Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

If you do not love me I shall not be loved

If I do not love you I shall not love.

Samuel Beckett

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ian Hunt is less than an hour from the end of his shift when he gets the call from his dead daughter. It’s been over seven years since he last heard her voice, and she was a different person back then, a seven-year-old girl with pudgy hands and a missing front tooth and green eyes that could break your heart if she wanted them to, so at first he doesn’t know it’s her.

But it is.

He’s sitting in the dispatch office in the Bulls Mouth, Texas, police station on Crouch Avenue, which, as usual, he’s got to himself, though he’s sure if he were to poke his head into the front room he’d see Chief Davis leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk and his Stetson tipped down over his eyes. An ancient swamp cooler rattles away in the window to his left, dripping water onto the moldy carpet beneath it, though the July heat doesn’t seem much intimidated by its efforts. Sweat rolls down the side of his face and he tilts his head sideways and rubs the trickle away on the shoulder of his uniform shirt. He clicks through a game of solitaire on the computer-assisted dispatch system on the desk in front of him. If folks in town knew this was how he spent ninety-five percent of his time they’d shit.

But Bulls Mouth just isn’t a big town. Three thousand people if you count everyone in the surrounding area, including the end-timers, revelators,snake-handlers,speed-cookers, dropouts, and junkies, and he supposes you have to count them. Bulls Mouth PD handles their calls.

Despite being the very definition of a small town, Bulls Mouth is the second largest city in Tonkawa County, making up a quarter of its population.

He picks up his coffee mug and takes a swallow of the cold slop within. Grimaces as it goes down, but still takes a second swallow. He must drink three pots of Folgers a day, pouring one cup after another down his throat as he clicks through his hundred games of solitaire.

He’s just setting down the cup when the call comes in from a pay phone on Main Street, just north of Flatland Avenue. Probably a prank call. In this day of cell phones, calls from pay phones almost always are. Fuck-off punk high-schoolers trying to chase away midsummer boredom with a little trouble. Growing up in Venice Beach, California, he did the same thing, so he can’t really hold it against them.

‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ he says into his headset, fingers hovering over a black keyboard, ready to punch in information.

‘Please help me!’

The voice belongs to either a girl or a woman, it’s impossible to tell which, and it is trembling with panic and out of breath. The girl/woman is gasping into the receiver, which is crackling in his ear like there’s a heavy wind, and high-pitched squeaks escape the back of her throat. If it’s a prank call the person on the other end of the line is the best pretender he’s ever dealt with.

‘Please, ma’am, try to remain calm, and tell me what the problem is.’

‘He’s coming after me. He’s-’

‘What’s your name and who’s coming after you?’

‘My name is Sarah. Wait, no. No. My name is Maggie, Maggie Hunt, and the man who’s. . I was. . he’s. . he’s-’

As soon as he hears the name, Maggie Hunt, Ian’s lips go numb, and like a low note plucked on a taut metal cord running through his middle, a strange vibration ripples through him. Nausea in F-sharp minor.

He swallows.

‘Maggie?’ He inhales through his nostrils and exhales through his mouth in a long trembling sigh. ‘Maggie,’ he says, ‘it’s Daddy.’

The funeral was in May, two months ago now. At first he didn’t want to have it. He thought it an absurd and ritualistic way of burying a past that was still, and is still, very much alive, and you don’t bury something when its heart is still beating. But finally Debbie convinced him that she needed it done. She needed closure. Her shrink, whom she drove all the way to Houston to visit, thought she did, anyway. So they had the funeral and people came and Pastor Warden stood and spoke platitudes while behind him lay a small and empty coffin.

But his words were as empty as the coffin was.

People cried and sang hymns out of tune and dropped to their knees and bowed their heads and prayed. They looked at pictures of pretty little Maggie, from age zero to age seven-up to seven but never older-sitting in a high chair with cake on her face; walking for the first time; sitting before a blue background for her second-grade yearbook photo; sitting on the front step of their house at 44 Grapevine Circle with a bloody knee, a crash helmet on her head, and a wide, mischievous Cheshire grin on her face.

If she were alive she would be turning fifteen in September.

Ian was neither among the hymn singers nor the weepers. He sat silent in the last pew throughout it all. His back was straight, his fingers laced together, his hands resting in his lap. Though Bulls Mouth Baptist was hot, even in May, he did not move to wipe the sweat from his forehead nor that trickling down the side of his face. He sat there motionless, his mind a room without any furniture in it. He only moved when people began to walk up to him and offer their condolences. He shook their hands and said thank you and when someone tried to hug him he accepted their hugs, but he simply wanted to leave. He wanted to go home and be alone.

After everyone else had come and gone Debbie walked over with Bill Finch. Bill was her new husband. He was also police, working out of the Tonkawa County Sheriff ’s Office in Bulls Mouth, just other side of the county jail from Bulls Mouth’s city police station, and a man who started many a jurisdictional argument with Chief Davis over even small issues the city always handled, which usually resulted in a yelling match between Davis and Sheriff Sizemore. Bill was one of only three county police regularly in Bulls Mouth. The main office was up in Mencken. The city PD handled most day-to-day policing on its own, and because of that all emergency calls in the area were filtered through Ian.

Debbie hugged him and thanked him for agreeing to the funeral. He and Bill nodded stiff greetings at one another, but neither offered a hand to shake. Then they went their separate ways. Debbie and Bill headed to their house and their twins, now three, and their two dogs and their backyard with its above-ground swimming pool. Ian to his apartment on College Avenue and his buzzing refrigerator and his piles of regrets.

‘Daddy?’ Maggie says.

‘I–I’m here. . I’m right here,’ he says after a moment during which speaking seems impossible. Then he realizes he has a job to do: ‘Tell me where you are. Are you on Main Street?’

Sometimes the location that comes up on the CAD system is incorrect. If someone is coming for his daughter he wants to make sure he’s sending a unit to the right place.

‘I don’t know. I need help.’

‘I know, Maggie. Help’s coming. But I need to know where you are. Do you see any street signs? Any store names?’

There is a pause. It seems to stretch on forever. Continents sink into the empty space. Then: ‘Yeah. It’s Main Street. The Main Street shopping center.’

Two months ago she was dead. Her headstone even now is planted in Hillside Cemetery just other side of Wallace Street. Row 17, plot 29. But there is no one in the earth beneath it. The person who in another world would be there is now standing in front of the Main Street shopping center with a telephone to her ear.