I’m sorry, but you have the wrong number,” Jason said for the fourth time that day. Ever since he got his new cell phone, the calls for a man named Sal hadn’t stopped coming. At first, Jason was polite to them, knowing it wasn’t their fault that Sal had changed his number. But then he started to get mad, wondering why the fuck Sal didn’t tell all these people. Now he was just tired of it all.
“What do you mean I have the wrong number? I’ve had Sal’s number for years, put the bastard on the phone,” the annoyed man on the other end told him. Jason sighed. Some of these people, for one reason or another, thought that “Sal” was just fucking with them, and always insisted for five minutes that he put Sal on the line. “No, seriously, you have the wrong number. Sal must have changed his and didn’t tell you. I really have no idea who he is, I just get his calls all the time, alright?” Jason yelled through the receiver, slowly rubbing the bridge of his nose. Finally, the man on the other line hung up with an apology. “It’s three in the morning, who the fuck calls at three?” Jason thought, and went back to bed.
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The next afternoon, Jason’s phone rang again. He knew it would be for Sal, but he had to know for sure, so he answered. Sure enough, a high, feminine voice asked, “Hey, baby, how you feeling?” The last time he checked, he didn’t know any girls that would call his phone, never less one who would call him “baby.” Deciding to have fun with it, Jason took a wild guess on what a guy like Sal would sound like, did his best Long Island impression, and spoke into the receiver, “Hey, baby.” The impression seemed to pass, since the girl on the other end just giggled and started to chatter about her hair appointment and how her day had gone. Ten minutes later, she was still going until she eventually cut herself off and asked, “Are you ok, Sal? You would have told me to shut up a WHILE ago.” Slightly panicked by the idea of being caught, he replied in the Long Island accent, “You know I’m not feeling good, baby.” There was a long pause on the other end, but when Jason was about to hang up, thinking he had been caught, she absent-mindedly said, “Oh yeah, I forgot,” and proceeded to giggle again. Then she told him, “You know, maybe I could do something to make you feel better over the phone.” After that, Jason heard some rustling movement and his eyes widened when he started to hear high-pitched moans. After a couple moments of hesitance, Jason settled down into a chair and listened as the girl on the other end continued to moan.
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It had been two weeks after the surprising (and awesome) phone sex, and Jason had started to accept all of Sal’s calls. It was fun to not only pretend to be someone else, but to get involved with his life, all behind the safety of a cell phone. Sometimes, he even used the accent outside of phone conversations, ordering coffee and talking to classmates with it. The ability to be in a life that wasn’t his was too much fun to resist; he knew about Sal’s car problems, was offered to go out drinking with Sal’s best friend, and received two more bouts of phone sex with Sal’s girlfriend. With this much entertainment going on, Jason couldn’t have known how sour this new amusement would become.
Jason picked up the phone with a “Sal here.” No one called his phone for Jason anymore, so he was safe. Immediately, the person on the other end responded. “Hello sir, I’m with New York City Off-Track Betting, I need to discuss your account with us. It seems you owe us quite a bit of money, and…”
Jason froze. It was okay to fuck with the guy’s life when it was just his friends, but this was official. It wasn’t his friend Dan asking for money that Sal would never remember promising, or phone sex conversations with his girlfriend that Sal would never receive; this was serious. Jason should have given up the charade right then and said, “Sorry, you have the wrong number. I’m not really Sal, I’m just a guy with a lot of free time and a lot of wrong numbers,” but Jason already knew he couldn’t do that. He had to go all out on this.
He cleared his throat and said “Yeah, what you need?”
---------------------------------------------------
Two more weeks passed, and Jason was now considering throwing away his phone. Sal’s friends and New York City Off-Track Betting were always asking him about the money he owed them, sleazy guys were threatening his limbs because of missed deliveries, and junkies kept asking him to come over. Even the phone sex started to suck. Calls came in angry floods at all hours, and it was enough to drive him mad. Still, Jason couldn’t help but answer the phone whenever it rang; he had to know who would be on the other line, waiting to talk to Sal.
The phone rang one day as he was walking to his car, and Jason mechanically picked it up, grumbling “Sal here.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and when Jason was about to respond again, he hear a rough voice ask, “You’re Sal?” Jason sighed, thinking it was another junkie, and said, “Yeah, this is Sal, whadya want?” There was another pause, and the guy on the other line asked again, “You’re Sal? Because last time I checked, I was Sal.”
Jason stopped walking, stopped breathing, stopped everything. He was talking to Sal, the Sal, the man he had been pretending to be for weeks. In his shock, Jason noticed how close he had gotten the impression without ever actually meeting the man. Still, Sal’s voice was a lot meaner than he could have ever imitated, and sounded heavier from cigarettes Jason had never smoked.
The only thing Jason could manage to say into the phone was, “Um…hi.” The accent completely dropped. Sal only said, “Look to your right,” and as he did, he saw a single figure at the other end of a parking lot with a phone in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. He hung up the phone.
Maggie Anderson is a freshman English major and a Literary writer for Generation.
