THE SLOW DEATH OF THE ENGLISH SHORT STORY

Here is another freebie short story, A GAME OF TELEPHONE.  I just had the impulse to write it without thinking where to submit it. There seem to be only 3, science fiction magazines left, a couple of crime magazines, and The New Yorker. The only offline paper magazines regularly publishing short stories of any kind.  And what I had written  just for the fun of it was not science fiction or fantasy or a crime story. So I had no choice but to submit it to The New Yorker, not really believing they would buy it, which they didn't.

So there was no place left to send it, and I let it lay until I got the idea of posting stories on  NORMAN SPINRAD AT LARGE as free one time non exclusive gifts, if you can sell a story to a magazine that counts because so few are left, let it at least let be read here while not giving away first exclusive publishing rights.  So here it is.  Reading it again, I réalise it would make very cool half-hour radio play.  But alas, that also seems to be a dying form, if it isn't dead already.

                                        A GAME OF TELEPHONE

                                              by Norman Spinrad

It was one of those Chelsea loft parties, could have been well over a hundred people, artists, would-be actors and actresses, publishing and agenting staff, real estate agents, famous bouncers, professional party crashers, dealers to the not-so-rich and entirely unfamous.  Maybe 20% of them knew 20% of the others, no one knew as much as half of anyone else, few of them were coupled, and most of the rest were on the prowl for hook-ups. By midnight, 60 % were drunk, 35 % were stoned, 25% were both, and by 1:00 AM all too many of them were on their so-called smart phones searching for better parties and trying to call up taxis or limos.

      The majority of cells phones looked identical to a plurality of others, many of the people had them in one hand and a glass and/or a joint in the other while reaching for one, causing scores of them to temporarily put their phones down on tables next to each other, so it was understandable if a total bummer that Bill Dumont didn’t realize he had picked up the wrong one until he was home and already undressing to crash out alone.

     Oh shit!

It wasn’t just that it had cost him six hundred bucks, which was bad enough, but since the agency system held his shared business files, he had considered it too much of a pain in the ass to back up what was in the phone so he hadn’t done it. This included current hot leads he hadn’t wanted to share with the competing agents in the Big Apple Real Estate Agency, as well as his personal PIN numbers and bank and credit card site password codes. And even his little black book, so even his connection to his so-called social life, which admittedly currently wasn’t very much, was likewise sequestered in the lost phone.

    It was late enough and he was barbled enough that he had passed out and woken up not much before noon in a state of hung-over panic before he had enough sense to realize that maybe taking home the wrong phone might not be condition terminal.

I    f he had picked up the wrong phone, either someone else had picked his up by mistake, or it was still there in the loft.  He might have been too much of a slacker to have backed up his data, but he did have the sensible habit of slapping a full charge on his phone before leaving the apartment with it.  And he never turned it off except when going to sleep or the toilet and even then not always.

    And he did have a phone, even if it wasn’t his, an LG to his Samsung, and when he checked it out, he saw that it had a 24% charge, so all he had to do was use it to call his phone, wherever it was, until someone picked it up.

“Who the hell is this?” rasped a clearly dazed and disgruntled female voice after his phone had rung fourteen times.

“Bill Dumont--”

“Bill who?”

“The guy whose phone you’ve got.”

“Huh....oh shit...”

“Look, I really need it! Give me your name and address and I’ll come and get it.”

“Not so fast...If I’ve got yours, where’s mine?”

“I picked up the wrong phone too.  Maybe it’s yours, maybe it isn’t.  How should I know?  You already know mine’s a  black Samsung 4G, so tell me what’s yours and we can--”

“If I tell you, you can tell me you’ve got it, no matter what you’ve got, now can’t you?”

“Well uh, yeah, I suppose,” he was forced to admit. “So, er, what I’ve got is a 3 G black LG.” 

“Could be...but there must be thousands of black 3G LGs in town...”

“So give me your address so I can come and get mine and if the one I’ve got isn’t yours, I’ll give you the cash to buy a new one before I take it.”

“Sounds very generous.”

“I need my phone, not someone else’s!”

“And I don’t?”

“Of course you do.  But if I don’t have it, seems fair to do the next best thing if you give me mine.”

“You sound like a good guy....but...”

“But what?”

“But how do I know you’re being straight with me?  How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know you’re not some kind of pervert angling to get into my apartment?  And my pants.  Whether I like it or not. Maybe even especially if I don’t like it.”

“Fer Chrissakes!  I’ll hang up and you call your own phone number.  You do know your own phone number, don’t you?”

A long silent beat.

“Okay.”

He hung up.

The phone in his hand played an instrumental cover of Elvis’s Love Me Tender. He answered it on the fourth note.

 “What’s my ring tone?”

“ Love Me Tender.” Might as well, he thought grumpily. “What’s mine?”

“The roar of the MGM Lion.”

“Okay, so we know we’ve got each other’s phones, so give me your address, and--”

“Not so fast. Just because you do have my phone, doesn’t prove you’re not a rapist or a mugger or--”

“So I’ll give you mine and we can make the exchange in my apartment.”

“Get real, Bozo, even you gotta know how that sounds!”

He could could hardly deny that he did.  “So how do you suggest we do this?”

“I dunno....I don’t know about you, but I left the party pretty pissed--”

“Me too.....”

“Which is probably why we both picked up the wrong phones.”

“So?”

“Let’s admit we’re both a little hung over, Bill Dumont.”

“You got me there, uh--”

“Allie Evans. “

“So?”

“So we’d better stop and figure it out when we’re thinking a little more clearly.  Call you later....”

“Wait! Don’t hang up! My phone was fully charged, but yours...” He checked the battery icon. “...is already down to 19.”

“So?”

“So I don’t have a compatible charger.”

“So go buy one. I’m in no hurry.”

“Buy one!”

“I don’t have one for your Samsung either.  So I’ll buy one, and when we figure out how to do this, we both end up with backup spares.”  

“Fair enough, I suppose,” he told her, glancing at the battery icon, now down to 16, and he hung up.      By the time he had dragged himself into the bathroom, pissed, skipped the shower and shave and was putting pants and shirt on over yesterday’s underwear, it was down to 13, and it suddenly dawned on him that her phone would be long dead before he could possibly find and buy a compatible charger, and without the PIN code--

     Love Me Tender started playing on her phone and he frantically picked up on the second note. “Look, I just realized this thing is going to be dead before I can possibly recharge it, and---”

“Four four two two.”

“What?”

“My PIN code. Without it, you can give mine a charge, but you can’t turn it on to use it.”

“Hey, you’re right! I was just thinking the same thing.”

Was he starting to like her? Or at least being a little impressed?  Might Allie Evans turn out to be someone he might really want to meet in the flesh for more than an exchange of phones?

“Call it a...meeting of the minds... So what’s your PIN?”

“You won’t need it. Take a look. I’ve got a full charge on.”

“Do you now?”

Was there a little ironic tease in that? Had he unknowingly fed her a straight line? 

“Come on, sport, it’s only fair, I’ve shown you mine...”

Didn’t that sound like a not-so-subtle double entendre?

Or was he just imagining it? Or just possibly wanting to imagine it?

“Just in case?”

“Just in case. You never know.”

Was this starting to get a little interesting? 

“Never know what?”

“What you don’t know yet that might hurt you.  Or not.”

Was he getting just a teeny little bit turned on?  What the hell....

“Six six sixty-seven.”

“Does that mean something?”

“It’s not six sixty-six and I’m not the devil.”

“And it’s not six-six....sixty-nine...now is it?”

Her phone went dead before he could come up with a comeback to that one.

    It wasn’t until he had found a phone store and bought an LG charger that it dawned on him that he could have just borrowed a phone, right there in the store even, and called her on his own phone with that.  And he could still do it, without going home and waiting for hers to charge up, now couldn’t he?

     But somehow he found that he didn’t want to do that.  Why?  Because somehow it didn’t seem fair? Because it would...violate the rules of the game?  What game? The game they seemed to have started playing.  What game was that? Because he wanted to find out? Because he was beginning to enjoy playing it?

      Be that as it may, he took the charger home, plugged in her phone, and waited not all that patiently until the battery was charged up to 20% before tapping in the PIN code and unlocking it.

     If he had suspected, or if truth be told, hoped, for some sort of voyeuristic thrills, naked selfies maybe, or at least revealing data about the phone owner’s life and maybe even loves, he was disappointed.  

      The opening screen was sunset over an ocean with a single sailboat in the far distance that could have been just about anywhere, festooned with the usual suspects of icons--Phone, Contacts,  Email, Chrome, Twitter, Apps, Settings, Facebook.  Email, Twitter, Play Store, Twitter, and Facebook required manually inputed passwords, and he couldn’t find any password file.  

        Chrome revealed not much more than  urls for Google News, Maps, Amazon, various vanilla newspaper websites, code protected bank account, code protected Visa, Mastercard, and American Express accounts.

     Phone showed a fuzzy headshot of woman in maybe her mid-thirties with not quite clearly dark brown hair cut ear-length that could have been an outake from a passport shoot.  No address given. The Contact file held less than  a hundred phone numbers, all of them without faces, most of them tagged just with first names except Mom and Dad, maybe two-thirds of them female.

         Either Ms. Evans was a spy, a hooker, some species of criminal, otherwise paranoid, or just had never really gotten a life, which, given her telephone persona, did not seem to compute.

       On the other hand, he wondered what she was making of his telephone avatar.  His opening screen was a NASA photo of a rocket launch which he supposed could be taken for crudely phallic by the sort of mind that did not believe that sometimes a cigar was just a cigar. 

      He didn’t collect ex-girlfriend photos, since he hadn’t had the world’s greatest love lives, and most of them had not had happy endings.  He did have a porn gallery but it was tagged just “Pix” with just the lettering and password protected. He didn’t Twitter, his Facebook account was password protected, what porn sites he had occasion to visit were done incognito, his Contacts were full-named and many had photos, but none of them were even remotely famous, and his own face revealed not much more than his early middle-agedness, his neatly groomed head of black hair, and his Caucasian complexion.

     now the strategic question was who was going to call whom first.  Conventional gentlemanality dictated that it should be him, of course, and he had been the one in a hurry to retrieve his phone,  not Allie Evans hers.  He had made that all too painfully clear and she had told him in words of one salable, or anyway two, that she was in no hurry.  But now he found himself wanting her to be in a hurry, and beginning to feel, well, something like insulted that she apparently still wasn’t. And maybe something else which he didn’t want to ponder too closely..

     Not yet anyway.

     So he sat there waiting to hear Love Me Tender for longer than he wanted to, and the longer he did, the more time he was investing in his end of this perverse game of inverse chicken, the more he had invested in winning it, the more impatient he became, verging on agitation.

   And when agitation began to mutate into being pissed off, he finally broke down and called his own phone. He took it as a wan good sign when she answered on the lion’s second roar.

“I thought you’d never call.”

“No you didn’t. You knew I’d call if you waited me out.”

“Well it was you who called me in the first place,” she reminded him coyly.

“No I didn’t.  I  called my phone without know who or what would be on the other end.”

“And now you do.”

“Do I?”

“Well you know it’s a white brown-haired woman who’s between twenty-five and thirty-five--”

“--who flatters herself that she looks younger than she is and not much else.”

“That in itself should tell you something.”

“Should it? Like what?”

“Like I’m careful about who might accidentally find out where I live.  Like I don’t live online.  Like I want to keep my life private from every, uh, Tom, Harry, or...Dick who just might happen to steal my phone...or pick it up if I lost it. See? You’ve already learned something else about me.”

“You do realize that sounds just a wee bit paranoid?”

 “Even a paranoiac could run into a rapist, a serial killer, or mugger.”

“Have you?”

“A lady never answers and a gentleman never asks.”

“And which do you think I am from perusing my smartphone?  And don’t tell me you haven’t.”

“Of  course I have.  Even though curiosity has been known to kill innocent little pussy cats. But all I can tell is that you play your phone persona close to the vest too.  Bor-ring.... Or...”

“Or what?”

 “I do get the feeling that you’re hiding something...”

“Like what?” 

“You could be a serial sadist, or Bluebeard, or an ax murderer...like I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?” he asked, wishing he did have some colorful secret identity like Clark Kent did, or better something sexier like Bruce Wayne’s.  But alas he wasn’t Superman or Batman or even 007. “Do you find that ....interesting?” was the best Mysterious Stranger line he could manage and it sounded pretty lame even to him.

“I find that ...dangerous. What about you? I could be an out of control black leather and bullwhip dominatrix or a desperate junkie or a  black widow spider--”

“Does danger...sometimes...turn you on?” he ventured.

“What about you?”

“From time to time,” he sort of lied, for it never had before, but it was starting to get to him now.  “So what do we do about it?”

“We don’t have much choice, do we?  We both need our smartphones back.”

“We do at least have that much in common.”

“So dangerous or  not, we have to...meet in the flesh, now don’t we?”

There was pregnant pause at her end of the phone game.

“You’re right about that,” she was finally forced to admit.

Point, set, match!

“But in public, crowded public.”

“Of course,” he told her, “and gentleman that I am, you may choose wherever would make you feel...most relaxed.”

“How gallant of you,” she said in a suddenly dryly ironic tone of voice that did nothing at all to make him feel relaxed and the laugh that came after it certainly did no better. “I may not be what most gentlemen would exactly call  a lady, but I do know a lady who is just the place.”

“Why is raven like a writing desk? A lady who is a place? Is that a riddle? I give up.  What’s the answer?

“You sure you want to know?”

“Let me have it, Allie Evans.”

And she did, blowing the wind out of his sails, the stiffness out of their mast, and the pride out of any semblance of his Mysterious Stranger persona. She had him by the testes.  

Or not.

“The Iron Lady,” she said.

“But that’s the notorious...well-known..er...”

A heartier laugh this time. And he almost found the savoir faire to laugh with her.

“Oh, just between...friends, I don’t mind the D word. The notorious dyke bar.”

Almost.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Gentleman that you are, you never asked, now did you?” she told him.  “So lady that am, I didn’t tell.”

        end