Yesterday I was walking and talking into my phone, as I am wont to do these days. When I do this I am not talking to anybody but myself and, potentially, you, should I decide to upload the audio here. I was talking about I don’t know what when someone started walking next to me at the pace, going the same direction. There was nothing weird about it, really, just two people who happen to transiently connect in routine pedestrian progress.

But I felt conscious of the fact that if this person, intentionally or not, listened in on what I was saying he would think the tone of my speech was obviously not that of someone talking on the phone to another person. He might think that me delivering a litany was strange. So I faked a conversation. I just started saying stuff as if someone was reacting and responding when really I was carrying on a conversation that only had one side.

I cannot quite explain why but it felt liberating. With this random and passing individual essentially assuming the role of a companion I felt like my “conversation” might endear him to me, or enrich his day with its substance and tenor. Talking on the phone, or rather talking into the phone, suddenly felt like a way for me to meet people, or subtly enter into their lives. I thought of doing this in a situation where I was sitting or standing near someone interesting to me who could not help but overhear me talking into the phone. I could talk about something bad that happened to me, something not so bad, or something exposing my vulnerabilities. Whatever I said the intention would be to draw the person’s interest, but it would not be false or misleading information. I could reveal my full name, maybe in a sly way reveal one of my website addresses, all this with the intention of drawing the person into my world without evidence of my pursuit.

Certainly it is not a new idea, whether conscious or not. People blabbing personal details about their lives into cell phones for all to hear are nothing new and they are not going away. But my approach would be more subtle. I would do this as a sort of performance art piece with the intention of making people want to listen. My goal would be to sound like a nice guy, a gentle soul you would not likely meet in normal life who can carry on an intelligent conversation better than others, and to make people fall in love with me.

It is akin to setting a trap, isn’t it? If someone was drawn into my world by this means it would amount to a relationship based on a lie. Who, they might eventually ask, was I talking to? I would say it was a magazine interview. How about Reader’s Digest? It might as well be a phantom interview with them since the interview they did do with me ended up being a waste of everybody’s time. I would say it was that publication and this person I had drawn into my life might act surprised that it even still exists. That would get the conversation going on cheerful but necessary matters of mortality and the dying off of Reader’s Digest‘s audience. The claim that I was talking to someone at that magazine would be a lie but it would be something I could back up with legitimate anecdotes when the story is never published.

But at what point would I have to admit to this person that the “conversation” was a ploy to attract their interest? Probably never because this whole scenario is a fantasy.

I did the fake phone conversation once in college, for reasons I cannot remember or explain. One night in the dorm room I picked up the phone and started talking to the dial tone, then to the howler, then to nothing. (The howler is the hacking sound a landline phone makes when it’s been off the hook too long. It lasts for a minute or two then the phone goes silent.)

As I continued talking my roommate entered the room and seemed to pay no mind to me talking on the phone. Why would he? I kept talking and laughing carrying on like someone on the other end was also having a great time with the conversation. I don’t know how long this canard lasted but after hanging up the phone I told the roommate what had been going on, that I was not really talking to anybody. He kind of shook his head, unable to summon a response. I don’t know if he even believed me, and I would not know if he remembers this incident today. It makes for a pretty strange roommate story.