Independent existence.

 Independent existence. 

Click on the phone for a
picture of the sound it makes.

The landline chokes, clatters to life, tweets, chokes-tweets. Roz answers. She brings the handset in to me.

     “It’s Nils,” she says. “He wants you to know he’s talked to me. I’m to tell you he has.” I start to take the phone. “No,” she says. “He wants to talk to Uncle Albert first. Where is he?”

     “He’s upstairs, I think, lying down. Don’t bother him.” She heads up the stairs. I hear her tapping on Uncle Albert’s door, a muffled reply. Some off-stage business. Sound effects: suppressed cough, whispered belch, broom sweeping sidewalk. Then Roz’s feet on downward stairs.

     “He told me to tell you he’d talked to Nils.”

     “What did it smell like?” Uncle Albert claims he can smell cats; they are like raw liver and lime sherbet. Roz goes to the foot of the stairs, climbs up until her head is above the second-story floor: “What did it smell like?”  Hesitation. A muffled reply. She comes back down.

     “He says, ‘very faintly of Canadian whiskey.” She reaches out with the handset. “‘In a plastic cup,’ he says. Nils,” she says.

     “Nils,” I say into the handset, all jolly.

     The voice at the other end has no smell I can detect: “Just calling to say though I’m not there, I do have an existence apart from you.”

     “I see,” I say.

     “As Roz and your uncle A. can testify.”

     “I see,” I say again though, I confess, I don’t. Or I’d rather not.

03.29.20

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* I don’t want to see, but Nils may be talking about this. Links to other posts featuring Nils are here. 

AND, check out «love in a time of cholera» on YouTube. 

Click here for links to episodes 1 & 2. Episode 3 in production now!