Municipal Ghostline
Joseph Randolph
The city kept the old hotline number because changing it would mean reprinting the signs. You called, a machine answered, and a list unrolled—potholes, missed trash, broken lights, dead possums. Jim dialed from his kitchen, the oven clock frozen at 1:57 again. He’d read that the line routed through a contractor’s server near the rail yard. He liked imagining civic complaints moving through that corridor of pallets and shrieking brakes before looping back into the neighborhoods like bottles across a tide.
“Welcome to City Services,” the voice said. “For roadway concerns, press one. For sanitation, press two.”
He knew the tree by heart.
Tonight, a new option: “For archives, press nine.”
He set the phone on speaker and pressed nine.
A cleaner voice arrived—archival, brisk. “Municipal Archives. For incident logs, press one. For historical recordings, press three.”
He pressed three.
A tape clicked. Then a woman from 1986: “My landlord says the leak’s from the upstairs dog. The dog does not make water through plaster.” She spelled her name and number with weary pride.
Jim listened, then tried another code—0127.
A man about a fallen elm: “I’ll cut it myself if you won’t.”
0143, random.
And then—his father’s voice.
“Yes,” the man said, clearing his throat. “This is—” and then the name Jim hadn’t heard in ten years. “I called last week about the alley light behind the house on West 58th. It blinks on, then out. Kids cut through there. Someone’s going to get jumped or fall. I’ve tried to call the councilman. Maybe you pass this along. Thank you.”
The line ended. The tone returned.
Jim stared at the stove’s glow. He pressed again—0143 once more—but the system had already moved on. He tried 1143.
Same voice, older: “Still out. I don’t want trouble. I want a bulb. If someone would come out in the day and stand there through dark, you’d see the problem plain.”
He could picture his father saying it: standing at the table, one finger pressed to a scrap of paper, rehearsing the phrasing before dialing. The patience had always sounded like anger.
He pressed 2143.
A woman’s voice this time, strained: “Please. The light on West 58th. Car broken into. The baby seat’s gone.” Names followed, three of them, offered like passwords.
He pressed 3143.
“Me again,” his father said, almost laughing. “They swapped the bulb. Burned till midnight. Dead by two. Tell the man to check the ballast. I know a thing or two about current.”
Jim turned off the stove, let the apartment quiet. He could hear the years between each call—the pauses filled by shifts at the plant, evenings with the news low, the same problem glowing and dying over and over.
4143.
“I saw the truck,” his father said. “They fixed it. Lit up until the kids found the gap. Send a person, not a picture.”
The words had a workshop rhythm—repetition until precision. Jim wrote the numbers down: 0143, 1143, 2143, 3143, 4143. A record of persistence.
He tried 5143. Someone complaining about a blocked drain.
6143. Loose stones in a park path.
7143—his father again, thinner now. “A neighbor says people steal the bulbs for scrap. Doesn’t sound right. I need the light, not a theory. Send a man with a ladder.”
Jim sat on the bed, the phone balanced on his knee. He could hear the scrape of his father’s chair against linoleum, the little grunt he made when bending. He pictured the alley exactly: gravel pressed to dirt, old garage doors flaking paint, the one with the dent from the rock thrown that summer nobody forgot.
He pressed 8143. Busy signal. 9143. “Last time,” his father said. “It’s out again. I know I’m a joke to a clerk. Stand there and wait for the on-cycle—it’ll lie for ten minutes then give itself away. I don’t like calling. I’m calling.”
The laugh at the end was almost kind.
Jim pressed zero for an operator. The system refused and returned him to the menu. He pressed nine again, then three. The same sterile prompt: “Enter a four-digit extension.”
He entered the house number where he’d grown up.
A woman wanted speed bumps.
His father’s old badge number.
A pastor, requesting a parade permit.
Finally, his own birthday: himself, years ago, reporting an unplowed street. His younger voice sounded polite to the point of shame.
He went back to 0143.
“This will sound crazy,” his father said. “I was on the back steps at three in the morning. The light was dead. I could see my breath.”
A pause.
“There was a shape in the alley. Big. Quiet. When the bulb flickered, it flattened against the fence like a man at the end of his luck. I told it to get, and it got. I don’t need a police unit. I need the light to work.”
Jim set the phone down. He let the words fill the room like an afterimage. Then he called the main number again.
A man answered—gravel voice, tired.
“You still feeding the archives?” Jim asked.
“They feed themselves,” the man said. “If it’s in the system, it plays.”
“Who keeps them?”
“Somewhere downtown. Server rack no one’s shut off yet.”
“Ever listen?”
“I got my own,” the man said, and hung up.
Jim dialed again—0144.
“Update,” his father said. “A man came with a bucket truck. Swapped the fixture. Smelled the burn in the socket. Good worker. Tell his boss he didn’t leave a mess.”
He tried 0145.
“Thank you,” his father said. “Kids cut through and you can see their faces now. You see a face, you act decent. I’ll stop calling.”
The tone returned. Jim sat still, the kind of stillness that comes only after a demand is met too late to matter.
In the morning he took a bus to West 58th. The alley lay where memory had placed it—narrow, sun-baked, wet ruts holding yesterday’s rain. The pole was new wood, the light asleep. A woman carried groceries in one arm. A boy on a bike skimmed past, his shadow in and out of puddles. Nothing divine, nothing strange—just a world continuing.
He stood under the pole long enough to feel foolish. Then he turned back toward the bus stop. The city had moved on; the problem was solved.
That night he dialed again.
0143: “It blinks on, then goes out.”
1143: “I want a bulb.”
2143: “The baby seat’s gone.”
3143: “Check the ballast.”
4143: “Send a person.”
7143: “I need the light, not a theory.”
9143: “I don’t like calling. I’m calling.”
0144: “Good worker.”
0145: “Thank you.”
He played the set twice, like a record of the human voice learning to surrender. When the system beeped for another extension, he didn’t press anything. The machine waited, humming quietly through circuits somewhere below the city. Then, without a tone, one last tape began.
“You there?” his father asked.
The breath came through—labored but measured. “Anyway,” he said, “the light works. Somebody did their job. That’s all a man should have to ask.”
The line clicked.
Jim left the receiver against his ear until it went to static, then silence.
He set it down on the counter and watched the oven clock blink 1:58, 1:59, then roll clean into two o’clock—the hour when most things in Cleveland either quit or endure.
