Malcolm Steadman will buy a gun in 70 days.

Malcolm’s Phone service has been turned off, and naturally this made Malcolm contemplate the nature of brain death for an hour.

He’s doing fine.

My phone works. It can tell me the time, track my calorie intake, play games and surf the internet if I have a WiFi signal. But it does not do as it is intended: make phone calls.

Malcolm Steadman desperately needs to make a phone call.

If I experience brain death, my body can still pump blood, and can still digest food, but it can’t think. Is that my body’s intended purpose?

Malcolm spent this hour huddled under a tree, which for the past few weeks has been his makeshift home, and agonized over philosophical delirium. He is out of his meds. He has not had a therapy session in weeks. He needs to make a phone call. After the panic attack ravaged him, it was clear to Malcolm that the very next thing he needed to do was stymie its forces. There is no way he can survive being homeless with these panic attacks. Well, at least not for another 70 days.

All of his conventional defenses are spent. There will be no Calvary to rescue him.

It is time.

After making sure to pack his blanket, which is now his most important and valued possession, Malcolm double checks the rest of his inventory. This is a routine he has done countless times since taking up residence in the park. He has his phone, his charger, his clothing, his debit card, three paper dollars and two dollars in coins. He cannot believe how fast he went through the $100 he took out of an ATM, physical money to help him budget through his paycheck. In a week there is just five assorted dollars. Other things he still has that he doesn’t count: a job, endless boring time, fatigue, and the remnants of a nasty cold.

Malcolm is lucky that his manager suffered from the same illness.

Things Malcolm does not have: too much to count.

With his inventory counted, and his psyche shocked, Malcolm makes the journey out of the park and treks toward the only other haven for the homeless besides a McDonald’s: 7-11. Now outside the comfort of his blanket, Malcolm feels the chill morning air and shivers. He is already so used to shivering that he does not notice his body’s plight and he marches on. The path is familiar, and he is mostly on auto-pilot. He is inside of the store in minutes.

Malcolm spends only a dollar and sixty cents on a bag of Fritos, and immediately heads over to the condiment section for 7-11’s hotdogs. There he opens his bag and dispenses “chili” from an automated machine labeled free. The brown liquid splatters out and into the bag, Malcolm tops it off with some “nacho sauce” also labeled free from the chili’s sister machine. This is breakfast. It is the cheapest and most filling thing Malcolm knows that he can pay for. He learned it watching another homeless man.

Moments later, with his physical imperative of food obtained, Malcolm leaves the warm confines of the store and he heads over to his real destination. The payphone.

It is likely the only payphone left in the city within three miles. Its plastic cover has been graffitied over so many times one would be hard pressed to guess that it was originally blue. Large steel bolts lay naked in concrete near the base, likely the foundation of another pay phone pried out a decade ago. How this one has survived that fate is only due to an oversight. A relic beneath a relic, the phone book hangs swaying silently on a chain. Malcolm does not need to open this book, he reads the number off of a call log from his brain-dead smart phone, he pays and dials.

There is ringing. Then silence. Then ringing.

Malcolm plunges his hand into his breakfast and scoops a hand of hot chilied Fritos into his mouth. Before he can finish chewing them there is a click on the receiver and a voice answers the call. The voice is somehow chipper and sardonic, a mixture of practiced politeness that is hollow in its delivery. Malcolm feels an old sense of relief in his bones, the kind that only an addict feels after avoiding a fix for so long… He is greeted by a customer service rep from his old internet service provider.

They do not recognize the phone number, they have no idea that it is him.

“…how can I help you?” The representative finishes after introducing themselves and repeating information Malcolm already knows.

It begins.

“Yes, uh hello?” Malcolm asks instead of stating as he shovels another handful into his hungry maw. “I am having problems with my internet router, the blue light keeps blinking”.

“…That is very odd sir, I have not heard of our routers doing that, can you give me a minute to check something?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t see anything in my manual to indicate what could cause that, what was your name and address?”

“I am a homeless man named Malcolm and I live under a tree.”

The representative laughs. Malcolm swallows his breakfast, takes a deep breath, and unleashes his unholy problems at the wage slave.

“I made the mistake of showing compassion to a junkie I met at a suicide prevention ward. He is addicted to heroin and got arrested because I wanted to eat free pancakes from a Mormon. Do you understand? I bailed him out using my rent money so he could see the birth of his child but he bailed that for heroin. Now I’m homeless. Did you find out what was wrong with my router yet?”

The customer service rep has no idea what to make of this, there is no training that could prepare him for a polite madman. Erroneously, he rationalizes this as an eccentric joke, and laughs nervously. With doubt in his voice he reports that he has not found why a router would do that.

Malcolm continues.

“Do you know what I did last night? I hid under a tree and contemplated what the function of a human being is while being near to tears because the lack of an answer horrifies me. Even now, after doing this exact kind of thing multiple times I am still mystified and terrified by the lack of answers. You think I would get used to it? Wouldn’t you?” Another handful of Malcolm’s breakfast makes its way into his mouth. “But nooooo! I am still paralyzed at the thought that the universe is not ordered and kind. It probably won’t go away until I am brain-dead, like my ph- uh, like my router.”

There is no answer on the other side, only the cacophonous sounds of a busy call center. Malcolm does not wait for permission.

“I washed my clothes for the first time in weeks, found an old laundromat, and I washed myself in a bathroom there. Used the sink to sort of sponge bathe myself. Co-workers still have no idea that I am homeless. In that time waiting for my clothes to dry do you know what happened? I had a panic attack about something that I have already had a panic attack over! Would you believe it? I sat there freaking out about entropy even though I knew the conclusion! Hold on..” Malcolm says as he rips the Fritos bag by the edges, flattening it out and revealing the very last smudges of chili. The customer service rep waits patiently, only hearing the crunching of metallic plastic and having no context for it. Malcolm licks off remnants of food on the bag. This sounds like something obscene to the rep, and when Malcolm resumes to his phone call he finds that the rep has hung up.

“It will never end” Malcolm says aloud to nobody.

He has no idea how near the end is.

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