by C M Muller
She held out the receiver and yelled, “Liza! Liza Collingham! They’re asking for you. I think.”
Liza was one of the newer residents. A series of strokes had brought her here. She still couldn’t really move her right arm or walk without support, and yet she flashed past me like a sprinter half her age.
No one else dared breathe.
Liza took the phone, said “Hello,” then went silent. Everyone in the nurses’ station stared expectantly. Charmaine whispered, “Tell them about the staff.”
But Liza said nothing. She nodded twice and replaced the phone in its cradle. She looked up and smiled in a way I’d only seen in Renaissance paintings of mysterious, all-knowing women.
The room exploded in questions and accusations.
“Why didn’t you say anything to them?”
“Who was it?”
“Did they say what was going on?”
“You could’ve told them we needed help.”
“You should’ve said something.”
I didn’t join in. I was more interested in that weird smile.
Finally, under the din, Liza said something.
Everyone quieted and she spoke a second time, her words soft and sheer, as if her tongue had unraveled them from a spool of silk.
“They’re coming for me.”
Charmaine grabbed onto Liza’s good arm. “Who? Who was that? I could barely hear ’em. A lot of strange noises in the background.”
Liza patted Charmaine’s hands and said, “They told me that my two daughters are coming for me.”
More questions swirled: “Who told you that?” “Did they tell you why we don’t have any television?” “Was it one of the nurses?” “Can I come with you?”
Liza turned to us, beacons of triumph glowing in her eyes. “They told me,” she said. “The people on the phone. They told me. Maybe they’ll call for you, too.”
And the phone rang again.
Over the next two hours, the phone rang sixteen more times. I don’t know if seventeen is a magic number or has some kind of metaphysical significance, but that’s how many calls came in, and every one promised a ride and a rescue. None of them were for me, of course, but that was expected. My family already had plans to pick me up and I couldn’t hope for more than their promises. Even so, I loitered in the lounge with the rest of the mobile members of our community and secretly wished that my name might be shouted following one of the rings. That wish faded fast when I began to see how strange my neighbors who did receive calls acted after they’d talked to the people on the phone.
Except for Liza, who sneaked away to her room, every one of the recipients clammed up and sidled over to the grimy bay windows in the lounge, where they stood together in the cold light from outside and hummed low, monotone notes to themselves—not songs, mind you, but bare tones. To me, the humming sounded like that noise you hear when you stand under high voltage power lines. Martika Jessup, a woman from the first floor who sometimes played piano for us when her Parkinson’s allowed her fingers to slow their frantic dance, said that those hummed notes made her uneasy because they weren’t really notes at all but the frequencies between notes. Whatever our neighbors were doing, she said, had no basis in music. I didn’t entirely understand what she meant but the humming made my skin crawl, too.
One of my casual acquaintances in the home, Paul Blackmon, a man I played chess with a couple times every month, was a call recipient. As he stood by the windows humming his anti-music, I hobbled up next to him, tapped his shoulder, and asked him what he was doing. He stopped humming and, without turning to me, said “Waiting for it to turn.”
“Waiting for what to turn?” I asked, but he had resumed his humming and paid me no further attention.
During the spate of calls, only the seventeen people who received them and Charmaine, who insisted on manning the phone and screening all incoming messages “in case it was the authorities,” heard the voices of salvation on the other end of the line. After my peculiar interaction with Paul, I asked Charmaine if there had been anything odd about the voices. She told me that they sounded “damn peculiar,” but in a way that was hard to describe.
“Like when you set a record’s speed just a notch too high,” she said. “But also sort of like an answering machine that’s not really talking to you so much as talking at you. Sends a chill right through me, though I can’t rightly say why.”
By the time the last of the calls had come in and the phone had settled into prolonged silence, it was after noon. The internet was still unresponsive, 9-1-1 was still down, and the staff still hadn’t arrived. Our bedridden compatriots, many of whom lay in their soft coffins feebly moaning for aid, needed to be cared for. Although the rest of us were hungry and on edge, we tried to oblige as best we could. We wrangled pills and injectables and set off to help our siblings in enfeeblement traverse the terrain between mattress and toilet. As I stood with my hand on the paper-thin shoulder of a man whose name I didn’t even know and tried to coax him to choke down a barrelful of capsules and tablets, most of which he spit up onto his chest, I could only think that whoever had called old age the “Golden Years” must have died young.
I fled to my room as soon as our goodwill mission had ended, my hands smelling of urine from inexpertly emptying catheter bags and my joints already beginning to protest against their extended use. I scrubbed my arms in my room’s sink then tried the television again, but the only news it carried was that there was still no signal.
I slumped on my bed and stared out the window. Thoughts of dialing Zachory and Annie and leaving another message fluttered at my temples.
I glanced at Cammy’s present, silver wrapped and patiently seated on the chair in the corner of the room. The girl was going to be famous one day, was going to do important things. She was too sharp and too creative not to. I remembered her second grade Christmas program. She wrote a fifteen-minute play about being kind to homeless people for it. The plot included ghosts and a talking dog and the president of the United States who, if I recall, was an astrophysicist named Lilac. The rest of the kids in her class performed and she and her teacher directed. I think that was the day I knew she was going to be someone who changed the world. I wish Suzy was still around to see her. I wish Suzy was still around for a million reasons. This is what it is to be an old man: every thought becomes a wormhole to the past.
A voice from behind shook me from the embrace of nostalgia.
“Have you been watching outside? It’s scarier than the people downstairs.”
Patricia Cortez again, on the threshold of my room. I wondered if she was patrolling our hallway, seeking any ears that might be receptive to her worries.
“What are you talking about?”
Patricia bumbled into the room and motioned at the window but refused to come any closer to it.
“You don’t see? You don’t notice?”
I looked. I saw the chill, grey-toned bowl of the heavens. I saw the imposing oak, devoid of avian or insect amongst its branches. I saw the lawn outside, a wild scrubland rarely mowed or groomed. And I saw the road that ran parallel to the home, chock full of potholes and in desperate need of line repainting.
“No.” I shrugged. “What am I supposed to see?”
Patricia shuffled closer. “The cars,” she whispered. “There aren’t any. There haven’t been any all day. I’ve been keeping track.”
She was right. I waited and watched, but the road outside the home remained barren. Normally, vehicles of all manner pass by, as our wrinkled enclave lies just two miles from a large shopping plaza that includes a supermarket, a big-box store, and a Chinese buffet restaurant. Apparently no one was out shopping or gorging themselves today, though.
I stared at the road, curious where the cars had gone, a pin of unease stuck in my throat, and the road stared back, taunting me with the knowledge that it stretched to far off places well beyond the horizon, places I’d surely never see again.
I turned to ask Patricia whether she’d seen any airplanes or helicopters in the sky, but she’d disappeared from my room just as suddenly as she always appeared. Sometimes I thought that she must be a ghost that only I could see. In many ways the same could be said for all of us here at the home.
As the afternoon crept by, I loaded up on another round of pills and tottered my way back downstairs. I had to be ready if—no, no, when—Zachory and Annie showed up.
The call recipients were still in the rec room where I’d left them, waiting for their rides by the windows, humming their monotone hymn. I couldn’t believe that some of them hadn’t collapsed from exhaustion. Maybe the calls had imbued them with superpowers. Maybe a mystical energy generated by their hum had somehow shaved a few years of wear from their bodies. Or maybe the mere idea of jailbreaking the home, even if only for a few hours, had gifted them something that the sterile beige walls of the home seemed to constantly leach from us: a purpose to go on living.
Charmaine, still seated in the nurses’ station and hovering over the phone, motioned for me to join her. I’d never seen her frown. When she lost half her toes to diabetes last year, she laughed about it and said she was never good at dancing anyway. When doctors told her that she was too old to receive a bypass operation for her clogged and failing heart, she shrugged and flipped them her middle finger. But today, in the dim light of the nurses’ station where few people could see, the weight of worry dragged down the corners of her mouth.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said as I walked in, “you’re an intelligent man, a learned man. A former teacher, right?”
I nodded. I had been a teacher. I wasn’t so sure about the rest of it.
“So what do you make of them?” She pointed to the hummers at the far end of the rec room.
I studied the backs of their heads, the unflinching postures. “They’re very...focused,” I said.
Charmaine chuckled but her frown somehow remained. “Yeah, a little too focused. Have you ever seen anyone their age stand in place that long? Their feet must be swollen up like cantaloupes. But that’s not what I mean. I mean they’re all a little off. Up here.” Charmaine tapped her forehead.
I ran down the list of the people by the window and their infirmities. Blackmon, stroke. Greer, stroke. Cutter, Alzheimer’s. Chandra, stroke. Reyes, Alzheimer’s. Samuels, Alzheimer’s. As I mumbled their conditions to myself, I realized I was repeating only two primary debilitations.
Charmaine could see the comprehension dawning in my eyes. “So why them?” she asked. “Why just people with brain injuries? Why do they get to go and not the rest of us?”
I had no idea. Maybe in the answer to that question lay the answer to all questions great and small. Einstein famously said that God doesn’t play dice with the universe, and I believe it. God plays much more byzantine games, games that we don’t know the rules for, games that we can’t possibly understand though they’re constantly played out around us, with our lives as their tokens and currency.
“We don’t even know where they’re going,” I said. “Or if they’re going anywhere. Maybe no one’s actually coming for them.” A length of anxiety knotted itself in the center of my chest as I listened to my own words. My hand reached for the phone number sheet folded up in my pocket. I slid it back and forth between my index finger and thumb. Perhaps if I rubbed hard enough, I could summon Zachory like a genie from a lamp. I had only one wish, after all.
Charmaine shook her head and shuddered. “I’m telling you, those phone calls. The voices on the other end…” She broke off mid-thought, suddenly distracted by the people at the window who, without warning or apparent reason, had changed pitch. Their hum was now higher, much higher. It was the skirl of a tea kettle’s whistle but indescribably hollow, as though the sound that issued from their throats was an echo from much deeper within themselves or much farther outside our shrinking corner of the world.
Everyone in the rec room who could hear well enough to notice the change dropped what they’d been doing and looked past the hummers to the window itself—for what, none of us was sure.
The room suddenly grew dark, the four tall standing lamps in the corners of the room—lamps that remained on both day and night—becoming soft beacons in a hard-tossed, caliginous sea. Beyond the window settled an impenetrable murk. To call it black would’ve been wrong. Black implies a color, a substance, a tangible idea. What lay outside was none of those things. Gazing into it reminded me of lonesome nights filled with dreamless sleep and the longing for dead friends and lovers.
Liza Collingham broke from the group by the window and edged toward the reinforced glass double doors to the main entrance.
A pale red glow flashed out from within the murk. It could have been a car’s taillights, but it could have just as easily been lightning or UFOs or the bloodstained eyes of a marauding demon.
“They came for me!” Liza called out. “Just like they said!” Before any of us realized what had happened, she pushed open the doors—from which swept a blast of frigid, soul-shattering wind—and walked through, immediately disappearing into the darkness without a sound or a stirring.
Most of the residents who had gathered in the rec room, myself included, were too stunned to say or do anything meaningful. We gaped at the entranceway, now an exit to anywhere. Icy cyclones continued to spin out from the darkness, the windows in the room rapidly frosting over and frostbite snapping at our noses, our fingers, the lobes of our ears.
“Close the goddamned doors!” someone shouted, but no one moved.
I tried to force myself forward, but my body wouldn’t respond. Everywhere the currents from the doorway brushed against me, I felt the infinite heaviness of regret. I thought of the darkness in the hallway outside my children’s bedrooms when they were younger. I thought of the muffled conversations they held at night, conversations I could never be a part of, conversations I desperately wanted to join. I thought of all the hugs I could’ve given, but didn’t. Paralyzed in every way, I thought of distances even greater than that between the rim of the universe and the center of the human soul.
Unexpectedly and without notice, the people by the window dropped their hum back into its initial register and, outside, the murk disappeared—whether as a precursor or as a response it was impossible to say. Rather than dissipate like a fog or gradually fade into day as nights must do, this darkness simply winked away, its chill uniformity replaced by an abandoned afternoon.
The doors to the home drifted shut with an anticlimactic swoosh.
My thoughts returned to the present, where I found I could move again. In a daze, I shambled to the doors and peeked through. Several other equally curious residents joined me by the entrance. I feared, but half-expected, that Liza Collingham’s lifeless body would be sprawled on the other side, frozen stiff or worse. But no. Liza was nowhere to be seen, dead or alive. For that matter, much of the world was nowhere to be seen.
The titanic oak trees and lilac bushes that normally graced the front yard, the gold and blue “Serenity Acres” sign posted by the home’s driveway, the cinderblock dentist’s office across the street, the fancy new gas station and convenience store next to the dentist’s place, even the very tarmac road that ran past the home: all had vanished. There was no concrete foundation left at the dentist’s office or the gas station, no gaping holes in the ground where the shrubbery and trees had once been rooted, no indication that anything had gone missing anywhere. Yet I wasn’t crazy. Those things had been part of the view from the home since I arrived. It was a view that I knew too well, given that most days there’s little else to do here other than stare onto a world we can barely recall without a frayed edge of sadness, a world we helped build and shape but that’s perfectly content to continue on without us.
“Where’s the gas station?” someone beside me asked.
No one responded because there was no adequate response to give.
After a few
minutes of quiet disbelief, we all drifted back into the rec room where I checked the time. If the clocks could be trusted, it was a quarter past one.
My joints were already complaining again, so I took up residence in a cushy, hopelessly stained recliner and waited, keeping the front entrance in my direct line of sight. I no longer believed that I’d taste Cammy’s birthday cake later in the afternoon, but I wanted to believe. I wanted a reason, any reason, to believe. So I watched the entrance, just in case.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty minutes passed. I kept watching the entrance, hoping Zachory’s car would materialize on the other side, hoping Annie would stroll up to the doors. But neither happened.
By the nurses’ station, an argument broke out between Charmaine and a wheelchair-bound man whose name I couldn’t remember. He was trying to persuade people to push him outside while Charmaine was trying to prevent anyone from passing through the exit. The man said he wanted to go out to “smell the air today” because, as he put it, “you can tell a lot about the kind of day it is by the way it hits the nose.” Charmaine had only to respond, “Liza Collingham went out there, now where is she?” to discourage any would-be volunteers.
As Charmaine and the wheelchair-bound man continued to bicker, the people by the window again raised the pitch of their hum. The argument immediately stopped. A few hearts probably stopped, too.
Just as it had before, the change in pitch coincided with the sudden appearance of the murk, which again slathered everything beyond the home in a thick tar of nothingness and leaked shadows into the rec room. Again a pale, red glow flashed out of the darkness and again one of the call recipients—a hunchbacked man named Vetterly—shuffled to the front doors.
Someone in the back of the room shouted “Don’t go out!”
Someone else shouted “It’s not your ride!”
And still another person began repeating the word “No” at increasing volumes.
Vetterly placed his hands on the door handles and was ready to yank them open when, from behind him, flew Charmaine Jackson. She grabbed both of Vetterly’s shoulders and whipped him around to face her. He struggled against her grip and cried out, “Let me go! They won’t wait for me! They won’t wait!” but Charmaine refused to release him.