what telephone travel would be like

"This mouthpiece I'm talking into? Of the telephone?"
"Yes?"
"It's like a sieve. It's like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?"
"No, I think that sometimes," he said.
"But the interesting part," she said, "is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would be like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmmn-yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn't be painful--I think of the part where I'm just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane's going very fast and I'm going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I'm miles long, and because it's so cold, I'm crystalline. Very long arms, you'll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshp, as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that's what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." (pp. 95-96)

From "Vox" by Nicholson Baker