Hotline
The calls came in around the clock. A nunnery in Nova Scotia with a broken clavichord. Smitten soldiers looking for prostitutes they slept with years ago during some war. Orphans writing school reports on osmosis or the mating habits of the praying mantis. Minor poets searching for obscure rhymes. Prisoners eager to debate Nietzsche’s will to power or their theories of transcendentalism in American advertising. I quit my job, stayed home waiting beside the telephone. I consulted tattered repair manuals, outdated phonebooks, defunct encyclopedias, old gossip tabloids. The dead were, of course, the most difficult, always calling from pay phones in the middle of night, emptying their despair in foreign tongues. I’d try to keep them talking, but always they’d drop the receiver and vanish. I’d wait in vain for their return, fall asleep listening to the crackle of fog on the other end, wind whistling guy wires, the long hollow calls of tugboats over black water. Or once, the patter of rain on giant jungle leaves, monkeys squealing from the canopy, the sad songs of brightly colored birds that I could not name.
