strangereality158

Contrary to the bulk of my entries on this 'web log', this entry really does reference an overt strangeness about reality that everybody can identify with. Not just borderline sociopaths. My Sunday dinner is cooking in the oven, so I'll try to be quick.

Perhaps everybody has experienced 'lost object phenomenon' – you drop or misplace an object of some description, and you never find it again. Or you do find it, and can't ever work out how it got there, and how you didn't find it when you were looking for it.

Keys and coins and other miscellaneous small items are common candidates for the phenomenon. You're fiddling with the item(s), whatever they are, in your hand, and one of them falls to the floor, and takes a flukey bounce, and although you search and search, looking in every nook, every cranny, even moving the furniture around when you start to get really annoyed about it, you never find the item again. Or you find it weeks or months later, somehow occupying a little ledge on the inside of a cabinet (say), where it would have had to have bounced through solid wood to get to... I am improvising this example. I am sure that the reader will know what I mean.

I have an old mobile phone that I use exclusively as an alarm clock. My new mobile phone is also used primarily as an alarm clock, but that's by the by. My old phone is one that I bought at the tail-end of 2003; it is appropriately brick-like and features-lacking. No camera, no internet, no Java games. How did we ever live in 2003?

Last Saturday night before going to bed I set the alarm on the old phone as usual and left it in its usual spot on the far end of the computer table in my room. Having it in that position forces me to get out of bed to turn the alarm off, the theory being that once out of bed I will stay out of bed. Most often I simply get back into bed and go back to sleep, but it's the thought that counts.

Last Sunday I recall being woken up by my other alarms. I have three other alarms: my current mobile phone, and two regular travel-style alarm clocks. I stagger their alarm times, spaced around ten minutes apart. I'm terrible at getting up. Last Sunday I got up with the last alarm and found my way downstairs and had breakfast and so forth.

I should point out here that I have had the house to myself for ten days. The others who live in the house went on holiday; they come back the day after tomorrow. Nobody else has been in this house.

Sunday night, I went to look for my old phone, wanting to set the alarm for Monday – and it wasn't on the computer table. I looked on the floor around it. I looked on every other surface in the room – on top of the TV, on the bookshelves, on the small table at the side of the bed where I place my glasses of quintuple vodkas, everywhere that was likely.

The old phone wasn't anywhere likely. I expanded the search to include the floor. Obviously, I thought, when the alarm went off I had got up whilst more than half-asleep, deactivated it, and then sloppily put it down, only for it to bounce somewhere unlikely. I would find it among all the furniture somewhere. I'd look tomorrow, I thought, and finished setting the other alarms and went to bed.

I spent an hour on Monday moving all the furniture in my room. I looked everywhere that the phone could conceivably be. No phone. I briefly checked the rest of the house, thinking that I might have unwittingly carried it out of the room in a sleepy trance.

I spent Tuesday searching the entire house. Then I went back and searched my room, even more thoroughly. I checked the pockets of every garment of clothing that I own. I checked in and around every stick of furniture, every inch of floorspace.

Wednesday I sort of gave up, deciding that it was too strange to think about. I clearly recall setting the phone alarm on Saturday and putting it down in its usual spot. However I do not recall turning off the alarm on Sunday. The house was secure from all other people: nobody could have got in and removed the phone. What kind of burglar would break into a house (without leaving any sign of having done so), ignore the TVs and VCRs and the DVD player in the downstairs rooms, ignore my laptop which was set up on the living room table, sneak into the room where the house's sole occupant (me) was sleeping, and take an outmoded old mobile phone, and nothing else?

The phone was in off-mode, so I can't simply call it with my other phone, and follow the ringing sound. I've already tried doing so anyway, knowing that it was switched off. I got the recorded message from the phone company saying the phone was switched off.

It is absolutely certain that the phone has not been taken by a person. It's been just me, myself, and I in the house all this time. And I am as certain as I can be that it is not in the house. I plan to search again in all of the places where I have looked several times already.

My dinner is ready. I cannot stop thinking about the whereabouts of the phone. It isn't the phone itself that's occupying me; it's the weirdness of its disappearance.