I thought to myself, 'who uses voicemails nowadays?' I don't even have voicemails saved from before since I don't actually bother about it, and it wasn't a thing for me. I hate voice calls and voicemails. I turned off that recording function and never bothered with voicemail inboxes. People can have stupid and unproductive arguments over voicemails. Dohhh.
And what have lanternflies and killing them gotta do with the story? So I read 'The Ferry' by Ben Lerner published in The New Yorker on April 3, 2023.
The narrator received voicemails from someone (apologizing for what he did) who obviously got the wrong number. He went about his day. He dropped off his daughter, Ava, at school. Then he went to work. He is an archivist at the city library, selecting old photographs for digitization.
When the narrator had a moment at lunch, he did what everyone would normally do. he texted the caller that he had the wrong number. The day went weird from thereon. In an interview, the author thought about letting the narrator go down a steep rabbit hole, and letting him wrestle his own demons.
The narrator becomes preoccupied by the man who has left the message. He imagines scenarios that the man might be apologizing for. When he sends a polite text message pointing out that he has the wrong number, the man replies with a barrage of abuse. How upsetting is that response? If the narrator were in a less febrile state, would he have been able to dismiss it?
It would certainly have been healthier to dismiss it, but I guess my hope for the story is that it’s not entirely obvious how pathological or reasonable the narrator’s response to that threatening message is. (I mean at first; it’s clear that his response to Camila is beyond unreasonable.) It’s another instance where it becomes difficult to sort paranoia from a technological present in which a staggering amount of personal information can be accessed instantly by anyone. That earlier, more benevolent idea of a generalized apology and possibility of forgiveness gives way to a sense of exposure and menace.
The unknown caller left a threatening message to the narrator's helpful note. It derailed the narrator's day. That was the very second he picked up his daughter from school. The narrator is spooked by the fury in the caller's tone. He went completely paranoid that the caller could find his address and family based on googling the phone numbers.
The narrator was so rattled that he snapped at Ava and lost his train of thought. He had to calm himself down by going to the bakery, letting the girl get a huge cookie and did a loooong walk. His phone battery is dead. He couldn't call Camila, his partner. He would be two hours late in getting home. Camilia would be in a panic.
I realized I’d had very little to eat, I’d barely touched my lunch, I still had my Kind bar, and so I interrupted myself to ask: Can you make enough for me? The incongruity—this man is after us, can you make me spaghetti—struck me as funny, and I laughed, it’s good to laugh at yourself, but it sounded off, wild, and still she said nothing. It was kind of crazy to ask if she could make enough for me when the pasta was halfway done. I tried to explain that I hadn’t really eaten, though Ava had had this giant cookie—why withhold it—and that’s what Camila responded to, in a surprisingly quiet voice she confirmed: You bought Ava a giant cookie?
I was astounded that she was ignoring everything I was trying to say about the messages and how exposed we were as a family but couldn’t pass up an opportunity to dwell on how I’d violated the dessert policy. She herself let Ava have scones from the place on Fort Hamilton all the time, which I pointed out to her. I pointed out that it was pretty fucked up for her to try to “score points” with the cookie thing, but she’d gone silent again. She opened the refrigerator door to get the cauliflower, which Ava liked to eat raw.
The narrator and his partner are separated, but seem to be amicable enough, and are co-parenting Ava. I don't know whether he's a responsible father. He has loads of mind stress to deal with, as if he can't quite handle the nitty-gritty of day-to-day living in a hectic city.
The narrator was definitely in a fragile state of mind. He wasn't the type to remain calm, and he kinda went into the deep end in his mind, and couldn't really function. Is this the result of living in a huge scary metropolis with mad crime rates? I hate voicemails.
Oh, at the end of the story, I still didn't know what the lanternflies were about.
No comments:
Post a Comment