Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “I wish I had more to give,” I said.

  “Je m’en fou!” she shouted. “Je m’en fou!”

  Gewoben vom verblendenden Geschicke

  Hilary Gill had made it through the departmental vote regarding her tenure, no small feat given her lack of work; the quality of her work and the promise of it had persuaded most of us. The harsh news, and harsher because the news came so quickly, was that the dean had denied Hilary tenure. The response within our ranks was not one of surprise, and there was not much desire to push back. Not even I was surprised. However, I became immediately irate, first because the decision had come so quickly as to appear an insult to our judgment and second because I was constitutionally disposed to find the actions of any dean or upper administrator suspect, ill considered, and wrong.

  I walked into Hilary’s windowless office and sat on the hard chair beside her desk. We sat there without speaking for a minute or so. I looked at a picture on the wall that I imagined was her sister, but I didn’t ask. Hilary sighed, got up and shut her door, came back to sit at her desk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m afraid I got your hopes up.”

  “It felt good for a while,” she said. “Being hopeful.”

  “You realize that this is complete bullshit. The dean knows shit, that’s the first thing. If the department says yes, she should say yes.”

  “Well, she didn’t. I appreciate your support. Believe me.”

  “I can’t let it go.”

  She laughed. “What does that mean? Listen, I didn’t do the work. You told me that a long time ago.”

  “You actually did do the work. You just didn’t happen to show it to anyone. Well, until now.”

  “Anyway.”

  I stood, perhaps a bit suddenly. I was angry.

  “What?”

  “I’m going over to talk to that asshole,” I said.

  “The dean?”

  “Yes, the asshole dean. Do you know another asshole I need to talk to?”

  “Don’t do that,” Hilary said. Hilary stood and put her hand on my arm. “I don’t want you to talk to the dean.”

  “The chair should do it,” I said.

  “We talked about this before. I told you, I’m simply not cut out for academia. It’s not my thing.”

  “First of all, that’s bullshit. You’re a good scientist. You’re a great teacher.”

  She shrugged.

  “Let me talk to the chair.”

  “No.” She kissed me gently on the lips.

  I kissed her back, then pulled away. “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “About what?”

  “I never should have kissed you.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I’ve got a lot on my mind these days.” I knew I sounded nervous, scared even. I was suddenly thinking of Sarah. I sat down again. “I’m confused about a lot of things in my life, and I’m afraid I was sort of using you as a distraction.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t think you do,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I hear you.” Her voice was even, almost monotone.

  I felt my shoulders sag.

  “Are you okay?” She put a tentative hand on my shoulder. I heard her swallow. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me,” I told her. I reached up and tapped her hand. It struck me that Hilary was understandably, rightfully distraught, but that her concern for me was somehow odd. “Listen, if you don’t want me to talk to anyone, I won’t.” I stood. “Well, I’ve got to go try to teach these people something.” I looked for the window that was not present in Hilary’s office. I wanted to kiss her because I knew it was the wrong thing to do, a feeling or thought that made no sense at all to me but made all the sense in the world. I was not attracted to Hilary at all, did not want at all to be close to her, to be intimate with her, to know her any better than I did. Yet, I wanted to kiss her. Had I not needed to leave for class, I don’t know what I might have done or why. “We can’t do this anymore,” I told her. I walked to the door.

  “Can we get together and talk later?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about everything,” she said.

  I didn’t understand her apology. I stood frozen for a beat. “You’re certain you don’t want me to talk to the chair?”

  “Yes. It’s too late for that anyway.”

  I had gone into Hilary’s office to offer help, perhaps comfort, but I ended up being the one comforted and finally offering her some extra pain. I was not happy with myself, needless to say. I was, in fact, ashamed. But like so much lately, I had no idea how I had so deftly stumbled into the muck. I went on to class and delivered my lecture on autopilot. I had the sinking and sobering feeling throughout that it was one of my better performances; it seemed I was so much better when I was not fully present.

  The plain package contained the plain shirt I’d ordered in a larger size. Tucked discreetly under the collar was a neatly rolled yellow Post-it square with tiny writing. It read, “Por favor ayudenos. No nos dejan ir.” They will not let us go. Outside my den window, I could see clouds gathering against the hills.

  In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus

  After picking up Sarah from school, I took her for a short hike in the hills. It was unusually cool, especially as we gained some altitude. However, the sky was cloudless, cerulean, and brilliant. It was that bright California light that I often found harsh and disliked. We spotted a few birds, but then Sarah seemed to grow listless. She began to space out more and more and then suffered one of her seizures, one that lasted somewhat longer than any we had observed. Needless to say, our walk down took considerably longer than the trek uphill. I had not taken my phone with me, and so we returned to the house to find a worried mother. She became more so when she saw my expression.

  During dinner Sarah was actually chatty, uncharacteristic for her recent self. She told us about some girls who were visiting her campus from some other local school. She reported that two of them had gotten into a rather nasty fistfight.

  “They were such apes, these girls,” Sarah said.

  “What was the fight about?” Meg asked.

  “I don’t know. Clementine Gilbert said it was all about a boy. But I don’t know. Both of them got sent home. I didn’t really see the fight, but I could sure hear it. They sounded like cats. I saw one of the girls after. Very tall with red hair and freckles. Clear marks of a hooligan.”

  We laughed. It felt good to laugh a little. It served mainly to underscore how quiet we as a family had become.

  Sarah tired. She became quiet, and we could see a weakness in her eyes. We put her to bed.

  In the kitchen, I washed the pots and pans while Meg nursed a mug of tea. The mug was one that was once broken, and the handle had been glued back on. She insisted on using it whenever she saw it.

  “I didn’t think the deterioration would be so fast,” she said.

  “I don’t know if it actually is fast. I mean, we don’t have anything to compare it to, after all.”

  Meg nodded. “Seems fast.”

  It was my turn to nod. The house felt too quiet, too still. None of us had laughed in our old way, the way we had tonight, for far too long. We seldom played music in the house, and yet music seemed missing. I felt as if I was dying inside, but I didn’t say that. Even thinking it seemed so selfish as to make me uneasy. I felt an anger toward Meg that I knew was misplaced and unfair, and, recognizing it as such, I was able not to act on it, but not shed it. I wondered if she felt anything similar.

  “I want to talk to Dr. Gurewich and ask her when we should expect what,” Meg said. She set her mug heavily down but held on to the handle.

  “That sounds right.” The question we really wanted to ask was how long we could expect to recognize our daughte
r.

  A scream found its way to us from Sarah’s room. Meg and I stared stupidly at each other for several seconds before running. When we arrived at the child’s bedside, she was asleep, as peaceful as if nothing had happened. Perhaps nothing had happened. Perhaps everything had happened.

  That evening, Meg and I undressed, bathed, and went to bed at the same time. It had been such a long while since that had happened. For as long as I could remember, she or I found work or some other reason to stay up well after the other. Lately, it had been mostly me. On several occasions I was not even at home when she went to bed. Though tonight I felt a need to hold her, or to be held by her, and sensed clearly that she too had the same need, we did not come together but lay there in the darkness, facing the ceiling. I listened to Meg’s breathing change as she moved into sleep. She always pushed a tiny stream of air out of a small aperture between her lips with a little pop with each exhalation. There were times when she would feign sleep, but I always knew. Though I never knew why she would feign sleep. I would fight sleep tonight, as I did most nights. I was afraid of dreaming. Perhaps not so much afraid as uninterested.

  Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt

  No one or nothing appeared different as I bought my coffee in the shop behind the library. The little round lady at the register asked me, as she always did, whether I wanted a muffin or croissant with that. Students studied their phones. I walked into the department office to check my mail and I knew something was wrong. Tim, the office manager, looked at me with a blank expression I had never seen on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Hilary Gill,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  His eyes were wet. He was just this side of crying. He looked out the door and down the corridor, then back at me. “She committed suicide last night.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He didn’t repeat his words. He didn’t need to. I heard him the first time. Had he repeated himself, those words I would not have heard. He readied himself to tell me more, to give me details.

  I raised my hand and stopped him.

  I walked away toward my office but passed it by, then passed Hilary Gill’s office as well. I did not look at her door.

  All the things that people think when they learn of a suicide passed through my mind. Mostly I wondered if she had been telling me the last time we spoke. Worse, I wondered if she had been asking for help. Sad in so many ways, that I had been too tone deaf to hear her message or her plea, and that, even if I had understood her, no one was more incapable than I was to offer comfort or help.

  Und den Kopf ich drehe

  coda

  Man hat sie hinaus getragen

  Why do people speak of things coming full circle? If a thing does not come full circle, then there is no circle at all. It is like past history or a hot water heater or end results. Things do not traverse a full circle of meaning so that we discover their proximity to their opposites.

  Across the long and very old Stanton Street Bridge from El Paso, Texas, is a not-so-little town in Mexico called Ciudad Juárez. Friendship Bridge, Puento Rio Bravo, Puente Ciudad Juárez-Stanton El Paso. Hundreds of women had been hunted there, on the other side of that bridge, pursued, raped, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. They were mostly dark haired and of slender build, as was my beautiful Sarah.

  Time slipped away. Cliché, yes. True, yes. Days, months, life not marked by clock or calendar but by the decline of my daughter’s health. The seizures became more severe, far more frequent. Sarah would forget where she was going, what she was doing. Her friends fell away quickly; they were children. That was just as well, as their names were more and more often a mystery to her. She had not yet misplaced her mother or me in her memory, but it was coming. She would sit for hours just staring. We hired a nurse to sit beside her and stare into space with her. The stress of it all, the sadness of it all, the inevitability of it all drove a fat wedge between Meg and me. She withdrew into manic exercise, yoga and cycling. I failed at burying myself in work but succeeded at staring for long periods at the return address of the packages that had delivered the handwritten notes pleading for help.

  PO Box 219

  Bingham, NM 87832

  I would go there.

  And then there was a day when my daughter wandered from the house when no one was looking. We were always looking, but for one brief moment we each thought the other was looking, and so no one was looking and out of the house stepped our child. We searched the house over and again, then the street and the next street. Neighbors we did not know searched their yards. Meg talked to the police while I drove around. Then I thought of our trail, her talk of lions and bears, her big feet one at a time raising dust, and I went there. It was just dusk of a day that had been far too sunny, far too warm for the season. I hiked up the mountain, keeping in mind at every bend that if she had gone this way, there was no reason to believe that she would have remained on the path, and so I looked for signs, for footprints that the hard, dry surface would yield only grudgingly. Up the mountain looking for large scat that I hoped to not find, scanning the far ridges for the flash of a white tail tip, listening for rustling or perhaps even singing, as it was our habit to sing in these woods that supported bears and cats. I worried that my daughter might be running through these woods and so appeal to a cat’s instinct to chase. I imagined that she might be experiencing her first period and so lighting up the air with a pheromone enticement to a wayward bear. I distracted myself by remembering that bear in French was ours and imagined that the bear might then be ours. I paused every several hurried steps to listen, to stare ahead at the trail and to the sides for anything broken, for any transfer of soil onto plant matter on the ground. Then I heard a whistle, or at least an attempt at a whistle. I listened hard. Again. I slid down off the trail toward the sound and there she was, sitting on part of a downed tree. I worried that there might be a snake that she had not seen, and then I felt stupid and neglectful for not having worried about her encountering snakes during my climb.

  “Sarah?”

  She turned and stared at me. She did not know who I was in that moment. I died some. I died quite a bit. I sat beside her, looked around for danger.

  “This is a nice spot,” I said.

  She said nothing. She was not having a seizure, but she said nothing. She played with the cuticles of her thumbs.

  “Let’s go home.” I reached over and took her hand, and I saw a flash of recognition in her face. I looked at my mobile phone and saw that I had no signal. We walked together. We sang. Lydia, oh Lydia …

  Here comes an old soldier from Botany Bay

  a pocketknife

  The way we treat each other changes at a pace that in all other arenas of human experience we would find intolerable. We might call the pace slow or unhurried or, most accurately, glacial. A glacier is a body of ice and firn that shows evidence of movement, occurring where the production of snow is greater than ablation and so continues from year to year, persisting even when a change in climate reverses the conditions that have allowed it to exist. So it is with the indecency, harm, and evil we inflict on each other, prejudice, neglect, torture, and slavery. Like glaciers, they are not unique to any one part of Earth. Like ice, it is both mineral and rock.

  In case you forgot, my name is Zach Wells. It would not be so strange or awfully bad if you had forgotten. After all, my dear daughter will forget me, my face, my voice. It is inevitable. That means I cannot stop it from happening. It means that no one can stop it from happening. I suppose God could, but of course It has better things to do, bombs to drop, tornadoes to wind up, disease to unleash. There finally is also the fact that, well, there is no God. But there is a devil.

  As my daughter moved ever closer to losing her voice, what young voice she had managed to attain in her brief and beautiful life, beautiful until life became what life becomes, my voice too changed, as inevitably, as necessarily. Logic is a harsh master. However, another quite unde
veloped voice remained constant, stabile, even resolute. That voice had no timbre, no volume, no depth, no resonance, was a voice scratched out across small paper in blue ink, an unwavering plea for aid.

  The postman will not tell you who belongs to what mailbox in the post office. I knew that, and so I didn’t bother wandering into the tiny Bingham, New Mexico, post office to ask the question. I could not hang out in the post office waiting to see who opened the box of interest. It was a one-room affair. I therefore mailed a big red-paper-covered box to PO Box 219, Bingham, NM, 87832. Then I waited hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, three days in my Jeep, pretending to look at topographical maps and aerial photographs on my dash, three days in the diner across the road, pretending to study maps and photographs on the table in front of me. I told anyone who wondered about me that I was a petroleum geologist and that I believed there was oil in the area. I left my perches when the postman left for lunch. When the postman left at five I drove to the little town of San Antonio at the junction of the I-5 and US 380 and slept in a Motel 6, with air-conditioning and cable TV.

  On day one I sat in one of the three window booths of the Bingham Eatery. They had just months earlier had the seats and stools reupholstered with new vinyl that did not quite match the very old Formica veneer of the tables and counter. The vinyl still smelled new. The clashing reds were unsettling to my eyes, but I was comforted to discover that I was not alone, as the first thing the waitress, DeLois from her name tag, said to me was “Sorry about the colors, but it hasn’t really made anybody sick yet.”

  “What brings you here?” was the second thing she said. She was a middle-aged, stout, blond woman set atop spindly stockinged legs. She actually wore a uniform, light blue, a deliberate relief perhaps from the fighting reds.

  “Work,” I said.

  “It would have to be, ’cause we ain’t on the way to no place. There’s no passing through Bingham. You’re either here because of whatever weird shit brought you here or you’re lost. I pegged you for lost.”