Eye of Flame (10 page)

“I used to feel the same way,” she said, “but you know how it is. Once everybody else has something, you almost have to get it yourself in self-defense. I mean, people sort of expect you to have them, so they can leave messages if you’re not around and not feel they have to keep calling back.”

“I still don’t see—”

“Look, if I get a job, we may need an answering machine. There wouldn’t be anyone here during the day to take calls then.” Not, Cheryl admitted to herself, that there was much chance of her getting any kind of a job soon, although it eased things with Nick to pretend that she was looking for one. Too many jobs—almost all of them, in fact—seemed to require encounters with telephones sooner or later.

“You’re not taking calls now,” Nick said. “You’ve got to get over this, Cheryl.”

“You’re right.” She turned toward him, trying to smile and look determined. “That’s why we should get a machine. I’ll be able to know who called, and if I can screen calls, so I know what to expect, maybe I can get into the habit of answering.”

“I suppose it’s worth a try.”

“It is. I’m sure. I know it’ll help,” she said, wanting to believe that.

Cheryl had gone back home after graduating from college. The attorney handling the estate of her parents had told her that she was the sole heir, which was hardly a surprise. Each of her parents had been an only child, too.

The details of the estate were as tidy as her mother’s house had been. The mortgage was paid off, the house now belonged to Cheryl, and there was enough money from cautious investments and an insurance policy to give her a modest annual income. It had been surprisingly easy to move back home, and to tell herself that she might as well stay there until she decided what to do.

The house was still as quiet, as peaceful, as it had been when she was a child. Days would pass in which she got up late in the morning, ate her usual breakfast of cereal and fruit, took her early afternoon walk, and spent most of the rest of the day reading one of the books in her father’s den or a volume borrowed from the town library. Occasionally people who had known her parents or one of the few old school friends who still lived there would invite her to dinner. When she was feeling especially adventurous, she would drive to Wellford, the nearest city and only a hour away, to shop in its new mall and see a movie.

Only the telephone disturbed her tranquility. She had grown so used to other people answering it for her that she could not pick it up herself or even bear listening to it after two or three rings. There was no reason for anyone here in town to call her. She always made the rounds during her walks, passing the houses and shops where she was likely to run into anyone wanting to see her later; the people in town knew her routine. She wrote letters to her college friends, although their responses were becoming less frequent. Soon she had turned off the telephone; the damned thing could ring all it wanted to as long as she couldn’t hear it. There was, she realized, no reason why she had to have a phone at all as long as she lived here, yet she could not bring herself to have it disconnected.

Somehow, she needed the phone there, much as she feared it. She would gaze at the telephone and think: If it weren’t for you, everything would be fine. I wouldn’t have anything to worry about then; I’d be content. It’s your fault that I’m afraid. Such thoughts soothed her, reminding her that only an intrusive technology over which she had no control was responsible for most of her fears.

Eventually, Cheryl sometimes told herself, she would come to grips with her fear, maybe by forcing herself to make the occasional call to the local doctor or dentist for an appointment instead of dropping by to schedule one in person. She could work up to the occasional personal call and eventually to picking up the phone when it rang. But whenever she had such thoughts, her mouth grew dry and her body stiffened with fear. She would be hearing nothing but a voice, one created from electronic signals. There would be no visual cues to tell her what the unseen person might be thinking. She would be nothing except an insignificant, halting, hesitant voice herself, an invisible being that the one at the other end of the line could easily crush with only a few words. One call could destroy the peace she had managed to find.

The lines snaked down telephone poles, along streets, and through windows, then slipped into telephones. The world was encased in a web of shining wires and fiber optic cables over which voices babbled, shrieked, moaned, muttered, and screamed. No matter how many hallways she ran through and how many doors she closed behind her, she could not escape the tentacles through which all the world could demand her attention. Once she picked up the receiver, her thoughts would be drawn out of her, her soul trapped inside the wires.

Cheryl woke, afraid to move. The dream was a warning. The telephone was just waiting to ensnare her in its net along with everyone else.

The telephone on the night stand chirped, making her tense. She gritted her teeth, knowing that the answering machine would take the message after four more rings. She counted them, then let out her breath when the phone fell silent.

At last she forced herself out of bed and went downstairs. Nick had bought an answering machine with a cordless receiver; the device sat on an end table in the corner of the living room, its light blinking at her. Two calls had come in already that morning; she had heard the phone ring earlier, before falling asleep again.

Cheryl lifted her hand, steeling herself to retrieve the messages. Her finger moved toward the “message” button, then froze. She could not know what was on the tape, what she would hear. The machine had not eased her fear, but had only compounded it. Nick had installed the machine three weeks ago, and she had not retrieved a single message. Even if she listened to the messages, she would never be able to return the calls.

Nick could listen to the messages later, not that this would solve anything. In fact, it would only make matters worse. He now had something else to hold against her; not only did she refuse to take phone calls, she left all the messages for him to handle.

The phone suddenly rang. Cheryl stiffened, knowing that if she did not pick it up, she would still hear the caller when the machine began to take the message. There was no escape. She longed to grab the machine and dash it against the wall.

Somehow she seized the receiver and pressed it to her ear. “Hello?” she squeaked.

“Hello,” an unfamiliar male voice responded, “am I speaking to Mrs. Christopher?”

“Wrong number!” Cheryl screamed, then hung up and fled from the room.

Although Cheryl had welcomed a calm, serene life far removed from the turmoil of most of the world, she began to grow restless after nearly two years of living alone in her parents’ house. She had taken on a part-time job at the local library two days a week, work that required her only to shelve volumes and arrange displays near the desk, but felt the need for more activity to fill her time. She did not see the people she knew here as often, and their conversations with her were more brief; their invitations to dinner came less frequently. Sometimes she could even feel that they were avoiding her.

While in Wellford one day, she picked up a flyer from the local branch of the state university listing evening non-credit courses for adults seeking self-improvement. During her next trip, she went to the small campus on the outskirts of Wellford to sign up for a course, knowing it would be impossible to register over the phone. Over the next two years, she took courses in calligraphy, conversational Spanish, Chinese cooking, and drawing. There was no need to call up any of the students in her courses, since they could easily get together after class for the occasional bull session, and she never grew close enough to anyone to worry that someone might try to call her. By now, she supposed, her phone would almost never ring even if she turned the ringer back on. She was safe.

She met Nick Christopher after signing up for a course in macramé and going to the wrong classroom, where Nick was teaching a course on rental property management. He was a lawyer by profession and a stocky, energetic man with curly black hair and a wide grin. “Why don’t you check out my first lecture?” he told her. “Maybe you’ll want to switch to my course,” and she had been powerless to leave his class after that.

She never did master the intricacies of managing property, but Nick was soon taking her out for late dinners after class. He had a law office in downtown Wellford and owned two commercial buildings and two apartment complexes. He had reached that point in his life when he was looking for a nice woman to settle down with, someone who wasn’t as driven and hard-edged and career-minded as a lot of the women he knew, someone who was more gentle and old-fashioned.

When Nick asked her to marry him, Cheryl quickly said yes. The warm, kindly feelings she had for him had to be love, and he accepted her as she was. He had hoped to find a quiet soul, a contrast to his outgoing and vociferous temperament, someone for whom he could play the outmoded role of protector. He did not mind the quirks he thought of as her charming eccentricities.

“What do you do all day? Why can’t you ever finish anything instead of just dabbling in one thing after another? Why can’t you find a job so you’d at least have something to do? Why can’t you even answer the goddamned phone and retrieve messages?”

Those were the kinds of questions Cheryl got from Nick lately. She no longer looked forward to having him come home in the evenings, when he was likely to destroy whatever serenity she had won during the day. What did he expect her to do with her days, anyway? She did the housework and shopping, and would still have been doing all the cooking if he had not recently decided that he preferred cooking spicier dishes she didn’t much like. She took a course at the state college every semester, her favorite ones lately having been anthropology, Italian Renaissance art, and the nineteenth-century novel, and could not see why she had to limit herself to one thing in order to get another useless degree. There was no economic reason for her to get a job, one that would undoubtedly force her into confronting a phone.

Nick was on the telephone now. He had been on for almost half an hour, ever since the end of dinner, and now he had retreated to his study next to the living room with the cordless. She could hear him talking behind the closed door. Hearing his voice indistinctly through a closed door only made the call seem much more ominous. He had never gone to his study, closing her off, to take calls before. He was speaking in English, so he could not be talking to either his mother or Mr. Vassilikos.

Cheryl put her book down, got up from the sofa, and crept toward the door. “… don’t know,” she heard Nick say. “It’s driving me …” She leaned closer. “… try to get there by one.”

She could not listen any more. She would never be free of the calls, the messages, the efforts of all these callers to wrench her from her refuge. Because she could not pick up a phone and speak to someone at the other end, her husband now considered her disturbed and possibly in need of help. He no longer saw her horror of telephones as a charming eccentricity; he had, the day before, raised the possibility of counseling.

Maybe he was talking to a counselor now, the kind of person who would consider her healthy and normal if she went around routinely spilling her guts over the phone to all and sundry. Maybe Nick was complaining to a friend. He could hatch a plot against her with impunity over the phone. He knew she would be incapable of tiptoeing up to the bedroom and listening in on the extension.

The door opened; Nick came back into the living room and hung up the phone. He sat down in his chair in front of the television, picked up the remote, channel-surfed for a while, then turned off the set.

“We have to talk,” he said. Cheryl stared at her book, refusing to lift her eyes. “We’ve had that answering machine for four months now, and it hasn’t helped at all. It’s probably made things worse. You’re just using it as a barrier, something else to put between you and everything outside. I could put in one of those things that gives you the number of who’s calling, and it wouldn’t do any good, because your problem isn’t just the phone—it’s something more.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

“I’ve been trying to,” he said. “You can’t say I haven’t been patient. I thought you’d get over it, but it’s becoming pathological.”

How could she explain her fear to him? How could she convey her horror of phones? Having to speak to someone she could not see, having to fear that at any moment a call might come from someone she could not see or touch, with a message she could not anticipate—the thought was unbearable. Throughout her life, on those rare occasions when she had picked up a phone, she had imagined invisible callers listening to her stammered, uncertain words with mockery and contempt and indifference while feigning friendliness.

It was the interconnectedness of it all that got to her, the vision of a world hooked up and wired and always in contact, with fibers and cables and satellites carrying messages that no one could escape. It wasn’t enough to put telephones in everyone’s home; now people could carry pagers and drive around with cellular phones. They would all be sucked into the constant babble, the noise that would allow for no peace. There would be no solitude, no time for quiet moments; they would all be nothing but automatons reacting to the latest stream of messages. Nervousness, some might call her fear, or a speech problem, or a lack of interpersonal communication skills, but at last she knew it for what it was—her defense of her innermost self.