The 3:14 Call

The exchange had no windows. There was only the one bare lamp hung low over her desk on a single black cord, and beneath it the long board of jacks and patch cords that climbed the wall in dim rows like a city seen from the air with most of its lights gone out.

Vera worked the night shift alone. She had worked it for nine years. She knew the small square the lamp made on her desk the way other people knew their own kitchens — the chipped saucer, the enamel cup, the tea going from steam to skin to cold, the little notebook where she wrote down the times of strange calls in a careful hand. Past the edge of the square the room dropped off into a flat unbroken dark that smelled of bakelite and dust and the cooling iron of the switches.

The first night the call came in at three fourteen.

A single jack lit up at the bottom of the board, a small dull bulb behind frosted glass. She slid the cord home and drew breath to say her operator number, and before the number could leave her mouth the voice on the other end said, calmly and without hurry, Hello, Vera.

She did not answer. The voice went on. It said she was sitting with her left hand around the enamel cup. It said the tea was cold. It said the lamp above her was swinging, very slightly, the way it always did after the building settled at three. It said her notebook was open to a clean page.

The second night it came at three fourteen exactly. The third night, the same. By the end of the first week she had stopped saying her number at all. She would lift the cord and wait, and the voice would describe her — the angle of her shoulders, the place she had set the saucer, the small habit she had of pressing her thumb against the bridge of her nose when she was tired — and then the line would go quiet, and she would unplug it, and write down the time.

After that she stopped reporting the calls. There was no one to report them to who would do anything. She stopped pulling the panel. She drank her tea while it was still warm. She sat very upright inside the square of light and tried, every night, not to look at the dark behind her.

One night, to keep from listening to the voice, she began to count her own breathing. In for four, hold for four, out for four. She did this with her eyes closed and her hands flat on the desk on either side of the cold cup.

On the third round she heard the voice counting with her. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Not echoing — leading, by the smallest fraction of a second, the way a person breathing close behind your ear is always a little ahead of the breath you think is yours.

She opened her eyes. The lamp made its small square on the desk. Her hands lay inside it. Past the edge of the square the room went on being dark in every direction, including the one directly behind her chair.