the Last Fax Machine

Hank started dialing on the day he received the diagnosis. After the appointment he had
called into work, saying that he was sick and wasn’t coming in. Which was true. He went
into the attic to find the facsimile machine that his father had given him which was behind
a box of his granddaughter’s forgotten stuffed toys: plushed and flushed Disney Poohs,
Puffs, and Velveteen Rabbits. The attic was warm and smelled like dust and the fax was
rinkey, beige and plastic. There was a phone cord still inserted and wrapped around the
body of the device, and a receiver stuck with some sticky material to cradle sticking out of
the side.

His father had given him the fax before he died. Of all things. Not his watch or vintage Aston Martin. That would all come post-mortem. But pops had made a big deal of bringing out this fax machine and presenting it to him as if this were the one thing of value that had to be presented in person. This thing that would have been first in the dumpster when they cleared out the house. His father in the hospital bed, white and tethered to machines. His father frail and tired, patting the fax machine in his adjusted lap with hands speckled and veined.

“This isn’t the last fax machine.” Breathing and machines blipping. “Not yet.” Shoes squeaking in the hallway. “But it will be.” Flowers and sunlight on a white linoleum floor. “Someday this will be the last fax machine.” A side tray with an uneaten plate of white food, a pitcher of water, tissues, wrappers, straws. “Ever, and nobody else.” The TV playing baseball, the clock on the wall. “Will have one.”

Okay. Thanks. I love you. And so he had brought it to the attic, this collectors item. And now he was bringing it out. He went downstairs and grabbed the keys to the apartment in the city, where he knew there was a landline that was still working. He’d noticed the bill for the line on his credit card statement again last month, and had forgotten again to have it disconnected. He left a note on the table for his wife, saying that he had some things to see to in the city, and might be there for a while.

When he got to the apartment, he unplugged the old cordless phone that had been sitting there for decades, blinking the number of telemarketing voices that had spoken in the empty flat. He unwrapped the cord from the fax and plugged it into the wall. He unstuck the receiver from the cradle and lifted it to his ear to hear the humming F of the dial tone. He hung it back up and went to the kitchen to get a sponge. He turned the faucet on over his hand until it ran luke warm, then he wet the sponge, and squeezed it out. When he was younger, and thinking of going into economics, his father had told him a story about the cost of producing the first fax machine; about how the first fax machine
was useless, and extremely expensive, the second was useful and made the first useful, and was much cheaper to make, and the third, even more use for all and cheaper still. This was the end of object economies, his father had said, that they were living in an age where the more of something there was, the more valuable it was. Supply and demand turned on end.

Back in the living room, he slowly cleaned the cradle and receiver, scraping out the gummy bits with the green, plastic side, and pulling off the remaining pieces by rubbing the yellow spongy side in circles. When the goo was gone, he ran the sponge over the rest of the receiver, picking up all of the dust that hadn’t already come off on his hands. He cleaned the cord, the top of the machine, clicking the buttons as it passed over them. With the corner of the sponge, he pulled dust out of the crevices and seams, going back to the kitchen several times to wring out and refresh.

At first, when he got the fax machine, he assumed it was some age-addled idea of a collectors item. In the doctor’s office with it’s jarred cotton and fluorescent hum, he had felt suddenly otherwise. He had felt that that machine was his life, trying to communicate with people that never understood the messages he was sending. That he was sending love notes into the ears of people that only heard screeches and buzzes. That it was his father’s life of trying to communicate in a code that nobody understood. And that the object was his father’s last attempt at communication, a gift that said: I can only say that I cannot say what I want to say.

While he was washing the bottom, he found a crack in the back corner, where the plastic meets the metal, and he took a piece of clear tape and scissors from his desk and fashioned a small band-aid to try to keep the crack from spreading further. By the time he was done it was dark out, and he was working by the street lights coming in from the window. When he turned on the lights, the fax machine looked clean and old.

Now he felt otherwise again: this machine was his antithesis. That they were both in the same position, on opposite sides. If this were the last machine, it would be speaking a dead language in an empty world, tugging on sleeves in an unmanned coatroom. If his diagnosis were correct, he would be the empty coat in a room full of people talking, and then, not even a coat anymore. He would die and life would go on; the machine would live alone unable to affect anything. Same place, different views.

He called for take-out from his mobile, and took a shower while waiting for it to come. When the food came, he put it down on the coffee table by the fax machine. A search for ‘fax numbers’ on his mobile came up with over 10 million hits. He narrowed it down, and auto-tasked to make a list of 3,984,332 fax numbers. Taking a piece of paper from his desk he wrote Hello? with a marker and stuck it into the feed. Sitting down, he broke his chopsticks apart and rubbed them together to shave off any splinters, and dialed the first number.