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| This is the telephone that was left behind in the old tenement building where I "sublet" a studio in an (almost) abandoned building by the Hudson river, a thousand years ago. I took the studio over from a mere acquaintance who then disappeared forever. The phone sat in the middle of the empty room like a sentinel and seemed to have a life of its own. In fact it had been "dead" for years, but not when I was in a lucid-dream or sleeping and unconscious to the world of daylight. |
The telephone rang in the dead of night ...... or so I thought it did. I sat up in the cot that I was sleeping on and could feel the chilly air on my feet as they touched the strangely damp, cold rug. The old rotary phone was where it always was, in the middle of the room on the floor. I never moved it since I took over the apartment, not even to clean ...... I just went around it, as if it was its own private space. The telephone was very "Ghost in the Machine", and seemed to have a life of its own or some other life force or spirit in it. It must have been a bright yellow years ago but was now a faded eggnog color. It continued to ring as I stared at it. It was very dark in the room except a dim, shaft of light coming from a street lamp through the fire escape window. I froze for a minute and then reached down to pick up the receiver of the phone and put it to my ear, it was frigid cold. It had a light up dial pad, and it surprised me when its dim light hit my eyes. I said "Hello", and could hear loud static coming from the telephone in my ear. I was still in a bit of a sleepy trance and momentarily distracted when I heard a night-hawk calling from right outside my window. I started to take the receiver from my ear when I heard a voice say ...... "You're going to be alright, there's nothing wrong with you, you may get a little cold but you're going to be fine, everything will work out for you, now just go back to sleep and don't worry about anything". The man's voice sounded so familiar, but in an eerie way.... very unnerving. The voice had a strange echoe, like that in recordings or radio programs from India. The line went dead and I hung up the phone. I was so exhausted and overwhelmed by this "call", that I just fell backwards onto my cot and did not wake up until 3 o clock the next day. I still felt wiped out and just sat on the edge of the cot trying to wake up. I picked up the telephone receiver and it was as dead as a door nail ...... I was flabbergasted. I was also very distraught when I realized that the man on the telephone from the night before, was the voice of my one brother who had died ten years before. I sat there lost in a maze of mixed emotions and a foggy mind. I tried to convince myself that it had only been a dream, and that although I did physically make the motions in my sleep, (I was a habitual somnambulist in my teenage years), that this was the only reason why the dream seemed so real. I thought about my late brother all that day and night, but didn't really feel any connection as we were never close and I had many mixed emotions about his previous constant negativity and aggression towards me. He had not been on my mind for a long time. I just wanted to act as if this "call" had never happened so I could move on into my new life in Manhattan, letting go of that unhappy past. I never told a soul of this disturbing incident and I started to forget about it ...... until the next "call".
The unusually cold weather for late May continued and I would have to sleep with my winter jacket and several sweaters as extra blankets. I was off from work that night and went for a long walk by the river before returning home to sleep. The river front area was unusually empty that night, and looked weathered, abandoned and forgotten. I walked by a condemed building on my way back and there were some very old and twisted Lilac bushes that were in full bloom and they were the last thing I thought about as I crawled right into my cot to sleep. I wondered who had planted them and when, and what happened to all the people who had lived here before.
I had strange dreams all night about being lost in the woods back where I grew up, close to Niagara Falls. It was beautiful out inside my dreams with an indigo-blue sky, cotton ball clouds and lush, glossy trees swaying in a light, soft wind. I stood there in the open area where four rows of high tension wires met, taking it all in. It was a tranquil dream until I spotted a Loggerhead Shrike perched on an old farmer's fence post that still had rusty barbed wire on it. The Shrike was staring at me as he sat surrounded by his prey that were all spiked on the sharp, twisted tips. There were toads, field mice and petrified grasshoppers all impaled on the barbed wire. I turned away from this macabre scene and wandered off from where I was into the darkness of the surrounding forest. I could not find my way back to the sun light of the power lines, as I got deeper and deeper into the forest. I could here a Veery's flute-like singing and the echoing call of an Ovenbird. It was dark and the forest floor seemed alive with strange plants that glowed slightly in the dark. Indian Pipes, Horsetails, Chanterelles and strange mushrooms called Earthstars all seemed to move a little as I walked by them. I stood there staring at all of this lost in wonderment and then ...... boom!, all of a sudden it became night and pitch black all around me. I could not see where I was and I felt as if someone was supposed to meet me there and take me somewhere, but they never came. The dream then ended.
The next weekend I was invited to spend two nights out in Astoria with good friend Jorge to watch rented films. I decided to let an aquaintance of mine from Montreal, Laurel stay at my place while I was gone. It was close to her work so it gave her a break from her usual long travel on the weekends. None of the supernatural occurrences or dreams were on my mind as I left for the N train. I had a great time ...... we ate and ate and ate, while drinking huge amounts of coffee. We watched two classic films, "The Ghost Goes West" and "Blithe Spirit".
My building looked unusually lit up as I approached it late Sunday night on my return home. Every light was on in my studio and I found Laurel sitting out on the fire escape with a friend of her's Pierre. They had been waiting for me and Laurel was quick to take me aside and pull me into the bathroom to whisper very low to me in my ear. "Fritz, I've been scared to death here since you left, its been so strange between the eerie silence and the weird noises that I heard late at night". I tried to calm Laurel down and asked her what had happened. Laurel told me that everything was fine until after she went to sleep the second night around 1am. She said she had been asleep for about an hour when the telephone rang, (I had never told Laurel that the phone was in service or not). She was startled at such a late call and hesitated to pick it up since she didn't live there. It stopped ringing so she fell back asleep only to be woken up by the loud ringing an hour or so later. Laurel sat up and picked up the phones receiver to answer it. Laurel told me that she heard very loud static on the line, but no one was there. She said hello over and over again thinking it might be me, but there was only the loud, crackling static until the phone suddenly went dead. She could not fall sleep until daylight and picked up the telephone first thing when she woke up to find it stone, cold dead. She assumed that the telephone had been working but just died, or there was a temporary failure in the service. I said nothing, but by now I was getting really nervous, anxious and spooked. I went to look at the telephone and picked it up, it was dead and not plugged into the jack anymore.
The building was strangely quiet that following week and I received the news that my Grandmother needed me to come back across the river for a few weeks to help her with a family matter. Of course I agreed immediately although I did not want to leave Manhattan, despite "the Telephone". My neighbor Mrs Novac (there were only three of us in a building all the other apartments were empty), said that she would keep an eye on my place while I was gone. Not unexpectedly, Laurel politely refused my invitation to stay there while I was gone. That night I woke up to the dead phone ringing once again. I rolled over to the side of the cot, put the cold reciever up to my ear but said nothing, no one spoke and all I could hear was that really loud kind of static that we used to experience upstate. I kept the phone to my ear for a long time but whoever was on the other side never spoke a word, yet I knew that someone was there on the line, I could sense it. I finally gave up listening to that static and hung up the telephone. I fell right back asleep, but had repetitive dreams about the telephone ringing and ringing all night, but everytime I answered it there was no on the other line, just that loud, crackling static. I left for my Grandmother's early the next morning, looking at the telephone sitting in the middle of my room as I closed the door behind me.
The time away from the my studio and the telephone flew by like the wind and I was relieved because I had no strange dreams and felt very rested. That is not how Mrs Novac felt or looked upon my return. She came immediately out to the hallway to greet me even before I reached my door. Mrs Novacs second question was ...... "Did you get a telephone line put in Fritz?" I already knew what she was going to tell me. I said no, that I did not have telephone service, and slyly questioned her why she was asking me that. Mrs Novac looked towards my apartment and said ..... "It was the strangest thing Fritz, but there were a few nights when you were gone that I heard a telephone ringing from inside the building in the middle of the night". I stood there frozen and in shock, what would I do now, I felt like I couldn't stay there anymore, but had nowhere else to go. I felt very angry then and defiant, I marched into my studio picked up the telephone, pulled the cord out of the wall and went downstairs to toss it into a garbage can on the other side of our building. I marched back upstairs to my place and proceeded to get things back in order, this seemed to be the end of the "party line" in our building.
Later that night I went to bed after several hours of talking with Mrs Novac. I feel asleep quickly although I was nervous about having those reoccurring dreams again. I drifted off and within a heartbeat I was back in the power lines by where I grew up once again ...... but I did not want to be there. It was sunny and beautiful, very tranquil but that feeling would not last too long. This time I got lost in the forest immediately and it was dark and pitch black as soon as I stepped inside the woods as it swallowed me. All of a sudden I was on a familiar path that used to lead to my old neighborhood and I followed it anxiously, as I felt a frightening presence around me, but I could not see it. I came out of the dark shadows of the forest and I could see my old house a ways up the glowing, narrow street. It was night and the sky appeared to be brilliant and luminous with millions of stars that cast one dimensional shadows on the houses below. They all looked like they were made out of thin plywood, like those old fashioned road side billboard ads. I felt that I was lost because the mailboxes all had different names on them, not the names that I had known as a young boy. Everything there appeared to be cardboard replicas of what once was. I approached our old house and my one brother and my Mother were standing on the front steps and they were waving to me. They were there together and they looked happy and at peace. My Mother greeted me from afar but it was obvious that I did not belong there. For some reason an unseen energy prohibited me from stepping onto our front lawn, I could not get any closer than the street. The glowing sky was also filled with common night-hawks and whip-poor-wills that were calling and circling the plateau on which the homes were placed. It looked like an astral island rising above the surrounding dark forest. I just stood there and took all of this mystic moment in. I could feel the cool wind on my face and the ground beneath my feet and I knew in that moment that I was really there. In the blink of an eye, it was daylight again and somehow I was back up in the power lines wandering aimlessly around. It was sunny and warm and I could see and hear a Scarlet Tanager displaying his brilliant plumage and singing from an old, floppy oak tree at the edge of the forest. I turned to walk down an open area of a hill that was overgrown with goldenrod and stag's horn sumac bushes, as it appeared to lead to a large path, and my way back to myself, deep in sleep. I was looking up at the meringue clouds in the sky just as a beautiful, buck deer with a magnificent rack of antlers ran out from the forest to stop dead in his tracks in front of me. The buck deer looked right into my eyes and seemed to nod his antlered head to me ..... the dream then came to an end.
I woke up exhausted with my face and neck drenched with tears. My pillow and jacket were soaking wet too, I must have been weeping heavily in my sleep. It was sad and magnificent and I did not know what to feel. I dont remember falling back asleep but I slept all day, until I woke up just as the afternoon sun was beginning to set. I went to the garbage can to find the old telephone that I had thrown out. I brought it with me upstairs and put it back where I felt it belonged, in the middle of the room. It had probably been there in that apartment for over thirty years at that time that I moved in. The telephone never rang again.
