Us Do Part

As a joke, you use your cell phone to dial your own number. Someone picks up.

Clouds of blue smoke were floating in the air. Shifting, mixing, coming together and falling apart. Dancing together in a dark room, a slow waltz of formless bodies, whirling through eternity. Cara was drifting among them, a weightless spectator. She was nothing and everything, alone in space, her soul touching the whole world, and she felt nothing but pure bliss in her unity with the universe. She heard gurgling water to her right as Fabian took another hit.

“Man, his stuff is strong,” he said, coughing out another puff, adding to the mist. Under his red, glazed eyes, a wide smile appeared. “It’s been so long since the last time we did this.”

“We smoked yesterday, Fab. Maybe you should ease up if you don’t remember that,” said Loraine. The day before they celebrated Cara’s thirty-second birthday. This time they celebrated their leftovers.

“A day is too long, Lorrie,” he said, and they all laughed. Loraine and Fabian because of the joke; Cara, because someone fell on TV.

She pointed at the screen, and everybody was turning to look at Jim Carrie on his ass when a repeated ringing sounded in the other room.

“Cara, do you want me to get that?” asked Loraine.

“No, it’s probably just another dumbass,” said Cara, frowning. Jim Carrie was no longer on his ass.

Then the room was silent, until Fabian asked, “What happens if you call yourself? Like, call your own phone. Maybe you get to talk to yourself. Like your subconscious.”

Even when sober, Fabian wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Seriously, Fab? How high are you?” asked Cara, since Loraine was too busy cracking up.

“You don’t know! Have you ever tried?”

“If you really can’t figure it out by yourself, I’ll show you right now.” She got up, then set back down. When the world stopped spinning, she got up again and grabbed her phone from the other room. Back in her chair, she dialed her number on the phone that carried it, set the phone to speaker mode, and placed it on the table between the three of them.

A ring, another, and a third. Cara started saying, “I told you so,” when the fourth was interrupted. They all froze in their seats as the sound of weeping emerged from the device. After two seconds, “Hello.” The voice seemed to belong to an old man. When none of them replied, he asked again, “Hello?”

Still, they sat silent. The call was terminated. “Cara — your subconscious sounds like an old man,” said Loraine.

“Yeah,” said Cara, after a pause. “And he sounds really sad.”

* * *

The next day, Cara came back from the office to find thirty unanswered calls on her phone. It had gotten even worse a few days before. Her number was used in a skit commercial on Saturday Night Live, and she had been getting calls virtually non-stop since then. She opened up the phone’s call log, just to make sure she didn’t miss anything important.

As she browsed through the numbers, she came across a familiar one. It wasn’t saved in her contacts — but, unlike the others, this one was an outgoing call. After a couple of seconds, she realized it was her own, and the events of last night came back to her, played out before her eyes. “I was just high,” she muttered, “I must have been hallucinating. No one picked up.” She couldn’t carry on scrolling.

She stared at the phone, a little scared, a little curious, but mostly ashamed of not dismissing the idea immediately.

Then she swiped the number to the right and heard the ring once, twice, three times. Then: “Hello?”

She was amazed. She couldn’t believe what was happening and a million explanations popped up in her head, all competing over the title of the most ridiculous one. This time, though, she managed to speak. “Hello, this is Cara Mayrant.”

She didn’t know what to say next. Luckily, she didn’t have to say a thing. As soon as the ‘T’ left her lips, the man on the other side of the line said, “Cara Mayrant? That’s my wife’s name.” He’d said was in an agonized whisper.

The call was terminated.

Cara was puzzled. Cara Mayrant wasn’t too common a name. What were the odds of her reaching a Cara Mayrant’s husband, and a dead one at that? And how did the call even go through? She pondered for a while, trying to figure it out, when an idea came to her, one that was significantly more reasonable than any other she had come up with before. She called again. The old man answered after three and a half rings.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Who am I talking to?”

“This is Joel Henshaw, on Cara Mayrant-Henshaw’s phone.”

“I’m sorry — wrong number.” Cara ended the call.

She finally understood. It was all just a blunder at the phone company. Someone must have mixed up their names and had their lines connected. The poor guy. His wife had obviously passed in the past few days. He sounded on the verge of wailing. She decided to stop harassing Mr. Henshaw and try to get the problem fixed. The next day, she sent an e-mail to her provider with the details of the issue and forgot all about it.

* * *

About a month later, an e-mail popped up on Cara’s screen. It was an answer from the phone company’s tech support. Took them long enough, she thought. The reply was short and to the point: no issues with her line were found, and therefore, there was nothing to fix. She raised an eyebrow. How could they not find an issue? There clearly was one. In a moment of self-doubt, she wondered if she had imagined her brief conversations with Joel Henshaw, and once again dialed her own number.

She heard the ring once, twice, three times. Then, “Hello.”

“Hello Mr. Henshaw, I called you a couple of times a month ago. I think the phone company mixed up our lines.”

His voice broke as he answered: “I’m sorry, Miss. But this is a bad time. Besides, you talked to my wife.” He hung the phone up.

Cara was relieved to find she didn’t imagine anything, but she wasn’t at ease. Why were tech support unable to find the problem? And why was Mr. Henshaw still so sad? Losing one’s partner must be difficult and she didn’t expect him to be chipper, but still. It’d been a month, at this point she would’ve expected him to get past the uncontrollable crying stage. She carried on her day, preparing dinner and eating in front of the TV, but she was only half there. She had another ridiculous explanation. This time she wanted to test it.

The experiment consisted of two parts— each meant to confirm a different suspicion. Once again, Cara dialed her own number. She hesitated before making the call, not wanting to harass Mr. Henshaw any more than she already had, but if she was right, it wouldn’t matter. She pressed the dial button and counted the ring backs. She counted three and a half before the man picked up.

Trying to mimic the tone she’d used last month, as much as she could remember it, she said: “Hello, this is Cara Mayrant.”

As soon as the ‘T’ left her lips, Mr. Henshaw said: “Cara Mayrant? That is my wife’s name.” He was silent for a moment, then whispered, was. The call was terminated. First suspicion — confirmed.

She called again, this time with no hesitation. Again, she counted three and a half rings before the call picked up.

“Hello, this is Loraine from the city — ”

Mr. Henshaw interrupted her. “I’m sorry, Loraine, but this is a bad ti — ”

“I understand,” she pressed, a bit more harshly than she intended. “But this will be short and very important. I only need to confirm the date of birth for the owner of this phone.”

“This was my wife’s phone,” he said. “She was born on June twelfth, 1985.” Cara hung up. Suspicion number two — confirmed.

Even though her experiment confirmed it, she couldn’t believe her discovery. When she was calling herself, she was, in fact calling herself. Her future self, that is. Her call reached her own phone, at exactly the same time in the future with every call, shortly after her death. Joel was her future husband. Or rather, her current husband in the future. Or widow. Her head hurt.

When I’m dead. A shiver went up her spine.

Cara felt odd, carrying the gravity of this discovery on her shoulders. With the push of the button, she could reach a man who could tell her everything about her future. Everyone feared the unknown, and now, the unknown would never be an issue. She would know when to repeat all her good choices and when to change all of her bad ones.

But her excitement became fear before long. She didn’t know how she was able to call the future, and she couldn’t anticipate how her actions might change it. She thought about the story of King Laius, father of Oedipus. In an attempt to escape his fate, as was predicted by the oracle at Delphi, he’d brought upon the very future he tried to avoid. Maybe she couldn’t change the future. Maybe she could only change it for the worse. Maybe merely knowing the future would cause it to change. She was only sure of one thing— this was not a tool she could use without forethought.

* * *

Over the next few weeks, she spent all of her free time researching, reading and watching anything that seemed relevant. Theories of time travel written by physicists. TV shows about people with precognitive abilities. Myths about prophecies from ancient cultures. Nothing helped. Every story or theory had different ideas about the effects of foreknowledge, and the consequences of its use.

Cara hadn’t called Joel again.

But life had other plans. Her boss called her into his office one day and gave her a choice. A job had opened up in their European headquarters. If she wanted it, it was waiting for her in Marseille — along with a 30% raise. Her family and friends, on the other hand, were not.

There wasn’t any time to decide. Except —

After a day of grappling with the choices in front of her, Cara picked up her phone.

As the phone was ringing the usual three and a half times, Cara realized she had no idea what to ask, and how. Joel had just lost his wife — how could she possibly ask him for career advice? But then the rings were over and she heard Joel say, “Hello?”

“Hello. I’m C — Loraine. I knew your wife. I’m sorry for your loss.” Thoughts of mortality passed through her mind. She suppressed them. She still had time. She hoped.

Joel took his time answering. “How, how did you know? The doctor just announced — ”

He couldn’t make it any further. The sound of his pain tore something apart in Cara’s chest.

“I know, because — well, I’m an executor. Your wife. She was a client.”

“You’re not our executor.”

“I know, I — ”

She didn’t know what to say, all of a sudden. “Sir, may I ask you a question about your wife?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Cara said, then froze for a second. Then another. “Never mind. This is not the time.” This was her turn to turn away. “I hope you find peace, Mr. Henshaw.” She hung up the phone.

* * *

Six months later, Cara’s French was improving in Marseilles. Enough to help the American tourist ahead of her in line order his coffee. After he thanked her and offered to pay for her order, an offer she refused, they left the coffee shop, only to learn they were walking in the same direction. They talked of this and that for a few minutes before their paths parted. Cara shook the tourist’s hand and introduced herself to him. Then she introduced her cup of coffee to the ground when the tourist replied, with a smile: “It’s a pleasure to meet you. My name is Joel. Joel Henshaw.”

Bar Danino is a mechanical engineer and an aspiring writer.