Trapped on dispatch duty at the squad on a sunny Sunday, my only real interaction with the world is through the reach of telephone lines (dedicated and open), multiple radios, paging systems, computer-aided dispatch terminals. Ambulance calls go out with the heart-stopping wail of a buzzer on my console, and I send the crews on their way with a courteous change of the stoplight at the end of the ramp. They fly out into the warm afternoon, their red lights subdued in the impossibly bright outdoors. I look out the venetian blinds from the watch office and watch them corner onto the street, the unit leaning on the turn as the driver hits the gas with enthusiasm. I think a couple drivers are competing to see who can rack up the most calls today, and every time I broadcast a call on the station PA there's a mad scramble for the front seat. But I stay still amidst the confusion. Today there is a major water main break in DC, and we send them a unit for support. There are several unconscious people out there, and some broken bones, strokes, and a smattering of car wrecks. There are others -- it's pretty busy for a Sunday, perhaps because people are getting out and doing things that can get them hurt. I dispatch a call to one unit by radio as they drive to get ice cream, knowing that if they'd already picked it up I've just doomed their dessert to a watery dissolution. Ambulances fly out the bay, and I keep an eye on their status through the CAD terminal and radio chatter. Some time later they return, clean and restocked, as if nothing ever happened. Their back-up alarms beep in familiar rhythm as they slide back into position in the bays. Then the flatulent burst of the air brakes and the engines fall silent. The crew spills out and comes into the dispatch office to finish their reports on the computer. They share some details from the call with me.

One thing I've been missing is music. During the months of fire class I managed to accumulate a large collection of MP3s, songs that accompanied me as I ran out every morning for some ever-more-distant spot in the city. And in that way that music acquires meaning through association, those songs became utterly emblematic of that time period. Shortly after I passed the class, I began to feel the songs' emotionals lose their immediacy and become associated with memories. It's peculiar the way that your mind has the capacity to distinguish between events that are happening to you now and those that are past (some scientists believe a momentary failure of that system gives rise to the feeling of deja vu, as your brain briefly interprets current inputs through the filter it places over previous experiences). Without quite knowing it, I had moved on to the next phase, a phase that lacked accompanying music.

Only in the last week did I really recognize the necessity of identifying a new repertoire. Without music I'm condemned to nostalgic indulgence in old tunes, resampling past eras of my life and unable to complete the transition to newer things. Tunes have a symbiotic relationship with the texture of life in a particular period: they are selected and prized for their emotive consistency with the times, but later develop more richness and subtlety in my mind through their associations with events. They're made more powerful and evocative to me, but they're also fixed in a particular period and thus mortal. They're like lovers, and you never quite get over them even as you move on with your lives.

When I came home from Senegal I had spent three years listening to a limited repertoire on auto-repeat. With a few exceptions, all the music I had was the few tapes that I guarded from the Sahelian dust in the plastic shell of what was supposed to be my personal medical kit. I was hungry for new sounds, and spent hours hunting in used CD bins for a musical accompaniment to my reentry to the United States. The heat, illness and poor nutrition had stripped most of the flesh from my bony frame, and I began a feverish exercise regimen to restore myself, listening to my new music at swelling volumes. Somewhere in the songs I gathered I discovered that I was consumed by a furious, inexplicable anger. I lifted weights for hours alone to the sounds of rage and discord. I felt like a stranger everywhere, and there was nothing to do but wait for a natural adjustment to take its course.

Now, with fire class behind me, taking my first tentative steps into the real world of the rescue squad, plagued by confusing dreams with some message I can't discern, I look at my first musical selections and try to discern the pattern in which I will be living for a while.