Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

“Hey, Oz, I’m here,” said one voice. “Slap Dog in Memphis.”

“Me too, as promised. Motor Mouth in Detroit. What’s up?”

“Thanks for coming,” Oz said. “This is a gathering, all. We are going on a phone phreak adventure. Get comfortable, as this will last a while.” More people called in. Jelly soon figured out that without her being aware of it, Oz had connected to the open sleeve number every day for the past few weeks and told everyone to phone in at this time for a special happening.

At 3:30, Oz began to speak. She could hear the delight in his voice. Oz sounded happy, and she realized she hadn’t heard him sound that way in a long time.

“Okay, let’s begin. Welcome Ma Bell and local phone companies everywhere. You aren’t onto us yet, but we will give you plenty of time. Everyone quiet!” Then Oz whistled some digits and soon they were all on the line with a man at the American Embassy in Egypt.

“Hi! This is DJ Oz calling from my radio show on WSYR in Syracuse, New York. Can we interview you about the work you do there? Just some basic questions.” He then asked him to hold on as he connected to another person. Some people at some places said yes, and then Oz asked them to stay on the line too. Then he called another embassy and did the same thing. He was gathering a crowd on the open sleeve, and he was blatantly courting trouble by involving government agencies. Some of the phreaks bailed when they realized what he was doing, but a lot stayed on for the prank’s full elaboration.

“I am Professor Oz in Syracuse, New York. This is my talk show with embassies around the world. Please stay on the line.”

After he called a number of American embassies across the world, he then called foreign embassies in Washington. Even Jelly knew that government agencies — certainly embassies — were dangerous places to call using hijacked lines. Any calls to these places were monitored by security. No one knew how much could be traced or was traced, whether it was the phone company or the FBI, but surely this would be noticed. Jelly felt adrenaline raise a wave in her stomach. She could hear her heart pumping faster. She was part of it too, and it would not end well. She pulled the phone away from her face and took a breath. Then she slammed the receiver down on the cradle. Oz laughed.

“We’re losing some folks, some phreaks, and some embassies. And here we are just about to hit the payoff, the punch line. Quiet, please!” Then Jelly heard Oz sharply chirp into the background hum. He held the phone receiver slightly away from his ear.

“White House switchboard,” Jelly heard a woman say. “With whom should I connect you?”

“This is Citizen Oz in Syracuse for President Nixon,” Oz said. “This is a live interview.”

“I am sorry, the president is not available at this time. I can take a message and give it to his office.”

“We want to know what is going on in Cambodia, can the president talk to us? Exactly what are we doing there?”

Apparently at this point people hung up or began speaking, because Jelly heard a lot of voices on the phone.

“Shhh!” Oz said in a loud stage whisper. “This is on the down low with See-No-Thing, Hear-Every-Thing Blind Oz. What about Kent State? What about the B-52 bombing runs? Can we ask the president about his secret war? His crypto-presidential activities? I mean the activities on the sub rosa, the ex officio, the whispered back channels.”

Again Oz turned the phone receiver away from his ear and Jelly heard a roar of voices. Oz laughed at the chaos — the babble — on the line, and then he gently placed the phone on the cradle, disconnecting.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Jelly said. In a few minutes the phone rang. Oz let the rings vibrate into the room. He didn’t pick up. He let it ring until it stopped. Then it started up again. Jelly went to bed and put the pillow over her head. On-and-off rings into the night. Although lately Jelly fell asleep before Oz went to bed, tonight she was still awake when he came in. She heard him moving around the room, undressing, and she slowed her breathing and pretended to be asleep. In the middle of the night, half-asleep, they sometimes fucked. But whether he thought her asleep or not, Oz didn’t reach for her, and soon Jelly heard the sounds of sleep breathing from Oz’s side of the bed. She rolled over on her back. She was fully awake. To her surprise, she felt tears dripping into the corners of her eyes. And once she felt the tears, she let more come, the saltiness in the corners of her mouth, the clutch at the back of her throat. She stayed quiet and she cried.

It took a few days, but eventually the FBI came and questioned Oz. He was charged with malicious mischief and had to spend the night in jail. Jelly was not charged, but she gave up her blue box and swore never to phreak again, which she didn’t. The incident was reported widely in the press, and in interviews Oz stated that he just wanted to get a job with the phone company. That was why he did it. Jelly figured that the phone company was not keen on rejecting a blind youth in such a public way, because indeed they did hire Oz to help with line security and system weaknesses, something he understood better than anyone. Two months later, Oz moved out of their apartment and she let him go without an argument.

Jelly knew that she had lost Oz long before the phreak debacle. In the painful last weeks of living together, deep into the limp nights of being in the same bed without having sex or touching at all, she sometimes thought about it, traced the tendrils of misery all the way back to the first hints of problems. But in the morning, when she would be momentarily happy before she remembered the state of things, Jelly blamed everything on that phone incident, the way we like to pinpoint things in one moment, one increment of time, the way it happens in certain movies or stories. But some part of her knew that wasn’t the truth. One day, years later, she would even remember that she had been doing her own secret thing elsewhere for months, so how could she blame Oz?

The phone rang very early one morning. Jelly woke in her bed, the room dark. She had fallen asleep talking to Jack, and the phone was on its cradle on the nightstand. She reached out from under the covers and picked up the phone. She held it to her ear and half asleep she whispered, “Hello?”

“Nico,” Jack said in a low voice.

“Are you okay?” she asked, and her voice sounded girlish and sleepy.

“Yes,” he said. “Are you asleep?” Jelly pulled the covers over her head and held the phone to her ear as she closed her eyes.

“A little,” she said, and she made a long exhale into the mattress by the receiver.

Years ago when Jelly was in college, she had rented her first apartment, just off campus. She was excited about having her own space and her own phone. One night the phone woke her. She was still partially asleep when a man’s voice said, “Hi,” as if he knew her.

“Hi,” she said.

“It’s me,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said.

“You sound sleepy.”

“I am a little sleepy,” she said.

“It’s good,” he said. And then she heard something in his voice. “So good,” he whispered. “And you like it, don’t you?”

“Who is this?” she said, now awake and angry. And he moaned a little into the phone. She heard it, paused for just a moment and slammed the phone onto the cradle. Who was it? But it wasn’t anyone she knew. He just randomly called her, a crank call. He called women in the phone book, probably, and got them to talk to him by acting intimate, by whispering to them while they were disoriented from being woken in the middle of the night. What upset Jelly the most was how he sounded, gentle and easy. She replayed the voice in her head, and it wasn’t a deviant voice. It was sexy. He never called again, although she almost wished he had. It was the first time she realized the phone could be like that, a weapon of intimacy.