“And?” he asked.
I stared at him without saying anything.
He laughed amusedly. “Walk with me through the park.”
III.
“It’s silence I want to hear,” he said. “That single instance where a person is bare and pure and doesn’t know how to feel. The silence that follows. That’s all.”
IV.
“What do you get out of this?” he wondered.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I can tell that wasn’t the first time you’ve listened in on a conversation.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I replied.
“Why not?”
“Words can cheapen an experience,” I said, “misrepresent a truth, especially when you try to describe it exactly.”
He laughed.
As we walked along, I asked him about himself, why he started doing what he did.
He answered, “I got tired of losing things because I wanted them so badly.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve never lost anything?”
“What’d you lose?”
His eyes hardened. Then he said, “They say that people only have a few motivations for anything they do. You think people ever do anything without any reason?”
“Love, hate, jealousy… what real reason is there for any of it?”
“The disease is existence,” he said.
“What?”
He grinned. “I’ve never thought nature beautiful. I always thought people made up the word beautiful just so they can look at something forever. What if they discarded the words beautiful and ugly? Would any concept of physical judgment disappear?”
“No,” I answered.
“Then words don’t really mean anything.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re just symbols for what we really mean,” he said.
“Symbols are important because they give things meaning when they normally wouldn’t have sense of anything,” I said.
“Maybe…” he replied. “Let me tell you a story. I once met this woman by random chance. We were both looking for champagne in the supermarket. She’d just finished graduate school and wanted to celebrate. I asked her who she was celebrating with. She frowned and said no one. She was sad to be alone. I insisted I would do something for her if no one else would. She pretended to be shy, refused initially, but I broke through all the barriers. Back at her apartment, she told me how she’d been studying hard for the last few years. After a few drinks, we made love on her bed. I know most people like to sleep right after sex, but I can’t. I have a hard time with anyone next to me. She was happy because she thought I wanted to talk. This was her most intimate of moments. She told me about her ex-husband, how they’d been together for three years. One night, she came home and found him with another woman. He didn’t apologize even though she would have forgiven him. Instead, he cut off contact and refused to speak to her again.
“She’d lost something pure. And I don’t mean her virginity. A man can fall in love just as easily in the span of a second as he can in ten years. She continued talking about her ex, describing what a scumbag he was, how he went from girl to girl. All I could think about was her wasted love. She’d be suspicious, reluctant of me after a while. We’d probably have a scene a few weeks into the relationship. She’d ask for space and time, demand that I prove myself trustworthy. It was already written. I didn’t want to play my part. So when she fell asleep, I left and never looked back. Truth is, if she would have shut up, I would have loved her. But in this case, as in most cases, the truth wasn’t worth knowing.”
“But the truth is what makes her interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I love people for their scars,” I replied. “No scars and they’re a bore.”
“Self-induced scars are signs of stupidity.”
“Then I’d be the stupidest man alive.”
He laughed. “It’s curious how normalcy seems so abnormal when surrounded by abnormalities.”
“Then it’s normalcy you’re searching for?”
“Or the lack thereof,” he replied.
We conversed for a few more minutes. He excused himself to go use the restroom. An hour later, I realized he wasn’t returning and was filled with a pang of regret. I wished I could have at least said farewell.
V.
As a nine-year old boy infatuated with imagined histories and treasure coves of lost fortunes, there was no moment more exciting than when my mother brought home twelve boxes filled with old telephones. Her younger brother, my uncle, had died in a motorcycle accident and left them to her in his will. We set them up all over the apartment: oblong ones, coldly metallic ones. There were phones I thought carved from dead dinosaur bones, others from ancient Egyptian ceramics buried with resurrected pharaohs. There were cords made from the leather of old British armor sets and hides from sharks who’d struggled violently with fishermen for weeks. Many of the cases had been constructed from frozen plastic secretly harvested from the moon. It was a laboratory for the senses, all the phones hooked up so that one ring would result in a chaotic opera of discordant ringtones vying for domination. I’d run to pick up, curious who it was. I’d hope for a sword swallower, a piano virtuoso with cerebral palsy playing with her toes, an eco-terrorist who poured yogurt inside fuselages. Instead, it was almost always sales people wanting to talk about bills and special offers.
My adulthood would be different. I’d meet a million different people, holding conversation parties with the entire world. My ear would be a permeable vessel for the turbulence of their thoughts, a balloon brimming with the hydrogen of inspiration and the volatility of revolutionary musings. We’d chat about a metropolis where people only spoke in musical chords and plan a city made entirely of vegetables: Carrot Lake, the Celery Towers, Radish Hall. But to my disappointment, no one ever really wanted to talk about anything except their problems. That’s when they wanted to talk.
At the end of our relationship, I couldn’t get my wife to say anything, no matter how hard I tried. I called her from all over the world and all that ensued was a rote, automated conversation that could have lasted one minute as easily as three thousand. I wondered how many passionless I love yous had been carried across the transatlantic cables, how much lusterless joy and rueless savagery that blended apathy with hatred and bliss. Even my hatred felt obtuse over the phone.
Many had their destiny invisibly carved by phones, ones with the musty smell of disuse and dirt, or the lean fragrance of congealed honey and ketchup stains. I knew a man who killed himself because his girlfriend left him, not realizing she would call him eight minutes after his suicide, confessing her mistake and expressing her desire to return. One woman stopped to take a wrong phone call on her way to work. The delay caused her to run a yellow light as it turned red, resulting in the car on the other side ramming her from the left. I knew of an uncle who could never forgive himself for missing his wife’s phone call as she lay dying in a hospital because he’d turned the ringer off to take a nap.
I grew up surrounded by his phones.
VI.
I often strolled through the park alone. This particular morning, I noticed a young woman playing chess by herself. She had light blonde hair that undulated into a field of cherry freckles scattered across her dapper cheeks. She possessed an airy posture as though she were floating, continually swaying her body from side to side, gripping her seat so that she wouldn’t fly off. I sat across from her and asked if I could join her.
She nodded her head without expression.