Woke up at two and the TV was already on in the bedroom, because Curt leaves it on for me when something happens, so I don't have to find out from the clock radio. John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane is missing off Martha's Vineyard. His wife and her sister were with him. The Coast Guard is out searching the water.

I keep thinking about the first phone call. Not the ones on the news. The one before all that. Somebody waiting on a small plane that didn't come in, and at some point, midnight, one in the morning, they picked up a phone, and somebody like me picked up the other end and said, "Okay. What time was it due?" And wrote it down. And didn't know yet it was going to be on every channel in the world. At that point it's just a late plane.

Most late planes are nothing. You say that to people, because it's true. "Most of the time it's nothing." Most of the time.

Going in early tonight. Lorna's short a body.

For the record, there is no such thing as a quiet Fourth of July in the desert.

Highlights: one palm tree fully on fire, like a torch at a luau. Three brush fires in vacant lots. A man who put out his own garage with a garden hose and then called to ask if somebody could come look and tell him he'd done it right. (The engine went. He had. They told him.) And between nine and eleven p.m., every dog in the valley ran away from the booms, and every one of their owners called 911. I love you. I love your dog. Please call animal control in the morning.

At 4 a.m. Sully looked up from his crossword and said, "Happy birthday, America," to nobody, and went back to it.

When I got home there was a bowl of Bonnie's potato salad in the fridge from Dale's barbecue with a note from Curt taped to the plastic wrap: "Happy 4th. Missed you. Eat this before it gets you."

I ate it for breakfast. Standing up. It was perfect.

Father's Day. I called Dad at eleven my time, which is two his time, which is when Mom calls me, so I got both of them on two extensions talking over each other like a radio with two stations.

Dad drove a bread route overnight for thirty-one years. He's the one who taught me the night. How to nap in the afternoon. How to eat eggs at 7 p.m. and not feel weird about it. How the world is kinder at 4 a.m., because the only people up are the ones who have to be. When I told him I got nights at the center, he said, "Good. Fewer bosses."

It was 112 here today. The heat calls have started: older folks whose air conditioners quit, and a daughter in another state who can't reach her mother and wants somebody to go knock. We go knock. That one turned out fine. The mother had unplugged the phone because it was "too loud."

Dad said it was 71 and raining in Michigan. I almost cried from jealousy.

A huge tornado went through the Oklahoma City suburbs last night. An F5. Moore, Bridge Creek, a lot of other places I'd never heard of until this morning. The break room TV had it on at six, and the weather people had tracked it street by street on live TV before it got there, saying the names of roads out loud, telling people to get underground.

All I could think about was the dispatchers. Every line lit at once. You can't take them all. You take one, and the others ring, and you finish and take the next one, and the next, and you don't look at the board because the board will break your heart.

I have never worked a real disaster. Our big nights here are New Year's Eve and fight nights. I hope I never do. And I hope if I ever do, I'm half as good as whoever was sitting in those chairs last night.

Woke up at two yesterday afternoon to Curt's voice on the answering machine saying, "Ren. Turn on the TV." Littleton, Colorado. A high school. I watched until I had to leave for work, and then we watched it on the break room TV all night between calls. Nobody took their break. We just stood in the doorway.

I'm not going to write much about it. It isn't mine to write about. But all night I kept thinking about the dispatchers there, and the calls that came in from inside that school. I know what they said, because it's what any of us would say. Keep your voice low. Stay where you are. Stay on the line. Help is there. Are you still with me.

Around four a boy called us, fourteen maybe, to ask if it could happen here. Not an emergency. I talked to him for a minute anyway. Lorna saw and didn't say a word.

A couple of you have asked about the aliens. Okay.

Sunday nights The X-Files is on Fox at nine and I don't leave for work until quarter after ten, so Sunday is the one night a week I get to watch something new, live, like a regular citizen. The rest of the week I tape the FX reruns and watch them when I get home at dawn, with cereal.

People think it's because of the UFOs. I don't care about UFOs. Half the tourists in this town care very much about UFOs, and every so often I take their calls.

It's that it's a show about two people who work nights, in a basement, taking the calls nobody else wants, who mostly never find out what really happened. And who keep showing up anyway. Of course I love it. It's a workplace comedy.

There's a little copy of the I WANT TO BELIEVE poster taped inside my locker. Sully says it's unprofessional. Sully has a picture of a bass inside his.

Happy New Year from the phones.

Everybody was drunk and almost everybody was fine. At 12:01 Curt called the business line to say happy new year, which you are absolutely not supposed to do, and Lorna let it ring through to me anyway and pretended to be very busy with a stapler.

One more year until the big one. Everybody at work already talks about Y2K like it's a hurricane with a date on it.

I've been reading other people's online journals on the slow nights, the ones where people just write down their lives, and I thought, well, I've got nights. So here's mine. Day sleeper. Night talker. Hi.

[email protected]

Want a heads-up when I post? Write and say so. I'm up anyway.