“What,” said Conway, “are they doing there?”
“Doing? They swim that roaring furnace, that suction, to drown, inhale, exhale out, far out. You heard it last night. So you had to come. The hairs all over your body jumped. Your mouth eats cold steel, gasps flames, right?”
“No!”
“Liar!”
“No,” said Conway. “What are those voices?”
“Homeless libidos, love-starved wannabees.”
“What love is starved, what do they wannabe?”
“Together.” Smith stirred his drink with his little finger. “To be wildly together.”
“How?”
“By its sound, can’t you guess? To be part of that lost soul circuit. To throw themselves in that sea of lust. Ever read Thoreau? He said most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
“Sad.”
“True. Ours is the sad, desperate channel that brims Venice with unclean floods of driven men. Remember that comic strip Desperate Ambrose? The world swarms with men wanting, not getting, sleepless night Ambroses. Desperate. My God. Body says this, mind that. Men say yes, women no! Were you ever fourteen?”
“For a few years, yes.”
“Touché! You discovered wild hot flesh, but it was years before you touched someone else’s arm, elbow, mouth. How long?”
“Six years.”
“Forever! Alone twenty thousand nights. Loving mirrors. Wrestling pillows. Damnation! Use the new number. Come back tomorrow.”
“You’ve told me nothing!”
“Everything. Act! If you cancel now, to rejoin listening again costs six hundred!”
“Based on what!?”
“On the heavy breathing that made you trash your phone. The Bell Company reported the repairs.”
“How could you know that?”
“No comment.”
“Smith?”
Smith waited, smiling.
“Are you,” said Conway, “God’s Angel, or his dark son?”
“Yes,” said Smith, and left.
Conway telephoned Norma to have the phone canceled.
“Why, for God’s sake?” said Norma.
“Get the phone out. Out!”
“Madness,” she said, and hung up.
He arrived home at five. Norma toured him through the house.
“Hold on,” he protested, “the phone’s still in the library and—”
He glanced toward their bedroom.
“They’ve put a new phone in there!”
“They said you insisted. Did you change the order from take out to put in?”
“My God, no,” he said and walked over to stand by the new device. “Why would I do that?”
At bedtime he pulled both phones’ jacks, slapped his pillow, lay down, and shut his eyes.
At three in the morning the phones rang and kept ringing. Norma’s put the jacks back in the wall, he thought.
Finally, Norma stirred. “God, I’ll do it!” She sat up.
“No!” he cried.
“What?”
“No, me!” he shouted.
“Calm down.”
“I’m calm!” He seized the phone, which rang and rang as he carried it on its long cord to the other phone, which still rang and rang. He stood motionless. The bedroom door opened wider.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” Norma said.
Ignoring her, he bent to touch and then take the phone but only hold it away. The phone whispered.
At last Norma said: “So? Private calls? Is that some male-menopausal bimbo?”
“No,” he said. “It is not a floozie-bubblehead-camp-follower bimbo!”
The list was so headlong that Norma laughed and shut the door.
No lie, he thought. No bimbo, floozie, bubble-head … It’s—he hesitated, what? Cloud-cuckoo-land, a sinking loveboat of lost women, crazed bachelors, dry heaves, plea-bargaining, salmon migrations upstream to nowhere! What?
“Well,” he said at last and went to open the bedroom door and study the cold white arctic wilderness of bed and its snowblinding empty sheets.
There was a faint rattling behind the bathroom door. The sound of aspirin shaken out as a faucet filled a glass.
He stood by the glacier bed where the floe moved never, and shivered.
The bathroom light went off. He turned and went away.
He sat quietly for an hour and then dialed the new number.
No answer. And then …
A whisper so vast, so loud, it might comb the dead to wakening. The whispers panted from one line, two, four, ten dozen voices erupting, fused.
And it was the sound of all the girls and women he had always wanted but never had, and it was the sound of all the women he had wanted and had never wanted again, their whispers, their cries, their laughter, their mocking laughter.
And it was the sound of a sea moving in on a shore, but not the tidal floe beyond the trembling surf but a flood of flesh striking other flesh, bodies rising to fall, rising to fall and fall again with vast murmurs, incredible whispers falling, rising, until the whole volcanic mix exploded into downfalls into mindless dark.
An entire population of field gymnasts rushed to leap hurdles, shouting, to drop in surfs of bodies to whine ascramble, to clutch at limbs, to writhe in midnight calisthenics, explorations, arrivals, departures clutched to teeter-totters of ascension and decline, breakaway trapeze actors who reached, seized, held, and let you plunge to strike catchers on a wild field of grabbing, rejecting arms, legs, torsos in full chorus!
Orchestras of hands snatched up to grip, hug, mold. Hurricanes of cries stormed in need, dislodged their holds, then fell in rains of cooling sheets to night calms. All was silence at last except a kind of sigh that dogs might sense, and admire with barks.
Then, a buzz. “Deposit cash!”
“Smith, you son of a bitch,” Conway said.
“That’s me. Well?”
“What in hell are these voices!?”
“Aliens, neighbors, high-class Party Liners, like when we were small-town kids and our randy neighbors broadcast their pillow talks.”
“Why is everyone calling at once?!”
“They’re cowards, nervous Nellies, afraid of ravenous insatiables. Long-distance sumo wrestling, kick-boxing, mattress turning, top back row Elite Theater Saturday nights, drive-ins, motors killed, cars jouncing to pig squeals, weight-lifter grunts, raped canaries.”
Conway was silent.
“Cat got your tongue? You a party pooper?”
“Is that a party?”
“Yes! Where they say what they want to say, hidden, old maid in Vermont, wino in Reno, Vancouver priest, altar boy Miami, stripper in Providence, college president Kankakee.”
Conway was silent.
“Still there? Hate facts? Damn reality? Pay nothing! Hang up!”
Silence.
“Goodbye! Cut off, damn me, jump in bed, harass the wife! Still there? Still hot-flash wild-love delicatessen curious? Temperature a hundred and two? I’ll count to three. Then triple cash for this midnight matinee. One, two …”
Conway bit his lip.
“You’re hooked!” Smith brayed. “Got a mirror? Look!”
Conway stared at the mirror on the wall. A strange mad pink face, slick with sweat, eyes fired, burned there. The phone voice barked!
“See? Bright cheeks. Sweat! Jaw clenched. Eyes like July Fourth!”
Conway exhaled.
“Is that a yes!?” cried Smith. “Last chance. Hang up or a Johnstown Flood of volcanic Krakatoa lava burns your bed. Yes? No? Gotcha!”
Conway at last said: “Dozens of people on-line?”
“Thousands! Once the word spread, mobs joined, the more mobs the higher the rates. Mobs didn’t drive rates down but up. Whoever ran this late-night bender figured it was special, why not lift all the money boats in the same used bathwaters?
Lots of sleepless hungers, plenty of walking wounded, much nameless dark-meat game. You never know who’s talking. That lady, woman, girl squealing with delight, is she your old-maid schoolmarm, your sad aunt who while the old man sleeps punches Dial-A-Ride?
Or your loving dad, loving the Night Family more? The Night Family, all night each night, screaming, snorting, thrashing, drained at dawn coughing hairballs with each unseen mattress-jump. Listen up! Ten thousand raw bods, Freud-crippled Christians, devoured by hello-goodbye panthers, ocelots, raw-tongued lions. Kill, kill me with love, they shout, yell, cry, please, thanks. You there?”
“Here,” whispered Conway. “Do they ever meet?”
“Never. Sometimes.”
“Where?”
“The bait must home where the carnivores roam, right? They don’t want to meet. The wires suffice for nightmare fevers, their barks so high just hyena laptop lapdogs hear. Listen.”
A bedlam choir drowned in static. Yes, yes. More! Oh, yes, yes. More!
“Like them apples?” Smith cut in. “Fresh off Eden’s tree. Sold by the Snake. Midnight park rentals. You will not be driven forth! Drop coins for virtual garden beds.”
“Stop!” said Conway.
“Stop? Taffy-pulling your ravenous groin? Lunch, mañana? If you can creep or crawl to weep thanks to this sinner friend?”
“Kill you,” said Conway.
“I’ll duck faster than you shoot. Jump back on line. Be a torn party favor. Ciao!”
Click! He was gone. The storm of fevers poured in, firing his brain. More heavy breathing. He glanced up.
The wall was lit by the wild fire in his cheeks.
He let the phone fall to lie gasping unspeakable raw things as he staggered toward bed, the flames in his face lighting the floor.
He lay down with whispers and clenched his eyelids and in a moment of sleeping dream heard, far off, the clang of a metal storm drain manhole lid, lifted and slid. He blinked and jerked his head to stare across into the outer room.
Where Norma stood, the telephone thrust to her ear, eyes shut in pain as her color melted and she swayed, breathless, listening, listening.
He lifted up to call but in that instant she seized the cord and, eyes still shut, yanked the whispers out of the wall.
Sleepwalking, she glided toward the bathroom door. With no light he heard her shake and spill the aspirin bottle. The tablets rained in the toilet. The bottle fell to the floor. She flushed three times and turning, walked to stand by the bed for a moment, then lift the blanket and climb in.
After a long moment, he felt her hand touch his elbow. After another moment she whispered. Whispered!
“You awake?”
He nodded in the dark.
“Well,” she whispered. “Now.”
He waited.
“Come over,” she whispered, “on my side of the bed.”
The end
