by Anthology
Within minutes, people around the world who had never even heard of acrobatic gymnastics know it too. And no one will remember who will actually end up winning the World Championships this year.
Leo Vladimirsky
http://leovladimirsky.com
Collar(Short story)
by Leo Vladimirsky
“Collar” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2014.
TOM WAS NAKED, SKIN sparkling yellow-gray from the thick grease he’d been rubbing, almost seductively, into his short, meaty legs. He’d seen the young man walk up and down the beach at least four times. The kid was clearly nervous: with every pass he peered, uncomfortably, at the goods for sale in each stall, trying to figure out whom he could trust. The market centered around Beach 69th in Far Rockaway was an intimidating place if you’d never been there before. Tom decided to be nice and made eye contact. Once they locked eyes, the young man nodded, glanced furtively up and down the shoreline, then straightened up. He was just green. There was no need to be suspicious.
Tom went back to greasing himself and putting on his little show. After all, his clients needed to see that their money would be well spent, that the body on sale could handle the six hours safely, could get them where they needed to go.
“You available?” the young man asked. His voice cracked a little bit on the last syllable. This made Tom smile. “That is, you busy tonight?”
“First time?” he asked back, pointing to a pile of plastic crates behind him, deeper under the crumbling concrete and exposed rebar of the overhanging boardwalk.
Tom’s stall was cozy, like most of the other stalls in this ersatz grand bazaar. A fire, in a small steel-bucket-cum-brazier, gave each room a friendly, warm aura. All along the beach, underneath the rocky awning, the other merchants were starting their nightlong engagement in capitalism. Food stalls serving fried noodles and grilled meats. Supply stalls selling waterproof bags, goggles, wetsuits, and everything else a swimmer might need to last the long swim. The outlying stalls housed the prostitutes, providing sandy fucks to whoever wanted one. And then there were the bare stalls, dark except for their fires, empty but for their crates. Those belonged to Tom and the other navvies.
“Thanks,” the young man said. “What gave it away?”
He walked back into the darkness. Tom saw him wince and crinkle his nose at the condensed vapors of the synthfat he’d been massaging into his skin. It did not have a pleasant odor. One of his fellow guides described it as “dirty sex mixed with rotten meat, and a dash of acetone to cover it up.” It smelled rich and corrupt, but in all the wrong ways. Somehow both barnyard and factory, but with none of the wholesomeness of either. And its color was sickly, too: like cheap fluorescent light passing through a yellowed plastic sheet. But that’s what it took to stay warm out there. Better to stink and be stained than freeze to death miles offshore.
The kid sucked it up and returned with a purple crate which he shimmied into the sand across the fire from Tom.
“Jake,” he said, sticking his hand out.
Tom held up his greasy hand and shook his head. “Tom. Nice to meet you.”
Jake nodded. “Laid off a year now. Unemployment benefits just ran out. Can’t find work anywhere. Wife said it’s the ships or she’s leaving me.”
“She still working?” asked Tom.
“Yeah. Nurse for old folks,” he answered. “Recession-proof, I guess.”
“Unless people stop getting old.”
The men looked out toward the horizon. The sun was setting and they could see the running lights of the factory ships coming on, dipping into and out of view, now obscured, now visible, sprinkled along the edge of the ocean.
“You ever do factory work before?” Tom asked. “You ever been on one of the ships?”
“Nah,” Jake answered. “I was an office guy. IT, mostly. Worked and lived downtown for about five years. When the bridge started going up, me and the wife couldn’t afford Manhattan anymore so we moved to Brooklyn. Had kids, then…” He made a confused half-smile and shrugged.
It was the same “then” as every other person Tom ran into down at the market.
“All work is done in a factory,” Tom assured him, “no matter what color your collar is. You’ll figure it out.”
A little girl of eight or nine came up to the stall opening. “Empanada? Coke? Fries?” she called out. Tom waved her off, but he saw Jake eyeing the deep blue tubs covered with steamed-up plastic wrap, filled with meat pies.
“Did you eat?” Tom asked him. “Alice, over there three stalls down, she fries up some serious singapore noodles with squid. Blow your mind.”
“I’m too nervous to eat,” Jake confided.
“It’s a long swim, kid. You gotta eat something.”
A man and a woman walked by in bathing suits, dry-bags held high, the synthfat covering their heads in a caul which caught and threw the light from the many fires on the beach.
“Gonna drown another one, Tommy?” the woman called out.
“That’s the plan,” he yelled back. “The gods demand their sacrifice.”
The couple went down to the sea. Tom looked back at Jake.
“Friend of yours, I take it,” Jake said.
“Friendly competitor, more like it,” Tom replied. “So you gonna get some food or what?”
“No offense, but this market doesn’t look like the cleanest place to eat,” Jake said. “What if I get the runs?”
Tom made a little explosion with his hands. “Then you shit in the water, like the fish.”
“Fair point.” Jake smiled and got up. “Singapore noodles?”
“With squid. Tell her I sent you over. She’ll be sure to wash her hands then.”
“I’ll be back.”
Jake walked out of the stall and headed left. Tom followed him to the entrance and leaned against a pylon, watching the boy go down the shore. The warm air brought many of the other stall-holders to their makeshift doorways, under ragged awnings that gently luffed in the breeze. When Jake reached Alice, Tom could see him trying to explain something complicated to her. She got annoyed. Confused, he pointed back at Tom’s stall. Alice nodded excitedly and waved at Tom. He waved back. She then grabbed Jake’s hand, lifted the awning to let him through, and they both disappeared from view in the darkness beneath the concrete roofing.
He’d always had a soft spot for Alice. She’d been an institution at the night market long before the navvies worked the boardwalk. He wondered if the story was true, that her family had died, burned when the canals in Queens flooded, and that now she could only sleep during the day. It was a good story. And a good story could keep you safe.
He checked his watch. It was half-past seven. Slack tide would soon be over and the ebb tide would begin. Time was running out. The patrols would be looking for him at ten. He needed to close this deal and get in the water or the next time he went swimming, they’d stun him and not bother fishing him out. So either the kid was a little sacrifice to the gods of the day, or he was.
It was not a kind thing to do, but everyone came up against it. And his luck had run out after five years. He knew the others had done it. Drunken early-morning confessions, after they’d swum back, pounds lighter, slurring their shame through the stink of sea and synthfat, made all the more absurd by their salt-hardened hair, sticking out like a clown’s wig.
Jake came back, following three young men who were eyeing each stall, uncertain of where to go. He carried an old plastic yogurt container filled with steaming noodles. An errant green onion clung to the side.
“Eat up,” Tom said, “and let’s talk business.”
“How long you been doing this?” Jake asked.
Tom looked up at the sky and cocked his head thoughtfully. “November, five years ago. I went out to work. It was awful, just after a late-season hurricane. No guides, then, just desperate men, desperate for money.”
The legislation had passed through Congress swift
ly: all products or services for sale in the U.S.A. cannot be made, or rendered, on foreign soil. It was political posturing and everyone knew it. The Chinese had built factory ships for years to skirt their own trade wars with the WTO, but now, with high fuel and labor costs at home, they saw a perfect opportunity to export our own jobs back to us. The law, which on paper was meant to protect workers, ended up doing the opposite. Near-shoring, they called it.
No one was surprised.
But to create the illusion that they didn’t want to do exactly what they planned to do, they created the Labor Police to patrol the coast up to the international water boundary, which, conveniently, the U.N. had rezoned to six miles from the high-water mark. No exclusive economic zone. No contiguous zone. Just six miles from the sun chairs and umbrellas and you’d find an internationalist free-for-all.
Nobody knew if they were supposed to work or starve, except the companies who realized it was just a matter of dragging those factory ships from the edge of Chinese waters to the edge of ours, then let the free market supply the workers. After all, it had already supplied the law.
“Damn. You’re old school, man.” Jake was impressed. “That’s pretty brave, going out on your own.”
“I used to surf and fish around here, so I knew the water pretty well.”
“Weren’t they rounding people up like crazy back then? You ever get picked up?”
Tom answered, straight into Jake’s eyes. “A couple times. Back then the Labor cops were aggressive, but stupid, so you could bullshit your way out of it. Or bribe them.”
Jake looked a little concerned. “They’re not a big deal anymore?”
“Not as much. They’ve had bad in-fighting since their union sold them out. Their managers got a golden parachute and the rest of ’em got a fist in the ass.”
“So that’s a no?” Jake pushed.
“Now it’s mostly privatized. Those guys work on commission: independent contractors like everybody else, so they’re pretty aggressive. Though rumor is if you put up a big enough fight, they’ll recruit you.”
Tom was now vigorously rubbing the synthfat into his face and bald head, the fire in the bucket reflected through tiny flames on his scalp.
“There’s another recession-proof job for life,” he continued, “keeping other people down.”
“So what do I need you for?”
“You don’t. There’s the ocean,” Tom said, gesturing toward the water with his palm up. “Start swimming.”
“Hey,” Jake said, mistaking Tom’s comment for hurt, “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“I know,” Tom replied. “They’re definitely still around, the cops and the private cops. Now they try trickier things: some hero fucker wants to make a career for himself. Comes to the market, finds a guide, makes some arrests. If they get really cocky, they bring the hammer down and close the whole boardwalk. You can smell those guys a mile away.”
“Why is that?”
“They act like men who have jobs,” he said. “But the law isn’t the problem anymore. The real trouble comes from the patriots. Vigilante assholes bankrolled by rich leftists who think taking jobs from the Chinese is destroying the country. They don’t arrest. They blow things up.”
Jake slurped up some noodles.
“So how do you know I’m not an undercover cop or one of these terrorists?”
“Can’t know for sure, of course,” Tom said as he started to rub the fat on his upper thighs and groin. The hairs on his body swayed left and right, like seaweed caught in competing tides. “But, like a lot of those fuckers have learned, asking a strange man to take you on a six-hour swim at night in cold water can be a good way to drown. It’s a lesson you only need once.”
“For the record,” Jake said, “I’m not.”
“The thought, my friend, never crossed my mind,” Tom replied. “Right. Enough morbid shit. Back to practicalities. You said you did IT?”
“Yeah,” Jake replied. “I was a coder.”
“I can’t guarantee you’ll find a ship where your particular talents would be useful. Some factory ships are call-centers, some do computer stuff, others need programmers and developers. But most are just factories…making baubles for the natives.”
“So I’ll be an assembly-line worker?” Jake looked upset.
“What were you before? C-E-effing-O? An innovator?”
“Maybe I should go ask one of the other guides.” Jake said, a defensive edge in his voice. “Shop around.”
Tom continued to stare out at the sea. “Go right ahead. Three stalls down is Ahmed. He’s good. Ask away. Or, like I said, the water is right there. Enjoy the swim.”
Jake sat silently. The sound of the surf broke through the susurrus of stall chatter.
Talk like that, Tom thought, will not close this deal.
“Look, I’m not saying it’s impossible,” Tom said, his tone softer now. “Maybe one of the full-time workers got sick or transferred. You might get lucky and steal their job. It’s better for me, right? I work on commission. But this is New York. There’s a lot of competition.”
“So it’s just as bad out there as it is up here?”
“It’s different. Not everyone is up for swimming six hours in the cold through one of the busiest waterways in the world. The Chinese respect tenacity. I met one in a bar once who told me that if we’d showed that kind of work ethic in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“Harsh.”
“Yup. But true.”
“Fuck that,” Jake said. “I worked my ass off and got screwed.”
Tom stood up and looked himself over, checking to make sure the synthfat was evenly and correctly applied. He was a greasy gray-yellow statuette. Perfect. He reached for his waterproof bag.
“We all did.” He dug around inside the bag and pulled out a little gun. “I need to tag you.”
“What?”
“It’s for my commission. They’ll scan the code when you negotiate your contract and I’ll get my cut.”
Tom checked the magazine of chips. There was white corrosion all over its edges. If he stuck it in the gun, it’d frizz out for sure. The guns were expensive and not easy to come by.
“Fuck. I’ll be right back. Gotta get more chips. Eat those noodles before they’re cold.”
Jake watched Tom rise and leave the stall. Flickering in the warm yellow light, under the grease, he could see alternating bands of rippled and smooth skin on Tom’s back, a birds-eye view of marbled scars.
A few stalls down the sand in the opposite direction from Alice sat Ari, an old Lubavitcher from Williamsburg who’d moved to the beach to retire back in the teens. Why he hadn’t moved to Inwood with the rest of the Hasids when the bridge started going up was unclear. Tom doubted his religiosity, as he’d seen him getting stoned with some of the other stall merchants and had definitely shared some of Alice’s squid noodles with him. But donning religious garb was a good way to avoid being robbed and must have helped him keep his identity so far from his missing friends and family.
Bearded, bald, and wearing his rekel (which he did regardless of the weather), Ari sat on a little stool atop a vaguely middle-eastern-looking rug he’d spread out over the sand. The plastic containers he used as shelving had their flaps open, presenting lots of trinkets and gadgets and things…sunscreen, cigarettes, amphetamines, water, swimsuits, fins, goggles, snorkels…like a degenerate triathlete’s beach shop.
Ari was no triathlete. Degenerate, maybe. His big belly swelled under his white collared shirt, his tzitzit fringing his lap.
“I need a chip magazine. The one I have is fucked. Corroded.”
“Second row,” he said, with a thick foreign accent despite having been born in Brooklyn, “on the right.”
Next to the aluminum squeeze tubes of energy goo, Tom found a cardboard box full of magazines. Used, mostly. He grabbed a new one and examined it. The label read “Proudly made in the U.S.A.”
Tom waved the magazine at Ari.
“How much?”
“For you, forty-five.”
“Five a chip?” He opened his mouth wide, feigning shock. “Outrageous.”
“They’re not dropping many anymore. Most of the magazines are rotted away. I guess even their hiring is slowing down.”
It was true. In the last few months there’d been fewer and fewer ships out there. He’d had to turn more and more clients away to keep his track record up, which made tonight’s swim a little more depressing. But if he was going to keep his job, he had to do what had to be done.
“Fewer of you boys out there these days,” Ari went on. “Lots going up north, to Canada.”
“Right. Those libertarian candidates finally broke the labor laws there. Gonna be tough work. Much colder water, that far from the Gulf Stream.”
“Even the sea has been outsourced.”
“Bad omens, Ari. Put it on my tab.”
“Of course.” The old man smiled at him. “By the way, perhaps you could do me a little favor. My nephew, David, needs to find work.”
Ari had thousands of nephews. Tom’d placed a lot of them.
“What does he do?”
“He was a lawyer. Tax stuff. He just lost his job last week, but he has a baby on the way. Can you help him?”
“Can he swim?”
“He’s not exactly what you’d call ‘in shape,’ my David,” Ari said. “I thought maybe you might be able to ask around when you go out tonight and see if anyone needs someone of his abilities. Perhaps they could arrange a pickup.”
Nobody did pickups anymore. At least not the kind you’d want. Today’s pickup was very different.
“If he’s on Manhattan, I can’t get him out. It’s on him.”
“No. His mother was a goy. He wasn’t allowed to go with the family.”
One diaspora replaces another. Tom nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He got back to his own stall as Jake finished his noodles. The container was empty, scraped clean. Even the overboard onion was gone.
“Hungry after all?”