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Consideration | On the Phone with Forever Mag
by Forever Mag
Kurt Kauper. “Fantasy #1: Bus Stop” (2019-2021). Oil on birch panel. 45” x 58”. Courtesy of Harkawik Gallery.
Curated by Madeline Cash and Anika Levy
Forever is a literary magazine publishing weekly online and quarterly in print. Find us at forevermag.net or at Sunday mass.
The call is coming from inside the house. Meet Shy, Bud, and Kristen respectively from Montana, New York, and Florida. Their three stories, though written out of context of one another, each return to themes of place and technology. Who we call, how we call, why we call, etc.
Preamble
Madeline Cash: Hey Anika–what’s up? I’m eating an unwashed head of lettuce and crying on the phone with PayPal!
Anika Levy: Hi Mads–I just got a new set of acrylics so I’m having a hard time typing also the cat is pacing back and forth on my desk. But yeah women shouldn’t have access to their own bank accounts. I think we’re off to a great start.
MC: No one should be able to use PayPal unless they’re emotionally prepared to sit on hold for 2.5 hours with a man in Bangladesh.
AL: We talk on the phone every day and also you’re my only friend so I think we’re really well suited to the task.
MC: I agree! I love the phone. I truly have a healthy relationship with technology. I love sponsored content. I love tailored advertisements. It’s where I buy all of my ballet flats. And birth control. And how I find out about foreign wars.
AL: Are phone sex hotlines still a thing? I wanna call a phone sex operator and just read Baudrillard aloud for like an hour.
MC: Let me check. Nah it’s mostly camming. That sounds expensive ^
AL: Phone sex: it’s cheaper than grad school!! But yeah, it’s dangerous to read theory when you don’t have any money.
MC: Right. I caution against even having a credit card in 2022. That’s the year right? I have been thinking it’s 2018 lately. I guess that’s where I plateaued culturally.
AL: LOL–I feel like my whole sense of chronological time is totally dissolving.
MC: Trying to keep us on track; What is the first thing you open on your phone?
AL: My texts from the Forever girls. What about you?
MC: <3 yeah texts, then I will impulsively open Instagram and see all my friends from middle school getting married. The other day I DM’ed an ex like “I’m rich!” because I had gotten my tax refund and he was like “from your literary zine?” and really put me in my place. I also check our email and then I check the news.
AL: I’ve literally never read the news. When was the last time you had fun on your phone?
MC: I have fun on my phone every day. I love taking pictures of my skin up close. I love to clean and organize my apps like I’m gardening. I like the sounds they make.
AL: Love to stare pointlessly into my phone for hours to make myself feel bad on purpose. So weird how the photo app on iPhone will randomly decide to show you a picture of your cancelled ex-boyfriend or whatever now.
MC: Yes! My phone made a slideshow of my ex crushing lines of Adderall on a coffee table to that happy stock music. He’s in AA now. I’ll send it to you.
AL: Aw! Auggie!!! Big shouts. How old were you when you got a smart phone?
MC: Also “smart phone” what a funny term! I guess not ha ha funny… I was probably a junior in high school. First I had a Razr with the charms you get at the mall. Then I had a knock-off sidekick because I didn’t have T-mobile. Then I had a blackberry.
AL: OMG. I used to be so obsessed with getting a sidekick and I would constantly try to buy them cheap off of Craigslist with my allowance but I always got scammed. They always sold me a busted sidekick. It would be cool to get one now though. Who do you talk to on the phone besides me? I talk to my mom a lot…
MC: I talk to you, my mom and PayPal. Nick more and more but boys aren’t great at the phone. It’s really a feminine medium.
AL: Remember when we were kids and our parents were convinced that everyone else on the internet was like a rapist or a foot fetishist? And now like all of my friends are from Twitter.
MC: Yeah I wonder what the actual pedophile to child ratio was on AIM. The early aughts were all about the rapist > tween pipeline, like Chatroulette and that other one?
AL: AIM!!! Now there’s fertile ground. What was your away message? Mine was like “brrrrrb, shower :]” cuz I wanted my crush to picture me in the shower.
MC: That’s brilliant. No wonder you’re the one at the ivy league college. Mine was a quote from Harry Potter; “I solemnly swear I am up to no good” which negates any possibility that I was up to no good because I had watched/been significantly influenced by Harry Potter. Shot myself in the foot with that.
AL: You really weren’t up to any good!! As much as you fully believed your stuffed animals were sentient until you were seventeen, you also had a penchant for inhalants.
MC: Yeah I really loved my stuffed animals and computer duster. Oh, another phone thing I would do: I’d leave my blackberry at my friend’s house so, when my mom tracked me, it said I was at Gabby’s. But I was really at Spin the Bottle which is an LA relic. My Viper Room.
AL: Wow, Susan is such a tyrant. The only person who’s ever tracked my location is my boyfriend. And he’s not even my boyfriend; he’s like my captor. I hope when I go to heaven it’s just Spin the Bottle at the Roxy. I hope heaven is all ages. I hope they have iPhones in heaven.
MC: Remember you used to pretend to be a parent on the phone to placate my mom? Reader: Anika and I were also friends in high school! Isn’t that endearing? I think there will be iPhones in Heaven. Heaven is an operating system. When I was in middle school I had a hamburger phone like in Juno I bought from Urban Outfitters.
AL: That’s a killer away message—at Spin the Bottle—leave me a message on my hamburger phone.
MC: LOL. I think we pretty much summed up phones?
AL: Yeah I have to go do a sketchy deal involving the Chinese mafia so that PayPal doesn’t sell me into white slavery.
MC: Oh right, you’re in PayPal debt too!
A TARGETED AD
Written by Shy Watson
Exa Dark Sideræl M*sk, aka Y, purchased an iPhone 57, chosen primarily for its built-in DreamMate app, then fired her psychoanalyst. No longer would she need some withered, impotent creep to interpret her inadequate nighttime recollections. Now, she had a device that would flawlessly record, store, then analyze her dreams with an algorithmic accuracy only a company like Apple could provide.
After transferring her data, Y lay jittering on her plasma bed, too excited to sleep. As a child, she would simply calibrate her Neuralink to “exhaustion,” but since its botched removal during her teenage rebellion, she had worked hard to autoregulate. After forty-five minutes of staring fruitlessly up through the skylight toward Los Angeles’ light pollution, Y reached under the bed and grabbed her ASMR blowup doll, Tonya, modeled after her childhood idol Tonya Harding, leg bruises and all. Y commanded “skate,” then drifted to sleep with the hushed scraping of metal on ice.
When Y awoke from what seemed to be a dreamless sleep, she was surprised to see three new notifications on DreamMate. Y hastily paid the 30 ChimeraCoin, then squeezed Tonya close as she pressed play.
In the first dream, Y twirled clad in her Telfar toddler snowsuit, holding hands with her nanny, Keratin, on the frozen pond near Aspen. Keratin let go of Y’s hand and skated with a near Olympic elegance. She smiled, cajoling little Y to join. But Y was too awestruck by Keratin’s jingle bell necklace, which chimed as it reflected the blinding white of surrounding snow into Y’s pupils. The sound grew loud like clashing cymbals and the glare grew brighter until little Y skated blind and deaf in Keratin’s direction. When they collided, Y’s blade lodged into her nanny’s neck.
In the second dream, an adult Y sat on the edge of the pool at one of her father’s many Bel Air mansions. She gazed into the saltwater for a long while as a cloud of now-extinct seagulls flew overhead. Bored, she ran her fingertips along the surface. The water promptly turned viscous, rat snake black. Horrified, Y recoiled. But it was too late; the seagulls had already dive bombed into the muck and drowned.
In the final dream, a 16-year-old Y sat first class in her father’s private jet, head shaved, scar exposed. Across the aisle, Keratin rested against her window. Y unbuckled and stood to join her, but as she approached, she was bodied by sudden turbulence. Oxygen masks dropped, but Keratin continued to stare out the window unfazed. “Kera!” Y yelled. The beverage cart careened down the aisle as the overhead lights flicked on and off. “Kera!” Y repeated. Slowly, Keratin turned toward Y, revealing a face loose with oozing lesions.
After watching her dreams, Y had the distinct impression that she was still asleep. She scrolled down to “analytics,” then paid another ten ChimeraCoin to unlock the results.
All DreamMate offered was a mere pop-up ad for wind-powered ice skates.
SUB HOSTAGES
Written by Bud Smith
The automatic update was supposed to free the hostages. That was one fan theory. But it didn’t work. The hostages woke up with new emojis and a teaser trailer for a dream they’d never live and already the comments section was melting. This was in those young days of the standoff, a line of police squinting at the skyline, someone screaming for help from some unidentifiable rooftop garden with the blue reflected in every window and the puff ball clouds making it difficult for snipers. Whoever was deceived didn’t just deceive themselves. The list of demands was simple: GO BACK TO HOW IT WAS. Impossible. Thumbs were lopped off and sent out to the negotiators. A severed head rolled endlessly down the feed. So many hostages, in so many situations, the city called in fresh negotiators, no matter how unqualified. I had made the mistake of exaggerating in a handwritten valentine, that I was the city’s best chance at escalation—I’d been bluffing for pussy. Turns out she was a recruiter, a headhunter, deepfake and undercover. The SWAT team tried my door but I never answer. They came up the fire escape and shot out the window. At ten o’hundred I was briefed at my trash can. The hostages had been up all night on their phones reading fan theories about themselves. One idea was that the hostages had taken themselves hostage for the attention. Another idea was that the hostages had been asking for it by dressing like that and thinking like that and by being born. Last night the hostages began to fraction into niche pools, beginning at the perceived ‘top’, the socialites taking the rest of them sub-hostage. Not to be outdone, the sub-hostages took the class of hostages below them sub-sub-hostage, and so on. I’ve got a flip phone friend who works two jobs to support his family, he’s in there, out of minutes for the month, or we’d call him. The SWAT team is not listening. They’re sucked into Reels. Watching a beautiful lady deadlift the Lost City of Gold. Their leader is just a child. Says his parents are in there too, but I shouldn’t free them, their captors have them conned into employment for the health insurance—the parents either have cancer or will soon because they are humans on earth. All righty. My assignment is to negotiate with the lowest tier hostage who’s final sub-sub-sub-sub-sub hostage is just an imaginary friend. I’m supposed to post on a message board that my fan theory is we could all set ourselves free anytime because we invented our captors, which is total bullshit, officially. My kitchen is full of severe haircuts, notifications, pings, flash grenades, and nerve gas. But when their batteries die, they look up and see my landline telephone for the first time, blink and scratch, and begin asking, seriously, how it is I survive like this.
CENTRAL FLORIDA EDITION
Written by Kristen N. Arnett
Her phone sat in the gunk at the bottom of the lake, wedged next to something that looked like a faded can of Budweiser. It was only three hours old, that phone; a newborn, really, sunk far enough below the surface of the water that there was no way to reach it without getting down into the lake herself.
And Gina couldn’t swim.
Stupid, that she’d lived in Florida her whole life and never had a swimming lesson. She was familiar enough with the bodies of water that populated the state–lakes and retention ponds and oceans and chlorinated pools–but she’d only ever waded inside them, dipped a tentative toe into the shallow end, never trusting herself to venture into deeper water.
Its screen lit up with a missed call, bright as a searchlight under the dim wake. Gina sat down on the edge of the dock, raw wood cutting into the backs of her bare thighs, and wondered if it would be worth drowning herself to try and get the phone back.
The guy who’d sold it to her said that the iPhone 14 was not only waterproof, it had sonar capabilities. Gina wasn’t sure when she’d need to use sonar–the closest she ever got to the ocean was when her girlfriend talked her into heading out to Cocoa Beach for the afternoon, and even then she spent her time getting wasted off water bottle vodka and stayed far away from the waves—but sonar sounded cool. The plan she’d sprung for cost more than what she made in a month at the afterschool care where she watched hyperactive kids scream and terrorize each other until their parents finally picked them up. And she needed something, anything, to take her mind off her problems. Because not only had she lost her job at the afterschool care, she’d also lost her girlfriend.
She kicked at the water. Her toes barely licked the surface of the lake. It was drought season, summer in Central Florida, but there was still too much space between herself and the overpriced phone, the only good thing she had left in the world. Frogs screamed out in the cattails, throaty howling, and she shushed them like she would those loud kids at work.
The loss of the job and the loss of her girlfriend, Myra, were connected. She’d been caught making out with one of her coworkers in the janitor’s closet when she was supposed to be watching the children do arts and crafts with popsicle sticks. The co-worker had gotten fired, too, and had been mad enough to call Myra and tell her what happened.
Myra had kicked her out of the house. She’d been on the new phone all night, trying to win her girlfriend back, and just when things had started to turn her way—Myra was maybe considering letting her come home for the night—an egret had swung up out of the reeds and startled her so badly that she’d dropped the phone. It slid between the cracks of the dock, down into the water. There it sat, surrounded by algae and muck, waiting for her to pick up the call. Gina wondered if the sonar might be able to reach out from beneath the water, talk to Myra for her.
I need you, the message would read. Even from down here in the wreck, I love you and I’m sorry.