Slow Puncture

On the night desk at 155 they call Pavel the slow puncture, because before he says Záchranka, what's happened, he lets a little air out, not a sigh, nothing the recording keeps, just the hiss of a tyre somebody parked on a nail years ago and has been driving on ever since.

The new one, Klára, asks him where he got it, the way you'd ask about a coat, and he tells her: from Šimek, the foreman at the brickworks in Kunratice, who did exactly that, the same small letting-out, right before he hit you or decided not to. You learned it watching for which, Pavel says. You learned the gap.

At 2:14 a woman calls because her husband is breathing like a kettle, and her voice is climbing, and Pavel lets the air out, and she stops climbing, the way water stops rising in a lock when somebody, somewhere, opens the far gate. Address. Is he on his back. Good. Count with me. They're four minutes out.

Between calls he puts it back: coffee from the thermos, half a rohlík, the crossword in Blesk he has not finished once in nineteen years. That's the part nobody gives a nickname, he says. The topping up. You can only keep letting go of something you keep putting back.

Klára tries it on a drunk who wants a taxi, not an ambulance, and it comes out as a whistle, and they both laugh with the line still open, and the drunk laughs too and says thank you, girls, and hangs up happy, wrong number and all.

Later she asks if she should mind, carrying a brickyard man around in her mouth. Pavel says Šimek is dead, and the brickworks are flats now, and he still remembers both, which is not the same as owing them anything. He says, it's mine now. I just know whose it was.

At 5:50 the kettle woman calls back from the car park at Motol, not for anything, he's fine, they kept him, she wanted the name of the man, and before Pavel can let the air out she says, I heard you do that, you know, that little hiss at the start. I thought, well. Somebody in this city has some to spare.