3:30 p.m., Saturday.
Call this number. ###-###-####
Enter this access code. #####
Be alone.
In a quiet room.
With good reception
It’s 3:21 and I’m driving home from Pease Mountain, hoping for a spot to park with solid reception. It’s Vermont. It’s winter. The heat blasts, rattling like a gashed speaker box of hell. The price for a piece of warmth, careening around tight country curves in search of the ever-elusive four-bar standard of service.
By the time it’s 3:29, I’m near enough to the town hall, so I pull into the parking lot and turn the pickup truck to face the mountains. The night before a foot of snow had fallen, so with the truck in four-wheel drive, the axles groan in a U-turn. Wheels rub against the newly packed snow sounding like velvet pushed in the opposing direction. Directly in front of the hood is a lonely bus stop, forever unoccupied. To my right: a soccer field, two nets gaping wide in the pillowed field. Welcome, nobody. A single footpath, smooth, parallel, certain, connects the lot to the forest on the other side. Cross-country skier, likely.
Everywhere the impact of humans.
Call this number. ###-###-####
Enter this access code. #####
It’s 25 degrees and the truck’s engine purrs with a steady tenacity—a self-confident conviction reserved for machines or computer programmers. Enviable to say the least.
Be alone.
In a quiet room.
So long, engine. Shuttered to silence. I wait for the inevitable January chill to seep in. Suddenly, I’m in New Orleans, recalling how the wet cold enters your bones like an unwelcome ghost, sipping all your blood tea while nesting in your knee joint as she kicks up her heels, laughing...
With good reception.
I’m connected to a meeting waiting room. Was there music?
I zip my wool jacket up. Bury my mouth in fleece. Then, click.
A voice welcomes me.
“Say hello.”
I think that’s how it starts.
Like nearly all beginnings, that’s how it starts.
Before the surgical, unrelenting pursuit of possibilities, there’s hello.
Before the oncoming fracture, diversification of potential routes, there’s hello.
Before the widening and narrowing of outcomes, lives lived, enamored encounters, perceived triumphs, bargained losses, there’s hello.
“This will feel like a conversation, but it won’t be one.”
A mechanical voice leads us. A person? A program? Her intonations unmask a data-text input base. (Really, it’s all design. Her clunkiness is charming and an amplified lo-fi construction. All edges. To remind us, perhaps, that we are the human ones and, also, maybe to suggest that neither of us, person or programmed moderator, can ever be seamlessly ironed out.)
It’s a three-way. I have been paired, anonymously, to another ticket-holder. It could be anyone. Anywhere.1
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