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By Root 1045 0

you're wasting your time. But all the better if it does: I can hang up immediately, saving myself another pointless wait, and try again. Generally, though, having embarked on the exasperating business of tracing a dozen figures in the dial's rotations, I'm left with no indication as to the results of my efforts. What straits is my signal negotiating right now? Is it still stuck in the recorder of the exchange here in town, waiting its turn in a line of calls? Has it already been translated into commands for the selector switches, divided in groups of digits that are heading off to look for the way to successive intermediate exchanges? Or did it fly straight to the network of your city, your local area, without encountering so much as an obstacle, only to be caught there like a fly in a spider's web, reaching out towards your unreachable telephone?

The earpiece tells me nothing, and I don't know whether I'll have to accept defeat and hang up, or whether all of a sudden a light rustling crackle will tell me my call has found a free line, has set off like an arrow and in a few seconds will be waking your bell like an echo.

It's in this silence of circuitry that I speak to you. I'm well aware that when our voices finally get to meet along the wire we will have only banal and awkward comments to make; I'm not calling to say anything to you, nor because I imagine you have anything to say to me. We phone each other because it's only in these long-distance calls, this groping for each other along cables of buried copper, cluttered relays, the whirling contact points of clogged selector switches, only in this probing the silence and waiting for an echo that one prolongs that first call from afar, that cry that went up when the first great crack of the continental drift yawned beneath the feet of a human couple, when the depths of the ocean opened up to separate them, while, torn precipitously apart, one on one bank and one on the other, the couple strove with their cries to stretch out a bridge of sound that might keep them together yet, cries that grew ever fainter until the roar of the waves overwhelmed all hope.

Ever since then distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story, of every relationship between living beings, the distance the birds seek to bridge when they launch their subdy trilled archways into the morning air, as we launch bursts of electrical impulses into the earth's nerve systems, each translatable into commands for relays: the only way human beings still have of knowing that they are calling each other for no other reason than the need to call each other. Doubdess the birds have litde more to say than I have to say to you, as I flounder on, finger turning in this number-crunching dial, hoping that one click will prove luckier than the rest and set your bell a-ringing.

Like a wood deafened by the twittering of birds, our telephonic planet rings with conversations achieved or attempted, with the trilling of sound equipment, with the whining of a line cut off, the whirr of a signal, tones, ticking; and the upshot of all this is a universal chirping, arising from each individual's need to demonstrate his existence to someone else, and from the fear of our finally understanding that only the telephone network exists, while we who call and answer perhaps don't exist at all.

I've got the code wrong yet again, from the depths of the network I pick up a sort of birdsong, then snatches of other people's conversations, a recorded message in a foreign language repeating: “The number you have dialled is not presently assigned to a subscriber.’ Then the insistent engaged sign swells up to black out every glimmer. I wonder whether you are trying to call me at the same time and running into the same obstacles, floundering in the dark, getting lost in the same thorny labyrinth. I am speaking as I never would if you were listening; every time I push down the cradle wiping out the fragile succession of numbers I'm also wiping out everything I've said or thought as though in a delirium: this anxious insecure