“You just faced it,” said Deeny. “Telling me.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t know. All I did was tell you. I can’t—I’m a coward. That’s what we are, the ones who linger here. Cowards. We just can’t go on. We’re too ashamed.”
“So you haunt cellphones?” She couldn’t keep the derision out of her voice. Did he expect her to believe this? Of course, she did believe it, because it made more sense than any other possibility that had occurred to her. So the dead live on. And some of them can’t bear to take the next step, so here they are.
“We never haunt things,” he said. “Not houses, not any thing. It’s people. We have to find some way to make ourselves . . . noticeable. To people. Somebody who knows how to look at other people and really see them. Somebody who’s willing to accept that a person might be where a person couldn’t be. Or a voice might be coming out of something that shouldn’t have a voice.”
“Why me?” she said. “And besides, Lex heard you, too.”
“Lex heard what she expected you to hear. Not the same voice, but the idea of the same voice. The voice you were hungry for.”
“I wasn’t ‘hungry’ for a man,” she said.
“You were hungry to have people think of you differently at school. But what you chose, what you pretended, was a man. A lover on the phone. And I could do that. I remember it . . . not how it felt because I don’t even have the memory of my senses, but I remember that I once felt it, whatever it was, and I liked it, and so I talked about what I did that I knew made girls . . . shiver. And ask for more. And let me do more. I remembered that. It’s what you wanted. I couldn’t miss it—you were screaming it.”
“No I wasn’t,” she said. “I never said it to anybody.”
“I told you, I can’t hear. I can only know. You were like a siren, moving through the streets. You were so lonely and angry and hurt. And I—”
You pitied me. She didn’t say it into the phone, because the battery was already dead, and anyway, he could hear her whether she spoke aloud or not.
“No,” he said. “Not really. No, I was attracted to you. I thought, here’s what she needs, I could do that.”
“Why bother?” she said.
“I’ve got anything else to do?” he asked.
“Granting wishes for sex-starved ugly teenage girls?”
“See, that’s the thing,” he said. “You’re not ugly.”
“I thought you couldn’t see.”
“I can’t. But I know what you see, and you’re completely wrong, the very things that you hate about yourself are the things that seem most sweet to me. So young, fragile, so real, so kind.”
Oh, right, Miss Bitch herself, let’s check this with Ms. Reymondo and see what she thinks.
“Stop listening to Treadmarks,” said the voice. The man. Carson. Vaughn.
“You really are raiding my brain,” she said.
“You know what? Your father is really just doing the best he can to deal with the fact that he lusts for you. You haunt his dreams.”
“Oh, make me puke,” she said. “That’s such a lie.”
“He never actually thought it through, but by treating you so badly, he guarantees that you’ll hate him and so he’ll never be able to get near you and try the things he keeps dreaming of doing. He hates himself every time he sees you. It’s very complicated and it doesn’t make him a good father, but at least he’s not as bad a father as he could have been.”
“What, were you a shrink?”
“Come on, I’ve been dead for seventeen years, I’ve had time to figure out what makes people tick. Never had a clue while I was alive, no one ever does.”
“So how many other girls have you talked dirty to.”
“You’re the first.”
“Come on.”
“The first who ever heard me.”
“Lex was first.”
“She heard me because you wanted her to.”
Deeny began to cry again. “I didn’t really. I didn’t know what I wanted.”
“Nobody ever does. So we try for what we think we want and hope it works out. Like me and Dawn. I thought I wanted to impress her so she’d sleep with me. All I did was scare her and then kill her. That wasn’t what I wanted. What I really wanted was . . . to marry her and make babies with her and be a father and watch my kids grow up and if I’d married her, if I hadn’t killed us, then maybe our first child would have been a girl and maybe she would have looked like you and when she was so lost and angry and hungry and sad, then maybe I could have put my arms around her, not like your poor father wants to, but like a real father, my arms like a safe place for you to hide in, my words to you nothing but the truth, but the truth put in such a way that it could heal you. Show you yourself with different eyes, so you could see who you really are. The dreamer, the poet, the singer, the wit. The beauty—yes, don’t laugh at me, you don’t know how men see women. There are boys who only see whether you look like the right magazine covers, but men look for the whole woman, they really do, I did, and you are beautiful, exactly as you are, your body and mind and your kindness and loyalty and that sharp edge you have, and the light of life inside you, it’s so beautiful, if only you could see what I know you are.”
“The only guy who sees it is a dead guy on the phone,” she said.
He chuckled. “So far, maybe you’re right,” he said. “Because you’re still in high school, and the only males you know are just boys. Except a few. This Wu kid, he’s not bad. He saw you.”
“Only after I got a reputation as a whore.”
“No, I know better than that. I really know. He saw you before. Before me. He just took a while to work up the courage.”
“Because his friends would make fun of him if he—”
“The courage to face a woman in all her beauty and ask if she’d give a part of it to him, just for a few hours, and then a few hours more. You don’t know how hard that is. It’s why the assholes get all the best women—because they don’t understand either the women or themselves well enough to know how utterly undeserving they are. But look at the guys who did that to you today. Look what they confessed about themselves. They already knew that the only way they could get any part of your beauty and your pride was to take it by force, because a woman like you would never give it to trivial little animals like them. All they could do was tear at you, rip it up a little. But they could never have it, because a woman of true beauty would never even think of sharing it with them.”
To her surprise, the words he said flowed into her like truth and even though they didn’t take away what had happened that afternoon on the bus, it took away some of the sting. It didn’t hurt so bad. She could breathe without gasping at the pain and shame of it.
“Now I know what I wanted,” she said.
“What?”
“On the phone,” Deeny said. “What I wanted on the phone.”
“Not a lover?”
“No,” she said.
And in her mind, she did not say the word aloud, but she thought it all the same, knowing he would hear.
What I needed was a father.
“Can I call you again?” she said. “Please?”
“Whenever you want, Deeny,” he said.
“Until you decide you can go on,” she said. “It’s OK with me if you go, whenever you want, that’s OK. But while you’re still here, I can call?”
“Just pick up the phone. You don’t even have to press the buttons. It doesn’t even have to have any juice. Just pick up the phone and I’ll be there.”
And he was.
Six years later. Deeny was married. Not to Jake Wu, though they came close, until it became clear that his family really did expect that his career would swallow her up and she realized she couldn’t live that way, and couldn’t bear their disappointment if she didn’t. But the guy she married was just like Jake. Not in any obvious superficial way, but just like him all the same, in the way he treated her, in the things he wanted from her. O
nly he didn’t want her to become a support for his life. The man she married wanted them to support each other. And now she had his baby, their firstborn child, a girl, and she could see that he loved the baby, that he was going to be a great father.
And that was why she came to the cemetery. She had finally found Vaughn Carson, even though he had never told her where his body was. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he simply didn’t notice how much she wondered. But she found him, anyway, in a cemetery two states away. How he got from where he lived and died to where she was as a teenager—maybe she really had been calling out like a siren. Or maybe it was one hunger calling to another.
However he had found her, now she’d found him back, and here she was, standing at his grave, a single red rose in one hand, a cellphone in the other.
“You’re so silly,” he said when she opened the phone. “It’s just dust now. Dust in a box.”
“I just wanted to tell you,” she said. “That my husband is a wonderful father.”
“I know,” he said. “I told you he would be when I gave you my permission to marry him.”
“No, you’re not hearing me. It isn’t that he’s a wonderful father, it’s that I know he’s a wonderful father. How do you think I know what a wonderful father even is?”
She didn’t have to say, Because I had you. She knew he heard what was in her heart.
“So what I’m saying,” she said, “is that you’ve had that daughter. Not the way you wanted. Not with Dawn. But you found a fatherless girl and you led her out of despair and instead of marrying somebody like my own father because I thought that’s what I deserved, I married some-body . . . good.”
“Good,” he said. His voice was only a whisper.
“And so,” she said, “it’s done. You can go on.”
“Go on,” he said.
“You can face whatever it is you have to face, because you’ve done the thing you hungered most to do. You’ve done it, and you can go on.”
“Go on,” he whispered.
“And I will love you forever, Vaughn Carson, even when you aren’t on the phone anymore. Because you were on the phone when I needed you.”
“Needed you,” he echoed.
She laid the rose on the engraved plate that was set in concrete at the head of the grave. It softened the stainless steel of death a little. Even though the rose, too, was dying now. It was still, for this brief moment, vivid and red as blood.
She took the phone from her ear and kissed it. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll miss you. But I’m glad I had you for as long as I did.”
“Long as I did,” he echoed. And then one last sigh. “Good-bye.” And she thought she heard something else as if he had laid it gently inside her heart instead of speaking it aloud. “My daughter.”
NOTES ON “INVENTING LOVERS ON THE PHONE”
It turns out that Janis Ian and I had been fans of each other’s work for a long time without suspecting the other felt the same way. I, of course, memorized all the words to “At Seventeen” and played her first album over and over. But being a consumer of pop music, not a connoisseur, I had no idea of what had happened to her after that wonderful early work, or what course her life had taken.
But we made contact—both AOL users, it turned out—and emailed each other until we had a chance to meet at a concert she gave in Raleigh, North Carolina. I brought my daughter Emily with me and we loved the concert. Her new songs were better than ever, and Janis is a stunning performer on the stage, a born actress.
She took time to visit with us after the show and the friendship was cemented. A while later, when we held the first (and only) EnderCon—a convention for fans of Ender’s Game—Janis not only came, she performed and offered a master class. Talk about generous!
I wasn’t her only friend in the world of sci-fi, though; with Mike Resnick she was editing an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on her songs (Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian). When she invited me, of course I accepted.
It was a pleasure to listen to everything and find the story I wanted to write.
Oddly enough, though, I kept coming back to a single phrase in “At Seventeen” about invented lovers on the phone. That lyric had haunted me as a teenager, too, the idea of being so lonely that you pretend to be talking to someone just to hear yourself in a conversation. And the “vague obscenities” part—well, that song came out just as I was busy inventing sexual desire (every teenager thinks that he invented it) and I understood that, too. This was long before I ever heard any public mention of the idea of “phone sex,” but Janis Ian, natural-born sci-fi writer that she is, had not only thought of it, she had taken it a step further.
When Janis wrote that lyric we all used telephones that were tied to the wall. Now it’s cellphones—but cellphones make the sad little girl of her song all the more believable. Now she has her phone there at school, and she can walk around where others might hear her and pretend she has a boyfriend who is too cool or too old to attend this crappy high school. I liked this girl, the sad defiance of her attitude.
Of course, it was an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy stories. Janis said they didn’t have to be speculative fiction, but the literary story I first intended to write would have belonged in a different kind of publication. So I found the daemon in the cellphone and wrote this tale.
By the way, at the time I wrote this, individual cellphone numbers did not show up on caller ID, the way they do now.
WATERBABY
First off you got to know about Tamika, how it was with her and water. First time she got into a pool, she was only two, we had those tube things around her arms to hold her up and me and Sondra, we were both there in the water, she was our baby and no way she was going to be out of our sight for a second, so we were both there kind of holding her up and making sure those air things really kept her from sinking. So Sondra was kind of holding her on one side and me on the other and Tamika just laughed and shrieked and we could feel how she was kicking and wiggling her arms and it sort of came to me how maybe by holding on to her I was holding her back, and so I let go, figuring Sondra had her on the other side anyway, so she’d be safe. Only later on Sondra tells me she had the same thought at the same moment and she let go and right away, Tamika starts moving forward through the water, kicking her legs, pulling with her arms, smiling and keeping her head above water and there was no mistake about it, she was swimming. By the end of that day we had those tubes off her arms and never looked back. She was born for the water, she was born to swim.
It’s been like that ever since. We just couldn’t keep her away from swimming pools. We called her our waterbaby, she’d catch sight of a pool and one way or another, in five seconds she’d be in the water. We took to dressing her all summer in a swimsuit instead of underwear cause if we didn’t, she’d go in fully dressed or stark naked, but she was going in, right now. Anybody with a pool, they were Tamika’s best friends whether Sondra and I liked them or not. At three years old she’d head on out the front door to go over to a house with a pool. We had to put locks high up on the door to keep her in. Sometimes it was scary, she loved the water so much, but we were proud, too, because that girl could swim, Your Honor. You had to see her. She’d go underwater quick as a fish, move like a blur, pop up so far from where she went under you’d be sure there had to be a second kid, nobody could move that fast. When she dove off the board—she was never afraid of heights as long as there was water under her—she was like a bird, but even so, when she slipped into the water it’s like there wasn’t even a splash, the water opened up to take her in. I can hardly think of her except soaking wet, drops glistening on her brown skin like jewels in the sunlight, smiling all the time, she was so beautiful, she was so happy.
Tamika said it all the time. “Oh, Daddy, oh Mama, I wish I didn’t ever have to come out of the water. I wish I was a fish and I could live in the water.” And Sondra would always say, “You�
�re no fish, Tamika, you’re just our own little waterbaby, we found you in a rain puddle and fished you out and took you home and dried you off and your daddy wanted to name you Tunafish but I said, No, she’s Tamika.” Said that all the time when Tamika was three and four. By the time Tamika was six, she’d say, “Oh, Mama, not that again,” but she still loved to hear it.
Sondra and me, our dream was to make enough money to get a house with a pool so she didn’t always have to go somewhere else to swim. But you know how it is, that wasn’t going to happen. We used to joke that the closest thing to a swimming pool we’d ever have was the waterbed me and Sondra slept on. My parents thought we were crazy when we bought that bed. “Black people don’t sleep on waterbeds,” my daddy told me. “Black people have more sense with their dollars.” I wish to Jesus I’d listened to my daddy.
It was a hot summer night, you know how it gets here in LA late in August, you got the ceiling fan going full blast and no covers on top of you but you still got sweat dripping all along your body like rain and your pajamas are soaked and you toss and turn all night and you’re half the time dreaming and half the time thinking about work and problems and worries and you can’t even tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And so that’s why I thought it was a dream at first. I was there on the waterbed only something was moving under me. The bed was rocking a little and I thought that meant Sondra had gotten up or just lain back down or something, only it kept rocking and I could hear her breathing and she was asleep, and then I felt something bump into me. From below.
Like a fish in the water, a big fish, it bumped me hard. I was awake right away, only I wasn’t sure I was awake, you know? How you’re thinking that you’re dreaming that you’re awake, only maybe you are awake, only you know that it’s still part of the dream? I felt something start pummeling me from below. Like fists punching straight up at me, pounding on my back from inside the waterbed. Hard enough to almost hurt. Little fists. And I got this picture in my mind of a mermaid trapped inside the waterbed, pounding on me to get me to get off and that’s when I woke up, or anyway that’s when I rolled over and got off the bed, and I was thinking, This dream’s too much for me. I got up and went to the bathroom and took a piss and got a drink and I was kind of shaking from the dream, it was so real, and then I thought, I gotta look in on the kids, and I knew it was dumb but whenever I felt afraid from a dream or a noise in the night, even if I knew it was nothing, I still had to look at the kids and make sure they were all right.
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