'The Telephone'

I wrote 'The Telephone' in early 2008.

One of my greatest and most abiding fears is homelessness. That, and forgetting my mobile (cell) phone one day, goes some way toward explaining how this story came about.

The Telephone

You leave your home one bright morning; setting off to work or learn, to meet a friend or just to get groceries. It is not important which and before long you have almost forgotten why you ventured out: you are preoccupied with something else. You haven’t brought your mobile phone.
      Like many you have become so accustomed to having it, and being able to contact and be contacted by others wherever you are that without it you feel a strange loss, like losing a limb or your voice. The nagging discomfort is such that you decide you cannot last for long without it, or rather you don’t need to, because although the telephone belongs to you rather than vice versa it is still a necessity.
      You turn and make your way back home. It seems to take longer than usual, considering the haste with which you are travelling. You feel as if only lightly anchored to the pavement, skimming the surface but seldom touching it.
      After an interminable time you arrive and reach in to your pocket, searching for keys that, as it transpires, are not there. You wonder whether you have left them indoors with the phone or whether you dropped them somewhere but how this has come to pass is not as pressing a matter as how it will be resolved.
      You think about phoning a friend with whom you have left a spare set. A good idea in all but one thing – you don’t have your phone. The reminder of this fact, coupled with your current lack of access to your home, begins to worry you a little, although it can all be dealt with.
    The payphone is not far away. It stands on the corner by a high-rise block, a skeleton, every pane broken and glittering in a ragged corona around it. It stinks of piss.
      You enter and pick up the receiver gingerly, as if a poisonous spider lurks beneath. It must be broken. There is no dial tone, not even the sound of your own breathing on the line, silence.
      It occurs to you as if it is somehow more than that, not an absence of sound but a negation of it, as if you could open your mouth to speak and nothing would come.
      You step outside again, leaving the handset dangling, deciding to visit in person. They will probably be at home.
      After walking all the way there (you find now that you don’t have your travel pass) you knock on the door. You wait there for some time, until a woman arrives, weighed down by supermarket bags.
      She sets them down on the floor beside your friend’s door, takes out a key, and proceeds to unlock it. You guess that she must be a new flatmate, and enquire about your friend.
      She looks at you strangely, furrowing her brow, impatient for the conversation’s end. She has never met or heard of your friend; and claims she has lived here for a year at least. You leave, puzzled and somewhat troubled.
      On your way out, you notice strange graffiti scrawled upon the building, nonsense words and phrases, jagged shapes that appear to depict something different every time you look. The more you try to understand it, the more disconcerted you become.
      Stopping outside a shop, thirsty now, hungry, inexplicably tired, you reach into your pocket for your wallet. You feel its weight there, heavy and comforting. Moving to take it out, it slips through your fingers, and you reach again, touching it with the tips of your fingers, but again your hand leaves empty.
      You turn your pockets inside out. You turn every pocket inside out. People are looking at you.
      For the rest of the day you visit the addresses of friends and family, even mere acquaintances, everyone in the city that you know. The result is always the same. One house visited is derelict, gutted by a fire that appears to have occurred months before even though you remember having dinner there a matter of days ago.
      By now you are panicking. You eventually reach home at nightfall, and attempt to break in. This is seen by a passer-by who calls the police and they arrest you and take you back to the police station.
      After listening for a full hour but somehow, you think, not hearing you at all, they assume you are mentally ill or a harmless drunk and lock you in a cell. You eventually fall asleep, disturbed and in great discomfort, your wrists rubbed red raw by the handcuffs.
      In the morning you are freed, sent away with hot tea in a white foam cup. The city seems to be different, familiar buildings not where they should be, architecture unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
      You walk a little way and stop, a hollow feeling within you, bending to vomit in the cold light. You spew white dust on the pavement; yellowed and crumbly like peeling paint, and crisp packets, cash-point receipts, ring-pulls from soft-drink cans, a small sodden mouse; the kind you see in subway tunnels.
      Wiping your mouth with your sleeve you wonder whether somehow you are purging the city, or whether it is purging you.
      You wander the streets for a few hours, and find that they’ve become a labyrinth, implacable and horrible in its unfamiliarity.
      Every car that passes you seems the same, as if when one disappears in the distance, you turn to see the same one coming toward you from the opposite direction. Looking at the driver, you see that they have no face, no eyes or nose, ears or mouth, instead a blank taut sheet of skin stretched around their head.
      When you approach you realise that what you are seeing is your own reflection in the window.
      You walk until the flow of people on the pavement and cars on the road peters out to nothing. That night you sleep on a piece of cardboard in a shop doorway, part of a chain that you’ve never seen before in your life, whose sign is in a lettering and language that you can’t read.
      Now when you wake the shop is gone, and the cardboard is gone, and so are the buildings, people, the city itself. You stand there and take it all in, wishing that a breeze would disturb the stillness, that some sound would end the silence. There is neither. Around you there is only a vast all encompassing vista, a blue sky empty save for the sun. For some reason you feel unwilling to turn your back to it in case you turn again to find it is no longer there.
      You consider that this makes the whole telephone fiasco seem quite trivial. You check your pockets one last time to make sure that it hasn’t been there all along.