The Hang-Up

Night Shift

Chapter 9: The Hang-Up

The call lasted three seconds. Three seconds was not enough time for the protocol, not enough time for the questions, not enough time for the location and the nature and the dispatch, not enough time for anything except the two words the caller spoke and the click that followed the words, the click that was not a click but an absence, the sound of a connection ending, the sound of the phone line returning to silence, the silence that replaced the voice the way night replaces day — completely, immediately, without transition.

"I need —"

Click.

The two words entered Delia's headset at 1:14 AM on a Wednesday. The voice was male. The voice was strained — not screaming, not whispering, but strained, the strain of a person speaking through something, through pain or fear or effort or the particular constriction that the throat produces when the body is under duress, the vocal cords tightening, the airway narrowing, the voice emerging not from the easy place where casual speech originates but from the harder place, the deeper place, the place where the body's distress reaches the voice and the voice carries the distress to the listener and the listener — Delia, at Console 7, at 1:14 AM — the listener receives the distress in three seconds, in two words, and then the connection ends and the two words are all the listener has.

"I need —"

Need what. Need help. Need an ambulance. Need someone to come. Need someone to hear. Need the thing that all 911 callers need, which is response, which is the system's engagement with the emergency, the system's attention directed at the caller's location, the system's resources deployed to the caller's crisis. But the need was not specified. The need was interrupted. The need was begun and not completed, the sentence started and not finished, the caller's intention articulated in two words and then silenced by the hang-up, the hang-up that could mean many things and that Delia's training required her to interpret in the way most likely to protect the caller.

The hang-up could mean: the caller changed their mind. The caller decided that the emergency was not an emergency, that the need was not a need, that the call was unnecessary, and the caller hung up.

The hang-up could mean: the caller was interrupted. Someone entered the room. Someone took the phone. Someone prevented the caller from continuing the call, and the someone's prevention was itself an emergency, the interruption evidence of the thing the caller was calling about.

The hang-up could mean: the caller's condition changed. The pain increased. The injury worsened. The medical emergency that prompted the call escalated to the point where the caller could no longer hold the phone, could no longer speak, could no longer maintain the connection.

The hang-up could mean: the caller was in danger. The caller was calling from a situation where the call itself was dangerous, where being heard on the phone would produce consequences, where the two words — "I need" — were all the caller could risk before the risk became too great and the phone had to be put down, the connection severed, the silence restored.

The protocol required callback. The protocol for hang-up calls was explicit: call back. Call back immediately. Call back and attempt to reach the caller and determine whether the hang-up was voluntary or involuntary, whether the caller was safe or not safe, whether the need was resolved or ongoing. Call back because the hang-up might be the last communication from a person in crisis, and the system's response to the last communication could not be silence, could not be nothing, could not be the acceptance of the hang-up as a conclusion when the hang-up might be an interruption, when the silence on the other end of the line might not be the silence of someone who no longer needs help but the silence of someone who needs help more than ever and can no longer ask for it.

Delia called back. She pressed the callback button on the phone system, the button that redialed the number the system had captured — the ANI, the Automatic Number Identification — the number that the system recorded regardless of whether the caller provided it, the system capturing the number the way a camera captures a face, automatically, passively, the capture a function of the technology that the caller might not know about, the caller who might think that hanging up erases the call, that ending the connection ends the record, that the two words and the three seconds will disappear into the system's void. They do not disappear. They are logged. The number is captured. The callback is made.

The phone rang. It rang four times. Five times. Six times. Seven. The ringing continued — the sound of a phone ringing in a location Delia could not see, a room or a car or a street where the phone sat or lay or was held by a hand that was not answering, the ringing the system's attempt to re-establish the connection, the ringing the dispatcher's outstretched hand reaching through the phone line toward the person who had called and who was now not answering, the reaching the thing, the reaching all that the dispatcher could do from Console 7, the reaching the limit of the voice, the voice that could not travel without the connection, the connection that required the caller to answer, the answering that was not happening.

Voicemail. An automated voicemail, no personal greeting, the generic voice of the phone system saying: "The person you are trying to reach is not available. Please leave a message." Delia did not leave a message. The protocol did not require a message. The protocol required the attempt, the callback, the effort to re-establish, and the effort had been made and the effort had failed and the failure was noted in the CAD log: callback attempted, no answer, voicemail reached, no message left.

She called again. The protocol did not require a second callback, but practice — the practice that existed alongside the protocol, the practice that dispatchers followed because the dispatchers were people and the people had instincts and the instincts said call again — the practice said: try once more. Try once more because the phone might have been on silent. Try once more because the caller might have been unable to answer on the first ring but might be able now. Try once more because trying costs nothing — costs seconds, costs a few keystrokes — and not trying costs the possibility, the possibility that the second ring reaches the caller and the caller answers and the two words become a sentence and the sentence becomes a location and the location becomes a dispatch and the dispatch becomes a response and the response saves the life that the hang-up put at risk.

The phone rang. It rang. It rang. Voicemail.

Delia had the number. She had the location — the ANI/ALI had captured both. The number was a cell phone, Memphis area code, 901. The location was triangulated from cell tower data: the 1200 block of Gill Avenue, South Memphis, the location approximate because cell tower triangulation was approximate, the location a circle on the map rather than a dot, the circle encompassing a block, maybe two blocks, the area within which the phone was located when the call was made, the area that contained the caller and the caller's need and the two words and the hang-up.

She dispatched a welfare check. She keyed the dispatch into the CAD: welfare check, 1200 block of Gill Avenue, male caller, two words — "I need" — followed by disconnection, two callbacks unanswered, cell phone location approximate. She dispatched a police unit, Code 2 — urgent but not emergency, the code a judgment, the code Delia's determination based on the information available, the information that was two words and a strained voice and a hang-up and two unanswered callbacks, the information insufficient for a full picture but sufficient for a response, sufficient for sending someone to the block to look, to check, to knock on doors if necessary, to find the person who had called 911 at 1:14 AM and said "I need" and hung up.

The dispatch went out. A unit acknowledged. The unit would go to the block and the unit would look and the unit would find something or not find something and the finding or the not-finding would be reported to dispatch and the report would close the call or escalate the call and the closing or the escalating would be the resolution that the hang-up had denied.

Delia sat at Console 7 and waited.

The waiting was different for a hang-up. The waiting for a normal call — a call where the caller stayed on the line, where the dispatcher had the information, where the location was confirmed and the emergency was described and the dispatch was targeted — the waiting for a normal call was the waiting of knowledge, the dispatcher knowing what was happening and waiting for the response to reach it. The waiting for a hang-up was the waiting of ignorance, the dispatcher not knowing what was happening and waiting for the response to discover it, the waiting a guessing, a wondering, the mind filling the silence with possibilities, the possibilities ranging from the benign — the caller changed his mind, the emergency resolved, the need was met by some other means — to the catastrophic — the caller was dying, the caller was being harmed, the caller had used his last seconds to call 911 and the last seconds were gone and the phone was on the floor and the person was on the floor and the need was unmet and the silence was the silence of a person who could no longer speak.

The waiting was the hang-up's particular cruelty. The normal call gave the dispatcher information, and information was containment, information was the thing that the mind could hold and process and organize and respond to. The hang-up gave the dispatcher nothing — gave the dispatcher two words and a silence and the silence was a canvas and the mind painted the canvas with the worst possibilities because the mind was trained to assume the worst, trained by the protocol and the practice and the experience of six years of calls to assume that the hang-up was not benign until proved benign, to assume that the silence concealed an emergency until the welfare check revealed otherwise, to assume the worst because assuming the best was a risk the system could not take, the risk of inaction, the risk of accepting the hang-up as a conclusion when the hang-up was a cry.

She took other calls while she waited. The phone beeped. The double tone. She answered. A fender bender on Park Avenue, no injuries. She dispatched. She logged. The phone beeped. A noise complaint in Binghampton. She dispatched. She logged. The phone beeped. A medical — an elderly man, fallen, conscious, complaining of back pain. She followed the protocol, dispatched EMS, logged the call. The calls came and the calls went and the calls were the work and the work continued while the hang-up call sat open in the CAD, the incident number active, the status pending, the welfare check in progress.

Twenty minutes passed. Twenty minutes during which the unit was on the block — on the 1200 block of Gill Avenue, in South Memphis, at 1:30 AM, in the dark, in the particular darkness of a Memphis neighborhood in the early morning hours, the darkness that was streetlights and porch lights and the occasional glow of a television through a window, the darkness that the officer navigated while looking for the sign of the emergency that the two words had implied, looking for the person who had called, looking for the need.

The radio — or the CAD, the text on the screen: the unit's report. Delia read it.

"Unable to locate. Checked 1200 block Gill, no disturbance observed, no persons in distress observed. Knocked at three addresses — no answer at two, resident at third reports no knowledge of emergency. Cell phone location approximate. Unable to locate caller. Recommend clear, will note for follow-up patrol."

Delia read the report. She typed the disposition: unable to locate, welfare check cleared, no contact with caller. She closed the call. She typed the narrative: brief, factual, the narrative a record of the two words and the callbacks and the dispatch and the welfare check and the officer's inability to find the person who had called, the narrative the system's documentation of its effort, the effort that had been made and that had not been enough, or that had been enough because there was nothing to find, or that had not been enough because there was something to find and the officer did not find it because the cell tower location was approximate and the block was large and the night was dark and the person who called might have been inside a house with the doors locked and the lights off and the phone on the floor.

The call was closed. The incident number was retired. The CAD released the record to the archive, where it would sit with the other records, the thousands of records that the system generated every day, the records that were the city's emergency history, the city's archive of trouble, the archive that contained every call and every dispatch and every resolution and every non-resolution, every raccoon and every shooting and every cardiac arrest and every hang-up, the archive that was the system's memory, the memory that the dispatchers did not share because the dispatchers' memory was different from the system's memory — the dispatchers' memory was selective, was emotional, was the memory that retained the calls that mattered and released the calls that did not, the memory that was the bank's record of the river, the record written not in data but in the body.

The hang-up would stay with Delia. Not permanently — not the way the shooting on Lamar Avenue would stay, not the way the CPR calls stayed, not the way the calls involving children stayed. The hang-up would stay differently, would stay in the register of the unresolved, the register that was quieter than the register of the traumatic but that was persistent, that hummed beneath the surface of the shift like a low-frequency sound, the sound of a question without an answer, the question being: what happened to the man who called at 1:14 AM and said "I need" and hung up?

She would not learn the answer. This was the probability — not the certainty, but the probability so high as to be functionally identical to certainty. She would not learn what happened because the system was not designed to inform the dispatcher of outcomes, was not designed to close the loop that the hang-up had opened, was not designed to follow the caller's story beyond the call, beyond the dispatch, beyond the welfare check that did not find the caller. The system was designed to process and dispatch and move on. The moving-on was the design. The moving-on was the function. The moving-on was what the system required of its human components — the dispatchers who were the voice and the ears and the hands and the minds of the system, the dispatchers who processed the calls and dispatched the units and logged the incidents and took the next call, always the next call, always the moving-on.

But the human inside the system did not move on as cleanly as the system moved on. The human retained. The human wondered. The human carried the two words — "I need" — in the space where the calls lived after the calls ended, the space that Marcus called the body's archive, the space that held the unresolved alongside the resolved, the answered alongside the unanswered, the space that grew with each shift, each night, each month, each year, the space expanding to accommodate the accumulation, the accumulation that was the job's invisible cost, the cost that the paycheck did not compensate and the protocol did not acknowledge and the system did not measure.

The not-knowing was the job's particular cruelty. And its particular mercy. The cruelty was the open loop, the unresolved question, the man who needed something and might not have received it. The mercy was the alternative — the mercy was that Delia did not know if the man had died, did not know if the need was the last word the man ever spoke, did not know if the welfare check's failure to find the man was the system's failure to save the man, the mercy of ignorance, the mercy of the blank space where the outcome would be, the blank space that the mind could fill with hope as easily as with despair, the blank space that was the system's gift to the dispatcher, the gift of not having to know, not having to carry the certainty, not having to hold the knowledge of the outcome alongside the knowledge of the call.

Other dispatchers handled it differently. Rodriguez, at Console 5, was a researcher — Rodriguez would check the CAD the next shift, would look for follow-up calls from the same number, would search the address for subsequent incidents, would try to close the loop that the system left open, would try to find the answer that the system did not provide. Rodriguez's researching was his coping, his way of managing the not-knowing, his way of converting the open question into a closed one, even when the closing was: no further calls from that number, no further incidents at that address, the absence of information serving as a kind of resolution, the resolution of nothing-happened, which was not certain but was the closest thing to certain that the system could provide.

Delia did not research. Delia let the hang-ups go. She let them go the way Marcus said to let the river go — let the water flow past, hold the bank, do not chase the current, do not follow the river downstream to see where it goes, because the going is the river's business and the holding is the bank's business and the business of the bank is to be here, at the console, for the next call. Delia let the hang-ups go because the alternative was to carry them, and carrying them was carrying the question, and carrying the question was carrying the possibility that the answer was the worst answer, and carrying the worst answer was the thing that broke dispatchers, the thing that sent dispatchers to Employee Assistance and to therapy and to the exits, the thing that turned ten-year veterans into former dispatchers who could not explain why they left except to say: I couldn't carry it anymore. The it was not a single call. The it was the accumulation. The it was the hang-ups and the not-knowings and the open loops that never closed, the archive of unresolved emergencies that the body held and the mind wondered about and the system recorded and forgot.

Marcus, at Console 6, had his own hang-ups. Ten years of them. Ten years of two-word calls and three-second connections and callbacks that went to voicemail and welfare checks that found nothing. Marcus carried them the way he carried everything — in the fist that closed and opened, in the thermos that he drank from, in the steady voice that did not waver, in the bank that held. Marcus had told Delia, once, during a 3 AM quiet:

"The hang-ups are the ones. Not the shootings, not the CPR, not the domestics. The hang-ups. Because the shootings have endings — the patient lives or dies, the scene is cleared, the report is filed. The hang-ups don't have endings. The hang-ups just stop. And the stopping is the thing you carry, the stopping is the weight, because the stopping means you don't know, and the not-knowing is heavier than the knowing, because the knowing has a shape and the not-knowing has no shape, and the thing with no shape cannot be put down."

He said this and then he drank from the thermos and then he took the next call and the next call had a shape — a location, a nature, a dispatch, a resolution — and the shape was the comfort, the shape was the contrast to the hang-up's shapelessness, the shape was the thing the dispatcher held onto after the hang-up's formlessness threatened to dissolve the edges of the work.

Delia took the next call. The phone beeped. The double tone. She pressed the key.

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

The caller spoke. The caller provided an address. The caller described the emergency. The information entered the headset and traveled to Delia's mind and the mind processed the information and the hands typed and the voice asked the questions and the protocol engaged and the dispatch was made and the units responded and the call was a call — a complete call, a call with a beginning and a middle and a resolution, a call with a shape.

The hang-up sat in the archive. The two words sat in the archive. The man who needed something sat in the silence that the hang-up had created, the silence that was not on the phone line anymore — the phone line was carrying other calls now, other voices, other emergencies — the silence that was in Delia's body, in the space where the unresolved calls lived, in the archive that grew with each shift.

"I need —"

The two words. The strain in the voice. The click. The silence.

Delia held the bank. The river flowed.

The phone beeped. She answered. The night continued.