| |
 |
 |
t automatically dials, “beep, boop, boop, bop, beep, beep, bop.” It clicks. Now it’s ringing. People think this job doesn’t take any skill, but it does. It takes patience. Only one out of every ten calls do you find someone home, and out of that one that answers, maybe after the twentieth of those, do you find someone to stay on the line with you.
It rings five times and then someone or something picks up. “Hello.” If it’s a machine it will start the prerecorded message and its time to hang up and try again, but if the voice on the other side says hello a second time, there is someone alive and breathing on the other end.
“Hello”?
“Hello sir, my name is Max and I’m calling to see if you are happy with your phone service.”
Max hears heavy breathing on the other end. He’s going to lose this one if he doesn’t act fast. Keep them on the line for as long as possible, that was the name of the game. “Now what if I told you that I could offer you all of the same features as your existing service for a third of the price? Its true, with Chimes new phone service we can offer you the same quality and commitment as your existing service for a third of the price. Do you have a cell phone? Chimes new wireless plan can merge your cell phone service with your home service on one convenient monthly bill.”
“How did you get this number?” The voice cracked on the other line in between its wheezing breath.
“Well sir, we are calling all customers who may be unsatisfied with their current phone service in order to offer them this great opportunity. Now I’m not looking for a commitment over the phone today. If you could just give me your name and address and I would be happy to mail you some brochures that you can look over at your leisure.”
“How many times,” the voice began, as breathy as before, “must I tell you to never to call me here? DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND I AM WORKING, AND YOU MUSTN’T EVER DISTURB ME WHILE I AM WORKING! Just for that, I think I will take your tongue.” On the other end of the line a phone is slammed down with a “twing” as if it was an old rotary dial phone. The impact of the handset on the cradle sets Max’s right ear ringing on the other side.
“Wwwwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnngggggggg.”
Thankfully his workday is just about over. Another day, another dollar-fifty.
When he returns home there is a red tag on the door. The big bold black print means it’s important. He opens the door and throws the notice with the other ones. He gets paid in two days. He’ll make his minimum payments then to hold off the wolves a little bit longer. He hears beeping and walks over to his answering machine. The red digital display is flashing a big F. That’s his life story all right. A big F for failure. Although in the machine’s case it meant full. He pushed the button and again the machine beeped, before announcing he had fifty-three messages. “Beeeeeep,” followed by nothing, he pushes the delete button. “Beeeeep’, again open air, he pushes delete. A majority of the calls are from dept collectors and telemarketers like himself. He should just delete them all, or better yet just leave it full so he won’t get any more messages. Fifty-three messages, fifty-three beeps and only three voices and those were recordings telling him to hold for an important message. Why does he bother? She’s never going to call him. As soon as he’s done checking the messages the phone rings. Max often wondered if they had some kind of device, which lets them know that some part of the phone was in use. He brushes his wavy blonde hair over his ear and answers the phone. “Hello.” No matter the delay, he only says hello once, if no one responds in three seconds, he hangs up. He doesn’t hear the telltale click as someone connects to the line, but what he does hear is breathing; heavy breathing as if someone was about to have an asthmatic fit on the other side. Max hangs up. He’s reminded of the quack pot he had gotten a hold of before his shift ended. What a nut job. Sometimes in his line of work he ran into a game player or two. Someone who tried to get his goat. Some of these conversations, he’s sure ended up on some radio station somewhere with everyone laughing at how they pulled one over on one of those annoying telemarketers. This one didn’t have that flavor though. If that were the case the man would have kept going, in order to get a reaction from Max. He would have been sorely disappointed. Even if it were a prankster he would have kept them on the line and stuck to the script.
“Riiiiiinnnnggggg.” Max picks it up again, pushes the button on and off, and disconnects the phone. Lori has his cell phone number. If she needs to get a hold of him for any reason, which she won’t, but if she does, she can call him on that.
Take his tongue; that was a good one. He’ll have to remember that. He wasn’t bothered by the threat, what bothered him was the fact that his ear was still ringing. It’s not like it was the first time it has happened. Every now and then it would happen when he was a kid. When it did, he would pretend he was a super hero receiving a distress signal and would have to fly off somewhere to save the day. As he got older, it usually only happened after concerts. Whether it was Cheap Trick, Bon Jovi, Ratt, ACDC, or even someone a little mellower like Eddie Money, he always ended up with a head full of bells. It made falling asleep a bitch. Luckily the after effects of booze and weed lingered within him and helped lull him to sleep. Ah, those were the days. The days of head-banging rock and roll and no worries. Of course those were the days that shot all of his dreams to hell. Since he had always wanted to be a super hero as a child, he thought that the closest thing to that as an adult was to be a police officer. He thought he would be a shoo-in. So did Lori. He had never been arrested for anything and other than underage drinking and some drug experimenting, he had been a good kid. When conducting a background investigation most drug experimentation can be over looked. A few can’t and Max was unlucky enough to have tried one of those. LSD was a hallucinogenic drug that could affect you long after the high was gone. Doctors say that some of the compounds in the acid can hide away in places like skin cells and muscle tissues for up to ten years. Those acids could then slip back into your blood stream causing you to have a flashback. Although the chances were actually pretty slim, no police department could ever assume the risk of having one of their officers go through a bad trip right in the middle of a hostage situation or even something simple like a traffic stop.
This was one case where the laws of physics were wrong. Max’s future was right on track and picking up speed and then, “boom!” Out of nowhere, it not only stopped, it started heading in the other direction. Although Max’s calculations were off. He had forgotten that things in motion stay in motion, unless impacted by a greater force. Setting your sights on something for most of your life and then being told you will never be able to obtain it was that greater force. So now Max was left in a life he didn’t claim. His girlfriend left him. He had no car and unless he found himself a better paying job, he was going to be without a home.
All those thoughts were too depressing, so he did what he did on most nights; he went to the fridge, pulled out a beer, sat down and watched television. As one beer became two, and two became three, he started nodding off. “Wwwwwiiiiiiiinnnnnnggg.” Max jumped up with a start. Of all the channels he could have left it on, he found the one that still actually runs a test pattern late at night. He looked at the screen and saw images flashing before him. It wasn’t a test pattern. People were talking, but no sound was coming from their lips. He looked over at the remote and realized he must have hit the mute button while he was sleeping. That’s when he realized the ringing was coming from inside his head. That annoying ringing, the constant drone as the tiny membranes on his ear drum vibrated insistently. With a mouth that tasted like a bar room floor, he got up to brush his teeth. He looked at the clock and noticed it was only eleven.
With his nightly chores done, he settled off to bed. This was going to prove more difficult than he realized. He always slept on his right side, with his right ear pressed against the pillow. This muffled any other sound coming in through this canal, allowing his mind to intercept the clear distress signal being channeled through his head. He rolled over on to his left, but it wasn’t the same. It was like a foreign bed to his body, and even in this position he could hear the nagging call in his head. He needed something to drown it out. With a flick of a switch, the bedroom light was back on and Max was busy rummaging through a box of CD’s. As much as he loved his music, one would think he would take better care of them, but his small apartment represented his state of mind. Someone had pulled the carpet from underneath him and he had taken the fall, now nothing seemed to matter. His apartment was as messy as his life. Clothes were thrown here and there, empty beer cans spilled out of overflowing trashcans, and splash marks and toothpaste splatter formed an abstract painting on his bathroom mirror. As for his CDs, which at one time had been kept in pristine shape in a nice catalog case (in alphabetical order no less), they now had broken and cracked cases, with the CDs inside mismatched and scratched. He popped Def Leppard’s Hysteria into the player and hit random play. “Armageddon It” was the first song out of the shoot. Max shot out the light and crawled back into bed. “Screeeeech, scraaaaaattttttttt, rrreeeppppp, reeeppppppp.” The scratches on the backside took effect. Infuriated, Max bolted back up, switched the light back on and pulled out the CD. He took it, looked at the back of it briefly, and flung it against the wall hoping to break it into a million pieces. The space age plastic was more resilient than he thought and instead of breaking into pieces it embedded itself into the paper-thin yellow wall. Ignoring the damage, Max searched again, this time looking at the backs of the disk as well. He settled on Rainbow’s Bent out of Shape and tried to go back to sleep. This seemed to do the trick and as “Drinking with the Devil” played in the background, Max found some peace.
“WWWWWWIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGG”! Max reaches up and slams his hand down on the snooze button. He lies back down and the ringing continues. With blurry eyes he looks at the clock. At first, he panics as his double vision told him it was past eight. As he blinks away the sleep, he realizes the burning numbers on the clock say it is only 3:14 in the morning. No wonder no light was trickling in from outside, it was still the night of all nights. He heard screeching tires outside. At first he was worried that someone was taking his car, but his memory comes back, his car had been repoed two weeks ago. With the ringing in his head unsubsided, this night was going to be a long one.
“Blleeeeaaattttt, Bbbllleeeeaaatttt, Bbbbbllllleeeaaattt.” This time it was the alarm and not the noise in his head. He didn’t need it though, for he hadn’t slept much of the night. From the time the suns rays pierced through the blankets he had nailed over the windows, he knew it was only a matter of time. He turned the switch before the sound could unnerve him further. If only he had a switch for his head. The constant humming and ringing was driving him crazy. If driving a three-inch rusty nail into his ear with a claw hammer would silence the static, he would do it.
Like a crate over flowing with the catch of the day, Max slid out of bed and peered at himself in the spotted mirror. No wonder Lori had left him. He looked twice his age. His normally well cropped hair had grown long and straggly. His face hadn’t spoken to a razor in weeks and even his normally manicured nails looked like he was shooting for some kind of world record. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered. The only thing that did matter was that damn shrill ringing in his head.
With no car, Max had to leave earlier to catch the bus to work. The air was brisk and steam rose in front of him as he walked the several blocks to the stop. For some reason, noises he never noticed in day-to-day life stuck out like an untuned guitar. The bells of a church rang in their bell tower to mark the hour. The screeching of breaks as someone who’s too busy applying make-up or talking on the phone and doesn’t see the car stop in front of them until the last second. The vibrating chirp of a school buzzer calling all the chattering boys and girls into the classroom. Each sound resonated in his head, sinking deeper and deeper, causing him to want to clamp his palms over his ears. He withstood the urge until the squeal of air breaks punched him in the head. He recoiled and instinctively covered his ears. This did little to ease the destraction, as his blocked ears merely echoed the ringing already buried within.
He arrived at work on the edge of despair, only to find that he had walked out of purgatory and into the embrace of the fiery inferno. People talking, chittering, and chattering away. Phones ringing, beepers, buzzers, computers chirping, bells, whistles, it was all too much. Max did his best to sit down. He did his best to punch in the keys to the computer so it could proceed with its automatic dialing. Calling out to the world over. It would seem there would come a time when it would run out of numbers to call. It probably just started over when it did. The computer dialed a number. Max closed his eyes trying to will away the noise. Someone picked up. Heavy breathing followed by “Hello.” Max didn’t wait for the second hello, anything was better than hearing all of the noise. He would rather talk to a machine than deal with the ringing.
“Hello sir,” Max began trying to get back into his groove.
“It’s you!” The voice said within each breath. Suddenly Max heard the pinging sound of a hammer, “clllinggg, pppiinnnggg, ccchhiiinnggg,” followed by a death-curdling cry. “Maybe,” the voice labored, “I’ll take your ears instead.”
Max hung up, stood up and walked out.
Five days later, Max found himself sitting at a desk at the employment center. A large black lady was in the process of reviewing his work history. All Max could hear was the wheezing sound of the big woman’s breath as she labored to fill her massive lungs. Phones were ringing everywhere. Max sat trying to focus, trying to tune out the grating, nerve-racking noises. Max tried to concentrate on the jobs he was being offered. He couldn’t. She might have been saying one thing, but he heard another. “Telephone switchboard operator, dispatcher, bell hop, elevator operator, bell cleaner, alarm clock tester, police siren technician.” Beeps, chirps, whistles, buzzers, and ringing all constant, never ending, never ceasing ringing. He has heard it was called tinnitus, but it did him little good knowing what it was called. He had no health coverage so he couldn’t go to the doctors to get it checked out and they would never see him in the emergency room for a ringing ear. They were too busy dealing with the deafening sounds of gunshot wounds and the shattering sound of car crashes.
With no answers in sight, Max walked out of the employment office and returned to his cold, dark apartment. Two slips of bright colored paper are stuck to his door. One is a disconnection notice. The other is advising him he has three days to pay the rent or get out. He knows it will take longer than three days to get him out of the apartment. He walks into a room that is just as cold as the air outside. He’ll be sleeping with extra blankets tonight. With the gas off, there will be no heat, no hot water, and no stove. He didn’t cook much anyway. Although who was he kidding, he wasn’t going to be sleeping much either.
The next morning he awoke to no power. He retrieves a box of cold pizza and beer from the icebox, which by midday would likely be nothing more than a pantry. As he sat in relative silence, except of course for the steady music in his head, he heard something vibrating on the table. His phone had been turned off two days ago, but he still had his cell phone. He couldn’t bear to have it set to any cutesy little chime or song, so he left in on vibrate just in case a lifeline would be extended to him from Lori. He quickly answers the phone, but instead of the sweet voice of his lost love, all he heard was breathing. Unreasonably frightened, Max threw the cell phone against the wall. Apparently this little device wasn’t made as well as a compact disc, as pieces of phone showered the room and littered the floor. Fear crept up and through him, sending spikes of frozen water through his veins and temples. “Ddddiiiiiiinnnnnnngggggg, Dddooooonnnnngggggg.” The door bell rang once. “Diinggg doonng, biingg boonggg, dddiiinnggg, dddooonnnggg.” Insistently the bell rang over and over. Screaming at the top of his lungs, Max ripped open the door to confront the rude intruder and was blown back with such force and power that he cartwheeled across the floor smacking his head against the wall, sending a stream of confetti from the ceiling.
Mixed with the intense ringing was a dull thump, which reverberated through his whole head. The ache in his temples was maddening. He wasn’t sure what had happened, but he felt like he was waking up from an all night drinking binge. He tried to raise his hands up to massage his frontal lobe and found that both his arms were stuck in place. He blinked his eyes trying to clear his vision, tried to bend his head down, and realized that he couldn’t. Using his peripheral vision he looked around and found himself duct taped to one of his kitchen chairs.
“What the hell is going on?” Max yells as he tries to wiggle free. Each movement, however, seems to apply more and more force to his ears. He stops jerking when he hears movement behind him. “Hey, whoever you are. Just let me go, man! Just let me go! You can see I don’t have shit. I’m not shit. I don’t have two fucking nickels to rub together. What do you want with me?”
“Hhhuuuuuhhhhhhh hhhhhhuuuuuuu.” Deep breathing could be heard behind him. “I told you not to interrupt me while I am working. Huuuuuuhhhhhhh, Hhhuuuuuu. I told you to leave me alone. Hhhhhuuuuuuuuu hhhuuuuuuuuuu. I asked you how you got our number. Hhhhhuuuuuuuuuu hhhhuuuuuuuuu. You didn’t listen.”
Max felt a small jerk on either side of his head as the razor thin wire that was looped around his ears was yanked. As easy as peeling an onion, two fleshy leaves flopped to the ground. Blood blossoms on both sides of his head and spurts forth like a Rain Bird sprinkler being turned on and shut back off. Blood with a tomato sauce texture trickles down his face, neck, and chest. The pain is more like a burning sensation replaced with numbness as Max begins to fade from consciousness. Spots of black begin to appear in his vision as he sees two gray hands, with reddish pusy lumps all up and down the hands and arms. Long curled fingernails, split and blackened, extended from each overly long finger. The hands pick up the swirled flesh and cartilage that made up the outside ear. Max thought the thing might be talking, but all he could hear was the sound of water running and of course, ringing. Light fades from his eyes, but the ringing never ceases.
Max survived, but that was all that could be said about his condition. He had been found a day later, still in the chair mumbling incoherently. The sides of his head had been cauterized to stop the bleeding and also to fuse skin over the holes in the side of his head. Max survived, but only so he could suffer. Suffer, he did, since now there was nothing that could drown out the noise in his head. He couldn’t listen to the TV. He couldn’t listen to music. He couldn’t even hear a telephone ring. He was left in misery for the rest of his days, with only the ringing in his head.
Back at his old workplace, people continued to make their daily calls as computer banks randomly scoured for number after number, reaching out and touching someone. Sometimes though, it reached too far. Sometimes it reached a place where you would think they would appreciate the work these men and women do. You would think they would take pleasure in the sheer annoyance and disdain these people caused. The constant ringing, badgering, pressuring, cajoling, pushing, relentlessness, that was their driving force. If you thought this though, you would be wrong. For even in Hell, they hate telemarketers. |
|
|
