The registry opened every year on the first of October, and every year Maren filled out the form in the same blue pen she kept in the kitchen drawer. Name. Date of birth. Intended recipient. Still planning to use: yes.
Eleven years she had written her brother's name in the recipient field. Eleven years she had checked yes.
This October she sat at the table for a long time before picking up the pen.
The system was simple enough. Each citizen received one call at age thirty. One hour. One person. The connection was described in the literature as "temporally suspended": the dead as they were at the moment before dying, available for exactly sixty minutes, after which the line closed. No extensions. No second calls. Citizens registered their intent annually with the registry: who they planned to call, whether they still meant to. The government ran it like a utility. There were waiting periods. There were fees.
Maren was forty-one. She had been waiting eleven years to call her brother.
She picked up the pen.
She wrote a different name.
The booth was on the third floor of the Central Exchange, a building that smelled of carpet cleaner and old paper. She was given a room the size of a closet, a black telephone, and a glass of water she did not drink. The attendant closed the door without a word.
The line opened with a tone, then silence, then breathing.
"Hello?" Her father's voice. Not old, the way she'd last heard it. The voice from Saturday mornings in the house on Crane Street, unhurried, slightly rough. A voice she had not heard in twenty-two years.
"It's me," she said.
A pause. "I know."
She had prepared nothing. She had spent eleven years preparing for a different call, and so she had prepared nothing for this one.
"I don't know why I called you," she said.
"I do," he said. But he didn't explain it, and she found she didn't want the explanation. She wanted the sitting.
They talked. Not about the things she'd imagined she would ask, the questions she'd been building since she was nineteen, since the diagnosis, since the fast end of it. They talked about smaller things. The house on Crane Street. The garden he'd kept badly. A trip he'd taken once before she was born, somewhere in the southwest, alone, that he'd never mentioned to anyone. He described a mesa at dusk. The specific color of the light.
"Why didn't you ever tell us that?" she asked.
"I didn't know how to make it sound like what it was," he said.
She looked at the black telephone in her hand.
"I think about that a lot," she said. "Not being able to make things sound like what they are."
"I know," he said. "You got that from me."
The hour was nearly gone when she asked the thing she hadn't known she was going to ask.
"Did you know?" she said. "At the end. Did you know we were all there?"
The line was quiet for a moment.
"I knew your mother was there," he said. "I could feel her hand. The rest of you: I could hear something. Like a room full of held breath. I knew it was you."
"We were so quiet," she said. "We thought that was right."
"It was right," he said.
The tone came. A low, single note. Thirty seconds.
"Dad," she said.
"I know," he said again.
The line closed.
She sat in the booth for a while. The glass of water was still on the table, still full. Through the small window she could see the street below: a man walking a dog that had stopped and would not move no matter how the man pulled the leash. The dog was interested in something on the ground. The man stood with his hands in his pockets and waited.
After a while, the dog moved on.
Maren put on her coat and left.