The following is a true account of some events that occurred ten years ago. The names have not been changed to protect the living. Or the dead. PHONE CALLS FROM THE FRINGE #3: Theres no Lorelei Here. In the fall of 2003 I went to my hometown, Washington, D.C., to work on a short-lived HBO show. The series ended after only a few months, but I loved my DC apartment so much that I held onto the place for another year. It was in an old Art Deco building that had been under construction in the 1920s. When the Great Depression hit, there was one main wing that had been completed in addition to space for a smaller wing that was planned but never built. It gave the building a sort of incomplete, haunted look of unfinished business and plans put on permanent hold. The apartment was big, bright, and airy, and the windows opened onto a wooded lot that bordered the zoo. On summer days I could open the windows and hear the zebras braying at feeding time. Sometimes at night you could hear the pumas growling in their cages. I adored the place. I had requested that my newly-public number be listed under “Leslie Carangi”, but for some reason it ended up in the directory simply as “L. Kelley”. This was probably because Kelley was the legal surname on my credit card. Why they didn’t bother to spell out my first name as they did with every other first name in the directory remains one of Gods own personal mysteries. On the other hand, if my name had been spelled out, I might not have a story to tell. Since everyone preferred to call my cell phone anyway, my landline almost never rang the entire time I had the place. Until late in the summer of 2004, when it suddenly sprang to life in a way that I couldnt have imagined. I was home that night, and had just climbed into bed when the first of the calls came in. Thinking it had to be a family member and that something must be wrong for them to be calling so late, I quickly reached over in the dark and picked up. “Hello?” Terrible connection. Loud buzzing and static. And a faint rushing sound, as if wind were blowing through the wires. “Lorelei?” Through the crackling line, I could make out a faint voice that I didn’t recognize, a young woman. I raised my own voice over the hum. “Sorry, wrong number.” Then I couldn’t hear anything beyond the static, and the line went dead. I switched on the bedside lamp and looked over at the caller ID. No number on the display. I chalked it up to the bad connection and dropped off to sleep. A few hours later, the jangling phone yanked me back into consciousness. I fumbled for the receiver as my heart jackhammered in my ribs. In my family, when the phone rings at that hour it can only mean that someone is dead, needs to be bailed out of jail, or is looking for a place to sleep off a drunk. “Wha- hello???” I stammered. “Hello, I’m trying to reach Lorelei!” Same young woman as before, sounding as if she were calling from inside a beehive somewhere near Neptune. My relief that it wasn’t the police or a coroner was quickly replaced by irritation. “I can barely hear you!” I snapped. “Do you know what time it is? You have the wrong number!!” A short, static-filled pause. Then, more emphatically: “Lorelei Kelley.” Ahhh. I groggily surmised that she’d seen the truncated “L. Kelley” listing in the directory. “The ‘L’ in the listing doesn’t stand for Lorelei!” I snarled. “You called earlier tonight. You have the wrong number. Again!!” It’s strange how a bad connection can simultaneously muffle words and amplify emotions. My caller sounded devastated. “Are… are you sure? I... need to reach her.” “Yes I’m sure. Theres no Lorelei here.” The line went dead. Confident that I had gotten my point across to this moron with the crappy connection, I went back to sleep. I didn’t think about the calls again until when, a few days later in the afternoon, the landline rang again. I was expecting a call from my cousin, and picked up expecting to hear her voice. “Hey girl!! What’s up???” I piped. And again, that horrible connection and that faint, hopeful voice that sounded like it was coming from the opposite end of the universe. “Oh Lorelei!! I knew this was really your number!!!” Jesus. Really?? “No. This is STILL not Lorelei, and you STILL have the wrong number.” Undaunted, my caller continued. “Lorelei, I’ve been trying so hard to find you! It’s Minerva!!!” Minerva?? Her name is Minerva?!? I snickered audibly. “Lorelei, listen to me,” Minerva continued cluelessly through the static. “Stop kidding with me. There’s something I need to tell you.” My annoyance instantly eclipsed my mirth. No, no, I interrupted. This is NOT Lorelei and I’m NOT kidding you. I was laughing about something else. You have the wrong number, Minerva. The same wrong number you dialed the last time, and the time before that. I already told you. There is no Lorelei here. The static continued to buzz the background like a swarm of tiny hornets. When her voice returned, it sounded flat and fainter than ever. I had to strain to hear her. Im sorry, Minerva said. Its just that I need to find Lorelei. I have to tell her something. I could hear through the buzz that she sounded really despondent, and now I felt like a jerk for laughing at her name. “OK, I sighed. I’m sorry you’re having trouble finding her. Have you tried Google?” Minerva’s faint little voice became hopeful. “Please, can you help me find her? I was in the Peace Corps with her in Kenya. She’s from Washington!” She sounded kind of desperate. And clueless - who didn’t know how to Google a name? Not to mention, she had a lousy cell service provider. I told her to hold on, grabbed my laptop and went straight into Lexis-Nexis, the mother of all intrusive background check engines. Lexis-Nexis is the one they use to find out how many divorces and illegitimate children you have. What your mortgage is. How many alimony payments you’ve missed. Complete with every address and telephone number you’ve ever had, going back decades. I found one Lorelei Kelley in Washington, DC. A few addresses for her, but no matter how many cross-indexes I ran, there were no phone numbers. I got back on the line with Minerva. “I can’t find her number. She probably doesn’t have a land line. Give me your number and I’ll call my friend at Peace Corps to see if they can locate her, and I’ll get back to you.” “Thank you,” I heard her say softly through the whistling wires. You’re very kind to help me. I’ll call you again.” “No, wait! Just give me your number and I’ll get in touch if I find out anything.” A hiss of static, and then the line went dead. Fine. Good luck with that, Minerva, wherever you are. And that, I thought, was the end of that. I stopped thinking about Minerva and the strange calls until three months later. And then, I would never really get them completely out of my mind. A couple of journalist friends talked me into going to a National Press Club dinner one swampy July evening. It was the kind of balmy, humid Washington night where the cicadas are out in full force, their songs swelling and falling in the distance like rhythmic electrical currents in the air. I generally eschewed gatherings like these, and still do. I think someone like Maureen Dowd was the keynote speaker, so I reluctantly agreed to go. I despise networking events. There is nothing more mind-numbing than having to work a room full of people you don’t give a damn about, pressing the flesh and exchanging business cards nonstop until you’ve had too much champagne and need to leave. And this event promised to be no different than the others. Until I found myself shaking the hand of another guest who introduced herself as Lorelei Kelley. My chin dropped. “Oh my God, what are the odds!!!” I exclaimed, pumping her hand. “You are not going to believe what I have to tell you!!” I asked her to repeat her name three times. She must have thought I was drunk or hard of hearing. And then I proceeded to tell her the story of Minerva and the phone calls. Lorelei listened without emotion until I was done recounting my amazing tale and then, rather than being delighted at this phenomenal coincidence, merely shook her head. “I only knew one Minerva in Kenya or anywhere else, and she died of Dengue fever over there, in Mombasa.” “What?? No, that can’t be right! This was Minerva who knew you in the Peace Corps.” “Yes, Minerva Riley from the Peace Corps, she said. She’s dead. Ten years now.” “How could that possibly be?? She said she’d been trying to reach you, and had something important that she needed to tell you. I tried to look up your number for her on Lexis-Nexis.” “I don’t have a land line; haven’t in years. Just cell phones, because I’m always travelling.” And as I stared in disbelief at Lorelei, I realized that she was staring back at me as if she’d just seen a ghost. I decided that she must be hiding something – maybe she owed Minerva money. Maybe Minerva wasn’t dead at all but worked at some collection agency. Maybe Minervas message was about a large, past-due payment. Perhaps it was a crank caller pretending to be Minerva. Or maybe it was something more sinister, and Lorelei was the victim. I decided to let it drop. We exchanged business cards and moved on to shake the next hand. But we both looked back at each other a time or two, each of us obviously wondering what the other was hiding. Only, I knew I wasn’t hiding anything. It must be Lorelei who knew something, and she wasn’t talking. Leaving that night with my friends, I recall thinking that the humming of the cicadas reminded me of the static in the background when Minerva called. This is where the story should end. But, as it turns out, this story doesn’t really have an ending. A day later, my cell phone rang. It was Lorelei Kelley. She apologized for the way she’d reacted to my news of Minerva at the Press Club, and added that she’d been too shocked to get her mind around what I was telling her. “You can’t imagine what it was like to have a total stranger walk up to me and start talking about Minerva,” she said. I chuckled. “Yeah, bet that came as a bit of a blindside.” Lorelei went on. “I’ve only known one person in my life with that name, and that was my friend Minerva Riley, from the Peace Corps in Kenya. The one I told you about, who died ten years ago.” I asked her if she thought maybe someone was trying to victimize her or impersonate her friend. She replied that there would be no reason why anyone would want to do either of those things, especially after all this time. She added, quietly, that the Minerva she had known had been a close friend and a sweet, uncomplicated girl from a nice Midwestern family, who had loved being a Peace Corps volunteer. A girl like that, she said softly, what you see is all you get. “Are you sure she really died?” I asked. “Oh yes,” said Lorelei sadly. “We were like sisters. I was there at the hospital with her family when she died. They flew to Mombasa when she got sick.” She paused for a moment, and then her voice suddenly dropped. “It haunts me, you know, she said softly. She shouldn’t have died. That hospital in Mombasa... it was so overcrowded, understaffed… We should have made arrangements to have her airlifted back to the States. It was my fault. She was young; we thought she was going to pull through...” and her voice trailed off. “Oh God... I’m so sorry,” I said. “If I’d had any idea, I probably wouldn’t have said anything to you.” She was silent and for a moment I thought shed hung up. Then, she finally spoke. “It’s all right,” she replied, brightening. “You know, it was strange… hearing you talk about her after all this time actually made me feel better. Like a weight had been lifted. I hadn’t heard her name in so long. Having you stand there, telling me that you spoke with Minerva, and that she had a message for me... it felt like she was still here, and everything was fine. I know that sounds crazy.” I told her it didn’t sound crazy at all. “Are you absolutely sure the person who called you said her name was Minerva?” she asked. “Yes, I’m completely sure,” I said. “Well... if this girl, whoever she is, calls me again, would you like me to let you know?” “Please do,” she said. “I’m completely stumped.” I could tell that she meant it. And, I realized after I hung up, if there had really been anything shifty going on, Lorelei would never have bothered to call me. Now I was stumped, too. I had written the whole thing off as some sick joke, or possibly a really motivated collections agency. But after hearing from Lorelei, I had nothing. Just a weird feeling of unfinished business. I wish I could tie this up neatly by saying that eventually we discovered something that explained the calls. The only other thing I have to share is one last call that came in about a week after my conversation with Lorelei. At around two in the morning on that night, my landline rang. I was dead asleep and it took me a minute or two to figure out that the ringing wasn’t part of the dream I was having. I reached over, half asleep, and pulled the receiver to my ear. And there it was. That unmistakable buzz of static that had hummed through the line every time Minerva called. The adrenaline sparked through me like electricity and I sat straight up in bed. I didnt wait for her to speak. “Minerva??” I yelled into the phone. “Minerva, is that you?! You won’t believe this. I found your friend Lorelei Kelley!! I met her here in D.C.! I told her you were trying to reach her!!” No reply. Just the buzz of a thousand hornets, and that strange sound of wind rushing through the wires. “Can you hear me, Minerva??? I shouted. I said I told Lorelei you were trying to reach her!!!” The roar became almost deafening, and then I heard, ever so faintly, almost indistinguishable from the static, what sounded like either Thats all or Thanks a lot. Then the line went dead. I switched on the lamp, and again saw that there was no number showing on the caller ID. I knew I’d never be able to go back to sleep, so I called Lorelei’s cell. My call went straight to voicemail, so I left a message asking her to call me first thing in the morning. I lay awake the rest of the night waiting for the phone to ring again. It never did. Lorelei called me back early the next day. I told her about the call from the previous night. I explained that I couldn’t hear anyone through the bad connection, but I was sure it had been the girl who called herself Minerva. I told Lorelei that I expected “Minerva” would call me back again when she was somewhere where reception was better to get Loreleis phone number, and then we would get to the bottom of this mystery. Except that she never did call again, and both Lorelei and I were left to wonder who it really was who called me. It could have been some kind of a crank caller or a bill collector, but in that case they would have most certainly called me again. It’s always possible that there was another girl named Minerva who had served in the Peace Corps in Kenya with Lorelei. Except that Lorelei double-checked her Peace Corps volunteer records from her Kenya tour, and found only her friend Minerva. And, in case you’re wondering, yes: I went back into Lexis-Nexis and found the death record for Minerva Riley. Lorelei was telling the truth. Sometimes lives are like unfinished buildings. Unanswered, incomplete, haunted. And then there’s that other explanation, which I reject because I don’t believe in the supernatural, life after death, or any of that other foolishness. That would be The Twilight Zone explanation. The one that says it really was Minerva calling with her own unfinished business and her plans put on permanent hold. Trying to get a message to her friend Lorelei, who she had been haunting all these years, to tell her to forgive herself. Yeah, I know. I saw that episode, too. The one where the dead husband calls a bedridden and guilt-ravaged, crippled wife on the phone, to tell her that his death in a car that she was driving wasnt her fault. Unfortunately, though, none of the logical explanations for the calls pan out. Which makes the Rod Serling explanation just as good as any. If you believe in that sort of thing. Which I don’t. Right?
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 16:05:24 +0000
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