the mute phone and the message left for the machine — "Orin’s recorded voice said he’d just…"

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.