Phoning Faust

Excerpt

Phoning Faust
Sophie Mutiara Nova © 2025
All Rights Reserved

Chapter One

Hell Hath No Fury Like

This is not a cry for help.

This is a scream.

Please, please, please.

I don’t want to die alone.

The suicide hotline is taking too long. Another shining example of the American medical system as I stare, dissociating, at my black-polish-chipped nails surrounding the dimly lit version of my nighttime phone screen. The string of unfamiliar text blinks blankly back at me. Not judging. Not caring. On my empty gold-whorl desk, a laptop. The web browser which has “I WANT TO DIE” in a Google search next to a second tab that screams: “HELP ME.”

I don’t want to.

I don’t want to.

I don’t…alone…

I sigh as the ringtone keeps going, going, going, gone. It’s a little comforting, the faded buzz like a lukewarm high in my brain as I shiver while encased in sweat. It feels cold tonight even as my body runs hot. I’m always cold even in the heat of summer, like the vampire in Nosferatu, shadow tendrils trailing along white walls. I’m also all cried out at this point, empty as the bottom of a Styrofoam cup. Monologuing to my own reflection in the mirror like Gen Z Hamlet (to be or not to be) so at least someone listens.

I stare at the empty cardboard box across from me with a smiley face note on it. My roommate, singular, had long packed up after we got the pandemic alert. All our courses cancelled as the oh-so-lucky graduating class of 2020, sending us off to an uncertain one-week vacation while they rebooted school for Zoom classes.

My roommate, Talia, and I had gotten along decently for the past three years, time flying by in a whirl of late-night fast-food adventures and giggling over TV show reruns. Though she’d taken to more emotional distance as my senioritis turned to ennui turned to something much worse. Something that probably required a clinical diagnosis—but hell if I was going to haul ass to the campus medical ward with COVID on the rise. They had bigger problems than my mental health right now to deal with.

Talia returned home to parents who are worried about her, relatives who rely on her college knowledge to make the world a better place. Time and visas and the pandemic are all extra unkind to her as an international student, even if she is from Canada. We’d bonded fast over both being Southeast Asian—I was part Indonesian, and she was Filipina, and we’d often joke over the word selamat meaning “hello” in Indonesian but “thank you” in Tagalog. Switching dinner responsibilities and struggling through half-remembered family recipes when we were homesick. I always begged her to bring extra hopia from her trips visiting aunties, and whenever I fried kerupuk I’d find a few missing after I got home. It was a symbiotic relationship.

But I miss Talia—the void she left behind—as I stare at her smiley-face note, the spare coffee maker she left even if I don’t have any of those special tinfoil cups to put in it. I barely have enough energy to eat microwave oatmeal and mi goreng lately.

Which leads to me here, stuck in lockdown, surrounded by crappy dorm room furniture and microwave, nonperishable meals. A vacant room where Talia used to be. I’d insisted on staying out the rest of my lease even if campus was nonoperational. My parents are maybe an eight-hour drive from here, but I told them I wanted to quarantine a bit before going home to see them. My mom’s immunocompromised, and I don’t want to risk giving her anything. Plus, home has always been a bit tense since I was outed a while ago as queer when my aunt saw me in the college pamphlets during Pride Week—Pride flags smeared across my grinning cheeks in vibrant, technicolor paint. I’d rather let that conversation go to voicemail, metaphorically and in what remained of my reality.

I reframe my time alone here as a martyr’s sacrifice, a saintly retreat, like all those macabre stories I learned from Sunday school. Like Joan of Arc burning in her armor, cursing out the enemies of Satan and giving up her life for all of France. Or maybe she was crazy like I’m crazy. Maybe I’m just as bad as her, continuing a cycle of women who thought they had to die rather than live and be “too much.”

The number you have dialed is not responding, please hang up and try—

I hang up.

I don’t want to try again.

I stare at the bottle of aspirin. Our generation’s version of ambrosia or perhaps snake oil, a cure-all that could vanquish your average colds, flus, fevers, and everything but the mysterious virus devastating America. The plague is upon us and all I have are crumpled masks from our school health office in the corner and vitamin C packets—like that will keep me safe. Global warming is getting worse, world events are shitty, but I’m alive. A lot of people don’t have that luxury.

God, I’m a shithead.

I don’t deserve to…to…

I stare at my open laptop screen. The morbid searches. I don’t deserve to do this. People in the world are really suffering. Afraid and huddled together for warmth against a cruel, unforgiving backdrop of hellish global torment. I don’t deserve to cry about this. Cry about what? Being lonely? Being “big sad”?

Why do I feel so empty inside?

I shake my head as though that’ll clear it, brushing away the flyaway bangs at the corners of my newly pierced eyebrows. I’d DIYed a haircut I’d grabbed off social media, wanting to look more rocker chick but instead, just looking like a little kid with craft scissors. That was okay. It would grow out soon. My mom’s hair always grew out thicker. My dad was bald. He said I had good hair—shame I kept dyeing it and chopping it and dyeing it again in my quest to find myself in queer person’s second puberty. Change helped me feel better…

…for a little while at least.

I take in a deep breath. Suck it up, bitch. And I type in the number of the emergency hotline again. But my fingers type too fast, vision a bit hazy, and I accidentally press too many 6s. Three of them, in fact. My blood runs cold.

My mom would call it the devil’s number.

Not knowing what possesses me, I press enter. The number rings…

…and rings…

And finally, someone picks up. A few breaths into the receiver and I’m blushing already, unsure how to handle speaking to another person. I haven’t seen anyone since Talia left in a flurry of quick tears and hasty care packages. “H-hello?” I stammer.

“Hello.” The voice that purrs back is silky, soft. Full of sensuality like the sex kittens in all those movies from the 1960s, lounging on a lace canopy bed as big bad Mr. Super Spy comes back from one of his missions. Dressed in nothing but a diaphanous nightgown. But there’s something else to her voice, a vocal fry undertone, like a punk rock babe singing about crimson and clover. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

Jesus. It seems I have accidentally called an escort. My thumb hovers over the End Call button as I stare, my cheeks fully on fire now at the traitorous phone. “S-sorry. It seems I’ve called the wrong number.”

“Or the right one, baby. We could go at this all night.” Then, an ungodly hacking sound, like a black cat with its hackles raised in an arch, coughing up a hairball. “Sonuvabitch, sorry. That voice is really hard to keep up.”

I was right. It’s not their real voice.

The voice that comes through deepens more on the vocal fry, with a tinge of an accent I can’t quite place. Like the kids from international schools have, the ones who pick up and move because their parents are famous ambassadors or something. Perhaps in Paris or Singapore. The kind of mystery that people have when they grow up everywhere and nowhere all at once. Sophisticated. Metropolitan. Way out of my league.

“Who were you supposed to call?”

Suddenly embarrassed, I find I can no longer answer that question. “Nobody. Is this…is this like a roleplay sex hotline or something?”

“It can be,” the voice answers with the same noncommittal attitude of a shrug. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“Di.”

“No, it’s not.” This time, the voice that rumbles is less sex kitten and more forceful. Cracked leather, whiskey, cigarettes. Hair rising to the heavens in a lightning storm before a crack of Zeus’s lightning comes down and obliterates you. “Tell the truth, baby.”

“Fine. It’s Dian. And don’t call me baby.” I shudder. “It’s weird.”

“How Puritan of you.”

“No, not like that. I mean I’m not like that.”

“Hm.” Whoever they are takes their dear, sweet time in the electrical silence, tension buzzing in the electromagnetic waves between us. “Do you not swing that way then?”

“No. I mean, yes. But like, take your time with me. I’m queer but in, like, a demi way. You have to do more than buy me dinner first to get me interested, you know?” There, I’ve finally admitted it. Talia had been gearing for months to take me on benders to get laid at the campus’s solitary queer nightclub. But I’ve had a hard time voicing it until now.

Though I sob over Fried Green Tomatoes and wear my flannel like any other good queer person, I don’t want to take a stranger home and crawl into their skin. It takes time for me to open up and feel comfortable. Maybe it’s trauma or maybe it’s just how I’m wired. I don’t know. I still struggle with it now, admitting it. That it is okay being queer and demi—that the body contains multitudes like the soul does and sometimes labels are helpful. They helped me say: please wait for me, be gentle, be sweet.

I’m queer and demi.

“Oh,” and the voice eases again, the storm receding. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep that in mind then as we continue our conversation. I’ll follow your lead.”

“Like I said,” I repeat, cursing inwardly at myself that I don’t just hang up the phone and leave. But then I glance to the giant bottle of pills beside me, realizing that my evening plans weren’t exactly…that urgent. “I told you I dialed the wrong number.”

“Then why are you still here?”

Dammit, they’re good.

My reply comes out more snarl than question. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“Aww, so formal.” A laugh then, almost a witch’s cackle. I could picture this person sitting atop Baba Yaga’s hut, a wood cabin on chicken legs, hurtling into a dark and foggy forest. “I am Memphis. She/her/hers, well, for today anyway.”

“Your name is Memphis? Like Memphis, Tennessee?”

“You know, the original Memphis was named because it was also founded on a river. But the original Memphis was a city in ancient Egypt, and its river was the Nile, not the Mississippi like in You’re-The-Only-Ten-I-See: Tennessee.”

“Sounds real grand…Memphis.”

“Your turn.”

“My turn? Wait, I—!”

Typing sounds then, but not like a regular keyboard. It’s like fingernails tapping directly into a chalkboard. A screeching, deeply unpleasant noise. “Ah, there you are. Dian Faust.” Another laugh, cynical and cold. “Did your daddy like Goethe or something? Or perhaps he followed Shakespeare’s idol: Christopher Marlowe?”

I close my laptop now, like that will somehow stop this freak show from happening. My blood runs cold, which is interesting for someone so deeply depressed as to have called the suicide hotline. Just because I chose pills doesn’t mean I want some Blackhat hackers to bust into my lonely apartment and drag me out by my legs and spill my guts in a river or something. “How the hell did you know my last name?”

“Caller ID.” And there it is, a voice that shrugs again, not a care in the world.

“That’s a lie.”

“No shit, Di. Sorry, Dian.” Another breath.

God, they really are some creepy hacker or serial killer type then. This is what I get. The universe heard me complaining and is now sending someone to finish the job with a chainsaw to the abdomen. Just my damned luck. I was hoping to go more Ophelia floating among peaceful cerulean river reeds, not this bullshit!

I firmly press End Call, my chipped thumbnail smashing the eerily smooth cellphone screen over and over and over again. The phone gives a weak beep, but the surface doesn’t respond. It’s like the whole screen is frozen. I can’t even turn the Speaker or Mute option on or off either. I try to shut down the entire phone, but the device refuses to comply. Then, to my horror, I watch the battery life in the upper right corner tick upward from the red to fully green. Charging in seconds.

That’s impossible.

I scream, chucking the cellphone across the room. I wonder if any of the other tenants in this building heard me. Honestly, they probably couldn’t over the sounds of daily life. Fighting, fucking, dancing the salsa and merengue overhead with a vacuum in hand, little daily rituals of mundanity that have only gotten worse since lockdown started.

If they can’t get in, perhaps I can get out. I stride to the door, curious and desperate, and try the front lock.

Nothing.

The door refuses to budge.