Yannick Murphy - The Call

WHAT I SAID:You’re right. I am. I’m angry for you.

WHAT ARLO SAID:You’re just angry, period.

WHAT I SAID:Sure I am.

WHAT ARLO SAID:I can’t say I blame you. His name’s Passen, and put him the hell behind bars.

WHAT I LEARN ABOUT PASSEN:He’s been arrested before for the same thing. He hunts. He hunts grouse. I go with the CDC to his farm. We have a permit to search. There are stuffed grouse perched on his mantel. There are shotguns in a glass case and a drawer beneath the case with boxes of bird shot shells. There are freezer bags in the freezer in the barn labeled “grouse meat.” I think this man could be the man who shot Sam. The CDC finds papers in Passen’s house, papers he signed that show he knew that the cows he bought were diseased. The CDC can arrest him again.

WHAT THE WIFE SAYS:Thank God, now can you stop searching for this man? He’ll be arrested. Your son’s alive.

CALL:An owner says her horse is lame.

ACTION:Drove to farm with Sarah. The horse had a swelling on its hind ankle, and the swelling had begun to progress to the hock. I began massaging the tissues above the hock, slowly working my way down the swelling. I asked Sarah to hold the flashlight and shine it on the leg. She shone it on the wall, she shone it on the beagle who had trotted in after us, she shone it on the corner post where a spider had begun to spin its web. Hey Charlotte Web, I said, keep the torch on the horse.

RESULT:Worked the leg with my hands for forty-five minutes so that I moved some of the swelling down. Told the owner that if it wasn’t better in a day or so, we’d come back with antibiotics.

WHAT I ASKED SARAH ON THE WAY HOME:What do you want to be when you grow up? You ought to start thinking about that now.

WHAT SARAH SAID:Are there any jobs for people who want to get paid for sleeping, because Sam could get that job.

WHAT THE WIFE SAID:There is always the Head Potty Cleaner job on the spaceship.

WHAT THE WIFE COOKED FOR DINNER:Steak sandwiches she said were really Martian gut sandwiches.

WHAT I AM ORDERING:Fifty dollars’ worth of seeds. Among other things there will be fingerling potatoes growing in our garden this summer. I know what they will look like. They will look like fingers growing up from the ground, as if the dead were buried in our garden and they are trying to claw their way out.

CALL:No call. I drove to Arlo’s farm. Arlo, I wanted to say, what about that spacecraft. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? I wanted to tell Arlo that it knew who shot my son. That I had dreams of the military footage locked at a base somewhere, the picture of my son’s attacker in the films. I wanted to tell him I was almost sure if those films were found, it would be Passen’s face in them. I wanted to tell Arlo I had solved the mystery.

WHAT I ASKED ARLO INSTEAD:How are the Chianinas? How are my favorite cows?

WHAT ARLO SAID:I’d like to preg-check a cow.

WHAT I SAW DRIVING HOME AFTER PREG-CHECKING THE COW:A half-dozen does crossing the road. They ran, then stopped right in the middle of the road and I could have sworn they were all looking up, looking to where one night they had seen the spacecraft and looking to see if it would show up in the same part of the sky once again.

THINGS I HAVE SAID TO THE WIFE OVER THE YEARS:You’re mentally incompetent. Maybe you have a mitochondrial disease. You’ve got a slow learning curve. Your hands are as cold as death. The operative word is Fuck off , but you already know that I said that once.

THINGS SHE HAS SAID TO ME OVER THE YEARS:Fuck you, Fuck off, Go fuck yourself, You’re a Nazi, You’re a prick, You’re a shit, Eat shit.

CALL:A voice on the phone that sounds like my own, only younger. Hello, is this the residence of Dr. David Appleton? the voice asks and I am elated. I have achieved space-time travel and here I am calling myself from the past. Are you the David Appleton who lived in Williamsburg, Ohio? Are you the David Appleton who went to ____________________ high school in ’75? my young voice asked. I wondered where I was that I was calling myself from. Was I at my childhood home? Was I in the kitchen with my mother? Was the smell of her vegetable soup cooking on the stove? The smell of her peanut butter cookies baking in the oven? Was my brother beside me, punching my arm? My father in his La-Z-Boy chair smoking his pipe?

ACTION:I actually held the phone away from myself and looked at the mouthpiece thinking there would be some shred of me, some image of myself, coming out from the small holes in the plastic.

WHAT I WANTED TO SAY:Eureka! Yes, by God you have achieved space-time travel. You did it! I did it! I wanted to shout and I wondered when in the future I would actually be achieving this amazing feat of being able to travel through time, because as of yet, I hadn’t a clue how to do it.

WHAT I SAID INSTEAD:Why yes, you’ve reached Dr. Appleton’s residence.

WHAT THE VOICE SAID:Thank you. Thank you very much, and then the caller hung up the phone.

WHAT THE WIFE ASKED:Who was that?

WHAT I ANSWERED:I really don’t know. Someone who wanted to know who I was, but they already knew who I was.

WHAT THE WIFE SAID:Did you tell them? Maybe you shouldn’t have told them anything. You don’t want everyone knowing who you are. Maybe it was that Passen, or one of his men, calling you from jail. Maybe he’s out for revenge. I wish you hadn’t called the CDC on him. I wish you had left well enough alone.

WHAT I SAID:Yes, maybe it was just Passen or one of his men.

WHAT WAS TALKED ABOUT AT TOWN MEETING DAY:The three streetlamps in town. Voters wanted to keep them on at night because they cut down on crime. Voters wanted to get rid of them because they cost the town money in electricity bills.

WHAT I WANTED TO KNOW:What was the lunch? What really is red flannel hash? Who sitting here has shot my son?

WHAT WAS DISCUSSED:Wattages and the cost of replacing standard bulbs with LEDs.

WHAT SOMEONE’S NAME WAS IN TOWN WHOM I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE:Boogie, and I wonder, of course, if Boogie who lives on the next hill over from us knew who shot my son and also if she had seen the spacecraft. I thought how if the spacecraft returned it might show up at town meeting, floating above us, hovering still over the school where we have the meeting, coming in low every once in a while, peering through the gym windows, blinking its lights, giving its own ayes and nays to the passages of bills and amendments, and taking on, too, the smell of the red flannel hash cooking in the kitchen that we all seem to carry on our clothes and that hours after, we can still smell even when we are in our own homes.

CALL:A man and his wife have a borzoi who’s sick. I told them I don’t usually do small animals. Oh, no, they said. Jordan is quite tall. Please, would you come?

ACTION:I drove to their home. Jordan was happy to see me. Are you sure he’s sick? I asked. The woman nodded her head. He wouldn’t get up this morning. He lay at the foot of the bed. That’s not like Jordan, she said. He seems all right now, I said. Jordan sniffed my pants, smelling the scent of my own dogs. I took his temperature. It was normal. I felt his abdomen. There was no unusual swelling. While I was there he walked over to his food bowl and ate what was put out for him in the morning.