17

Susan rented a car and drove to Long Island to the pet cemetery where Sweet William had been buried. She was surprised at the size of it, large and sprawling as any human version, gracefully sculptured and serene. Years before, she would have laughed at the thought that all this beauty was created for the corpses of dogs and cats (or rather, for their hopelessly lonely owners) but now it seemed to her justified.

An almost comically soft-­spoken man (in appropriate dark suit) in the main building directed her to Sweet William’s as yet unmarked grave (the stone, Lou told her, had been ordered with the inscription “Sweet William, companion and friend”).

As she walked alone toward Section D, Row 14, Site 12 (a supermarket of dead things), it occurred to her that Sweet William would have liked this place; he would have raced up and down its paths, returning to her salivating and out of breath, only to race away again, looking back at her, daring her to try to catch him. She imagined him galloping at full speed away from her, turning abruptly when he heard her call, jumping up on her with dirty paws, his ears down as she chastised him, his head leaning forward for the kiss of forgiveness.

About thirty yards from her a couple stood by their pet’s grave, smiling down at the newly placed flowers, the woman bending down briefly to snatch a weed that marred her surrogate baby’s resting place.

Susan felt humiliated to be in their company—to witness the emptiness of their lives, to be seen displaying her own.

She found Section D and walked along its numbered rows.

“Goddamn it, Sweet William!” She saw herself, years before, in her first apartment. In her hand was a shoe, or what had been a shoe before her ungainly puppy had at it. “You’re gonna get it!” It was a studio apartment, there was nowhere he could run, but, ears back, tail under, he scrambled under her bed and curled himself into the smallest ball beneath it.

“Get out of there and take what’s coming to you.” She was on her hands and knees, brandishing the ruined shoe at him.

He looked back at her, immense brown eyes filled with regret. If he had been human, he would have wept.

“Come on, get out of there.” She tried to reach under to get him; he was too far away. “The longer you wait, the worse it’ll be!”

He fell over on his side under the bed and lifted a front paw, pleading forgiveness.

“You’re a rotten dog and I’m sorry I got you. . . .”

He poked the paw at the air in her direction, the eyes, even in the dark under the bed, gleaming with impossible tears.

“You pee all over the place and eat the only decent shoes I’ve got . . .”

He whined.

“Miserable mutt . . .”

And again.

“Rotten, cute mutt . . .”

The paw reached out to her, he laid his head on the floor, a remorseful supplicant; he whined softly, as if regretting his foolishness, his weakness, his sinfulness.

“All right, come out.” Her voice was softer, though it still had an edge of anger to it.

He whined loudly now, as if praying to God to intercede.

Despite herself, Susan laughed. “Get out here, you nut.”

He crawled to her, head, still too large for his young body, still on the floor, eyes, soulful, tortured eyes, not daring to look at her.

It was then that he leaned forward to be kissed, for the first time.

“Oh, lord,” she had said, taking him in her arms, “what have I got myself into?”

The reverie over, Susan found herself weeping softly at Sweet William’s graveside, wishing she could kiss him once more.

It was after two when she returned to the apartment. As she closed the front door, as if on cue the phones rang.

Once.

Susan stared in the direction of the kitchen (the nearest phone to her) waiting for the silence that would mean Harriet was trying to reach her.

It came.

And then the second call started. She let it ring several times (slowly entering the kitchen, still frightened at the thought of touching it), but then, remembering how sure Harriet was of herself and the world around her, she answered.

“Harriet?” she said, not yet holding the thing to her ear.

“Fuck Harriet,” was all she heard before slamming the receiver down.

If it was a voice that had said it, it was unlike any human voice. Surrounded by the imploded silence, it could only have been one person.

Or one thing.

“I can’t describe it!” Susan said, still shivering, though Harriet had sent her secretary off to bring her a cup of coffee. (She had run from the apartment, stolen a taxi from a man who, on seeing her, was too frightened to resist, and gone directly to the phone company offices on Forty-­second Street. The receptionist had immediately sent for Harriet, urgently summoning her from a meeting.)

“I don’t even know if it was a voice,” Susan said, breathing deeply, trying to slow the rush of words that were pouring out of her. “It was more like an animal’s growl . . . I don’t know. . . .”

“Could it have been electronic?”

“What?”

“Someone speaking through a machine?”

“I don’t know. God, Harriet, I’ve never been so frightened . . .”

“I know, honey. Try to calm down.”

“It knows about you! It knows how you’ll call me!”

Harriet wanted to answer that, to assure Susan it wasn’t so, but there was nothing she could say except “Try to calm down.”

In a few minutes Susan did calm sufficiently for Harriet to demand, “Look, one thing you’ve got to do. No matter how scared you are, the next time it calls, you mustn’t hang up. Put the phone down, get out of the apartment, come here if you like, but don’t hang up. We can’t do a thing if you hang up.”

“I understand,” Susan replied, ashamed of her inability to assist the only person who might help her. “I won’t. I promise.”

“Good girl.” And with a glance at her wristwatch, “Shit, it’s three-­fifteen. I’ve got a roomful of minor executives out there waiting to snipe at me. Gotta go. Walk you to the elevator.”

They walked to the elevator bank together, Harriet assuring her that something would be done about her caller, that sooner or later, he (it?) would be caught and put where he belonged.

“He’s just some creep, Susan. Every once in a while one of them crawls out of the woodwork. You can’t let him get to you.”

Thoroughly ashamed, Susan nodded and watched Harriet as she hurried off to her meeting, feeling that if this horror were happening to her, she would know how to deal with it; she had everything Susan lacked, including courage.

She was halfway to the lobby when she remembered Andrea, alone after school, waiting for her.

One more shame.

Their chance came.

It was early the next morning. Susan could still hear the closing door of the elevator that was taking Lou and Andrea off for the day.

One ring. Silence. The second call.

She stood in the kitchen, still holding her coffee cup, aware that she was beginning to tremble, knowing it wasn’t Harriet (she wouldn’t be at her office yet; she wouldn’t call from home), certain that the thing waited on the other end of the line, waited to laugh at her or worse.

Harriet’s words came back to her (“Don’t hang up!”) and she silently gave her promise once more.

She approached the phone, hesitated, felt Harriet’s imagined impatience with her and picked it up.

As she held it to her ear, she heard Harriet’s voice.

“Look, one thing you’ve got to do. No matter how scared you are, the next time it calls, you mustn’t hang up. Put the phone down, get out of the apartment, come here if you like . . .”

“Harriet?” she said.

“. . . but don’t hang up. We can’t do a thing if you hang up.”

“Harriet, what are you saying?”

“I understand. I won’t. I promise.”

Susan recognized her own voice.

“Good girl . . .”

“Harriet? Harriet?” she called out as if she could reach through what they had said to the Harriet who now existed. 

“. . . Shit, it’s three-­fifteen. I’ve got a roomful of . . .”

“Stop it!”

“. . . out there waiting to snipe at me. Gotta go . . .”

“Damn you! I won’t hang up!”

“. . . walk you to the elevator . . .”

“You won’t make me hang up this time!”

“. . . so, how do you like our offices? Snazzy, huh? . . .”

Susan slammed the receiver down on the kitchen counter with such force that the earpiece split, sending a semicircle of white plastic skittering to the floor, where it trembled for a moment and came to rest at her feet. She stared down at it as if it were a dismembered human part.

In a moment she became aware that no sound came from the remaining, shattered part.

She hurried to the living room and pulled the second receiver from its cradle.

Only the sound of a dial tone.

Cursing her stupidity, Susan vowed that the next time she was called, no trick, no obscene joke, no matter how unexpected, would make her fail in her promise.

Susan smelled smoke.

It haunted her that entire evening as she searched for the source. (Lou smelled nothing and grew annoyed with her constant opening and slamming of doors and cupboards.) But the smell persisted. (Three times she checked the service area and the outer hallway; she opened and shut the oven door a dozen times; she checked lamp wires and the two TV sets, even the transistor radio she had brought back from the office.

And still the acrid odor of fire persisted.

And in her sole dream that night.

She saw Harriet as a doll (“A regular doll,” Tara’s voice giggled somewhere in the darkness of the dream). But the doll was burning. Harriet was burning, her mane of hair frizzing from the heat and then exploding into flames. Her face, each lovely feature, melting, discoloring, flowing off the head into puddles beside it. Her dress (the one she’d worn to lunch) turning brown, black, incinerating.

Susan woke (late as always, alone in the apartment) knowing the truth, and for the first time in weeks she voluntarily reached for her bedside phone.

“Harriet?” she said, when she had reached her. “It’s Susan.”

There was a hesitation. “You’re using the phone,” Harriet said.

“Yes, I had to. Are you all right?” And her voice pleaded that she was.

“Sure. What’s the matter?”

Susan doubted for a moment, felt foolish but pushed the question.

“Nothing happened last night?”

“What?”

“Did anything happen? Was there a fire?”

Another hesitation in which Susan heard the answer. And then, “How the hell did you know that?”

It was as she’d surmised—a warning; fire from a world of fire.

“What happened?” Susan asked, sickened.

“It was the oven. Larry thought I turned it down and I thought he did. But how did you know?”

“I smelled it.”

“What?”

“Harriet, I want you to listen to me and to do exactly what I tell you—” and the image of a hand (her hand) releasing a lifeline came to Susan. “I want you to stop tracing my calls. I want you to forget you ever met me. . . .”

“Susan, what on earth are you talking about?”

“I don’t want your help. I want you to leave me alone.” And she thought of Jimmy and Sweet William.

“Why? What have I done?”

“It’s not what you’ve done, Harriet. It’s what’s going to happen to you if you don’t leave me alone! Please, for your own sake . . .”

“Susan, come on, calm down . . .”

“There’s nothing you can do. Don’t you see that?” She forced a calm, better to protect her friend. “The fire was a warning, Harriet. It knows you’re trying to help me. It won’t let you . . .”

“Susan, that’s ridiculous. It was just a small fire in the oven. We have mishaps like that all the time. I mean, if there’s a worse slob in this world than Larry, it’s me. . . .”

“Please, Harriet, please!”

“Susan, we’re practically there. When I got into the office there was a call from the guys in computer readout. Yesterday they registered a call on your line, but you hung up too fast. . . .”

“It won’t make any difference. I don’t want you harmed.”

“I’m not going to be.”

“Please, Harriet, please . . .” she begged weakly.

“Look—” Harriet’s voice came back at her filled with a sudden authority. “This isn’t just a favor, Susan. I’m part of the phone company and we don’t like our instruments used to torment people. Honey,” she softened, “face it. Like it or not, I’m on your side.”

“Forgive me,” Susan said after a pause in which she realized it was useless to plead any more. “Forgive me for getting you involved.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You’re a wonderful person. . . .” She was crying.

“You, too. We’re all wonderful people with one glaring exception. And we’ll get him, Susan. I promise you, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And when we do, you owe me dinner at the Palace, is it a deal?”

“Yes.”

“You know the cheapest bottle of wine there is seventy-five bucks? I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“You’ve got it,” Susan sniffled into the phone, smiling.

“And I’m a hell of a wine drinker.”

“You’re a hell of a woman.”

“We aim to please. Now stop crying and go out to a movie. That’s what I always do.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“See you at the Palace.” And she hung up.

Susan replaced the receiver and rolled over in bed. Finding herself on Lou’s side (unfamiliar, seeing the room from his eyes), she thought of Florence and the Arno.

The phone rang.

She thought of Harriet, blessed Harriet, as she picked it up.

It was there, waiting for her, as she knew it would be.

She placed the receiver down on the bed gently (her teeth were chattering, her lips trembling) and left the room.

In Andrea’s bed (the door closed) she could hear nothing. She lay there wondering how she could ever express her gratitude to Harriet. Her awe. Her love.

She would never get the chance.

Harriet sat at her desk, looking at the phone she had just hung up.

“Poor baby,” she muttered to herself as her intercom buzzed.

“Uh-­huh?” she said into it.

“It’s Tony from the twenty-­second floor. On Three.”

She pressed into his call.

“Miss Walgreen, there’s something wild going on on the Reed line, the one you asked us to monitor. You wanna see it?”

“I’ll be right up.” She headed for the door. “We’ve got you, you bastard,” and her secretary, overhearing her, wondered who was in trouble now.

Harriet stepped out of the elevator on twenty-­two, smiled, thinking of the only time she had ever eaten at the Palace (the bill, lunch for four of them, came to over three hundred dollars) and walked down the hall to the switching network. She pressed the correct combination of numbers on its door safe and pushed the heavy metal door open.

Inside, the usual sound of millions of separate clicks combined into one low static welcomed her. She always enjoyed the sound, authoritarian and important—a long way from Brooklyn.

She walked between two rows of computer banks, ten feet tall, eighty feet long, filled with thousands of terminals. “The largest corporation in the world,” she often told friends proudly.

“Hi, Tony,” she said, reaching his office, cubbyholed behind the gargantuan machines. “What’s up?”

“You tell me.” He held out a readout sheet to her.

Harriet took it, saw the endless lists of pale-­blue numbers that meant nothing to her. “I’ll wait till they make the movie.”

“Look—” he picked up a pencil and hurriedly circled Susan’s number—“here’s the Reed number, the one the tap is on.” He circled it four times, twice at the top of the list, once in the middle, once at the bottom. “According to this, the call is coming from trunk line 01603.”

“Uh-­huh,” Harriet said, aware that Tony was bristling.

“So?”

“So, that’s Santa Monica.”

“Great.”

“Not so great. I called the tandem office there and they have no readout on any calls to the Reed number. . . .”

Harriet felt a chill, a slight one, and buttoned her jacket.

“. . . Moreover, that trunk line is down. 01603 hasn’t been used in two days. So where the hell are the calls coming from?”

“That’s impossible.”

“You bet it is . . . unless . . .” He shook his head.

“Unless what?”

“Unless somebody’s beaming into our satellite system. How important is this Reed guy?”

Another man stepped forward from the corner of the room, frightening Harriet, who hadn’t noticed him sitting there. “Or unless the caller’s got his own microwave tower. Listen, for a couple of million dollars, I could call, too, and you wouldn’t find me.”

Tony, on the verge of anger (he had traced kidnappers and spies in his twenty years with the company), waved him away.

“Come with me, Miss Walgreen. I’ll show it to you on the output terminal. It’s coming in, regular as clockwork.”

Harriet (definitely chilled now, wishing she had worn the sweater she always kept behind the door of her office) followed Tony into the switching room. They passed the computer banks (tens of thousands of terminals, hundreds of thousands of resistors, all the size of miniature bullets), and went to the small machine dwarfed by the others, the “stars” of the system.

They stood before it and watched the TV screen as numbers flashed on.

All the while, the low static of clicks.

“See?” Tony pointed to the screen. “Here it is again.”

“Damn it,” Harriet muttered.

And the sound of the clicking grew more intense.

“Listen, Miss Walgreen, is there something about this you haven’t told me?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Is it a test of some kind? Some new jamming equipment?”

“Tony, what would I have to do with that?”

And louder.

“Listen to this,” someone across the room said to a coworker.

“I don’t know,” Tony replied sheepishly. “There’s just something not kosher going on.”

“Jesus . . .”

“It’s not a joke or a test, Tony.”

“Why’s it doing that?”

“I don’t know.”

Now the static, three, four times louder than normal, interrupted them.

“Hey, Pat, what’s going on?” Tony called to a man far down a row of computers.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“It sounds like a swarm of locusts got in here,” another offered.

And the sound swelled.

“Holy Christ!” someone said.

The machines started to tremble. All of them.

“What’s going on?”

“It sounds like an earthquake.”

“What the hell . . .”

“Look at this,” one technician said to another, pointing at a row of terminals that vibrated, adding the sound of clapping metal to the machine-­gunning clicks.

And the resistors, by the hundreds of thousands, shook wildly within the terminals.

“Holy Christ . . .”

“What’s going on? . . .”

“Call upstairs, will you? . . .”

Suddenly, in one giant shatter, the resistors exploded out of the terminals, each one a small, lethal piece of shrapnel.

Aimed at Harriet.

Their impact was simultaneous.

She fell, like red snow.