dial tone

dial tone

All the leafy paper tickling his skin imparted no solutions. He wasn’t able to leech any wisdom from its inky weight. In retrospect it was probably counterproductive to dump half a dozen shelves worth of the second hand paperbacks section on top of himself. Catharsis is what he was aiming for but the whisky and doubt had probably muddled his targets. Breathing through brittle pages, with the fine overly handled texture of ancient dollar bills, had quickly lost its romantic appeal. It dawned on Nelson, only now, that he’d created just another mess that he would have to clean up.

He rose like a revenant from his tomb. Lord of the Flies, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Martian Chronicles, and Fahrenheit 451, streaming off of him like soil tended with the ashes of desecrated high school syllabi.

He was bald because he was balding and had long ago decided that he would make the best of his traitorous genetics. When he was twenty he found his large liquid chocolate eyes charming and expressive. Now he thought they compounded to the expanse that was his forehead and invited scrutiny to the tiny unfitness of his ears. His lizard dry Guinness skin could be camouflaged with copious amounts of cocoa butter and coconut oil but it had to be managed on a daily basis and some days, like today, didn’t seem to merit the effort.

Tomorrow this would all be someone else’s problem.

Getting to his feet took more effort than he was comfortable admitting, even to himself, but when he eventually straightened like a crooked weed he waded through the ankle deep debris of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Great Gatsby, The Hobbit, The DaVinci Code and their softbound ilk, navigating by the north star, the lonely terminal that served as his register, digital window and muse.

Nelson smoothed the sleeves of his corduroy blazer though it would take nuclear armageddon to wrinkle them, then sat heavy in a chair molded to his contours like the grip of a bike’s handlebars.

Being broke was a chronic condition to which he had never found a cure, and though this place, even at the beginning, when newness and ambition whispered sunlight to every shadowed caution, was never going to be a source of wealth, he had thought that it was his. Something else he’d been wrong about.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there but it was long enough for him to grow uncomfortable with the stillness and the quiet and the ache in his back. Fishing for his keys while calculating his sobriety, his hand groped something unknown and small and square in his pocket.

He held it by the light of the screen like a gemologist inspecting a faceted alien stone. A book. It was about the size of his palm. No, it was exactly the size of his palm. Black and dusty, like the leather came from something dead and shriveled, but there was an energy to it, a compulsion to flip through its pages that made his fingers tingle.

“Where did you come from?” he said to no one because he was alone but for some reason, right now, he didn’t feel like he was.

He opened the book. There’s a word when confusion curdles into fear then subsides into a complacent understanding that you don’t see the world as clearly as you once thought. He didn’t know what that word was, because this wasn’t rapturous, or nirvana or simple dread, but he now understood what his mother had described as God when she was alive in a way he thought he never would since she was now dead, and would therefore never be able to adequately explain.

Each page had a single number on it. A phone number. Ten digits. There were eight pages in all. The first four he knew. They were carved indelibly to his sense of identity. The last four were utterly foreign to him, as was the book itself.

But each number was written in his handwriting.

718.786.5423

Why was this here? He took out his cell phone, wondering who would pick up, if someone had inherited these digits all these years later. It rang.

“Merry Christmas...Nelly, hush now you see I’m on the phone.”

He hangs up while falling, cursing, stumbling.

HIs mother called him Nelly, and that was her voice. She wasn’t talking to him, she was talking to the child he heard in the background beneath the din of gospel music. He called back, frantic, feeling stupid and remorseful, but there was no answer.

646.239.6021

“Hello?”

“Sandra?”

“Nelson, that you? You have a cold? Where are you calling from? Are you still coming after school?”

He hangs up. His first girlfriend. Married now, school a distasteful memory for both of them, but she sounded, she was happy to hear his voice, deeper now and changed, but happy. What is this?

He looked at the book, skipped to the last page, the last number.

012.345.6789

“Hello?”

“Yeah.”

“What is this?”

“There’s a comic book in the store. It’s worth about $20,000. Sell it and you keep the store. But you shouldn’t. I should’ve listened to you when I got the call. Don’t do it. This isn’t the future that you want. You won’t listen, but you should. You should.”

Then, a dial tone.