Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

Even the real smells overwhelmed her lately. She could barely walk past her neighbor’s house with its ridiculous lilac tree. What kind of tree is this, with its heavy sudden bursts of overripe flowers? It too made her bring her fingers to the base of her nose. Just thinking about the rotting blossoms brought back the dense thickness of the odor. She had taken to crossing the street and pointedly facing away when she couldn’t avoid walking in the direction of that house and that tree.

Oz gradually taught her the phone stuff. He had a kid’s red plastic whistle that he got from a Cap’n Crunch box, and he showed her how to blow pitch tones into the phone. Oz had perfect pitch and on his own could whistle the unlocking combination: seventh-octave E at 2600 hertz. Short bursts achieved with tongue against lips and pushed over-and-out air, or by covering the second hole on the toy whistle. (“What’s a hertz?” she asked. “A vibration,” he said. “It is all waves and vibrations.”) He could connect to anyone anywhere without any charges to his line. Jelly did not have perfect pitch, but she learned how to use the whistle. Eventually she even had a blue box to make tones, given to her by one of Oz’s phone friends, the phone phreaks. The other phreaks were much younger than Oz and still in college. They had learned to make handheld boxes for what Oz could do by ear and mouth alone. Only Oz could do that. To hear him whistle a series of tones into the phone was impressive, but it was more than a trick. He could talk to her about the intricacies of the phone system like he was a line engineer: “single-frequency dialing system” and “hook dialing” and “Strowger switch.” Or the thing that Oz explained made it all possible: the #4 (then #5) crossbar switch, the innovation to a mechanical electronic switching system all done with tone codes. The world connected by phone lines and Oz could go through it all by whistling. Sometimes he would get to a person deep in the network, an inward operator, and ask her to connect him to any line he wanted. But his favorite thing was reaching an electronic switching station. Then he didn’t have to speak. He could use the sharp whistle tones to get wherever he wanted to go.

Oz had sat her down and showed her: seven short whistled tones. There was a click, another click. A distant ring, a connection sound. Another tone. Connected to a switching station in New York. Another series of whistles, and patched through to a switching station in London. Then Chicago. You could hear the response on the line — the gap, the distance — in the lag before the clicks registered. Then the other phone, Oz’s second line rang.

“Pick it up.” She picked it up. A distant click. “Hello, girl,” Oz said into his phone. Less than a moment and it crackled on through the speaker by Jelly’s ear. Thousands of miles, across a sea, contained in that slight lag.

“Hello, Oz,” Jelly said.

“Your voice just went to London and back to reach me.” There was no reason for it, just the fun of imagining sounds bouncing across the world in seconds. World whistling, he called it. Sometimes Oz was mischievous with his skills — he told her how he once walked past a man talking loudly on a pay phone. He did his sharp whistle and instantly disconnected the call. He could hear the man say, “Hello? Hello?” But mostly Oz played with phones because he liked losing himself in the vast network of connections and he liked how he felt as a sound from his lips vibrated across the globe.

Oz sometimes patched into an open-sleeve conference circuit that allowed two or more people on a secret untracked and unbilled line. The phone phreaks — all those college boys — called this warbling. Chatting really, about phones mostly, with Ditto in Los Angeles and Mo in Seattle. David in England. They were united in the high of subverting Ma Bell. For its own sake, and also to find one another. Everyone used nicknames or fake names because this was illegal. Go-to-jail illegal, even though it felt like a harmless prank. So the warbling also concerned not getting caught, who got caught, who was being taped and recorded. Oz, whose real name was William, became the Great Oz because he was the first and the best, and Jelly, whose real name was Amy, was called Jelly Doughnut because Oz said she was soft and round and even sweeter on the inside. All the kids wanted to talk to Oz, but the funny thing was that Oz never had much interest in talking. He liked the tones and the mechanics and the distant clicks, whistling from one responsive line to another. But Jelly was different. Jelly liked to talk. Jelly could talk. She loved to patch into the open-sleeve circuit with the others. Their voices hanging in space; Jelly listening and laughing and recognizing. She was the only — the only — woman who phone phreaked. These were shy, awkward men. They gave her lots of attention, which she enjoyed, but they were never ever nasty.

Oz did not like the time she spent talking to other phreaks. At first he was proud of her, but then he became jealous. He wouldn’t admit it, though. Eventually Oz started leaving the house when she got into a conversation and not returning until long after she had finished. He said that he didn’t mind, but hearing the talking gave him a headache.

In the years after he had left her, Jelly would trace the way they unraveled in her mind. She thought if she could figure out the place they came apart, she could fix it and he would return to her. Being left was bottomless. Not only in the moment, but the way it gave the lie to all the moments that preceded it. Is that true? Is love real and true only if it continues? Was it revealed to be “not love” when it unraveled?

This was another crucial moment, and she knew that she could not initiate anything more. She had to wait for him to open it further. She could not get anxious. Jelly held the receiver with her left hand and leaned back on the pillows. She crossed her legs at the ankles, pulled her kimono robe over her knees. She was a little cold. She wanted to be in that room with the beach smell and the sun on the windows. She waited, closed her eyes. She listened to the quiet line. She heard him cough.

“So how do you know Mark?” he said. He sounded friendly and a bit amused now.

Jelly made an “em” sound in her throat, with a little push through her nose. It sounded thoughtful, vaguely affirmative. She knew that even if she had to say “no” at some point, she would say it low and round and long so it sounded as if it had a yes in it somehow. Or an up-pitched down-pitched mmm-mmm, like a hill. The hums take you for a ride, just under the nose with the mouth closed.

“We talk a lot. Sunday-morning talks, late-Monday talks. Middle of the night talks. Sometimes we talk for hours.”

“Yeah? What about? Are you a girlfriend?”

Jelly laughed. These men all had “a” girlfriend, meaning several at any time. She never wanted to be one of a number. What Jelly wanted was to be singular. Not even “a friend.” She wanted a category of her own construction. Something they never knew existed.

“No,” she said. “Actually he talks to me about his writing. He reads me what he has written that day. I listen and tell him what I think. He says it gives him motivation, knowing I will call and he has to have something good to read to me.”

“Really?”

“He never told you about me?” she said.

“No, but I don’t listen to everything Mark says. He tends to fill the air with static. It is ambient noise at a certain point. You know, busy but easily ignored.”

She laughed. He laughed. Jelly sat up, stretching her back straight, feeling her spine arrange itself in a line above her hips. She switched the phone to the other side and relaxed the tension in her neck. She took a breath. So much of this involved waiting, silence, timing.