“Advance copy,” the journalist said. “It hits the world tomorrow.”
Madeleine rose and stood behind Harrison’s shoulder, watching him flip pages.
“Page forty-six,” Jamey said. “I think you’ll like it.”
“Harry, your hand’s shaking,” Madeleine said, and laughed. “You want me to turn the pages for you?”
“He’s just another stranger about to be introduced to a new friend: celebrity,” Jamey said, smoking a cigarette, her elbows propped up on the table.
Harrison turned the pages. He tried to steady his hand. These sudden nerves—was it because he was about to read about himself? Or because of the echo inside his head, the sound that lay trapped and reverberating inside his skull? This chick has access to you.… He smiled palely at Madeleine, feeling a vague sense of guilt that he hadn’t told her yet about the most recent message. What was the point? What was the point in scaring her further anyhow?
“Page forty-six, Harry,” Maddy said. “Let me do it for you.” She reached over. He felt foolish, like a small child being helped. “There, there it is.”
For a moment his eye was drawn to the facing page, where there was an advertisement for Camels. And then he scanned the article and began to read.
SORRY? RIGHT NUMBER
by Jamey Hausermann
Imagine a pale, thin, rather effeminate young man stepping furtively into a small booth dimly lit by a single overhead bulb and pulling the folding door closed behind him. He sits for a moment in silence, then begins to bare his soul. “Please help me,” he says in a whisper, then his voice becomes clearer as he recounts his first homosexual experience. “It felt really good. I don’t know if I did anything wrong. I don’t think I did, but anyway—I’m sorry.”
There’s no penance, no absolution.
In a cluttered loft, which contains all the usual debris you associate with an artist—old canvases, tubes of paint, odds and ends that you figure must have some purpose to them—Apology says, “This is a new way of communication. People just can’t confide in people anymore. They can’t find anybody who’ll listen to their problems. Your friends have their own problems, psychiatrists cost too much, and the local bartender has heard it all before. So people tell the machine truths they normally wouldn’t tell other people.”
He believes in the project wholeheartedly. He went to the trouble of printing more than a thousand handbills, which he posted up all over the city recently. You’ve probably seen one and you’ve probably wondered if you should call. If you need to get something off your mind, go right ahead, because Mr. Apology always listens to his messages.
Even the one from a local priest who berated him by saying he didn’t have the qualifications for this line of work. “He’s going to preach a sermon against me next Sunday,” Apology says. “I wish I could say I was sorry.”
Harrison looked at the last line, smiled, turned to face Madeleine. Across the table Jamey Hausermann was lighting another cigarette.
“I took some liberties with your messages,” Jamey said. “You know what journalists are like.”
“I love it. I love the whole thing,” Madeleine said. “What do you think, Harry?”
Harrison put the magazine down on the table. It was weird to read about yourself: He might have been reading about somebody else, the invention of a reporter, somebody who didn’t exist at all except as a figment. A sink for emotions people find hard to contain. He’d never said anything quite like that to Jamey Hausermann, but he liked it anyhow—it fitted in some way. He picked up the magazine again, stared at it.
“Harry?” Madeleine asked.
“It’s a strange feeling,” he said.
“You’re having the old problem, Harry,” Jamey said. “When you first read about yourself in print you go through a whole identity crisis, right? Can this be me? Can this really be me? It’s okay. The feeling passes. Rest assured.”
Harrison looked at the article again, noticing for the first time that there was a pen-and-ink drawing of a telephone gripped by skeletal knuckles. It looked grim. He sat down at the table and thought: Get this into perspective. Tomorrow’s magazine is next week’s back issue. You’re an item, then you’re not. It comes and goes. “I like it, Jamey.”
“Sure?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“It’s probably going to cause you a whole bunch of trouble.”
“Like how?”
“Your telephone will be ringing off the wall.” Jamey rose, picking up her purse, looking at her watch. “Would you believe I’ve got to meet a guy at nine o’clock who’s just won the state lottery and refuses to move out of the Bronx? If that was me, oh boy, I’d be in the Bahamas on the first plane out.”
She walked out of the kitchen, followed by Madeleine. Harrison watched them cross the loft towards the door. They hugged each other, kissed cheeks, then Madeleine shut the door. She came into the kitchen, hugged him.
“Know something, kid?”
“Tell me.”
“I think I’m proud of you.”
A good feeling. He caught her hand, lightly kissed the back of it.
“You’re news, Harry. News. Remind me to buy up all the copies I can find tomorrow. And remind me to mail one of them to those stooges on the grants committee. No, don’t remind me. I won’t forget.” She sat down facing him. She lightly stroked the surface of the magazine. “By the way, I gave Berger one of the tapes.”
“Did he listen to it?”
“Patience. He will.” She was silent a moment. Staring at him. “I have this terrible urge to fuck your brains out, Harry. What are you going to do about it?”
“Do you have any brains left?”
“Have you ever been struck by a rolled-up magazine containing an article about yourself, my love?”
He leaned across the table and kissed her. I have to tell her about the most recent message, he thought. I have to do that much. He looked at her; she seemed so high, so excited by the article, that he didn’t have the heart to mention the damn thing. Why spoil her mood? Why wreck the moment? She gets off on this whole publicity bit.
Publicity, he thought.
What was there about the word that made him vaguely uneasy?
He had a sudden idea that his privacy would somehow be shattered, that some other journalist, perhaps less discreet than Jamey, would ask for an interview, promise him secrecy, and then go ahead and print his name anyhow.
He shook his head. It wouldn’t happen. There wouldn’t be any more interviews. He wouldn’t give any more, even if somebody did ask. Once was enough. Publicity was a thing to court frugally.
This chick has access to you.…
He closed his eyes, remembering how he had seized the receiver and talked into it, how the line had been dead. It was as if something inside him had broken for a solitary moment and he’d lost the edge of things, he’d given way, breaking in on a call from out there. Breaking in, wanting to tell the caller never to use the number again. It shouldn’t have happened like that. The whole point was that anybody, anybody at all, should have access to the Apology number. You couldn’t pick and choose your callers. They existed and acted independently of your desires and needs. You didn’t have control over them. You couldn’t stop some anonymous stranger from going into a phone booth and punching out the number—unless you did, as Levy had suggested, scratch the project entirely. No, he thought. He would see this thing through. He was going to do that much.
Finish something. Finish this project.
Madeleine had gone inside the bedroom. He could hear her moving around. He got up from the table and went to the doorway. He looked across the loft at the door, then he moved towards it and quietly slid the bolt in place. I’ve never done that before, he thought. It’s getting to me. He’s getting to me.
He went inside the bedroom and lay down beside Madeleine. He glanced at the answering machine. The red light was burning and he wondered what messages had come in during the time Jamey Hausermann h
ad been in the loft.
“Don’t,” Madeleine said.
“Don’t what?”
“I can read you like a book. Right now you’re thinking about a certain device that lies within a few feet of us at this very moment. However, Harry, I have other plans for you.” And she kissed him, her fingers sliding inside his shirt, one hand pressing into the small of his back. He shut his eyes. It was a lazy, wonderful drift, a sweet darkness, a sense of binding to the exclusion of separate identities: Orgasm seemed like some kind of deep rupture, something breaking into tiny, delicious fragments far inside himself. She held him, clasped him in such a way that she might never release him; it was almost as if she were afraid to let go of him, as if she were scared of losing him—losing me to what? he wondered. The tapes, the machine, the project. The message he had seen upset her so much the night before. She’s afraid of losing me to Apology. He shut his eyes, felt her fingertip trace a pattern on his face.
“I love you, Harry,” she said. She propped herself up on one elbow. “I love you very much.”
He pressed his face against her shoulder. Surprised by the force of her love. By its vigor. Surprised by the depths in her voice. Maybe that was the way love operated, a sneakthief of the heart, coming up behind you like a phantom. Catching you when all your guards and all your defenses were absent and all your senses suddenly alert. An awakening. He closed his eyes, enjoying the nearness of her body. It was an odd high to him: She affected him more than any other woman he’d ever known. More than any other he’d ever slept with. And what he realized was how strangely empty, lonely, his existence might be without her. How sad and dark. You’re going to the edge with this girl, Harry. You’re going to the edge of loving her. You’re beginning to fall off into some dizzying space.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“About you.”
“And?”
“I hate romantic language,” he said.
“Why?”
“I always feel there should be an alternative language of emotions. Something you could say without feeling so damned coy and embarrassed.” He touched her hair. It was as if, in the touch, he wanted to demonstrate some kind of gratitude. “But there aren’t new words. It’s always the same old language.”
She kissed him. “It works, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t speak. He could feel the strands of her hair brush the side of his face, cover part of his bare shoulder. He could feel her breath in his ears. The warmth of her flesh seemed to enter his own skin and go coursing through his bloodstream.
“Damn,” he said quietly. “I think I love you. I think I’ve loved you since I first knew you.”
He heard her laugh lightly.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“I knew that all along, Harry,” she said.
“How?”
She stared at him, palms of her hands pressed to the sides of his face.
“I told you before. I can read you like a book.”
“As transparent as that, huh?”
“Pretty obvious.”
He lay back against the pillow. Obvious. Transparent. He wasn’t altogether sure he cared for these words.
“Let’s make love again,” she said. She rolled towards him and he turned, very slowly, to meet her.
She wasn’t sure what time it was when she woke; it was still dark. She was conscious of Harry sitting up on the edge of the bed, aware of the red light glowing faintly on the answering machine, aware too of a voice coming across the tape. A familiar voice. She sat upright and turned on the bedside lamp and Harry swung around to look at her: There were dark circles under his eyes, a certain sleepless look.
“Harry,” she said.
He reached out and switched the tape off, a movement he made with unexpected haste.
“What is it?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes, looked at her watch on the bedside table. 3:24. Go back to sleep, she told herself. Don’t listen to anything. Pretend this was all a dream. An abrupt pointless dream. She couldn’t. The voice. The same goddamn voice. She’d heard it. And it was too late to go back.
“Harry, for Christ’s sake, say something.”
“It was just another message.”
“No,” she said. She shook her head. “It’s more than that, isn’t it? I can see it on your face. It’s more than just the usual insane message this time, isn’t it?”
“No.” He lay flat on his back, one hand rubbing his forehead.
She crawled across him, reached the tape machine, felt him seize her wrist and hold it tightly in his hand.
“You don’t need to hear it,” he said. “Maddy, you just don’t need to hear it!”
“You’re hurting my wrist, Harry.”
“I’m sorry.” He let his fingers go slack.
“I’ve heard the other ones. I might as well hear this.” You don’t want to, she thought. You don’t need to listen to this. You need to shut your eyes and go back to sleep.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I hate the idea of you keeping something secret from me.” She pressed the REWIND button, conscious of the way he was watching her, guarded, careful, like a visitor to somebody’s sickbed. The solicitous eye of a nurse.
She stopped the tape. Pressed PLAYBACK. Waited.
She was cold suddenly.
She lowered her head, watched the pattern thrown by the light bulb among the crumpled sheets. You can still stop it, she thought. You can still switch the thing off and ignore it. But as soon as she heard the voice, the awful voice, she realized she wouldn’t turn it off, she would listen, she would go on listening until the caller had finished.
MR. APOLOGY. SIR … I KNOW IT’S LATE. I’M SORRY. HA HA HA. WHY DO I SAY I’M SORRY WHEN YOU KNOW I NEVER AM.…
She saw her hand catch the sheets, bunch them. Her knuckles were white.
THIS WOMAN … I THOUGHT SHE WOULD KNOW.… UNDERSTAND? I THOUGHT SHE WAS SURE TO KNOW HOW I COULD FIND YOU, MAN. I FIGURED SHE WOULD HAVE A WAY TO GET YOU.… WELL, I FIGURED THE WHOLE THING WRONG.… SEE, SHE DIDN’T KNOW SHIT, APOLOGY. SHE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO GO LOOKING.… LOOKING.…
Was it the laughter?
Was it the coarse laughter that made her so ill at ease?
That made her blood chill?
SHE WANTED TO FUCK ME, SEE. I KNEW SHE WAS BEGGING FOR THAT. YOU KNOW HOW YOU CAN TELL, MAN? SOMETHING IN THE WAY THEY LOOK, LIKE THEY’RE HUNGRY.… I DUNNO.… BUT I ONLY WANTED TO GET AT YOU, APOLOGY. I THOUGHT SHE WAS LYING. I REALLY FIGURED SHE WAS LYING, TRYING TO PROTECT YOU, UNDERSTAND?
What woman? Madeleine wondered.
Who was he talking about now?
She picked up a pillow, hugged it. Something was coming—she knew it—something terrible was coming.
SHE JUST DIDN’T KNOW SHIT. I FIGURED BECAUSE SHE KNEW TELEPHONES SHE’D KNOW HOW TO GET TO YOU.… SHE SAID SHE ONLY SOLD THE GODDAMN THINGS AND THEN SHE SCREAMED.… I MEAN, SHE REALLY SCREAMED, MAN. SHE JUST OPENED HER MOUTH.…
Harry was watching her.
Concern. Anxiety. Waiting.
What’s coming? she wondered.
This woman, whoever she is, is going to die.
IT WAS PRETTY GODDAMN FUNNY, APOLOGY.… I DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE BATHROOM—SHE HAD ONE OF THESE BATHROOMS THAT’S ALL PINK TILE AND PINK FUCKING TOWELS, MAN. I DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE BATHROOM AND I DROWNED HER. CAN YOU PICTURE THAT, HUH? CAN YOU GET THAT PICTURE CLEAR? I STUFFED HER FUCKING HEAD IN THE SINK AND I FILLED THE THING UP WITH WATER AND I DROWNED HER AND THE FUNNY THING IS I WAS GONNA CHOKE HER, OKAY … BUT THEN I REALIZED I NEVER DROWNED ANYBODY BEFORE.… IT WAS KINDA PEACEFUL.…
Laughing, laughing, laughing.
Madeleine stared at Harry.
How much further could this go? She felt revulsion, a churning in her stomach, the fluttering of something with wings inside her chest.
I DIDN’T LIKE TO LEAVE HER LIKE THAT, BECAUSE IT DIDN’T SEEM DIGNIFIED.… I MEAN, SHE LIVED ALONE. SHE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A CAT OR ANYTHING … SO I
DRAGGED HER INSIDE THE KITCHEN AND I CUT HER.… I TOOK A KNIFE AND I JUST FUCKING HACKED AT HER HEAD, MAN.…
A pause.
A numbing pause.
SAY, APOLOGY. YOU GOT A WOMAN? I BET YOU GOT SOME PIECE OF CUNT, HUH? I BET YOU DO. I’D LIKE TO MEET HER ONE DAY. YEAH, I’D LIKE THAT. MAYBE I’LL SEE YOU TOGETHER, HUH? HOW DOES THAT GRAB YOU? HUH? YEAH, I KNOW YOU DON’T LIKE THE IDEA.… I’D LIKE TO TAKE THIS CUNT OF YOURS AND SCREW HER WITH A FUCKING HACKSAW.…
She put her hand out, touching Harry’s fingers.
She wanted something—consolation, protection, a place to hide. A place where she didn’t have to hear this voice. A big white silent room where this sound would never penetrate.
I DREW A BLIND TONIGHT, APOLOGY.… I CAME UP WITH THE WRONG CARD.… BUT I GOT TIME, MAN. I CAN STILL FIND YOU. I CAN STILL FIND YOU REAL EASY.… I LIKE THE IDEA OF YOU SITTING THERE THINKING YOU’RE SAFE. YOU AIN’T SAFE, MAN. I’M GONNA GET YOU.… I’M GONNA GET YOU SOON. I’M GONNA TAKE SOME REAL PLEASURE IN KILLING YOU … AND KNOW WHAT? JUST BEFORE YOU DIE, I’M GONNA SAY, “HEY, I’M SORRY. I’M REAL SORRY.” THEN I’LL TWIST THE BLADE IN YOUR NECK.…
The voice changed.
It became high-pitched, like the comic whine of some spook in a horror movie.
I’M COMING, APOLOGY. I AM COMING REAL SOON.…
The message ended.
She reached out, her hand shaking, and stopped the tape.
You didn’t hear any of that, did you?
It came out of the long tunnel of some bad dream.
Right. It never happened. It never took place.
She closed her eyes and felt Harry’s arm circle her naked shoulder.
“Tell me it’s just some fantasy, Harry, huh? Tell me it’s just some joker using the line to let off steam. Huh? Can you tell me that? Can you look me straight in the eye and tell me that? Can you?” She heard her own voice rising and rising, vaguely conscious of his fingers gently massaging her skin. “The hell you can! The hell you can!”
He was silent. The sound of his breathing seemed quick, shallow.
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