At the Sound of the Beep...

By LANCE MORROW

The telephone shattered distance: it is part of nature now. The Atlantic Ocean does not intervene between one's lips in New York City and the ear of a friend in Paris.

The telephone answering machine subverts time: one leaves a surrogate self back in a little box at home, frozen in time, waiting to be roused by a ring: "Hello," one says, disembodied. "This is Carl. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone now, but..."

It is not Carl, of course. It is a fragment of Carl, deputized with a brief memory. It is a crystal of Carl, like one in the ice palace of Superman's heritage from Krypton. Carl, at that moment in any case, is elsewhere. Carl has proliferated a little. His flagship self is steaming across town on some business, plowing along through conventional time. His ancillary self, his butler self, the ghost in the machine, is waiting in its little timelessness.

So the Stepford Carl, once activated, will speak. And then the caller will speak, and the caller's words will likewise be frozen in time, and both of those small ancillary selves will lie side by side for a little while in their other dimension. Words can be chilled down like human seed and thus suspended in time until they are ready to come to life.

Answering machines can be very funny. They have their protocols and social comedies. Does one play one's messages when one has just come home with a guest? What intimacies and embarrassments will come flying out of the machine before one leaps for the stop button? "Gee, I wonder who that could have been."

The machines can also be a little spooky, metaphysically spooky. There was a tale about the archipelago called Nova Zembla, which was discovered in the 16th century, high in the Arctic Circle. A ship's crew was stranded there, frozen in. The air was so cold, the story said, that when the sailors spoke, their words crystallized in mid-air and remained there. Presently a thaw arrived, and all the words, warmed up, came cascading down in a tremendous, unintelligible din. The owner of an answering machine knows that there may come a moment when the machine, for all its customary obedience, will disgorge, in a weird, surreal monologue, all the messages accumulated over months and months: disjointed voices, greetings and arguments and appointments long dead. And then one might hear a voice one does not recognize: a sort of gypsy croak, a voodoo voice, heavily accented and far away: "Please call. .. Eeet eees verrrry imporrrtant!" A cold gust goes through the room.

Usually, the machines are more banal than that. They do still make people uncomfortable, although that is passing with familiarity. Their use has become so widespread that callers no longer feel quite so much the instant of stage fright. Still, the tape on the end of the line, expectantly unreeling, silent as a director awaiting the audition, does intimidate. The caller feels ambushed, like one who has suddenly learned he is being bugged. He becomes more ... responsible for his words. They are not going to vanish into air. They can be replayed again and again, like the videotape of a fumble. The machine subtly puts the caller on the defensive, thus reversing the usual telephone psychology, in which the caller is the aggressor, breaking in upon another's silence.

Answering machines are handsome instruments of privacy. They have solved the greatest disadvantage of the telephone: the mere ring does not announce the identity of the caller. In picking up the receiver, one must sometimes pay the penalty for satisfying one's curiosity. But the answering machine has solved that. The little butler in the box answers. The caller must declare himself, and the aristocrat in the armchair can then decide whether he will condescend to pick up the phone. In the world of Henry James, the butler announced at the door, "not at home," meaning "not at home to visitors." One placed one's calling card in a silver tray held in the butler's left palm. The answering machine electronically duplicates the ritual. This maddens callers, who suspect that exactly such a game is going on. "Come on, Carl, pick it up, you jerk. I know you're there!" Pause. Long sigh of irritated resignation. Defeated mumble. "Yeah, well, call me later..."

There once was a story at Harvard about a visiting professor who did not have the time to appear at a weekly seminar and so placed a tape recorder and the recorded text of his lecture in the middle of the seminar table. The students could come each week and play the tape and take notes. One day the professor stopped by the seminar room to see how the class was progressing. No one was there. In the middle of the table, he saw his large tape recorder unreeling his lecture. All around the table, before all the chairs, he saw little tape recorders taking it in. An intellectual antiworld: the big surrogate instructing the little surrogates.

Many telephone callers still refuse to converse with the machine. They hang up. That makes the machine owners nervous. So they turn their messages into jokes or performances, minidramas. The most baleful byproduct of answering machines is these awful shtik. The caller bears madrigals playing in the background, romantic Muzak or cutely chosen rock songs. One endures impressions of Bogart and Cagney and Nixon: "And I promise not to erase the tape. Huh, huh, huh." The humorist Jean Kerr had friends whose message was a jingle: "We shall not sleep, we shall not slumber/ unless you leave/ your name and number." Anonymous callers left the only appropriate rejoinder: "Burma Shave." Across the way from comic impersonation is self-abnegation, strict anonymity: the machine answers not with a name but a hard, bleak number--"You have reached 887-5443 ..." The self is abstracted, washed blank like a bureaucrat. Inspector 324. Either way, the self has a way of skittering off a little. It does not like to be recorded, just as Muslims once did not like to be photographed.

It might be an entertainment of the Mel Brooks kind to wonder what sort of messages certain historical figures might have left on their machines in the past 2,000 years. The examples one thinks of run toward the grotesque--monsters being gemuetlich. Nero's message would be one of his awful, overripe lyrics, with strummings. Hitler's, a little Wagner, perhaps, in the background (something from Tristan) and a creamy, loverboy's voice: "Hello, this is Adolf. I'm not free to talk now, but. . ."

The machines can park words outside time. But there are situations in which that won't do. The Governor calls at one minute to midnight. Ring. Click. "Hello, this is Warden Parker. I'm attending an execution at the moment, but if you'll leave your . . . Or the President of the U.S. gets on the hot line and reaches the Kremlin's answering machine: "... So please just leave your message at the sound of the boom.

" --By Lance Morrow