Telephone

by Percival Everett

  “Are you ready for class tomorrow?” Meg asked.

  “Did I mention that I hate this class?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sick of describing and discussing the formation of rocks with people who are essentially rocks themselves.”

  “You’re a geologist.”

  “Your point being?”

  “Why don’t you teach that karst course next semester?”

  “Maybe. Are you done trying to turn me on yet?”

  “Yes, I’m done. But I’m not prepared for class.”

  “Well, you read your poems and poem-likes and I’ll lie here contemplating the metamorphic rock that is my penis. Perhaps it’s hornfels or marble. No, it’s novaculite tonight. The rhyming is for you.”

  “Very nice. I’ll be in the den.”

  “Gneiss, that’s what it is. Gneiss is nice. My plagioclase won’t last.”

  “Good night.”

  “Too late for my slate.”

  “Good night, Zach.”

  “Enjoy your iambics.”

  As I fell asleep, I knew I would dream, and I dreamed first that I knew why I dreamed, why humans dream. We dream, quite simply, so we know we’re not dead. Pure blankness, deep, unmoving darkness, would be so terrifying, so paralyzing that we would never wake up. My dreams were not my entertainment but a lighthouse of sorts. I knew somewhat as I drifted off to sleep that I would dream about my daughter, and so I did. We were, as in life just hours before, playing chess, but the pieces were too large for the squares of the board, and all thirty-two of them were the same color insofar as all of them kept shifting color, red, blue, white, black, all together at the same time, and yet we continued to play. Sarah, her thick hair ever thicker, pulled to the back of her head, hovered her hand over the same knight that in life died so ignobly.

  “Don’t you see my bishop?” I asked before she touched the horse’s mane that was now green, pink, brown.

  “What bishop? I don’t see a bishop.” She stared at me. Her eyes became fixed but not on me, through me.

  “Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”

  She would not respond. She could not respond.

  “Do you see the bishop?” I asked.

  But I was not there in her eyes. And in that dream I wondered if she was seeing me, if she was seeing, realizing, at least contemplating the limitations of vision, how we, she and I, could see light waves that were only a fraction of the total spectrum. I thought of my eye’s blind spot, that all-too-human blind spot where the optic nerve connects to the retina, the spot the other eye tries to make up for, that hole, a hole where things can disappear or retreat or simply sit. Was I in the holes of both of my daughter’s eyes? Her eyes were open, her vision was engaged, but she was not seeing me.

  “Sarah. Sarah.”

  I awoke with a start. I did that so that I would not die.

  Falco mexicanos. Four bones of this species indicate at least three individuals: an adult, a male-sized immature, and a female-sized immature. It should be noted that, of the larger falcons, this species, which nests on cliffs, is most frequently encountered in southwestern archaeological sites. Some consider the prairie falcon a statewide resident that was formerly more common.

  Meg was asleep in bed beside me. I put my hand on the small of her back. She was warm. It was difficult to know if I was comforted by her presence or her warmth. The truth was that I was not comforted at all. I recalled when my daughter had come into our room every night and climbed into my side of the bed. I never encouraged it, but I never discouraged it either. I knew that it would stop, and it did, abruptly. She was a preteen. It bothered me that it would feel creepy if she had come in now. Yet I wanted her always coming to me; I wanted that child again.

  the gene CLN3 is located on the p12.1 region of chromosome 16 and contains at least 15 exons spanning 15 kilobases

  I was standing outside my classroom. It being early in the semester, I was about to give for the fiftieth time my lecture on how Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference. I was preparing for the glazing over of eyes as math entered the subject.

  “Professor Wells?”

  I turned to find the young woman who always sat right in front of me in class. She wanted an A, that was clear. I would no doubt give it to her because she sat in the front row and wanted it; it mattered to her. “Miss …” I searched for her name.

  “Charles. Rachel Charles.”

  “Miss Charles. Do you have a question?”

  “Do you believe Eratosthenes actually used the obelisk at Alexandria, or did he use a scape?”

  She was, she thought slyly, letting me know that she had done the reading. I was pleased that she had done the reading, but I truly could not have cared less. For this I felt bad. Briefly.

  “I just want you to know that I really like the class.”

  “Thank you, Miss Charles.”

  “Would you mind calling me Rachel? I don’t like my last name.”

  I studied her stunningly average face. “Why is that? Charles sounds like a good, sturdy name.”

  “It’s my father’s name, and he wasn’t much of a father. Isn’t much of one. So, would you mind?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Okay, Rachel.” I looked at my watch. “Almost time to start, and I have to draw some stuff on the board.”

  “Okay.” She looked down the hallway. “I’m going to grab a quick coffee. Can I bring you one?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She turned to walk away.

  “Rachel.”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks for asking.”

  I had said her name just so she would know I remembered it.

  I felt my shoulders sag as I stepped into the classroom. I knew that the only thing most of the students would remember years after would be the joke “schist happens.” Yet none of them would even get “subduction leads to orogeny.”

  Centrocercus urophasianus. A left coracoid and left scapula from the surface of antechamber 1 are referred to the same individual. Both are in the female size range, as is the surface humerus reported in an earlier excavation. Another, well-preserved right femur was found in a pack rat nest in the upper end of antechamber 1. Its minimum axial length is 68 mm, maximum 73 mm, putting it also in the size range of a female sage grouse.

  At home I found a package left by the postman. It was addressed to me, always a thrill. I seldom bought anything online, but I had ordered a tin cloth Filson jacket on eBay and there it was. I set it aside and gave Basil a long greeting, then turned him out into the backyard. I was alone in the house and so fell onto the sofa to enjoy the quiet. I put myself to sleep by recalling my lecture. The last thing I remembered thinking of was my overly excited proclamation that the Greeks knew in 200 BC that Earth was round and about twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. When I woke up five minutes later, my box was still there. I opened it and tried on the jacket. It fit perfectly, was perfectly rugged, was perfectly old fashioned. Meg and Sarah would find it perfectly boring. It was perfect.

  I lay back down on the sofa and looked out the big window at the hills. There was not a cloud in the robin’s egg–blue afternoon sky. From our house we could see the trails in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. I had half a notion to take Basil on a long walk up the hill, but the Santa Ana winds were blowing, and I was sick of the heat. The house was cool and I was comfortable. I would just lie there and get fat like my dog.

  My wife and I loved our daughter, and so we were together. Had it not been for Sarah, I doubt we would have continued as a couple. We liked each other well enough and I was a faithful and devoted husband, but I was bored, and I am fairly certain she was as well. But that was okay. I was not bored with my family. I was not bored with my child. I was not unhappy with Meg. I was not unhappy with my job, which incidentally bored me most of the time. I was, to say it again, simply in love with my daughter, with being a father.

  Accipiter striatus. One bone, a tibiotarsus in the size range of a f
emale. This species is uncommon in this area now. Buteo jamaicensis. Quite common in the area, this species is represented by a complete tarsometatarsus. One burnt and broken buteonine pelvis. A coracoid within the range of at least three buteonine species.

  Things developed, as they will, and usually when we speak of such development, “things” means bad things. And so it was.

  A bad mark on Sarah’s social studies test prompted her to confess that she was not seeing all that well. The whiteboard was a blur. Pages as well. It was an easy enough problem to address and to accept. My wife had worn glasses since early childhood, so it was no surprise to discover that Sarah had her eyes.

  The appointment with the eye doctor was on a Wednesday. I didn’t teach on Wednesdays, so I took her. The doctor was a pleasant young woman who hummed a lot, more and more as the examination went on. I asked her why she was humming. She didn’t answer. She had my daughter stare at a distant farmhouse.

  “Is this better or worse?”

  “Worse.”

  “Better or worse?”

  “Same.”

  “Now?”

  “Same.”

  “How about now?”

  “Same.”

  She moved my daughter and took another look at her eyes through the phoroptor. To me the doctor said, “I can’t prescribe glasses because I can’t figure out what’s going on. She seems to be both near and farsighted and neither.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Nothing. I can’t tell you anything. I think she needs to see an ophthalmologist. I can’t find anything wrong with her eyes.”

  That was, to say the very least, disconcerting. To say the most, it caused me to climb my interior walls like a crazed cricket. I relayed the thin substance of the appointment to my wife and we spent the rest of that night climbing our respective walls, taking turns supplying optimistic nothings.

  “What do you think is going on?” she asked again.

  “I made an appointment with Dr. Terence. Tomorrow at three. She’ll tell us what to do next.”

  “I’ve never liked that Dr. Terence. She’s always trying to be funny.”

  “She’s a kids’ doctor. Anyway, she’ll give us the name of an ophthalmologist. If we need one. Might be something simple.”

  Meg nodded.

  Meleagris crassipes. A distal end of a tarsometatarsus was obtained from a pack rat nest. The nest had been burned by vandals, so the bone was somewhat calcined. The fragile specimen was damaged after identification, then restored. The plane of the trochlea and curvature of the distal-most end of the shaft distinguish this species from the common turkey, M. gallopavo.

  In my dream, a dream that I did not trust from its onset, probably because of the furnishings, I was not myself but instead someone who knew me well and pretended to be me. He, as me, arrived home to sit at the dining room table with a woman who pretended to be my wife and my daughter, who was, in fact, my daughter. My daughter knew that neither of her parents were really her parents, but she didn’t let on. She was frightened, quietly so, the worst way to be afraid, more scared than I had ever seen her. Even the fake me was taken by this fear, and wherever the real me was, I was feeling cold deep in the pit of my stomach. My daughter moved her food around on her plate with a spoon, and the fake me found this odd. Her fake mother and fake father talked about things that never happened. Then, in my dream, I complained about my dream, singled myself out as the maker of the dream, then laughed. Laughing, I didn’t know if I was me or the pretend me. I awoke with the same feeling.

  Some officials in Juárez considered that devil worshippers might be the killers of the women. They sketched a map showing that the locations of past murders outlined a pentagram. People see what they want. With so many sites of murders one could construct a Christmas tree or a poodle’s face.

  Hilary Gill was an assistant professor. Her area was earthquakes, and unfortunately she had yet to do anything groundshaking. She was extremely young, an attribute that upon her hiring had suggested genius but now after five unproductive years came across as immaturity. She came to see me in the eleventh hour, asking how she might gain tenure and escape dismissal.

  “What’s in the works?” I asked. “Any papers near done?” I already knew the answer to this question.

  “Not really.”

  We were sitting at a café on campus near the football and soccer practice fields. Flip-flop-clad athletes, men and women, strolled by with their shuffling gaits. Hilary kept looking around uncomfortably.

  “Where does your fieldwork stand? What kind of shape is that in?”

  “I have a lot of data.” Always a bad answer.

  I sipped my coffee and watched her as she wouldn’t look at me. A couple of years earlier I had instructed her to ignore the advice of colleagues who told her to attend every conference she could. I had suggested that she refuse all committee work. She hadn’t followed my advice and here she was, scrambling to make scant data fit into poorly conceived experiments. And, of course, no grants.

  “What should I do?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Hilary. Sometimes things get to the point where it’s just too late.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think I’m saying you should start looking for other jobs.”

  Hilary didn’t show it, but she was weeping. It was then that I had the realization that this was not the first of such conversations she had had. I was not special. She was no doubt seeking out colleague after colleague in search of either a strategy, or at least encouraging, even if misguided, optimism.

  “Sometimes it’s just too late.”

  Truth and satisfaction.

  While waiting with my daughter to see her pediatrician, my wife and I held hands. I could not remember the last time we held hands.

  There was a large aquarium embedded in a wall shared by two waiting areas, one for sick patients, the other for well. We were on the well side.

  Sarah studied a movie magazine. We held hands. My phone sounded. I turned it off and shoved it into the pocket of my newly acquired jacket. In that pocket I found a small slip of paper, the kind of slip that often says something like “Inspected by 53.” But this slip of paper said, “Ayuadame.”

  “What’s that?” Meg asked.

  “It was in my pocket. It says, ‘Ayuadame.’”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s ‘help me’ in Spanish, right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder where it came from. I just bought this jacket.”

  “It’s not new,” she said.

  “No, it was pre-owned, as they say.”

  The nurse called for us.

  Phalarope fulicarius. The proximal end of a right ulna was recovered at the 35–40 cm level. The phalaropes are similar osteologically to the small sandpipers.

  A note in a gutter. Does it mean anything? Is there any propositional content without a context? The note says, “the horse is yellow.” Found in the city street, does it mean anything? Is there a horse? Is it yellow? Was a child practicing her handwriting? Were the letters typed by a monkey? A sentence by accident? Marks on a page? What if the note read, “the horse is and is not?” It is senseless, but what does it mean?

  My daughter loved the infinite monkey theorem. She realized, of course, that the idea did not concern actual monkeys, but she wondered, rather correctly, why that mattered. She laughed and asked, “What if Shakespeare was just hitting keys?”

  “Shakespeare didn’t have a typewriter,” I said.

  “What if he was just making marks on paper? And that’s how he came up with Macbeth?”

  “I doubt it. Maybe Measure for Measure. I could see that with Measure for Measure. Not Macbeth.”

  Dr. Terence was a very young woman. My wife didn’t trust her age and lack of experience. I figured because she was young she was up on all the latest journals. And perhaps because she was young Sarah liked her. That was important.

  “
So, what’s going on?” she asked.

  “You tell her,” I said to Sarah.

  “I’m not seeing very well.”

  The doctor tipped back Sarah’s head and looked at her eyes while she talked. “Things blurry?”

  “The optometrist couldn’t find her problem,” I said. “Rather, she couldn’t solve the problem.”

  “Okay.” She rolled back on her stool. She looked at the chart and noted the vitals, listened to and observed everything much in the way that I might stare at a car’s engine.

  “Any pain in your eyes? Headaches?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  Dr. Terence held her hands wide on either side of Sarah’s head, well past her ears. “Keep your eyes pointed at my face. Can you see my hands?”

  “No.”

  She brought her hands forward. “How about now?”

  “No.”

  Forward some more, her hands now well in front of Sarah’s ears.

  “There, I can see them.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you think it is?” Meg asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to refer you to Dr. Peterson over at Children’s Hospital. He’s a pediatric ophthalmologist.”

  I could see that Meg was unhappy.

  “How are you sleeping these nights?” Dr. Terence asked Sarah.

  “Same as always.”

  “Hard to wake up?”

  “No.”

  “What does that tell you?” Meg asked.

  “I’m just asking questions,” the doctor said.

  “I see. So, the ophthalmologist will be able to help?” Meg was leaning forward in her chair, making a show of leaving.

  On the way out of the office, Meg said, “That was a waste of time.”

  I rubbed Sarah’s head. “We got the referral. That’s what we came for. We’ll get this figured out. Right, bug?”

  Galinula chloropus. The species is represented by the distal end of a tibiotarsus. This species does not require extensive vegetation for breeding but permanent water and aquatic plants.

  That night Sarah went to bed easily and quickly. Perhaps the doctor’s appointment on top of a full day of school had worn her out, or maybe it was simply anxiety. If she wasn’t anxious before, her mother and I had probably stirred some.