My mother died in May. She lived alone in Valeggio, sixty kilometers from me. I’m the one who found her. She’d been in there two days before anybody came.
My sister lives ten minutes from that house. She's the one who emptied it. She shut off the gas and the water, took the paperwork to the town hall, sold the furniture. She handled all of it, because she was the only one who could. I couldn't. I wouldn't have gotten through it.
One thing is still open. My mother never wanted a phone. I'm the one who put her on my family plan. A way to stay in touch. Nine euros a month. Closing it was on me. One phone call would have done it, saying out loud that the account holder is dead. A few words. Nothing hard about it. I'm the only one who can. I never did. I put it off for a long time and I couldn't tell you why.
We didn't talk much. Months would go by. Then one day â and I still don't know how she figured out how to do it â she turned on location sharing with me. A few years ago. I never asked her why, and it stayed on.
That's how I found her. I've always hated that app. It sends you an alert when the phone hasn't moved in too long, days at a time, same spot. One of those things they sell to old people as a safety device. It woke me up in the middle of the night once because she'd left the phone on her nightstand for three days.
When it went off again I figured it was the same thing. It wasn't until my sister started calling and calling that I understood something had actually happened.
That phone is in the drawer now.
End of May. There was still paperwork to deal with â my sister's paperwork, really, but some of it needed my signature too.
My sister's on the app as well, so I opened it to see if she was home. I hate bothering her at work, or when she's got the kids on her. She's not an easy person to talk to when her mind is somewhere else. I almost just texted her instead.
I opened it, and when I found her dot I saw my mother's was live too. Not far from her house. A few kilometers outside town, to be exact, in what the zoom made look like a plowed field.
Fucking app, I thought. Her phone was in the drawer in my bedroom and it had been off for days. You can't trust any of this stuff. Some kid put it together in his bedroom.
I closed it and opened it again a couple of times, figuring the tracking had glitched. The position stayed where it was.
Then I figured it was just some old trip of hers the app had held onto, so I tapped the dot and the box came up with the date and time of the last update. The night before. 20:00 exactly.
I swore the way people swear where I'm from.
Fucking app.
I let it go and called my sister.
I'd written the whole thing off as a malfunction. Then a few days later, bored and sweating through the first real heat of the year, I went back and checked. I couldn't decide if it was funny or just tiresome.
My mother's location was still live.
Not only that. It had moved. Tens of kilometers.
I tapped the dot again. Last update, that same evening. 20:00. Exactly like the time before. Was that the thing that proved it was a bug? I'm not a programmer. I know about as much about computers as the butcher in town. So I started looking online.
The TV was on. I don't remember what was on. Music in the background, some end-of-spring festival, maybe.
I didn't really know what to look for, or where. I scrolled through results without much energy, not paying attention to whether the source was any good, just to how simply it put things.
The handful of sites I opened all said the same nothing. The anomaly could come down to the fact that a lot of apps keep serving up the last known position, even after the phone is off. Plausible enough, except my mother's position had kept going. Like it was drifting.
I looked harder. I typed out the situation as well as I could put it, and nothing came back that answered it.
The only advice left worth anything was to close the line, and I decided to do it.
The next morning I called the carrier from the parking lot at work. I got through the menus and waited, the usual boring music underneath. And in that short stretch a thought got to me. Everything left of whatever there had been between me and my mother, frayed as it was, was going to end in a few seconds.
I don't know if it was the thought, or the wait, which went past eleven minutes. Either way I hung up. I went inside and did my day and promised myself I was done with it.
I was lying to myself.
June. I checked again. I'd told myself I wouldn't, and I did, and after that I stopped pretending it was a decision I was making each time.
It was still live. It had moved again, and it had moved north. Roughly north. That was as far as I could take it, because I was looking at a map on a phone, and north on a phone is just up.
So I started writing it down. A note on my phone, one line an evening. The date, the name of whatever town was closest, the number the app gave me. It took ten seconds. I told myself I was building something to show the carrier, since I hadn't managed to say the sentence.
By the second week the number had stopped being interesting and started being the same. Fourteen point four. Then fourteen point four. Then fourteen point four. That was the thing I kept turning over. Drift wanders. Wandering is the whole idea of drift. This didn't wander. It went out the same distance every evening, in the same direction, the way you'd pace off a field.
One Sunday I opened a proper map on the laptop. Not the app. The kind you can lay a straight line on. I dropped a pin on my mother's house, dropped another on the last position, drew the line between them, and then held the line against the grid.
Magnetic north where we live sits about three degrees off. It's printed in the corner of the map. Anybody can look it up. My line didn't have the three degrees in it. It sat on the grid, dead on, all the way back to the house.
That's the one I couldn't hand back to a bad app. A phone doesn't know where true north is. A phone knows where the magnet is.
Then it got to the water.
It went in at Peschiera at the end of June. I remember thinking, fine, one night. Fourteen kilometers is nothing on a lake that size, it goes in and comes out the other side and I'll have my answer in the morning, because a position in the middle of Lake Garda is an error and errors are what I was after.
It didn't come out. It kept going up the lake.
I started waiting for the update. That's the part I'd like to leave out and can't. I'd finish dinner and put the plate in the sink and by five to eight I'd have the phone in my hand.
There was one Tuesday in the middle of July, the balcony door open, somebody's television going next door. I watched the dot sit where it had been since the night before, which was blue, a few kilometers off Garda town. At eight it moved. It didn't jump or blink, it just redrew a little further up, still blue, still nothing around it, and the line under it said the update had come in at 20:00.
I zoomed all the way in. Water. I zoomed out until the whole lake fit on the screen and it was still water, and the point was still in it, and there was nothing on either side of it for kilometers.
I sat there for a while with the phone on my leg. Then I wrote the line in the note. The date, the nearest town, fourteen point four.
I talked to my sister the next morning. Not on the phone. I drove over to her place, with the kids playing in the next room.
She took it seriously, which I hadn't expected. While I was still talking she opened her own app and turned the screen to me. Me. Her husband. The two kids' watches. That was the whole list.
Our mother wasn't on it. She'd never been on it. She'd only ever shared with me.
She didn't say anything about it. You could see it bothered her. She was the one who'd always looked after our mother, on top of everything else she had going. Not being the one who got picked had hurt her somewhere, probably. Then she said what anybody would say. Close the line. Get rid of the phone. Stop opening the app. She was right three times out of three. She offered to make the call and I said no, it's my name on the account, which was true, but there was maybe another reason I was still having trouble admitting to myself.
She asked me to stay for dinner. I said no. I had to put an end to this thing, which was starting to get stupid, and I had to do it now.
I called the carrier. A young guy, polite, reading off a screen. He confirmed the line was active and said I could close it whenever I wanted, right then if I liked.
I asked if the network could still be putting out a position for a phone in that state. He said the network doesn't do that. Then he said that whatever an app shows me is between me and the app, and asked again whether I wanted to go ahead with the closure.
I said I'd call back. I sighed after I hung up. I wanted an answer nobody was probably able to give me. That this was a thing that happens, that I wasn't the only one. That it was an error I could live with and not think about again. And what if it wasn't? What if that mother I'd treated so badly was trying to tell me something?
I shook my head. I'd never believed in that kind of crap. The question stayed anyway.
I opened the browser on my phone. I went back to scrolling the same results I'd leaned on before, one of them a forum with an old-fashioned look to it where a few days earlier I'd left a sloppy question. And somebody, unbelievably, had answered.
He came in under one of those stupid handles obsessive conspiracy guys use, and the way he opened wasn't promising. Eleven years of posts about his father, banned and muted on a number of platforms because of it. But once he got into specifics, his story started lining up with mine in a terrible way.
He said his father's position had kept going for five months after he died. Every evening, at 20:00, a different position. Fourteen point four kilometers north.
My breath went out of me. That was information I hadn't put in the original post.
I only got it back when I read the last line of his answer.
"Close the line. Do it now." More of a warning than advice.
I didn't answer him. I closed the browser and sat there a while with the phone face down on my leg.
Then I thought about the drawer.
If her phone was here, in my house, then the thing that was sharing was inside it, and something inside it can be switched off. I wouldn't have to call anybody. I wouldn't have to say the sentence out loud. She'd turned it on herself one afternoon, sixty kilometers away, with nobody helping her. Whatever she'd managed to do, I could undo.
It was seven. I got up and went into the bedroom and opened the drawer.
Her phone was where I'd put it in May. The blue case she'd never taken off. There was a folded bus ticket tucked inside the back of it.
It had been off since the day I brought it home. I plugged it in and sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the battery symbol so I could get in there and turn it off. Nothing came up. I gave it ten minutes and then another ten. The screen stayed black.
I left it on the charger and picked up my own phone and called her number.
If the line was dead I'd get the three tones you get for a number that's been shut off, and that would put the whole thing back on the app, where I wanted it.
It rang.
Not a message, not a recording. It rang the way a phone rings when it's ringing somewhere. I held hers in my other hand, face up, and it stayed black, and it stayed quiet.
I counted. Twenty-two rings. Then the call ended on its own and the screen told me how long it had gone on. Thirty-nine seconds. There was no voicemail on that line. There never had been. She hadn't wanted one.
I did it again to be sure. Twenty-something rings, the same silence in my left hand, the same nothing at the end of it.
It was ten to eight by then. I stayed on the bed with both phones in front of me.
At eight the dot moved. Up the lake, the way it had been going. I tapped it and the box came up with the distance from the night before.
Fourteen point four.
I unplugged her phone and put it back in the drawer.
I took the car keys off the hook and went.
It's an hour and ten to the bottom of the lake and I did it in less. I don't remember most of it. I remember the toll gate at Sirmione and I remember being angry, which was new, because up to then I'd been a man looking at a screen.
I parked above Garda town a little after ten. Then I walked down to the water and stood on the wall and looked at what you'd expect. Black, and the lights of the other side, and a boat somewhere with a motor. The dot was four kilometers out. There was nothing to go to.
I slept two hours in the car with the seat back and the windows cracked.
I spent the whole next day there. I had a coffee, then I had another one, and around eleven I bought a sandwich I didn't eat. At some point in the afternoon I sat on a bench in the shade and put my head back and slept again. Nobody bothered me. It was a Thursday in July and there were families everywhere.
At five to eight I was standing at the wall with the phone in both hands.
At eight it moved, and it came out of the water.
It came out on the far side, above the road, up in the terraces where the olive trees are. Fourteen point four, the same as always, only this time the line ended somewhere I could stand.
It took me twenty minutes to get around. I left the car in a turnout and went up a farm track on foot with the phone in front of me like a man looking for his own car in a parking garage. The last hundred meters I was in the trees, and the two dots on the screen came together.
There was a dry stone wall. There were olives, and the netting they lay down under them, and the lake down through the branches with the lights coming on around it.
That's all there was. I want to be exact about it. There was nothing there.
I was still standing there when the phone rang in my hand.
It was her number. It had her name on it, the way I've always had it saved.
I didn't answer.
It rang for a long time. Longer than a phone rings. I held it out in front of me and watched it until it stopped, and then the screen went back to the map, and the two dots were still on top of each other, and I walked down to the car.
I'd quit smoking two years ago. I didn't really quit. I got it down to three or four a day and I've stayed there, and there was a pack in the door of the car that had been in there since spring.
I sat on the wall by the turnout and smoked one and looked down at the water with all the lights on it now.
Something had happened, and I hadn't had the guts to find out what. Not even when it came and called me.
I put it out on the wall and drove home.
I got home around two and I didn't open the app, and the next morning I didn't either, and after that it got easy.
August went by. My sister took the kids to the coast for two weeks and sent me photographs of them in the water. I put the drawer phone in a box in the storage unit with my mother's papers, still off, and I didn't plug it in again.
Here's the thing I kept coming back to, the only thing that mattered. My phone never rang again.
Not once. No missed calls, no messages, nothing in the log. It had one way to get to me and it used it, on a Thursday in July, and I hadn't picked up, and that was the end of it. That's how it works with anything. You don't answer, and eventually it stops.
The line was still open. It's on the statement every month, nine euros, between the gym I don't go to and the insurance. I saw it in September and I saw it in October and I let it be. There was nothing to close anymore.
I went back to work. I slept through the night, most nights. At the end of September my sister told me I looked better than I had in a year, and I told her I felt better, and neither of us was lying.
It's ten past two.
I've been in the kitchen since some time after midnight. There are four ends in the ashtray and I remember lighting one of them.
The app was open when I looked down. I'm not saying that to be clever. I mean that somewhere between the first cigarette and the fourth my hand did that, and I wasn't there for it.
The first thing I did, once I noticed, was go back to the olive terraces. I know exactly where it was. I can put my finger on the turnout and the farm track, and I went up the track on the screen the way I went up it on foot. There's nothing there. The wall, the netting, the same three houses down by the road.
Then I tapped her name in the list, the way you do when you want the map to take you to somebody.
The map started moving north.
It didn't jump. That's what I want to be clear about. It travelled, at the zoom I had it on, the one where you can still read street names, and it kept them coming â the lake road, then the valley, then names in German, then names I couldn't have placed but could still read. It took a long time. I watched a country go by under my thumb at walking speed.
When you drag the map yourself it puts the coordinates of the centre along the top. They were climbing. Seventy-eight. Eighty-four. Eighty-nine.
Then the names ran out, because there was nothing left to name. Ice, and the grey the app uses when it has no data, and the little compass in the corner sitting still.
Ninety came up.
Then ninety-one.
There is no ninety-one. Ninety is where it ends, that's the whole idea of it, and I sat there with a cigarette I hadn't lit watching the number keep climbing. Ninety-four. Ninety-eight. It was going at the same speed it had gone through Austria.
Then the grey ended and the blue came back, and there were coastlines in it.
Long ones, with bays and islands and rivers running inland, drawn properly, drawn the way the app draws everything else. There were labels on them. The characters weren't ones I know. Not Russian. Nothing I could have named, and I've looked at enough of the world on that little screen.
The map slowed the way it does when it's arriving, and settled, and centred.
There she was.
Last update, 20:00. Fourteen point four. The number along the top said one hundred and eighteen point six.
I'd like to say I sat there and thought about what to do. I didn't. My thumb was already on her name and the call was already going out, and there is no moment in my memory where I chose it. I've been over it and over it. It isn't in there.
It rang twice. It stopped in the middle of the second ring, the way it stops when somebody picks up.
Nobody says my name. Nothing in it is addressed to me.
There are people in it. A lot of them, and not one of them is close. That's the part I keep going back over â they're all at exactly the same distance, all of them, however many there are. I can't tell what language it is. I'm not sure it's all one.
It runs about forty seconds and then it comes back around and goes again, the same order, the same way.
One of them is my mother.
The call is still open. Eleven minutes.
I don't know what any of it means. I know what I have to do, though. I can feel it in my bones, and I think it's the same thing that made my mother open that app one evening a long time ago and turn the sharing on.
I found my sister in the list. I turned it on.
She'll get the notification when she wakes up, and I'm not going to explain it to her.
The call is still open. Twelve minutes. I'm not going to hang up.
Then I sent her one line.
If you come looking for me, I'll call you. Please answer.