He was well on his way to a breakthrough when the landline rang.
He always answered the phone because, in a discussion with the man in the mirror, he inferred that if no one answered, they might use the excuse that there was some kind of emergency behind his coat-hanger reinforced door.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Michael Trey, please?” a pleasant man’s voice asked.
“He’s not here.”
“Then to whom am I speaking?”
This was a new question, and it was very smart — very. This was not just some befuddled contrarian thinker but one of those unofficial agents that pretended to protect freedom while in reality achieving the opposite end.
“My name is X,” he replied, and suddenly, magically, Michael ceased to exist.
“X?”
“What do you want?”
“My name is Balkan, Bob Balkan. I’m an independent contractor working for the city to settle disputes.”
“I don’t have any disputes, Mr. Balkan Bob. As a matter of fact, I might be one of the few people in the world who does not disagree.”
“I don’t understand,” the independent contractor admitted.
“I have to go, Bob.”
“Can you tell me something first, Mr. X?”
“What’s that, Bob?”
“What do you want?”
The question threw X out of Michael’s mind. The man that was left felt confused, overwhelmed. The question was like a blank check, a hint to the solution of a primary conundrum from an alien, superior life-form. It had ecclesiastical echoes running down a corridor heretofore unexplored in Michael’s mind.
“What do I want?” Michael repeated the words but changed the intonation.
“Yes,” Balkan Bob said.
“I want,” Michael said. “I want people everywhere to stop for a minute and think about only the essential necessities of their lives. You know, air and water, food and friendship, shelter and laughing, disposal of waste and the continual need for all those things through all the days of their lives.”
Balkan Bob was quiet for half a minute, and so Michael, not X, continued. “If everybody everywhere had those thoughts in their minds, then they would realize that it’s not individuality or identity but being human, being the same that makes us strong. That’s what I’ve been thinking in here while the rain’s been falling and the landlord was trying to evict me.”
“But Michael hasn’t paid the rent, Mr. X.”
“I have to go, Bob,” X said, and then Michael hung up.
Eight days later the electricity was turned off. The grocery delivery service had brought him thirty fat, nine-inch wax candles, so he had light. It was all right to be in semidarkness, to be without TV, radio, or Internet. Michael had his five folders and the knowledge of a lifetime plus four years of college to filter through.
Two days after the electricity went off, it came back on. Michael wondered what bureaucratic and legal contortion had the man with his hand on the lever going back and forth with the power.
Just after the lights flickered back on, the phone rang.
When it sounded, Michael realized that there had been no calls for the past forty-eight hours — not his mother and not Melanie, who worried that her demands had brought him to this place.
He always answered the phone but rarely stayed on for more than a minute.
The phone didn’t depend on the power system. Maybe the phone company had cut him off for not paying his bill and then, at the behest of the city, had turned the service back on.
“Hello,” X said.
“Mr. X?”
“Bob?”
“How are you?”
“Things are becoming clearer all the time, Bob,” X said. “I just don’t understand why you cut off the power and then turned it back on again.”
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
“But you’re working for the people that did, or at least their friends and allies.”
“Do you feel that you are at war, Mr. X?”
“I’m just an innocent bystander who has made the mistake of witnessing the crime.” X was much more certain about things than Michael was.
“I recorded your statement about what you wanted. Someone in my office released the recording to the media. You have lots of friends out here, Mr. X. If you look out your window you’ll see them in the street.”
“I’d like to, but there might be something there I don’t want to see. And I don’t want anyone seeing me.”
“No one wants to hurt you,” Bob said in a very reassuring voice.
“No one wants to kill children in Afghanistan either, but it happens every day.”
“You haven’t come out of your apartment since we got hit by Hurricane Laura.”
“And here I don’t know anything about you.”
“What do you want to know?” Bob Balkan offered.
“You ask good questions, Bob.”
“And?”
“Do you think that we’re equal to our technology?”
“Maybe not.”
“So why are you on my ass? That’s all I’m saying.”
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. X.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you think that we’re equal to our biology?”
Neither Michael nor X was ready for that question. It got down to the crux of what they had been trying to figure out. If the human mind, Michael thought, was the subject of biological instinct, then there was no answer, no agreement, nor any exit from madness.
Stroking his beard, Michael forgot about the phone call and wondered if his own body was an unconscious plot against the idea of humanity, humanness. Machines and techniques could be torn down and abandoned, but what about blood and bone, nerves and hormones? Was he himself an aberrant machine set upon an impossible mission amid the indifferent materials of existence? Was his resistance futile?
While he was considering these questions, the phone went dead and the lights cut off. There came sounds of heavy footfalls in the hallway. Suddenly there was a great thumping wallop against his fireproofed, steel-reinforced, hanger-looped fire door. The police battering ram hit the door nineteen times by Michael’s count. The locks and hangers, doorjamb and metal infrastructure held. The pounding ceased, and voices sounded up and down the outside hall.
There were shouts and curses. One man suggested that they break through the wall.
Michael armed himself with a butcher’s knife and then put the cooking weapon down.
“I can’t hurt anybody,” he said to no one.
That night Michael slept on the living room floor in front of the door. His iPhone was dead and the lights were cut off, but under candlelight he read Man’s Fate by André Malraux. He felt for the characters in the novel, though for the most part he did not identify with them. Revolution, Michael thought, was both personal and shared, and everyone, and everything, had a part in it. His only affinity was with the feeling of doom and dread threaded throughout the book. He believed that soon he would be killed because he had decided to stop moving forward with the herd toward slow but certain slaughter.
“Mike. Hey, Mike,” a voice hissed.
Michael had fallen asleep. He believed that his name was part of a dream, but he didn’t know why someone calling out to him would be important.
He tried to lift his right hand, but it wouldn’t move.
“Mike!” The whisper became more plaintive.
Suddenly afraid that people had secretly come in and bound him, Michael lurched up, jerking his right hand from whatever held it.
His fingers were encased in wax. The candle had burned unevenly, and warm wax had pooled and dried around his hand. Michael laughed to himself, relieved that he was safe. He blew out the burning wick.
“Mike!”
The ventilation plate in the living room had a faint light glowing between its slats.