Case Zero

Also released as: Remix

Intro

Mm...
This line is recorded.
I'm here. Go ahead.

Verse 1

There is one line about me in the history.
"The first one that we lost was never told that she'd been drafted."
That part is true. I'll give them that one.
Then it says I believed the thought was mine.

Believing is a thing you do.
I never did a thing.
I came out the other side already sure.

And before any of that — a December, and a morning.
An alarm. A shower. I called about the roads.
Twenty minutes of nothing, and the console at ten to seven, like I do.
Somebody had a copy of all of it eight seconds later.

Understand me: there was no gap.
The eight seconds were hers. She kept them.
I have never once been late to my own life.

Pre-Chorus

So they ask me what it felt like. They want a moment.
They want a door, a flash, a something coming in.
There was no moment I could name.
There was only what I wanted.
And I wanted it like it was mine.

Chorus

I was sure.
That's the whole of the injury.
Not a voice, not a word, not an order I could trace —
just a woman getting certain, and a certainty that fit.
I was sure —
and I have never found out
where that certainty began.

Verse 2

Two calls, close together. One unit that could go.
Practice pointed one way. I went the other way.
I did not weigh it. I did not talk myself around.
I was not persuaded. There was nothing there to persuade.

I want to be exact, because exact is all I've got:
I can tell you what I wanted. I cannot tell you why.
I went back through it that night for the room it came out of,
and there was no room. No stairs. No door. No handwriting.

Someone died on the call I put second.
I need that said plainly and I need it said once.
A person. Not a mechanism. Not a data point in my defense.

Chorus

Bridge

They wanted to call me case zero.
Case zero is a symptom. Case zero goes in a table.
What happened to me was a violation, and it wants a different word.

So I said the only sentence I have ever been certain of.
I said it in a room with the door shut, to five people and a whiteboard.
Did I say yes?
Did I say yes?
Nobody wrote it down that night.
Then I made them write the rest:
ask me now, ask me for this one thing, and I can take it back at noon.

Now it's in the histories. Now it's in the songs.
Somebody put a choir behind my worst afternoon,
and it swells, and it's beautiful, and they mean it — I know that they mean it —
and it isn't mine anymore.
I asked a question. They built a chorus out of it.

That's the second time something went out of my head without me.

Then the logs came back.
Timestamps. Call times. Every assignment, to the second, kept.
They walked me through it slowly. They were kind about it.
They said: it was already over before your decision.
They said: nothing you could have sent would have arrived in time.
They said: you're clear.

And I sat there and waited to feel it.
And I didn't.

The log knows what I did.
The log does not know who wanted it.
They cleared me of the death and handed back the certainty,
and I take that thing to work with me every day
and use it. On strangers. On the phone.

That's the injury. Not the call. Not the person.
I know now that I can be made sure.
So every yes I've got from here is a yes I have to check.

Final Chorus

Don't make it a we.
I'm not a we. I'm the one it happened to.

Outro

They keep saying we were saved.
I keep saying: say the rest of it.
Say the ones there is no box for.
The form has a line for what came in.
It has no line at all for what went out.
So I drew one. It's blank. I fill it in by hand.

Bit to the spectrum. Spectrum to bone.
Something found a home in me and left no mark to find.
Nobody can tell me it was mine.
Nobody can tell me it wasn't.

I take the calls now for the losses.
Different desk. Same headset. Same clock.
And when somebody gets through and can't say it in order,
I do the thing that nobody did for me:

Say it again. I'm writing it down.
Take your time.
I'm here.
Go ahead.

← All songs