Outsourced Love

Marcelina didn't call him for a week, then, Valentine's Day. It was one of those crisp, clear, winter nights, but she couldn't appreciate it. She downed an entire bottle of corner-store champagne, undressed to her underwear, crawled into bed with the old, black rotary phone, and dialed.

"May I help you?" he said.

She bit her lip, hesitated. "It's me ... Marcelina from Brooklyn."

"Oh, it's been a while," he said, sing-song, light, airy. "What can I do for you?"

In spite of herself, Marcy still loved his accent. "It's on the fritz again." But she was lying. She wasn't even near her computer. It sat on the desk on the other side of the room with its black, dead screen ¿ a Mac from the late nineties that no one would service anymore, out of touch, obsolete, an O.S.9.

"What's it doing?" he said.

"It's making that grinding noise again," ugh, another lie. "A chk chk chk chk."

"Ah, sounds like the hard drive."

"It does?"

"But we can fix that. Don't worry."

But she was worried. Her mother would shake her head if she could see her now. "You're forty-five. Don't make a fool of yourself."

It all started this past Christmas day. She was alone in her apartment writing her annual holiday letter, filled with its platitudes, a round-up of tid-bits and what-not's, which would be e-mailed en-masse to distant relatives and not-so-close friends. "I am working in the registration office of New York University," she wrote. "And we see a lot of foreign students who are overwhelmed by the city¿" Her fingers kept typing but the words did not appear. "Clack, clack, clack" on the keyboard with her nails, but the old, obsolete Mac grinded and chugged in agony. A spinning clock appeared on screen and then a little cartoon bomb with a lit fuse, "Error 49." Marcelina felt a twinge of dread.