A Word for I

By Lennie Roeber-Tsiongas

/ First Place, 2026 Plentitudes Prize in Fiction /  

At the Helpline, they said I could use any name I liked. I chose Pat because of its shape; squat and compact, and easy to make out through a crackling phone line. None of the callers got mixed up about Pat, not like my real name. What’s that again? They’d ask, and I’d spell. S as in salute. E as in everything. N as in Nancy. Sometimes they’d get confused, especially the older ones, and just start calling me Nancy. I was no Nancy. So, I started going by Pat. Pat was stern and kind. Pat didn’t take any bullshit. She listened to their complaints, weeding through the stubborn emotions, pulling out the seeds, and dusting off the dirt. Pat had a clean, clinical empathy. Before I became Pat, I took things pretty hard. Most of the callers just wanted a place to put the anguish, a void with a human voice at the other end telling them to continue. They couldn’t picture me, sitting on the line with nothing but website URLs to offer them. A pair of disembodied ears, a voice with no throat. The Helpline was all about getting people to hang up. Pat didn’t take it too personally. Her voice never shook. She knew the line between careful and caring.

I started working at the Helpline the summer after graduation. It seemed like the logical thing to do with a Psychology degree. The repetitive motion of the Helpline was analgesic, a substitute for the more intensive work of an in-person job in the field. I thought it might diminish my loneliness, with the added perk of solitude. I was living with a boyfriend who worked the graveyard shift; we were ships in the night. He’d come home just as I was falling asleep and we’d lie facing each other, my eyelids fluttering, his hands making swift work. The hot swells of our breath would mix and rise, like heat does, through the open window. In the morning he’d be sleeping with his brow slightly furrowed, and I’d leave without waking him. We probably only spoke a handful of words to each other the whole summer; just combination and re-combination of one sleepy sentence. Most of the human interaction I did have was through the Helpline. I liked people better as voices. I became an anthropologist, studying the rhythmic movements of mouths in the moments just before and just after composing a question. I found I was able to tell, from the first crackle of breath on the other line, almost exactly what they wanted. In the moments that followed the phone line connecting—in that swollen quiet between us—I could determine despair, frustration, psychosis, hunger, outrage. The hard part was knowing what to do with the prognosis. This was where Pat came in; she’d made peace with futility, she didn’t mind that the help we gave amounted to placing a wet Band-Aid on a broken leg.

Suze said she had to be very careful because they were probably listening. The other day she’d been sitting on her balcony and a black car had driven by three times. These kinds of things don’t just happen. She said. I asked her if she was sure it wasn’t three different cars. This was the wrong thing to say. She’d checked the license plate, of course. She was sure. Another time, she told me, she was watching the hill up on Rowena, and she saw three men standing in the shape of a V. Solemn, heads down. She said she knew it was all connected, she just couldn’t place how. The men were using the car to signal to her. Sometimes Suze was so emphatic that I couldn’t help but believe her. I didn’t know how to get her off the phone, but Pat found a way. One of the first things they told us at the Helpline was that when you offered the callers a resource, you had to make them think it was their idea. Every call had to end with a resource. Sometimes they’d see right through that and call it like it was. You’re a liar, you just want to shut me up. Then, Pat would say; I’d prefer if you didn’t use that kind of language. I’m just trying to help. And I would think, but we are lying. What else is there to do?

Most of the callers were elderly, alone in cheap assisted living facilities with no AC, their papery flesh waterlogged with sweat. They’d call looking for help with Medicaid, Medicare, applying for disability, looking for new housing. They’d be childless, widowed, broke, easily diverted. They’d call me hon and missy. They’d ask if I’d ever listened to Otis Redding. They’d go to switch on the record player, and Pat would say, let’s focus on getting you those resources, shall we? Then we’d try to spell out a website for them. S as in Sam. A as in apple. M as in Mary. Sometimes, they’d get confused and I’d have to start over, irritation bubbling, my legs stuck to the vinyl chair and the whole room reaching a boil. S as in solitude. A as in apiary. M as in marbles. As in: Lost: Marbles. The hardest was finding the word for I. The most distracting letter. I could never think of a match in the phonetic alphabet. Idaho. Iceberg. Immune. Infection. I as in I: me, on the phone with you, as in Y.

Eventually, I’d get them the phone number for the resource, and they’d thank me so earnestly that I’d feel guilty, knowing they’d be hanging up and calling that number, just to wait in another endless hold queue. Maybe they’d speak to someone eventually, and that person would reassure them, and then they’d give them the phone number for my Helpline. It was the only number that led anywhere else. They’d call back, confused and frustrated, still sweating in their one-room unit, fingering the ceramic frames of sun-watered photographs, bowls with rose petal enamel, stacks of bills, embroidery insisting HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS. I didn’t know how to tell them the truth about the Helpline. Part bardo, part DMV, part cardboard house; it was both the start and end of an empty highway.

As soon as I clocked out, I’d begin my ritual. With precision, I’d extricate every caller from my conscience. Call it superstition, or prejudice, but I was convinced they would otherwise contaminate me. I’d start and restart my work computer twice. I’d collect the pencil shavings, balled-up notes, scraps of banana peel, or sandwich crumbs still lingering on the desk, and ascertain the contents of the pile. I’d tap the partition between my desk and the next at an odd interval. Usually seven. On bad days, fifteen. I kept detailed notes so I could remember each caller in order to properly release them. I always worried I’d forget one, and they’d linger for the rest of the day like garlic in my teeth. If the notes outnumbered the scraps—they almost always did—I’d collect them in my hands and carry them to the parking lot, where I’d disperse a small section of the handful in each direction. I’d reflect back on each caller: their requests, the fitness of my suggestions, the alternating wetness or dryness of their vocal cords.

I’d know the ritual had worked when relief flushed in. The same sensation as peeing, or peeling a hangnail. There was no logic to the ritual, only results. I’d go home and my long-distance boyfriend would have just left for work. Sometimes a note on the table, sometimes not. I’d get as stoned as I could stomach and take a long walk. I’d listen to my boyfriend’s records. I never told him about my days at the Helpline, and never about the ritual. I knew he’d get the wrong idea. He’d get that look I sometimes saw reflected back from my work computer screen when a caller was talking. Pat’s look. If I was going to learn I was a hypocrite, it would not be at his hand. I knew better than anyone that ‘help’ was just a word placed between people. A tool for maintaining safe distance.

Before sleeping, I’d hum a half prayer. I was too lazy to learn an actual prayer, so I’d just begin with an address: God, all-knowing. My brain would whir with devotion. I’d imagine myself at the center of the world. In lieu of sentences, instead of language, just the urgent force of thoughts before they’re contained by words. The not-prayer was like any other, for protection. For my boyfriend, driving, nodding off at the wheel. For the callers, who I cared for deeply in the least useful way; like visiting the pound with a dog allergy.

Mark told me I was a motherfucker. A no-good, shit-eating, useless son-of-a-fuck. Pat told him: I’m going to hang up if you keep using that kind of language. Mark apologized and said he was just having a hard day. Mark was bipolar, or as he said, something like that. He was disquieted—and I better not tell anyone this—because he’d been seeking sex with men. Pat asked if he would like the phone number for an LGBTQ talk line, and Mark scoffed. I don’t need to talk, I just need it fixed. Where he’d grown up, queer was a word like a knife. Pat said she’d give him the number just in case. I wrote down word like a knife on a piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball.

Tamika called, voice heaving, trying to whisper because her son was asleep in the other room. Her car was totaled. She couldn’t breathe. Pat asked if she had anything cold to put on her neck. Tamika had a bag of frozen peas. Pat said: Good, that’s really good. Can you name five objects you can see? She sniffed, her breath slowing. My baby’s shoes. A kitchen towel. Pause. The trash can, Isaiah forgot to empty it. A bowl of cereal milk in the sink. My shoes, next to my baby’s. Pat asked her to name four things she could smell. The laundry detergent, I’m standing right next to it. My baby’s head. Shit in the air. It smells like shit. At this, Tamika laughed, and her breathing steadied out. I loved panic attacks. The de-escalation training actually worked for them. Nothing else made me feel so useful.

The whole time I worked at the Helpline, I never pictured a face on the other end. I’d think about the caller, sitting on a park bench, in a dark bedroom, or waiting outside the ambulance they’d called because a sister/brother/cousin had stopped responding to reality. I pictured them as the surroundings they described; a piece of embroidery leaking salt, a hyperventilating bag of frozen peas, a paranoid car circling the block. I felt for them, these objects trapped in the phone, but I struggled to see them as anything beyond that. I thought of our voices echoing in the empty space. Pat with her cool composure, immune to panic, immune to the urgency of need. I tried not to get angry with the callers. I monitored my responses closely, cordoning off the emotions that were the least useful. Pity was the worst. I felt it the strongest when children called. This only happened occasionally, but those calls were always the hardest. I recognized them better than the other callers. I knew how they thought, stubborn synapses in fresh folds of brain. I’d been that way once, before the ritual.

One child, a girl, was afraid of taking a knife and slicing off her little brother's ears. She didn’t want to do it, but the image wouldn’t leave her; the knife, the soft little ears in the palm of her hand. Sometimes, she could make it stop by pretending it had already happened. She told me she was pretending the ears were in her pocket, that she could feel the warmth of them against her leg. I pictured her on the other line, a pair of severed lobes, and myself, another pair with the phone cradled between us. I nursed a lump in my throat, but I could never tell if I meant it. It was hard to feel anything for the people who were the most like me. I had my ears, and my ritual, and I was luckier than most. 

Suze called again. She’d gotten to the bottom of things. She’d seen the black car another time, so she’d written down the license plate. She was going to get her son-in-law—he worked at the DMV—to run the plate. She told Pat she’d gone for a walk, up to where the men had been standing, and found a framed photograph of the Virgin Mary, and one of a little boy with red shoes surrounded by candles, and wreaths of flowers, beads, and ribbons. I didn’t know what to tell her, unsure if grief held any sway in her reasoning. She couldn’t say much more, she knew her phone was tapped because it made a click when she picked it up. She didn’t want any resources, just someone to know she’d been right. I didn’t ask what she’d been right about. She was talking so fast I could hardly keep pace, and in the background, I thought I heard a man’s voice, low and grumbling, semi-patient.

As the summer went on, I became more intensive with the ritual. It started taking longer, but somehow, I never felt clean. I kept messing up, forgetting notes and steps. I’d get home and realize I wasn’t alone. It was getting harder to clock out of being Pat. Or maybe Pat was having a harder time containing me, reinforcing the separation between me and the callers. If I was honest, I knew I wasn’t cut out for the Helpline. I didn’t have a solid core of empathy, an honest bone in my body. I was all pity and self-preservation. A bad seed. Besides that, I’d realized that my boyfriend might have left me. Two nights he didn’t come home, and then I noticed his stuff slowly vanishing. Finally, a note: I don’t think I can do this anymore. Mostly, I was insulted by the ambiguity. Either you think or you know, and he didn’t even know the worst of it. I thought of how Pat would respond; clear-eyed, patient, indifferent. I’m sorry you feel that way. I happen to have a resource that specializes in separating your head from your—.

Then, there was the last call. When I answered he sounded warbled. Unlike the others, I couldn’t get a read on him. He was whispering, his voice cutting through in sharp jabs, catching and breaking. He told me this wasn’t like him. He didn’t need help, his brain worked fine. This is just the first number that comes up when you search. He explained. Slowly, I pieced him together. He’d been hiking to a campsite with two friends—he thought they were friends—when things took a turn. There was an argument. They pushed him down, stripped him. He described the torture carefully, with the close attention of an exorcism. The scent of the pine needles reminded him of a childhood trip to Big Sur. Now the memories were connected, and he could never unlink them. He was calling from the campsite outhouse. He kept saying: my brain works fine, on a loop, which made me wonder if he was trying to stoke my doubt.

I knew then that this wasn’t a job for Pat. I stayed on the line while he snuck back to the campsite, took his stuff, hiked to the car, and started to drive. He told me his life was over, what was the point of surviving? It would always be happening. He got to a hotel and said he was going to take a shower. He asked me to stay on the line while he washed them off. I sat there, listening to the water hitting the tile, hearing the gasps of air moving through his body. I don’t remember a word I said, but I must have said something. He thanked me for my time. Thanked me for saving his life. The whole call took about three hours, and my supervisor said I could take the rest of the day off.

After that call, the ritual felt pointless. I felt beyond myself, beyond pollution. I took the train to Chinatown and walked through the bleary heat, past the stands selling plastic woven sandals, bamboo chutes, petite terrariums with live turtles floating in a thimble-full of water. Some of them were belly up. I felt sick, like I’d been lying through my teeth for the last three months. I no longer knew why I’d decided to work at the Helpline. I thought of everything I had not disclosed. The ritual, and Pat, who was just an extension of the ritual. I thought of the questions they’d asked during my interview. If I felt stable enough for the intensity of the position. If I had any conditions of my own. When I’d answered, I’d been thinking of how I might heal through exposure. How simple and small I’d feel by helping others, how unsick. All I had cared about was staying clean. I couldn’t even say I was helping. Helping how? By giving them a revolving door of phone numbers, gritting my teeth, and praying for the call to end the whole time we talked? I’d been afraid of infection and failed to consider the risk of immunity. Now, with the sun beating down, I felt more numb than ever. I bought a terrarium, one of the belly-up turtles, thinking I could nudge him awake. The next morning, the water was green and cloudy and the body still.

Later, my supervisor called me into the office. The room was stiff with day-old coffee, her eyes dull and watery. Then, she asked if I’d noticed anything funny on that call. 

“What do you mean by funny?” I asked. She pursed her lips, grayish-orange lipstick curdling the corners. 

“We recognize the number. Next time, we ask that you check the frequent caller log before sustaining such an extreme connection.” The frequent caller log was where we kept records of all the red-flag callers: the ones who refused help and cursed us to hell, the pranksters, the ones with lusty, rhythmic breaths who asked what we were wearing. She tilted her screen to face me and showed me the name and number from the call. I caught snippets of words from the description of his behavior: stories of ritual abuse, inappropriate language, asks to bathe while on the phone. I just sat there, waiting for the words to mean something, but all I could hear was the crunch of gravel as he walked, the ding ding ding of the car starting up, the sound of water charting the shape of a body. My ears rushed with blood. I told her I didn’t understand, and she gave me the look I knew well. Pat’s look: polite, arms-length frustration, tight smile, impatience for all the time we could not spare.

“And you’re sure?” 

“Quite sure, Senora.” I didn’t see how to continue after that. I asked if I had to give two weeks' notice when I quit, or if I could leave as soon as possible.

Despite the evidence, I didn’t believe that the call had been fake. Instead, it became something else: a testament to my reservoir of goodness, which I turned to when I needed proof of my humanity. Clearly, this person was working through something that had required countless calls to the Helpline, a recitation of the events, a repetitive cleansing. A ritual was something I could get behind. Of course, my supervisor hadn’t understood. Not even Pat could have handled it. I left the building with all my stuff in a box: my monitor, a few photos, the crumpled pieces of paper that would have gone on to take part in the day’s ritual. I stopped and examined the crumpled notes, snippets of conversation. One straggler from a previous day. A word like a knife. The ritual meant something different now. The callers and I were alike in our exile. Wise Suze, her patterns taking on a shape I hadn’t been able to see.

For the first hour after my termination, the realization was freeing. Then, I started to worry. I felt like a fraud, giving out all that advice and not heeding it. I wondered if this was just proof that the contamination had taken effect. I’d spent so much time with the callers that I’d become them; I’d absorbed everything, including their illness, into my own. I tried to perform the ritual, but it was too late. I thought of calling the Helpline. I needed Pat. Pat would know what to do, but she wouldn’t answer. When I got home, I faced the full-length mirror hanging on the door and placed the nametag around my neck. While I waited to transform, I realized I had never imagined Pat before. Like the callers, she had been more circumstantial than a body allowed. She’d been a banana peel, a cluster of pens, my own warped reflection on the computer screen. I remained convinced that Pat and I weren’t the same, though we may have shared a host. There was something that divided us. Something that made her calm and healthy. I touched her collarbone. Her earlobe. I tugged a knot of hair loose at the nape of her neck. I kept waiting for her to activate, and when she didn’t, I wondered if she might be shy in the absence of a phone. I held one to my ear. 

“Will you help me?” I said, trying to prompt her. She was silent. I undressed her, I felt the warmth rising up from her legs. I picked a scab on her heel. We’d been intimate coworkers for so long, I no longer remembered how I’d conjured her in the first place. I closed my eyes. I thought I could hear her approaching, closer now on the other side of the door, the place I’d exiled her after so many shifts. My brain works fine. I thought. How can I help you? What can I offer you? Pat and I were quiet for a moment, hardly any distance between us. I decided that if she was there, there would be no answer. It would mean the ritual had worked. Everything we had, shared and split. Pat would do the caring, I would do the laundry. I would sleepwalk, and Pat would interface with the world. There could be one I for both of us. Outside, a car drove by. I wondered if Suze ever ran that plate. If she had looked into that prescription Pat had suggested. Her mind was a treasure; delirious, awake. She was convinced that each look was for her, each vehicle, each display of loss. And who’s to say it wasn’t? She knew something most didn’t. She’d cracked the code. She knew that every single person was sitting at the very center of the world.