auspices of the telephone

Taken from Erika's philosophy assignment; "In a 1 page paper prove you are crazy or not crazy."

I'm inside my closet when it starts, smelling a leather motorcycle jacket. The phone, I hear the phone ringing miles and miles away through wood, stucco, plumbing, telephone poles, freeway overpasses, living rooms, two-car garages. It sounds like one of those horrendous old hand-sets from the sixties, a White House red telephone connected to the President and screaming of nuclear war in its ring. The walls of my room shriek with war, the controlled cacophony of a ring that could shatter steel, that breaks the glass from my skyscraper head in a shockwave slashed through the atmosphere. Oh Mother Mary, we did not worship you enough, please, bring us mercy in the form of a silent telephone.

And the ring stops with the power of prayer. Replaced by the snake hiss of copper telephone wires and then a voice. Ms. Phoebe Leonards of condiminium-apartment 215 in Hacienda Heights, saying “Yes?” with the wet hiss of her tongue.

“There seems to be a problem, Ms. The war has been stopped by the intervention of an individual.”

“An individual?” Ms. Leonards asks, concerned yet scholarly. “Don’t be preposterous…who are they and where exactly do they live?”

A pause of electricity then the heavy meat voice. “We don’t know, they could be miles from here.” And the cliff recedes beneath my feet to its edge, I am standing while watching horrible stones rush towards me. I am that person they are talking about.

Horror, the conversation continues. The meat voice says they have picked up a signal and are now tracking psychic emissions from the suburbs, homing in on the person who stopped the great glory of the profitable war.

“We think,” the voice says “that it started with a prayer.”

I had been praying that morning for the war to end. I prayed to the seraphim, to the godhead Sophia, to Abraxas, to the goat-headed Baphomet. Then I took the host in standard Catholic transubstantiation, eating the flesh of a god, coursing in my thighs with factory power. The telephone has nothing on me. Let the lady and the voice communicate. Let them find me, for holy God I will burn them away with the secret prayer delivered to the prophets for use in the time of emergency. I will place my hands upon their hearts and envelop them with the startling truth of existence, burn their circuits out with divine knowledge, make them crazy with reality.

“Ah, we found it,” the voice says. “Standard disposal procedure. Sanitize all minds in the area with a formation sweep of Substance Antioch.”

“Oh, and I do thank you,” the woman says, and I hear the phone hang up.

Scraping the tin foil from my windows. Menthol sky with sun reaching out. Then a sequence of black aircraft shooting across in line segments. Chemical trails, white like fogged windows, drifting in paintbrush patterns to settle upon the town.

I hear another phone, next door.

“Martha, I really just had the strangest thing happen to me. I had the feeling that I was supposed to remember something, something really important, but that I forgot it.”

“Well, what were you doing when you remembered to remember?”

“Oh nothing. Just staring at reflections in the toaster.”

“Well, get some rest, dear. I’m sure you’ll remember tomorrow.”