Instead, in the notebook I kept beside me, I wrote down “Fires, ’94, like a war zone.”
In those first weeks at Triple Zero I had realized that if you sat at a station out of view of the managers, you could hide a phone in the headset box we all kept in our lockers when we were not at work. Everyone did. Most people used their phones to text or play games. Mostly, I used my phone to read. The reading, I thought, would keep me tethered to writing, to academia, to the life of the mind I thought was more important than being in the call center. I read political analysis and book reviews and long articles about climate disaster. I equipped myself with facts and stories, which I thought functioned just as well as conversation might. I wrote the facts down in a notebook, for safekeeping. The notebook was not against the rules, and so could be out in the open beside the computer monitor, whereas the phone had to be hidden at all times.
I read and wrote down, in those weeks, that a wasting plague was afflicting the starfish of the Western Pacific coast. The illness started in the waters off Washington State, but had spread from Alaska all the way down to San Diego. The starfish first developed a white discoloration, and then began to grow soft, until they turned to goo. The starfish were disintegrating for no reason anybody could seem to explain.
I wrote, too, that the Roman god Vulcan was the god of fire and volcanoes. It was understood that volcanic eruptions were a sign of Vulcan’s anger each time he learned that Venus, his wife, had been found fucking someone else.
I wrote down this passage from an essay by David Wojnarowicz: “I am fearful or something more than fear: it’s something in the landscape surrounding the cities and smaller towns between here and the coast, something out there that feels so empty and it is not made of earth or muscle or fur; it’s like a pocket of death but with no form other than the light one might cast upon its trail of fragments.”
I thought this was interesting.
Facts and passages like these seemed pertinent to my general condition. I had tried to bring up the facts in conversation, but Maeve had taken me to task. I explained that I was just trying to join in. I didn’t want to seem quiet or unfriendly.
People like to talk about television and lunch and their relationships, she told me. If you’re stuck, talk about the weather.
But I do talk about the weather, I responded.
Not your kind of weather, said Maeve. Normal weather.
Now I had taken to using the notebook every time I came upon a new fact, or a thought, or to record a portion of an emergency call.
The notebook became a place for certain types of information, unattributed fragments I wrote in from other texts, interspersed with my own thoughts and diary entries, as though by leaning into the fragmentation of my workday experience I might somehow conquer the sense of disarray and poor attention I felt daily on the phones.
And so I wrote down “Brewarrina” when the man called and shouted “Brewarrina.” In his mouth the four syllables were compressed into something that sounded like Brwr-Na, but it made sense when I wrote it down. I asked him to clarify which state Brewarrina was in. There was only one. We both knew it. But I had to ask anyway.
Brwr-Na you stupid bitch can’t you fuckin’ spell hurry up I’m bleedin’ to death.
Another important fact I learned that year: when the body begins to panic, the system floods with hormones. The panic enters the muscles, your nerves, and your tissue proteins. It starts in the brain. The hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system, which sends a cascade of adrenaline into your blood. Sight sharpens. Your heartbeat accelerates. Your breathing quickens. Your stomach ceases to digest. The airways in your lungs spread wide open. The blood races through your veins. Your emotions run riot. You might begin shaking. Glucose floods your internal grid like electricity during a power surge. Every cell of your being is set alight.
The panic response is so efficient that it has already taken full effect before the visual and intellectual centers of your brain have fully understood what is happening. It’s why people jump out of the path of an oncoming car, turn and run from the encroaching fire, duck away from the drunken husband wielding the kitchen knife, before they even think about what they’re doing.
The man from Brwr-Na stuttered on the phone as the ambulance connected through, his breathing staggered, his voice hoarse and moaning. Fuck, fuck, fuck, why aren’t they answering?
I said, The ambulance will answer as soon as they can, and by the time I’d tried three different lines they still hadn’t answered and he’d gone quiet, very quiet. As he whimpered, I’m fucking dying, I was looking up at the television, where a smiling man was frying another egg on yet another stretch of suburban bitumen, and when the ambulance answered the line was dead.
When it was over I stood up, logged out, and walked down the corridor to the bathroom. I shut myself in the stall and sat down on the closed lid. I focused on the white laminate of the door and the advertisements stickered to the paint, a banana wearing a condom, a rape hotline, graffiti.
I recalled that in high school drama classes we would sometimes play games of “focus,” in which the winner was the girl who could lie on the floor and stare at one place on the ceiling without giving in to the distractions of the other girls pulling faces and whispering dirty jokes above her. I always won. I acquired a reputation as “focused,” but it occurred to me that afternoon in the bathrooms that what I felt on the floor staring at the ceiling was more like dissociation than focus. The faces and whispers were there, but I wasn’t entirely certain that I was. The focus game was really just a kind of exercise in cleaving my mind from my body and floating away, with none of the “mindfulness” or “control” that the drama teacher pinned to my accomplishment when I was eventually invited to pull myself up from my prone position on the floor.
But I was good at it. And so I sat there, in the bathrooms outside the offices of Triple Zero on the first floor of a skyscraper on Elizabeth Street, focusing.
During my half-hour break, late that evening, a middle-aged man, a sculptor, read me Keats in the staff room. He approached me, laughing before he’d even said what he wanted to say. He explained that I could punch him in the mouth if I preferred, but he wanted to read me some lines of Keats. They’re pertinent to you, he said. He had the book open in his hands.
“She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue,” he began. “She seemed at once some penanced lady elf, some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self . . . her head was serpent but, ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete.”
As he was reciting, Maeve passed behind me as she made her way to the kettle. I felt her hand squeeze my shoulder.
Later, I found the poem, took a photograph of the stanza, and sent it to Lachlan. I had by then reacquired a thirst for him. I think the thirst was what came to me initially, followed by affection. The first feeling I had for him was still bound up in those early conversations in the Woolley Building when everything was possible and he was a voice more than a man.
But the feeling gradually increased, because he was something that both aroused thirst and satisfied it, and someone, too, who seemed thirsty for me. I wanted, more and more, to be alone together, satisfying the thirst, forgetting about what had happened, and what was surely to come. It was not reasonable, but the things we want rarely are.