Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“I saw Him today, in the square,” said Jennifer once at a meeting. “He was caressing a pole and talking to it with His cheek pressed against it like they were going to dance.” Or another time, when someone had gotten back an unfortunate paper from a notoriously harsh professor: “Come to think of it, Prof. Williams does have that accent, and I heard his wife left him.” Stephen said he bet it was the glassy-eyed janitor from the student center, the one who asked all the freshman girls for their phone numbers, but Miranda told him that was just classist and to shut up. I don’t say a whole lot in meetings, to any of them.

He sighs now, a loaded “Huhhhh…,” hoping I will take the bait. Miranda is staring at me. She scribbles a little note for me: “Get him off the phone! Someone else may be calling!” I nod as if I have every intention of ending this, but instead bite firmly down on His hook and ask Him how He’s feeling right now. Miranda shakes her head at me again.

“Oh, you know,” He says. “Frustrated.”

Again, whether by life’s circumstances or the mounting blood and pressure in His member, He doesn’t specify. I offer another of my I’m listening noises and give Miranda a Sue me shrug.

All the other girls avoid talking to Him. A girl named Marisa had refused to answer the phone if it rang at His usual time. Eleanor and Rebecca both dropped out altogether, each citing some touchy-feely crap about taking care of herself before she could take care of anyone else. Miranda came up with a little speech: “I know you’ve called before and I don’t think we can help you anymore. If you’re in an emergency please call 911, Good-bye.” Everyone agreed this was the way to handle His calls. Miranda is pointing to the words now, written out in hazard red stop-sign capital letters on a piece of construction paper taped to the wall. She draws her hand over her throat in a horizontal line, mouthing, “Get off.” But I can’t, or don’t want to, or both. He is lonely and He needs me. Me. I gesture Miranda to back off. She shakes her head and jots down, “Have it your way, going to the bathroom.” Then she leaves. I feel like an unsupervised child, justifying what I am about to do with the awareness that I was inappropriately left alone in the first place.

“What do you mean when you say you’re frustrated?” I fairly whisper into the receiver, sheepish. I hope Miranda has to shit.

He is confused by my indulgence. “Well,” He says carefully, not wanting the call to end, “it’s kind of like a build-up, you know? Like, I’m desperate, you know?”

His vagueness irritates me. I am trying to indulge this poor, strange man, and I want Him to be disgusting. I know He has it in Him, so to speak. The audacity to ask for a hand from me (oh, will the double entendre never end?) in releasing His frustration would entitle Him at least to a bit of my respect. I’m tired of people being too chickenshit to ask for what they need.

“What do you want to do about it?” I wonder, trying to nudge Him into the land of sweet, sticky honesty. I want nothing more than to be what He needs me to be, to make someone happy, to take the edge off whatever has led Him to us, to me. What kindness can I ever extend to anyone I actually know? It is only Him I can help, only a stranger; only Him, a stranger who might be willing to ask me for something I can give.

He weighs my odd offer, dumbstruck, before answering. “Uhhhh—” His voice cracks endearingly, like a scared pubescent’s. He lets out a laugh of disbelief. “Ah, I uh…”

I wait, poised to hang up if He won’t be truthful.

“Could you, uh,…could you, could you maybe, um,…maybe just talk to me?” He stumbles. “Just, you know, talk? For a while?” It is only in His postcall, semen-soaked dreams that He has asked this of me, or anyone, before now. I think, in a flash that coincides with a glance at the door out of which Miranda has exited, about our little hotline group. I think about Stephen and Miranda and Jennifer and the rest of them, trusting me to answer this phone; about them having bestowed on me the right to answer. As if I were somehow in a position to take on anyone else’s troubles. And then, somewhere inside, I feel a ticking begin, a dangerous and loose ticking that gets louder and louder in my inner ear each second I don’t hang up the phone.

So I do it: I begin to talk to Him, in a voice slightly higher pitched and more self-conscious than usual. I tell Him I wonder who He is, I wonder why He calls us, what His story is. I tell Him He should make friends, go out into the world and have it dirty Him like it does all the rest of us. I tell Him He should go back to school and become a therapist. I say for all I know He is a therapist; He is someone else’s therapist, He is someone else’s therapist’s therapist. I tell Him I certainly know that things are not always black-and-white and that people are complicated. And I tell Him, in an overshot of compassion, because I don’t really believe it, that I don’t think He is a bad person for calling us all the time.

Throughout my little monologue, I can hear Him breathing hard, like a compulsive exerciser on a binge. “Go on!” He says, my captive audience, inflating my sense of civic duty so that it balloons massively — a true, red, beating heart to prove to me that I matter.

And so I do go on, with the assurance of being heard. It doesn’t matter at all to me that He is not really listening, or that He is, in fact, using me. I tell Him that my name is Miranda, and to make up for the lie I start to tell Him other things, like what it was like when my parents split up, or why we had to move to Baltimore in high school just when I had emerged victorious as a popular girl, or how my dad married his secretary and my mom has no one but me. These are things I don’t talk about, ever. Because they are mine, and once you give these things away they are scattered like useless feathers to the deaf wind of other people’s empathy.

He is still letting out rhythmic exhalations that echo and imitate the beating of my heart as well as the still-present, inexplicable tick tick tick -ing in my head when I have exhausted myself of important things I need to tell Him. And then, like an old lover in sync with me, He comes just when I finish, at the same instant, with a gasp and a pitiful roar. We both sit quietly, spent, entangled in the fiberoptics between us. Dazed and embarrassed, I have nothing to say. It seems that I will never again have anything to say.

Miranda reenters the room and startles me back to myself as unpleasantly as the ringing of the phone took me away. She furrows her brow, jaw dropping in disbelief that I am still on the phone with Him. “This is not cool,” she scribbles furiously on a pad. “What the hell is the matter with you??” I can’t look her in the eye. She is poised with her hand over the phone, threatening to hang it up herself if I won’t.

I want to say something as yet unformed in my brain to let Him know gently that I have to go now. But before I can speak He hangs up his receiver carelessly and easily, thinking nothing of it, with a click like the last tick of a bomb before it explodes.

Iwas still doing my secret bleeding — a lot of it, and not the normal, dainty crimson bullshit either — when I deplaned, home for Yom Kippur and gingerly half waddling to accommodate my third maxipad in as many hours and the fact that I hurt everywhere. The cramps, as promised by the nice streaked blond at the clinic, were evil itself, and my boobs felt like two overfull water balloons with nerves. I was bodysurfing a weird wave of ache, my head heavy and hot.