the mute phone and the message left for the machine
it simply sits there, exuding the vague contained menace of mute phones.
Context
The call's whole apparatus is present before it rings: a phone that "sits mute," radiating the specific dread of a device that might at any second demand contact, and an answering-machine message in which Orin addresses not his brother but "Hal's machine," asking what the machine might make of his Emily-Dickinson theory. The recipient of a brother's call has already been demoted to hardware — later Orin admits "I was expecting the Disembodied Voice" — so that even before the two speak, the channel between them is figured as a man talking into a box.