Over the weekend I got another message from Mario. He sounded sad. I’d never heard a New Yorker sound sad before. “Hey, Thomas, just tryin’ to catch up witchu, see how you doin’, talk to you soon, Michael… okloveyougodblessbyebye.” Poor guy. All he wanted to do was talk to his buddy Thomas. Or maybe Michael.

“Wait, who’s Michael?” I thought. Maybe Mario’s senile, and that’s why he keeps leaving messages on my phone even though my voice mail greeting clearly state my name, which of course doesn’t sound even remotely close to either Thomas or Michael. “I guess that would explain it”, I mused, reflecting on his earlier confusion. Hopefully Thomas will eventually get back to Mario and straighten the whole thing out.

Then last night an new, unfamiliar number rang my phone. I let it roll over into voice mail. It turned out to be Andrea, apparently Thomas’s boss, letting him know his shift that night had been cancelled, and he didn’t have to come in to work. This changed the paradigm, Mario’s verbal slip notwithstanding; it’s not Mario being an idiot, it’s whoever this Thomas bastard is. Considering that I’ve had this phone number for the last three years or so, and am only just now getting calls for Thomas, it’s unlikely I’m using a recycled number. Even more astounding, however, is the fact that two different people are completely ignoring the non-Thomasian voice mail greeting and blithely filling in scraps of Thomas’s life story on my cell phone.

I wonder if this will get any more interesting before ol’ Tommy finally wises up. Perhaps I’ll be unwittingly drawn into some web of international intrigue, accidentally overhearing “too much”, and will have an adventure involving expensive cars, automatic weapons, and suitcases full of gold. Or this is possibly just the beginning of some bizarre supernatural journey into terror that will ultimately find me in an abandoned house, desperately trying to locate Thomas’s long-dead corpse and return it to his ancestral burial plot before the clock strikes midnight and the Thirteenth Tomb is opened, opening the gateway between Hell and Earth.

Instead, I’ll probably just have to start wading through mundane messages about grocery lists, shift changes, and listening to Mario, feeling alone and unloved, finally break down in tears, but hey, you never know.