Still on the line

Because it was toward evening now though the heat had not lessened any, had only thickened and settled lower across the flat country like something visible and old and faintly vindictive, the kind of heat which does not merely lie upon a man’s skin but enters him gradually through the eyes and lungs and the slow tired pulse itself until he can no longer distinguish between the weight of the air and the weight of his own accumulating years, and I was driving the county truck still farther out along that road that seemed not to proceed from one place to another but merely to endure, stretching vertiginously on among sidereal poles and wire and exhausted stubble fields with the same stubborn continuity by which old men persist in living long after they have ceased expecting anything from life except its querulous continuation, and the engine droned beneath me while overhead the wires sang in that thin unceasing monotone which at times resembled music and at times the lapidary bleakness of wind and rock and at times merely the sound the earth itself might make if one could hear the great invisible tension by which all things are held apart from collapse.

And because a man alone too long among distances and narcoleptic duties begins finally to people the emptiness with whatever memory or desire has rooted deepest in him, I heard you there again, numinous among the vibrating wires — not speech exactly, not even song perhaps, but that intimate and unmistakable cadence by which one human soul recognizes another despite all intervening miles and years and silences — and I thought then, not for the first time and yet with the dull surprise of a thought only now admitted into consciousness, that perhaps all love becomes eventually a form of listening, a strained attention directed toward faint and intermittent signals forever threatened by weather and castanetting static and the simple vastness of the world, so that what men call devotion may be nothing more than the refusal to stop listening after the voice itself has nearly vanished.

And because there was the matter of the weather too because there is always weather, always some impending burden descending from the sky toward the already overburdened structures men erect against impermanence, and I knew the southern stretch would never bear a hard snow because I had seen those poles up close, had placed my own hands against the cracked wood and rusting braces and knew how much of civilization depends finally upon things already weakened beyond repair but not yet fallen, and I remember thinking that I ought to take a vacation, a small one, though even as the thought occurred it seemed absurd and almost shameful, as though rest were a luxury intended for other men, men not perpetually summoned outward into darkness and storm by the failures of machines and the needs of strangers, and so naturally I kept driving because motion itself had become easier than stopping and obligation easier than reflection.

Because beneath all this — the roads and heat and wires and the lonely mechanical constancy of the truck — there persisted your absence, not dramatic nor theatrical but steady and immersive as the surrounding air itself, until I could no longer have said whether I drove those roads because the county paid me to maintain the lines or because somewhere at the far end of all that humming and trembling wire there remained the possibility of your voice once more entering the solitude around me and briefly transforming it into something inhabited, and it seemed to me then that wanting belonged to youth because youth believes fulfilment possible whereas need belongs to those who have lived long enough to understand that certain hungers do not diminish with time but merely become integrated into the structure of the self, waiting until at last the man and the hunger are indistinguishable, and so I went on there at dusk beneath the singing wires, imagining descrying in the slimmest charred stickman possibility of hearing your voice the sweetly mournful cry that would mean a game of hide-and-seek was finally over, olly-olly-ox-in-free suspended between one pole and the next, one memory and the next, and the Wichita lineman is still on the line.