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jovialtorchlight · 29 days ago

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Emergency Dream

911, what’s the address of the emergency?

Here.

Where is here?

In my bed. I can’t move. And it’s 8:30 a.m. and I slogged through a 16 hours. My legs ache and I’m lying in bed with my blackout curtains and I am trying to go to bed but I’m too exhausted to shut my eyes and I have five hours to sleep before I have to rise and get ready for another shift (supposed to be 12 hours but they can force me to work 16 hours whenever they are short staffed and they are always fucking short staffed) and I can feel the sick cynicism, the dead and dying of my soul spreading.

Later, at work. I answer the phone.

“911, what’s the address of the emergency?” I say.

A shriek of fear.

“He’s dead. My friend just shot himself in the head. Oh my god, he’s dead,” the caller screams.

“Sir, where is the gun?” I ask.

Because even if someone just shot himself in the head three feet from his best friend and left chunks and spatterings of his own brain on his best friend’s shirt, I have to ask where the gun is first. For the safety of the officer.

And there is a script. I read it off my computer. The first thing they teach is that the script knows better than we do. That if we don’t follow the scripted questions, everything devolves into chaos. I can say I’m sorry, ask him to take a deep breath, but I can’t ever say what I want to say and I have to ask first: where is the gun, even though I know that the gun is probably under a pile of flesh and brain chunks.

I’m so sorry, I want to say. I’m so sorry. And I know if my wife or my family ever called and I picked up the phone I would think, fuck the script. But I’m not fucking the script tonight. I’ve already had a non-compliant quality assurance review this month (yes, they quality control 911 calls) and even if this guy’s best friend just blew his head off, I am vying for compliance and I am not vying to go back into the office and have a box of tissues slid to me while my manager asks me, is everything okay? We’ve noticed your performance--

911 what’s the address of the emergency? My legs are swollen from sitting. I’ve gained almost 100 pounds since I started this job. My ankles are three times the size they should be and when I press down on my leg the flesh stays indented and that’s not a good sign, it’s a sign that I could have a heart attack--Sir, I need you to calm down and tell me your address. I am knee deep in a river that is flooded with springtime snowmelt and I am going to let it drag me into the undertow and you are going to find my bloated body frosted and blue and you are going to find me dead and I am going to do it.

Sir, what is the address of your emergency? And out of all the times I have tried to kill myself this is the fastest. And the slowest. I’m getting fatter. Four Red Bulls. Falling asleep in my car on the way home from a 16 hour overnight shift. Can’t wipe my own ass, too fat.

911 what’s the address of the emergency? My husband fell out of bed and I can’t lift him you’re going to need to send the fire department. I’m eating McDonalds chased by Little Debbies. I’m ordering Dominos at 11:15 a.m. I answer the 911 line and I leave grease stains on the oversized receiver.

911 what’s the address of the emergency? We’re pulled over on Route 4 next to the meatpacking plant, my husband complained his stomach hurt and now he’s clutching his chest and OH MY GOD HE’S NOT BREATHING and this for me is just a Tuesday night and this is everyday and this is forever and this is where I die in this rolling chair and sipping a Monster Energy and eating pork fried rice and scrolling Facebook while I talk to someone who’s mom just overdosed.

911 what’s the address of the emergency? I’m so sorry. What’s the address? I can’t do this anymore. Where are you? The days are full of the phone ringing and the nights are full of the phone ringing and the inbetweens are full of the phone ringing and I am here in this rolling chair in this dispatch center and I am nodding off while someone tells me they got into a car accident and the woman they rear ended is bleeding from the head and I fell asleep for thirty seconds on the phone with him and woke up to him asking “Are you there?” (and can you imagine calling 911 and the dispatcher FALLS ASLEEP?) and I think I am having a heart attack all the time and I am taking too much Lexapro I am skipping my doses I am not falling asleep I am sleeping all day when I am not working I am sleeping when I am sleeping I am on the phone asking

911 what’s the address of the emergency? The emergency is that I have to do this again. And again. And again. The worst part is waking up. The worst part is not dying in my sleep. But it’s my night off, and that’s a little bit better, I guess.

My wife leaves for work as I come home. We say hi. We say goodbye. I go to sleep at 8:30 a.m. when I can. But most of the time I am lying in bed, heart pounding, rising to piss and shit out the vile. My stomach is always sludgy, feels like a vat of poison sloshing around. Haven’t had a solid bowel movement in two years. Stomach is so large I can’t lean forward and I have to roll around. I roll off the bed and my knees almost can’t support my weight.

It would be one thing if I were fat and happy. But this motor won’t propel. It is sputtering, it is dying. It is betraying. I fell asleep at noon and woke up at 4:30 p.m. to my phone ringing. They ask/tell me to come in and I am back in at 11 p.m. and I work again and have worked for the past twelve days in a row and it won’t stop it will never stop.

Sometimes it is like the movies. 911 what’s the address of the emergency? 32 Walker Mills Road, Bethel, Maine. Our autistic eight year old fell in the hot tub and we don’t know how long he was under and he’s not breathing and he’s turning purple.

Ok, thank you for telling me that. I need you to lie him on the ground or a firm or flat surface. Put your ear to his mouth. Can you see or hear any breath?

No, he’s not breathing.

Ok, listen carefully. We need to start CPR, so please listen to these instructions. I need you to to press firm and fast in the center of the chest, just below the nipple. Let’s start now, and count with me so I know we’re doing it right. One. One. Two…m’aam, are you there? M’aam? It’s not working. He’s not breathing.

Oh my God, he’s not breathing. M’aam, listen, take a deep breath. I know this is scary, but if you work with me to help your son-- CAN’T YOU HEAR ME? HE’S NOT BREATHING! SEND THE AMBULANCE NOW!

The ambulance is heading to you as fast and as safely as it can. We need to do CPR to try and help-- HE’S DEAD. HE’S FUCKING DEAD. What’s your name? SEND THE FUCKING AMBULANCE YOU PIECE OF SHIT. The ambulance is coming, please, m’aam, we need to do CPR. HE’S NOT BREATHING!

Option one. Outcome: fired.

Jesus Christ, I know you’re scared, but your kid drowned and YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON who can save them. Stop swearing at me and FUCKING DO CPR ON YOUR CHILD.

Option two: Outcome: oh holy mother of God.

M’aam, I know your scared, but we really need to work together to make sure that your son is okay. We need to do CPR. Let’s start again. One…two..three..

And I picked option two. And the child died. And I did my job. And I got off the phone and I went to the bathroom. And I thought “maybe I should cry” while I sat on the toilet but I got out of the stall and looked in the mirror and saw a stranger with Cheeto crumbs in his beard, bags under his eyes, an animated dead man.

And I got back to my desk and I picked up the phone and I talked to someone who had their car towed during a parking ban and threatened to sue me, the city of Norway Police Department, and the entire county and the dead eight year old slowly faded and I never thought about him again and I was dying and I was slowly chipping away at what made me a human being.

Another shift. 4:15 p.m. someone, a female voice, called and told my coworker an eight year-old in the apartment is vomiting and isn’t breathing right. I send an ambulance. As soon as the ambulance gets there, the medic, in a voice that, even through the static and crackling of the radio conveys a sense of oh my god this kid is going to die, says “We’ve started CPR, send another crew and a Lucas Machine.”

A Lucas machine is basically a lifesaving strap-on chest compressor, and this tandem request spells out something terrible. But Jesus I thought the kid was just throwing up? How is he dying? What is happening? And I think he’ll make it, right? How bad can it be? The answer, usually, is much worse. The Lucas Machine and the crew came and the kid eventually died. And I know the crew tried their best but did I? Did I do enough? How did it even happen? It doesn’t make sense.

During shift change, we sat around in our rollie chairs like the people from WALL-E and we talked about notable calls. People being shitheads. People getting arrested, a father and son who got drunk and beat the shit out of each other for the third time in a month, endless domestic disputes,. a guy who drank a liter of vodka in the woods behind the Walgreens and was vomiting blood.

And one day, we talked about someone who didn’t make it, someone who died in a car accident, and we talked about how the guy’s spouse kept calling and asking questions in the middle of a rush and how annoying it was. My coworker said, lady, your husband died, that’s what you get, like it was the wife’s fault.

We’re always looking for someone to blame; the man who died of an overdose, the person who dared to have a panic attack in a parking lot, the schizophrenic woman who was arrested for going through trash in the McDonald’s. That’s what you get. Your husband sliding off the road and dying.

And I rise up and I do it again and I rise up and I do it again and I think;

This is what I get.

A kid called on my third ever shift. 14 years old. Her friend passed out and wasn’t waking up and was breathing “weird.” Breathing weird was basically the same as not breathing. Her family rented a condo at a ski resort and she and her friends decided to steal a bottle of Rosé and chug it. At least that’s what she said; the cop afterward said it was more like a handle of vodka and a bottle of Rosé.

Apparently the friend had drank way more than the other girls and, while we were on the phone, was awake, talking, and slurring. The kid was speaking like an adult. Answering all my questions. Keeping her friend safe. Keeping her friend alive.

And eventually, I had to ask, where are your parents? They were in the next room, drunk. She didn’t want to go get them, but I heard her take a deep breath, shore herself up, and go rouse them. And while I was speaking to her, I thought, you’re doing what you’re supposed to. And I knew that when I was 14 and getting drunk if I was dying of alcohol poisoning, my friends wouldn’t have called the cops. And I’m glad she did. The deputy who responded said she was unconscious when the ambulance got there, and that she could have permanent brain damage.

First word out of my trainer’s mouth: I hope she gets arrested. She did the thing we tell teenagers to do--call for help--and she got charged, the deputy cited her and now she has to deal with a friend on a ventilator and what the fuck man just give her a goddamn break charge the parents with furnishing liquor for a minor so they can get a fancy lawyer and move on. I said this, more timidly, and she called me soft. That I had to harden up if I wanted to work this job. And I took her advice and I hardened--rather, I shriveled, became desiccated, like an apple core left in the sun. Every night I got a little bit worse.

In real life, it’s always, 911 what’s the address of the emergency? In the shows, the dramas, it’s always 911 what is your emergency--bullshit. Really, it doesn’t matter what the emergency is. We’re legally obligated to send some sort of response to every call we get, even if it’s a dead line or someone says “sorry my cat walked across my phone and accidentally called.”

Or, at least, we make the call and pass it on to the officer and they choose if they respond or not. But let’s say you, reader, call in. You’re in the middle of the woods and you broke your leg.

Reception is bad. You call. We can gather something is wrong because you’re in the middle of the woods and you’re calling 911. We’re going to send someone to you regardless. Every time you call, a cell phone signal bounces off a tower, and most of the time we can pinpoint where you are using that information. So we always ask where you are.

Where you are is more important than what is happening to you.

Where I am is more important than what is happening to me. I am driving back home after a 16 hour shift. It is 3:30 p.m. and I have been working since 11 p.m. I have the windows rolled down and the subzero February air is blasting my face to the point of pain. I raise a sip of Redbull to my lips. My eyes feel incredibly heavy, like they’re weighed down with sandbags. Miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go. Gotta keep my eyes open. The lanes split into two as my Subaru crests the hill, and the highway rolls down, eventually meeting a lake. I fight my eyes. A tractor trailer is on my right, matching my speed, and another tractor trailer is in the oncoming lane.

Option one: fucking flesh pancake.

In this reality, my eyes weigh heavy and, for an instant, I succumb to the lure of sleep. Only for a moment, but enough. I drift to the right; no rumble strips between lanes, and my Subaru Impreza lazily moves underneath the semi for a moment before the back wheels roll on top of and crush the center of my Impreza like a piece of paper in a palm, along with the right side of my body, like a bug crushed under a thumb, the pressure squeezing out my eyes and collapsing steel on my organs and squeezing them until they pop like a cherry, guts and bits of bone shrew on the dash, which didn’t quite cave in.

The left side keeps rolling with my Impreza; the tires collapsed the middle, and with screeching steel sending up sparks from the pavement, half my body and half my car careens into the path of the oncoming truck, crushing what is left of my meat directly under the front driver side wheel, flattened like Wile-e Coyote.

Obviously, you’re here, reader, using your eyes to conceive words on a page composed by me, so this option is null.

Option two: I succumb to the heavy weight of sleep. I drift left and hit the rumble strip, jerk awake, slightly overcorrect--oh holy FUCK--but pull back into my lane to the low rumbling blair of the truck’s horn. I stop at the next gas station and sleep in the parking lot for an hour and a half before continuing home, the raw terror and chest tightening anxiety simmering back down into the back of the subconscious, filed away for another day’s panic attack.

This is what I get. Another fucking panic attack. A deposit, a promise on credit to have one in the future. This is what I get. I live to see another night of emergencies.

Another night of

911 what’s the address of your emergency? A line cook is conditioned to hate, or at least be stressed out, by the sound of a slip printing in the middle of a rush. A 911 dispatcher is conditioned the same way, but with telephones. There’s the big black emergency phone, and the “business” or non-emergency line. I worked a few snowstorms, and those were always absolute fever dreams. Four lines ringing at the same time. Someone with a tree down on their garage; someone wondering why they lost power, someone who was running low on oxygen, the big black phone on a shoulder and the business line on the other and nothing pissed me off more when I was already at the verge of lighting my hair on fire was ANOTHER phone ringing. On all sides, surrounded, phones, off the hook, none of the calls pleasant, either straight unfiltered terrible or fucking annoying or a little bit bad or mildly unpleasant. And you don’t get to know what the call is going to be, you just have to answer it and figure it out as you go. I got a call that started with silence and ended in someone bleeding to death.

To say nothing of the whiplash. One time, I went from an elderly man falling down the stairs, bashing his head open and dying in front of his grandchild to a business line call demanding the police race to her apartment because someone parked in front of her dumpster and called me a “fucking idiot who can’t do his job” because four months ago she called the same thing in and “no one did anything,” like I’m the one who presses hold and I ride my rolling chair to her parking lot and summarily execute the motherfucker who dared park in front of the dumpster.

There are people out there who treat police like a personal army. There’s someone sitting on a porch without a shirt. Someone in a store is talking to themselves as they walk down the aisles. A Black SUV with (fucking GASP) New Jersey plates has been parked LEGALLY in front of the post office and you “don’t see very many people” like that in rural Maine.

And you have to give the call to the cop who goes out and investigates and your sneaking suspicion that they’re wasting their time on this obvious bullshit is because the occupants of the car are black but you can’t prove that, really. So you just keep going. And you silence the part of you that wants to scream. You cut out your own fucking tonge because you’re a coward and you keep rolling around in your chair and filing paperwork and answering the phone.

It doesn’t matter what is happening to you, it matters where you are, and I am here, having an emergency. Right now.

911 what’s the address of your emergency? Does any of this make sense? Where the fuck am I? Sir, calm down. Sir, take a deep breath. I gasp awake from an uneasy sleep, back of my head pounding.

I only dream of work. I only dream of answering telephones and talking on radios and I rattle off codes in my asleep; we got a 10-38 (police chase) a 10-44 (mentally disturbed subject). And after a call where someone is obviously in crisis I get to say, on the radio, that the subject is “10-44,” and the subject is that they are fucking crazy and anything they say is invalid. Even though two years prior I downed an entire fifth of rum and was intent on killing myself before I called 911 while blacked out--they probably called me 10-44 over the radio as I wept in the back of a cruiser heading towards the psych ward.

After a terrible shift during training where I was dumped in front of a computer with all the law radio channels for the first time and my trainer said “let’s see what you can do,” and turned her back to me, she brought me into the back room and said “you were awful today. Do you even want to work here?” I should have said “no” and walked the fuck out of that building, got in my car, dealt with the overdrafts and the repossessions and gone back to whatever the fuck I was going. But, I did, so I said yes. I had an out, another option, (press one to stay and two to quit) and I pressed one on the keypad. This is what I get. And really, I chose all of this. I chose to stay silent as my soul got carved away shift by shift, as I pushed my body to stay awake for 24 hour periods multiple days per week. I had a way out, and I buried my head and I stayed in the fire. Burnout is a funny concept; on the first day my trainers talked about how rampant it was in solemn tones, like it was some kind of terminal disease, and that’s partly true I guess. It is terminal. It can’t be purged or cured once it sets in. It sat in as soon as I just FUCKING sat down to watch the Great British Bake Off and cracked a beer and the phone rang and it’s work and I could not pick up but I’m conditioned to pick up the phone always ringing and so I pick up and I say

911 what's the address of the emergency? 54 Crockett Ridge Road, Norway. Ok, can you tell me exactly what happened? He has a sword. He’s in the backyard. He’s drunk. He has a sword? Yeah. Does he have any other weapons? No. Where are you? I’m with the kids. Were barricaded in the upstairs bedroom. Is anyone hurt? No. Has he threatened to hurt himself? Yes. He drank a whole bottle of wine and said he was “going to end this like a Roman.” End what? I don’t know. His life? He gets really dark when he drinks like this.

What's his name? Erik Berkoswi. What’s your name? Lillian Berkoswi. Thank you. Are the kids safe? I don’t think he’d hurt the kids. How many kids? Two, a boy and a girl. What are there names? Noah. He’s five. Eden. She’s three. They’re scared, but okahy. Where is he now? Still in the backyard. Wait, shit, I can hear the downstairs door opening. Ok, Lillian I want you to lock the bedroom door and stay in the room with your kids. Ok. He’s coming up the stairs, towards the door.

If you need to, put me on speaker so I can hear what he says. You’re doing a great job, and the police are on the way. (Lillian puts me on speaker). A male voice at the door. Where the fuck are you? Who are you talking to? The police, Erik. You called the police? What the fuck? Erik, please, the kids can hear you. Please, just go down into the basement. Do you still have the sword? (Erik doesn’t say anything.)

My thoughts: oh my fucking God he’s going to take the sword and he’s going to plunge it through the door and he’s going to force his way inside and he’s going to slaughter his wife and children until she says

I can hear him. He’s walking down the stairs. Ok. Are the kids okay? They’re crying, but yeah. Has he ever done something like this before? Usually, when he drinks, he just gets sad. He’s never done anything like this.

And everything was fine, he still had the sword when the cops surrounded the house and they tased him and he dropped the sword and cuffed and he sounded so indignant, “I never said I wanted to kill them, why are you arresting me,” and thank God there was no blood on that blade. Thank God I didn’t listen to a mother and her children die on the telephone.

911 what is the address of your emergency? I’m going to hang myself. Where are you? Hang up. Piss drunk. Half a bottle of Kraken Rum. Staggering down to the river. Throw my shoes in the April snow. Hear the rush of the water.

This is a year and a half before I take my job at the dispatch center. This is a year and a half before I take calls from suicidal men every single night. This is a year and a half before the constant emergency.

This is the phone call before I sit in my rolling chair and I answer the phone. The phone rings. I answer it. There’s an emergency.

There’s an emergency, and I get to hear it. There’s an emergency, and it’s not my emergency, it’s laid out in front of me like silver platters from the course of a meal.

I eat and I gorge and I am having an emergency. I am always having an emergency.

#jonny bolduc #jovialtorchlight #jonny bolduc is alive #911 dispatch

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