interregnum (ii.) August 1998, 22 months apres Appleton

I call. I keep pressing the tips of my fingers into the corresponding numerical shapes. I call. Using the phone card that Jana gave me to call her. Jana knew full well that I wouldn’t call. She knows that I need time to myself. Time to think. Time to reflect over just what the fuck is going on with my heart. My heart, the heavy pendulous sac of arteries wound like a watch, thumping at the sight of Megan’s name. I call. The area code of Appleton is nine, two zero. And I keep hitting it. Keep dialing it, taking intermittent swigs from my beer, watching as the crimson fizz slowly creeps up the neck of the bottle. The phone continues to reverberate the monotonous drone. I am thinking of how last April and March we would spend the night together every night long distance, when Megan was still in Decorah. Now she is a camp counselor somewhere and I am in Chicago. Alone. Nursing my beer and tapping ashes from my Camel filters into ashtray, wishing that somehow she would saunter into her room right now. Wishing that she would leave the camp she’s at, anywhere in Minnesota, and arrive back home at Appleton right now. Wishing that she could somehow hear the phone hiss and whir, the sibilate chant; the Buddhist ‘OM’ reverberating with consistency, my eardrum earnestly glued into the receiver, offering a supplication. Hoping that she would pick up. Another ring. Another purr. Somewhere in East-central Wisconsin a phone chants out the time signature of my heart. Somewhere up north the Girl of the country stars is looking into a boys smile and not thinking about the man who is holding the phone in his hear, dialing the are code and the number, with each press of the button, he feels like he is unbuttoning her blouse. He feels like he is cradling her in his arms, He feels like he has a reason to come together, with her voice inside of his voice, a duet of arms and limbs, singing in the same key, at the same moment. Her voice shouting out his name, her voice explaining to him that he is the one she truly wants to spend her life with. Her voice reclining on the mattress, crying afterwards, sharing a cigarette with him, thanking him. Her voice conveying all of this in little technologically coated purrs; a slight warbled sentence composed in the scattered lexicon of the masses. He is waiting for her voice to brush through and say hello. Waiting to hear the click, the somnolent sigh, the nocturnal inquiry. The acknowledgment. The realization. He is waiting in his cousin’s kitchen in Lyons, Illinois.

Waiting to hear all of this.

 The phone groans like an insect in the mid-August swelter. Alone, naked with his thoughts unabashed of her (inside of her) determined to ride it through, focused on waiting for the sun to rise and her voice to vault over the horizon in a blaze of welcome, telling my heart that she just went away for the evening, she had to nourish other continents, I had to spin around in a circle and momentarily turn my back to her. But now she is here. In the incessant ring. Three in the morning and I can feel, can feel as I fish in the icebox for another one, can feel her movements pending, can feel her voice awakening, can feel her eyelids beginning to part, her body beginning to get moist and split down the center as the as the argot purr is suddenly truncated in mid-sentence, and a voice, half-asleep, masculine, picks up the phone, his eyelids heavy. Her father. The one I referred to as the master of the house. Offering a sincere hello. I hang up without saying a word. My phone card is swallowed in the trashcan and baptized with the offerings of the ashtray I’ve been stamping out my Camel filters in all night. Alone, all I can think about is her smile.

I don’t even call Jana once.