Anatomy of a Payphone

“The person you are calling is unavailable, please check the number and try again.”

The boy makes a face, cramped and tight. It is the type of face they have seen before, countless times, infinite times. The face of a call unanswered and suspected ignored. The Payphone knew this expression well. Years of experience had made it not just a vessel of telecommunication, but an encyclopedia of human emotion.

Humans displayed more of themselves in a phone call than they would ever willingly do in person, the lack of a living audience enough to recolour their disposition, put down the mask they would otherwise struggle to remove. The face doesn’t lie in a telephone box the same way that words do, with the silent, unassuming payphone their only witness. This was the strangeness of humans and their phone calls.

Their immediate needs were varied and specific. But under it all, everything came down to a single emotion: the infallible desperation that comes with the desire to hear those two perfect syllables: Hell-Oh.

-

The boy’s face said the same thing that it had yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that, reaching back as far as the boy had been visiting the Payphone—an antiquated activity that should not have been performed by this boy, in this era, in this new-age world of wireless wonder where payphones had been obsolete likely longer than the boy had even been alive. Mobile mania was all that people knew now. They were lost in it. They were different for it.

-

The payphone: a stationary monolith from a time gone by. A time when everything was connected by the physical over the digital. Before waves replaced wires. Each phone box linked to the other via a grounded, corporeal system of interwoven, interconnected networks, fibreoptic friendships specifically designed to bound voices and hearts across distances once believed impossible.

Once found scattered throughout townships, mounted to walls, crowded into street-side boxes, present almost anywhere that would satisfy customer convenience, now they were seen only as relics of a bygone era, lingering seemly out of spite or an unerring, desperate hope. Though, more likely it was an operations technicality, established systems not worth the bother of removal, but considered equally unworthy of upkeep.

This payphone, the one that watches the boy, harbours the boy, feels for the boy, is an outlier these days, when so often payphone boxes are more commonly utilised as unconventional easels for street artistry, brief shelter from the elements, or recreational drug use, than actual phone calls. Yet everyday he came, and every day he made that face, every call left unanswered.

-

The boy calls again, and still there is no answer. He replaces the handpiece to the switchhook, the sound of it made louder by the silence, yet somehow his disappointment came off even louder than that.

He left.

He’d be back again tomorrow.

Every day like clockwork. The Payphone would count down the minutes, desperate for a connection of its own. Tick tock. Tick tock. Though clocks no longer made that sound, finding themselves equally digitized. Clocks—their brothers in technological betrayal.

-

Oh, how times had changed.

Long gone were the small rituals that layer the phone calls significance. No more was the pragmatic pilgrimage from residence to box. The bus rides, the weather-bound walks, the desperate dashes, inconvenient but ultimately unavoidable.

Nevermore was the hopeful plunge of fingers into pockets, purses, wallets, (and other unnamed, undesirable receptacles). The rustling of currency, the sweet satisfaction of exact, perfect change.

Farewell to the probing of passing digits in the change deposit—the lottery of the penniless and the youth. Forgotten coins a pauper’s promised land.

Extinct was this process, this antique alchemy: coin fills slot, bounces through the bowels, hits the belly with a satisfying plink as the journey meets its end. Buttons pressed, dial tones singing out, calls that are answered or unanswered. The timing, oh the timing. The anticlimactic dip of the mouth when the moment wasn’t quite right, the realisation that to depart was to void a return calls potentiality. The joy in those lucky times when words were exchanged, faces were made (of which they only ever witness half).

Connections created; a timeless exercise as ancient as life itself.

The downward tick of the time-limit, the frenzied addition of supplementary seconds when others ran through, hoping between heartbeats for fingers that work swift enough, ‘Don’t hang up, don’t hang up, don’t hang up.’

They missed this.

The boy is now all that keeps the ritual alive.

He hangs up.

He’d be back again tomorrow.

-

At some point they had made them free, the payphones. An overt attempt at keeping their presence justified, disguised as a philanthropic endeavour, a service to the community.

Irregardless of this, each time without fail the boy bring change, would insert it into the slot, would perform the ritual. Possibly he wasn’t aware. Maybe he didn’t care. The Payphone considered the idea that this could be more about the rites themselves than the outcome, but then the boy would make that face and they knew that was not the case. There was desire hidden between the furrow of those brows, there was want tucked into the dip of his lip.

No one answers.

He leaves again.

Tomorrow.

Secretly, terribly, the payphone would occasionally send out a prayer to whatever entity would listen to the prayers of the intimate and defunct, that the call would never be answered, so that they would never truly be alone.

-

The cord, it was an anchor.

Handpiece to cord, cord to base, thirty-two inches of polyurethane-coated tether holding firm to one’s intentions. Now this link was seen as stifling and unnecessary, a chain shackling them to a single task.

Better the freedom a mobile provides.

But there’s a distance in a mobile phone that nobody seems to recognise. Not the physical distance from caller to callee—that has not changed, but an allegorical distance, a chasm in which long distance communication pummels to its demise.

Are they aware of it? The way this has left them unmoored? Is it productivity that drives the overplus of tasks performed in the absence of this anchor? The dishes, the laundry, the walks, the gardening, the blue light universes where dopamine receptors go to die.

“Are you listening to me?” “Yes, yes.”—but no.

Mobile words in a mobile age where limbs race, hearts race, minds race faster than words can process.

“Are you listening to me?”

Only so far as the ear canal, where context dances off the drum, disappearing amongst the messy microcosm that is the mobile mind.

Once upon a time, a call had been a call, had been a call, had occasionally been a penned-out doodle in the margin of a phonebook, a hair braid constructed and then deconstructed, words said and then listened to and then absorbed. The cord the arbiter of this, the master. This umbilical cord of verbal connection, severed too early, leaving them lacking vital nutrients.

A call wasn’t a call anymore. A call was background noise to the bigger picture. A picture coloured in productivity. A picture void of connection.

The boy must not own a phone, mobile or otherwise, to warrant this daily trek. An oddity and a virtue—as so far as the Payphone is concerned.

Today, again, he calls.

Today, again, there is no answer.

-

A cordless cancer that’s what it is, eating away at their attention spans, disconnecting them from each other, from themselves.

-

This in itself is a ritual, a grappling of faith, a clutching of soggy paper straws.

He rings and—

“The person you are calling is unavailable, please check the number and try again,” the automated voice relays as always, high and feminine, too polite, too rehearsed to ever be mistaken as human.

Still, just this once, a single word, the first word:

“Please…”

A plea down a line, across an electrical impulse ocean, to a prerecorded entity that could never hear him. He pleads anyway, desperate for someone to hear him, desperate for connection.

The Payphone could hear him, and it sends out a new prayer: let his call be answered.

-

The tragic thing about a phone call is, that even if you do not desire it, eventually one must hang up. 

-

The boy holds the handpiece loosely in jittery hands, features drowsy with doubt, but maybe, also, something else—the listlessness that only comes with a sleepless night. Possibility worry had kept him awake beyond the hours of his normal rest. Possibly he had not slept at all.

Despite this, it was still a surprise when instead of leaving as he always had before, instead the boy eased himself to the ground, settling in, and waiting.

The night came as it always did out here at the edge of the world, quiet and without fanfare, the only difference being that this time they had company. The sun slumbered, and the streetlamps awoke in its place, the phone box’s single globe following suit. The cramped space filled with the muzzy light of a too-old bulb not long for this world. It blinked intermittently; on-off, on-off, on-off, before settling into itself for the evening, pale and content. Insects flocked to it in a starving exchange of illumination for madness, their bodies creating soft thumps each time they would collide with the casing. The only noise in the night.

The boy waited and waited.

And waited.

Then he slept, body a contortion upon the cramped concrete floor, a gordian knot of threadbare faith. If he did not leave, he could not miss his call returned. If he did not leave, there was a chance.

The boy slept.

The phone never rang.

-

It’s the Payphone’s location that’s protected it from the same fate as the rest, in a small town with a small population, tucked into the shadow of a dilapidated building that has once been for canning or crushing or construction, at the outskirts of it all. There were train tracks nearby that made a great ruckus at least twice a day, thundering a metal-on-metal melody that made phone calls less than ideal. It had been for the workers back then, unplanned calls to home, or planned calls from, cents for seconds that management deemed unnecessary use of the office landline.

When operations ceased, so did the calls, but the Payphone remained, a token of a forgotten time.

How did the boy know to find it here? Did it matter in the least?

-

The boy awoke the next day to the screeching of tracks, to the blare of a horn, the train a less forgiving alarm than even a cockerel.

When he rose to face the Payphone once more, he wore the withering expression of a human at the end of their rope. He brought the handpiece to his ear, he dialled.

It rang.

As always, his mouth said nothing, but his eyes said, please.

The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

The phone is ringing.

“The person you are calling is unavailable, please check the number and try again.”

Now his features were positively apocalyptic, wide, and vibrant, neigh a line in sight.

“FUCK!”—the second word, violent yet arresting, the moment of eruption, the catalyst of the frenzy.

He does not hang up.

What directly follows is the sound of the handpiece hitting plexiglass, cracking plastic, rattling the varicoloured innards free. The noise is a dreadful thing, but even worse is the thought: I am useless a telephone now. He will not come back.

The boy disappears.

The Payphone, abandoned, handpiece hanging freely from its coil, spilling copper-laden viscera, dial tone an endless, winding loop, yearns, then prays, then despairs.

-

The boy does not return the next day.

Or the next.

Or the next. 

And without the boy’s visits breaking up the days, everything appears to come to a halt. Time wanes in and out in his absence, seeming almost imaginary. Moment touches moment top-to-tail, end-to-end, forever into infinity. Suns come and go again, as does the moon, now an ever-shifting mirage of bright white to nothingness. No one comes, not even the tick tock, tick not of the digitized clock.

So, this is what it is to be truly disconnected.

-

The boy does return eventually, albeit after many timeless, shapeless, feverish days. And when he does it is with a renewed vigour. He enters the phone box, an undercurrent of determination his secondary companion. He feels larger somehow, surer.

A sentiment that disappears almost immediately as he eyes the Payphone itself, withering down into something small, something easier to manage. His steps faulter. His eyes follow the trail of cord to the handpiece, where it remains the same as how he left it.

No one had come to repair it. Who would? Instead, it is the boy who crouches forward, gingerly returning the wiring to its shell, replacing what is left of the casing. It is imperfect, a large chunk of plastic still missing, likely flung far off in his fury, never to be seen again.

He nurses what remains, transmitter to mouth, receiver to ear, coin in slot. The payphone dials, it rings. There’s warmth in his breath, hitched only for a moment as the ringing cuts off.

This time is different. The automated message altered, just so as such to change the narrative:

“The person you are calling is unavailable, please leave a message after the tone.”

The tone.

The boy says nothing at first, features a Frankenstein’s monster of bewilderment and trepidation. He stays quiet for so long that the Payphone fears he may say nothing at all, that the message bank will grow impatient, cutting off his one, glowing opportunity.

Eventually, though, he leaves a message: “Hey, it’s me, call me back when you can.” Handpiece to switchback. Call complete. Heart left hanging. He takes a step back, one, and then another, before turning away. His back to the box, where all that can be seen is the rapid flex of his shoulder blades, the telltale sign of breathes taken in and expelled too quick. He remains there, rapid breathing, rapid soul. Unbelieving. The faint lines of a potential connection for the first time more than a pipedream.

The Payphone had missed this.

Out of habit, or apprehension, or disbelief, the boy takes a step away—

And the Payphone rings.