Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  “Hello, this is Nicole Lamphor.” Jelly hated the name “Amy,” and her phreak nickname, “Jelly,” was too weird and, well, private. She used “Nicole” for sales and now this, whatever this was.

  “Do I know you?” he said. She paused and smiled into the phone. Jelly knew that he could feel her smile through the phone—it changed her breathing and then the sound of her voice.

  She just said—quietly, slowly—the truth. “I don’t think so, but it is the strangest thing. You sound very familiar to me. Where did you grow up?”

  A pause. “In Albany,” he said. “Just outside Albany. In a boring suburb called Guilderland. But I guess all suburbs are boring, right? It’s their point, really.”

  “That’s funny. I’m from an upstate suburb too,” she said, “but not that one. I grew up in a suburb of Syracuse called Solvay.” All true.

  “And was it boring?” Tim said, a little tease in his voice.

  “More awful than boring. It was built to make soda ash out of the local salt beds. I never understood what soda ash was, but growing up there everyone knew the mining had leaked toxic chemicals into the groundwater and the lake. We used to say the kids from Solvay never got lost because they glowed in the dark.”

  He laughed. “Well, Guilderland’s main feature was easy access to arterials. Nothing going on, but you could get the hell out of there in any direction. And most everyone does. Leave, that is.”

  “Everyone also tries to leave Solvay because there are no good jobs anymore. Depressed economically and poisoned environmentally, instead of merely depressed like most of central New York.”

  “Okay, you win, but the name’s nice. Sol-vay.”

  “It sounds French,” Jelly said. “Isn’t it cruel to give cold, toxic cities in New York exotic-sounding names? Like Rome, Syracuse, Troy, Solvay?”

  “Cruel, yes. But Solvay also sounds like solvent, so apt enough, right?”

  “I never thought of that. Oh, gross,” she said, laughing.

  She heard Tim laugh. The sound of the laughter released them and made them laugh harder. They talked for twenty minutes more, and when she got off the phone, she promised to call him again soon. He never asked why she had called and she never told him. It was her first “pure” call experience. It was its own reason and there was no “why.”

  Jelly loved it: a man giving in to her, falling deliciously in with her. The feeling buzzed through her the rest of the day. Like the sex scenes she used to daydream about, the talk on the phone made her feel a tiny bit radiant and high. The feeling continued when she got home to Oz, and she found she didn’t resent his not talking to her as much. She couldn’t talk to him about it anyway. The past few months a pattern had emerged between them. She wanted to hear someone’s voice besides her own when she got home. Oz was not willing to say more than a short closed answer to her questions about his day, or about the world (so much to be discussed: Nixon, the women’s strike, the war, the Beatles breaking up—although Oz didn’t care for the Beatles, but still). She wouldn’t mind if he shared an idea, or even a joke. So most nights after dinner she dialed into the open-sleeve phone line to listen to the unmoderated free talk. No sales, no money, just people telling stories, talking over each other, talking politics. She called in even though it irritated Oz. He would always leave the apartment for a couple of hours. She couldn’t help it—she really needed it. But on the day she had talked to Tim, she didn’t feel the need to patch into the open sleeve. But Oz went out anyway; it had become his evening habit.

  Tim was the first one, and she moved on to others. There was a life expectancy, or a limit to these connections. Soon, very soon in some cases, he would try to see her in person. Or ask for a photograph. This took all the mystery out of it for Jelly, and she would say she would arrange a meeting or send a photo, and then never call again. She started over with someone new. Each time she did this, she became a little more agile at deflecting, a little better at postponing the inevitable escalation. They were at her mercy: she had done this over and over, while it was all new to them, just like the sales calls.

  After a few months, Jelly found that almost half her time at the call center was devoted to nonsales calls. Her commissions went down, which she couldn’t afford. But it was now a part of her, a part of how she saw herself. Stopping would be too hard. She cut back; she limited herself to one pure call a day.

  She thought it would be good for them, for Oz and Jelly, because she no longer needed the conversation with the phone phreaks in the evenings. Her need for conversation sated, she could stop driving Oz from her house. She even told him she had lost interest in the open sleeve, but to her surprise, Oz still continued to leave the apartment most nights for several hours. Was he with someone else? He vaguely described meetings and a singing group he liked to attend, but he never invited her.

  Soon Jelly began going to the movies when Oz went out. She hadn’t told Oz, but her sight was steadily improving. She could see things more clearly on the giant screen. Sometimes she saw white spots or streaks that obscured the image. But she could see the image, if not the details, and she could hear everything. She was so grateful that she could see movies again. When she was growing up, she would spend all her baby-sitting money on movies, usually devoting all of a Saturday to watching one film after another. When she got sick, she thought she had lost the movies forever. But now she went nearly every night. Sometimes she saw the same film two days in a row. This went on for weeks.

  The only time Oz and Jelly spent together was in bed. The sex was still there if she was awake when he got home, but often she fell asleep, and they started to have sex less often. Her orgasms were constant for them when they did have sex, but that meant less than she would have guessed. All the parts between them were becoming less and less. She knew, although she didn’t let herself really think about it, that things would end soon. She would try it out on herself over coffee, after she woke next to sleeping Oz and she had worked hard to not wake him. You don’t wake him because it is considerate. No. You don’t wake him because you don’t want him. Don’t want to do what you should, wake him with a touch and a kiss—but then she would shake her head and not think about it. Yes, it felt as though things would end soon, but it also felt as if they might go on like this forever.

  Then one Saturday afternoon, right after the wall clock chimed three, Oz made Jelly sit on the couch next to the phone. Oz suggested that they both connect with the open sleeve: Jelly on one line, Oz on the other.

  “There is a special phone happening in the next few minutes.” Jelly made the free call to information, and when the operator disconnected, Jelly stayed on the open, free line. She used her blue box to make the tones that got her connected to the open sleeve. Oz was already patched in and then there were others.

  “Hey, Oz, I’m here,” said one voice. “Slap Dog in Memphis.”

  “Me too, as promised. Motor Mouth in Detroit. What’s up?”

  “Thanks for coming,” Oz said. “This is a gathering, all. We are going on a phone phreak adventure. Get comfortable, as this will last a while.” More people called in. Jelly soon figured out that without her being aware of it, Oz had connected to the open sleeve number every day for the past few weeks and told everyone to phone in at this time for a special happening.

  At 3:30, Oz began to speak. She could hear the delight in his voice. Oz sounded happy, and she realized she hadn’t heard him sound that way in a long time.

  “Okay, let’s begin. Welcome Ma Bell and local phone companies everywhere. You aren’t onto us yet, but we will give you plenty of time. Everyone quiet!” Then Oz whistled some digits and soon they were all on the line with a man at the American Embassy in Egypt.

  “Hi! This is DJ Oz calling from my radio show on WSYR in Syracuse, New York. Can we interview you about the work you do there? Just some basic questions.” He then asked him to hold on as he connected to another per
son. Some people at some places said yes, and then Oz asked them to stay on the line too. Then he called another embassy and did the same thing. He was gathering a crowd on the open sleeve, and he was blatantly courting trouble by involving government agencies. Some of the phreaks bailed when they realized what he was doing, but a lot stayed on for the prank’s full elaboration.

  “I am Professor Oz in Syracuse, New York. This is my talk show with embassies around the world. Please stay on the line.”

  After he called a number of American embassies across the world, he then called foreign embassies in Washington. Even Jelly knew that government agencies—certainly embassies—were dangerous places to call using hijacked lines. Any calls to these places were monitored by security. No one knew how much could be traced or was traced, whether it was the phone company or the FBI, but surely this would be noticed. Jelly felt adrenaline raise a wave in her stomach. She could hear her heart pumping faster. She was part of it too, and it would not end well. She pulled the phone away from her face and took a breath. Then she slammed the receiver down on the cradle. Oz laughed.

  “We’re losing some folks, some phreaks, and some embassies. And here we are just about to hit the payoff, the punch line. Quiet, please!” Then Jelly heard Oz sharply chirp into the background hum. He held the phone receiver slightly away from his ear.

  “White House switchboard,” Jelly heard a woman say. “With whom should I connect you?”

  “This is Citizen Oz in Syracuse for President Nixon,” Oz said. “This is a live interview.”

  “I am sorry, the president is not available at this time. I can take a message and give it to his office.”

  “We want to know what is going on in Cambodia, can the president talk to us? Exactly what are we doing there?”

  Apparently at this point people hung up or began speaking, because Jelly heard a lot of voices on the phone.

  “Shhh!” Oz said in a loud stage whisper. “This is on the down low with See-No-Thing, Hear-Every-Thing Blind Oz. What about Kent State? What about the B-52 bombing runs? Can we ask the president about his secret war? His crypto-presidential activities? I mean the activities on the sub rosa, the ex officio, the whispered back channels.”

  Again Oz turned the phone receiver away from his ear and Jelly heard a roar of voices. Oz laughed at the chaos—the babble—on the line, and then he gently placed the phone on the cradle, disconnecting.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Jelly said. In a few minutes the phone rang. Oz let the rings vibrate into the room. He didn’t pick up. He let it ring until it stopped. Then it started up again. Jelly went to bed and put the pillow over her head. On-and-off rings into the night. Although lately Jelly fell asleep before Oz went to bed, tonight she was still awake when he came in. She heard him moving around the room, undressing, and she slowed her breathing and pretended to be asleep. In the middle of the night, half-asleep, they sometimes fucked. But whether he thought her asleep or not, Oz didn’t reach for her, and soon Jelly heard the sounds of sleep breathing from Oz’s side of the bed. She rolled over on her back. She was fully awake. To her surprise, she felt tears dripping into the corners of her eyes. And once she felt the tears, she let more come, the saltiness in the corners of her mouth, the clutch at the back of her throat. She stayed quiet and she cried.

  It took a few days, but eventually the FBI came and questioned Oz. He was charged with malicious mischief and had to spend the night in jail. Jelly was not charged, but she gave up her blue box and swore never to phreak again, which she didn’t. The incident was reported widely in the press, and in interviews Oz stated that he just wanted to get a job with the phone company. That was why he did it. Jelly figured that the phone company was not keen on rejecting a blind youth in such a public way, because indeed they did hire Oz to help with line security and system weaknesses, something he understood better than anyone. Two months later, Oz moved out of their apartment and she let him go without an argument.

  Jelly knew that she had lost Oz long before the phreak debacle. In the painful last weeks of living together, deep into the limp nights of being in the same bed without having sex or touching at all, she sometimes thought about it, traced the tendrils of misery all the way back to the first hints of problems. But in the morning, when she would be momentarily happy before she remembered the state of things, Jelly blamed everything on that phone incident, the way we like to pinpoint things in one moment, one increment of time, the way it happens in certain movies or stories. But some part of her knew that wasn’t the truth. One day, years later, she would even remember that she had been doing her own secret thing elsewhere for months, so how could she blame Oz?

  JELLY AND JACK

  The phone rang very early one morning. Jelly woke in her bed, the room dark. She had fallen asleep talking to Jack, and the phone was on its cradle on the nightstand. She reached out from under the covers and picked up the phone. She held it to her ear and half asleep she whispered, “Hello?”

  “Nico,” Jack said in a low voice.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, and her voice sounded girlish and sleepy.

  “Yes,” he said. “Are you asleep?” Jelly pulled the covers over her head and held the phone to her ear as she closed her eyes.

  “A little,” she said, and she made a long exhale into the mattress by the receiver.

  Years ago when Jelly was in college, she had rented her first apartment, just off campus. She was excited about having her own space and her own phone. One night the phone woke her. She was still partially asleep when a man’s voice said, “Hi,” as if he knew her.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “It’s me,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You sound sleepy.”

  “I am a little sleepy,” she said.

  “It’s good,” he said. And then she heard something in his voice. “So good,” he whispered. “And you like it, don’t you?”

  “Who is this?” she said, now awake and angry. And he moaned a little into the phone. She heard it, paused for just a moment and slammed the phone onto the cradle. Who was it? But it wasn’t anyone she knew. He just randomly called her, a crank call. He called women in the phone book, probably, and got them to talk to him by acting intimate, by whispering to them while they were disoriented from being woken in the middle of the night. What upset Jelly the most was how he sounded, gentle and easy. She replayed the voice in her head, and it wasn’t a deviant voice. It was sexy. He never called again, although she almost wished he had. It was the first time she realized the phone could be like that, a weapon of intimacy.

  Jelly closed her eyes and said his name into the receiver, “Jack.” She lay on her stomach with the phone next to her. “I’m in bed.” And she listened to him breathe.

  SOLAX STUDIOS

  Meadow had moved back upstate full-time after an aborted attempt at attending NYU in the fall. Carrie wasn’t able to make frequent excursions to Gloversville to visit Meadow. It was Carrie’s sophomore year, and school kept her very busy. She had also met someone, Will, and Meadow gathered that she needed to spend a lot of time cooking and playing house with him. By June, Meadow had a full agenda of projects she wanted to execute. Carrie couldn’t stay the whole summer, but she did come up for most of June and July as promised.

  First they made reenactments of silent films lost or destroyed. They focused on the lost Alice Guy-Blaché films because she was a woman and didn’t get enough credit as one of film’s early greats. Meadow didn’t have to talk Carrie into it; she was up for whatever Meadow had in mind. They shot black-and-white silent film, and Meadow felt such relief in not having to think about sound for a while. The silent, colorless world: at least two variables eliminated, some constraints. They used a vintage wind-up Bell & Howell 16 mm Filmo camera, “just like the one Jean Rouch used to make Moi, un noir.” The camera shot for twenty seconds and then need
ed to be cranked again. They would make black-and-white silent vignettes, like pieces of a dream.

  For inspiration Meadow insisted they watch Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s film about eighteenth-century Europe. It is a film of poses and artifice, each scene composed as clearly as a painting, each actor stiff and unmoving in giant wig and elaborate costume. Meadow remembered how Carrie and she hated the film when they saw it on video at Meadow’s house the summer of eleventh grade, a long Kubrick summer where they watched his films in a binge and then watched their favorites over and over (Paths of Glory, 2001: A Space ­Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove). Barry Lyndon had seemed a laughable misfire for the first fifteen minutes and then turgid and boring after that.

  But recently Meadow read that the disdained Barry Lyndon was playing for a short run with a new 70 mm print. She took the four-and-a-half-hour bus ride and snuck into the city, not telling anyone. She went straight to the beautiful Paris Theatre on West Fifty-eighth Street and made it just in time for the 3:30 show. Again the resistance in the first fifteen minutes, but already she felt herself change in relation to it. The baroque music, the minimal dialogue: it worked like a silent film. And it was almost a film of no movement from the actors or settings, a film about stillness. All the movement was from the camera, which languidly tracked in or out of the heavily sumptuous tableaux. Meadow felt it most in the remarkable scene in which Barry first kisses his future wife, Lady Lyndon. The music: the second movement of Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, with pulsing piano that gets complicated and intensified by a violin melody and then switches so the violins are pulsing and rhythmic and the piano plays the melody. The actors: Lady Lyndon walking in her huge silk dress to the edge of the terrace and turning to the moonlight. She stares at the sky, her face covered in powder, beautiful and unmoving. Barry moves slowly in the background until he is at the door to the terrace. Kubrick shows them in a medium-distance shot. Slowly—so slowly, wind-up-toy slowly—Barry walks toward her. They are separate but pulling toward each other, as in the music we hear, as if one is the piano and the other is the strings. And as the watcher of the film waits, the length of time—the duration, the time endured—works on you and changes you. It could take an hour and you would watch. It mesmerizes you. The music resolves as the characters finally kiss—the uncanny slowness lets him make a minuet of a kiss, as stylized as the wigs and the clothes. What an arresting, striking thing. Next Meadow watched the cold pale thighs of Lady Lyndon seated in a bath, catatonic with sadness, her white face like Ophelia in that Rossetti painting. The actress barely moves as the camera pulls farther and farther away. Meadow felt pinned to her chair, every part of her body alive to this film. She stayed for the second showing, almost seven total hours of sad, immobile faces burdened by beauty and decoration and decadence, trapped by their own lack of expression. Meadow felt the tears stream down her face and she didn’t wipe them away. How could she have missed the beauty of this film? She despised her younger, callow self and worried about what else she had missed or misunderstood.