Hold the Line (v)
Brain dumps from a crisis worker: FOMO, imploding souls, overpopulation, age, and Contracrostipunctus dreams.
My son said ‘Daddy and Granny are calling the police to put Mommy in a cage.’ His Granny has a hoarder house with big dogs; I think this is where they hide him. My husband has killed before and keeps guns in the house; he was kicked out of the military; it wouldn’t be the first time he fell asleep with the stove on.
One of the most unsettling things about this job1 is the perpetual state of not knowing. Every caller has a story, yet I seldom learn their endings. To them, I'm a flash in the pan, a transactional voice invited in for a quick peek. When the call ends, we return to our respective ethers; they're doomed to live their stories while I'm left on the edge of my seat, consumed by an odd species of FOMO: What happened to the child? Will he see his mother again? Who did the husband kill? Was I able to help?
I'm force-fed stories with hideous inertia. They're sharp question marks the size of red blood cells, buzzing locust-like in my gut, gorging on my stomach lining. Free-range acid sloshes through question-gnawed gaps, burning my abdomen in unforeseen flourishes.
Today, it struck at breakfast. I winced at the hot tummy tickle, signaling the caller's parade through my inner ear—it wouldn't be the first time he fell asleep with the stove on. I reflexively nursed my belly and picked apple flesh from my K9s with a bitter finger, wondering what it's like to burn alive.
All I can do is generalize about this world and point to it with a yearning, stumped pleasure. My pointing finger is the gesture of an outsider, a tourist, gawking at a radioactive carnival I can’t domesticate or quarantine.
—Wayne Koestenbaum
"I think I’ve found some help." They cast about for pen and paper. “Let me know when you’re ready for the number.” “Okay, I’m ready!” "1-800..." As I read, their soul implodes. An imploded soul is a sonic triptych: the gulp of a snuffed match, a post-sentencing lull, and the anhedonic confirmation of numbers (1-8-0-0...) I sense them sitting there, condemned to automata and phone-trees, their cells vibrating, itching to abandon ship.
Last month, I went to the state capital to lobby for increased funding for social services. We didn't get enough. The demand for our services increases daily, but my representatives seem uninterested in financial solutions.
As a concerned citizen, I'd like to propose alternative policies that may better tickle their fancies:
Overpopulation solution #4: On a random day every month, supermarkets hand out free samples containing chemical castration agents.
Overpopulation solution #11: Expand Sunday Blue Laws to include hospitals.
Overpopulation solution #17: On odd months, the homeless are immune from murder charges. They earn a point for each confirmed kill. Points can be redeemed for shoes, non-perishables, or gift cards.
Of all possible things, I dreamt of the Contracrostipunctus:
I'm in a leather-smelling study; Tortoise is taking issue with Crab's "perfect" record player, supposedly capable of reproducing all conceivable sounds with absolute fidelity.
Tortoise asks Crab to load a recording of an "original composition" into the player. Seconds after the stylus touches down, the player convulses and explodes, scattering across the room.
Tortoise reveals his "composition" is a recording of the record player's resonant frequency—the fundamental frequency of a material that excites it into maximum oscillation. As the dutiful machine played the record, it unknowingly conjured the sounds of its destruction.
Something snaps in me, and I sit ramrod straight, sweating hog-like. My hair hurts, and my eyes shortcircuit in a lighthouse loop: the phonograph fell into innumerable pieces, the phonograph fell into innumerable...
I close my eyes and find comfort in the fuzzy black until a pair of phantom Escher hands materialize, prying my eyes open with ink-shadowed thumbs. My pupils resume their perverted rote, tracing the page’s mantra, chumming the waters to coax truth from the deep, innumerable pieces, innumerable...
I recoil as I become the record player. I am material. I resonate. I produce sound. Therefore, every time I've opened my yap, I was (for all intents and purposes) playing Russian Roulette. Every I love you, laugh, song, yop, cry, squeal, guffaw, whistle, belch, sneeze, vow, reprimand, prayer, shibboleth were nothing but potential bullets to the brain—potential performances of catastrophic resonance.
The hands turn my head and squeeze. I see my brother's future wedding. I'm standing amongst faceless groomsmen. We're cheering as someone finishes a toast. Caught up in the jubilee, I try a two-finger-in-the-mouth whistle, but my embouchure isn't quite right. The pitch splinters into a crass multiphonic and goes rogue, glissandoing neatly into the pocket of my death frequency. I'm mauled by vibrations and explode with a wet pop, raining down in gelatinous blobs upon screaming relatives as they scramble for cover under tables and serving trays.
I awoke staring at the ceiling, still hearing my blobs strike tabletops like raw steaks dropped on a tile floor. I lifted the duvet, pleased to find I had a body. I tried to move my legs and couldn't. I wanted to call for help, but my mouth scared me.
Help is the most common resonant frequency. In my silence, I sit with a polished respect for those who spin the cylinder and call out for it—those who utter vulnerabilities despite being wired to blow.
I wish I were one of you.
Lucidity often arrives via subtraction, via impoverishment. Time is the Great Subtractor. It reserves a cruel ilk of lucidity for the youthful body encountering its first “I can’t do that anymore.”
It’s been a bummer re-visiting the music that stoked my passion for the guitar, only to realize it was recorded by artists younger than I am now. This music is the bedrock of my identity; it should catapult me into nostalgic bliss, but I’m cursed by my lizard brain’s eagerness to compare and compete.
I’ve long been obsessed with age as a unit of comparison. When facing the amorphous swarm of the other, X=X is the ultimate temptation. Ignore all differences and latch on to commonality. If X=X, then me at 30 = them at 30; two bodies worn by equal winters. Who accomplished more? How close am I to their greatness?
As I listen, my legs grow restless, scissoring side to side in my nylon sweats, filling the room with the sound of a castaway jerking his fire plough as darkness assembles. The music no longer inspires; it reminds me of how far I’ve fallen, or more aptly, how I never got off the ground. I console myself by intoning good things come to those who wait, but then again, so does atrophy.
Perhaps jealousy, inadequacy, and humiliation drew me to crisis work. I was not summoned to the front lines by pure altruism. I grew tired of being the one-eyed man in a world of binocularoids, so I retreated to the land of the blind to become king. The callers are my subjects, assembling before me with outstretched hands, unhoused and unmoored. I crouch beside my inner child, pointing at the callers like constellations: “See that one there? The sheepish twenty-something? She just lost her home. And the one behind her? Overdosed on Fentanyl last week. It could be worse, my child; we’re doing just fine. Forget the music! Help these folks and let their struggles put stars in your eyes, ‘but for the grace of God go I’ or whatever…”
If I’m wired to thrash about in the muck of neurotic comparison, at least allow me the high of greater-than. I can’t compete with the best. I can’t stomach Facebook gloat posts from high school cohorts praising God for their new home or the latest child they’ve shat out.
Show me the worst so I may feel tall.
Show me the worst so I may pretend I’m okay.
Show me the worst so I may learn a roof is a victory.
Show me the worst so I may become thankful.
Show me the worst so I may give myself to the one who needs it more.
My precious callers, show me your worst so we may rise together. Don’t be afraid of our dependency. It’s a rapturous thing to need one another.
The people who need people are the luckiest people in the world.
P.S…
Management gave us new computers with screen recording software.
I can no longer surf Amazon for self-cleaning water bottles as a life crumbles in my ear.
What happened to freedom?
Hold the Line (iv)
A caller pronounces “complaint” as “cum plant.” I smile like a schoolboy, knowing I’m free to butcher something to a comical degree and still be understood. The mistake fills my mind with images of Harvey Weinstein jacking off into potted plants, and my mood sours.
Hold the Line (iii)
The 5th of January A day of domestic violence. All the shelters are full. Victims with nowhere to go. I’m a terrible person.
I work full-time in a crisis call center.
This one is fantastic, wow. I do the same thing with music that I love, frantically looking up when albums were written and recorded on Wikipedia and comparing that to the age of the songwriters and musicians. I’ve done it for years, I don’t know why I still do because I don’t even play music as seriously as I used to.
Then pointing out the callers to your inner-child, holy. What an image, and something I think we all do, however we come across humans that are in worse off situations than ourselves.
Amazing work as always, Will.
This reminded of when I used to volunteer at a crisis center. Some calls were very difficult to digest. People have unique stories that stay with you. I sometimes wonder what happened to a lot of them and how they are. Thanks for this piece, William :)