New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 8

by Grant Bailie

He once received a call at work from a woman with the same sort of thin, scratchy voice Raina had had and even the inflections of her words seemed remarkably similar.

The name on the screen was not Raina, but it was not inconceivable that she could have given herself a new name, reinvented her life like she had once talked about changing majors.

Robert thought he could hear in this woman’s familiar seeming voice, a shared history of frustrations and disappointments. He almost said the name Raina out loud, but he did not. She was complaining about the package of channels she received. It lacked some of the premium entertainment stations she would have preferred while containing a number of sports channels she had no use for whatsoever.

He offered her a package that might be more in line with her interests. He asked her if she liked music — asked if it as if it was part of the process of determining how to best meet her cable needs. She said she liked music all right. What she didn’t like was sports.

When the call was over there was another call on the line waiting. He would have liked to have paused a moment to think of Raina — the real Raina, the Raina of the past — but a squirrels had chewed through the wires of Mr. Slatkovski’s wire again, on the very day of the season finale of his favorite show. A repair vehicle would be dispatched at once. Robert wondered if they would be using the flashing lights.

It was not until he was back in his apartment that evening that he could think of Raina uninterrupted, remember fondly certain glimpses and textures and smells and sounds that he still used for the fodder of his current sins.

He did not like to remember the scars that ran like a ladder up the inside of her thigh. He had avoided looking at them, trying to pretend that they were not there or that they might have been the result of an innocent accident. Had she fallen on her brother’s toy fire truck as a child?

But the scars now swelled in his memory and some nights, when he was attempting to revisit the softness of youth and her touch, they rose up from the fragile tissues of his dreams like an intrusive ghost.

There had only been the one time with Raina and there had only been one other time with somebody else under less interesting circumstances. Raina dropped out of school before Robert, or he assumed she did. Maybe she had only dropped Philosophy. All he knew was that her chair became empty and he never saw her in the hallways again. Several times he had visited the sidewalk, but never went so far as the front door of the building, never checked to see if her name was still on the buzzer. Maybe it was easier to imagine her gone than to find out she was not — that she was only gone to him.

What had happened to her, or for that matter Sarah, or for that matter the girl of less interesting circumstances? They were out there in the world somewhere, he assumed, he hoped, but there was something ineffably sad about not knowing any of the details of their current existence. It is the sort of sadness, he imagined, that drove the impulse of high school reunions, but he had never gone to any of his and after the tenth one they had stopped inviting him.

And they had aged, of course, they had aged like him and if he would find himself in the same room with them now they would not be the creatures of his mind, who were unaffected by gravity, sunlight, or erosion. They would be different women standing and towering before him, with all their old scars healed over and new ones added.

The woman whose voice reminded him of Raina’s voice called again sometime later. She wanted to switch her cable package. Now she wanted less entertainment stations and more history and science. Robert suggested the Explorer Package, which contained several science and travel stations as well as a history channel and one premium movie channel, which had the added benefit of being less expensive than the package she currently had. She thanked him for the service. She said he had a nice voice and was very patient. He told her she was welcome.

His next call was with a person who did not speak when Robert asked if he could help them. There was just a quiet breathing again, a whispered sobbing.

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