Short story · 3 min read · Set in Cala Mare ·
The Call-In I Did Not Record
A phone-in went out one caller longer than the log allowed, on a line the studio never had.
I present the small-hours phone-in from Pier Studio Two at Cala Mare, three shifts a week. The board carries two trunk lines and a spare lamp over a blank plate. There is no jack under that plate and no wire behind it; the paint on it is the trunk floor's paint and it has been on since before my time. Under the studio clock, in the shift book's own print, is the rule that ends every hour: OFF AIR WHILE THE HOUR TURNS.
Thursday before last I took seven callers in the ordinary way: light board, beeps in the cans, running order on my knee, Sylvia Morton signing the log across the glass. Seven callers, thirty-nine minutes of air. The spare lamp held a steady red the whole shift, the way it holds, a lit eye with no call behind it, and Morton says that lamp is dead glass on a live board and to let it be, and I let it be.
The same reel goes back out as the Monday repeat when the shift is short. The shift was short. On the replay, straight off my sixth goodnight, there is a seventh segment four minutes long that I did not take. Name given as Mabel Marsh, off the Cut. She says she has rung every Thursday since the spring and been passed over, so tonight she has come up on her own. Her talk is small and orderly: the placing of the pier lamps, which she says the Corporation has had wrong for years, and who will be on the bench by March. Then her questions follow my cue card word for word. There is no beep in front of her as there is in front of every caller the board lets through. She is simply on the line, seated in her own quiet, and I bring her through the item in my announcer voice, which is not a thing I would forget doing.
So the papers disagree in plain figures. Morton's log: seven callers. The reel: eight. The timing sheet from that Thursday: thirty-nine minutes of air. The reel: forty-three. And the four minutes are not spliced in. There is no cut anywhere in the tape; they run on from my goodnight the way a room runs on when the furniture stays where it was.
After the repeat I sat Morton down at the board and we played the reel twice through. Her memo went up marked uncounted caller, to ascertain. The trunk floor sent a man; he took the plate off, found painted plaster where a jack would live, two trunks wired for a two-line house, and initialled the socket card: NO THIRD CIRCUIT OWING. The card sits in the board file and the memo sits in the drawer under it, and the one does not cancel the other; they lie there together like two columns of the same account.
For confirmations: Morton heard her and signed the memo; the trunk man ruled the line impossible in the same week the line was audible, and signed that too; the spare lamp went out the night of the repeat and has not held since, and the girl on the switchboard watched it go dark with me and said nothing, which from her is an affidavit. I still put my one question to the board between shifts, standing over the blank plate where the paint is old and the nothing behind it is older. If the studio has two lines, who rang the third, and where does a caller wait who comes up on her own?