Singing With All My Skin and Bone

by Sunny Moraine

  The hole and the space beyond don’t eat the sound. But the darkness seems to, in some kind of fundamental way entirely to do with perception. People come back and they need to talk to someone, anyone; they need to hear a voice. More than they need to see. Most of them actually prefer complete darkness. But they need to be spoken to. Sung to. They need to go to sleep to endless, repetitive bedtime stories.

  Recorded voices don’t work. They also don’t seem to help the outbound while they’re out. As with so much of this, no one is sure why. There’s something about externality and sentience; a human voice in the void with you and on the other end of that connection. These people need whispers in the endless dark that’s settled itself into the expanses between their altered synapses.

  They need to know they still have a present. They need to know they’re here. A touch. A tether. That seems simple. So I took this job because it was something I could do.

  I set my own hours. I can also work from anywhere, technically, since all I need is a data connection and audio. But this isn’t the kind of thing you do in public. Or I don’t. I tried once or twice, because it seemed more convenient, if I could make it practical. Go out, go to the park, cafes, walk around and look at things and maybe talk to people—the stuff you’re supposed to do in order to be a well-adjusted human being alive in the world. But when I tried it felt like fucking in the middle of the street. It felt awkward. Creepy. I was sitting at a table in a coffee shop and my skin started crawling.

  I took the call because I knew she didn’t want me to do anything too raw. She just wanted to chat. About what she was up to, how she’s been settling back into her house and getting some renovations done. About streams she likes—turns out we liked a couple of the same ones. About nothing. The business of being. There was nothing to overhear, if anyone wanted to eavesdrop.

  But I couldn’t do it. It felt obscene. It still does a lot of the time—sometimes it is, depending on what people seem to need—but in private it’s easier.

  So I set my own hours, but I also don’t go out much anymore.

  *

  I tend to put myself on-call late at night, my time. I don’t know what it is, but the words flow easier and with less concentration, which means the sessions tend to be less exhausting. But late at night—though granted, the specific provider that employs me is global and some of the people who call aren’t anywhere near my timezone—is when things also tend to get weird.

  I don’t mean sexual stuff. I mean, there is more of that, and it is often less conventional. But I mean weird. People call and they just breathe, there’s very little info in their profile to guide me, and I flail around, trying to hit on anything they might want. Or they want to perform for me—sing songs they wrote or poetry they’ve written and get honest critiques. Or they want me to play some kind of role for them, and the roles are disturbing.

  I can’t complain. I put myself in this position. For some reason I haven’t articulated to myself, I prefer it. But I don’t like it, and every second I’m on-call my stomach twists itself into tighter and tighter knots, birthing slow nausea.

  Sometimes I feel the persistent suspicion that I’m looking for something. Waiting for something specific to come along. I have no idea how I would know it when it comes. But I keep going, held fast to it. My own tether is to some unspecified future, and that’s unsettling.

  There are things I don’t know, and I don’t know if I wish I could.

  I wander the apartment, watching the yellow and black stripe-shadows from the half open blinds float across my skin. I am a bee in the dark. I’m buzzing to unseen companions. We spin through a cold, starless void and now and then we orbit each other. But gravity always flings us away again, and in the end I’m as lost as they are.

  *

  Four AM. Stream on mute, whiskey. I shouldn’t drink on the job and if somehow I were caught I would be fined per my contract, but I just got done with a two hour session of… People joke about mommy issues, daddy issues. I think they joke because those issues are completely universal—literally, and it seems like months of near-sensory deprivation make those issues a hell of a lot worse. Even worse when you come back and discover Mommy and/or Daddy are dead, and there are things you want to say to them.

  Anyway. That’s why I’m drinking.

  But I’m still on-call. So when I’m called, if the profile doesn’t make it clear that I absolutely can’t handle it, I have to take it.

  This is a woman. Three years younger than me. Went out, came back, didn’t know anything. The dates of departure and return and that’s all. That’s she’s a woman, and a couple of numbers that tell me essentially nothing.

  Don’t take the call. Come up with an excuse. You can do that, you think on your feet for a living.

  Low voice, soothing, smooth, utterly neutral. Default Mode. And no hi, you’ve reached the ______ foundation/corporation/organization. Nothing to indicate the financial nature of this transaction. From the second I take the call, I’m spinning a carefully flexible web of artifice and make-believe.

  “Hey, how’s it going? Do you need to talk to someone?”

  Nothing on the other end of the line, and at first I think it’s another breather, which I simply do not know if I can handle. But then, a voice just as low as mine.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m here to talk. Whatever you need. Is there something in particular you’d like to talk about?” A little brisker than normal, if I’m honest, but now that this has started, I want it over as soon as possible.

  Nothing again. Then, “I... I don’t know. I’ve never done this.”

  “Doesn’t have to be anything specific.” Vague would have been exasperating. New, I can work with. “Is something on your mind?”

  “I don’t know.” A shaky breath, and words all in a rush, tumbling end over end. “I just... I don’t know, I haven’t talked to anyone in months, I don’t... I don’t know if I can do this, I’m sorry.”

  Freshly inbound. Her profile said.

  “You don’t have to do anything. If you need to hear someone talk, I can take care of that. I can read to you, or there are things I can tell you about. Would any—”

  “Tell me about your sister.”

  I drop my own sentence and I merely sit there in the dark, and her last words hang in that darkness with me. I’m staring at it. It rotates slowly, shadowy, like a planet far removed from its star.

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  “No?” Her voice is so low it’s almost inaudible. “Oh. All right. I’m sorry.”

  And she’s gone.

  *

  Sometimes the people who go out make their aims known. Sometimes they want everyone to know what they’re looking for, what secret is dragging them into the dark. More often they go out with that secret firmly kept so. That’s why it’s a secret to begin with. If they come back knowing.

  Hell. We don’t know how many come back knowing things and never tell. All we know about are the crazy ones. Those are the only ones we can count.

  Sometimes it can kill you, wondering what they wanted. Wondering what they needed to know that badly. Sometimes it keeps you up at night. Keeps you on-call, because there’s no point in letting your damn brain whirl like a hurricane.

  We don’t ask. We’re not allowed to ask. For whatever reason, they never volunteer the information. But you wonder.

  Maybe you’re waiting for the one time that changes.

  *

  Something that interested me—kind of surprised me—when I started out in this job is that you actually don’t get a whole lot of repeat business. For the most part when someone calls you once you don’t hear from them again. Maybe once or twice more, but nothing else. It’s an interesting contrast with what I understand traditional therapy is like: you form a relationship with someone, you reveal a long strand of history beaded with problems and you work through it together, fingering every bead like a rosary, praying for healing. Absolution. Your sin was sentien
ce. The fall of self-awareness.

  These people don’t want to be self-aware. They had months in the dark to become aware of themselves. So you don’t form an attachment. You don’t let anyone get to know you that well. You confess but you don’t pray. This therapy is all one night stands.

  It’s not just for them. We see the same profile pop up more than once, we have the option of referring. It’s not good for business if we’re being forced into emotional bonds we don’t want and can’t control.

  You can’t get attached to someone you can’t save.

  Rain. The streetlights outside catch the drops on the window, illuminate them like flowing balls of mercury. Every trickle on the glass a river. I map them, and when her profile comes up I don’t refer, and I have no idea why.

  I really fucking should.

  “Hi. Do you need to talk to someone?”

  “Yeah. I... I think so. Yes.” As uncertain as before... And also not so much. She sounds more there than she did. She’s not just listening on the other end. She sounds like she might be able to reach. “I can’t sleep.”

  So she’s in my time zone. Probably. Actually, who the hell knows; I get the distinct sense that the people who call me—like me—don’t maintain a conventional circadian rhythm.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  There’s a long silence. Then, quietly: “Do you think everyone has a moment where... when they realize that someday everyone they love is going to be gone?”

  It’s not the weirdest question I’ve ever been asked. I lay a hand on the window, watch rivers of rain vanish into my fingertips. “I don’t know. Did you have one?”

  “I don’t remember one. I don’t remember when I knew. It just happened.” Another pause. Her voice hasn’t increased in volume, but it sounds clearer, as if she’s moved into an area with better reception. “I think I had to lose someone before it was real. It happens once, it can happen anytime. You think about little kids at the funerals of grandparents. A body is just a body, no matter how much makeup they cake on. Little kids are little but they aren’t stupid. They know the person is gone. They’re looking at a thing. Suddenly it’s right in front of them, solid enough to touch. Maybe they don’t completely understand it at the time, but the seed gets planted. It sprouts. Every time it happens. Every time you lose someone else.”

  I don’t completely follow what she’s saying. That’s also not unusual. But I don’t like it. It’s not like usual, and I’d like it to stop. As I suspected I might, I’m wishing I had just referred. “So you lost someone? Was it a grandparent?”

  “I lost everyone.”

  This is common among people who come back, regardless of what they know. The isolation. The inability to connect, to reconnect with people with whom they shared the deepest possible connections. They know there’s a good chance of this and it doesn’t seem to matter to them.

  “Can you tell me how?”

  More silence. Then I hear it: an odd clicking. A crackle. As if that good reception is gone.

  “The usual. Space, Lonnie. Space and time.”

  We never tell them our names. Ever.

  I have no idea what the fuck I would say, if I could move my lips. My tongue. Every nerve ending just quit on me. Refused to accept any more input.

  Wouldn’t matter anyway. She’s gone. For real this time.

  For real.

  *

  She calls a third time, two days later. We get as far as the introductory lines, there’s about a minute of silence, then she cuts the call.

  *

  I’ve never wanted to quit. I’ve never actually wanted to stop doing this. Not that I love it. Work like this has a kind of inertia. It’s difficult for me, now, to imagine doing anything else. That’s not a problem, but it’s a thing.

  Honestly sometimes I have a hard time remembering when I did anything else. What it was like. What I used to want to do. What I used to want. What I want now. What I’m waiting for. Whether maybe I was hoping I might find something.

  Whether something happened that made me forget.

  I sit and I try to remember. The non-sound of an open line is like a conch shell full of darkness. There used to be something there. There might be again. What you’re listening to is the sound of alternates. Every possible voice. So many. This one keeps coming back.

  In that darkness, something moves.

  *

  I sit by the window with the phone set to on-call and I watch the rain. I do this for hours. The rain continues for those hours. Longer. It rained yesterday, and the day previous. I’m having difficulty remembering what I did before this; I’m also having difficulty remembering what the world was like when it wasn’t raining. Sunlight instead of this endless low gray. Color instead of monochrome. I stare, and sometimes blinking becomes an afterthought and when at last I do, my eyes burn and sting with dry-air grit.

  I don’t have the past anymore. I’m not sure about the now.

  I’ve dealt with my share of problematic clients, but this one is different and I have no idea how to explain it to myself. I don’t want to avoid this girl. I don’t want to refer her. I could. I don’t actually need the money that badly and it’s not like I can’t pick up another one. I have scores. But I don’t want to, so I don’t.

  I want her to call. Want to know if she will.

  The sun lost behind the clouds goes down. In the dark, I’m waiting, and I haven’t spoken to her in three days.

  In these moments of deep waiting, poised on the edge and ready to be knocked over into the abyss when what you’re waiting for finally goes down, they stretch out and out and you occupy them like a pocket universe. They enfold you. Everything is about one single thing. You don’t remember a before and it’s difficult to imagine an after. You wait and you want and it consumes you.

  I’m having trouble remembering familiar faces in any detail. I’m having trouble remembering the names of my old friends, the ones I’m still in contact with. Or was. I’m losing myself and it doesn’t panic me. It’s like watching from a distance, separate from the self I’ve become. I’ve split off because there isn’t enough room in that pocket universe for more than a small fragment of I.

  I’ve been here before. Sitting in the dark, blinds drawn now against a wet night. Touching my cheeks and brow and nose and chin, weirdly fascinated by the structure of my own bones, which I’ve had forever but which I suspect may be like a word repeated until it becomes strange, feeling and sounding alien in the mouth and ears. I’ve been here in this capsule, and I know what it’s like to wait for a call that won’t come.

  I know what it’s like to be tired of waiting.

  *

  I don’t remember picking up the call. I don’t remember checking the ID info or glancing at the dossier. I don’t remember making the decision to do it, to do anything. I don’t remember these things because I don’t need to, because the motivations for a thing ultimately don’t matter once the thing is happening.

  This is the nature of the present.

  I read a piece once on some science site or other about how we make decisions. About how we don’t make them at all, at least not the way we like to think we do. About how we just do shit—we see a collection of options in front of us and we lunge for one according to a logic far beneath anything we’re conscious of, and once it’s been done and we can look back at it with a minute or two of hindsight, we come up with the thought process that led us there. We construct something that never existed in the first place, like looking back at the river you’ve crossed and building the bridge so you can understand how you got there.

  I don’t make the decision. I’m just taking the call, and I’m floating in the dark and as always I’m waiting.

  “Lonnie?”

  Lifting my hand, turning my fingers against the streaks of rain-light on the window. Streaks but also beads; caught like they are, they look like stars. Close enough to be spherical, suspended on a transparent membrane. “I’m here.”

&nb
sp; “I know you are.” She’s silent. Dead air. Then, “What do you want, Lonnie?”

  No decision to make. “I don’t know.”

  Lost in the dark, waiting to be found. In the end a voice is all I had. I don’t have light. On a call, my body doesn’t matter. It has no part in the connection I’m making, the connection I have to make. There are my lungs, my vocal cords, teeth and tongue and lips, but after long enough you stop noticing those.

  In the end, without a voice, I’m nothing.

  “Did you come here to find out?” She takes a breath, slow. It sounds like wind in trees. I think of the spreading branches of bronchi, red like autumns I can barely recall. They flare with the inward rush of oxygen and fade as it leaves them.

  Things happen and we only make sense of them after, if we make sense of them at all. We always want to know, we want to know everything, but I think what we want to know more than anything else is why. They never ask me, but I think it was behind every word they said and every word they asked me to say.

  It happens, and you only find out after. Gone. And she never said. And you don’t know why.

  “I can’t explain that.”

  “No, Lonnie. You can’t.”

  “What do you want?” I’m tight with sudden desperation. I’ve been waiting and it’s been here the whole time, but it keeps slipping away. I just wanted to know. Every voice, maybe this would be the one who could tell me. I don’t want the past or the present or the future. I don’t want anything that complicated.

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Everyone wants something.” They do. I’ve learned that. It’s one of the few things I know. “That’s why they call.”

  “That’s why they’re here in the first place. But they don’t want what they want, Lonnie. That’s why they always go back empty. Even when they have something, they go back empty. They need to be filled and they have no idea with what, and that’s why they call you. They reach out to you because they want to know what they wanted in the first place, and they don’t have any answers. They won’t even talk to themselves anymore. When they went out, that was taken from them. They didn’t think about the choice so they didn’t know what they were giving up.” She pauses again, and I listen to the wind. “And they look back and there’s no bridge. There isn’t even a river. There’s just the dark.”