The telephone shattered distance: it is part of nature now. The Atlantic Ocean does not intervene between one's lips in New York City and the ear of a friend in Paris.
The telephone answering machine subverts time: one leaves a surrogate self back in a little box at home, frozen in time, waiting to be roused by a ring: "Hello," one says, disembodied. "This is Carl. I'm sorry I can't come to the phone now, but..."
It is not Carl, of course. It is a fragment of Carl, deputized with a brief memory. It is a crystal of Carl, like one in the ice palace of Superman's heritage from Krypton. Carl, at that moment in any case, is elsewhere. Carl has proliferated a little. His flagship self is steaming across town on some business, plowing along through conventional time. His ancillary self, his butler self, the ghost in the machine, is waiting in its little timelessness.
So the Stepford Carl, once activated, will speak. And then the caller will speak, and the caller's words will likewise be frozen in time, and both of those small ancillary selves will lie side by side for a little while in their other dimension. Words can be chilled down like human seed and thus suspended in time until they are ready to come to life.
Answering machines can be very funny. They have their protocols and social comedies. Does one play one's messages when one has just come home with a guest? What intimacies and embarrassments will come flying out of the machine before one leaps for the stop button? "Gee, I wonder who that could have been."
The machines can also be a little spooky, metaphysically spooky. There was a tale about the archipelago called Nova Zembla, which was discovered in the 16th century, high in the Arctic Circle. A ship's crew was stranded there, frozen in. The air was so cold, the story said, that when the sailors spoke, their words crystallized in mid-air and remained there. Presently a thaw arrived, and all the words, warmed up, came cascading down in a tremendous, unintelligible din. The owner of an answering machine knows that there may come a moment when the machine, for all its customary obedience, will disgorge, in a weird, surreal monologue, all the messages accumulated over months and months: disjointed voices, greetings and arguments and appointments long dead. And then one might hear a voice one does not recognize: a sort of gypsy croak, a voodoo voice, heavily accented and far away: "Please call. .. Eeet eees verrrry imporrrtant!" A cold gust goes through the room.
Usually, the machines are more banal than that. They do still make people uncomfortable, although that is passing with familiarity. Their use has become so widespread that callers no longer feel quite so much the instant of stage fright. Still, the tape on the end of the line, expectantly unreeling, silent as a director awaiting the audition, does intimidate. The caller feels ambushed, like one who has suddenly learned he is being bugged. He becomes more ... responsible for his words. They are not going to vanish into air. They can be replayed again and again, like the videotape of a fumble. The machine subtly puts the caller on the defensive, thus reversing the usual telephone psychology, in which the caller is the aggressor, breaking in upon another's silence.