Jim & Kathy – The Call

The phone rang.

This surprised Kathy.

She didn’t receive many calls, and when she did, she usually anticipated it

She would know both the caller and the time of the call. The datum would flash in her consciousness minutes, sometime hours before the call would actually take place, the variables only depended on how long the caller might have been thinking about dialing her number.

Throughout most of her life, the moments between the first sound of the telephone ringing and the time she choose to pick up the receiver from the cradle, were moments she spent fantasizing that the call would have a clandestine purpose, that it would take the form of an invitation to join a conspiracy, one that would free her from her obligations to the world, so that she could save it from itself; like the fabled message Luke Skywalker intercepted when he first encountered the little astro-droid named R2D2; it was a fateful encounter that set him off on an adventure to free the galaxy from the tyranny of the Empire, changing the fate of trillions of people.   

The fact that she was surprised by this call, on this day, informed her without the benefit of her psychic antenna that it was Jim; she could never anticipate him.

She picked the phone up the handset and said, “Hello.”

It was Jim. “I need to see you,” he said without preamble, speaking in his typical-tone of voice, dry and detached, as mirthless and remote as Mount Everest.

After a moment that spanned the length of a breath, his statement, which was more like an imperative, was followed by the single word: “Café?” it was a question, and in I she sensed something different about him; he was pensive and hesitant.

Kathy was well acquainted with Jim’s clipped and terse mannerisms, and the way he said the word “Café?” Was a question that conveyed the meaning: Could you go out? And if so, could you?

His unusual tone suggested a degree of urgency that she had not experienced in her relationship with him. Kathy also heard this: Please, I need to see you now!

The urgency was primal, it was a statement of need. He might have been a parched man asking for water or a suffocating man asking for air.

Kathy’s heart leapt in her chest, she was almost afraid, but she quelled it.

“Yes.” Kathy replied, keeping herself detached and playing along with his minimalistic language game, which was their normal repartee.

“Hungry,” she said, both a statement and a question, articulating her current condition and inquiring about his. She got the word out while masking the concern for him that was welling up inside her.

Jim didn’t reply, he merely hung up the phone without comment, brusque and abrupt as usual. The normality of it did not hide the unusual tone Kathy had detected earlier, something she would have never expected to discern in him…fear.

Kathy gathered her things and got ready to go. She didn’t have to ask where. They only ever met in one place, a busy café near her apartment.

It was secure.

She was there so often that her handlers hardly registered her activities there. The regularity of her visits inured them to it, which rendered it safe for her to carry out a private encounter with Jim.

She did not have to ask when, the time was always right now, so she hurried out the door to meet him.

When she arrived Jim was already in line. Kathy took her place next to him, ahead of a few of other people.

“Small coffee…please;” Jim ordered when his turn came, then turning obliquely to solicit hers; “Soy chai, thank you.” Said Kathy, perfunctorily.

They sat together at a table by the window of the storefront, in a booth with the morning sun to beaming down on them over Hennepin Avenue, and warming their backs.

Seeing Jim made it even more clear to Kathy that there was something unusual happening, he was tense and taut as a spring. Nevertheless, they carried out the mechanics of their routine as if it were a normal day, an ordinary visit with her friend.

They read the morning newspaper and surveilled the crowd. In that regard at least, it was a morning like any other.

The café was busy. They were together, and not together, they were both at the same time.

They were in the crowd of people and completely isolated from it simultaneously. They shared each other’s proximity, and casually ignored one another with a practiced affectation that masked their relationship.

This was not unusual; extreme detachment had always characterized the way they interacted with each other. It was their basic approach to the world.

Their nearness to one another was deliberate, intentional, they were each acutely aware of the other’s body, the focus of their attention, what they were reading, seeing, observing. It was intimate, though any other person would have felt the tension between them like a wall of estrangement.

For Jim and Kathy, it was an artifice they had cultivated to keep her handlers disinterested in Jim. It was safe and it was something Kathy never questioned, because she knew that it protected them.

Time passed in silence, minutes became hours, and those stretched into the afternoon, becoming a longer period of time than normal.

They were quiet until Jim began to weep.

Sitting side by side as they were, and reading as they did in one another’s company, Kathy did not notice his tears immediately.

If Jim were any other person in the world, she would have known he was crying before the tears even fell, so when she turned her head and saw him, she was quietly alarmed.

Kathy had never seen such a display of emotion from Jim. “What is wrong with you?” Kathy asked, sounding scared and judgmental at the time, as if they were two Vulcans, one bearing witness to the other falling apart.

Jim said, “Nothing at all.”

He just looked at her, as if he were looking through her for a long and protracted moment.

For Jim’s part, he would not say why he was crying, he could not speak to it.

He had nothing to offer her but lies, and so he preferred to remain silent.

Kathy moved to the other side of the booth so that she could face him across the table, it was a breach of protocol, but Jim did not object.

She looked at him for a long time, observing him. This was also unusual for them, but not completely unheard of in their encounters.

They often spent long periods of time together in silence. It was a characteristic of their friendship, of the only friendship Kathy had ever known. She could not read Jim’s thoughts the way she could everybody else’s…anybody else’s. However, she was adept at reading body language, and his was no different, the smallest movements of his features, a facial tick, the sweep of his gaze, his breathing, they spoke to her in volumes.

She watched him as he sat at their table with the newspaper folded in his hands. She watched intently, until finally she asked him: “Jim…what’s wrong?”

“I cannot say.” He said, as he looked past her, not meeting her eyes, while at the same time inviting a greater degree of scrutiny from her.

It was intentional, he was drawing her in; there was a purpose behind it that both frightened and intrigued her.

“Why not?” Kathy asked, a bit more insistently.

She was normally circumspect, but in this moment she stopped caring, deciding to push against boundaries that she would have otherwise respected.

“You wouldn’t understand, if I did,” he said, pausing for a moment, then locking eyes with her he added, “I’m not talking about it.”

There was a tone of finality in his voice, as if to say, that is it, you will not get anymore from me, but I want you to remain curious. There is something going on, something you cannot know about, but please try to figure it out

“I don’t get it.” She responded. “Why did you ask to see me today…and in such a dismal mood, if you did not need something from me?”

Kathy wanted very much to be needed by Jim. It had become a part of who she was.

Of all the people she had ever known, everyone who had ever exploited psychic ability, for one purpose or another, she believed that Jim was the only person she had spent time with that simply wanted to be in her company. He was the only one who had never evinced an ulterior motive.

“As I said…you wouldn’t understand,” Jim replied. “Even if I told you, you would not understand. I am in the middle of something intensely personal, regarding a project I have been working on for a very long time. We have never spoken of it, but the anticipation of its realization is more than I counted on.”

“That’s all I can say at the moment.” Jim concluded, apparently trying to shut her down, but it was a ruse, and Kathy knew that he wanted her to pry, he was not really seeking closure.

Then he said something she had never heard him say before: “I apologize.”

The words sounded strange coming from him.

He continued: “What I am on the brink of accomplishing is…terrifying.”

Whatever was going on with Jim, she knew he was not actually terrified. She also got the impression that she would know soon enough what it was, she could tell that his plans involved her, though she had no idea as to how.

Jim finished his coffee, gathered himself and left the café.

When he said goodbye to Kathy he was unemotional, focused. He did not reach out to touch her, even though Kathy was sure he had wanted to. He was methodical in his bearing, as always; he never looked back.

Kathy watched him go, following him with her eyes and when he turned the corner, she followed him through the eyes of other people, and with her thoughts, when he was no longer in sight, and what she felt was disturbing.

She shook herself free from it, slipping out of the psychic state, and she took in her surroundings.

Jim had left his pen behind.

He always left something behind, little tokens as if they were intended to be presents, just for her, gifts to compensate her for the love she felt for him, love which he never acknowledged, leaving it unspoken and unrequited, like a pebble in her shoe, a constant irritant that undermined her self-esteem.

Kathy stared at the pen, imagining it with all the other things of his she had collected over the years, reassembling them in her mind into an image of him and his persona.

This mental construct was like fabricating a golem made from the pieces of things he had discarded, like her. Her fabrication could take on various forms, in her heart, whether they were pleasant or cruel, she knew that they were lies.

Kathy had always believed that these little items; this pen, a book of matches, a handkerchief, what have you, never the same thing twice, she had always believed that they told her something about him. As if she could peer into his character through the assemblage of artifacts and see in the things lying there the things that she was able to see so clearly in anyone else but had always remained hidden in Jim, and she believed that each little token contained a message for her.

She was right about that, though the message itself was indiscernable.

Kathy had never been able to dispense with that idea, but now, as she looked at the pen she had another thought, she had doubt. She thought that all of the items left by Jim and gathered by her, that they had no meaning at all, they were just trash. 

She was never able to read Jim, but today the membrane of consciousness that shielded him from her was less opaque, almost translucent.

She could sense him, see him, feel him there through the strength of their friendship, and the thing he had been working on, and failing at, the thing he could not disclose.

The great volcano coming to life in Yellowstone.

As she looked at the future through his eyes, she saw the world covered in ashes, and everyone choking for air.

In that moment when she connected to him most deeply, she felt his despair.