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Late night panic attacks are the worst. It would happen that this one was on a Saturday, and fairly late in the evening. Just that time when you should be relaxing or coming home from work or out wasting your energies over some boy or some drug or some dance or something at all or just deciding where to go after the play or opera. But instead at that time I was at home, my attempt to have an evening out spoiled by a too-expensive dinner, a long delayed phone call (a cancellation), and an indistinct knowledge of the City. This wasn't even a panic attack as we commonly call them. The fit itself was marked by a hysterical lack of hysteria, and incredible absence of activity, a void of erupting negative energies. In fact, the nost notable symptom was this interminable ennui. Quite unlike the boredom of a doctor's office or a subway ride, and certainly not like a lazy Sunday afternoon lull, swilling coffee or cocktails and watching the sun on its daily journey. But certainly, that my evening was spoiled most by the phone call is of issue here. Hanging up the little instrument of torture, I took a long look at it and wondered, what makes the telephone so easy and so insidious? Why is it so much easier to lie over the phone, and if so, why so we put so much faith into the words we hear from it? Like the photograph, we believe that the telephone will not lie to us, although both are often used by people with every intention of lying. Look at the phone. Look now. It probably lies there dormant besides you, dreaming like a fed rat about garbage heaps of gossip and long-distance affairs. Or your friend or housemate is holding on to one end of it, like a lifeline, a trapese, a lasso, a coiled snake ready to strike, and who holds the other end but someone just like them, with the power to disconnect a relationship with a..."clik". I want to touch it, to hold its tiny glow in my hand, to feel its cool plastic hum and possess the ability to invent a new, unseen relationship with someone I know or don't know. But that very power is what makes the machine so frightening; that power is blind, and I can't reconcile that fact. I lose my eyesight a little more each year; each year the same memories become blurrier and fuzzier and seem a little farther away than they should. So that little myopic buzz, the tiny sonar signal coming from the receiver making sure its electronically enhanced barbs and love cooes and rejections and monotonies are received by their intended party is far too bittersweet to contemplate rationally. It lies to me. Of course, when one expects it to ring, it doesn't. As further proof that the nice man who said "I'll call you" really had no intention of it, as you suspected from the outset. I try not to make those promises myself anymore. Maybe it seems cruel to the casual observer. "No, don't give me your number. I won't call." But maybe that's easier than having to explain one's all-consuming paranoia of the digital-to-audio signal each time. I find myself incapable of talking on it anymore. I'm certain that the merest falsehood will be amplified tenfold back at me. I worry that the voice on the other end has become twisted, like the words in the mind of a schizophrenic, that the voice will become voices which cajole, mock, incite panic, or merely garble meaning. But above all I fear the easy familiarity that it promises. I cannot feel close to this piece of plastic. It is not a substitute for being there. And I often realize, while sitting there dumbstruck with fright on the dialing end, that I am paying someone thirteen cents a minute for the privilege of my paranoia. So, please, leave your number after the tone. I cannot promise I will return your call when I am available, but if nothing else, it's nice to know that someone called. |