After the Ghetto - E1

One day the phone rang at home. I stared at the object for a good ten or twelve rings. In his armchair my depressed elder brother didn't even move. That infuriated me. At last I picked up awkwardly – it had been so long! – and listened to a young, male, tenor voice spitting out words in what I guessed was French.

The tone was very dramatic, with many variations of pace and pitch. It reminded me of old radio dramas; but my leftover French was too poor for me to make sense of it. I hung up.

Across the crowded coffee table Fred looked at me with tired eyes. I told him what I had heard. I felt a bit offended and scared.

"What I can't figure out is how that goddam' phone got to ring in the first place. I mean, look at it: granted, this is a piece of military equipment with its own batteries. But there hasn't been a single network operating in the area since Vodaphone went bust in 2032!"

"Jorge has a phone" Fred replied, his voice plummeting every 3 or 4 words.

"Who has what?"

"Jorge. The neighbour... From there, you know... The Spanish trailer?  With the fried fish?"

"What phone, what phone, how can he have a phone if there's no network?"

"Some landlines are still working... He's got a landline."

"Has he? Does he? What does that have to do with my phone?"

I said "mine" instead of "ours". I couldn't help it. It hurt my brother, this denial of our community of existence. Sometimes, when his depression was running on my nerves, I was doing it on purpose.

He shrugged. "How would I know?"

He turned in his armchair and went back to sleep.

The phone rang again that night, its transparent plastic casing lightening with a faint amber pulse. This time my brother picked up. Although I could not understand what was being said I could hear enough to identify the high pitched male voice.

"Same guy again!" I shouted. "Same voice, same..."

My brother waived me silent.

I knew he could speak French. Recently he had been dating a series of youngish men from various French speaking countries. What I didn't know was how good his French was. His dates were unlikely to involve any kind of conversation. This is another consequence of the abject poverty to which we have been reduced: social rituals have shrunk to their bare essentials. Gone are the long hours spent in nurturing in our sex partner-to-be the illusion that our meeting might be driven by some other, higher, fatal order. Seduction is unaffordable nowadays. Dates are for sex. To get it, you would need but a few words: "Où ? Chez toi. Tourne. Comme ça. Oui. Demain ? Non.”

My brother had been holding that phone for over five minutes without uttering a single word. He seemed unwilling to do anything else. Thus I walked outside in search of something to drink and someone to drink it with. I left him fall into his fatal addiction.

For the next six hours, well after I had come back and fallen asleep in my armchair, he would not let go off that phone. Only when the batteries ran out he gave some sign of life: he disappeared for almost two days. He came back with twenty kilos of battery supply and his face, of which he had always taken so much care, a piece of horror. His left eye was missing.
The next sixty days he hardly moved from his chair. I had to clean around him - I even had to clean him twice, so rancid was his smell. He, in the meantime, gave no heed to anything but the French voice on the phone. Once or twice I saw him react: his face went paler, his hand shook, he shed a few tears.

The last two weeks of my brother's life I had to feed him as if he were a plant or an impotent pet. The infection from his missing eye spread throughout his body. I cleaned it as well as I could, using, instead of the dubious water from the outside barrel, the half glass of vodka I would normally share with him at night. In spite of my efforts his gaping eye socket soon turned brown then purplish. The last three days the stench was unbearable even from outside the caravan. But at no point did my brother show that he was feeling poorly: no complain, no fever, no shaking, no vomiting, nothing. On his last night we were both inside. I had tied an old cloth soaked in chemicals against my mouth to fend off the smell. Fred was listening to his damned phone, the handset in his right hand, the right elbow resting on the arm of his seat. I was reading Gulliver's Travels when, at the precise moment when [....................................], my brother's head slipped from the rest of his hand. His right arm opened at full stretch, his cheek came to lie on his shoulder, his hand opened and dropped the phone. He was dead.

His French had obviously been a lot better than I thought.

As I was leaning over him, someone behind me swore in French.

"What the hell is that smell, God! How you guys can live in a place like this I'll never understand. It stinks worse than inside a monkey's arse."

I turned around. My uncle Val was standing in the doorframe, his tall, square silhouette blocking the night glow, the light of our candle throwing evil shadows on his awesome face.

"I think Fred's dead, Val."

"Dead? How did that happen? When?"

"Just now. I don't know how, he was listening to this goddamn phone..."

"Don't put the name of the Lord to your filthy use. People don't die from listening to a phone. Hang on: a phone? What fucking phone?"

"That phone". I told him about the phone calls, the French voice, the battery hunt, the missing eye, the suspected infection, death. I told him all.

"But, I don't know, at the same time I find it hard to believe that the infection did it. He never looked sick."

"Never looked sick? What about the smell!"

"Yes but... You know what I mean. He never complained."

"Cats don't complain when they're sick. One day they just drop dead."

"Ha, that's the thing. You see Val, Fred wasn't a cat. He was gay and depressed, two states you might never understand. But he was still human."

"Peo-ple-don't-die-from-a-phone-call!" he said again. Val, I recalled, used to work in the phone industry in Belgium.

At that moment the phone rang. We looked at each other. I started towards the handset.

"Don't" Val said. He put his huge hand on my arm. He was starring at the glowing device with what looked like ferocious hunger.

We let the phone ring twenty seven times. When it fell silent, Val took it and examined it thoroughly.

"Army material" he said. "Comes with its own batteries indeed. But who the fuck..."

He put the phone back on Fred's knees. "Anyway. I came here to talk about Clem. He's using again. He's your cousin. You have to do something."

I sighed. Every time this was happening, Val and I had the same conversation.

"I'm sorry for your son" I said. "I wish there were something I could do but you're asking a not-so-former drug addict to lecture him against the overuse of weed and mushrooms. The most likely outcome is that I'll start using again and I'll buy from him. I could do with some weed actually. My hip's killing me."

"If I catch you buying from him, I can guarantee you won't feel your hip any more. He needs help, not  custom. I have enough money for him."

I sighed again, shook my head. "Your son is fifty now Val. And who the fuck needs money anyway.”

It had been ten years. Val was eighty years old. But he still didn’t get it. How hard was it? The disappearance of money was almost a benediction in regards to all the other ones. No more girls. No more children, no jobs, no economy, no energy. What use could money possibly be in such a world?

But for those who had spent their lives cuddling their fortune in the prospect of a comfortable agony, the news was just too big to take. Val was one of them: he had made a lot of money and still had it. He wouldn't admit of its uselessness.

"As for Clem" I added "he's like Fred. What he needs is purpose. Get him a job and a girlfriend and things will start looking different for him. He won't need his props."

Val shuddered in exasperation.

"A job. A girl. Sometimes I wonder if your brother is not the lucky guy."

"My brother’s dead, you moron. What about you? You’re married, for God's sake. And your wife stayed with you!"

"She's dying now though."

I pondered over that.

"I guess she's lucky too" I said.