Calling Mr. Nelson Pugh ✔️

*** Breathe Out ***

As I reached for the remote, it happened. The ringing began. Yes, it was just one simple ring at first, but it was also the precursor to so much more, so much that I will never be able change nor forget.

I glanced to the nightstand. My cellphone vibrated across the peeling lacquer adding its rhythmic thudding to the din with each incessant ring. I didn't need to see the screen to know that it was Eleanor, again. Who else would it have been?

I grabbed the phone - not to answer it of course, but to end its loud vibrations. Sure, I needed to speak with my wife, and that call would come, but then was not the time. I held the phone until the ringing ceased, then tossed it back down upon the nightstand.

The phone then silent, I stood and began pacing across the cramped room. My momentary impulse for distraction had vanished. With my anxiety there never existed more than a slim window of opportunity in which to escape the constant march of my thoughts, and that window had slammed shut with the ringing of the phone. Eleanor had been trying to call, trying to reach me, and there I was walking about a rundown hotel room hundreds of miles and two weeks of required travel away from any hope of seeing her. Yes, this job was truly a blessing.

Yet the fact that I still held a job when so many of my coworkers had found themselves in the unemployment lines was no coincidence. I had a knack of talking my way out of tight situations, at least, sometimes I did. I had always had a slightly above average skill for debate – I won't say that I excelled, but I was decent. As I often remind myself, mediocre talent is still some modicum of talent. That's my consolation prize for what is otherwise an average life, if not a shitty excuse for an existence.

Well, that modicum of talent and the fruits that it bore were my consolation prizes. That talent was the only reason I still held my job, especially as I had been slated to be axed. I didn't study debate, and I didn't practice or do anything to hone the craft, but this talent remained something else, something innate that played me, and always had. When the time came, it was like riding a wave to shore. I could think of no better corollary. When the stress hit, I caught onto it and rode it in, steering to avoid obstacles, but no more able to stop than I would be able to push back against the momentum of a surging sea.

That was the way of it, too, when Mr. Rochester had pulled me into his office to let me know that my twenty years of service were at an end. I rode that wave and talked my way back into my decades-old cubicle. In the end, Stan Myers had found himself on the chopping block in my stead, ending nearly fifteen years of friendship. After that I had tried not to think about Stan much anymore.

***

I glanced about my tiny room. The compressor of a nearby mini-fridge gasped as it started, breaking the silence once again. The fridge didn't have much life left. Numerous dents marred its surface, which itself appeared as faded as the room's walls. Like the room, the fridge had seen better days. As such, I found myself feeling a sudden and undeniable sense of camaraderie with this now dying appliance. Hell, I felt bonded to the room as a whole, replete in its descent from the glory it never had. I grabbed a hotel drinking glass and a small bottle of Kentucky bourbon from the fridge and raised the glass in a toast.

"To better days and better blessings." I gulped down the full glass in a fierce and ill-considered swig, squinting with the effort. Realizing my mistake, I shook my head and let out a heavy breath, trying to rid myself of the aftertaste. I had never been a strong drinker and the whiskey fell heavy and hard into my system.
I rushed to the bathroom sink gulping down a tap water chaser. As the water sloshed down my throat, the phone began to ring for a second time. I ignored it as I swallowed down the thick water. The phone continued to ring and buzz from its resting place on the nightstand, eventually sliding off and landing with a soft thud on the thin hotel carpet. Still it lay there, ringing, unanswered and abandoned upon the floor, but I was not yet ready to speak with Eleanor.

I missed her, true – her and our two daughters, Erica and Marie. Even more than for my job, I felt thankful for my family. They were my life's biggest blessing, my job really nothing more than a means with which to support that dream. The three of them were the reason that I kept my corporate job and suffered though the flights and crowds and the general malaise of a life of business travel. They were my reason for everything.

All the more odd then that I couldn't bring myself to answer Eleanor's call. Why was I so weak? What was it that I feared? What was it that shattered my nerves and left me battered and useless in that dark room?

As the questions mounted, I began to think that maybe I should answer that call. In fact, I knew that Eleanor might be the only person that could help talk me down from my travel-induced nerves. Yet, even knowing this, I could not bring myself to speak with her.

The ringing ended. I glanced out to the phone where it lay lifeless upon the carpet. As always, I had failed. I was not a good man. I was not even a good husband. I hung my head and took another sip from the sink.

The water downed and the cheap bourbon aftertaste held at bay, I looked at myself in the mirror. The same bland visage stared back at me that I saw every morning in the mirror - just an average guy with a hint of disorder. Bags clung beneath my eyes and my face had grown haggard. I had no clue how Eleanor tolerated our life together. Gorgeous, smart, and all the usual clichés, she could have married anyone and yet she chose me. Perhaps that spoke to her own mental failings, I don't know, but it made no sense to me. Sometimes I pitied her that choice. Looking into that mirror, I wondered how my life had reached such a juncture of mediocrity and disappointment.

Lost in my own self-hatred, I barely heard the ring of the phone begin again; yet when it registered, the first trembler of warning broke through my self-indulgent haze like a fist in the gut. Alarm bells sounded shouting for my attention.