Or Maybe

Hana does Tuesday nights on the crisis line in Olomouc, eleven till six, a headset that smells of other people's shampoo, and the first thing they told her in training was that the phone lies about loudness. Everyone arrives at the same level. The line squeezes the shouting down and lifts the whisper up, so the man who is breaking a chair and the girl in the bathroom with the tap running come into her ear the size of a weather forecast. You can't hear who's worst by volume, the trainer said. Don't try. So for a year she listened wrong, for the brave ones, the ones who sounded fine, as if coping were a voice some people had and others didn't. It isn't, she says now. It isn't in anyone. It's in a minute. It's when a woman who has said for forty minutes that her son won't speak to her stops, and says, or maybe he's just tired, he works nights too, and you can hear her try the sentence on, the way you test a stair in the dark, and then put her weight on it. Nothing in the voice gets brighter. That's the thing. The level stays exactly where the wire put it. What changes is she listens to herself a half-second longer, like someone who has walked out of a meeting and down three flights and only on the pavement hears what was actually said. Hana writes nothing down for that part. There's no box for it on the form. She just goes quiet so the woman can hear it too, and outside, the first tram comes along the street, empty and lit, and stops anyway, and opens its doors for no one, and waits.