Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

They light memorial candles, mumble their collective way through a mourner’s kaddish.

On the walk back Rabbi Amy attempts to involve them in a rousing chorus of “Am Yisrael Chai” (the Jewish people live!), but the sky is threatening a downpour, and they book it back to the bus so as not to get drenched. It starts coming down hard once they’re back at Auschwitz and the girls sprint to the bus, but Shayna welcomes the rain, wants to get wet and be made really uncomfortable, wants to be cold and damp and understand, finally, what they felt. And she gets what she wants, but only partially. When she falls into her seat next to Zoe, her clothes and hair are cold and wet and she’s pretty uncomfortable, but there’s nothing else there: no new, deeper understanding of anything but plain cold, wet, discomfort. As the bus pulls away, though, Ari treats them to an impromptu guitar performance of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which is very intense, very moving, and very, very sad, indeed.

When the hotline phone rings it makes my shift partner, Miranda, and me both jump. I had a roommate last year who had the same exact phone, left over from the fluorescent eighties, the plastic cover see-through with all the incoherent mechanisms of telecommunication visible underneath. Its ring, shrill and indefatigable, would startle me in the most unpleasant way whenever someone called her, which was not often; she had few friends. It is not often that we get calls here, either, lately. Miranda and I and the rest of the counselors speculate on the reasons for this. We do a poor job publicizing, perhaps, or people are embarrassed to call their peers (some of whom they probably know, have classes with, see in the student center, glare at in passing, avoid altogether), or antidepressants have taken over. We sarcastically bemoan the apparent lack of desperation on campus. Kids today and all that. We are not needed by the people we want to need us. Like old, ugly whores, though, we have our regulars.

The ring makes us shiver in recognition, our senses in upheaval, and then drops us back into ourselves carelessly, so we don’t know quite what to do. There is always that rushing, Quick, answer it! the scramble to remember our words, careful to present empathy, the breathless wanting to please: “Hello, Nightline.” It is mellifluous and brimming with what we hope are comfort and ease.

Tonight when it rings Miranda is reading a magazine on a couch worn down by expectation. Behind her the wall stands indignant with amateur artwork: vines like telephone cords with sick-looking leaves and absurdly colored flowers, people’s names, quotes. There are unidentifiable swirls and waves that look like whoever painted them just did so for the sake of it, giving up on anything concrete before they even started, not sure what they wanted to say.

I am sitting across from Miranda, slowly, methodically picking stray hairs out of my arm. The screamlike ring yanks me out of my hair-pulling trance, but for a second I continue to indulge, unable to look away.

There is a panicked hesitation between Miranda and me as we rush over to the phone on the desk, a silent debate over who will pick up the receiver, who will quiet it. We decide, with shrugs and pointed fingers and nods, that it will be me. I feign competence, even to my shaking self, as I pick it up.

“Hello, Nightline?” I say it stupidly like a question. There is very little doubt who it is on the other end of the line. I am hoping against hope for a standard third party eating disorder call (“Hi,…um, my friend Jennifer? Well, she’s kind of not eating?…And, well, we’re all really, um, concerned about her?”), or maybe a nice freshman-depression call (“I just — I hate it here, and you know, it’s just…not like I thought it would be.”). These I can handle. These I can offer some kind of service. Validation, Reflection, Referrals: our motto. Stephen, another counselor, likes to say them as an aerobic chant when the phone rings: “Validation, Reflection, Referrals, whew! ” “Validation, Reflection, Referrals, whew! ” “Validation, Reflection, Referrals, whew! ” On the whew! he’ll wipe his forehead in mock exhaustion.

But it is not a third-party eating disorder, or a freshman depression, or even a good old my-parents-are-making-me-insane. It never is, lately. It is Him, again, on the other end of the line, breathing His soft, heavy breath. The phantom release of air into my ear makes me flinch. Of course it’s Him: the clock says 11:30. He’s as consistently regular as a several-apples-a-day eater. We’ve nicknamed Him Fiber Man in a nod to His regularity. At meetings we all laugh politely at our weak attempt at humor and then lapse into thick, sad silence, thinking about Him.

“Hi,” He says, hopefully. And then again, less earnestly, as though He is slowly deflating, “Hi.”

“Hello,” I say, lamely. I roll my eyes at Miranda and start doodling apples on the legal pad in front of me. She sits back in her chair and shakes her head.

His voice is enigmatic. Older, but so saturated with uncertainty that it seems juvenile; dense with a low-class Boston accent but slyly manipulative; full of shit but pathetic and open and raw. I wonder, every time He calls — which is all the time — who He is. Where He works, where He comes from, how He reconciles his habit of calling our University Hillel hotline nightly with whatever else He does in his life. I talk to Him more often than I speak with my family. “How are you?” He asks. My parents never ask.

“Fine,” I say, although I am not supposed to answer Him. I am supposed to remain silent and passive and let Him exhaust Himself with no encouragement. This is supposed to get Him off the phone as quickly as possible. (Another group joke: “How long did it take you to get Him off?”—giggle giggle—“the phone !??!” We relish our feeble stabs at jocularity where He is concerned, they are our linen armor.)

I wait for a while, unfolding and settling into a familiar silence. Soon He will tell me that He is lonely, and I will say, “Hmmm.” Miranda is sitting back in her chair, still shaking her head slightly, reflexively. Join the club, asshole, is what I want to say, but I won’t.

“I’m lonely,” He tells me.

“Hmmm,” I say.

“You know, it’s hard,” He says then, covering the whole of his emptiness with a plush, vague blanket. I am well aware.

“Yes,” I say. “It can be very hard.” Then again, He may not be talking about the living of His life. He may be talking about His dick, enveloping it in His coarse hands even as we speak, as if they were my female voice. I clear my throat. He always hangs up the phone when male counselors pick up. “Life,” I say, to clarify, “can be very hard.”

And at this point I want nothing more than to launch into a monologue about myself. About all about the disappointments and the failed friendships and unrequited love and the crying myself to sleep and feeling safe only in the methodical pulling of stray arm hair. Isn’t it? I want to ask Him. Isn’t it just impossible to get through this life in one piece? Don’tcha think, mister? Life sure is a bitch. What a pair we would make, the two of us, with our penis and arm hair; we could meander off into the sunset, mollified and finally fulfilled.

“Yeah,” He says, drawing out the word like He’s making a sweeping gesture with his hand over a barren and battered landscape.

The possibilities of who He is are so endless as to be overwhelmingly manifold and finally, im possible. Is He sitting in a La-Z-boy on orange carpeting from the seventies with only His shabby self for company, or is He calling from a mahogany desk in a room lined with windows, while the wife and kids sleep? Is He the bagger at the supermarket? A university administrator? Someone’s dad? Well, he thinks every night, looks like it’s time to check in with my girls. He unzips his pants and dials as if it were the most normal thing in the world, sandwiched between a late dinner and Letterman. The ‘Who is He?’ drives us all crazy.