June 4–July 14, 1979

June 4–July 14, 1979 is the exact span recorded for a young illustrator’s forty-day bout of vomiting and a run of anonymous calls that overlapped almost precisely with it. Anchored by a diary that records not only the beginning and end dates but the final incidents down to the minute, the interval turns an ordinary calendar into an unresolved pattern: bodily distress and a hostile voice arrive together, persist together, and abruptly vanish together, without the story establishing why.

The Recorded Interval

The illustrator’s diary allowed the narrator to give the episode unusually exact boundaries. The vomiting began on June 4, 1979, a clear day, and ended on July 14, a cloudy one. The calls began June 5 and continued until July 14, so the two disturbances were not perfectly simultaneous at their outset, but ran in striking parallel for nearly the same period.

The episode is recounted retrospectively by a narrator who knew the illustrator through a drawing he had made for a story the narrator published. Their conversations also ranged over old jazz records, which they collected and traded. It was during one of those exchanges, over whiskey in the illustrator’s apartment, that the narrator heard about the forty days. The diary converts an unsettling memory into a sequence that can be checked against dates and times, while leaving its meaning uncertain.

Two Daily Intrusions

The first vomiting episode came after the night of June 3, when the illustrator had drunk a good deal of whiskey and beer and slept with a friend’s wife, as he had done before. At eight the next morning, he vomited the contents of his stomach into the toilet. Drinking seemed an ordinary explanation for that first incident, and he did not feel ill; he returned to his desk and worked with unusual vigor. By noon he was hungry enough to make a ham-and-cucumber sandwich and drink a beer. Half an hour later, he vomited the meal as well.

The phone began intruding on June 5. A man said the illustrator’s name and hung up. The narrator wondered whether the caller might be a husband or boyfriend of one of the women the illustrator had slept with, but the illustrator rejected that explanation: he knew those men’s voices, and this one was unfamiliar and carried a nasty note. The same brief call came once a day, at an unpredictable hour—morning, evening, or the middle of the night. He could not simply stop answering, because the telephone was also how he received work and calls from women.

The two repetitions therefore occupied the same everyday life in different ways. One repeatedly emptied the illustrator’s stomach; the other made the telephone ring and then offered no explanation. He could identify neither a cause for the vomiting nor a connection between the calls and his body. Their temporal overlap was exact enough to disturb him, but not to solve anything.

Endpoints and Unanswered Call

The diary preserves the last day with the same precision as the first. At 9:30 on the morning of July 14, the illustrator brought up toast, tomato salad, and milk: his final bout of vomiting. At 10:25 that night, while listening to Erroll Garner’s Concert by the Sea and drinking Seagram’s VO, he received the final call. The caller said his name as before, then added, “Do you know who I am?” The illustrator said nothing; the caller waited in silence for what he estimated was ten or fifteen seconds, then hung up, leaving only the dial tone.

The following morning, both disturbances were gone. The nausea and calls never returned, and the illustrator regained the weight he had lost, returning to 140 pounds. The custom-made suit and two pairs of trousers he had bought for his thinner body remained in his closet as souvenirs. The exactness of the ending closes the recorded sequence without resolving the caller’s identity or explaining the vomiting. The last question makes the silence feel charged, but the account does not disclose who was on the line.

Narrative Significance

The date range matters because it puts a firm frame around events that resist interpretation. The diary can establish that the symptoms and calls coincided, that each occurred repeatedly, and that both stopped on July 14; it cannot establish that one caused the other or that the caller knew anything about the illness. The narrator’s questions test possible explanations, but the illustrator’s uncertainty remains intact.

The final call sharpens rather than settles the mystery. For weeks, the caller had supplied only the illustrator’s name before hanging up. On the last night, the added question invited recognition, yet the two men exchanged no answer. In that contrast between a meticulous chronology and a missing explanation, the span becomes more than a set of dates: it is a bounded episode whose pattern is unmistakable and whose central connection remains beyond the evidence.