My life screamed at me today. Screaming what I could not tell. I could see the words better than hear them. What I saw was cacophonous and what I heard was indistinct. The choice words, the meaty words, were muffled and blurred. My life was telling me to do something, to change something, to go some place and do some thing, but I could not distinguish from the noise what my life was telling me to do. I spent the day wandering briskly around midtown Manhattan, darting through Grand Central Station, taking needless subway and bus rides, entering subway stations and leaving before the trains arrived. I spied on a woman using a payphone at 49th Street and 8th Avenue. Things were not as they appeared. As I got closer to her I noticed that the earpiece in the handset was missing and, as I later confirmed, the payphone simply did not work. What was she talking to? I heard her voice, seemingly engaged in conversation to no person, but to what? Was it she who was screaming at me? Was she the screaming voice I could see and hear but not understand? I approached another payphone at the Times Square subway station. I stepped away and the phone rang once, a very short ring, like an after-ring that used to punctuate the end of a call from a payphone. I picked up the phone. No dial tone. This payphone did not seem to work. I hung up the non-working phone, surprised but amused at the apparent attempt at communication. Was I being spied on? It would not surprise me. I was moving slowly through the station, picking up payphones, putting them down, taking pictures of them up close. None of them worked, it seemed, and this phone that rang at me seemed to be among the non-working, so why did it ring just as I was stepping away from it? Someone must have been watching me to have targeted that little ring so perfectly. I laughed a little, smiled some, looked around in hopes of smiling for whoever might be surveilling me. I had another odd encounter at a nearby payphone earlier this week. I had picked up the handset, taken a picture of the phone number printed on the payphone, and as I moved to hang up the phone I was intercepted by a woman who grabbed the phone from my hand and summarily but forcelessly pushed me aside. She dialed a 7-digit phone number but deposited no coins, making a completed telephone call unlikely but not impossible, and she stood for some minutes talking to what I do not know. Her mouth never moved but she maintained the posture of a human being having a conversation on the telephone. Was she surveilling me, too? Was she screaming at me? I was surveilled at least once before at a Queens subway/LIRR station. I heard a beefcake gumshoe security goon mutter into his shirtsleeve “I have not spoken with him, no,” as he looked right at me, less than a foot away, standing behind me, rapt in his conversation and rapt in his imagined feeling of invisibility. Then, too, I was idly picking up payphones and hanging them up, snapping photos, calling in reports from my experience, accumulating information for what ultimate purpose I could not say then nor can I say now. As long as it’s fun, though, it’s all good. And it’s all fun most days but not today, which felt like needles and spears raping my life, machetes and guillotines dismembering this inferior vessel, this ever-hoarier bag of bones and water punctured of its safety seal. I don’t know what my life was trying to tell me but its vagueness was as merciless as its insistence.
