Long Distance Caller

Fiction: A man wanders outside to hear the secrets of the utility poles.

At the exact middle of the city block is a wooden utility pole and an ancient man in a shapeless suit studying it closely. Utility poles have always seemed to me a class of infrastructure that should be cherished, or at least acknowledged politely, or even feared. Though utility poles are by no means obsolete, they seem to gesture toward a future in which they will soon become obsolete, or else they have, late at night while we day-beings sleep, become crafty and molded a world in which they are no longer obsolete. It was their obelisk magic that made us forget.

Even now, I can find myself almost anywhere in America and close my eyes. I can tell myself with utter sincerity that, though I’ve been on this street daily this past year, when I open them, I will find somewhere in my field of vision a previously unnoticed, unmentioned utility pole. Maybe in that instant a bulb of orange halogen will click on, like they did when I was young and it was time to run home. Maybe the graying wires will look suspiciously like unwashed hair. Maybe I’ll follow their trail from pole to pole to intersection to steep brick wall until I find myself behind my very own walls.

One thing is certain: future generations will notice the utility poles when they watch movies and TV from our time—telephone poles and high wattage power transformers, lining streets, low slung over back alleys, hissing contentedly in summer showers—tied up with Christmas lights in Hallmark films and flattening cars in apocalyptic summer blockbusters. Road trip buddy comedies with behemoth pylons hulking placidly in the background. These future movie-watchers will see, but they will not understand. They will call the poles garish and unwieldy. They will feel an ache. They will want them back.

I’m now close enough to the ancient man to see his shapeless suit is made of sackcloth. He’s noticed me for several minutes but has failed to acknowledge my presence in any way. He is engaged in his work, pressing a small device over and over into the flesh of the pole. Or, not the flesh, not the wood. Into the staples. There are thousands of these staples and nails. Some are far flung, way up high or down by our shoes, but most coagulate at eye level, piled atop each other like petrified ants.

I ask the man what he’s doing with his little machine. It’s brightly colored and cubic. Reminds me of something a teenager might want to smoke. With each press, it makes a modest beep and lights up a simple screen.

“Reading.” The man answers.

“Reading?” I say back.

“Would you like me to read to you?”

I do, and he does. He is without malice.

I see the little machine culminates in a needle-like protrusion. With it he can select each staple with exact precision. He picks an especially shiny one embedded in the pole. No rust. Perfectly silver. He touches it with the needle.

Beep.

“August, 2023,” he says, reading the screen, “lost cat poster. An orange fluffy kitten named Bagel. Cash reward gestured at, though not explicitly detailed. A phone number with an out-of-state area code.” The poster is long gone, but the staple remembers. I glance up to the run of wires above us. I can hear them humming.

“Was Bagel ever found?” I ask.

“Who am I to say?” he says flatly, already moving onward to a new staple.

For several minutes the man proceeds methodically, or at least, it seems to me a methodical process. Two dozen, three dozen staples, and the spatial zone of his focus barely shifts a few inches. Beep. January, 1982: punk rock show. Beep. April, 2017: kid wants to mow your lawn, ten bucks and he has his own equipment. Beeeeep. This staple is visibly old, especially rusty. August, 1967. Here the man becomes excited. He describes to me a childish and anatomically improbable sketch of a cartoon man fellating himself, above which is a lewd typewritten limerick—all rendered on a hastily torn out sheet of wide-ruled notebook paper. No signature. No attribution.

Now the man pockets his device. He unfolds a set of pliers from a multi-tool and carefully but firmly frees the staple from the telephone pole. He deposits it into a Ziploc bag, which already contains three other staples of equal rusty hue.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the last one in this set,” he says. “Other guys are happy to just get one, but when I find a flier or poster or ad that calls to me, I turn into a bit of a completionist.”

“A collector?”

“Just a hobbyist,” he says.

Muffled in his pocket, the machine makes its first utterance that isn’t a shy beep. It gets louder as he takes it out of his pocket, a nervous clicking that drags itself out into a buzz like an overworked hard drive or the death rattle of a tape deck. From an invisible slit in the plastic comes a section of thermal paper. It’s a standard receipt, except instead of prices and promotions on the surface it’s blank. And then, like those first seconds before a cut starts bleeding, some sort of strange alchemy takes hold—markings fade in, the paper becomes a facsimile of the long-gone cartoonish figure and the limerick. Even the lines of the notebook paper are represented. It’s exactly as he had described.

“Some stigmata, eh?” The ancient man is elated. He’s joking with me. He fastens the receipt to the Ziploc, ironically with a staple.

Part of my brain fights back. I think of the morning, before I wandered out to the street for some forgotten reason. In my apartment, on my computer just like all the mornings before, I’d been reading about MIC. Machine Identification Code. A spectrum of barely distinguishable yellow dots that can forensically trace almost any document to the exact printer it originated on, the date and time of printing, and, by extension, the person who made the print.

MIC was dreamt up in the ‘80s to help fight money counterfeiting, but had not been known to the public until 2004, when its existence in the innards of every major printer manufacturer’s line of products was leaked. The dots themselves weren’t even decoded until a number of years after that. They repeat all over the page, invisible and omnipresent, so only a scrap is needed for full analysis. Now, so many years later, weirder and more hermetic systems of fingerprinting are hypothesized to already secretly exist in printers other such appliances.

Things begin to make a kernel of sense.

I mention my thoughts to the ancient man and he only smiles.

“You’d be surprised what people collect nowadays,” he says. “Hex nuts, nails, flakes of paint—the negative spaces that scuff well-used things; cow paths snaking out beyond the confines of black tar asphalt; the echoes of words spoken aloud to nobody in particular.” I have the sense that any second now the man will spontaneously combust, though he makes no motion to leave me.

“Wait,” I say, “where did you get the thingy, the machine?”

He gives me a look like he’s just solved a particularly easy crossword puzzle, like he’s filling in the remaining blank squares only to relish the moment a bit longer. He has a new bag in his hand, but no image attached. There are two staples in it; they look like any other. He hands me the device. He tells me I should see for myself.