melancholy, Tuesday style

It was the seventh time this month that I had gotten the same phone call, and it was starting to get seriously under my skin. Or, actually, if I could backtrack for just a second, it was the seventh phone call that I KNEW OF, because I don’t have voice mail or an answering machine or anything like that. So the person could have been calling five times a day for all I know, waiting for the times when I was around to pick up the phone. (It’s a Western Electric Model 500, by the way, a real piece of craftsmanship from a time when people cared about their work.)

It always took me a second to realize what was going on, when the calls came, because of the popping and crackling that immediately overwhelmed what was usually the nearly inaudible hum that greeted me when I put the phone to my ear. I think that always left me a little off balance for what was to follow, even when part of my brain had already grasped the situation and had begun to play out various scenarios and outcomes, completely unbidden.

The calls were always slightly different, but exactly the same -- a few snatches of a woman’s voice, the ham radio static of a bad connection, words that somehow changed before they could be finished, forming phrases that didn’t have any meaning. The rising electric howl moved from the background to the fore, overwhelming every effort to ask whomever this was to repeat herself, to slow down, just to give that one piece of information that everyone asks for first, as if it matters: her name.

I would always ask, with a frightened desperation creeping into my voice in unconscious sympathy with the cacophonous half-language that I was trying to decipher, but I never got an answer, or at least an answer that meant anything to me. Then I’d hold the receiver close to my ear for long minutes even after the line had clicked dead, even after the automatic beeping began, signalling that whatever I was looking for from this particular instance of the great communications network that blankets our country was not there to be found.

So last week I bought one of those self-phone-tapping devices, so I can record the next call I get. It’s been twelve days now since the last one, and I hope that I haven’t somehow spoiled whatever conditions existed that have been bringing these calls to me. I don’t know, maybe it would be better this way, where it always remains a bit of a mystery, a story I can tell my non-existent grandkids.

Or maybe I’ll just get an answering machine.