Futile Heroism

Emery stared at the monitor, not understanding. It was an email stating that the editor of a well respected magazine wanted to schedule a meeting with him to discuss commissioning him on an ongoing basis. It was probably a joke.

Clutching the phone, Emery considered dialing the number on the page, but instead dialed Morty out of habit.

“Humph,” Morthy answered.

“Who is this?”

“Who the hell is this?”

“Morty?”

“State yourself now!”

“It’s Emery. I didn’t mean to dial you. I’m just nervous. An editor from a real live magazine contacted me. I don’t know what to do.”

“Learn to dial the phone. I was taking a nap.” He hung up.

Second try. Emery lowered his hand to the phone, punched numbers in. It rang, so he hung up immediately and stumbled backwards, dropping the phone from his lap as if it had shocked him. It rang back immediately.

“When I said I was napping, I meant I was asleep, as nappers often are. No more calls, got it?”

“Did I dial you again?”

“No,” he chimed in angrily. “You called the Pope and he called me and told me to make you stop calling him. He’s taking a nap.” Morty slammed down the reciever of his three pound rotary phone, the kind that really makes a clunk when you need it to.

Emery dropped the phone before he could hang it up, made a wide circle around his living room, and settled into a spot as far from the buzzing reciever has possible. He was essentially sitting on his stove, cowering in the direction of his refridgerator. ‘This is defeat,’ he thought. ‘I recognize this feeling.’

Without the athletic ability to sustain serious cowering for very long, however, it became clear that eventually he would have to move. He did not have the necessary abdomen muscles to keep himself in a fetal position while perched on his stove. Leaping down, he leaned agains the wall and waited for a striking thought to hit him. Tried to think through the situation with a clear head. A magazine was contacting him, for once. This was serious. Drastic times and drastic measures and all that.

He regained his composure, striking out to dial one more time. Aiming to succeed. He carefully read the number off the page. Saw that it had only a one numeral difference from Morty’s. Recognized his mistake and vowed not to make it again. Began to dial slowly and carefully. He got through six of the numbers, lost his place, but bravely started over.

Finally, a new, uniterrupted ring sounded through the reciever. A ring that woke no man from his nap. A pure, blissful ring that sounded like a professional future calling.
A ring that went unanswered. A ring without an answering machine.

After several minutes of basking in the heroic nature of the clear, crisp, journalistic ring, Emery realized his continued presence on the line was futile. The whole exercise was just that, an exercise in continued defeat. A lesson on the futility of bravery. Hanging up, he remembering that Morty said the word nap at least twice during their calls so he took the only direction that the unfair, confusing universe had provided, laid his head on the grimy counch cushion, and fell asleep. He’d call another time. Maybe.