Wrong Number

The headband was on the side table, charging, the indicator throbbing a slow amber pulse that meant another forty minutes before it was worth putting back on. Iggy sat on the couch, the TV glowing for attention that wouldn't come, phone warm in his hand. He hadn't meant to pick it up so much as reached for it reflexively, his hand looking for something to do while the rest of him faced but didn't watch the TV.

The home screen showed him a random photo in one of the small widgets that he didn't remember taking: him and Theo at some outdoor thing, both of them squinting, drinks in hand. He flicked the widget to the right impulsively. Past a picture of Dana laughing at something out of view. Past a screenshot of a Slack thread about something he'd probably already forgotten.

He flipped through the photos rapidly until one froze his thumb in the air.

The photo was old, the kind of old that told him it came from a far inferior camera technology years in the past. It was a photo of him and someone he recognized but couldn't place for a second, standing in front of a building with a sign in a language he couldn't read. The friend was grinning. Iggy was grinning too, which meant he'd been happy in that moment, which meant the memory was supposed to be good, which meant he should have been able to say the person's name.

He couldn't. He sat with that for a second: a face unmistakably glad to be standing next to him, and no name he could put to it.

The photo was from Japan, it was clear from the script on the sign behind them. He couldn't read it, but he recognized it as kanji. Nineteen. Study abroad. The memory came back to him. The language school was in a neighborhood he couldn't remember the name of, but he could remember the smell of: rain on hot pavement and something sweet in the air from a food cart. He clicked the photo which automatically opened an album of related photos. He scrolled slowly backward through the album, past a dozen more photos of the same trip, until one of them had a caption under it, his own younger handwriting layered into the photo app years ago and never touched since: Mikkel teaching me to say "it's raining" in polite Japanese.

Mikkel. The name landed in his mind like a stone dropped into a well from the past, and he heard it the way you hear the echo of the stone striking the bottom. Mikkel from somewhere outside Aarhus. Mikkel who made him laugh when he was homesick. Mikkel standing in front of a building with signs neither of them could read.

He hadn't thought about Mikkel in years. Maybe a decade. The last time he'd heard from him they'd been twenty-two, a few years after the trip, over email. Gratitude and nostalgia - promises to keep in touch.

There had been no falling out, that fact turning over and over in his mind as he stared toward the phone, his eyes focused inward on the memory. No argument, no slight, no last message either man had declined to answer. The friendship had ended the way satellites deorbit: no single day you could point to, just a slightly lower pass every year, an email thread that went from weekly to monthly to a birthday to nothing, each individual gap defensible, each one the ordinary drag of time zones and jobs and the nine hours between his morning and Mikkel's night. If you'd stopped him at any point during the decay and asked whether Mikkel was his friend, he'd have said yes of course, present tense, and believed it, and the belief would have been sincere. But friendship lives on the investment of time, and fades with silence.

He didn't remember having a number for him, but he went searching for it anyway and found it buried three screens deep in a contacts app that neither deleted nor deduplicated a record. Two entries for him, actually: Mikel and Mikkel. Both records just the name and a string of digits starting with what must have been the Danish country code; he remembered that Mikkel was from Denmark.

He pressed call before he'd finished deciding to, his thumb moving involuntarily.

The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. He was about to hang up, already telling himself of course Mikkel didn't pick up a number from a guy he hadn't spoken to in ten years, when someone answered.

"Hello?" the voice on the other end said in accented English. Iggy startled, he hadn't expected an answer, nor an answer in English. The voice sounded tired. Of course, it would be very early in the morning in Denmark. Stupid, he thought to himself and winced.

But the voice was wrong. Not Mikkel's. Older, rougher, the voice of someone who wasn't twenty-two anymore and hadn't been for a while. But of course he'd sound older, more than a decade had passed. What should he say?

"Hey, is this Mikkel?" his voice broke slightly, and he was embarrassed by his own sense of hope, a jolt of emotion like a live wire.

A pause. A long one, the kind that means the person on the other end is doing math in their head and the math isn't adding up.

"I'm sorry," the accented voice said. "I don't know a Mikkel."

The floor didn't move, exactly. The apartment was the same, the TV was still playing something he wasn't watching. But something in him tilted a few degrees off level.

"Are you sure? This is his number. Mikkel, uh, I don't actually know his last name anymore, I'm realizing. It's Iggy, from Japan, remember?"

"The number was reassigned," the voice said, and there was something in it now that wasn't just confusion, the voice sounded tired of having answered this exact question more than once. "You have the wrong person. I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry to bother you," Iggy said, and meant it, and hung up before the silence on the line grew any louder.

He looked at the number a while longer, the country code, the string of digits that had connected him to a stranger who'd never known Mikkel and was living a life that had nothing to do with him. Then he flicked open the browser app and typed the one name he had. Mikkel... from Aarhus. That detail popped into his mind for no particular reason. He added Japanese, because that was the only thread he had left to pull.

The results came back slow, the way they do when you ask the Internet for something nobody else has ever asked it for.

The top thread linked to a message board. Remembering Mikkel. The date stamp showed it had been created two months ago. Last post three weeks back. A candle emoji. A photo of a man too young to be gone, grinning the same grin as the boy who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him in front of the building in Japan. Iggy clicked the icon that would translate the text from Danish to English. It was an anniversary thread. The top post said he'd been gone two years. Cancer. He was thirty-two.

Iggy sat there with the phone still lit in his hand. He thought about the people who'd posted in that group, who'd known Mikkel, loved him, lost him, while Iggy himself had been sitting on this exact couch, oblivious. The shock broke the dam in his mind, and flooded his thoughts with the nameless faces of all the people he hadn't called. All the messages he'd meant to send and hadn't, put off until later so many times that later stopped being a destination he could reach so much as a place from the past.

The headband kept pulsing its slow amber light on the side table. Even if it were fully charged and strapped to his skull, the headband would be useless here. The device was built to optimize the present: to decode expressions and whisper social shortcuts into his ear. It had no syntax for absolute absence. The machine's entire architecture required another living person to be on the other side of the room, and the quiet weight of a decade's worth of unsent messages was something the code simply couldn't map.

He opened his messages and typed a name he hadn't thought about in ten years until tonight.

Hey Mikkel. It's Iggy. I don't know if anyone will ever see this. I just wanted to say I'm sorry I didn't call sooner. I'm sorry I forgot your name for a while there. I'm sorry I'm only thinking about you now, when it's already too late.

He didn't send it. There was nowhere for it to go. He saved it to a draft folder he already knew he'd never open again, put the phone face down on the cushion next to him, and lay back and looked at the ceiling for a long time, the amber light from the headband pulsing slowly against the ceiling, a steady rhythm, twenty-some minutes now until it could tell him what to say.