It was not the episodes of that morning that prompted his first use of his aunt’s telephone, but rather the first call he received from it on the previous evening. Nothing in his voice betrayed his misgivings until his friend on the other end of the line posed an incredulous question.
“How could a rotary telephone be in your house all this time and you never noticed it?“
“I’ve received no phone calls since moving here, and have had no reason to disturb the dust in the sewing room.”
“Who called you?”
“It was a robo-call.”
“A poll? A survey?”
“Honestly I was unable to determine its point. It was a clever automated program and took several minutes to figure out. If there was a sales pitch in the algorithm, its delay in being made betrays a design flaw.”
The Native American was pictured probing the telephone’s signal with unwarranted interest, as if he were an Indian scout employed to assess the risk of ambush in a High Plains gulch. “Would you characterize the clarity in this landline connection as unusually clear?”
Liam had no cause to reflect on the call’s lack of ambient background, yet where one was encouraged to have an opinion about it, its peculiarity bore similarity to what was heard in the receiver the previous evening. He would not draw this parallel.
“Look out your window,” instructed Howard. “Where is the nearest telephone pole to your property?”
The caller deflected. “I have electricity in the house. It arrives here by some means. (He interrupted himself.) “I have called to ask a favor. Can you check on my house tomorrow, or the next day? I have a painting commission that requires me staying away from home.”
“Staying where?”
“Tazewell Manor.”
“Isn’t that a derelict property?”
“I only require a portion of it to remain standing to shelter me for three days.”
“How did you come by this commission?”
Given his friend’s rapid imagination, only the barest, serviceable sketch was provided. “The commissioner came here this morning.”
A pause followed this admission. “Not only has your telephone rang for the first time, but someone, who is no one you know, was the first person to pass through your front door.”
“You’ve been to my house.”
Howard stepped around his omission. “It’s not good to leave one’s property unattended on the prairie,“ he warned, “especially with a front door with no lock. Nature is an opportunistic squatter.”
“I have motion-activated lights outside, which should dissuade any prowler, two-legged or four-legged, from lingering on the premises. Besides, you’ll keep tabs here while I am away.”
Howard’s brief silence was construed as consent.
Liam tested these placid waters. “I should also mention a second curious conversation at the country courthouse this morning, where the archivist wore a body suit.”
“A fat suit?”
“Something along those lines. I do not want to judge her unfairly, in case the outfit was a lifestyle choice. I could not help but think she worked in cahoots with my morning visitor.”
“Perhaps they were one in the same.”
“I cannot rule that out. My sense of being abused is not so injurious as to dissuade my curiosity. I intend to get to the bottom of this business.”
Howard pressed his concerns. “Given all these strange to-doings, has it occurred to you that you might be the subject of a prank?”
“Are you suggesting someone installed a phony telephone in a back room while I was out?”
The friend resumed his ponderous silence.
Liam’s thoughts returned, momentarily, to the odd phone call. “I took away very few things from my mother’s house after she passed away,” he reported. “Among those few things were bath towels. Now, I have washed those towels many time over the years but, queerly, some two months ago, I walked into the bathroom and smelled my mother’s hand lotion quite strongly. It was coming from the towel draped over the towel bar. The impression was so strong that it stayed with me throughout that week. I laundered the towel and quite forgot about it. Then I remembered a conversation you and I had some time ago about grief hallucinations, and about messages from the grave. I went to the linen closet and smelled the towel. The only scent in it was my allergy-sensitive detergent. I asked God, in an aside, what did my mother wish to communicate to me? Later that evening, I was watching a movie on TV. One of the characters was named ‘Fuchs.’”
Howard did not delay. “Your eyes are compromised, so your mother reached out to you through smell. It is not an unreasonable inference.”
“Is that it?” questioned his friend. “I realized, belatedly, that my mother’s hygiene, at the end of her life, was not what it had been when she was able-bodied. I suspect that she used lotion liberally, perhaps to mask odors. Bacteria mingled with the perfume, and though repeated washings of the towel removed most of both smells, it will never remove all of it. If the towel is too damp for too long in my bathroom, then perhaps these dormant odors spring back to life.”
“I do not doubt it,” responded the listener. “One should imagine that God uses chemistry as readily as magic in his communications with us. The reason why this episode stays with you is its timing, and the placement of the coincidence—not that these things can be explained away later by better reason.”
“And yet you are trying to convince me that I have fallen prey to a prank,” rang the reproach.
“It’s not always easy to draw lines between things.” The speculator was then inspired to relate, “When I was a teenager, I ran with a circle of friends on the reservation who were fond of staging pranks in the way of the heyoka, or Native American contrarian spirit. Given the small populations on the prairie, and ease of being incriminated by targeting those too near in the community, our antics required thought and planning. They were never malicious, but subtle. One might call them ‘metaphysical’ in design. They involved things like ringing a pay phone in the middle of the night, or wheeling a shopping cart filled with grocery sacks to the top of a conspicuous butte and leaving it there.”
Liam intruded, “I should think you, as a teenager, would have grown bored in due course, ‘metaphysical’ aspirations notwithstanding.”
Howard pondered the implications. “Synchronicity is the natural machinery of The Great Spirit’s Will, and when one takes up this machinery as a means of initiating fateful events, one invariably becomes an instrument of said fate. It is like imposing reality onto subatomic particles by observing them: The instrument of observation, as well as the observer, are drawn into a ghostly dance of provisional reality. This contamination by association cannot be escaped, even after one’s eye wanders back into the mere appearance of things. To the present day, my youthful indiscretions follow me, and I never see a grocery cart in a remote location and think it random.”
“You do not strike me as one inconvenienced by foreboding.”
“I would not characterize my situation as such. It is, again, subtle. My career as a trickster ended when, one afternoon, I climbed a telephone pole next to a rural road that saw some little traffic. I took a knapsack filled with decoy birds with me and positioned them around me: two atop the pole, and one perched on my work helmet. My goal was to remain motionless, slumping against the pole, where passersby might see these untroubled crows in the company of my lifeless body. This ideally would have been an opportunity to nap, were my lookout not so precariously high.
Ninety minutes passed before the first car drove by. It traveled past me and stopped a quarter mile up the road. Someone wearing a bright orange coat bolted from the idling vehicle. He did not run toward me but into the adjoining field. This person jogged no more than a hundred feet before dropping in the high grass like a scoop of mango sherbet. At first I thought I was witnessing a cardiac event, but given the sudden motionlessness of this individual, I thought perhaps he intended to mock my behavior. The longer this joint pretense endured, the more disturbing it became.
Eventually three crows lit on this mound of bright orange fabric. I was convinced that the fellow-prankster had, unlike me, fallen asleep. Crawling down my pole, I waded into the sward and came to the area; the crows were not inspired to leave it. (Perhaps they were unguarded because of the decoy bird attached to my helmet.) It made no sense, of course. I stood over this trio of placid crows, and in their midst found only a fluorescent safety vest, which apparently blew away from a construction site.”
The listener anticipated more. “At which point you awoke from your dream, still on top of the telephone pole?”
“No. I had not fallen asleep.”
“So what did you do?”
“I returned home and never told anyone what happened.”
“Then what is the takeaway from your story?”
“When you cannot sleep,“ the storyteller concluded, “it is because you appear in the dream of another.”
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.