Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

Oz applied for jobs in electronics when they came up, but he didn’t get them. Once he came close — he got an interview for a job at the huge Carrier factory that designed and manufactured air conditioners. After the interview, they didn’t call him. He presented too much difference and difficulty. She knew he was frustrated, but not because he talked about it. She knew because that night and the next few nights, Oz tirelessly chirped pulses on the phone so he could listen to prerecorded messages from faraway places. Oz let the recording of a woman’s voice — it was always women — efficiently but politely say something in a foreign language. Then a beep to signal an error and the voice started over again, saying exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. He listened to the repetition for a while and then he connected to another defunct line in another country. Again he listened as a prerecorded female voice repeated its polite lines over and over.

Jelly’s main interest in phone phreaking was to talk to people far away. Not recordings or pulses. Other people out there. It was a modern mystery: the connection with strangers on the phone. Not crank calls, but reaching into a network of other people and finding the ones you liked. Like writing a message in a bottle, a faith that even if no one wants to connect with you here in your immediate life, out there — the big Out There — someone is just waiting to hear from you.

For a time, Jelly had attended graduate school in communications with a concentration in film. But after she became partially blind, she had to drop out. Jelly got only a small monthly disability payment from the state, and as her sight improved, she looked for a job. Since she was good at talking, she had easily found work at a call center, first doing customer service and then moving into sales, which made more money. Everyone there hated making calls, hated the customers. Jelly hated it too, but she was excellent at it. Every day she got a stack of cards with her “turf”: names and contact history. Each time she had to force herself to hold up her magnifier, take one of the cards, and begin. Usually she sold vacation time-shares for a place in North Carolina.

David Johnson. (973) 623-1816.

Sometimes the cards had financial data and a history of previous sales on them, either with this product or a related one. Rarely was it a totally cold call.

Jelly had the script and had been trained in the techniques. KISS — keep it short and simple. Use their name. Get them to agree to something small, and then work to a bigger yes. Ask questions — if they answer a question, they are committing to you. But she understood the gist and did her own variation on the techniques. She often went off script and long.

“David, forget my Outer Banks Escape Offer for a moment. Tell me what would be your ideal vacation if you were entirely free to do what you wanted? Not the kids, not your wife. You,” Jelly said.

David Johnson — of Maplewood, New Jersey, previous purchaser of a deluxe gym membership that was canceled after six months, thirty-eight years old, fifteen-year member of IBEW, income in the lower-middle bracket — said nothing.

Jelly waited. She heard David make a wordless humph sound through air hummed out his nose that meant it was too ridiculous to consider such a thing. But then, into the waiting air, he spoke.

“I would like to fish, somewhere with no phone, no TV, and no family. Just me and the water,” he said. “Somewhere different from here, quiet with no traffic. Maybe a cold beer afterward, and some fried fish, a cabin.”

Jelly pictured what he said, and imagined David, handsome and tired, with his fishing pole. It helped if she imagined them as handsome. David had black hair and wore a flannel shirt. If you touched his flannel-covered arm, you could feel the hardness of his muscles through the fabric. Soft flannel, hard muscle.

“No neighbors,” David said. “No work, no talking. None. Not even the radio.”

“Yes,” she said, in her low, slow voice. She had learned to take a deep breath and relax her throat before a call. This was her phone register, hummed and liquid and soft.

“No phones!” he said, laughing.

Jelly returned a bright laugh sound into the phone receiver. “Silence?” she said.

“Maybe I would play my guitar. I like to sit around and play, but I never have time for it. But somehow I have time to watch two hours of TV after dinner, right? I don’t know why I don’t play more. I am beat after work, and anything but TV feels tiring. I guess that’s it.” Dark-haired David in a sad room lit only by the flickering light of the TV.

“You want someplace simple and quiet, away from work and obligations. No pressure, no shopping centers or traffic jams. Somewhere you have time to relax, but also do something you love and are good at, like play your guitar and fish,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sometimes doing something you love is the most restorative thing. TV seems to relax you, but it is the relaxation of being drugged. It deadens you, and you want something deeper and more satisfying.”

“It hypnotizes you. I don’t even care what I watch. We watch — me and my wife — Johnny Carson and the news and before that whatever nine o’clock drama is on. They are all the same, really. I just hate those comedy shows the kids watch. I can hear the canned laughs in steady bursts, drives me nuts. God, I hate it. Like nothing is worse than hearing laughing when something isn’t funny. And I wonder what it does to them, day after day, watching that garbage. All of us, hypnotized by lousy television. I tell you.” David in the doorway of the sad room. Watching his kids watch TV. Their faces impassive as staccatos of laughter erupt from the TV speaker.

Something would happen between them, a transaction. It didn’t matter if the time-share was not a cabin by a lake but a condo by the beach. It would suffice with the right emphasis. You don’t need to answer their answers so much as repeat the answers back to them. To be heard is a gift you can give them, and after, they will then do what you suggest. Don’t let them defer to a later time. Use a personal story to humanize yourself and relate to them. (“My own time at Outer Banks Escape is spent walking by the water early in the morning. I hear waves instead of traffic. The rhythm of the waves has been shown to mimic the rhythm of the heart, did you know that?” Jelly said.

“I do think I heard that somewhere.”

“Yes. It soothes us the way we were soothed before we were born. But I also love to walk to the bay side and the docks, where people take out small boats and fish. Or fish from the dock.”)

Always get the credit card numbers. The advantage was all hers — she did it dozens of times a week, while the people she called were not sales experts at all. They were just predictably human. It made her vaguely sick. What she liked was the connection she felt with them — and that’s what it was, a genuine connection between two strangers when they buy something. They trust you: it moves from transactional to faith. She liked that, and she knew that on the phone she was irresistible. She didn’t even mind making things up (her own experience at Outer Banks Escape, for example, was limited to emotive elaboration of the photos on the brochure). Making things up was okay because it was all about feelings, real feelings and real longing. How they came about, fantasy or not, didn’t matter to her. What she hated was that it was all for money. She hated that it all got reduced to numbers in the end, quantified. She had a quota, and she found this humiliating and stressful. Then one day she began to call strangers for fun, not money, from the call center. It felt a little rebellious, and it also felt good.