Static. It sounded like everyone in the world, everyone who ever existed, was calling him at the same time, calling from every moment in their lives, describing every feeling and every idea they had. But the sound encompassed more than people. He could hear gum wrappers in the grass, the shadow of a pine cone against a possum's skull, the upward stroke of a bat's wing in a cave no human eye had ever seen. All these things were speaking to him candidly, and also, shouting, there was his own death. The voices of everything, every single thing, and Bob couldn't make out one word of it. The only word he could even conceive of in all that noise was "everything."
As he predicted, the phone pulled him, but it pulled the entirety of him into itself. There was no chance of him resisting. He had plunged into it, completely at its mercy. He sifted through it, sifted into his own place among the everything, into his small insignificant voice which right now was talking to itself. Standing in the doorway of Isabel's room. On the phone. So really nothing had happened. Static. He handed the phone back to Isabel.
"I just hear static," he said.
"Every lie you tell me is as obvious as that one," she replied without a hint of hurt or remonstrance. In fact, she used a loving tone.
"What did He say?" Bob asked her.
"He said, 'Happy birthday.'"
Objects: flowers