Calling From Somewhere Else - Francisco Mora

The other call to Dr. Sylvester was Dr. Anderson who had been trying to contact him all morning. Several times, during the intense talk with Jake, at the most inappropriate moments, the phone bell chimed announcing yet another lengthy text message. When Jake looked at his father and said that he was losing the will to live saddled with shooting electrical currents in his legs every twenty-seconds, Dr. Sylvester whimpered through closed lips. The whimper was barely discernable. It made Jake rally enough to stop momentarily the path his mind was forcing him through.

The chime had come through immediately after the whimper. Dr. Anderson had a habit that Frank hated of sending winding, never-ending text messages, thanks to the voice software of the Android mobile phone.

With one hand on the steering wheel, his eyes move from the windshield and the traffic to the phone. Scrolling down, he found the first message. The red light, the fourth one he waited through to make a left, changed. The car jam didn’t even give him enough room to get through the intersection.

He maneuvered around into the other lane and cleared the intersection. All of this was done with a hand still holding the phone. Dr. Anderson, his protégé, was calling from somewhere else, from urgency in Dr. Sylvester’s business world. Dr. Anderson needed sign off on the final version of the presentation to the GenoPlex board. The outcomes of clinical trials of an important and fiscally vital new class of drugs were to be reported at the board meeting the following day.


At home, his wife walked around the circular breakfast table where Jake’s breakfast was rotting: untouched scrambled eggs; and a milkshake that was sedimenting and becoming yogurt. Glancing toward the sunroom, seeing the computer screen, thinking about the suicide, it was as if the doorframe moved to her hand to hold her up.

She crumbled around the edge of the door. Waves of tears came from the back of her chest. She touched above her heart feeling memories of her boy as a baby in her arms. Jake wanted to be left alone. That stopped an instinct to go upstairs. Shit.

She looked at the dishes, she looked across cuttings garden to Eugenia’s casita, the maid’s quarter. She called her daughter on the phone.

“Hi there, I wanted to check in and see how it’s going with Evelyn. Please don’t be angry, not now. I’m in a hellish place, baby. I’ll tell you about it later. I’m coming there. I wanted to give you ideas for the design of the body length sweater and the dress for your grandmother’s birthday, you can do what you want with the others. Remember, the point of a designer, especially this designer, really, the essence of couture, is form and shape. The stuff available nowadays is only revealing. Design today doesn’t shape the body anymore. It’s much easier, and it’s cheap, to simply show and exposed the body.”

Her daughter must have relented. Nancy went to be with her daughter and the designer.