Tuesday · 12:41 a.m. Grace period: 93 h 17 m remaining
I said the number out loud for Terrence, and he came down the steps with his phone still in his hand and stood beside station 14 for a while without saying anything. Then he went back up and called Omaha again.
Omaha had its own ideas. At 12:50 my earpiece went dead in the middle of the hiss, the same clean nothing as when Terrence transferred it, and the screen said CALL ENDED. Forty seconds later the tone sounded, the screen filled with nothing, and I said the greeting to it. The hiss came back. I waited. The two sentences came, the same as the first time, the same set-down pace. Then the other voice, its own.
"We got cut off," I said. "What happened?"
"The channel was closed from the premises."
At 1:04 it happened again. The same forty seconds, the same tone, the same two sentences. I said the greeting both times, all the way through, in the same voice I'd use for anyone.
At 1:30 Terrence set his phone on my desk on speaker, and two people from Omaha introduced themselves to the pharmacy counter. Brent Kolar was Network Operations. He sounded young and awake and like he was eating cereal. Carla Stroh was Workforce Integrity, which is Brightline's name for the people who decide whether you're stealing time.
"Ms. Pruitt," Carla said. "I want to start by saying we're concerned about you."
That's the opening from the Wellness section of the supervisor guide, and she said it well. She said Brent had tried twice to clear a hung session on the main number and the session had re-established both times, to my station. She said she'd pulled the recordings of station 14 since 10:14. She said they had three hours of me, alone, talking into a silent line, asking it questions and repeating things it hadn't said.
"It answers," I said. "It just doesn't answer you."
"You also have forty-one dead-air flags this quarter," Carla said, kindly. "Holding silent lines. It's a pattern."
It is. Seven years ago in March I released a silent call at five seconds, per script, and the silence was a woman named Loreen Vick on her kitchen floor in Hartford, and I haven't released one since.
I didn't say that to Carla.
"So here's where we've landed," she said. "Brent's going to block the originating trunk at six, at the shift change, which is our change window. That ends it cleanly. In the meantime we'd love for you to go home and get some rest."
"She's been separated," Terrence said. "As of 10:55."
"Then she doesn't need to be on the floor at all, does she," Carla said. "Terrence, we'll need her badge."
He didn't ask me for it.
Every escalation path at Brightline is built to end a call. That's not cynicism. It's what they're for. I went through them anyway, because that is what you do before you tell anyone you've tried everything. My supervisor had fired me. Omaha was cutting the trunk. Continental Wireless's client-relations desk opens at eight a.m. Eastern, and its after-hours number plays a recording that tells you to call Brightline.
At 2:40 I asked Hollis the question I'd been circling since midnight.
"You said we're behind. How have we been paying? Nobody here has ever sent you anything."
The hiss ran. In the office, Terrence had fallen asleep upright with his hand around his phone.
"You have been paying in rotation."
"In what?"
"Daylight."
I sat with that. I've taken payments in every form the system accepts and a few it doesn't. I once talked a man in Aberdeen through paying his bill with a prepaid card he'd bought at a gas station in a snowstorm, one digit at a time, while his truck idled. I had never been told I'd been paying with the day.
"So we're behind."
Nothing, because I hadn't asked anything. I asked what I'd have asked for anyone.
"Can we set up a payment arrangement?"
"An account in good standing carries variance without penalty. An account under presumption does not."
That's a no. I've said it myself, in about those words, to people who cried.
At 3:20 I had to go to the bathroom so badly it had become the loudest thing on the floor.
"Can you hold on a second?"
"Yes."
Holding is a thing with rules at Brightline, a code and a timer and a recorded apology. I had the headset half off. "Is that okay, or is there a rule?"
"A hold under the terms has an estimate. This is waiting."
I hadn't asked what a hold under the terms was for. I took the headset off and set it on the desk with the earpiece up, and walked back past the dark aisles to the restrooms by the old layaway counter, and was gone four minutes. The whole way there and back I could hear the hiss in my head, which is not possible at that distance. When I put the headset back on it was still there. Nothing else came.
"I'm still here," I said.
The hiss ran on. Nothing. It had been asked to wait, and it had waited, and nobody had told it to stop.
"Are you still there?"
"Yes."
At 3:45 Terrence came down from the office in his socks, carrying his shoes, and sat at 15 with them in his lap. His shift had ended at eleven. So had mine, in a different way.
"Omaha asked me if you were a danger to yourself," he said.
"What did you tell them?"
"I said you were a danger to handle time." He looked at the shoes. "They didn't laugh either."
"You should go home, Terrence."
"I've got a daughter who calls me at seven every morning to tell me she's up," he said. "I figure I'll go home after that." He sat at 15 until almost five, and every so often he looked at my headset as if it might do something he'd be responsible for.
At 4:30 I asked it to hold on again. It said yes. I went to the break room.
My cell was at nine percent, and my cell is what Junie's glucose monitor talks to. I wasn't spending it on hold with the government. The break room has a landline on the wall by the old garden-center doors, for emergencies, which Brightline defines as anything that isn't a customer. I looked up the FBI's Sioux Falls office on my phone and dialed it on the wall.
You have reached the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sioux Falls Resident Agency. This office is currently closed. It gave me a number for the Minneapolis Field Office, which is open all night. I wrote it on the back of my hand, under the premises identifier.
A duty agent in Minneapolis answered on the second ring. He sounded like someone who takes calls for a living, which I liked him for. I gave him what intake needs, in the order intake needs it. I didn't tell him it was true. I told him what I'd been told, and by whom.
"Ma'am," he said, when I'd finished, "I'm required to ask whether you believe anyone is in immediate danger."
"Not immediate."
"Then—"
"At six o'clock my company disconnects the call. If it's nothing, nothing happens. If it isn't nothing, that's the only line there is." I looked at the clock over the break-room sink. "I need someone with a badge here before six to tell Omaha not to."
"I'll have someone from the Sioux Falls office contact you. I can't promise a time."
"You can put it in the notes," I said. "Before six. The next person always reads the notes."
The line was quiet. I could hear him typing, and then stop, and then type something short.
"It's in the notes," he said.
Special Agent Rick Tollefson walked through the front doors at 5:52 in a gray SDSU fleece with the jackrabbit on it, carrying a travel mug and a phone charger. He was tired and polite and from Brookings, and he said good morning to Terrence and to me, and then, after thinking about it, to the dark floor behind us.
"Duty agent says you told him to put it in the notes," he said.
"Did he?"
"He did. Underlined. I didn't know you could underline in that system."
He plugged the charger into the outlet under my desk and handed me the other end without comment. Then he picked up Terrence's phone, which still had Brent on it, and asked for the change ticket.
"This line is now part of a federal matter," Tollefson said. "I'm asking you not to touch it."
"Do you have that in writing?" Brent said.
"You'll have it in writing by eight."
"Then I need your name and badge number for the ticket."
Tollefson spelled his name. Brent typed. At 5:57 the ticket to block the originating trunk was set to CANCELLED – EXTERNAL REQUEST, and the call went on through six o'clock like any other call.
Brent stayed on. It turned out he liked a problem. By 6:40, with Tollefson asking him questions over the speaker, he'd pulled everything the switch knew about the call.
"Latency's two point eight seconds round trip," he said. "Every exchange. Never moves. The worst satellite hop I've ever seen is six hundred milliseconds."
"So where is it?" Tollefson said.
"It's about one point four light-seconds out. Call it two hundred and sixty thousand miles."
"Out where?"
"Out," said Brent. "Just out."
I had been calling the three seconds the gap, to myself, since around eleven. It was nice to have a number for it. It wasn't nice to have that one.
Brent crunched something. "Here's what I can't do. I can see the traffic. It's there. I can't hear the far end. Your recordings, my taps, the monitor jack on her desk. They get her, and hiss. That's it."
Tollefson looked at my headset for a while. Then he pressed the speaker button on my console, the one we're forbidden to use because of customer privacy, and the hiss came out into the room, soft and even. I kept the headset on and asked Hollis to say its name.
The speaker gave the room three seconds of hiss, and then more hiss. In my ear, where the headset still was, Hollis said its name.
"Hollis," I said.
Tollefson was looking at the speaker. "Nothing," he said.
"It only talks in my ear."
He asked to try. I gave him the headset and he put it on, which took some adjusting, and said, "Good morning, this is Special Agent Tollefson with the FBI." He waited. He waited long enough to be sure, and then longer, to be fair. He gave it back.
"Did you hear him?" I asked Hollis.
"Yes."
"Why didn't you answer him?"
"He is not the representative of record."
I said it for the room. Tollefson wrote it down in a notebook with a pencil, which I didn't know agents still did.
"Ask it why it called a phone company," he said.
"Why did you call this number?"
The hiss. The sky in the front windows had gone from black to the dark blue it goes for about ten minutes, and over the roof of the Hy-Vee across the street there was a line of pale yellow.
"The customer has designated no channel. We used the number the most occupants called when something was wrong, in the rotations we listened."
"That's us," Terrence said. He had come down to stand behind Tollefson with his arms around himself. "That's one of the most-called numbers in the country. That's just the main line."
Brent wanted the headset's model and serial number, to rule out the hardware. I turned the headset over. On the inside of the headband there was a strip of label-maker tape that said D. PRUITT, and it had started to lift at one end, and under it was an older strip of the same tape.
"Beaudry's old headset," Terrence said. "His name's still on the tape under there."
It said BEAUDRY. I read Brent the serial number from the other side. I never worked with him. He sat 14 on the early shift, and everybody called him Beaudry, and he'd gone to Fargo before the station came to me. I pressed my own label back down with my thumb.
At 7:15 I called Junie on my cell, which was at sixty-one percent.
"Mrs. Hultgren says you're working late," she said. "It's morning."
"It's a long call."
"How long?"
"Nine hours."
She thought about it. I could hear Mrs. Hultgren's kitchen behind her, the radio on the farm report, a spoon in a bowl.
"Are you in trouble?"
"I'm in a position."
"That's what people say when they're in trouble," Junie said. "I did my breakfast one already. Mrs. H watched."
"Thank you."
"She says you should eat something. I said you won't."
Her pens are in the refrigerator door at home, in the butter shelf, where the butter used to be. I checked them Sunday. With the coverage ending on the thirty-first, what's in that shelf gets her into the first week of November, and then the shelf is a shelf.
"Go to school," I said. "Do the thing Mrs. Hultgren says."
"You too," said Junie, and hung up, the way she does, before you've finished being a parent at her.
At 8:20 Tollefson asked for something he could check.
"Not what it says," he said. "Something that's either there or it isn't."
I asked Hollis the only question I could think of that had a place for an answer.
"If they're released, which one gets here first? And where is it now?"
"In which reference?"
"The one our astronomers use," I said, after Tollefson had mouthed it.
The whiteboard on the wall next to the board still said TODAY'S AHT GOAL: 6:30 — WE'VE GOT THIS!, with a smiley face Terrence had drawn and then tried to fix. I erased it with the side of my hand. Then I wrote down what Hollis said, starting with the name it gave the thing, Item 7, and then one digit at a time, repeating each one out loud, the way I'd read back a card number: right ascension, three hours, seventeen minutes, forty-two point eight seconds. Declination, minus twenty-eight degrees, fifty-one minutes, six seconds. Distance from the premises, two hundred and ninety-one million, four hundred thousand kilometers. I read it all back to Hollis and asked if it was correct. Hollis said it was.
Tollefson took out his phone and photographed the whiteboard. He checked the picture, and took it again, closer.
"I'm sending this to someone who'll tell me it's nothing," he said.
He sent it. Then he stood in front of the whiteboard with the phone in his hand and the screen turned up, and waited for the someone.