For reasons that will soon be obvious, I struggle to lift the phone from the receiver. The weight is something I wish I could fix, but I am unable for reasons that will soon be obvious. True, I am a little weak. Not weak enough to explain my struggles lifting the phone, though. At least not fully.
This house went for sale back in 2013 around the time my wife and I moved to Cleveland from Buffalo.
She got a job asking rich people to donate money to a hospital here. It was a big career move that came with a much higher salary, so even though Cleveland was full of miserable, WASP-y people, she took the job and we looked for a new place to live.
Based on the pictures in the listing alone, we fell in love with the house, mainly due to a spacious front porch we would rarely actually use. The outside soon became unsafe for comfort. Winters spooled into a frayed vortex of cold. Springs slushed between extended winters and oppressive rain. Summers were typical of summers these days, far too hot and overburdened with twelve foot tall spiders that were not unfriendly but would accidentally catch us in their sprawling networks of webs and may not notice our existence for hours, thus they would not free us for us. So we wouldn’t often use the porch, beautiful as it was and still is.
Inside, it felt like home, which isn’t helpful in depicting its vaulted ceilings and thick wood trim, but anyone who has felt at home somewhere knows the feeling. Everything else aside, some places just feel like where one is meant to be. And though we considered other houses or two, those flirtations were never serious. This was the house we would always buy.
To our surprise, the previous owner left her phone behind as if it were the fridge or oven or dishwasher or washing machine or dryer or furnace or roof.
She left the phone behind as if it were the very walls, doors or windows. She left it behind like it was the ground and grass, the trees and bushes or the sky above us.
And this phone was bulky, designed of what appeared to be actual gold and shaped like a dumbbell decorated with a profusion of tubes, gears and wires. As a joke, I lifted the handset and did a few bicep curls, saying, “I’m going to get ripped now.”
On the other line, someone shouted, “Hello? Who is that? Hello?”
“I’m sorry!” I laughed. “I didn’t realize someone was on the line.”
“On the line? Where are you?”
“At home…” I said, cautiously.
“This is my home,” the other person replied. “I’m going to call the police.”
“Wait!” I shouted. “What’s this address?”
I’m not really sure why I asked this other than out of curiosity as this man seemed to think I was in his home, and I wondered where that home might be.
He paused but eventually said, “17 Fairmount.”
“Well, sorry. I think I accidentally called you,” I said, and as I began to hang up the phone, I barely made out his response of, “I’m not on the phone.”
My wife asked me to whom I was talking.
“Some fucking guy,” I said.
“Let’s keep the phone here,” my wife said, inspecting the phone and wiping dust from the receiver with a quick brush of her hand. “It looks cool. I wonder if it’s original to the house.”
We would learn the answer to that question in a note waiting for us on the floor of what would become our master bedroom, a refinished attic space with windows cut into the roof so we could have gazed at the stars while we slept if scientists hadn’t removed all the stars fifteen years ago. All the stars, of course, save the sun, which inched ever closer to Earth with each passing day.
Even the spiders have begun to complain about the sun, and they get more than half their daily energy from photosynthesis.
One spider, Xeneroth, who lives on my street and I talk to nearly daily, has seemed especially worried about it.
“There’s no web big enough to trap the sun,” Xeneroth said, shaking his head. “Your scientists haven’t actually tried using a web of some kind, have they?”
“I think a web would just burn up,” I said.
“Yeah. That sucks.”
Most things have been bad in this world. That’s undeniable. The previous owner’s bedroom note hinted at a way out.
“Oh hello,” the note said. “Is this thing on? Hello, you are the new owners of the house. Have you noticed the phone downstairs? … … … … Good!
“The original owner of this house was an inventor of some sort. He created the phone. I’m not really sure how it works. Vacuums or something? I know there’s a lot of tubes.
“Anyway, I suppose the important thing to say is you can talk to people in the past with the phone. It’s random if you just pick it up and start talking, but there’s a directory in the drawer under the phone if you want to talk to someone from a specific place or time.
“It’s kind of hard to use, though. Good luck!”
Far from being any kind of directory, this book appeared to be some kind of work of advanced physics, but nobody we asked could understand any of it.
Xeneroth gathered around the volume with some of his spider friends, and they slowly paged through the thing, shaking their mammoth, black heads.
“Whoever wrote this certainly spun a complex web,” Glordif said, winking one of her terrible eyes.
“But I don’t understand any of this shit,” Aaaaaaldern said.
“Thank you for trying,” my wife sighed.
We emptied fifty sacks worth of live elephant-crickets into the spiders’ mouths. Orange innards squished between their fangs, dribbling from their succulent spider lips.
It was the last of our elephant-cricket supply, so we’d have to call off work for the rest of the week, and it was only Tuesday. Even the friendliest of spiders wouldn’t peel back their webs without a food payment, and their webs blocked all the streets. A new shipment of elephant-crickets would arrive on Saturday.
As we played around with the telephone inside, we discovered three things:
- The phone didn’t seem to contact anyone before its creation in what appears to be 1917.
- When the previous owner said we could contact people “in the past”, this means any time up to one second prior to the second. We found this out when we, through sheer luck, called our own house. My voice echoed through the house, every word I spoke coming out precisely one second prior to me incanting into the mouth piece.
- We randomly dialed numbers and took note of the locations and times of each one. While we never figured out how to dial a certain time or an exact address, we were able, by trial and error, to discover the code for several locations.
The location we chose as a place to consistently call was Mumbai. It’s one of the largest cities in the world and has a sizeable English speaking population. My wife studied some Hindi-Urdu so she could communicate with non-English speakers. Though far from fluent, she seemed passable, and that was good enough for now.
Of course, the question arose as to what the hell we would do with this great power we literally held in our hands.
Our first inclination was to compile a list of winning lottery numbers in India and recite them to the people on the other line, but we made so many calls and passed on the numbers to so many people that the effect was such that a large population of poverty-stricken Indians bought their lottery tickets with the winning numbers and nearly all of them won.
When 500 million people buy winning lottery tickets and 10 million people buy losing lottery tickets, the general effect was 510 million people all losing money playing the lottery, even the winning tickets. With the Indian lottery, the government takes half money from buying lotto tickets as a tax of sorts. The prize pool makes up the other half. So 510 million people buying tickets for the equivalent of one American dollar meant that the pool was 255 million USD. Divide that by 500 million, and you get the picture.
We underestimated how much word would spread that we were calling people giving them winning lottery numbers. So even if we only called a few hundred people, the winning numbers would get out there and persist despite ample disinformation campaigns by public and private parties who wanted to confuse people by lying about the prospective numbers.
We tried basically the same idea but by telling people which companies to invest in. That went better, but stocks have their own issues as a means to redistribute wealth to those in need. Only a limited quantity of stocks are even for sale, which mostly works to drive up the price of stocks we were touting as safe bets to the good people of Mumbai. What ended up happen was every time stocks from otherwise unknown startups began to shoot up, rich people would swoop in and buy the rest. This process made more money for the poor but not enough to make any real difference.
Real change was impossible to create without having a direct change on policy. And even if I solved wealth inequality, that was only half the problem. The sun still plummeted toward Earth, which wasn’t a good thing.
Xeneroth came up with The Plan.
“Bribe some people to hold the world leader’s hostage,” he said. “Have the leaders do whatever you want. Just make sure you do it while you can change all of this.”
And he waved two appendages in the general direction of the sun. Two weeks before this conversation, Mercury melted inside the one remaining star’s ravenous belly. We’d all die well before this fire God of death swallowed Earth too. We’d all be dead soon.
The plan was this:
The spiders didn’t emerge from deep within their caves until about two decades ago, but they were always there, watching and observing. I would bribe one person from the distant past to go to them and recite the Spider’s Pledge in full. They’d be bound by oath to help us – that “help” taking the form of a world leader hostage situation and perhaps world domination.
It played out like this:
It worked, or so the people on the other line repeatedly told us.
“The spider overlords are fair and care about universal harmony,” one past person said.
“They cleaned my teeth!” said another.
“They only eat dickwad mother fuckers!” still another said.
All this first hand testimony of the power of Spider Overlords filled me with rage. Without fail, everyone we called told us of how scientists didn’t destroy all the stars. They told us how cars and electricity were abolished and how we certainly didn’t begin to pull the sun toward Earth with that misguided gravity ray in our last failed attempt to save this planet.
Gone were all the things making life thoroughly unpleasant, so they said.
Yet my situation remains unchanged. Our leaders are still humans. Our history books are the same.
I struggle to lift the phone from the receiver. The weight is something I wish I could fix, but like everything else here, I am unable to fix anything for myself or for all of existence.
All the stars but one are gone, and when everything on this planet dies sometime in the next few weeks, no life will exist in the observable sector of our universe. That could mean no life exists anywhere in our universe. We can’t really know.
“Hello,” I say into the phone. “Please, please, please, don’t fuck this up.”
“What?” the person on the other line says. “Who is this? Where are you? Is this God?”
“This is God,” I say. “Don’t fuck this up.”
“Don’t fuck what up?”
“Anything. Don’t fuck anything up.”
“Okay,” the person says. “I won’t.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
I hang up and can’t help but smile.
In some other reality, Spider Overlords have rescued everyone from themselves. We did that. And while we couldn’t save our own universe, I don’t care anymore.
My wife and I sit on our porch where Xeneroth has cleared all the webs so we can enjoy our last moments together, drinking shandys mixed with cyanide.
“Cyandys?” my wife asks.
“What?”
“Like ‘cynaide’ and ‘shandy’ put together.”
“I thought you were saying ‘sandies,’” I laugh. “Like it’s sand.”
I gulp down the awful mixture, and these stupid words will be the last thing I ever said.