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1. [REDACTED]
It is Lucy’s 26th day on the job, a crisp November morning with frost on the station’s windows, when she gets a call at her desk. She picks up the phone with the focus of a junior receptionist eager to prove her mettle, left hand on the intercom buttons, right one clasping her pen, paper on the ready. What greets her from the other end of the call, this other world beyond the phone line, connected to her through the incomprehensible twists and turns of electricity, is the Sonoran desert at night, lit by stars and by the faint trace of a car’s headlights on a distant highway.
“Who’s there?” Lucy calls out, but the desert at night does not respond. She asks again. Still no response.
Odd prank. She disconnects the call.
The vast expanse of cracked rock seeps in her thoughts all day, coiled like certain species of cactus. There had to be a voice in there, she thinks, a hum hidden in the empty air: a deduction that owes to a telephone operator’s impeccable logic. When people make prank calls, she reasons, they may remain silent, but there is always, in reality, a living, breathing person standing next to the receiver on the other end, giggling to themselves. Deserts do not make phone calls. Not even at night.
Hours pass and night comes for her too. The desert presents itself again in the electric connections of her brain. No dark cars cross it now. A tortoise rustles a bush. In her dream, there is at last a voice, condensed from thin air, soundwaves joining together like moisture until it is heard. It is pained and tired, and speaks with an odd drawl: “No. Do tell Gordon I am going away,” it says.
When Lucy wakes up, she writes down that message and brings it with her to work, where she puts it in the first drawer of her desk, along with the usual stash of undelivered notes and letters. As the years go by, the ink will lose its brilliancy and the paper will turn yellow and a little brittle, because it wasn’t very good paper, and it will be too late for everything, then. All the same, one day, too late, Gordon Cole will appreciate the gesture.
2. [REDACTED]
She gets that prank again three months later, give or take, there is snow on the Douglas firs outside the station and there is an abandoned villa inside the phone, somewhere in the countryside, maybe in Europe, maybe France. Old bricks and no moss. The sky darkens. A voice is once again hanging in the air, unfocused, an unresolved possibility of communication.
“Hello?” says Lucy who, by now, has some experience as a receptionist and knows how to handle these things. “Hold on,” she adds matter-of-factly as she unplugs a cable and gives it a disapproving look. She ponders the bare copper endings and speaks again. “Can you hear me now? Andy’s grandpa couldn’t hear him too and you’ll never believe it, they found out it was because of hornets. Those big ones on TV that come all the way from Asia. But the ones in Andy’s grandpa’s phonebox, they...”
“Hello?” says the distilled voice at the other end.
“You said you were going away?” asks Lucy, who is still holding onto the note she wrote (it is already too late by then, but she doesn’t know).
“Sweetheart, I am always going away.”
“Should I tell Gordon?”
The voice hovering in the abandoned villa focuses on the sharp corners of the window frames, finding solace in parallel wooden lines.
“He knows,” it concludes.
“But I haven’t told him yet.”
“Nevertheless.”
“But he can’t, because I haven’t seen him yet. I will on Friday, I think. But it has been ‘Friday, I think’ for a number of Fridays, like twelve, or fourteen...”
“Alright. I follow,” the voice says, and the way it follows is like a man in a desert putting step after bleary step toward the promise of a distant line of trees. He may die before he makes it there, but he is lost no more.
“...because we are trying to cut down on meat, as Margaret says, you know Margaret, they call her the Log Lady because of the log she carries, she says it’s for the environment, the meat I mean, not the log, although it would be strange if a cut of ponderosa pine were against the environment, wouldn’t you say? But what’s got a cow to do with trees, I don’t get it, but Hawk says she’s read the right books and Hawk…”
“...I’m not so sure I follow.”
“...and Gordon, that is, Tim Gordon, the butcher, not John Gordon, who is really John Fincher, we just call him Gordon because he looks like the butcher, he takes it as a personal slight, you see, the meat thing, so we have been avoiding them, Andy and I, both of them so we don’t get the wrong one. Can I tell Sheriff Truman to relay your message?”
“I see, yes. I see. Waste of time, flesh.”
“Don’t you mean meat?” Lucy asks, but she can only hear a loud wind through the receiver, echoing as if traveling through long copper pipes.
3. [REDACTED]
“I know you got those there, and I gotta know it now and I gotta know it straight: have you ever looked at a horse? Really looked?” The voice is urgent, fading, bleeding out. It sounds like the bliss of someone going into shock.
“My cousin’s donkey kicked me when I was fifteen. I got a good look before they brought me to the doctor...” says Lucy, but the conversation’s gone. All that is left through the phone is a vast, dark coast lined with sand.
4. [REDACTED]
“Do you want company? Is that it?”
A great city of concrete rises above a wine-dark ocean. Boiling waves as tall as hills roar and crash against the windowless shoreside buildings, the abandoned vanguard. Vapor fills the streets. It’s heavy with thoughts, or old discarded ideas. It breathes past gray corners, pushed by the onslaught of the ocean, and washes the city in a deep purple haze. A tension underpins the architecture. What lies deep within the center all these lines beckon toward? The streets do not reach it. They bend inward like flower petals at night, but come shy of its truth. The fog grows. The fog grows. The fog grows. And the great city stands guard, brittle, a lookout carved by its ocean.
“You sound lonely, mister. If you ever visit Twin Peaks, come by the Sheriff’s station. I’ll make it so that we set aside some donuts.”
5. [REDACTED]
The phone rings for a long time. Lucy traces the coils of its wire with her finger and thinks of electricity, that great unknown. Where are these impulses going, how can these “electrons” she read about be so small, where will her message go if she cannot deliver it. So many thoughts left to melt in the wires.
Someone picks up at last.
“Hello?” Lucy says. “Is this the Briggs household? I mean where you are, not here. The place I am calling from is the Sheriff’s department, receptionist’s desk, the booth left of the entrance, left if you are walking in. Right if you are walking out. I am calling to say that little Bobby is...”
“Briggs?” a voice says, drawing out the name as if savoring a strange coincidence, maybe even, in the infinitesimal dice rolls of the cosmos, a funny one.
It is just a voice, which Lucy is receiving as sounds from across the phone. If she tries to picture what lies on the other end of the call, all she gets is darkness, because she has closed her eyes to do so and her imagination only goes so far. But the voice is the same voice from the desert and all those empty places, Lucy is sure of it, even though she hasn’t heard it in so long and it sounds a little different now, it has a shine like a metallic reverb. “I’ll tell him. Please hold.”
“Is Briggs not home?”
The voice shushes her in a long, drawn-out sigh.
“But I need to tell the Major that little Bobby...”
The voice shushes her again, so she frowns and remains silent, but the shushing comes a third time anyway. Lucy, who is not alien to being told to shut up, begins to suspect that it is not the voice itself, but rather a valve, a vent, a mechanical discharge. In the silence that follows, she thinks of vapor again. She thinks, for a moment, that she understands electricity, but the room on the other side of the conversation is too big, and the realization gets lost without an echo.
“You have a task ahead of you,” the voice says, and Lucy cannot help but notice that its words are not bleeding out now. They have reached an equilibrium, locked in a distant orbit. It is just strange, but many fine people are strange, all in all. Her cousin Violet who lives next to the vet is strange too, and did she let that stop her, no sirree she did not.
“Or behind?” the voice adds. If she wanted to think ill of it, an affectation like this could sound like her voice is saying something weird for the sake of meeting some kind of state-issued weird quota, but Lucy thinks that it is genuine and that she understands that kind of confusion, or at least Andy does, and she knows Andy to be a genuine human being most of all.
“It’s ahead,” she adds, helpfully. “I need to tell the Major that Bobby...”
“I’ll do that, doll.”
“You will?” She pauses as realization dawns upon her. “We’re colleagues?”
“Take the night off. No one will call.”
+1. A Tuesday
“It’s all the god-damn trees,” says a bored voice over the intercom. It must come from the electrical room – that always-on, always silent channel of communication that has been left open since the day Frank got lost looking for the fire alarm control. Electricity, corralled within the confines of the station’s reliable walls.
Lucy stares at her switchboard. She brings a hand to her mouth.
“He’s here! That’s my friend from work!” she explains as she hurries across the corridor, kitten heels tapping on the formica floor.
Hawk, who was taking old community notices off the station’s corkboard, turns around and leans against the wall to watch her go. “But I’m your friend from work, Lucy...”
“You’re here!” Lucy repeats for good measure as she walks into the room, a clean statement that defines a reality. “You made it! I did tell Gordon, but he didn’t know what I meant. He told me to stick that note back where I found it, if you can believe it, so that’s what I did, it’s in the first drawer, the one to the left of my chair. In the entrance, behind the glass. The left glass, when you’re coming in – not the glass frame on the wall. Are you hungry? There’s donuts, they’re fresh. And coffee, which isn’t fresh, because someone made me brew an extra pot yesterday and left it all there, and we’re not the RR, you know, but...”
She trails off. The person she finds there, who had been busy ranting at distribution boards, is a young man her age, blond, jagged, thin as a rake, animated by a snappy energy that seems to fill his big city clothes like straw in a scarecrow. The kind of man who would leave his suit hanging on a stick in a field and disappear, too, beyond the desert. Always going away, he said. You have to arrive somewhere sometimes in order to do that, Lucy reckons.
“What are you doing here, little girl?” the owner of the voice asks without turning around.
“I work here,” she replies with a hint of frost. As she speaks, however, his words finish traveling in the coils of her brain and fetch an old memory, a childhood escapade, a little girl adventuring right into the unsounded depths of the Sheriff’s offices on the very day when two federal agents had come to town.
The figure in front of her is a memory.
“But you are here,” she says.
The young man turns to look at her. He cocks his head and taps a little rhythm with his heel. The sound reverberates like a guitar chord in the darkened room.
“And I’ll be gone the moment my partner’s done hittin’ on waitresses downtown. Special Agent Phillip Jeffries, FBI. At your service.”
He offers her the saddest handshake she would ever get, like an abandoned scarecrow in a field, flapping empty clothes and nothing in between.
She brings him donuts. It will have to make do.