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A World with Nobody in It
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
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55 A World with Nobody in It A woman’s voice instructed me to leave a message. I hung up. Later another voice recording, female and metallic as the first, informed me I’d been chosen for a prize. I think I hung up also, but I can’t (or won’t) remember. In town I pressed an elevator tab and smiled at my fellow passenger. “I never speak,” she hissed, “to strange men on elevators, sir.” I wondered what I would or could have done if she had screamed. All day I spoke to no one else. Shopping, I checked out all my groceries by credit card, refueled my car myself by credit card and ordered a takeout through a microphone. Later I thumbed a button labeled push and parked in silence at an unattended lot, punched out in sequence the proper buttons to procure my airline ticket and on arrival rented a dolly from a rack to cart my bags. 56 Before I slept I realized I’d never really talked with anyone all day and never even needed to. But where’s the life in that? Compare it to a pub in Galway or Kilkenny where the fare is song and talk and more talk. Or the lot of mates in war where everybody shares alike. Or the old and stricken who need the daily bread of company. Or Steinbeck’s ending in The Grapes of Wrath where a nursing mother feeds a starved and dying man the milk from her very body. ...