The sprang wrist was believed tolerable provided it did not worsen. An ice pack was wrapped in a dish towel and, after an early dinner, the resident prepared for bed.
A telephone began to ring—the nephew was unaware that his aunt owned a rotary telephone. The chime led him to a little-visited sewing room off the back of the property, where he anticipated the inflective female voice that lit up his ear.
“Where did you go?” she asked hotly.
“Go…?” he answered. “You must have the wrong number.”
She paused (a beat of irregular length). “I don’t think so.”
His inquiry took on a note of formality. “To whom am I speaking?”
“You know,” came her causal, disconcerting reply.
“I do not know,” he replied.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Something was off in the woman’s response; he consoled. “No need to be sorry.”
An accusation charged at him. “Why are you being such a stranger?”
“You think I am someone I’m not.”
“I don’t think so.”
Her words bore the same intonation as their previous utterance. “You have the wrong number,” he repeated in a sterner tone.
“Are you upset with me?”
“How can I be upset at someone I do not know?”
This sensible question was ignored. “Why are you talking like this?”
“Is this a joke?”
“Why would this be a joke?” she declared disarmingly. “Do I sound like I’m joking?”
Liam had little daily practice at human communication. He clutched the phone to his chest and stuck his nose through the part in window drapes; the yard and field beyond them were impenetrably black. During this reconnaissance, the woman had continued to speak. Her voice reverberated beneath his breastbone. He interrupted her with less courtesy. “If this is not a joke, then it is a wrong number. Goodnight.”
The telephone receiver was not immediately returned to the base; Liam used the delay to probe the prickly quiet in his earpiece. “Are you still there? Hello…?” he asked.
The lilting inflection at the end of his utterance barely cleared his throat when she hurried over it. “Are you going to ignore what I just said?”
“What did you say?”
“Do you want me to repeat it?“
Liam struggled with his flailing end of things. “Are you drunk?” he inquired gruffly.
Her laugh broke into a trot. “I would not have said what I said if I were drunk.”
“You said nothing,” he complained. “I heard you say nothing.”
“You hear what you want to hear.”
Like a persistent phone solicitor, the woman stampeded over his objections; she was committed to a script irrespective of his replies. This was not a haggard recitation of an underpaid operator from Mumbai, however, but dialog cut-and-pasted from somewhere else. “What is your game?” he snapped. “What are you playing at?”
“We must be careful,” she divulged.
Liam felt a frostier draft—one that did not emanate from a window. “Is that what you said before?”
Her lulls were ill timed in duration, and the silence within them was unusually quiet for a landline connection. Regardless, her pleasant voice had duped him into prolonging a prank. “You refer to a we, but how do I know you?”
“You know me well. And have the proof of it.”
“Proof? What is your proof?”
“Why are you talking like this?” she interrupted.
This answer was a carbon copy of one supplied earlier. He queried her darkly. “I cannot imagine you do this for your amusement. Are you employed to call random men in the middle of the night?”
“Are you a randy man?”
“I said random, not randy…”
Clicking was heard in this awkward silence.
“Are you a robot?” he asked pointblank. “Am I talking to a digital automated program?”
“Why would you say that?”
Her tone was charmingly deflective, and inappropriate given his agitation. “Are you a robot?” he charged again. “Does this end with me giving you my credit card number?”
“I am not a robot.”
Liam continued his taunt. “You’re binary code, a circuit board, a toaster oven.”
These words were evidently not in her data bank. Stalling, she reacted less imaginatively with a third repetition of her question, “Why are you talking like this?”
“You’re a toaster oven,” he proclaimed forcefully.
“A toaster oven?”
Assuming she was responding to keywords, as well as to the volume of his voice, the listener imagined a series of algorithms at work. “Congratulations,” he said. “You have learned a new phrase.”
Her pauses were becoming impossibly long where the program needed to dig deeper to compose responses. He waited to hear her latest aggregation, and eventually she answered, “Your proof is in the dryer.”
Thinking a non sequitur had occurred, the call was terminated—this act was immediately regretted.
As with everything else in his aunt’s house, the nephew made little use of her major appliances. It would have been the work of a minute to go into the basement and check the electric dryer, but this action was deemed foolish and unnecessary: The resident would not bow—capitulate—to an irrational directive. More to his unsettledness, the phone call spooked him. He worried that he had been targeted in some way he did not understand.
It had been a day of too many uncommon occurrences, and truly it was more emotional than intellectual perturbation that threatened his sleep. It was rare when any feeling rose to prominence, and should this state constitute destitution, then it perhaps reflected on a life that had become singularly unreflective. Was his waking life consequently reduced to facsimile, or empty shell, because his dreaming self had been eroded? Was this absent dreaming self the genuine personality?
His breastbone, where the telephone’s earpiece had rested, continued to vibrate, as if the woman’s unheard conversation still echoed there. Like his anticipation of her voice, this resonance was known to him where it moved about inside his body, but not in his intellect.
Around midnight, his ever-vigilant consciousness broke with the present moment and strayed into dark, whistling corners of the old house. A perplexing chain of thought preceded him to this vacuity.
The television was left on in the other room, and a suitably uninteresting program was chosen for company. The flickering light and soundtrack provided distraction from his fixation on sleep onset latency. The television was programmed to turn off on a timer, yet in the preceding hour, his disassembling mind labored to make sense of what it heard. He was certain that a character in a show, without dialog, and for a prolonged, inexplicable scene, fussed in a cutlery drawer by picking up handfuls of metal utensils, clattering them together like coins, and then dropping them haphazardly into tray slots. This was done repeatedly.
This activity did not so much end as he lost track of it, and being marooned between prospects left him to careen down a bone black hole of sleep. Twilight placed him on the floor of a colorless valley, and on a bed of softer earth. There, radiant clouds abandoned his shadow to the domain of others…
The patient’s wrist throbbed. More pointedly, he agonized over being seen through French doors, as these alone separated his examination room from the waiting room. The table on which he sat was covered with tissue paper; an eye chart hung on a nearby wall.
The larger room past the glass doors was filled to overflowing with other patients. A ladder, seen beyond three rows of chairs, crowded these gathered sick. It stood under an excavated section of ceiling where insulation hung like smothering smoke. Why this maintenance was left unattended was unclear, especially as loose debris threatened those with open wounds and breathing problems below it.
The shallowness of each tread on the ladder made it both unstable and unusable to all but impishly small feet, and so it functioned like a piece of preemptive stage furniture dragged into place in anticipation of a second act.
Liam’s attention wandered nervously back to the eye chart—but was it an eye chart? It was, to be sure, a medical illustration exhibiting parts of the eye, although this eye was subdivided like floors in an apartment building. Each cross-section revealed a dark cubbyhole. Perhaps this was an eye test where one was challenged to find which of these murky compartments was occupied; and then to describe what manner of thing occupied it. This thing, he feared, would be nothing wholesome.
A Korean doctor entered the room amid this forming terror, already putting away his stethoscope. He immediately exited the examination room on a pretense, though through a side door into a corridor not visible from the patient’s seated perspective.
By their diverted gazes, visitors in the waiting room could see the gentleman. He had not walked far, and was arguably engaged in pantomime going by the rapt expressions of the quiet spectators. Their roving eyes appeared to follow his movements, but these movements were not so ranging that they required the participants to sway in any direction over their seats, or tilt their heads. Had their eyelids been shut, the witness would had supposed them all to be dreaming the same REM dream.
All at once, and in unison, the audience jumped with fright. Whatever they saw the Korean man do was not enough to make them flee, though their faces slowly softened with silent laughter. When they again looked at Liam sitting on the examination table, they laughed more boisterously.
The horrified patient jumped up and closed the curtains over the French door windows. He found more holes in his shirt than corresponding buttons, yet managed to marry the sides of the garment. Opening the side door, the doctor was not seen to inhabit the corridor. Kitchen utensils were scattered over the floor. Whatever high comedy played out here involved tossing about forks, knives, and spoons.
Liam decided not to proceed this way.
Peeking through the fabric panels of the French doors, the scene had changed from the waiting room to the interior of his aunt’s house. The ladder had become the pull-down attic stairs.
Before the waker could assess his lucidity, or tear an encrusted eyelid from his pillowcase, he saw her dash up the slatted attic steps like a whitish bat! Paralyzed, he listened for feet to land on the cracking timbers above, but the blow did not come.
What he had seen, in full possession of his wits, was not an infirm woman or wafting ghost. Some burly someone—a matronly cross-dresser—was in his house and charging up the collapsible stairs, and with thundering steps so close and fast together he could imagine no human producing them!
A lull in the wind amplified the quiet that rushed back on these booming blows, yet the resident could not dispense with the paroxysm. Courage was gathered and he crept with trepidation into the unlit hall. Should whoever shot up these attic steps see better than he, it was likely this person stood in the open hatch and stared down at him.
He dared to grope the treads of the ladder, though in search for the tread that gave way under his foot previously. It was in the same relative position that he left it. Had someone stormed up this ladder as fiercely as he supposed, then they would have met with this shattered step and lost their footing. The tread, should it remain attached, would be dangling by a nail, but nothing like this was discovered.
Relieved that his experience was merely a vile specimen of a nightmare, Liam stopped by the bathroom and turned on the overhead light. He was alarmed to see a white film over everything, and had forgot about the sodium chloride rubbed over his eyes. Washing them clear, he wondered if he had been sleeping with his eyes open.
The resident returned to bed with apprehension, yet was swiftly returned to sleep. First his mind was severed from the dream remnant and its queer, disassembled logic, and then his body from the sheet that tethered it, and him, to the undone bed.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.