Landline
There used to be good things outside the window. Early in the semester, I discovered that the men’s cross-country team would run past my dorm each morning. When fall arrived, I would make myself some coffee and watch the leaves fall from the trees, a meditation that left the leaves scattered instead of my thoughts. Sometime around late October, there he would be, waiting on the steps outside so that we could have dinner together on campus. But in the thick of winter, all that was outside were stretches of snow interrupted by poorly paved streets and the sides of other dorms and houses.
During this part of my senior year, way back at the end of the aughts, I usually woke up roughly around nine in the morning. Upon waking up, I would stretch my arms up to the ceiling and my legs out toward the end of the bed. Then, I would lay my head back on the pillow. Sometimes, I would stare at the ceiling trying to remember what homework I had left to finish. Sometimes, I would turn to the news and weather on the television, even though I knew that the forecast would always be the same. Sometimes, I would watch as the numbers changed on my alarm clock.
Typically, I would decide to roll out of bed at ten after nine. That left fifteen minutes left before my earliest class started. By then, I had it down to a science: it took roughly six minutes to get dressed and then five minutes to briskly walk across campus and up a flight of stairs to my class. Basic math, a safe routine. Occasionally, part of this routine was checking the landline phone. Sitting in my desk chair while I laced up my snow boots to head outside, I would check my messages. Even now, I can hear the electronic intonation in my head. One new message.
The messages were all from the same person: Benjamin. Benjamin first started calling around October. He was looking for Nate. Benjamin would explain that Nate was his friend he had not heard from in a while. Whether or not it was a prank, the first time I got the call, I felt it couldn’t hurt to reply with some sincerity.
“Oh, um, you seem to have the wrong number.” After a short pause, I added. “Sorry about that.”
Benjamin coughed into the phone.
“I apologize.”
The second time Benjamin called, I let him go through the whole thing (Benjamin, Nate, my friend) before he said anything.
“Um, this is the wrong number—again.”
Maybe he was one number off, and Nate probably lived just upstairs. Perhaps Benjamin just simply didn’t write down the number right. I wouldn’t have put it past the school to have mixed up the landline numbers of my dorm and this Nate person either.
The third time, Benjamin barely got his name out before I cut him off.
“You need to stop calling here,” I said in my sternest voice before I hurriedly hung up the phone.
The full and official name of my Monday morning class that semester was ENG 380: Late 18th Century - Early 19th Century British Literature, but it was known as a bore amongst my classmates. For a period characterized by grand sweeping emotions and feelings about life, nature, and humanity in the course description, our professor’s droning voice and his insistence on choosing the most obscure poetry and texts from this supposedly romantic era ensured that the only passion inspired was the passion to keep one’s eyes open.
Secretly, I was somewhat happy that the class was boring, as I wasn’t in the mood to feel too many emotions, much less grand sweeping ones. I burrowed into the mountain of monotone sound and banal information, creating a mental cavern with walls that gave me a welcome gift of numbness.
I was granted a short reprieve one Monday, as I needed to meet with my advisor about classes for the next and final semester and the only available slot was in the middle of class. Eventually making his way down from Saratoga, my advisor was twenty minutes late due to traffic and icy roads. After my advisor hurried up the stairs to his office with me following, my advisor apologized, quickly looked over my class choices, signed at the bottom, and sent me on my way.
Returning to my seat after explaining the situation to my professor, I felt the eyes of some of my classmates upon me. I caught someone looking at me briefly before they returned hastily to their books. I looked over to Rachel, a friend who always sat next to me, with an arched eyebrow.
Rachel leaned over to me to explain.
“Some of us have been worried as you haven’t been in the best mood lately. You were gone for enough time that some of us began to wonder if something,” her eyes darted towards the window, “you know,” and then made their way back towards me, “happened.”
I gave her a flat smile and a gentle pat on her hand in response.
Something had happened. Isaac, a junior, realized that I would be graduating soon, so he decided to leave me before I left college. I didn’t hate him for it, but I wished that I could have made Isaac realize that it would hurt either way, so we might as well go through with it. He could have at least waited until it was warmer.
I was upset, but I wouldn’t be taking drastic measures like my classmates thought I might. Sure, there were moments where I thought about throwing myself in a hill of snow, to be cocooned by the empty mound of whiteness, but only so I could be unfrozen later, just in time for graduation. I did not want to make any final decisions; all I wanted was to side-step out of my life momentarily, at least until this part was over.
That night, I sat in my desk chair watching television as I gradually took bites out of a microwaved pizza. It was far too cold and dark to go outside for dinner. I had just sunk my teeth into another slice when the phone rang. I thought to myself: Benjamin. It must be Benjamin; everybody else uses my cell phone. This time, I’m going to tell him off.
“My name is— Benjamin and….”
I sighed into the phone. “I know, Benjamin, your friend, Nate. He’s not here.”
In a burst of anger, I rose out of the chair, I pointed at some invisible version of Benjamin that stood in between me and the television.
“He hasn’t been here the last twelve or thirteen times you’ve called either, but you haven’t left me alone about it. Why do you keep calling here?!”
At this point, I was red in the face with a few droplets of sweat slowly trailing down my brow. Then, I heard what sounded like a sniffle on the other end of the line.
“I just— I just don’t know what else to do.”
I slumped back down into my desk chair.
It was the first time I let him speak long enough to hear the hurt in his voice. There was also something in the way he said the word friend. It was said in the same way that I had heard other older men say it before. I, too, had used it as a lexical dodge when feeling unsafe in conversations.
My imagination was cobbling together an imagined life for Benjamin and Nathan. The various outcomes I came up with made me feel even worse. Perhaps, Benjamin wasn’t absent-minded, but hoping against hope that calling the same number would lead to the right person. In my distress, I was starting to confuse parts of his hurt with mine.
“I’m—I’m sorry, I’m just,” I sighed, “Just having a rough—no, not compared—I’ve kind of been moping about and the calls just….”
I pinched a bit of my forehead with my other hand, using the minor pain to help me focus.
“Benjamin, Mister Benjamin, sir, I don’t know if this will help at all. But…” In shoddy preparation for what I thought I might be getting into, I breathed in again, “would you be interested in talking about it?”
“I, oh, uh—,” He was clearly taken aback. “After all the nonsense I’ve put you through?” Then there was a pause. “Yes. Yes, it would. It would, um, what’s your—?”
“Brandon.”
“Brandon, something before I go on.”
“Yes?”
“What’s on your mind?”
I let out a wistful chuckle. I thought: Should I? Then, I reasoned it was only fair. “His name is Isaac.”
I didn’t need to see Benjamin on the other side of the line to know he had a knowing smirk on his face. “Oh, dear.”
After our hour-long conversation, I hung up the phone, gently this time, and looked outside the window at the sheet of snow lit orange by the streetlights. I had been looking beyond them, beyond the streets and houses, towards the emptiness of the future. It had been an inviting void for a time, but it became something far less sinister after that night.