A Mysterious Tale.

I was woken by the phone in the early hours of Monday, November 1st, 1999.

I could have ignored it, but with two small daughters I was used to waking up in the middle of the night, plus I was a little fatalistic about late night calls. Nine times out of ten they were wrong numbers, but if it was that one time out of ten, then it was going to be news that was too urgent wait until morning.

Feeling a mix of annoyance and trepidation, I rolled out of bed, stumbled to the hallway, found the phone, and pressed “talk.”

I was greeted by the sound of man yelling over a deafening roar. The background noise was so loud that I couldn’t make out what the voice was yelling.

My trepidation gone, I was now merely annoyed, but I restrained myself, knowing that sometimes you can hear all kinds of interference on your end of the line, but the person on the other end can hear you perfectly clearly.

Growing up in England, I was used to the wrong-number thing leading to apologies all round. The caller would apologise for dialing the wrong number. The person picking up the phone would apologise for being the bearer of bad news.

In Brooklyn, where I now resided, the whole thing was handled differently. A week earlier I had picked up the phone only to be bombarded by a stream of Russian.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think you have the wrong number.”

“What the fuck!” cried the caller, changing to English. “You shit-for-brains faggot…”

Now, here I was a week later, in the middle of the night, listening to roaring and screaming which, now I listened a little more carefully, actually sounded as if it might be Hebrew or Arabic. Clearly a wrong number if ever there was. With my previous wrong-number incident in mind, I cleared my throat, and in my deepest voice, and my best Brooklyn accent I said, “Sorry buddy. I think you have a wrong number.” I then hung up and returned to bed.

I fell asleep right away but had a nightmare in which I was on a boat in the ocean, watching an air liner plunge through firy clouds and crash into the waves.

Next thing I knew it was 6 AM, and the radio was on with a report about the mid-Atlantic crash of Egypt-Air flight 990.

A chill ran right through me. I remembered the roar and the man screaming. Had my caller been a passenger on that plane?

I had heard that in the event of an impending accident, the airlines allow passengers to use their cellphones. If it was a passenger was it a wrong number? Or was it really someone I knew? According to the news the plane went down just off Nantucket Island at around 2AM. Nantucket was well within cellphone range of Brooklyn, but I hadn’t checked the time that we’d received the call.

Maybe it was just a random wrong number, that just happened to come in at the same time as a plane crash.

Or maybe not. As soon as they were available I scanned the passenger list, but no familiar name jumped out at me.