October

Night Shift

Chapter 27: October

Twenty shifts. The month of October contained, for Delia, twenty night shifts — five shifts per week for four weeks, the schedule the schedule, the schedule the structure that organized the month into working nights and non-working nights, the working nights the nights at the center and the non-working nights the nights at the apartment, the nights when Jaylen slept in his own bed and Delia slept in her own bed and the sleeping was at the same time, the mother and the son sleeping simultaneously in the same apartment for the first time all week, the simultaneity a luxury that the schedule allowed twice a week, the two nights off per week the schedule's concession to the body's need for rest and the life's need for normalcy and the mother's need to be in the same house as her son at night, in the dark, in the hours when the city called and the city's calls went to other dispatchers, other voices, other consoles.

Twenty shifts. Approximately fifty calls per shift. Approximately one thousand calls in October. The number was approximate because the calls varied — some shifts produced thirty calls and some shifts produced seventy, the variation determined by the city's activity, by the weather, by the day of the week, by the events that the calendar contained (pay weekends produced more calls, holidays produced more calls, football Saturdays produced more calls, the city's rhythms producing the city's emergencies in patterns that the dispatchers recognized without being able to predict, the recognition the experience and the prediction the impossibility).

One thousand calls. The number was a measure and the measure was a weight and the weight was the month and the month was October and October was Delia's body, the body that had received the thousand calls through the headset and processed them through the protocol and dispatched them through the CAD and carried them through the shifts and the days between the shifts and the sleep and the waking and the park bench and the school pickup and the cereal and the bath and the stories and the goodnights, the body carrying all of it, the body the vessel, the vessel full.

The thousand calls contained everything. The thousand calls contained the shootings — seven shootings in October, seven calls where the word "shot" or "gun" or "bleeding" entered the headset and the protocol engaged and the units were dispatched Code 3 and the scenes were managed from Console 7 while the scenes happened on the streets of Memphis, on Lamar Avenue and on Winchester Road and on Elvis Presley Boulevard and on the other streets where the violence happened, the streets that the mapping system displayed as lines and that the dispatchers knew as locations, as places where the calls came from, the places that generated the incidents that the CAD recorded.

The thousand calls contained the domestics — approximately forty domestic calls in October, forty calls where the emergency was inside the house, inside the relationship, inside the life that the caller lived with the person who was the danger, the forty domestics a fraction of the domestics that were happening in the city (the fraction the called fraction, the fraction that reached the phone and dialed the numbers, the larger fraction the uncalled fraction, the domestics that happened without a call, the violence that the system did not know about because the system only knew what it was told, and the telling required the calling and the calling required the ability to call and the ability was not always present).

The thousand calls contained the medicals — approximately three hundred medical calls in October, three hundred calls where the body was the emergency, the body failing in the ways that bodies failed, the hearts and the lungs and the brains producing the crises that the EMD protocol addressed, the protocol's tree opening to the branches that the medical calls required, the branches followed with the precision that the training gave and the practice maintained.

The thousand calls contained the CPR — one, the one on Ketchum Road, the eighteenth, the eleven minutes of counting while Denise Palmer pushed on her husband's chest. The one was the one. The one was the call that the ledger recorded and the body carried and the outcome remained unknown.

The thousand calls contained the children — approximately sixty calls involving children in October, sixty calls where a child was the patient or the witness or the presence in the house, the sixty calls that broke the rule, that sent the river over the bank, that produced the shaking in the hands, the sixty calls that were Jaylen, every one of them Jaylen, the sixty iterations of the mother's fear that the headset delivered to the mother at the console.

The thousand calls contained the hang-ups — approximately forty hang-ups in October, forty calls where the line connected and the voice said nothing or said a word or two and the line disconnected and the callback went to voicemail and the welfare check found nothing and the outcome was unknown, the forty hang-ups sitting in the archive with their silence, the silence the weight, the weight the not-knowing, the not-knowing the forty open loops that would never close.

The thousand calls contained Mrs. Pemberton — four calls from 3847 Mynders Avenue in October, four calls about intruders who were not there, four dispatches that found nothing, four times the word "unfounded" in the disposition, four times the word "dear" in the conversation, four times the connection between the lonely woman and the voice on the phone, the four calls a regularity, a rhythm, a recurring appointment that the system did not schedule but that Mrs. Pemberton kept.

The thousand calls contained Walter — once, the once at 3 AM, the once that was the cornbread and the cancer and the forty-one years and Dorothy's name, the once that was the quiet call that followed Delia home, the quiet call that sat in the space where the quiet calls lived.

The thousand calls contained the bridge — once, the once at 3 AM, the forty-seven minutes, the cable, the step back. Chris. The once that Barnes provided the outcome for, the outcome that was: alive.

The thousand calls contained the silent call — once, the taps, the breathing, the man's voice through the walls, the officers arriving without sirens. The once that was the silence that was louder than the screaming.

The thousand calls contained the noise complaints and the fender benders and the lockouts and the alarms and the neighbor disputes and the trespassing and the shoplifting and the false alarms and the butt dials and the misdials and the non-emergencies and the calls that were not calls but were interactions, were moments when the city touched the system and the system touched the city and the touching was the dispatchers' work, the touching the voice, the voice Delia's.

One thousand calls. Twenty shifts. Thirty-one days. The month measured in every unit available — the calls the unit, the shifts the unit, the days the unit, the hours the unit (approximately 164 hours at the console in October, 164 hours with the headset on, 164 hours of the voice), the units the measures, the measures the month.

But the month was not the measures. The month was the thing that the measures measured but could not contain — the month was Delia's life in October, the life that was the shifts and the calls and the days between and the sleep and the waking and Jaylen and Gloria and Marcus and Barnes and the headset and the console and the building and the parking lot and the drive to Gloria's house and the drive to the school and the drive home and the curtains and the phone on silent and the bed and the lying down and the not-sleeping and the sleeping and the alarm and the getting up and the doing it again.

The doing it again. The repetition. The cycle. The twenty iterations of the same day-night-day-night rotation, the rotation that was the schedule and the schedule was the life and the life was the rotation. Wake at 2:45 PM. Shower. Pick up Jaylen. Homework. Dinner. Bath. Stories. Goodnight. Drive to Gloria's. Carry Jaylen in. Kiss his forehead. Drive to the center. Park. Badge in. Corridor. Console 7. Headset on. Calls. Voice. Protocol. Dispatch. Count. Listen. Stay on the line. Log. Move on. Calls. More calls. 3 AM. 5 AM. 6 AM. Headset off. Badge out. Drive. Gloria's house. Morning. Jaylen. Cereal. School. Home. Curtains. Bed. Sleep. Alarm. Again.

The cycle was the life. The life was the cycle. The cycle contained the thousand calls and the cycle contained Jaylen and the cycle contained the tired and the cycle contained the weight and the cycle was Delia's, was the life that Delia had built from the materials available — the job and the mother and the apartment and the arrangement and the $2.85 per hour differential and the night shift and the headset and the voice.

The weight of October was not a single call. The weight was not the shooting on Lamar Avenue or the bridge or the CPR on Ketchum Road or the child choking on Dunn Avenue. The weight was the aggregate. The weight was the accumulation of the thousand calls, the calls layering in the body the way sediment layers in a riverbed, call by call, shift by shift, the layers not individually heavy but collectively substantial, the collective weight the thing that the body carried, the thing that the body could not put down because the body was the vessel and the vessel was always receiving, always accumulating, always adding the next layer to the layers below.

The body adapted. The body adapted the way all bodies adapted to the conditions they were placed in — the body of the night-shift worker adapting to the inverted schedule, the body of the dispatcher adapting to the calls, the body of the mother adapting to the insufficient sleep, the adaptations not comfortable but functional, the adaptations the body's compromises with the demands that the life imposed. The body's circadian rhythm, bent but not broken, functioning on the night-shift schedule with the chronic inefficiency that the research documented — the research that said night-shift workers had higher rates of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of metabolic syndrome, higher rates of depression, the research that quantified the cost that the schedule imposed on the body and that the body paid in the currency of years, the years subtracted from the lifespan by the schedule's demands.

Delia knew the research. The dispatchers all knew the research — the research was discussed in the break room and in the supervisor's meetings and in the union newsletters, the research a constant background presence, the research the data version of the thing the dispatchers felt in their bodies, the thing that was the tired behind the eyes and the weight in the joints and the headaches that came at 4 AM and the stomach trouble that came from eating at midnight and the particular quality of the night-shift worker's sleep, the quality that the research called "poor" and that Delia called the curtains and the phone on silent and the lying in the dark at 9 AM while the world was bright and loud outside.

But the body's adaptation to the schedule was the lesser adaptation. The greater adaptation was the body's adaptation to the calls — the adaptation that the protocol and the training and Marcus's metaphor and Barnes's debriefs and the break room's sitting all served, the adaptation that was the process of learning to carry the weight without being crushed by it, the process that Marcus called holding the bank and that Barnes called the standard and that Delia called the work, the work of being both things at once — the dispatcher and the person, the voice and the woman, the bank and the human who was the bank.

The adaptation was not complete. The adaptation was never complete — the dispatchers who believed the adaptation was complete, who believed they had fully adjusted, who believed the calls did not affect them, the dispatchers who said "I'm fine" when they were not fine, the dispatchers who did not take the breaks and did not attend the debriefs and did not call Employee Assistance — those dispatchers were the dispatchers who burned out, who left, who became the former dispatchers, the people who one day put down the headset and did not pick it up again.

The adaptation was ongoing. The adaptation was the work within the work, the internal work that accompanied the external work, the processing that happened alongside the dispatching, the carrying that happened alongside the sending. The adaptation required the tools — the thermos and the break room and the debrief and the nod and the sitting-with and the fist that closed and opened and the photograph of Jaylen on the desk and the drawing on the refrigerator. The tools were not the protocol's tools, were not the system's tools. The tools were the human tools, the tools that the dispatchers created and shared and used, the tools passed from the senior to the junior, the tools that Marcus gave Delia and that Delia would give Tasha and that Tasha would give whoever came after Tasha, the tools the tradition, the tradition the survival.

October was ending. October was the month that the novel followed, the month that the narrative tracked, the month that contained the twenty shifts and the thousand calls and the weight and the adaptation and the cycle and the life. October was the month. And October was not special — October was a month, one of twelve, the twelve months of the year each containing their twenty shifts and their thousand calls and their weight. October was not the hardest month (January was harder, the cold and the holidays and the post-holiday depression producing more calls, more crises, more bridge calls) and October was not the easiest month (no month was easy, no month was the month where the calls were light and the weight was manageable and the body did not hurt at 6 AM). October was a month. October was the month that was happening, the month that Delia was living, the month that the headset was delivering.

And Delia was carrying it. Delia was carrying October the way she had carried September and August and all the months before, the carrying the thing, the carrying the job within the job, the carrying the work within the work. She was carrying it in the body and in the mind and in the voice, the voice that had said "Memphis 911, what is the location of your emergency?" approximately one thousand times in October, the voice that had said "help is on the way" approximately one thousand times, the voice that had counted compressions and coached back blows and talked a person off a bridge and listened to the silence and said "I hear you" and said "you're doing great" and said "stay on the line" and said "the officers are there" and said "your daughter is breathing" and said "Dorothy" and said "good" and said all the words that the thousand calls required, the words that the city needed to hear when the city called at the hours when the worst things happened.

One thousand calls. Twenty shifts. One month.

And the city did not know. The city did not know that Delia Robinson sat at Console 7 on Poplar Avenue five nights a week and answered the phone when the city called. The city did not know her name or her face or her voice (or knew her voice but did not know it was hers, the callers hearing the voice and not knowing whose voice it was, the voice anonymous, the voice the system's voice, the voice belonging to the system and not to the person). The city did not know about Gloria's house or Jaylen's drawings or the blue-rimmed bowl or the Spider-Man sheets. The city did not know about Marcus's thermos or Barnes's debriefs or the break room's sitting. The city did not know about the shaking hands or the fist that closed and opened or the stillness after the bridge call. The city did not know.

And the not-knowing was fine. The not-knowing was the condition. The not-knowing was the way it was and the way it should be, because the city's knowledge of the dispatchers was not the point, the city's safety was the point, and the city's safety was maintained by the dispatchers' anonymity, by the dispatchers' invisibility, by the dispatchers' willingness to sit in a windowless room and answer the phone and be the voice and not be known.

The not-knowing was the sacrifice. Not the biggest sacrifice — the biggest sacrifice was the sleep and the health and the weight and the years subtracted from the lifespan. But the not-knowing was a sacrifice, a small one, the sacrifice of recognition, the sacrifice of being seen, the sacrifice of mattering visibly rather than mattering invisibly, the sacrifice that Delia made every night when she put on the headset and became the voice that the city heard without knowing whose voice it was.

The voice mattered. The voice mattered to the callers who heard it — to Sharon with the raccoon, to Tamika on Lamar Avenue, to Denise on Ketchum Road, to Chris on the bridge, to Walter in his kitchen, to Mrs. Pemberton on Mynders Avenue, to Tanya at 2614 Mallory Avenue, to all the callers whose names Delia remembered and to all the callers whose names Delia did not remember, to the thousand people who called 911 in October and heard a voice say "help is coming" and the voice was Delia's.

The voice mattered. The mattering was the thing. The mattering was the reason.

October would end. November would begin. The shifts would continue. The calls would continue. The voice would continue.

And Delia would carry it. Would carry November the way she carried October. Would carry the weight the way she carried the weight. Would hold the bank the way she held the bank. Would be the voice the way she was the voice.

Because the voice was the work. And the work was the life. And the life was the thing. And the thing was Delia's.

One thousand calls. Twenty shifts. One month. One woman. One voice.

Memphis 911, what is the location of your emergency?