"A thousand ships sailed because of her beauty," said the man on the other end of the line. "Thousands of men went into war - walked into death - and considered it their honor to die for her. No woman in all of history was as adored as Helen of Troy."
"You can call me Helen," she said, wishing this one would get to the kink already. The more calls she can take in an hour, the more likely she is to make this month's rent.
**
She has many regulars - both on weeknights, when she reads tarot cards for the desperate, and on weekends, when she talks dirty for the even more desperate. So she keeps tabs of who they are, what they want, in a little notebook on the bedside table. Kimberly in Denver knows she shouldn't go back to Devon, but she wants to. Craig in Baltimore calls her Mommy when he comes.
Sometimes she feels she's good for these people: It doesn't take the Queen of Wands to tell you that cheating, alcoholic Devon is bad news, and she puts real vigor into the ominous portents that just hold Kimberly back. But mostly, she thinks of her callers as dollars and cents - hard earned, for all that it's just talking - no more and no less.
But a few of them creep into her thoughts from time to time - become more than voices - and John Locke is one of these.
**
He's smart, which is unusual. The tarot card callers are not drawn from Mensa membership, and most of the sex-line callers don't say the kind of things that would reveal whether or not they're well-read. But John Locke has quotations for every subject, and he's done research on every place and every activity you can imagine.
He likes to talk to her - just talk - which is not unusual. A surprising number of the sex calls come from guys who know exactly what they're going to get: a woman's voice, not her body. They like to be told that they're good men, that the people keeping them down are bad men, that things will be better someday, that she enjoys talking to them.
She doesn't actually enjoy talking to most of them. John Locke, sometimes, she does. Wargames and Sun Tzu bore the hell out of her, but she has to admit that Australia sounds nice.
**
The details of John Locke's life slip through, bit by bit.
He mentions a bus, and not a car, and once when he speaks about work , he says "cube," not office. So she knows he doesn't have a lot of money; this bothers her, sometimes, when their chats run long. She suspects he hasn't told her everything about the accident that took his ability to walk, but he did tell her about the wheelchair. When they do get around to talking dirty - and for all his love of conversation, they always do get around to this eventually - she uses her imagination to describe acts and positions he could actually perform. This bit of ingenuity is something she's rather proud of, though he's never said whether he likes it or not.
Virtually every weekend night, he calls, so she knows there's nobody else in his life - not lover, not family, not even many friends. Sometimes she listens hard, hoping to hear a cat or a dog or something. It would be nice to think he wasn't totally alone. If he weren't totally alone, she wouldn't feel so responsible.
**
"If we were to meet," he begins, once in a while.
She always steps down on this, hard. It's against the rules, for one; she could get another job like this easily enough, but missing even one night's work could make the difference between being able to pay the electric bill or enduring 30 nights of candlelight.
More importantly, she doesn't want to meet John Locke. He's sweet to her, but he has managed to project all his emotional and sexual needs on a voice he pays to talk. She holds such men in a kind of contempt. This comes with the job.
And finally: She doesn't want John Locke to meet her. To him, she is beautiful and strong and dazzling and unique; to him, she is Helen of Troy. Reality is not so kind. Clutching at this false glamour is cheap, and she knows it, but that comes with the job too.
**
When he mentions the plane tickets, she freaks out, and doesn't do a good job of disguising it.
"Is that all I am to you? A customer?" he shouts. She gets him off the line so that she won't have to say yes, and that he won't have to pay $89.95 to hear it.
It's a kindness, and a sign that he is something more than a customer, though he will never understand that. It doesn't matter, either. If John Locke is more than a customer to her, he is still much less than he wants to be.
She dislikes creating these bonds - they're parasitic, and she knows it. But that's the job, and she needs it, and he's smart enough to know that, even if he's tricked himself into believing something else.
**
Two weekends later, she takes a few calls, waiting for John Locke's report about Australia. No matter how badly they parted last time - and it was bad, the kind of thing that presages the end of Regular status - she's quite sure he will tell her about his trip. It's his big step, his adventure, his proof that he is still a man like other men. Perhaps this will be the last call he makes to her; she suspects that would be just like him, to want to go out on a high. That way, he might be able to convince himself he'd left her with regrets.
He doesn't call on Saturday, which is odd, but not unheard-of. Besides, she rationalizes, he probably has jet lag.
But he doesn't call on Sunday either, and that's when she puts it together. Australia to Los Angeles. That crash that's all over the news. The plane that dropped into the ocean and they'll never ever find -
She takes the phone off the hook and cries for half an hour - precious money, ticking away, and she's aware of it all the while. But she can't stop. She won't miss John Locke for her own sake; there are always other callers. Still, just thinking about somebody lonely, somebody hurt, somebody who took one big chance in his life and died for it - well, it tears her up.
Then she thinks, Maybe he got to go on the walkabout. If he did, then it was all worth it.
This steadies her, and after a smoke and a beer, she's able to put the phone back on the hook. It rings almost instantly.
"Hey, baby." This one sounds drunk. "What's your name?"
She smiles, because they can always hear it in your voice. "I'm Helen."
THE END
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