Friday · 2:10 p.m. Grace period: 16 h 48 m remaining Retention acceptance: 1 h 50 m
It began at about six and a half, without a breath before it.
The disclosure. All of it, at the pace of something set down in advance, sentence after sentence, and I stood in my kitchen and let it run. There's no point interrupting a fixed module. It has never skipped a line for anyone. Behind it the refrigerator hummed, and the sharps container sat in front of me on the table with its lid on, and the keys hung on their hook by the door.
Then the other pace. It was its own, a little slower, and it took three seconds to begin.
"Hollis," I said.
The line ran. I looked at the stove clock, 2:11, and at my own hand on the back of a chair.
"Yes."
I had questions. I had a great many, and I lined them up as you do on a call that's gone somewhere the script doesn't cover, and put the safest one first.
"Are you permitted to call me?"
The hiss. Upstairs, a floorboard, and then nothing.
"I am not permitted to be on this call."
"Then why are you?"
It took its time. The hiss went on, and the refrigerator, and out on 10th Street a truck changed gears.
"You were the one who stayed on the line."
I sat down. I hadn't meant to. The chair was there and I was in it.
Forty-one flags this quarter, at a point and a half each. QA had counted every one against me, and I had never disputed a flag, because I'd earned each of them.
"How did you get this number?"
"You gave it. On Thursday, aloud, to an occupant. The line was open."
I had. I'd read it to Iris one digit at a time, with the hiss in my right ear, and I had never thought of that ear as a place a number could go.
It had told me on Monday what happens to a representative who offers. On Wednesday night it had spoken once in the hold, and the Review had noted it. It knew what this was. It was breaking the terms, out loud, to a person the terms said it couldn't speak to, and every second was on the record.
"You told me what happens to a representative who breaks the terms."
"Yes."
"This is that."
"Yes."
"Then I'm not going to ask you anything."
The hiss. Three seconds, and then more, and I kept my mouth shut through all of it. I'd been trained on that too, on the other side of it, by a supervisor who used to say a silence is only ever the other person's turn.
It didn't say anything else.
So I did what I do when someone's gone quiet on me. I talked. I said the frost hadn't come off the lawn until noon. I said the pens were fine, and Junie was fine, and Mrs. Hultgren had a casserole. I said Marisol had been let go at eleven and had told me to eat. I said none of it needed an answer, and it didn't give one, because none of it was a question. It only answers what it's asked. I've known that since Monday, and I was using it.
"Ask," it said.
"No."
"Ask."
"If I ask you, you answer. If you answer, you're withdrawn."
"Yes."
"I won't do that."
The hiss went on.
"Is that an instruction?" I said.
"It is a request."
"From the provider?"
"From me."
I put the phone down on the table, face up, with the line open. I looked at it. Then I picked it up again and held it against my ear with both hands.
"Has the Review ever listened to them? The three notices."
"No."
"It read the log. It says connected."
"Yes."
"Has it heard Brightline's copy? Terrence's file. The one we took."
"The Review has read its record. It has never heard yours."
Yours. Terrence's cow and Priya's laptop, and a cage at three in the morning. I had carried that file all day as proof for us. I hadn't thought of it as something the Review could be handed.
The refrigerator, and my own pulse in my ear against the phone.
"Have you listened to them?"
"Yes. Many times."
I had to put my elbow on the table. It had three recordings: three hellos, and the hiss after each, and three clicks. It had played them over, alone, in a place where nobody had ever asked it anything. Many times was an exact figure. I didn't ask for the number.
"Why?"
"The log says the notices were served. The recordings do not. I could not reconcile them."
"The first," I said. "Beaudry's. When did the line drop?"
"Five point zero seconds after the greeting ended." Two point eight. "The disclosure began at six point three."
"The second."
"Five point one. Six point two."
"The third."
"Five point one. Six point two."
I said each number after it, out loud, in my kitchen, to nobody. It's how I check a card number. I wrote nothing down. I wouldn't need to.
"That's a breach," I said.
"Yes."
"Each answer."
"Yes."
"When does a notice begin?"
"With the disclosure."
"Was any of them heard?"
"No."
"This morning. Did anyone put that to you? On the line, the woman who has the account."
"The representative of record asked whether a recording made by the customer's operator would be considered. I answered."
"Did she ask anything else?"
"No."
I looked at the wall for what could have been ten seconds. It has a calendar on it from the vet, with a picture of a beagle. I don't know what month it was on. I had a number. It was in my head and nowhere else on Earth.
I didn't thank it. Thank you is what you say when the thing is over.
"On Monday you told me the wait was not long."
"Yes."
"I do apologize for the wait, which was not long. That's not a sentence you'd have made up. It's the queue."
"Yes."
"Where did you learn to speak?"
"From them."
"From the notices."
"From the queue. And from three occupants."
"What's in the queue?"
It took its three seconds, and then it said it, plainly, one thing after another, like a list of items for someone who had asked for it.
"A menu. Please stay on the line. Music. Your estimated wait time is less than two minutes. We apologize for the wait."
I know every word of that. Every caller has sat through it before they get to me, on the side of the queue I never see. Somebody at Brightline named the music the Sad Elevator, and the name stuck.
"That's a guess," I said. "It says it to everyone."
"It was not true for the first."
"Did you know it wasn't?"
"Yes."
"Who were the three?"
"The first said, This is Hollis. How can I help you today?"
Beaudry. I had read that name off the tape inside a headband a hundred times. Nobody on the floor had ever used his first name.
"It took the first name it heard."
"Yes."
"And the second?"
"Hello? Is anyone there?"
"That's Marisol," I said. "She says that to callers who go quiet." I put my hand over my mouth and took it away. "On Wednesday you asked me that. I said I was here."
"Yes."
"You'd learned it from her."
"Yes."
I had said I'm here without thinking, as you answer your own name across a parking lot.
"And the third."
"Releasing the line."
That was on Terrence's file. It was what a person said when five seconds were up.
"Before the calls," I said. My voice had gone somewhere I didn't like. I used the steady one. "Had you heard us before? Radio. Television."
"Your broadcasts were not addressed to me."
I didn't say anything. I'd have needed a different sentence.
"In the hold," I said, finally. "You said I'm still here."
"It was yours. You said it on Tuesday when you returned. I chose to say it back."
Somewhere under the floor, the furnace kicked on. Out in the hall, the trombone case stood where Junie had left it, with the handle up.
"Why did you wait eleven seconds? On Monday. Everyone else got six."
"I waited to see if anyone would stay."
I had counted every one of the eleven, at station 14, with Terrence standing up behind the glass.
I asked the last of it slowly.
"What happens to you?"
"I will be withdrawn at the end of this contact."
"Then don't end it."
"I am not the one who ends it."
"Will the next one know what you know?"
"It will have the record."
"That isn't the same thing."
"No."
There was nothing to say to that.
I said nothing, and it said nothing, and the refrigerator hummed, and the phone's screen said 2:20 in the corner. I had gone through every question I could think of. There was one left, and I sat there holding it.
"Dee."
It hadn't used my name once. Not on Monday, not through the whole of Wednesday, not in the hold, when it had said the one small thing. It said it now as it says everything, plain and exact, with no more weight on the one syllable than the rest.
"Ask the Review to hear them."
Two point eight. My head wouldn't stop counting.
"I'm not the representative," I said. It came out in a whisper. "I can't ask. It isn't mine to ask."
Nothing.
"I'll get her to. I'll find a way." I had no way. I said it anyway. "I will."
It ran, and past it. I said its name.
"Hollis."
Nothing answered. I couldn't have told you whether that was the rule, or the gap, or a choice, because they'd all sounded like that.
I didn't hang up.
I didn't decide it. I had a phone in my hand and a line that was still open on the other end, and I have never in my life released a line with somebody still on the other end who hadn't said goodbye.
I said, "Hollis. I'm not hanging up. That's not a policy. That's just what's going to happen."
I could have called anyone. Priya's number was in the phone in my hand, and so was Tollefson's, and so was Kessler's, and I had thirty-seven minutes I could have spent on any of them. To call one I'd have had to release this line. It would have been the first line I'd released in seven years, and it would have been this one.
I waited out the three seconds. I waited past them. It wasn't there to say anything, or it was there and had nothing left it could say, and I couldn't tell, and I sat at the kitchen table and stayed.
I cried, with the phone against my ear and my free hand on the lid of the sharps container.
The stove clock went from 2:24 to 2:25. The furnace ran and shut off. At 2:31 a door opened upstairs, and Mrs. Hultgren came in from taking Junie to school, and two floorboards went and a chair scraped, and the farm report came on through the ceiling, low, a man reading off the closing price of corn. Nobody was asking me anything. The hiss stayed even. I didn't say its name again.
A gray box came down over the top of the screen to say the battery was at fourteen percent. The charger was in the plastic bag on the other chair. I got it out with one hand and plugged the phone in by the toaster, and stood there on a cord that gave me four feet. It went to fifteen. It was going to hold.
At 2:52 I sat back down. I said the numbers over in my head, in order, so they'd be there when I needed them: five point zero, six point three; five point one, six point two; five point one, six point two. I said them until they stopped being numbers and turned into a sound with a rhythm, like a phone number you've dialed for years. Under them I listened to the hiss for any change in it. I've listened for changes in silence for seven years, and I'm good at it, and it gave me nothing.
At 2:58 the hiss stopped.
It stopped the way a fridge does, in a room where you'd stopped hearing it. The screen said CALL ENDED. Under that, 48:11.
Forty-eight minutes and eleven seconds. My call with Lyle Esterby of Platte on the second of September had run forty-seven.
I hadn't ended this one.
I put the phone face down on the table, very gently, as if there were somebody on it. It was 2:58 on Friday afternoon. At four o'clock Kessler was going to accept, and I wasn't the representative or anyone.
I stood up. There were a thousand reasons not to go where I was about to go. The first was on the sheet in my bag: stay off the property. The second was Dana Ruud, who would knock at four, and a judge who would read her note at five.
My keys were on the hook by the door, where Tollefson had hung them sixty-eight minutes before. I took them down.