The medieval science of Angelology occupies itself with the nature, constitution, and organization of the supernal race of angels. What might a Scammerology discover about these invisible, reality-based order of sub-beings?
The phone rings. I know the male voice which says, “Hi, Grandma” to be a scammer; my grandsons call me Lore. But it is with a small, a lingering anxiety that I hang up on the call from the student who has lost her passport, she says, and is about to be taken into custody by the police in Paris, France. No student of mine would say Paris, France. Several by-now familiar voices have exhausted themselves, they tell me, trying to reach me before the expiration of my car’s warranty. I don’t own, have never in my life owned a car, I tell them, but they will keep calling.
Robbers, thieves, con-men—the nation of goniffs figures in our oldest literatures, preexists angels for all I know. But the voice, this voice saying that my bank is charging my account $1,099.00 for a purchase I could never have made, belongs to a fellow human, a person living at this hour, which puzzles and interests me.
What sort of a person are you? I want to ask him. Is the creation of scenarios that will swindle people out of their money an art or is it a profession? Is it a way to make a living or a quick buck to pay, perhaps, for your college loan? Are you getting rich? Getting by? How are you making out? If, like me, you’re addicted to watching nature films, you know how often the prey gets away before the predator has a square meal. How many calls must you make before you hit on a patsy? I wonder—are you feeling offended when I hang up on you? Does it feel like game? Is it a turn-on? A chore? A bore?
There are so many of you out there calling live, plus those who record the robocalls. You must, each one of you, physically exist someplace. Whenever I make a phone call and the person who answers offers to transfer me to an associate in another department, I like to ask what the weather is like there—it may be in Houston, or in Delhi, or up on 102nd Street. Might the caller who is saying that the IRS is initiating a criminal case against me be the neighbor with whom I came up the elevator? How would I be able to tell?
Artists have envisioned chubby baby-boy angels, or blond males with ankle-length wings, or girl angels as elaborately dressed as the first Queen Elizabeth. (I imagine yet another order of beings who must have hand-washed, brushed, polished, or anciently dry-cleaned the celestial wardrobes.) But I need a mental documentary to envision the unknown scammers—not, surely, dressed like the old hippies, not ragged and homeless, nor preppy, but middle-modern drab. It is hard to think of them living regular lives in apartments. For me they exist in the yellow-gray half-light of a permanently dying day in certain streets like the streets remaindered from Eliot’s London. I can’t explain why they do not have their feet on the ground; they hover, singly, in no community, no hierarchy, host, or rank; they meet in no covens, for it is electronically, of course, that they agree on the identical wording of the various scams. Someone should tell them that beginning with “How are you today?” is a give-away.
Will one of you, one of these days, hit on a scam so new and impenetrably clever that I will give you the password to my existence? And will it give you that kick, I want to ask, the thrill of winning, the triumph of your cleverness? Can I guess your nature by what I know about my own (for I have experienced the bright sudden pleasure of being in the money—it happens seldom enough)? And then do you feel just a tinge of guilty regret? Will you invite or dismiss a litany of mitigations?
There used to be another, an all-male breed of humanity, the dirty callers of yesteryear. They got on the telephone to talk creepy sex talk with an ugly suggestion of violence. I came to rather pride myself on my method of dealing with them. “I will tell you what I’m going to do,” I used to say to the voice from the instrument in my hand. “I’m getting into bed. My bed has an under-drawer which I am opening. I am putting you into the drawer and I am going to close the drawer with you inside it, and then I will go to sleep. You can keep talking.”
Nobody I have asked has had a dirty phone call in—I don’t know how long. This puzzles the believer in Ecclesiastes. If there is nothing new under the sun, what is always was and will always be. Do we need a Dirty-Caller-ology to study who they were and what has become of the breed?
My telephone is ringing.
Lore Segal, a novelist, translator, and children’s book author, was born in Vienna in 1928 and died in New York on October 7, 2024.
