Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“What?”

“I’m drunk. I’m sorry.”

“You’re a jerk,” Louise says. His coworkers stop talking to see why Louise is so angry. “He’s a jerk ,” Louise says to her captive audience. “You know what he told me?”

“Actually,” Doug says, keeping his voice low, “it’s true . It’s just that… I don’t know… the way you were looking at me.”

Jerry, Doug’s boss, stands up from his end of the table and walks over. He’s eighty pounds overweight and speaks in a voice that sounds like every businessman Doug’s ever overheard: deep, loud, fake. “Hey, now,” he says, smiling. “Everything okay over here?”

“Fine,” Doug says, standing. Louise is crying but shrugging away those who want to comfort her, even though it’s obvious she wants the attention. “It’s fine,” Doug continues. “A misunderstanding is all.”

Jerry nods. He escorts Doug to the Tick Tock’s exit, and together they stand in the glow of neon beer signs. “Let’s talk on Monday, shall we?”

Doug nods. “Okay. All right.” He reaches out to shake Jerry’s hand, but Jerry turns and heads toward Louise Malgrave, leaving Doug with his arm outstretched.

Doug hits three more taverns on his way home. By the time he reaches his apartment foyer, he’s having a hard time inserting the miniature key into his mailbox lock. He rests his head against the wall, shuts his eyes, and tries it one last time. This time the key goes in. When he opens the door, a fat phone bill falls out onto the chipped tile floor.

“Damnit,” he says when he sees it’s the same phone company he’s been having problems with. His long-distance phone service was slammed. Doug heard the term slammed for the first time only recently when news reports popped up about a local renegade phone company taking over people’s long-distance service without the customers’ approval. It’s illegal, of course, but extraordinarily difficult to stop once it’s set in motion. The name of this company is Blue Skies.

Doug tears open the phone bill as he mounts the stairs to his apartment, and after banging open his door and flipping on the kitchen light, he examines the bill. Amount Due: $3,456.72.

“Three thousand and what ?” he yells. “Are they kidding ?” He squints at the bill.

He walks into his bedroom, where he has hung all the old covers from the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland , the same covers he’d hung on his wall in childhood. They are torn now and fading, but he can’t bring himself to take them down. The thought of doing so fills him with an inexplicable sadness. He clings to his monsters, the way others cling to old blankets or favorite coffee mugs.

Doug climbs into bed with his shoes on. The heavy black rotary phone sits like a purposefully silent and endangered reptile, the last of its kind, on his bedside table. He picks up the receiver and dials the number for Blue Skies.

“Blue Skies,” a woman says. “My name is Bethany. How may I help you?”

“How may you help me,” Doug says coldly, staring into the eyes of Lon Chaney as Mr. Hyde. “First off, Bethany, you can tell me how it’s even possible for my bill to be over three thousand dollars.”

“The amount due,” Bethany begins, “is based on how many calls you—”

Doug cuts her off. “ Look ,” he yells, “I didn’t even sign up with your company. What you’re doing is illegal. I want you to switch me back to my old provider.”

“I’m sorry,” Bethany says, “but it’s too late. There’s nothing to be done.”

“What the hell do you mean it’s too late, that there’s nothing to be done?”

“Sir,” Bethany says. “Please lower your voice.”

“I won’t lower my voice. I…”

The phone goes dead.

“Hello? Bethany? Hello?”

Doug slams down the phone. He calls back and Bethany answers again.

“Are you calm now, sir?”

“Look,” Doug says. He shuts his eyes. He’s drunk and sleepy. He can feel the room spinning, the way the merry-go-round felt when his Uncle Bob started to push it faster and faster—Dougie crying, begging him to stop because it was going too fast and he could barely hang on. He starts dreaming about that time in his life when he hears a voice in his ear: “Hello? Are you still there?”

“Who is this?” Doug asks.

“It’s Bethany.”

“Hi, Bethany,” Doug whispers. He waits for her to say something, but when she doesn’t, he asks, “What are you wearing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m in bed,” Doug says. “Where are you ?”

“Maybe that’s why your bill is so expensive,” Bethany says sharply. “Those sorts of calls are expensive. Now, good night, sir,” she says, and hangs up.

Doug falls asleep with the phone against his ear until he’s woken by a loud beeping, a phone off its hook. He returns the phone to its cradle, stares at it for a good while, then picks up the receiver again. Every year, on the anniversary of his mother’s death, he dials his old home’s phone number, a number that has remained etched in his mind, even though it’s been disconnected for years.

Concentrating, he puts his finger in the rotary’s dial, draws his finger to the right for each number, and lets the dial go. He expects the familiar we’re-sorry-but-the-number-you-have-dialed-is-no-longer-in-service message, but on the second ring a woman answers, an actual human being, and Doug quickly sits up.

“Hello?” she says. A baby is crying in the background.

“Hello?” Doug says. “Who’s this?”

“Hey, who’s this ?” the woman asks. She laughs, and a chill runs through Doug: He knows this woman . The baby cries louder now, and the woman is saying, “Hush, hush, sweetie.” A doorbell rings. “Hold on there,” the woman says to Doug. He hears the phone getting set down; he hears footsteps, a door opening, voices. And then he hears what sounds like a hurt animal, a sound that frightens Doug, has always frightened Doug—the plaintive wailing of grief. What’s happening?

“Hello!” Doug yells into the phone. “What’s going on there? Hello!”

He hears someone moving toward the phone. The receiver is lifted, and a man says, “Who is this?”

“It’s Doug. Who’s this?”

“Doug?” The man sounds confused, disoriented. “I don’t know what you’re selling, Doug, but you’ll have to call another time. There’s been an accident here.” The phone is hung up with a thud.

Doug removes the receiver from his ear and stares at it. He knows he shouldn’t do this, but he dials the number again, just to confirm that he did indeed dial his old phone number. If the same man answers, he’ll simply hang up. But it’s the woman this time.

“Hello?” She sounds tired now. Doug hears a young child in the background calling out, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

“Hush,” the woman says sharply to the child. And then again: “Hello?”

“Hi,” Doug says. “I was just calling to make sure everything is okay.”

“I’m sorry?” the woman says. “I think you have the wrong number?”

It’s the way she ends her sentences as questions that exhumes the past, confirming for Doug who it is he’s speaking to: his mother . He hasn’t heard her voice for so many years, a voice he thought he would never forget, but as one year folded into another, one decade after the other disappearing behind him, he found it harder and harder to conjure her up as she had once been. Her voice had been the first thing to fade, until he couldn’t remember her inflections on certain words or the precise way she carried her southern childhood in her speech. For the first time, he experiences what everyone else who’s ever stepped into his bedroom has experienced—that all the monsters on his walls are staring directly at him.