Answering Machines and the Voices That Remain

There are people, right now, who keep a phone number active that they cannot afford and do not use, for one reason: it is the only way left to hear their mother say we can’t come to the phone right now.

You may be one of them. If you are, you know the ritual precisely. You dial the number. It rings the ceremonial number of times. And then the voice — the real voice, the actual person — comes on and tells you, brightly and forever, to leave a message after the tone, and you don’t, of course, you never leave a message, you just stand there in your kitchen listening to fifteen seconds of someone who is dead being completely, ordinarily alive, and then you hang up before the beep because leaving a message would be unbearable and also because you are not entirely sure, in the animal part of you, that no one is listening.

I think the recorded voice is the most haunting of all the dead media, more than the photograph, more than the home movie, and I have thought for a while about why, and I think it comes down to a difference between being posed and being caught.

Posed and caught

A photograph is the dead performing. Even the most candid snapshot is somebody who knew, at some level, that they were being looked at — arranging the face, holding the moment. A photograph is a person doing the verb to be photographed, and there is a formality in it, a thereness, that keeps it at a small safe distance. It is an image. You know it is an image. It does not ambush you.

A recorded voice is the dead caught unaware, doing something else. The person who recorded that answering-machine greeting was not sitting for a portrait; they were doing a small annoying chore, getting the wording right, maybe laughing at themselves, entirely inside an ordinary Tuesday that they had no idea would become the last surviving scrap of their sound. The voice is not posed. It is present — it has the exact rhythm and warmth and specific irritating over-cheerfulness they used on the phone and nowhere else, and it is doing that thing in a present tense that no longer exists, and when it reaches you it does not feel like a representation of the person. It feels, for fifteen seconds, like the person, which is precisely the problem, because they are not there, and the gap between the voice that is so completely them and the fact that they are gone is the whole of grief, opened up, on demand, for the price of a phone call.

A photograph shows you that they were. A recording insists that they are, and is wrong, and makes you find out again.

The second death

And here is the part that keeps me up, the part that makes this a Dead Media problem and not just a grief problem: these voices are being deleted, quietly, by the machines and the companies that hold them, and almost nobody planned for it.

The answering machine itself is already gone — the little cassette that held a dead person’s voice, thrown out with the dead person’s house, in a box marked electronics at an estate sale, wiped or landfilled by someone who did not know what they had. Then the voicemail replaced it, and the voicemail lives not in your house but on a carrier’s server, tied to a paid account, and when the account lapses — because the dead do not pay their phone bills — the voice is deleted, by a system, on a schedule, for non-payment. People have described the specific modern horror of it: getting the message that the number will be disconnected, and understanding that this is not an administrative event, this is the second death, the final one, the day the last of the sound goes, and that it is being carried out not by God or time but by a billing department that does not know it is doing anything at all.

We have built a world where the dead survive exactly as long as the format is supported and the account is current. That is a strange and careless thing to have built. The old media at least died slowly, of neglect. This dies on time, by policy, and sends you a notification first.

The one thing they can still do

What gets me, in the end, is the content of the message, because it is always, by the nature of the thing, an instruction the dead can no longer follow.

Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. They will not get back to you. That was true when they recorded it and it is the cruelest kind of true now — the last recorded act of a person is very often a promise to return your call, preserved perfectly, addressed to everyone, impossible to keep. And people play it anyway. They dial the number precisely to be told, by the person they miss most, that the person will call them back. There is no logic in it. There is only the fact that this is the last place that voice still lives, still says your name’s worth of ordinary words, still does the small warm thing it did ten thousand times when it was easy and free and you never once thought to keep one.

So keep one. That is the whole practical burden of this essay and I will put it plainly: if there is a voice you would call a disconnected number to hear, record it now, off the machine, onto something you own, in a format you can move forward as the formats keep dying, because the companies will not save it for you and the cassette will not last and the account will lapse. The dead are only as permanent as the least reliable device holding them, and the least reliable device is always the one you assumed would be there. Get the voice off the answering machine. It is the closest thing to them that the world still has, and it is fifteen seconds long, and it is telling you, brightly, to leave a message — and one day, sooner than you think, the tone will be all that’s left.