ZACH PECKHAM / SAYING BY SAYING: AN ESSAY IN VOICEMAILS
People keep staples for conversation. Fallbacks for when we’re meeting someone for the first time, possibly trying to make a new friend, or just standing around at a boring job trying to whittle down the clock. One of mine is to say we lived through the best era of communication technology. That we could make friends with kids from other schools and learn each other’s music tastes by building profiles on clunky websites but would still have to call one another eventually, usually on a landline. Internet and telephone sharing the same physical infrastructure with room for only one at a time, a single-lane road unless you had the fortune of a household with multiple lines. Watching flash videos on long-scrolling content aggregators and perfecting the absurd parlance of pre-meme internet humor. Finding out about obscure bands by panning record label websites for embedded mp3s. Calling to arrange a meeting on an instant messaging platform for a specified date and time. A lot of glowing in the dark and sneaking around.
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What I mean is we enjoyed the luxurious peculiarities of an internet as adolescent as ourselves, a barely-mapped space. All the connective promise and creative possibility, but with none of the in-app purchases and paywalls. Processing saddled by dial-up connection speeds. Websites with beginnings and ends. The hulking absence of algorithmic suggestion and data collection. A friend who isn’t on the internet once remarked that those who came of age during this period should not be called Millennial or Generation Y but Generation AOL Free Trial Disk. I have stolen this line as well, from one conversation or another. There was always a stack of NEW! America On Line trial CDs on the counter at the gas station in the center of town. We would take them to each other’s houses after school and put them in the microwave.
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Friends with flip phones fell off of maps easily. Parents could call and they could lie. Location is irrelevant when one is always reachable. Much more complicated for anyone having to provide a phone number terminating in fixed physical location for each and every outside excursion, illicit or otherwise. One error and the whole show could go out. The network of voicemail boxes blinking like a tangle of Christmas lights pointed toward damnation.
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The only people who leave me voicemails anymore are my mom and distant computers with appointment reminders, news of potential security breaches involving my bank account, and suspiciously ebullient voices congratulating me on a free cruise. It is a cyborg population of mostly not people at all. In my mom’s case the message always starts with “You don’t have to call me back.” I am never sure if this is a courtesy or something more coded. The robots are very direct.
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Not quite a letter but certainly more business (in the shake-your-hand-look-you-in-the-eye kind of way) than a text or email, the voicemail is a type of marker, tagging the call that preceded it with a certain level of importance. Information needed to be conveyed in just that very moment and was, regardless of whether you were present and able to hear it. In this way a voicemail is a burden. It is requiring of your time. A form of request. A box to be checked. Couldn’t you have texted instead.
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But a voicemail is also a gift. This purposeful recording of a voice from far away, saying something just to you, and left, in perpetuity, by one who took the time, having spoken in the moment without edits or checks for spelling and grammar, no conversational response, no tonal reflector or buffer, no burden of validation, for only you to hear, when you can, at your convenience, whenever you get the chance. Here is my voice for you. Here is me. I’m here. Wherever I am. I am with you where you are. It says.
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In a year that didn’t need a name, I set up an unattended voicemail box and put out a call for submissions. I asked about memories, since no one had seen each other for a while outside of videoconferences and social media, but there were no strict guidelines. I wondered what we might say to each other if we were actually saying. If the things we said only to each other inside the separate, safe and dangerous, individual vacuums of point-to-point recorded voice messages would have anything to do with one another. I wondered what we would all be saying by saying by ourselves.
1. Time to stay home.
The first voicemail I get is an automated message from somewhere in Western Massachusetts, or something using a Western Mass phone line as evidenced by its area code. Not that I am there. I have given my voicemail box a number with this area code because the cellphone I’ve had since flip phone days starts with these same three digits and the sequence feels important somehow. A cursory search for the number that leaves the stay-home advisory confirms this geography, in forum posts from others on sites with names like WhoCallsYou and 800notes saying they have received this exact same message verbatim. Neither wanted nor malicious, a little computerized voice shakily recites, “Time to say home. Stay safe and stay home.” It must be related to our public health situation, but it’s hard to imagine a state actor behind a project as seemingly threadbare as this one. The voice does not identify itself, like a government agency would be glad to, and its sound quality is bitcrushed and quiet. It even sounds nervous, though it is clearly computer and not human. No effort has been made to make it seem living or cite a source. Perhaps some public health vigilante is out there doing this work on our behalf. Or there is a ghost somewhere in this network of machines that knows exactly what we all need to hear. Either way, I want to thank it. I’ve listened many times now. It isn’t scared or sad.
2. Don’t look for me in the tree house.
My mom leaves a voicemail recalling the time I ran away from home. I’d left a note ending in the postscript “don’t look for me in the tree house.” In her version, she joins me there with some sandwiches and we have a picnic overlooking the small strip of yard between the tennis court and the woods. The tree house is more of an outpost than the home-shaped structure I had come to understand from books and movies. A plywood floor supported by a framework of Home Depot lumber and cinder blocks with a tree running up through its middle, providing lateral stability but no other functional support, assembled by my father one afternoon with “help” from my siblings and I. It is roofless and open to the elements but overlain with a sheet of camouflage netting, as seen in use by the deer hunters in our town and the snipers in my dad’s collection of war movies. I do not recall my mother’s version of this event until I hear her tell it, and suddenly there is an image of us sitting on the plywood eating together that may or may not have been invented by my brain at the moment of hearing. This feels like a memory, but I can’t tell if it’s really mine. What I still don’t have the heart to tell her is that I stole that postscript—actually the entire contents of the note—word for word from a book. A small bear wearing human clothes fashions a bindle out of a red bandana and a tree branch and runs away from his family. In her voicemail, my mother says she could relate.
3. Proud and amazed at your sense of humor.
The second voicemail from my mom is another story from childhood (maybe this is a good time to say that I am going through these messages chronologically, in the order they were received) only this time you can tell she’s done some pre-writing. She speaks in complete grammarized sentences, free of fragments and pauses of processing and recall. I am seven years old and we are at the big hospital. A technician is preparing me for an ultrasound of my heart because it has a bad valve, a condition from which I suffer no majorly life-altering effects, though it is advisable that I avoid competitive bodybuilding and never do cocaine. After attaching electrodes to my chest and getting the ultrasound machine all set, the technician gets up to turn the lights off so we may better see my heart beating on the black and white screen. When she flips the switch I begin convulsing on the exam table and making buzzing sounds like I am being electrocuted. She screams, turns the lights back on, and once I stop pretending to be killed my parents erupt in laughter, followed by the technician, hesitantly, who is clearly shaken up. In her message my mother remarks how she and my father were so impressed by my early sense of humor. I have no idea where I could have gotten the idea to do such a thing at this age, but am suspicious of having come up with it on my own.
4. A lifelong golfer, not a great one.
While I had not expressed interest in golf, per se, I did enjoy visiting my grandparents, where taking my grandfather’s old wooden clubs out and whacking balls and clumps of dirt around their yard in suburban Connecticut felt like participation in something ancient and revered. I’d watched Mike do it, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, sweater over slacks and a Jack Kennedy haircut, lofting the little white globe gracefully around manicured mulch beds and statuary in a meditative state of slow-motion. I could occasionally manage to put the ball up in the air myself, but mostly enjoyed yard golf as some sarcastic type of cosplay. It seemed funny to be doing. Both because I was bad at it and because I was a kid. Wedged into a blank summer toward the end of childhood but far from the possibility of legal employment, I am profoundly bored. And because I have indavertantly demonstrated interest in the sport, my parents suspect I may have some innate talent to be cultivated at a golf camp in Connecticut. I spend a lot of time on my grandparents’ couch, drinking drinks with ice cubes in them and watching Comedy Central movies. I eat a lot of turkey sandwiches. My golf skills do not improve measurably. I read The Outsiders and a novel in which humans and dinosaurs coexist peacefully and go on adventures together.
5. I’m drinking whiskey and I decided it’s a good time.
My sister Hannah leaves a message from a hotel in Maine, where she is holed up with her mother- and sister-in-law on some type of trip. Her mother-in-law does this kind of thing from time to time, just books herself a room somewhere and goes and stays there alone. I have come to admire it. I aspire toward just this kind of adultness in my life. They are staying in separate rooms and only interact outside as a pandemic precaution. It is late fall and they are overlooking a beach.
She tells me about the time she took a train down from New Hampshire to stay at my place in Boston, and we went to see a band we knew from a long time ago play the Brighton Music Hall. As kids we had been involved in this oddly vibrant rural music scene. Booking shows and playing in basements and VFWs and trailers in the woods. Xeroxing flyers in the school library and posting them on Myspace to get weirdos from two school districts away to come hang out when we didn’t even have each other’s phone numbers. Tim rolled into the driveway in an orange Kia Rio with Pennsylvania plates to play a set by a campfire across a dirty little lake from our friend Ryan’s mom’s house. On foot the spot could only be reached by walking around the entire lake, so we ferried everyone back and forth in a small metal rowboat, three at a time. I remember Tim’s set clearly, his song about John Belushi and a fictional revenge story involving Dan Aykroyd, a drug dealer, and a sawed-off shotgun. All of us huddled in the low orange light. Tim was so much older than all of us but didn’t seem to have a hangup in the world. He doesn’t remember us when we see him after his set in Brighton. Her message gets cut off.
6. I don’t think we look that much alike.
There was this shitty all-ages venue in Worcester being run by a creepy old dude who seemed to exclusively book teenage bands and charge exorbitant covers at the door. The place itself was terrible. It sounded like an airplane hangar and looked like an eighties dance club, all chrome and red pleather. But playing a show in Worcester, the city, felt like a real big deal when we were fifteen. It’s unclear how we managed to get put on a bill there, but Tyler and Jake and I had a band and some songs and probably that was all it took. We were too young to drive so we convinced Tyler and Jake’s older siblings, who were dating at the time, to haul us and our gear down to play this crappy show. The place had a strangely filial guest list policy that allowed family members in for free—definitely not a fair trade for driving, though I’m sure we framed it as one. Their friend Scott came along, and his voicemail is about how I pretended he was my older brother so he could get in without paying too.
While he may have been surprised at my willingness to run this scheme when we were kids, the truth is I jumped at the chance, and was elated to have even been asked to pretend that Scott was my older brother. I didn’t have one who could drive me and my broken amp to shows, after all. And the entire music scene in our little cluster of towns, that culture of starting bands with your friends and booking shows wherever, just doing it because you could, was all thanks to him. His band was the example we all learned from watching, and I had looked up to him for as long as I could remember. I’m sure our set, like the entire show that night, was a total fucking mess. But it was the first time I felt like I could count Scott as a friend and not just a hero. Like maybe what I was doing could be valid too. Scott’s message gets cut off, but I’d be glad to be his little brother, and while I’m listening I realize there’s an automatic time limit on this voicemail platform I’ve been using.
7. Chlorine or boron. Your medication. That image.
James leaves three messages in a row, all memories from high school. He transferred in during our freshman year from the Christian school a few towns away, and I remember that when I met him he seemed kind of mythical. He lived in our town too but I’d only ever heard about him secondhand through Tyler and the shadow network of older brothers. James’s voice in these messages is lilting and succinct. I appreciate his enthusiasm nearly as much as his directness. He leaves one in the third person, two in the first, with pauses and inflections that seem almost sarcastically emphatic.
I realize the subtext at the heart of this project is an ask, potentially a big one if not grossly self-involved: that others take time to leave you messages that are somehow pertinent to you or your memories. To be something worth writing about when not everything warrants writing. Stepping in from the other side, I don’t want to have this authority. But I need to do a good job with these voices no matter what they say. Treat them gently. Be an art handler of sorts. You can tell James is having a good time when he’s leaving these, and for the first time since making the voicemail box I wonder if maybe it could go the other way too. Maybe this could be an opening. Maybe it doesn’t have to feel bad to do.
8. Knowing you were around made me feel better.
I get a message from Libby, a friend since elementary school whose name is Elizabeth whenever I see it printed. Another child of divorce with two younger siblings, there are things we have in common that seem more than incidental. When we met she wore a yellow vest and recited the poems we had to memorize more accurately than anyone else in our fiftth grade class. She wrote an extremely good paper on Martin Luther King Jr. I think, though I feel hesitant to say for fear of having remembered incorrectly, she may have been my girlfriend for about a day when we were ten.
In high school we share the same close group of artsy friends that go on weekend adventures together and navigate the odd but exciting situation where our homeschool pal’s hippie parents don’t care if we all crash on the same floor. Nothing comes of this advanced degree of co-ed adolescent proximity, to my continual surprise, but after listening to her voicemail I realize my recollection might be off. There was one event. A physical memory of some distress that I can only partly locate. Something involving one of our dude friends and the sense that certain parts of the group had started shutting her out, maybe because she called attention to something that made certain parties ashamed. She says I stood up for her through this, but I can’t recall how. We meet up at a publishing conference and compare notes on turning thirty. We send each other essays and find we’ve both been writing about home, the ghost towns, New England. We are not always close, but there is a type of tunnel between us. In years I can’t recount where she might have left school for a while or lived in another state. In and out of the frame. Only just.
9. It’s your wife.
Meghan and I got married once we realized we wouldn’t be able to go home. The mayor of the next suburb over officiated on the lawn of the town hall at 9 AM, morning trucks and buses whipping by in trails of exhaust. A photographer was hired for an hour to document the moment, which we hadn’t been expecting to be exceedingly beautiful. The sky was clear and it was warm for late fall in Cleveland, a place that wasn’t home but what we’d picked up and moved to so I could spend three years in grad school. Good jobs we quit. Better friends we left. The specifics of the mayor’s speech are faded but I think this moment is crystallized because it caught us so off guard. He starts talking about commitment and suddenly there is gravity on the grass across from the McDonald’s. Sun slicing over gray shopping plazas and traffic to reach me squinting behind my foggy glasses. Meghan standing next to me in the shade with her contacts in. The mayor presents us with a framed document proclaiming this day will henceforth be known as “Zach and Meghan Day” in this suburb in Ohio, well beyond expected for the fee of $40. The whole thing takes ten minutes. We’re wearing masks in all the photos.
10. He did not look his age to me.
Jason calls with a message about the first time we met. A DIY show in Worcester. The space an old light bulb factory, I think. It is a frequently revisited classic at this point, one of those friendship creation myths you continually return to and somehow becomes a living monument. The punch line is that he had no idea how young we all were when were talking after our set, and only realized once Tyler’s dad arrived to pick us up with all our gear. Or, by contrast and more strangely, maybe the real punch line is that we became such good friends despite the gap of years between us. We’d book his band and he’d book ours. He and his wife Anne would sign the forms saying they were legal chaperones for our VFW gigs so everyone could get to play and have something to do on a Friday night in the middle of nowhere. Not a lot of adults would do that kind of thing, and I’m both surprised and relieved that no one got caught drinking Fireball and smoking joints in the graveyard across the street because the two of them would have been held responsible. If it seems weird, it’s just what they’ve been always willing to do. We could believe in each other. Music could matter. I don’t want to be reductive and try to say something deep about the power of art or love, but I want to believe that people can be different in all kinds of ways and still share in certain things meaningfully. Show up for each other when it isn’t convenient. That friendships are communities and communities can be friendships. I am suspicious of these buzzwords.
11. Frequency modulation.
Jason’s other message is about how he met my father without realizing it, at the small municipal airport in Central Massachusetts where my dad sometimes worked as a pilot, carrying loads of skydivers up into the air so they could jump back out again. Jason, like a lot of folks, was there to put a checkmark in a longtime life box: go skydiving. And on the day he picked my father happened to be piloting the jump plane. He would not learn this until later.
I’d spent countless hours languishing in the dry vicinity of that horrendous scab of an airport as a kid. Wandering around what felt like miles of repeated sand. Skateboarding down the old stretch of runway when they’d let me. Literally grounded while waiting around for my dad to get done with whatever it was he was doing. Work or something personal. Not always very clear. We never could travel that stretch of road without the chance his steering wheel would suddenly cut a left and then we’d be turning down the long sandy path toward the hangars. Slumped against the interior of the passenger side door with my cheek cradled in a nylon safety belt, resigned. From the outside this could look one way. But despite having grown up so close to it there is nothing exciting or impressive to me about jumping out of an airplane. It’s all too caught up in the tangled lines of memory. My parents and their divorce. Arguments about how much time my dad was spending at the airport and the yelling matches in the parking lot of this place. Hours and days kicking dust. He made me promise him I’d jump before he dies.
12. You order whiskey, which works.
I set up a form so people can type their messages if they don’t want to speak them. I know I’m better on the page than in the moment, and this gives an option for messages to be left without any identifying information. I don’t end up getting any anonymous messages, but a few typed ones do come through. These are fed into a TTS reader to generate a speaking voice, which is why Dylan has an English accent.
His message is about the tour we went on the fall after I finished college, playing as the backing band for a singer-songwriter friend of ours, driving from the Northeast out to the Great Plains and back, a two-month disaster. Playing to empty rooms in cold towns. Fighting in the car. Sleeping on friends of friends’ awkward, hard floors. The highlight of this slo-mo shit show was every night after the set, getting wasted and pretending we were somewhere else. In a better band. Playing for more people. Making more money or at least having more fun. I don’t remember the bar in Nebraska. In my memory this happened in Kansas. The tracks ran through the dark between the bar and a halfway house where the porch light was always on. I remember the bottle rockets’ high-pitched screams and the red lights on the trains as they were passing us to elsewhere.
13. The smallness of the moment speaks to me.
Eating in diners and drinking in bars are the two activities I miss most after a year inside of quarantine. When classes were still in person and I was driving to Akron once a week, I’d usually stop off for a beer and post-workshop debrief with Danny and DT before heading back to Cleveland. One night the bar was running a special on this drink they called a “Spaget” (like “spaghetti” without the third syllable), which was just a bottle of High Life with a shot of Aperol in it. It cost $2.50 and was apparently some kind of pro wrestling promotion. These solutions of amaro and beer in clear glass bottles made us look like we were holding big red Christmas lights. No one else at the bar ordered the stupid things and we stuck out like three literally sore thumbs, laughing and talking our way through every other thing in the world.
14. I don’t know if I have a memory.
But people just have these memories of you out there, you know? They’re carrying you around with them, peeking down into their pocket once in a while and there you are looking up. You don’t even know about it.
Portland changed my life as soon as I landed. I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest before and everything was so green and lush and blooming it blasted me, setting the gray and brown spring of Cleveland in extra-sore relief. Normally it would be raining this time of year, but I’d stumbled into a kind of interregnum, a seasonal margin where spring was already happening and the world was opening back up. Body and brain confused, I ended up skipping a lot of the conference I’d come to town for in the first place to go wandering around the city, talking with friends and enjoying the weather. One of our last nights there, Xan and John and DT and I found our way up to the dance floor of a nice hotel on a hill where the drinks all cost a thousand dollars. We smoked a CBD joint in the parking lot and I spent the rest of the night trying to discern whether it had had any effect on me. I think I danced pretty good. I fell asleep back in my room watching Bob Ross paint a lake in the dark.
15. Intense public displays of affection.
James calls back with another note from high school, about the couple who made out on my locker all freshman year. It was awkward at first, having to ask them to relocate every time I needed my biology book, but in time we came to better understand what it is that we all need.
16. Geographies that we’d spent time in.
But I can’t stop wondering what makes a space important. What marks it as a place any more than a name that sits on a map. It’s why I keep writing about the ghosts and mapping drowned towns and trying to trace these fractured imprints. If the importance is really real and if the facile fossil outline is the shape of anything that actually happened. Regardless of whether it’s been remembered or memorialized, narrativized or no. If through the act of commemorating we create the memory in the first place. Whether the memorial is to the thing or to the memory itself. What weathers whether or not we commemorate it at all. If a place is an event that stains the air. The ground the water the people.
17. It’s actually extremely well-documented.
Dan calls back a day later and reads a journal entry from summer 2011, when we were on a tour through the South and Midwest. Two weeks in the van and the heat and sweat and dirt. I had just quit my dishwashing job with nothing lined up on the other end, but enough saved up to live for a month or so into the future. Two touring bands in one vehicle would mean two cuts of the door, we figured, and might make the logistics of booking shows with strangers and finding floors to sleep on every night a little bit easier. Anthony and Olivia threw the second band together in the weeks before we left. Jake would play drums for both sets every night and sort of half-learn all the songs. Dan documented everything and drew the days into sketches and journal entries.
One of the things I love most about playing with Jake is his unpredictable musical memory. I think it’s because he’s pure energy. Always in the present. This used to frustrate the shit out of me until I learned to embrace it as an integral part of the process. Each song is a run-on sentence of surprises.
We ended up making our way around the eastern half of the country without losing too much money. Dan had the hiccups for two weeks straight. Sometimes during the long drives I’d hear him wake himself up with one after nodding off in the backseat. There was Chex Mix all over the floor.
18. That is still the best haircut I’ve ever given.
A bad breakup is a great reason to try an extreme haircut. I type this sentence and immediately feel suspicious, while remembering the Mullet Period as one of the best of my whole life. We were living on Hobson with six people in a four-bedroom apartment. The washing machine was broken and our basement was full of old mattresses. Our landlord raised the rent every year and refused to fix anything. All his old Cadillacs were parked in our driveway since none of us would pay an additional fee to park there. But the lease had no security deposit, and for Boston it was a steal. I had abruptly ended a three-year relationship and started exercising and riding my bike a lot. Going to sleep early and getting up before the sun because my room was in the attic and mornings were relatively cool. Mad set me up on a chair in the kitchen and cut the sides off my shaggy blond hair. We all went bowling and drank whiskey on the porch.
This is the summer I meet Meghan, when she comes to photograph the band I’m playing in with Hannah and Anthony. Two weeks later I lie and say I’m going to visit Dan at cartoon school in White River when I’m actually driving four hours to get a coffee with her when we’ve only barely met. I don’t return home until five the next morning. Something about this haircut makes me braver than I am. It contains a mysterious power. It’s still the best haircut I’ve ever had.
19. Getting to see the whole adventure from a safe distance.
Sam types his message instead of speaking it over the phone, which makes perfect sense. He describes our dog’s funeral in a robot voice after I feed it to the text reader. My brother the android. We bury her in a mulch bed in the backyard of the house my parents will lose in their divorce. In a box wrapped in a blanket that we all slept with at one point. I’m not sure why they want us to touch her so badly. Her little dog body is so cold and hard. Still the only dead body I’ve ever actually touched.
When Mike died we all went down to the wake in Connecticut, but I spent most of it standing in the windswept parking lot, squinting at the sun and trying to work up the nerve. Entering the building seemed completely impossible and it was confusing to me at the time why anyone would want to see the body of a loved one without the loved one living inside it. I manage to stand at the doorway of the reception room right before the funeral home closes, just in time to see my grandmother lean over the casket and lick her fingers to fix his hair. I cannot locate Sam in this memory of the wake, his robot voice calling me back into it.
Usually you hear about kids fighting for their turn with the controller, but Sam was so happy to just sit there for hours and watch me play a videogame. Usually something nerdy and immersive like a complicated RPG or open-world puzzle thing. It strikes me now, listening to this robot, that those times had been an actual place. Beyond our house or my room or his. A space within a space where there was only possibility. A field of light where our world was only growing. There was never any need to say anything at all. Those games took days to get through. Weeks if you were really enjoying them.
20. Time to stay home.
A few days after I shut down the voicemail box, a new message appears from the little robot voice. It says the same thing as before: “Time to stay home. Stay safe and stay home.” I never did respond to the first voicemail it left. It’s nice to get a call back.
Zach Peckham is a writer, musician, and educator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Territory, Action, Spectacle, Poetry Northwest, American Book Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the NEOMFA and CSU Poetry Center, he is managing editor at Cleveland Review of Books.