
But as he surrendered to the rattling and heaving breath, letting it strip away his brief and fleeting illusion of self-satisfaction, he slowly came to realize he was mistaken. It was not laughter that he heard, and the discovery made his animosity evaporate like a cooling sweat. The sound, unfurling like a white flag, was the sound of crying.
He could not tell how old she was; in suffering all sounded the same, but he could guess that she knew pain as he did, and the comfort that came in silence. Her grief rose and fell onto him like waves. The cold air on his body crept into his eyes, putting everything into a new focus. This war had been his own all along. Who she was or why she called was not important now; they were beyond that. Maybe she was someone like him, tired of being alone and revealing himself to her showed he was still listening to her—had not given up.
He settled back into the strange configuration of the chair now alien to him, listening to her cry, never saying a thing but letting her know this time that he was listening, as he had been all along. And when her tears stopped his began, and she listened to him, letting his tears fall into her ears. They were no longer two people separated by a thin wire, they were two people sitting in the same empty room, holding each other in the retreating dark.
As dawn cracked open the last of the night sky, it severed them in two once more, putting each at their respective end of the line. By the full rush of morning, the distance between them had become indeterminable, each on the phone with a stranger again, their intimacy lost with the night He thought of something to say, some way to thank her, but no words came. Words he realized didn’t belong. He just smiled with a truer sense of satisfaction than any he had felt before, letting his check brush against the phone. He was pleased to hear what he imagined was her doing the same. It was a difficult effort to end the call—he did not want to hang up. But he also knew that staying on would run the risk of severing more than the call. He shuffled the phone to cue he was hanging up, then waited, ear pressed hard against the hot wet plastic, dreading the sound of it. She shuffled too, then paused for a moment, no doubt waiting to see if he really was hanging up or still listening. Silence, then the abrasive click, severing their connection forever. He sat for a moment, waiting for the full awareness of his senses to return, then stood, walked to the window and opened it, noticing for the first time the jumble of rooftops, television antennas and phone lines spilling as far as his eyes could see.
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