He
works the phone all morning, calling to remind his clients to take their pills
and drink lots of water, and to reassure them that the voices aren’t real. Some
of them he calls and calls again, hoping that on his third or fifth or eighth attempt
they’ll give in, pick up, and maybe even recognize his voice, hear and heed his
advice.
By noon he’s pretty toasted from the effort, buys himself a
burger and a Coke and goes down to sit in the shade beside the lake,
contemplate its smooth surface like it’s a giant crystal ball, and try to
divine what comes next. The only other beings he encounters are a few ragged
gulls scavenging the shoreline for scraps and a pair of loons forty or fifty
feet out, bobbing and diving for whatever it is loons dive for. He watches them
for the longest time, thinking about how quiet it must be just below the
surface. He wonders why they come back up at all.
He can hear the snarl of a revved engine on the bank far off to
his left, somewhere out of sight. He can’t tell if it’s a chainsaw or a
dirtbike, only that it’s small and angry sounding. It echoes across the water
and comes back at him almost a full second later, only slightly smaller but
just as angry. When he can’t stand it anymore, he heads on back to the office.
When
he gets to his desk, the phone is ringing, but he can’t bring himself to pick
it up. There’s a meeting going on in the conference room; he can hear voices
through the wall.