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| The
Answering Machine |
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“Hey
watch where you’re going, asshole” – the exact
same sounds I heard from the street after hanging up. I sat on
a kitchen chair and stared at my machine. The green light, meaning “no
messages” lost focus in my eyes, and grew to the size of
the world. I was staring at the new reality I discovered. Fucking
hypocrites, liars, all of them, everyone.
I won’t bore you with details about what I think about
each of my so-called friends. I don’t mean this to be an
emotional journal, but a record of an invention, or rather a
document of society. For the past three months, I have been experimenting
with my machine. I now call it the Reality Machine because it
is revealing to me a truth. During the month of March I have
transcribed twenty-two mind-boggling messages. There were eighteen
other messages that didn’t bring me anything juicy. This
is because people don’t always talk after they leave a
message and I can only hear exactly one minute and thirty seconds
after each message click, which isn’t much time to play
with. But that day when I returned from squash and heard Donna’s
voice, I changed. I am not the same Gray that New York City has
known, or the same Gray that I have known, for that matter. I
have become an experimenter. I still schmooze people and chicks
at clubs, give them my card with the VIP guest list number. But
it’s only a job now, and I never bring it home with me.
It is completely insignificant, as far as I’m concerned.
Actually, I don’t bring anything home from the outside
world, not even a slice of deli pizza. All I do is listen to
people’s voices on my machine, and then their real voices.
I decode their fake words. I unravel their gibberish to discover
reality. All I ever do is listen to my machine. I’ll be
the first to admit that I am completely addicted. It’s
worse than cocaine. I don’t listen to what anyone says
to me in person, or for that matter, what I say to myself. What’s
the point? It’s all lies. I only pay attention to
the minute and a half following each message, that brief time range that is so |
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