For a moment, I flashed on her body, imagining those beautiful round breasts with creamy brown aureolas, making saints out of nipples, her soft, full lips barely hiding her teeth, while in the deep of her eyes her Irish and Spanish heritage keep closing like oxygen and hydrogen, and will probably keep on closing until the very day she dies. And yet in spite of her shocking appeal, any longing I should have felt vanished when I saw, and accepted, how little I knew about her. The picture in my head, no matter how erotic, hardly sufficing. An unfinished portrait. A portrait never really begun. Even taking into account her daisy sunglasses, her tattoos, the dollars and fives she culls while draped around some silver pole hidden in some dark room in the shadow of the airport. A place I had still not dared to visit. I had never even asked her the name of her three year old. I had never even asked her for her real name - not Thumper, not Thumper at all, but something entirely else - which I suddenly resolved to find out, to ask both questions right then and there, to start finding out who she really was, see if it was possible she could mean something to me, a whole slew of question marks I was prepared to follow through on, which was exactly when the phone went dead.
She hadn't hung up nor had I. The phone company had just caught up with their oversight and finally disconnected my line.
No more Thumper. No more dial tone. Not even a domed ceiling to carry a word.
Just silence and all its consequences.
[House of Leaves, Danielewski, M. Z.]
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