Calling Home by Michael Cadnum Read Free Book Online

too big for him.”
    â€œSo are you. He’s wasting his time with you. You ought to be put to sleep.”
    â€œThanks.”
    She sighed, and it was as though all the misery of all the times, everywhere, stood there in the doorway wearing a blue bathrobe. “Oh, Peter. You know I don’t mean that. You’re just so much trouble, that’s all. And I worry about you.”
    â€œYou lied to him.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œYou told him I tried to kill you.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWith a jar of mustard.”
    She laughed.
    I locked my bedroom door, and sat on my bed. I wished Lani was there to talk to, but all I had was half a bottle of Cream Sherry, really terrible, sweet-sick brake fluid.
    I could, I knew, kill myself. This was a very real thought. It seemed like a logical alternate route. But as long as Mead’s parents thought Mead was alive, it was almost like having Mead alive and well, happy somewhere.
    I practiced his voice. “Hello, Mother …”
    And I shivered. I felt like Mead. I felt clever, and quick.
    I wept, calling Mead’s name.

7
    Walking in the darkness, the body feels alive, but as it approaches the well-lit place, it begins to change; it slows and thickens and stops. The body stands for a long time, as if it never has to go anywhere ever again, and it doesn’t, really, because now it is not a living body, but something else. No one can see. No one sees the important, obvious thing standing in the dark beside a hedge.
    Then the transformation. The arm lifts, falls. The rot-wet lungs inhale. The dead guts grumble and the foot goes forward to the place on the sidewalk where the light just begins. Blood rises into the tissues that have not tasted blood since the terrible change and they warm and swell, and feeling wends along the nerves invisibly, like massive amps along a frayed cable.
    And by the time the first number is touched, the change is complete, and the tongue is poised, the ears alive with the electric tones the finger makes on the face of the telephone.
    The phone rings. It is like the first sound ever made in the world, a dry purr that lasts just long enough for a heartbeat, a soft noise, but metallic, too, the love coo of an old robot.
    It rings once.
    Only once. The phone is answered quickly, and the woman’s voice says, “Hello?”
    Her voice is different this time. More afraid, and more hopeful. “Hello?” she repeats. “Mead, is that you?”
    â€œMother. Yes, it’s me.”
    And it is Mead. It is Mead, standing at the telephone in the dark, listening to his mother’s sobs. “Mead,” she says. “Where are you?”
    â€œDon’t worry, Mother. Please—don’t worry. I’m all right.”
    The streetlight barely ignites the darkness. Blue-white smears the dark at the end of the street where a gas station is still open, a twenty-four-hour station with a man in a glass booth, waiting.
    A car door opens, too quietly. A head leans, and a voice asks, “What are you doing walking around in the middle of nowhere?”
    Nothing makes any sense. I am not Mead, but I am not anyone else, either.
    â€œAre you all right?”
    The voice answers. “Sure. Of course I’m all right.”
    â€œGet in. We can drive up into the hills and look at the view.”
    â€œThat’s a good idea.”
    â€œCome on, get in. Don’t just stand there like a zombie.”
    I don’t move, my body not quite mine.
    Angela drove up Lake Boulevard, across the Warren Freeway, into the hills. The spice of eucalyptus was everywhere. The tires crushed leaves and seedbells under its tires. The air had the taste of delicious medicine.
    â€œWho were you calling?” she asked at last.
    â€œCalling?”
    â€œYou were on that pay phone.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œOf course. That one beside the insurance company?”
    â€œI was calling no one.”
    â€œHow do you do