The Dead Man

The Dead Man (Chapter 1) - Overture

She's never been obsessed before. This is her first time and it's kind of interesting. It's like watching some psychopath in a movie, stalking someone, plotting to kill them, except that the psychopath is her. In Canada it's not so bad — she can't call Jake from Toronto because he'd see the area code and guess it was her. So it's only in his country, in Israel (where she'll be in ninety minutes) that it happens. There she won't be able to walk by a pay phone without having to wrestle down the desire to do again what she has already done numerous times: Dial his number and then keep silent on the end of the line — an ominous, threatening silence. And then hear the anger mount in his voice as he says, "Hello? Hello? Hello?" And then, when he gets no answer, he'll slam down the phone with a bang so loud that it hurts her ear. When Jake's wife answers the phone, though, it's not anger; it's fear. Instead of her voice getting stronger and more violent like Jake's, Fran's gets smaller and thinner ("Hello? Hello? Hello?") till at the end there's almost nothing left of it. It's a high and squeaky-scared voice, like a mouse or a little girl. On one of the last times, though, instead of going squeaky-scared on her third hello, Fran gathered all her remaining strength and called out "Jake!" in a loud, frightened voice — calling him, Eve knew, from the phone on the kitchen counter to Jake's study upstairs. Then Eve hung up fast before Jake could come on the line, and stood in front of the orange pay phone on a Tel Aviv street corner, her knees trembling and her hands sweaty.

Eve looks out of the airplane window. It didn't start out like this — as a form of stalking, or harassment, or whatever this would be considered under Canadian law. It started out just as a phone call because she missed him. She loved him and wanted to hear his voice again. But he told her not to call or write him anymore. He said this had to end once and for all — this relationship of theirs, their love, was destroying his marriage. So Eve wasn't allowed to call him after that. But she needed him still. She needed to hear his voice just one more time. His beautiful, deep voice. Even anonymously, if that was the only way. So she started phoning him and hanging up, each time thinking this time would be the last.

Eve looks out the window at the clouds below. In the beginning dusk, they look like furry, pale grey animals. The backs and sides of hippos, or rhinos. Flying animals floating in the sky. Sleeping in the sky. Jake never sleeps in in the mornings. The first time she called and then hung up on him, it was only six o'clock in Israel, but he was already wide awake. He always woke up before six, and his wife never did before seven, so as Eve had predicted, Jake picked up the phone. He answered the way he always did, with a musical wave in his voice, "Hel-lo-o," with the middle note higher than the others: C, G, E, Eve registered automatically. At that point, Jake's voice still sounded quite normal, if a little surprised at a six a.m. call. But after his first hello, when Eve didn't say anything back, it quickly got more insistent: "Hello? Hello?" and then turned frustrated-enraged, "Who is this?" and Eve hung up swiftly in fear. He was yelling at her. One and a half years after sending her away, after surgically removing her from his life, here he was, yelling at her. But a couple of hours later Eve, though blushing at the memory of this phone call, was also grinning broadly. There was a funny side to it. And it was validating, too. It reminded her of something that deep-down she knew but kept on choosing to forget: that Jake

was not the gentle, sensitive man he'd become in her fantasies (or anyway not only this); he was also someone with profound anger and a very short fuse. Laughing, Eve felt powerful. She had played a trick on Jake, but there was no way for him to know it was her, so he couldn't retaliate. However powerless she had felt over the previous year and a half (powerless to regain his love, or even to make herself visible to him), she realized now that she wasn't actually all that powerless. She could call him. She could torment him. So over the next three years, Eve phoned Jake's house five or six times on each of her visits to Israel (which, between conferences, board meetings, and holidays, turned out to be seven different trips). Seven trips at five or six calls each trip — she quickly does the math — that's altogether thirty-five or forty calls. This may sound like a lot, but really it's not all that much. Anyway, she had no alternative. She had to keep calling back because she kept missing Jake and getting Fran instead.