Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “No doubt.”

  “What about you? Where did you grow up?”

  “Durham, North Carolina.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She used her finger to draw in the sand in front of her, something she couldn’t see in the dark. She raked her dark hair behind her ear and offered a nervous smile. I hoped she could sense how uncomfortable I was. I looked back at the quiet campsite to see if anyone was observing us. No one was.

  “What’s your major?” I asked.

  “Biology. But I’m thinking of changing to geology.”

  “Why is that?”

  “You,” she said, happily. “You seem to love your subject so much.”

  I had never heard such bullshit in my life. I opened my mouth and said, “I have never heard such bullshit in my life.”

  Her face went blank. Blanker.

  “Really, Miss Charles, do you think I will date you? Kiss you? Sleep with you? You don’t know how I feel about anything. I have taught you a few terms about sediment and rocks and watched you have sex for a nanosecond. I didn’t even watch long enough to have any interest.”

  To her credit she did not cry in front of me, or perhaps at all. She got up and marched away without a glance back at me.

  I felt like shit. I was a shit.

  I didn’t sleep that night. And not because of snakes. Perhaps in some perverse way it was because of snakes. I got out of my bag and walked through the desert. My footfalls were heavier than normal, and so my own noise bothered me.

  3

  I returned to find my home empty. I stepped out into the backyard and saw that some clouds had started to gather in the western sky. The temperature was dropping, and I wondered if we might be lucky and get some rain. Like most Angelenos I resisted believing any promise of precipitation, even, maybe especially, if made by the sky itself. Basil was happy to have me home. He considered the manner in which I ignored him a kind of attention. He and I were not so different.

  That night, as I prepared to shower off the last of the desert dust, I told Meg about Rachel Charles. I mentioned it only because it bothered me so much, made me sweat like I was about to be electrocuted or something equally unsure to work. I wondered why it unsettled me so and even considered momentarily whether bringing it up was a wise thing to do. It was not. I thought I was being open, honest, clean handed, but apparently I was being egotistical, insensitive, throwing a young girl into the face of my middle-aged wife.

  “You must have been very flattered,” Meg said in way that had nothing to do with my being flattered.

  “Well, I wasn’t. What’s eating you?”

  “You loved it.”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I hated it. I was embarrassed by it. I’ll ask again, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Why are you telling me about her?”

  I paused to look at her, still in my skivvies. “I’m telling you because that’s what we do, our being married and all.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said. She grabbed a book from her nightstand. “I have no interest.”

  “Duly noted. I won’t mention it again.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I wasn’t patroni—I didn’t mean—All right, I won’t do it.” My head was swimming. “I’m going to go get clean now. Okay?”

  When I came out of the shower, I said, “I absolutely was not flattered by that young woman’s attention. I am truly sorry I told you, but I was simply sharing. I’ll know better from now on.”

  Meg said nothing as I pulled on my pajamas and left the room.

  That night, instead of sleeping, instead of restoring my body, because that was what I was told and believed sleep was for, instead of dreaming and so subconsciously or unconsciously (I could never keep those straight) sorting out whatever waking-life problems that were eating away at me or that I was afraid to face, I sat up and stared at the small strip of paper I had found in my jacket. “Help me,” it said in Spanish. Perhaps it was a joke or merely a message from one tailor to another, a plea for assistance getting a seam straight, making sleeves the same length. Regardless, it carried no weight in my real world. There was nothing for me to do, say, or consider. As that had never stopped me before, my never having been a depository of good or even common sense, I opened my computer, logged onto eBay, and looked to order something else from the vendor who had sold me the jacket. I found and bought a shirt with two flapped breast pockets.

  Anas platyrhynchos. There are thirty-seven occurrences of the species from the cave. There have certainly been changes in the distribution of this hen-feathered population since the Pleistocene. The mallard is a common transient and winter resident where there is open water.

  Sarah claimed that her vision had not deteriorated further, but she was not seeing as she had. Dr. Peterson was not what I had dreamed. He was in every way average, height, weight, humor, and strangely all of this ordinariness served to promote confidence in his ability as a doctor. He was at ease with Sarah, patient while listening to us describe the situation, and remarkably calm as my daughter slowly and quietly began to have the very seizure I had dreamed she’d have.

  “Sarah, how is your vision today?” Peterson asked. “Sarah?” He leaned forward to look at her eyes.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Peterson looked at her eyes. He paused, adjusted his light, and studied the left one again. He made a note. “Sarah, would you look to your left, please, away from the light? Sarah? Sarah?”

  Sarah looked disoriented. She smacked her lips in a way that was unfamiliar. She had never done that before. Meg looked at me. I had never been so alarmed by any sound in my life.

  “What’s going on?” Meg asked.

  “Sarah?” Peterson was quietly alarmed now.

  Meg and I, not so quietly. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  After a minute, she was staring back at us. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Are you all right?” Meg asked.

  “Sarah, do you recall me turning to look at your eyes?”

  Sarah didn’t answer, but it was clear that she was confused and quickly becoming scared.

  Peterson measured her pulse and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm, inflated it while he studied her face. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Mom?”

  “Just relax, baby,” Meg said.

  Peterson released the cuff. “Everything sounds good.”

  “What just happened?” I asked.

  “Could have been nothing,” the doctor said. He got up, opened the door, and called in a nurse. “Lacy, would you take Sarah down and get her height and weight for the chart?”

  Sarah looked at Meg, then to me. I nodded. “Go on.”

  Once the door was closed, Peterson sighed. “Could be nothing, like I said. But your daughter might have just had a seizure, what we call a complex partial seizure.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “What does it indicate?”

  “Maybe nothing,” he said.

  “People don’t have seizures for no reason,” Meg said.

  He took a pad from the pocket of his white jacket and started to write. “I don’t like to guess about anything. I think you need to have a neurologist see her. Dr. Gurewich is in this building and she’s very good.”

  “What are you thinking?” Meg asked.

  “Dr. Gurewich is excellent.”

  The drive home was as awkward as any I remembered. Fear had not settled in but was looming. Sarah did not take her customary seat, right-hand rear, but instead buckled herself into the middle. Her confusion was manifesting as anger, a generalized, unfocused, silent rage. I daresay I was feeling some rage as well, as unfocused as hers, and I was doubtless no less confused.

  Finally, “What did the doctor say about me?”

  “We have to go to a different doctor,” Meg said.

  “He didn’t even look at my
eyes.”

  “I know, honey.”

  Olor columbianus. Two mandibles recovered from a pack rat nest. The species is a winter resident in Arizona. It will rest in deep water; however, it uses its long neck to feed from the bottom of shallower water.

  A seizure. Sulking, if one could call it that, in the backseat, she seemed so normal, so much herself. I immediately thought that the seizure must have been brought on by a brain tumor. I reminded myself that I was no physician. I reminded myself as well that Peterson had not stated certainly that my daughter had had a seizure. I glanced at Meg, who stared straight ahead through the windshield.

  “It’s good that we can see Gurewich tomorrow morning,” I said.

  Meg did not reply but kept her gaze forward.

  The worst feeling in the world is knowing your child is afraid, not startled or apprehensive as when about to take a test or ride a roller coaster but paralyzed by that icy cold in the pit of her stomach, confused because she suddenly believes her parents cannot make it all okay. When Sarah broke her tibia playing volleyball, I was of course concerned and hated that she was in pain, but that was manageable. Now, there might have been nothing wrong at all and certainly I was afraid, but the look of fear in Sarah’s eyes sent that same ice lance through my center, lodged it in my spine, and stayed there, unmelting, unmoving. My daughter was my reason for waking each day, and I wanted to kill myself for having in some fashion already resigned myself to losing some part of her. Selfishly, I saw my world as illusionary, fragile, existing only because others allowed it to exist. I realized that I was ever awaiting such a moment of loss, that I was, in fact, daily resigned to death but had never resigned to life. I bit my tongue hard enough to snap out of it.

  But not hard enough to injure myself.

  As always, though I could get caught up in a swirling current of anxiety, I was a lightweight compared to Meg. She was aerial; she could latch on to an optimistic balloon, ride it high, and then let go, spiral into despair at the prescribed acceleration of thirty-two feet per second. It is very difficult to catch someone falling from a dizzying height. It was good for neither fallen nor catcher and sadly was historically the reason for our disconnectedness. I understood at once and disappointedly that my spiraling was an unconscious effort to ignore the fact that something was wrong with my daughter.

  As Sarah’s appointment was in the afternoon, it seemed advisable to send her off to school, an attempt to give her the impression that all was normal in our eyes. I too was off to school to face my auditorium full of rock-bored underclass folks. Still, breakfast was a quiet affair, which saw us seated at the table together, a rare configuration, as I usually ate standing between the sink and refrigerator while Sarah sat at the table while Meg consumed nothing at all, spending her morning gathering her students’ work. This day was a nonteaching day for Meg, and I observed her unsettledness. I felt relieved that I had someplace to be and something to do, even if it was describing the geologic features of the relatively small alluviated lowland that was the Los Angeles basin.

  Anas discors. Four bones of this species were found, identifications based on the diagnostic tympanum. The blue-winged teal is the rarest of the teals in the region.

  I was standing in the doorway to the lecture hall when Rachel Charles walked past me. She was quite obviously still unhappy with my having blocked her attention that night in the desert, but it seemed she was no less interested in me. This I gleaned from her protracted sidelong glance and her clothes, which were somewhat more revealing than usual. She sat in her customary first-row seat and conspicuously crossed her exposed legs. That I noticed at all made me feel bad. With her eyes down the entire period, she appeared to be taking notes. I found the absence of her gaze slightly more disconcerting than the adoring, fixed, and hungry stare that I had grown so used to apprehending. The most annoying effect of her newly found motif was that it served to arouse me somewhat, an arousal that I immediately recognized as another attempt on my part to ignore what was happening at home, but that made it no less shameful or opprobrious. My lecture ended with a description of the Playa del Rey, Inglewood, and West Newport oil fields and the threat that I would continue the same lecture at our next meeting. The students collected their things and made haste out of the room as they always did, and as she always did, Rachel was quite slow about packing up until she was, in fact, the last one leaving. She still hadn’t looked at me as she headed for the door.

  “Rachel,” I said.

  “Yes, Professor Wells.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” A good question that made me feel small and rather stupid.

  “I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings the other night.”

  “Well, maybe. But you were right. Why would someone like you be interested in someone like me?” And then she walked out.

  I had to admit that it was an unsatisfying exchange, and yet I was happy it was so abruptly concluded. What would I have said if she had lingered? Lord knows. It could not have been good, that was all I knew.

  Hilary Gill was waiting at my office door. I suppose that we had bonded somewhat on the field trip, but her presence was still unexpected. Without much of a hello she launched into her request for a favor. It started with, “I was wondering …”

  “What do you need, Hilary?”

  “Will you look at my data?”

  “I’ve got a lot going on at home right now.”

  “Just a glance. No rush. Well, a bit of a rush.”

  “No promises.”

  She put a USB drive into my hand. “Thank you, so much.”

  “Okay.”

  She started to walk away.

  “Hilary.” When she turned back to me, “I can’t make any promises.”

  “I know.”

  We performed well enough in the scene that preceded the afternoon appointment with the neurologist. We prepared as if headed for a routine visit to the dentist, Meg even reminding Sarah to brush her teeth, a request that made no sense and somehow all the sense in the world. In the car we listened to “Sarah’s” music, always worse in theory than in practice. At least for me. The sappy pop seemed to irritate the poet in Meg, but I had to admit I sort of liked it. While a girl sang a cheery, up-tempo ditty about happily casting off the devastating hurt of lost teenage love, I reached over and squeezed Meg’s hand. She rubbed her thumb against my knuckle. And thus was the only expression of panic during our ride. I continued to be an agreeable audience to my daughter’s tunes and recalled first bringing her home after her birth. I thought as we were leaving the hospital, Are they really just going to let us stroll out of here with this person? But they did. No one warned us about the sounds a baby was likely to make in the night or how they might seem to stare ghostly at you in the darkness. Sarah gurgled crazily while sleeping, causing us to think she was choking to death. I would leap up and rush to her side only to have her noise subside into the most peaceful breathing. When I didn’t tear myself away from the sheets, her gagging would become eerily absent, and so I would spring out to be sure that she was still breathing. Most of my parental sleep deprivation was a consequence of my anxiety over keeping this creature alive. And so, here I was again. When I looked in the mirror at Sarah in the backseat, I found her staring at me, wanting me to make it all okay.

  Aythya valisineria. Eleven individuals of this species are represented in the cave. The humerus of this species is distinguished from Aythya americana by the shape of the proximal end. In modern times, the canvasback is an uncommon migrant. It winters on open water.

  I suppose anytime someone is seeing a pediatric neurologist, it is given that there is an abundance of anxiety, and so our wait in the outer area was notably brief. The doctor joined us in the examination room almost immediately.

  Dr. Gurewich was a broad-shouldered woman with a noticeable accent, I thought Eastern European. She talked to the three of us first, questions about Sarah’s schoolwork, her vision, her diet. She then call
ed for a nurse to take Sarah and get her weight.

  She turned to Meg and me and asked about the alleged seizure we might have witnessed. We told her what we knew, what we thought we saw. She asked if we’d noticed any new behaviors, tics, sounds, sleeping problems.

  “Nothing,” Meg said.

  “She didn’t see my bishop,” I said.

  “What?” from Meg.

  “We were playing chess. She’s a very good, very careful player. She didn’t see an obvious danger.”

  “What’s that have to do with anything?” Meg asked me.

  “No,” Dr. Gurewich said. “It’s a bit of information. It might mean nothing, but it might be useful.”

  “It was something she never would have missed before,” I said. I shook my head. “But people miss moves all the time.”

  “But it concerned you?”

  “I guess it did.”

  The nurse returned with Sarah, handed the doctor the chart.

  “Okay, young lady, you sit up here and let’s have a look at you.”

  “Have a look at you,” she said. I was reminded of my father saying that it was all well and good for one to see a doctor, but the doctor had to see you as well. Here was my daughter, my Sarah, being seen by the doctor, and I stood by wishing that the doctor could not, would not see her at all. In the examination room, the very fear that had begun to push or jolt Meg and me close again now seemed to do just the opposite. It wasn’t so much a coolness or estrangement as it was that we were dividing, cleaving our child; she wanted her daughter and I wanted mine. Even then, out of nervousness, I considered that word, cleave, and wondered how it could contradict itself so cleanly, wondered if the two meanings canceled each other out, leaving nothing in its wake. Cleave.

  Dr. Gurewich had Sarah put her fingertips together, touch her nose, close one eye and then the other and take a pen, walk, hop, repeat series of syllables, repeat series of numbers, say the date, recall breakfast, recall yesterday, sing a song. The doctor looked at her eyes, felt her joints, tapped her reflex points with a hammer, checked her peripheral vision, talking all the while, a soothing voice, accent and all.