VOW OF SILENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

Almost everyone in the world has a phone. Cellular service connects New York with Antarctica or Greenland. Every day I call my son Fenway's mom and Mam will pick up in Thailand. Every minute, millions of cellular calls and SMS messages crisscross the globe, searching billions of destinations. People. We are so close, yet so far away from each other.

Back in the last decade, AP and I moved a set of headboards from the 3rd Floor to the penthouse landing. They were heavy, and luckily neither of us injured our backs. I had lived there from 2008 to 2016. Not anymore, but I was always willing to offer AP a helping hand. He had always had my back over the last decade.

"Thanks," my landlord/friend/architect said, walking down to the 2nd floor.

"No worries."

Those three syllables ended my verbal communications for Saturday. I walked over to my apartment on Myrtle Avenue in Clinton Hill.

Three beers sang a lullaby. I was in bed by 9. I pulled John Rechy's 1963 CITY OF THE NIGHT from my night table. Within two hundred words of hustlers in New York sleep wrapped my body in bliss.

The next morning I rose slowly from my slumber. Rain splashed against my window. I grabbed my watch on the bedside table

7:30am. Sunday morning. Another drop into dreams. Thirty minutes later, church bells rang in Brooklyn. I pulled the cover over my shoulders and continued reading more of John Rechy's novel about backroom sex on the West Side Highway. I had hoped to get an erection. It wasn't porno. Ten minutes later the book fell on my chest, and I napped for another half-hour.

I awoke to a heavy rain. Outside the window, a deluge bucketed from ominous clouds crawling across a charcoal-gray sky. I pitied churchgoers and checked my cellphone.

No one had called me. Not my wife in Thailand. Not my family in Boston. Not my friends around the world or even a Chinese scam caller.

I got out of bed and looked out the window. Not a soul was visible in the alleys or the back windows behind the Myrtle brownstone. The dark sky was devoid of airplanes. Within these four walls I was the Last Man on Earth, but I am not Mada, Adam’s dead end.

Hungry, I cooked myself breakfast. Two slices of toast and milky tea with one sugar. I sat by the window. A rear window like in Hitchcock's famous suspense movie. Across the backyard alley, no sign of life from the neighbors.

Five million people lived in the borough of Brooklyn. None were visible today. I wondered if zombies had risen from the dead and eaten the entire population of Brooklyn, but no zombies were terrorizing the streets. I would have heard zictims’ screams. Zictims or Zombie victims, instead my ears registered the BBQ's eternal traffic two blocks to the north. Humanity lived unmolested by the dead.

Families ate brunch at the restaurants in Fort Greene. Kids were on playdates with their friends. Lovers lay in bed late. None of them thought about me. Me neither. I ran a hot bath and put on some Graham Parsons. OH, LAS VEGAS. I had yet to speak a word.

After a good twenty-minute soak, I dedicated my day to a monastic vow of silence, assured that, if I didn't leave my top-floor apartment.

Silent Sunday had been a tradition dating back to my old apartment on East 10th Street in the East Village.

During the 70s and 80s I regularly sequestered myself from the rest of the world. I worked at nightclubs. Four nights a week dealing with a clientele of hundreds of drunk and high people, and I was a little insane too. Sunday mornings were reserved to be in bed with a book. Apart, alone, but not lonely or so I thought. Believeing it was not so sure.

Far from the maddening crowd. I had a late breakfast at home, followed by a long afternoon bath, with my evenings devoted to finishing the book and drinking a bottle or two of wine. I had no women in my life.

Once or twice on these silent Sundays I checked for the phone. There was a dial tone. No one had called me on Sunday for months.

This vow of silence lasted, until 1991, when I started dating Ms. Carolina. The former blone beauty queen liked talking and I couldn't blame her. She lived in a redneck community below the Mason-Dixon Line. Every Sunday Ms. Carolina attended extraordinarily long church services, and her Baptist congregation was very advanced for North Carolina. The faithful believed that blacks possessed a soul. One Saturday she called late at night.

"Sometimes I need to speak to someone sane.”

Despite being born in the Adirondacks, her accent was pure Tarheel.

"I'm not really sane." I warned her about my Sunday tradition.

"You don't speak to anyone on Sunday. Why the silence?"

"Seneca said, “As often as I have been amongst men, I have returned less a man."

"Which means?"

"That I don't like speaking on Sundays. I want to empty my head or humanity. Empty it of me too.”

“And do you succeed?”

“Not really. I can never shut up the voice in me, although it doesn’t really speak, so much as constructs images from my past; people, places, things, and I speak with them all.”

"You are crazy, but when we first met I wrote down a list of the ten things I didn’t like about you. Being crazy was one of the ones I loved. Don't worry. I respect your vow." The blonde southerner was a true gentlewoman. "But what if you just pick up the phone and listen to me? That's not really breaking your vow of silence."

"Let me reflect on this."

One Trappist sect was very strict on silence, but many aspects of my life rejected the Cistercian dictates, and I told Ms. Carolina, "As long as the phone calls don't last longer than twenty minutes, I'll pick up the phone and listen."

"Thank you." Her gratitude was sincere, and I said, "You know I love you in my own way."

"I can't ask for anything more."

The next day my phone rang at 11:15. I was soaking in the kitchen bathtub. My apartment was very East Village. I answered the phone without saying a word.

Ms. Carolina recounted the morning preacher's ranting sermon. I thought I could talk, but this woman was a champ and she complained, "This Bible-Thumper believes that all homosexuals will be damned to Hell. I told him after the service that I knew that he frequented some Richmond bars where men danced with men and gave him a check for $25. It's going to fix the roof."

Seventeen minutes later she said, "Good luck with your vow of silence. Are you there?”

“In my bath.” Three words, The vow of silence was not sacred.

“Thank you. I love to hear your voice.”

She was in love. I wished I could be the same. I said nothing.

Click.

I had merely listened to a woman on a phone.

Words had never left my lips and I forgot the conversation, while watching BONANZA on TV. The telephone did not ring during the show.

Two weeks passed and Ms. Carolina drove north to visit me in the East Village. Saturday night we dined at a good restaurant in Soho. I drank more than I should, but I was a sucker for a good Saturday night drunk.

Sunday morning I woke up before Ms. Carolina. Light filtered through the shades. My eyeballs scrapped my sandpaper sockets. My guest lay on her side facing me. She liked to watch me sleep before she fell asleep. I picked up a book, Peter Freuchen's BOOK OF THE ESKIMOS, and read to escape the nails of a hangover pounded into my skull.

A little before 11 Ms. Carolina opened her eyes and said, "Sometimes I think you're dead when you're reading. You barely breathe."

The blonde heiress accepted my shrug as an answer. We had one week a month together. She deserved more, but I could only give what I had to give.

"You know the Trappist monks never really practiced a 'vow of silence?"

“My mother loved the quietude of their monastery outside of Boston in Spencer, Massachusetts.” I always imagined their conversations once the faithful left the grounds.

"St. Benedict, their founder, had three tenets; stability, fidelity to monastic life, and obedience. Benedict preferred the monks to exist in silence, because speech was disruptive to contemplation." Ms. Carolina was as good as a nun and only wicked with the lights out.

Like my Irish mother, I have the gift of gab, although dampened by my Yankee father's preference for silence. The Maine native had held his piece for years under the blitzkrieg of my mother's monologues, but today Ms. Carolina wanted to hear my voice and I surrendered to her need.

"I've been to the Trappists monasteries in Belgium. They made good beer. Actually not good, excellent. Did I ever tell you why I began my vow of silence?"

"No." Ms. Carolina was a repository of my vocal history. She had heard many of my stories on our road trips through Guatemala, Peru, and the Far West. Listening was one of her better traits.

"Back in 1979 the phone in my 10th Street apartment was shut off."

"Let me guess. Non-payment."

"Yes." I had racked up a $700 bill tracking down the whereabouts of my blonde model from Buffalo. Paris, London, Milano, Hamburg, and points in between. I finally contacted her in Madrid. She told me that she was going out with a dealer in Russian icons. I wouldn't meet him, until Vadim helped finance our after-hours club, The Continental in 1981. My broken heart remained broken all that time.

"My service was cut for a year. I never could get together the money to pay the bill. The phone gathered dust under the sofa. One Sunday I was watching a BONANZA re-run and a telephone rang. I thought to myself, "That's funny, I didn't think they had phones on the Ponderosa."

"And they didn't." Ms. Carolina laughed at the image. She was my best audience.

"No, it was the phone. I reached under the sofa and brushed off six months of dust, but didn't pick up the receiver. The phone rang for a minute and then stopped. I picked up the phone. There was a dial tone. I tried a number. My parents. I hadn't spoke to them in ages. It worked, and not only that I could call anywhere in the world."

"Strange."

"Even stranger was that the phone would ring every Sunday at the same time."

"During BONANZA?"

"Correct." I liked the chemistry between Little Joe and Hoss.

"Did you ever pick it up to find out who was calling?"

"No. The phone stayed in service for two months, then went dead again. After that, I never spoke on Sundays. At least until I met you."

"All that remains is a vow of silence." Still quiet on Sundays.”

"I try my best." I nodded and led Ms. Carolina by the hand into my bedroom. There was no need for words in the darkness, as our bodies spoke without words.

That Sunday was over thirty years ago. Ms. Carolina has been dead for over ten of them. If she called today from the Beyond, I would answer. It would make her feel good in the Afterlife. This rainy Sunday rain splashed against the windows on Myrtle Avenue. I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator.

The beer poured into my mug with a pleasant glut glug glug. I raised my glass to Ms. Carolina. She had been a good friend and tomorrow was Monday.

A day to call my wife Mam and speak with my son on the phone. Fenway will tell me to come home soon.

"I will."

Until then, my vow of silence rules Sundays, but before the Day of Rest is over, I will watch some Bonanza. Hoss has to be speaking somewhere in the Here-Before on an eternity cellphone, and I promise I will answer the phone from anyone in the after-life.