The Repeat Caller

Night Shift

Chapter 14: The Repeat Caller

Delia recognized the number before the voice. The ANI populated the screen — the phone number, the name associated with the number in the reverse directory, the address — and the recognition was immediate, was the recognition of a pattern, the pattern being: this number had appeared on Delia's screen before. This number had appeared on Delia's screen many times before. This number was a regular. This number was Mrs. Eunice Pemberton of 3847 Mynders Avenue in the Berclair neighborhood, and Mrs. Eunice Pemberton called 911 on an average of once a week, sometimes twice a week, sometimes every night for a stretch of nights, and the calls were always the same call, the same report, the same emergency that was not an emergency, the same voice that Delia knew and that the other dispatchers on the night shift knew and that the officers in the Highland precinct knew because the officers had responded to 3847 Mynders Avenue dozens of times and had found, each time, the same thing: nothing. No intruders. No suspicious vehicles. No noises that a human was producing. An elderly woman in a house alone, hearing things that were not there, calling 911 because 911 answered.

The phone beeped. The double tone. Delia pressed the key.

"Memphis 911, what is the location of your emergency?"

"This is Eunice Pemberton at 3847 Mynders Avenue. There is someone in my backyard. I can hear them walking. They're trying to get into the house."

The voice was thin and clear, the voice of a woman in her late seventies or early eighties — Delia did not know Mrs. Pemberton's exact age, the CAD did not record the caller's age, the age a detail that existed outside the system's data — a voice that carried the particular quality of elderly speech, the quality that was both fragile and precise, the voice weakened by age but sharpened by the caller's certainty, the certainty that someone was in the backyard, the certainty that was absolute and was, almost certainly, wrong.

"Mrs. Pemberton, are you inside the house with the doors locked?"

"Yes. I'm in the living room. I can hear them. They're in the backyard near the fence."

"Can you see anyone?"

"No. The curtains are drawn. But I can hear them. Footsteps. Someone is walking back there."

Delia typed. She typed the information into the CAD the way she typed every caller's information — fully, accurately, without abbreviation or shorthand, because the protocol required full documentation regardless of the dispatcher's assessment of the call's validity, the documentation the system's record, the record the evidence that the call was received and processed and dispatched, the record protecting the caller and the dispatcher and the system, the record the thing that would exist if the improbable happened, if the night that Mrs. Pemberton called and reported someone in her backyard was the night that someone was actually in her backyard.

Because this was the thing. This was the thing that the protocol understood and that the dispatchers understood and that the officers understood even as they drove to 3847 Mynders Avenue for the fortieth time: the call might be real. This call, tonight, might be the call where the intruder was not a phantom, where the footsteps were not the product of an old woman's loneliness echoing back to her as fear, where the report was accurate and the response was necessary and the dismissal of the call would have been the system's failure. The probability was low. The probability, based on the history, was very low — thirty-nine responses, thirty-nine clearings, thirty-nine times the officers had walked the perimeter of 3847 Mynders Avenue and found nothing and reported nothing and cleared the call and driven away. But the probability was not zero. And dispatch did not operate on probability. Dispatch operated on the call. The call was the thing. The call was a woman reporting an intruder. The call required a response. The probability was the system's problem to calculate, and the system's calculation was: respond. Always respond. Respond because the cost of responding to a call that is not real is an officer's time, and the cost of not responding to a call that is real is a life, and the calculus between time and life is not a calculus at all, is not a calculation, is a principle, the principle that said: respond.

"Mrs. Pemberton, I'm going to send an officer to check. They'll take a look around the property. I'd like you to stay inside with your doors locked until the officer arrives. Can you do that?"

"Yes. Thank you. Please hurry."

"They'll be there as soon as they can, ma'am."

Delia dispatched. Code 1 — routine, non-urgent. The code reflected the assessment: repeat caller, no confirmed threat, history of unfounded reports. The code determined the response level: the officer would respond, but the officer would not respond with urgency, would not run lights and sirens, would proceed to the address at the pace that the code prescribed, the pace of a routine response, the pace that balanced the obligation to respond with the reality that the resources were limited and the night's calls were distributed across a finite number of officers.

She stayed on the line. She did not need to stay on the line — the protocol did not require it for a routine police dispatch, the information had been gathered, the dispatch had been made, the call could be closed from the dispatcher's end. But Delia stayed on the line because Mrs. Pemberton needed the line, needed the voice, needed the connection that the phone provided, the connection that was the reason for the call — not the intruder, not the footsteps, not the security concern. The connection. The voice. The hearing and the being heard.

Delia understood this. She had understood it gradually, over the months and years of Mrs. Pemberton's calls, the understanding arriving not as an insight but as an accumulation, the accumulation of the sameness of the calls, the sameness revealing the pattern, the pattern revealing the truth, the truth being: Mrs. Pemberton was not calling about intruders. Mrs. Pemberton was calling about being alone.

The house on Mynders Avenue was the house that Mrs. Pemberton had shared with her husband, Harold Pemberton, for forty-seven years. Harold had died — Delia did not know when, did not know how, the system did not contain this information, the information existing outside the CAD's data fields, existing in the life that Mrs. Pemberton lived at 3847 Mynders Avenue, the life that the calls described obliquely, the way a shadow describes the object that casts it, the calls the shadow of the life, the life the object, the object a woman alone in a house where she had not been alone for forty-seven years. Harold's death was the event that produced the calls. Not immediately — the calls had started, according to the CAD's history, approximately two years ago, which meant approximately two years after Harold's death, which meant the calls began when the mourning became the aloneness, when the grief became the condition, when the missing became the permanent state rather than the temporary affliction, when Mrs. Pemberton realized that Harold was not coming back and that the house was not going to fill itself and that the nights were going to be this — this quiet, this empty, this long — for the rest of her life.

And the rest of her life was now, was tonight, was 1:47 AM on a Friday in October, and the rest of her life was the living room with the curtains drawn and the telephone in her hand and the voice on the other end of the telephone, and the voice was Delia.

"Mrs. Pemberton, the officer is on the way. How are you doing?"

"I'm fine. I just — I wish they'd hurry. I can still hear the noises."

"What kind of noises are you hearing?"

"Footsteps. Like someone walking on the gravel. Harold put gravel along the fence line — for drainage, he said. You can hear when someone walks on it."

Harold. The name entered the conversation the way Harold entered Mrs. Pemberton's calls — unexpectedly, casually, as though Harold were still alive, still a reference point, still the person who had put the gravel along the fence line, the gravel that Mrs. Pemberton heard someone walking on, the gravel that was Harold's project, Harold's contribution to the house, Harold's presence persisting in the landscaping the way Harold's absence persisted in the silence.

"That's helpful, ma'am. The officer will check the fence line."

"Harold always said the gravel was good for security. He said you could hear anyone coming. He was right. You can hear them."

The hearing was the thing. Mrs. Pemberton could hear someone walking on the gravel, and the someone was not there, and the hearing was not a malfunction but a function — the function of a mind that was listening for presence, that was listening for the sound of another person in the house, near the house, around the house, the sound that Harold had provided for forty-seven years and that Harold's death had silenced and that Mrs. Pemberton's mind was now providing in Harold's absence, the mind filling the silence with the sound the silence had replaced, the mind producing the footsteps because the mind needed the footsteps, needed the evidence that she was not alone, needed the thing that the gravel had been designed to provide: the knowledge that someone was there.

The knowledge was the emergency. The knowledge that no one was there. The knowledge that the house was empty and the gravel was quiet and the footsteps were the mind's footsteps and the intruder was the mind's intruder and the 911 call was the response to the emergency of the emptiness, the response that the system provided: a voice on the phone, an officer at the door, the brief presence of another person in Mrs. Pemberton's night, the presence that the call created, the presence that was the call's actual purpose.

Delia waited with Mrs. Pemberton. The waiting was seven minutes — seven minutes during which Mrs. Pemberton talked and Delia listened. Mrs. Pemberton talked about the gravel and about Harold and about the fence that needed painting and about the neighbor's cat that came into the yard and about the oak tree that was dropping leaves on the roof and about the church that she could not get to on Sundays because she did not drive anymore, had stopped driving after Harold died because Harold had always driven and the driving was Harold's job and the job was unfilled and the unfilling was the loss expressed in practical terms, the way all of Mrs. Pemberton's losses were expressed in practical terms — not "I miss my husband" but "the fence needs painting," not "I am lonely" but "there is someone in my backyard," the translations the particular language of a generation that did not name its grief but enacted it, that did not speak its loneliness but called 911 about it, that found the words for the thing that had no words by using the words for other things, the proxy language, the displacement.

The officer arrived. Delia heard the dispatch update in the CAD: on scene. She told Mrs. Pemberton.

"Mrs. Pemberton, the officer is there. They'll be checking around the house."

"Thank you, dear."

Dear. The word was Mrs. Pemberton's word, the word she used for Delia every time she called, the endearment the evidence of the relationship that the calls had built, the relationship that existed between the repeat caller and the dispatcher who answered, the relationship that was not friendship but was familiarity, was the familiarity of voices that had spoken to each other in the dark over months and years, the familiarity that had names — Mrs. Pemberton knew Delia's name from the calls, knew it as "Delia" or "the one with the nice voice," and Delia knew Mrs. Pemberton's name from the CAD and from the voice and from the address that had become, over the years, one of the addresses that Delia carried in the mental map of her callers, the map that was not the CAD's map but was the dispatcher's personal map, the map of the people who called and the addresses they called from and the lives that the calls implied.

The officer checked the property. The officer found nothing. The gravel was undisturbed. The fence was intact. The backyard was empty. The report came through the CAD: unfounded, no signs of intrusion, property secure.

Delia relayed the information.

"Mrs. Pemberton, the officer has checked the property. Everything is secure. There's no one in the backyard."

A pause. The pause was the pause that always followed the clearing — the pause during which Mrs. Pemberton processed the information that the intruder was not there, the information that contradicted what she had heard, the information that meant the hearing was wrong and the wrongness was the mind and the mind was the loneliness and the loneliness was the thing, the thing that the clearing confirmed, the clearing saying not "your property is secure" but "you are alone," the clearing the system's answer to the call that was really about the aloneness.

"Well," Mrs. Pemberton said. "I was sure I heard something."

"The officer checked thoroughly, ma'am. If you hear anything else, you can call back."

"I will. Thank you, Delia. Thank you for staying on the phone with me."

"You're welcome, Mrs. Pemberton. You have a good night."

"You too, dear."

Delia disconnected. She logged the call. She typed the disposition: unfounded, repeat caller, no evidence of intrusion. She typed the narrative: the narrative brief, the narrative factual, the narrative the same narrative she had typed for the previous calls from 3847 Mynders Avenue, the narrative that did not mention Harold or the gravel or the loneliness or the word "dear," the narrative that recorded the call's official content without recording the call's actual content.

The call joined the others. The call joined the history of Mrs. Pemberton's calls in the CAD system, the history that was a document of loneliness measured in incident numbers, the history that read, to anyone who accessed it, as a series of unfounded reports from a repeat caller, the history that suggested, to a system that measured calls by their outcomes, that Mrs. Pemberton was a problem — a resource drain, a time consumer, a caller who used the emergency line for non-emergencies, a caller who generated responses that found nothing and cost the department the officer's time and the dispatcher's time and the system's bandwidth.

And Mrs. Pemberton was a problem, in the system's vocabulary. The system's vocabulary had a word for callers like Mrs. Pemberton: frequent caller. The word was neutral in its denotation and loaded in its connotation, the connotation being: this person calls too much, this person's calls are not real, this person is using the system incorrectly. And the connotation was true, in the system's terms. Mrs. Pemberton's calls were not real in the system's terms. Mrs. Pemberton's emergencies were not emergencies in the system's terms. Mrs. Pemberton's use of 911 was, in the system's terms, incorrect.

But the system's terms were not the only terms. The human terms — the terms that Delia used, the terms that lived inside the dispatcher alongside the protocol, the terms that the training did not teach and the system did not acknowledge — the human terms said something different. The human terms said: Mrs. Pemberton is an elderly woman whose husband died and who lives alone in a house on Mynders Avenue and who calls 911 because 911 answers. The human terms said: the emergency is loneliness. The human terms said: the response — the voice on the phone, the officer at the door — the response is the treatment, the treatment for the condition that Mrs. Pemberton cannot name and that the system cannot diagnose and that the protocol cannot address but that the call, the call itself, the call addresses, because the call is the connection and the connection is the company and the company is what Mrs. Pemberton needs at 1:47 AM in a house where the other person's footsteps have stopped.

Delia had discussed Mrs. Pemberton with Barnes. Not formally — not in a debrief, not in a supervisory meeting, not in the official language of the department. Informally, during a quiet moment, during one of the gaps between calls when the floor was still and the coffee was lukewarm and the night was deep. Delia had said: "Mrs. Pemberton called again tonight." And Barnes had said: "I know." And the knowing was the knowing of a supervisor who monitored the CAD and saw the patterns and recognized the frequent callers and understood, because Barnes had been a dispatcher for fifteen years before she became a supervisor and the fifteen years had taught her what the protocol did not teach, the human knowledge that the job deposited in the people who performed it.

Barnes had said: "We dispatch. That's what we do. She calls, we dispatch. The day we stop dispatching for Mrs. Pemberton is the day we stop being what we are."

The statement was not policy. The statement was not protocol. The statement was Barnes, and Barnes was the supervisor, and the supervisor's statement was the standard, and the standard was: we dispatch. We dispatch for the shooting and the cardiac arrest and the fire and the domestic and the raccoon and the lockout and the lonely woman on Mynders Avenue. We dispatch because the dispatching is the thing, the thing that the system does, the thing that the people in the system do, the thing that the voice does when the phone rings and the caller speaks and the caller's need — real or imagined, emergency or loneliness, threat or emptiness — the caller's need enters the headset and the voice responds.

Marcus had his own Mrs. Pemberton. Marcus's repeat caller was a man on Lapaloma Street, a man who called to report suspicious vehicles — cars parked on the street that the man did not recognize, trucks that idled too long, vans with tinted windows. Marcus dispatched. The officers checked. The vehicles were the neighbors' cars. The trucks were delivery trucks. The vans were vans. Marcus dispatched anyway. Marcus dispatched because Marcus understood what Delia understood: the call was not about the vehicles. The call was about the man on Lapaloma Street sitting at his window at 2 AM watching the street because watching the street was the only activity that the 2 AM hours offered and the watching produced the seeing and the seeing produced the interpreting and the interpreting produced the call and the call was the point, the call was the man's participation in the world at 2 AM, the man's connection to the system that the man paid taxes to support and that the man used because the using was the right and the right was the connection and the connection was the thing.

The connection. Always the connection. The 911 system was a communication system and a communication system was a system of connections and the connections were the thing that the system provided — the connection between the caller and the dispatcher, the connection between the dispatcher and the responder, the connection between the responder and the caller. The connections were designed for emergencies. The connections were used for emergencies. But the connections were also used for Mrs. Pemberton and for Walter at 3 AM and for the man on Lapaloma Street and for all the people who called 911 not because they had an emergency but because they had a need and the need was a voice and the voice was on the other end of the connection and the connection was three digits.

Three digits. The simplicity of the access — three digits, memorized by every person in the country, available on every phone, the number that required no directory and no internet and no literacy and no technology beyond the phone itself — the simplicity was the thing that made the system universal and the universality was the thing that brought Mrs. Pemberton to the system and Walter to the system and the man on Lapaloma Street to the system, the system's universality its strength and its burden, the system designed for the worst moments receiving the worst moments and also the quiet moments, the moments that were not emergencies but were needs.

Delia took the next call. The phone beeped. She answered. The night continued.

But before the next call, in the space between the logging of Mrs. Pemberton's call and the answering of the next, in the gap that was sometimes two seconds and sometimes two minutes, in the gap where the dispatcher existed between calls — in the gap, Delia thought of Mrs. Pemberton.

She thought of the gravel that Harold had put along the fence line. She thought of the footsteps that Mrs. Pemberton heard on the gravel. She thought of the hearing — the hearing that was the mind's response to the silence, the mind filling the silence with the sound of the person who was no longer there. She thought of the word "dear." She thought of the call that was not a call about an intruder but was a call about a woman in a house at 2 AM who needed a voice, who needed the phone to ring at the other end and a person to answer and the person to listen and the listening to be the company and the company to be the thing that got Mrs. Pemberton through the night.

She thought of Gloria. She thought of Gloria in the recliner at 2 AM with the television off and the lamp on and Jaylen asleep in the back bedroom. She thought of Gloria alone in the house at 2 AM, alone the way Mrs. Pemberton was alone, alone in a house where a husband had been and was not. She thought of the difference between Gloria's aloneness and Mrs. Pemberton's aloneness — the difference being Jaylen, being the child in the back bedroom, the child whose presence made the house not empty, the child who was the company, the child who was the thing that Mrs. Pemberton did not have, the thing that the 911 call was the substitute for.

And she thought: one day, Jaylen will be grown. One day, the back bedroom will be empty. One day, Gloria will be in the house on Millbranch Road alone, truly alone, and the aloneness will be the condition, and the condition will be the night, and the night will be the silence that Gloria has kept at bay with the television at volume nine and the checking on the boy, and the boy will not be there to check on.

The thought passed. The thought was not a dwelling — Delia did not dwell, did not allow the thoughts that the calls produced to become residences, allowed them to be visitors, allowed them to arrive and stay and then leave, the leaving the discipline, the leaving the bank, the leaving the thing that kept the dispatcher functional, that kept the mother functional, that kept the person functional, the functionality the requirement and the requirement met by the discipline and the discipline applied to the thoughts the way the discipline was applied to the calls.

The phone beeped. Delia pressed the key.

"Memphis 911, what is the location of your emergency?"

The night continued. The calls continued. Mrs. Pemberton slept, or did not sleep, at 3847 Mynders Avenue. Harold's gravel lay along the fence line. The footsteps that were not there were not there.

And the system held. The system that dispatched for the shooting and the loneliness. The system that sent officers to the cardiac arrest and to the empty backyard. The system that did not distinguish between the real emergency and the real need, because the system understood — in its design, in its protocol, in the principle that Barnes had stated and that the dispatchers followed — the system understood that the distinction was the system's to make but the response was not, the response was always the same, the response was always: answer. Respond. Dispatch. Send someone. Because the someone was the thing. The someone at the door was the thing. The someone on the phone was the thing. The someone was the answer to the emergency and the answer to the loneliness and the answer was the same answer, the same voice, the same three digits, the same connection.

The connection held. The night held. The system held.

And Mrs. Pemberton, at 3847 Mynders Avenue, in the house that Harold built the fence around and put the gravel along and lived in for forty-seven years and died in — Mrs. Pemberton was, for the moment, not alone. The officer had come. The property had been checked. The voice had answered. The connection had been made.

The connection would end. The officer would leave. The voice would take the next call. The aloneness would return. And Mrs. Pemberton would hear the footsteps again — tonight, or tomorrow night, or the night after — and she would call. And the system would answer. And the system would dispatch. And the officer would find nothing.

And the nothing would be the something. The nothing — the officer at the door, the voice on the phone, the response to the call — the nothing would be the something that Mrs. Pemberton needed.

And the something would be enough. For tonight. For this call. For this moment in the deep night when the phone connected the lonely to the system and the system responded and the response was a voice and the voice said: "I'm here, Mrs. Pemberton. The officer is on the way."

The voice was enough.