Page 57 of Stay Awake
Wednesday 3:51P.M.
The telephone rings and my nerves shatter. It traps me in an indecisive limbo. I’m desperate to leave this apartment, but the ring of the phone erodes my willpower. I’m powerless to resist its pull.
I find the phone plugged into a socket on the floor next to the sofa. It would be so easy to pull the plug from the wall and break the hypnotic hold the phone has over me, but I resist the urge. Instead I hover my hand over the receiver as it continues to ring.
DON’T ANSWER THE PHONE, says a Post-it note stuck to the phone.
It rings again. This time I snatch up the receiver and press it hard against my ear.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
More silence, followed by aclick. The line has been cut. It must have been a wrong number. I put the phone back on the console.
It rings again. I answer it immediately.
“Liv. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
The man’s voice is so muffled that I have to strain to hear properly.
“I knew you’d eventually return home, Liv.”
“What do you want?” I ask, my voice tight with fear.
“I need to know where you left the knife.” His muffled voice is drowned out by the roar of traffic.
“What knife?” I ask blankly. I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Don’t tell me that you fell asleep again! Did you, Liv? Did you fall asleep?” he rasps.
I don’t respond.
“Where did you wake up this time? Tell me, Liv.”
“I woke up on the subway,” I concede.
“You don’t remember what happened last night, do you?”
“No.”
“I thought so. You forget everything every time you fall asleep.”
“How do you know all of this about me? Who are you?” I clutch the phone receiver tightly.
He ignores my question. “You try to stay awake all the time. You even write it on your hands as a reminder. It’s taking a toll on you, Liv. The insomnia. It’s taking a toll on your sanity.”
I look at the back of my hands and read the letters across the knuckles.STAY AWAKE.
“How do you know about the writing on my hands?”
“Honey, I know more about you than you know about yourself,” he rasps again. There’s something about his muffled voice that’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it.
A car horn blasts. I hear it in stereo, over the phone line and through the apartment windows. The long aggressive blast goes on for seconds. A truck driver leans out of his window and shouts: “What the hell is wrong with you!”
A series of expletives follows. Once again, I hear it all unfold instereo. It tells me what I intuitively know. The man on the phone is outside this building.
