Changing my number had always been a street-level fantasy, the kind of thing I’d dream in my idle hours of doing because it seemed illicit — a thing you’d do on your first day on the job as a spy. It probably would have stayed that way, a never-realized fancy, had a stranger not directly offered to realize it for me. My phone contract expired and I had a busted screen, so I went into the store to get an upgrade. Here is your new SIM card, the employee told me. Can I transfer your number for you? I could have said yes; instead I chose to dream.
I’d had the same number since I first got a cellphone at age 15, which means 25 years with the same string of numbers attached to my name. This persistence was not itself a liability. While I’m a little tech-paranoid — as everybody should be — I was under no illusions that simply changing numbers would stymie surveillance by tech companies. Instead, I wanted to see how disconnecting from the number would or would not disturb my everyday world.
Your phone number gives your mother, your plumber and that hookup from 2013 strangely equal links to you; and each person who keeps your number generally does so on the basis that they might use it, a warrant that grows more unlikely as the years pass. In my case, the phone number was also on file at a dozen former rental properties and every pizza store that had ever opened or closed in those properties’ varied delivery zones.
All those random people; all those random pizzas. Do they make up who I am? We all know that passports expire and email addresses change; simple acts of wedlock are sometimes all it takes to obliterate a family name that has lasted for generations. By contrast, a phone number is treated as if it were inviolable. You can kick your phone’s digits at any time — you don’t even need to wait for an upgrade. Why weren’t more people doing this? If so many were avoiding “dropping didge,” there had to be a shocking outcome I could not foresee, more serious than the logistical hassles.
I needn’t have worried. I experienced plenty of missteps, but none socially fatal. Once, I visited a friend at her office and found the door locked and the hallway empty, because she had a migraine and had texted my old number to tell me. Then there was an encounter on a tram — the kind of loose acquaintance I might see once a year. We rode several stops together. He was obscurely hostile. It could’ve been anything, but I later realized he must have texted me and thought I was ghosting.
If we had talked about it, I could have explained that ghosting, cleaved from its negative valence, is a pretty good word for the exhilarating experience of controlled reinvention that a new number allows. There’s an organic grocery store on the other side of my suburb that asks me for my phone number to prove that I’m a member in order to get rotating discounts on refrigerator treats. It’s a loyalty program in which you don’t get points or birthday messages, just access to the sticker-advertised discounts. Once or twice I have reeled off the old digits, not having updated my account with the fresh ones. I could have been busted, those numbers no longer being mine; in the meantime, hadn’t we continued to enjoy these frictionless purchases together? Wasn’t the defunct number just a conventional point of ingress, being used to access the real me?
There’s a glamour to the idea of a person who can take their life, scrunch it in a ball, toss it and move on, never again to think of whom or what they leave behind. There’s also a darkness in which people have to endure brutal cycles of phoenixlike destruction and rebirth. I grew up knowing both kinds, because I was an Air Force kid. Every few years we would pack up, switch addresses and get new area or even country codes. At these bases, I’d often meet grown-ups who dealt as best they could with their careers’ protean qualities, focused on the benefits while dreaming of a life in which they might eventually put down roots. I also met hectic people who I’m sure, if not still in the armed forces, are finding other reasons to keep the cycle of chaos rolling.
Whether from wisdom, cowardice or fortune, most of us — the lucky ones, I think — walk a line between the need for constancy and the need for change. This balance is not to be taken lightly. Without a level of staged upset, you might end up painting that kitchen a deep eggplant, adopting those triplets, seceding from that nation. At the same time, once you start jettisoning those convenient markers of self, when are you meant to stop? I suspect that you may end up finding out that the these surface-level aspects are only nominally surface — who are we to judge what defines who we really are? There’s a trick to calibrating the appropriate level of change: an act that disturbs the firmament, but only disturbs it.
Of course, it can turn out that the things we toss away are less disposable than we assume. As if to show that it needs me no more than I need it, my old number has already been assigned to someone else. I know because another friend I hadn’t seen in ages started sending a delicious volley of gossipy text messages, and got a reply from a stranger politely explaining that they did not know what she was talking about.
I love knowing that this stranger is out there, that maybe we’ve passed on the street, though hopefully not in the aisles of that organic grocery. But part of me thinks I’d know it’s them. A look would pass between us, something that says, Don’t call me — I’ll call you.
Ronnie Scott is an Australian novelist whose next book is “Letter to a Fortunate Ex.”
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