My son Ben is studying product design at ČVUT, a campus of eclectic buildings in a pleasant neighborhood of northwest Prague. He has to do some old-school things like free-hand sketches and three-dimensional prototypes and applied calculus, but the ‘T’ in the university’s title compels a ‘tech’ mandate to be ahead of the curve in terms of robotics, A.I., optimal alloys and such. He’s happy with the facilities at ČVUT, if equally focused at his huge drafting desk in his bedroom, which also happens to be the only place in our house that still has a functioning phone jack. That jack no longer supplies a ‘landline’ telephone number yet vitally enables our Wi-Fi router to work.
Eight years ago this spring, when Ben was away at some scouting weekend, I spent hours in his room trying to telephone a hospital in Columbus, Ohio, six times zones away. My brother Josh was in the last throes of cancer, accustomed to the disease for half his life, battling less to die than have us feel alive for any chance occasion—throwing horseshoes at our folks’ backyard, going to Ravinia to see, say, Steely Dan (the New York band who seemed to love Chicago’s northside), owing all his happiness to a peace that passeth understanding. I had heard from my relatives how his platelets were not keeping up with chemo, and time was running out. Illinois clinics having given up, the Buckeye state was now on the case.
“Hello?” I bellowed through the landline, putting me on hold and sometimes forcing me to “Press 1 for English, 2 for Esperanto, 3 for Are You Kidding Me,” as well as reasons to release this tendril of a vine no longer viable.
“Yes,” finally, an unfamiliar voice: “can I help you?”
“Oh!—thanks—you see, I’m trying to reach—” my brother Josh. You’d know him, Nurse, if only he’d be able to be himself. Listen to your jokes, precisely as he’d let you know how much he’d want every voice to be, well, heard by somebody. His own was sometimes raspy, but always waiting in the queue to let more urgent cogitations through.
Again on hold, I twirled the coils of this twentieth-century phone around each finger, discretely, as if the product was designed that way. Deliberate. The furls of teen-aged hair, before or after primping for a public face. With little else to do, I studied how my son had organized his room: the foosball table sometimes used, scouting badges not quite ready for display, homework as an afterthought, a picture of a grandpa he had never met, posing as an American G.I. in West Germany, prepared (I guess) to storm the commies of the East. His smile, bequeathed to Ben, suggested otherwise.
“Hello?” my echo through the afternoon. Nurses’ desks are polynesian posts, each integral to a culture we can never know by dropping in, demanding details of some delivery that may be docked within the still-birthed time of night. “My brother Josh—”
“Lamken?” the fifteenth island ascertained, and gulping too much—
“Yes! That’s me—him—both of us! Though ‘Vold’ is also who we are—our older brother Jonathan having checked Josh in, and while Josh and I took our step-dad’s last name, Jon retained our—”
Disconnect. The nurse, I’m sure, was just as apoplexed. I slammed the plastic piece of shit into the windowsill of Ben’s good room and threw myself onto his bed. I knew I’d need to do this all again and cursed the fact that mobile phones would also have to “Press 1 for English” in the ongoing scourge of Moore’s Law. Progress made the process more arcane, regardless of the payment plan.
For as it happened, Josh could finally receive my under-ocean landline call, through the coils of friction on my end and, I must imagine, his—a phone some nurse would tighten to his ear, tinnitus wracking anything he’d claim to hear. “Dan?”
“Yes! Josh! You can—”
“I can’t hear you, Dan. Can you—”
“Yes! I can! I can hear you—”
“hear me? Dan, I can’t—sorry, this ringing in my ear is—”
“That’s okay, Josh,” I gauged the decibels to scream or shriek, aiming for the softness he would naturally receive. A pillow on Ben’s bed would mute the agony or be within the stretch of coil to let me give my head a rest, contingent on the minutes next to beg my brother hear: “I love you, Josh—you do not need to—”
“I cannot hear a thing. Are you still talking, Dan?”
“I’m here,” my lungs expelled, “not to talk but to—”
“What? I cannot hear. I’m sorry, Dan. This damned disease—“
The only time I heard him curse outside a joke. Still, without a hint of hatred for what seemed such a loathsome thing. “Cancer,” I might have broached, but... nothing worth revisiting. “God,” I’m sure I said, interrupted by my brother’s patient sighs, “bless your—”
“What? I cannot hear you, Dan. I wish I could but... thanks for—”
Disconnect. Or more likely, I couldn’t hear myself, for all the coils inside my head, hoping to fast-forward to a glimpse of heaven semi-seen on earth. Columbus problematics, Prague ambivalence, thoughts and prayers to victims plagued beyond the call of vigilante souls.
End o’ story, if it ever was. Ben’s room is still the epicenter for Wi-Fi clarity, if most of what we have to say remains in bubble screens and twitter taps to satisfy the agency to filter thoughts, as ‘filling silence’ is less an issue, technologically.
I have to think, though, how phonelines worked the psyche more than cyber-updates. When my dad died, 1989, and I had a hundred calls to make, everything went through such coils. No emojis preconsigned, only guilt if I cut a conversation short or reassurance if I didn’t have a hint of what to say—and someone on the other end was listening, anyway.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2024)
