I'm Renee. I'm 29, and for the last five years I have answered 911 for the county, the last three of them on graveyards: 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., in a room with no windows about twenty minutes from the Strip. I live with Curt, my boyfriend of four years, and a cat named Skinner in a stucco house with aluminum foil on the bedroom windows. I started this journal on New Year's Day because the nights are long and my mother doesn't have e-mail.

House rule: I never write who called, or where they called from. That belongs to them. What I write about is the part that's mine, which is whatever is left over after I hang up.

Harvest moon last night. It came up enormous and orange over the mountains on my drive in, the kind of moon that makes you pull over, and I did, on the shoulder, for about a minute and a half. That is the longest I have sat still without a phone in my ear since August.

Saturday nights are loud. Two bar fights, a grease fire, a man who needed us to know his neighbor's sprinkler was hitting his car (sir, this is 911), and a lady whose husband hadn't come home who turned out, by 4 a.m., to be a lady whose husband had come home and was asleep in his truck in the driveway. I love that call. I would take that call every single night.

Here's what I keep thinking about. Thursday, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter. It went around behind the planet and never came back out. Nobody knows why yet. The news showed the control room, all those people in headsets staring at their screens, and I thought: oh, I know that room. That's the room where you keep listening after the line goes quiet. Where you keep saying "are you still there?" to something that isn't going to answer.

Curt had gone to bed early and left a note on the coffee maker for me:"Moon's good tonight. Look up." He drew a face on the moon. It is hard to stay mad at a man who draws faces on things.

Came home, fed Skinner, put in the tape. Mulder, Scully, two flashlights and a basement. I fell asleep before the end, which lately is a miracle, and I am counting it.

I'm staying.

I'm going to type that again, because I have been going back and forth for three weeks and I want it written down somewhere I can't erase with my thumb: I'm staying. At the center. On nights.

And I called the EAP today. The Employee Assistance Program. The county counselor. The pamphlet Ray the chaplain handed out at the debriefing, which Curt stuck on the fridge under the Hoover Dam magnet and which I have been walking past for three weeks like it was a bill. I called at two in the afternoon, which is my two in the morning, and a woman with a very calm voice answered. I know professionally calm. This was the real thing. I said, "I'm a dispatcher, I had a bad call in August, and I don't sleep," and she said "Okay," like that was a normal sentence to hear on a Friday. Tuesday at three. I have to take the afternoon. She didn't blink. I guess she gets a lot of us.

How I decided, if you can call it that: last night, around 1:30, a man called because his wife was having chest pains. Scared, fast, not making sense. I did what I do. Slowed him down. Confirmed the address. Told him to unlock the front door, turn on the porch light, put the dog in the bedroom. Stayed on with him until I heard the medics come through the door and heard him say "they're here, they're here," like I'd been the one driving.

And I thought: I'm good at this. I'm really good at this. It's the worst night of somebody's life, and for four minutes I'm the calmest person they know.

Curt took it better than I expected. He was quiet a long time. Then he said, "Then I want you to go talk to somebody," and I said, "I called today," and he said, "Oh," and hugged me in the kitchen with the dish towel still over his shoulder.

He isn't wrong, is the thing. He's been sleeping next to somebody who doesn't sleep for a month. That's its own kind of shift.

Went to look at Dale's office today, like I promised. (Dale: Curt's big brother. Owns a title company.) Night off, so I set the alarm for 9:30 a.m., which for me is like a normal person getting up at 3 a.m. to go to a party.

It's in one of those new office parks where the palm trees are still wearing their wooden braces. Inside, it's beige. Beige carpet, beige cubicles, a water cooler that goes glug every so often like it's thinking. Everybody was very nice. Dale walked me around and explained escrow, which I now understand to be a system for making sure the right papers get to the right people before anybody gets their keys. "With your phone skills," he said, "you'd be a natural." Days. Weekends off. A little less money. Nobody calls a title company screaming.

Actually, Dale said, people do call screaming. Closings fall through. Loans don't fund. So I asked him, "Does anybody ever stop breathing?" And he laughed, and then he looked at me and stopped laughing, and said, "No. No, not so far."

It was so quiet in there. I could hear the fluorescent lights. I kept waiting for something to ring.

On the way home a medic unit passed me going the other way, lights and siren, and my whole body turned to watch it go, like a dog hearing its name.

Curt asked how it went. I said, "It's really nice." Which is true. He heard the other part anyway.

All week the break room TV has been hurricane. Floyd. First Florida, then Georgia, then the Carolinas, and all those people in their cars on the interstates going nowhere at five miles an hour. Then early yesterday it came ashore in North Carolina, and now it's the rivers. Water up into whole towns. People waiting on roofs.

Everybody else watches the weatherman. I watch the little names of the counties at the bottom of the screen. Every one of those counties has a room like mine. Somewhere in eastern North Carolina there's a woman in a headset who's been on for thirty hours, taking calls from people whose water is at the second step, then the fourth step, and she has nobody to send because the roads are gone. That's the part of this job nobody puts in the recruiting brochure. A lot of it is deciding who waits.

Sully, the other overnight call-taker, said "God help 'em" and went back to his crossword. Around three I looked over and he wasn't doing the crossword. Just holding the pen.

Here it was 84 degrees at midnight and dry as a cracker. We had a tourist whose rental car got towed who wanted to report it stolen, a couple of fender-benders, and a man who wanted to know if it was legal to shoot a pigeon. (No. Also: why.)

Sunday dinner at Dale and Bonnie's. Which is my Sunday breakfast.

Dale had the Browns on in the den, back in the league after three years and losing to Pittsburgh 43 to nothing. He said "It's a rebuilding year" about nine times. Over pot roast he made the offer. Official this time. Escrow assistant, days, health insurance, "we'd love to have you, Renee." Bonnie had clearly been told to smile. Curt looked at his plate like the answer was under the gravy.

In the car I said, "You set that up." He said, "I asked him." I said, "Without asking me." He said, "I've been asking you for two weeks, Ren. You just don't hear me, because you're asleep. Except you're not asleep. You're lying there at noon with your eyes open, looking at the foil."

Which, okay. Fair.

He said he's scared. He said, "You come home gray." He said he hears me get up at one in the afternoon and turn on the TV and it's the aliens again.

I didn't say anything smart. I said I'd go look at the office. That's all I promised. Look.

9/9/99. For those of you not in computers (me neither, but I have been told): some old programs used 9999 to mean "end of file," or "stop here," so some people were worried today's date would make things stop.

The county sent an IT guy. He came in at 11:45 last night with a thermos and a box of doughnuts and sat behind us watching the screens roll over to midnight like it was New Year's Eve. Nothing happened. The clock went from 23:59 to 00:00 and the screens stayed the screens. He looked almost disappointed. He says he'll be back for the real one, December 31, along with every supervisor in the county and probably the governor. I'm working that night. Everybody's working that night. They cancelled all leave in June.

Otherwise a slow night. He ate half my sunflower seeds.

Twelve days since the call. I keep counting, like it's something I quit.

The debriefing was yesterday at ten in the morning, which the county considers the middle of the day and I consider the middle of the night.

They call it a CISD: critical incident stress debriefing. It was in the meeting room at the fire station, with the good chairs pulled into a circle. Everybody who touched the call was there. Me. Lorna, because she was supervising. The two medics. The engine crew. The trooper who got there first. The tow truck driver, which surprised me, and then didn't. Plus the peer team: two firefighters from another station who've been trained for this, and Ray, the chaplain, who has a mustache like a push broom and the kindest eyes in the county.

The rules are: nothing leaves the room, nobody is being graded, and you don't have to talk. So I won't write what anybody else said. I'll write what I said, because that's mine.

I said the thing I haven't been able to say to Curt. That I didn't see anything. I never see anything. Everyone else in that circle saw it, and I'm the one who can't sleep, and I feel like I don't have the right. Like I'm a tourist in their bad night.

And the tow driver, a big guy with forearms like hams, turned in his chair and said, "You were the voice? On the lady's phone?" I said yes. He said, "When I pulled up, she was still holding the phone up. So you could hear."

I didn't know that. I didn't know she did that.

Ray says it's normal not to sleep. Normal to replay it. Normal to get furious at small things, like the grocery store being out of the good bread, which I did on Tuesday, in public, at a teenager in an apron. (Sorry, kid.) He gave everybody a pamphlet with the EAP number on it. Curt put it on the fridge.

I keep walking past it.

Okay. I'm going to write about Saturday once, and then I'm going to try to stop carrying it around.

2:51 a.m. The line lights. Cell phone, which means nothing on my screen. No address, no location, just a number. Wireless 911 doesn't tell us where you are; you have to tell us. A woman driving home came over a rise on the highway, out past the last of the lights, and there was a car on its roof off the right shoulder, headlights pointing at nothing.

First thing is always: where are you. She didn't know. Nobody ever knows. It's dark, it's the desert, every mile looks like every other mile. I asked if she could see a small green sign on a post. A mile marker. She had to back up to find one. She read it to me out of her own headlights, and I typed it in, and the engine and the medics and a trooper were rolling before she even got out of her car.

Then she went to him. I asked what I ask. Is he awake. Is he breathing. Don't move him. Don't move him. Talk to him.

She talked to him. For eleven minutes she knelt in the sand and talked to a boy she had never met, and I talked to her. I know it was eleven minutes because it's on the tape. I've listened to the tape once. Lorna says don't listen to it again, and Lorna has been doing this since I was in first grade, so I won't.

The car radio was still playing. I could hear it under everything. "All Star." The Smash Mouth song. Which is on every radio station in America every twelve minutes, so, good. That's great. That's just great.

And his pager kept going off. She said, "His beeper keeps going," and I said, "That's okay, stay with him," and it kept going. It was three in the morning. I think it was his mother. I think his mother was paging him because he wasn't home yet.

Then the sirens on her end, then the medics' voices, and she said "They're here" and hung up, the way they always do. You almost never find out what happened. That's the deal.

Except this time I did. It was in the paper this morning. He was seventeen. He died Saturday afternoon at the hospital. They printed his name. I'm not going to.

I did everything right. Lorna pulled the tape and told me so, and the trooper told her so, and I know it. I know it the way I know my own phone number.

I just can't find the off switch.

Bad call last night. Rollover out on the highway. A kid.

I'm okay. I'm not okay. I'm going to go lie in the dark and not sleep.

More when I can.

Friday the 13th on the overnight. Everybody's cousin calls. I'm kidding. (Mostly.)

The Perseids peaked this week, so on my 3 a.m. break I went out to the back lot, past the generator and the smokers, and lay back on the hood of my car. It was still warm. Everything here is still warm at 3 a.m. in August. I counted nine meteors in twenty minutes. Sully came out and saw two, because he kept checking his watch.

Wednesday the break room TV had the eclipse in Europe: people in England and France and Turkey standing around in fields with cardboard glasses, and the sky going dark in the middle of the day. I've been living in the middle-of-the-day dark for three years. I could have told them it's not that exciting. (It looked extremely exciting.)

Curt says Dale is hiring at the title company again. Curt says this about every three months, like a comet. I said, "Tell Dale thank you." That's my answer every three months, too.

A reader asked how you sleep in the daytime in Las Vegas in August. Great question. I'll let you know.

No, here's the system. Aluminum foil taped over the bedroom windows, shiny side out. Box fan on high, for the noise, pointed at the wall. Phone ringer off, answering machine on, volume all the way down. A sign on the front door that says DAY SLEEPER, PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK, which has never once stopped a kid selling candy bars for band. Earplugs. Skinner shut out of the bedroom, which he takes personally and protests at the crack under the door.

And the tapes. FX runs The X-Files reruns, bless them, so the VCR tapes them while I'm at work, and when I get home I watch one with a bowl of cereal while the sky gets light behind the foil. Mulder believes everything. Scully believes nothing. Between them they cover my whole job.

On my nights off I'm up at 4 a.m. anyway, so I watch them then, too. Curt calls it "the aliens" like it's a religion. It sort of is.

He wants to go see The Blair Witch Project this weekend. I told him I get people screaming in the dark for free.

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If you want a heads-up when there's a new entry, write and say so and I'll add you to the list. Any subject line is fine. I'll be up. Thank you to the forty-some of you on it now, and especially to the dispatcher in Oregon who wrote after the August 30 entry just to say "me too." I read it on my 3 a.m. break. It helped.

If you know me in real life, you know where I work. Please be kind, and please don't forward these to anybody at the center.