Friday · 3:59 p.m. Grace period: 14 h 59 m remaining
I took the headset from her with the earpiece already on the way to my ear, so the first thing in it was the middle of a sentence.
"—acknowledged. Deirdre Pruitt is now the representative of record."
It was the voice. It was pitched where Hollis's had been pitched, with the same set-down pace for the formal words, the same man's or woman's depending on which word it was. It said Deirdre Pruitt with every syllable in its place and did nothing else with any of them. Hollis had never once said my name that way, and Hollis had said it once.
"Thank you," I said.
I didn't look at anything. Then, without my asking, because a new representative opens a contact as the old one did, it read me the two sentences at the pace of something written before I was born.
This contact is recorded and may be heard in full by the Review. Notice is served when heard by an occupant.
I had heard those sentences on Monday night and forty times since, in that voice, and I had heard them as weather. Now I sat in Marisol's chair and heard the last word of the second one, and it was a different word. Heard.
"There's one more person coming," I said. "I'm going to be quiet until she gets here."
"Yes."
Priya had picked the laptop up again and was walking away from me across the floor, fast, toward the old service counter, where the store's public-address panel still sat under a plastic cover nobody had opened since the Shopko closed. Tollefson had stepped back with his notebook and left a yard of carpet between us that nobody had told him to leave. Kessler stood where she'd been standing, with her hands at her sides and nothing in them.
Four o'clock came, and nobody accepted anything.
Kessler's phone rang on the desk. It rang like a phone that has been ringing for an hour and has learned the room, one long ring and a short one, and stopped. Nobody looked at it. It rang again.
"It's ours, not theirs," Kessler said, to the desk. "The four o'clock. The offer stands until the determination. I told the President's office that on Thursday, and they asked whether that was a legal distinction or only a technical one, and I said I'd get back to them." She looked at the phone. "I didn't."
She let it ring out.
On 10th Street, about now, Dana Ruud would be standing at a dark door with a clipboard. I had it for as long as one ring took, and then I put it down. I had a headset on.
I kept the line open and said nothing to it. I'd thought I knew every kind of silence. I knew Mrs. Duchene's, and the one on Monday night at eleven seconds. This one was a woman waiting for one more person to walk into a building. On the floor the calls went on, the last thirty-seven, thanking the world for calling. A man in Duluth thanked someone for their patience. In my ear the hiss lay level.
At 4:06 the phone in the pharmacy office rang, and it wasn't hers.
Haugen took it in the doorway, under the boat, with his back to the floor. He listened for most of a minute. "Yes, sir," he said. He listened again. "Yes, sir. Understood." He put the phone in his jacket and came down the two steps and across the carpet, and the agents at the folding tables got out of his way before they'd decided to.
"Ms. Pruitt. I need that headset."
"I'm on a contact."
"With whom?"
"The provider."
He looked at Tollefson, who said, "Sir, she's on a call," in a voice with no rank in it. Haugen didn't look away from me. He had been fair to me for four days, and he had run out of time to be.
"The offer is to be accepted," he said. "I've been told to see that it is, and I can't from here. You can relinquish to me, on the record, and I'll say the words. I'd like it to be your choice."
"No."
"Then I'm going to take the headset, and you'll say it in the car."
He came around the corner of the desk with one hand open, toward the band over my ear. It wasn't fast. I watched the hand come, and did not lift mine. In the earpiece the voice waited with nothing to say.
"Glen."
Kessler hadn't raised her voice. She hadn't moved.
"Compulsion of the representative by any occupant. You were at the tape when I asked whether that included one acting for a government." She said it the way she'd said it on Tuesday, off a legal pad. "It does. A relinquishment made under restraint is void. Put a hand on her, put her in a car, and whatever she says the provider writes down as void, with your name beside it."
"My people don't restrain anybody."
"Then don't start. Take that headset off her and all you've got is a headset with nothing in it. It knows one voice."
"You don't know that applies."
"No." She said it plainly. "I know I asked it on Tuesday, because I was asked to consider doing what you're about to do. I considered it. This is how it works."
The hand stopped a foot from my ear and stayed there, open, where I had once watched hers stay over a mute key. Tollefson had his notebook out. He wrote the time slowly, so that it could be seen being written.
"That's the President's instruction, Alma."
"It was my sentence," Kessler said. "I'd like it back."
"And if she's wrong?" Haugen's voice had gone quiet. "Tens of millions. You wrote that number."
"I know what I wrote," said Kessler.
In his jacket his phone began to ring.
Nobody spoke. It rang out. It began again. There were two phones on that floor and nobody answering either, and Haugen stood with his hand in the air, and I kept my eyes on the wall and my hands in my lap.
He took the hand down. It took him a while. He put it in his jacket pocket, next to the phone, and left it there.
At 4:08 Terrence took his mug out of his box at 15, and set it on the desk beside the keyboard, and looked at it, and put it back.
Marisol came in at 4:10.
She came through the front doors, past the lieutenant, who did not ask her anything, in her good coat over a housedress and her hair still wet, and she came down the main aisle without her purse. In nine years I had never seen her walk onto that floor with her hands empty. She looked at the aisle hooks. She walked to 13, and stopped where her chair wasn't, and looked at me.
I got up and wheeled it back to her.
"Honey," she said.
"Hi."
"Priya said you needed to be here."
"I need you to hear something."
She sat down at 13. Terrence came and stood behind her chair, and after a moment Tollefson found him a second chair and Terrence sat. They were six feet from me. They'd been six feet from me for years, and I had never once turned around.
I had written it on the back of my hand with Tollefson's pen while we waited, in blue ballpoint, because I don't trust myself with a sentence I've only said in my head. It had smudged. I read it off.
"I require that the Review hear notices one, two and three in full. I submit the premises' recording of the third, made by Brightline, to be heard beside the Review's own."
I said it for the room too. There wasn't any need to. Everyone in the building could see my mouth.
On the far side of the floor, Priya stopped with her hand on the plastic cover and the laptop open on the counter beside it. The cow's file was on that laptop; Kessler had handed it to Priya at seven that morning without a word. Kessler herself had not moved.
"This is a dispute under the terms," the voice said. "The retention offer has lapsed. A recording of the contact is a recorded contact. It will be heard beside the Review's."
I said that for the room.
"Acknowledged," I said. "Please proceed."
Priya had explained it at the counter. The Review takes in a recording the only way it takes in anything, as sound down the line, and the line was mine. Her patch would put the human half on the store's speakers. The provider's half would come to me alone.
There was a wait, and it was longer than the gap. I counted it, out of habit, and gave it up at eight. Then the whole floor went off. It was a chime, two notes, one high and one lower, which I knew from a childhood in Mitchell, and which I'd have known in the dark. It was the sound that used to come before Attention, shoppers. Priya had opened the panel and had a cable in it, and the sound came down out of the speakers in the dropped ceiling, every one, all the way to the back of the building and out over the garden center and out through the doors.
Then it played the queue.
Nobody warns you how long it is. The menu alone is forty-one seconds. For billing, press one. For technical support, press two. A woman recorded once in a booth in Tampa, twelve years ago, on a Tuesday, who had never been told what her voice would say to people. It went through the whole menu with no one pressing anything, and I have never heard it so slowly in my life. Somewhere behind me Terrence said "two" along with it, very softly, out of habit.
If you'd like to speak to an agent, please stay on the line.
Then the Sad Elevator. It went round, and round, in the ceiling of a dead Shopko, and every agent and federal employee in the building listened to it. "I hate this song," Kyle Brekke said, to no one. Somebody at 22 said, "Everybody hates this song."
Your estimated wait time is less than two minutes. We apologize for the wait.
It said it again at sixty seconds. It said it again at a hundred and twenty. The first call had waited three minutes and two seconds. Terrence had his hand over his mouth.
Then the piano stopped in the middle of a phrase, and there was a click, and a man's voice came out of the ceiling.
"Thank you for calling Brightline, this is Hollis. How can I help you today?"
He had a good voice for it. It was a little low and a little tired, from Fargo or from before Fargo, kind, without weight. I looked at Terrence. For years he had said Beaudry about an old headset, and I watched the other name come at him out of the ceiling in a stranger's voice, and stay.
"Hollis," Terrence said. He said it like a word read off a label. "His name was Hollis."
The hiss. It went on. It was the ordinary sound of a line with nobody on it, the sound I have spent seven years refusing to end, and it came out of every speaker in the building with a room's worth of people holding still to hear it. One. On the floor no one said anything. Two, and a man's voice, careful: "Hello?" Three. Four. Nobody in the room moved.
"Releasing the line."
Five point zero. The click was exactly what it was, a plastic sound like a small door.
I had the voice in my ear before the click had finished. It began where it had been going to begin, a second after, on a line that had no one on it.
This contact is recorded and may be heard in full by the Review. Notice is served when heard by an occupant.
Both sentences, whole, into a line that had already closed behind him. The human side of a call ends at the click; the provider's side is kept to the last word. I didn't relay it. The room had heard a man say hello.
There was one question that would have told me whether any of it was working. Is the Review hearing this? It would have answered. I kept it in my mouth and did not ask.
The second wait was two minutes and forty-seven seconds, and it said the lie twice. The Sad Elevator came around and went, and the woman in Tampa apologized for us. In Hilo it was a little after eleven in the morning, and Iris Nakamura had told me she would stay by the phone.
"Thank you for calling Brightline, this is Marisol. How can I help you today?"
She had meant it. It was a warm greeting, and it was hers, and it had been a Tuesday morning at eleven.
"Hello?" the recording said. "Is anyone there?"
She had drawn breath before the second sentence. It was on the tape. Marisol's hands stayed folded on her knee.
"Releasing the line."
Five point one.
In my ear, one second later, the voice began. This contact is recorded and may be—and I found I was saying it. I was saying it with my mouth, silently, along with it, at the set-down pace, to no one, both sentences to the end. Marisol was looking at me. She couldn't hear it and she knew what I was doing anyway.
"Is that it?" she said, very low. "Is that what it was going to say?"
"Yes," I said.
"Ah," said Marisol. "Well. It was polite."
The third wait was three minutes and twenty-one seconds. I did not listen to the music. I watched Terrence. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he took it out and looked at the name, OMAHA, and put it back.
"Thank you for calling Brightline, this is Terrence. How can I help you today?"
"Hello?"
He'd said it as he always says it, like a form that needs its second signature. The hiss ran under it, five seconds of even nothing, and behind the hiss a floor: keys, a chair, somebody a long way down the row thanking someone for their patience. One of the voices was mine, too far off to make out a word.
"Releasing the line."
Five point one. The click.
In my earpiece the two sentences began a second late, into nothing. I let them run.
Then Priya touched the laptop, and Brightline's own file came out of the ceiling: the same greeting, a little drier, the same Hello?, the same click, recorded at the other end of the wire by a machine that was not listening for anything. She had Brightline's waveform on her screen, a flat green line with the click standing up out of it like a tooth. From where I sat I could see that tooth, and I knew, because I had just heard it, that the voice in my ear had begun a hair after it, into nothing. The Review had its own record of the call. Now it had ours beside it: two recordings, made by two parties who had never spoken, and one place where the line ended. All the Review had ever had of this was the word connected.
Terrence stood up, and I thought he was going to leave. He stood behind Marisol's chair with one hand on the back of it, and stayed.
Then it was over, and the floor made no noise.
I have been on hold for forty minutes for a fifty-dollar credit. I have been on hold for eleven minutes at a time for a person who was going to be the difference between a woman keeping her house and losing it. I know what waiting is.
The timer on my screen had started over at the click. Four minutes. Kessler had sat down on the floor. She'd gone to the end of aisle 6, where the tables from the command post still stood, and put her back against the upright of a shelving unit, in her good suit, with her knees up and her shoes side by side on the carpet. Tollefson had sat down on the nearest cot, carefully, and hadn't taken his eyes off me since the click. Haugen stood where he'd stopped, with his hand in his pocket. Priya stood at the counter with her hand still on the plastic cover.
Six minutes. Nobody's phone rang, not Haugen's, not the thirty-seven on the floor. On a floor with a federal command post and every phone line in America ringing, for six minutes nothing rang.
At nine minutes I closed my eyes.
When I opened them the timer said eleven minutes and eight seconds, and the voice, which had never in four days taken a breath before it spoke, spoke as if it had.
The Review has heard three contacts in full, and the premises' record of the third beside it. The records agree. In none of them was the notice heard by an occupant at the time of contact. A notice heard afterward, on replay, is not service. Notice that is not heard is not served. Three notices were not served. The presumption of abandonment is not established. The account is in good standing. Its variance is carried. All items remain in custody. This determination is immediate. The provider regrets that it did not reach you.
I said it aloud. I said every word, and the room heard it in my voice and no one else's.
No one made a sound.
Then it began, in small pieces. Terrence said "That's it," to no one, as you'd say it at the end of a form. Priya lifted her hand off the plastic cover, slowly, as if it had been holding something down, and the hand was shaking.
Kessler laughed. It was one syllable, the worst laugh I've ever heard, and she put the back of her wrist against her mouth afterward as if to check.
"It's after four," she said, from the floor, to the ceiling. She had pulled the phone out of her jacket and turned it off without looking at the screen. "Somebody should tell the President's office it's a little after four."
Haugen took his own phone out of his jacket and looked at it. Then he went up the two steps into the pharmacy office and shut the door, and through the glass I watched him dial.
I had a last thing to ask.
"Is the last contact of the previous representative in the record?"
The gap.
"Yes."
"Can I add a note to the account?"
"Yes."
"Please record this. Hollis stayed on the line."
"The note is added."
The room was starting to make noise. It came up from the back first, then all at once: chairs, someone laughing in the wrong place, Kyle Brekke's voice saying "Thank you for holding, ma'am," to a caller in Idaho who had been on hold for six minutes and wanted to know if the Moon was all right. Marisol had put her head against Terrence's arm and he'd let her. The aisle numbers hung from the ceiling on their hooks. Out the front windows the wind was leaning on the lot lights.
"Is there anything else I can help you with today?" the voice said.
It had my sentence, in my rhythm, and it gave it back as carefully as it had once given me the wait, which was not long. It was the sentence I say at the end of every call. I opened my mouth and there was nothing in it.
I didn't say anything. I didn't take the headset off.