The Phone Company

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The Phone Company Page 2

by David Jacob Knight


 

 

  . . . hundreds of thousands of times, with the exact same inflection.

 

  Kong used to enjoy testing his ability to visualize myriad processes all at once, to see how many moving parts he could conceptualize and keep track of.

  Not today, though. In fact, not for a while. He no longer liked to think about the scope of the place.

  Over the years he had watched technology reach out and sink its wires into everything. Now it was practically wet-wired with the world. He had watched as machines replaced men, and factories replaced fields. Then he watched as men themselves became part of the machine. His whole life, reduced to the tick of a cog.

  Thinking about it only worsened Kong’s heartburn, so he struck the factory from his thoughts. Today, he obsessed over something much different.

  He wondered how his wife and son were doing at the hospital. It was a short walk—perhaps a mile to that side of the compound—but he rarely had time to make the trip.

  So he would call them, then. Today. He had meant to touch base with them for a week now. Last time they had talked, his wife couldn’t hold anything down, and his son had been excreting something like oil.

  “Kong!”

  He jumped and tweaked a camera module as he plugged it into the circuit board. Randy had snuck up behind him, and his megaphone app had gone off so close to Kong’s head that the sound ruffled his hood.

  “Hah!” Randy beamed down at the twisted module. “I’m docking that from your pay.” Then once again, he moved on to harass someone else.

  Frowning against his face mask, Kong tried to bend the module back into place with his tweezers. It snapped at the kink.

  “Cao ni ma,” he muttered into his mask. He stared at the broken component, wondering how much it would cost him. Surely more than its worth.

  “Ándale,” said Maria Vasquez. She waited in the workstation down from Kong.

  He nodded and tweezed off a new camera eye, which he installed on the circuit board before passing the electronics off to Maria for further assembly.

  Hours flashed by of nothing but pluck and plug. Outside, sunrise slanted in from the east, only to stretch its shadows westward. Temperatures fluctuated with every breeze, and birds flew by. Inside this windowless box, however, nothing changed.

  Randy’s voice moved here and there throughout the factory, first far away, and then closer still. Kong’s heartburn waxed and waned with the shouting.

  Usually his stomach would settle in the late morning. Today, it just kept burning. His stomach and part of his esophagus felt hot.

  Kong’s phone rang. He pulled the Tether out of his pocket for a quick look, but then saw the caller’s picture onscreen. He nearly sobbed.

  His wife had updated her photo since last he’d seen. Fei Yen sat in her cot at the hospital in her white gown, waving. Her barcoded bracelet no longer fit her wrist. It swung nearly at her elbow.

  Kong had always loved his wife’s soft, round jawline. Now, her face hung from her skull the same way her gown hung from her gaunt frame.

  He started to pick up, but his finger stopped just above the glass.

  “Ándale,” Maria said again.

  “Sorry,” Kong replied, holding up one rubber-gloved finger. He burped up acid and grimaced. “Un . . . baño,” he said, struggling with his limited Spanish.

  Maria stared at him from under her hood, glancing once at his phone. He didn’t need to see her whole face to know that she hated him.

  “Yo muerto,” Kong added, hoping that meant sick.

  Finally, Maria’s eyes softened. She nodded, and Kong left for the bathroom.

  “¡Dos minutos!” she cried after him.

  He vomited before he could reach the toilet. Kong burst into the stall, ripped down his mask, and let his mouth explode. He’d been able to hold it, and get all of it into the bowl, but now his mouth burned. He spit into the toilet and knelt there for a while, eyes closed, not thinking about anything.

  He’d seen the blood. In the vomit.

  He wasn’t thinking about anything at all.

  Kong’s phone beeped.

  He pulled it out and flinched when his leg buzzed anyway, as if the phone were still there. The ghost phone thrummed three more times in his pocket and then ceased.

  His real phone beeped again. Apparently, Fei Yen had left a voice message. She stared back at him from the screen; the hard lines in her face made her look robotic.

  Kong flushed the vomitus and blood and thought about erasing his voicemail, wondering whether sometimes, wasn’t it better to be in the dark?

  No, he thought, and he pressed a button.

  He was not a weak man.

  He refused to be weak.

  the voicemail operator said in her polite British accent. The phone beeped as Kong keyed in his four-digit code.

  Unlocked, the operator read off the date and time of the message before playing it back for him: it wasn’t his wife.

  “Mr. Kong? This is Dr. Scheidler. I’m sorry to tell you this. Your wife has died.”

  Kong felt that phantom ring again. The buzzing in his thigh was the only thing he felt as he listened to the message.

  “Her stomach cancer was at such an advanced stage, there was nothing we could do. We made her as comfortable as possible, but . . .”

 

  “Mr. Kong, I regret to also tell you that your son is not doing well. If you can get here as soon as you can . . .”

 

  “He doesn’t have long. Again, I’m sorry for your loss. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call us.”

 

  Kong cried out and nearly dropped the phone into the toilet as the phantom ring resounded in his palm. A new picture appeared onscreen, a different caller now.

  “Bao?” Kong said as he answered the phone.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  The little boy sounded oceans away, and full of static.

  “Bao,” Kong said. “Wo zen me lian xi ni?”

  “Daddy, I don’t understand. I can’t understand you now.”

  “Where are you?” Kong said. His Mandarin accent had always been heavier than his son’s. He spoke his English carefully. “Can you understand me now?”

  “Are you coming to see me, Daddy?”

  “How can you call me?” Kong asked again, this time in English. “How are you calling—?”

  “Daddy? I can’t hear you. Will you come? Are you there?”

  Kong shut his eyes. “Hao,” he said, nodding. “I will come.” The call quality hissed for a moment. In the deepest, darkest corner of his son’s side of the line, Kong could barely hear a Mandarin fembot voice emerging from the static, as if his son were in some other factory, far, far away:

 

 

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, Bao.”

  “Goodbye, Daddy.”

  This time when Kong clenched his eyelids tighter, hot tears spilled down his cheek. “Zai jian,” he said back. “Goodbye, Bao.” But he was talking to dead air. His son had never owned a phone in his life.

  A few minutes later, Fei Yen’s picture lit up Kong’s screen. He stared at his skeletal wife. He assumed it was Dr. Scheidler calling with yet more news. Some distant part of him, the part that still had the ability to pay attention, realized he didn’t want to know what the call was about.

  Kong slipped the Tether into his pocket and walked out of the bathroom, as if nothing at all had happened.

  The cleanroom light glared down on him, making the entire factory glow. All the white bodysuits left streaks as they moved, revealing their web of activity.

  Kong walked through the tracers, which bent around him, so slowly he felt he’d lost his helmet on the moon. Hsiu Mei grinned at him with her eyes, but he didn’t acknowledge her.

  “¡Burro!” Maria said as Kong sat down at his station. “¡Ándale, a
hora!”

  He nodded, or rather his head bobbed up and down. No gravity. No air. Just pluck and plug.

  “Kong!” Randy shouted from somewhere else in the factory. He marched up the line and picked Kong from his seat by the scruff of his cleanroom suit. “What did you do?” Randy screamed in his face.

  Kong said nothing as Randy dragged him out of the cleanroom, into a completely different part of the factory. Here, they didn’t have to wear full bodysuits, just antistatic coveralls, with face masks and little white work caps.

  The Mandarin fembot was no longer repeating She was simply saying, as workers logged defective phones.

  “What did you do?” Randy shouted. He pushed Kong by the back of the neck, forcing him to face the wasted product line, hundreds of thousands of phones spilling onto the floor like some fish kill, each one gleaming a slimy black.

  “They’re all ruined!” Randy said. “Dust in all of them!”

  “Dust? No, I did not—”

  “Not just dust!” Randy scraped a finger across Kong’s forehead and showed him the clot of white, flaky cells caught under his nail. “Your skin! It’s in all of them! Your dead, stinking skin!” He flicked the ball at Kong, whose stomach had begun to rot out of him as he realized his mistake.

  No bath.

  He hadn’t even washed his face.

  Randy continued to shout at him, but the foreman’s amplified voice faded to the background until Kong could barely hear anything over the ringing in his ear. The tone resonated at the same frequency as the factory lights, so that sound and waveform undulated as one.

  “Pay dock!” Randy was screaming. “Pay dock for everyone! And no more medical! Not for you—not for your children!”

  Some of the workers shot up from their seats as shouts and curses arose throughout the factory.

  “I can take your bathroom breaks as well!” Randy screamed.

  One of the auras of light waved to Kong and pranced away, like some child. He followed it, now hearing only the ringing; the uproar faded behind.

  The light child always stayed ahead of him, turning a corner just as he turned his, so that he was always seeing only a glimpse of it streaking away.

  He found himself on the factory roof, blinded by the sun, his ears still ringing. Kong looked down and realized he was standing at the edge. He swayed, dizzied by the sudden height.

  “Are you coming to see me, Daddy?”

  “Hao,” he had said.

  Okay.

  The whole compound spread out before him, from factory to prison fence. He saw his house, among the other housing within the compound, all scoured and ripped apart by the hurricane, his tarp flapping. Some of the houses didn’t even have roofs.

  He could see the debris still stacked against the foundations where the water had deposited it; brush, bikes, even whole trees. Tons of cans rolled around in the finer detritus of sticks, leaf bits, and trash; fences twisted, cars rusting.

  Town looked the same past the razor wire. Only the factory stood pristine, its lots freshly landscaped and leaf-blown, its few windows washed.

  Kong had been here so long he had stopped noticing the destruction all around him. Now he looked on with completely different eyes. He blinked away the bright, syrupy light and felt cold tears on his lashes. He didn’t want to look south to the hospital, toward the employee graveyard.

  He was weak.

  Kong had come to this land chasing opportunity. He had brought his family, had promised them they were moving to a better life. Because that’s the lie he had always believed. Because, while being born into the world poor was no fault of his, to die poor was a sin.

  He stared at his house, at that flapping tarp and his son’s scooter parked outside.

  Apparently, all the runoff from the factory had been contaminating their water. Everyone’s. That’s how the doctors had explained it. The carcinogens had leached into everything. So that was the result of chasing a dream: waking up.

 

 

 

 

  Kong looked down when he heard the many hellos. Far below him, Randy had exited into the lot, hood torn back from his golden-blonde hair, face mask torn down around his chin.

 

 

 

  Hsiu Mei trailed behind the foreman, the pieces of her bodysuit still intact, her eyes tight with worry. “Hong Kong!” she cried out, using the pet name she’d given him. “No!”

  Seeing her now, it reminded Kong of what she’d told him, of what she’d told all of the employees who gathered secretly at night to talk about home and abandoned friends and their terrible day at work. They called themselves the Union, and Hsiu Mei had told them a story about a factory in the Shanxi Province where she once made phones. There, when the workers were angry, they would threaten to jump off the roof of their multilevel dorms. Once, a whole group of them did. And then the safety nets had gone up.

  Here, there were no nets.

  Not yet.

  Randy held his phone up to his mouth and spoke through the megaphone app. “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here, Kong! If this is some sort of pay negotiation, we do not respond to suicide threats!”

  “Kong, please!” Hsiu Mei said.

  And then Kong’s head whipped around to the sound of voices behind him.

  Hundreds of young women and men marched across the factory roof toward him, pulling down their face masks and tossing their work caps aside, so that the workers behind them trampled the little white hats. Girls, once beautiful but now sunken in, shook out what hair they had left. A few of the emaciated kids from Africa spat.

  Some of the workers were crying, blubbering, while the stronger ones helped the weaker ones along. Others were angry, punching the air as they yelled about unfair wages, their sicknesses, and all their loss.

  “What’re you doing?” Randy shouted as the workers lined up with Kong at the edge of the roof. “Get back to work—all of you!”

  Kong, with sun-dazzled eyes, looked up and down the line, weeping and confused. Maria stood beside him, a head shorter. She offered him a sad but reassuring smile as she took his hand.

  Everyone at the edge joined hands.

  “Your wife?” Maria asked.

  Kong nodded and looked down. “And Bao.”

  Tears sprang to Maria’s eyes and her lips trembled.

  “We have strictly prohibited collective bargaining!” Randy was shouting, pacing back and forth and aiming his cell phone speaker at the many faces above him. “If you do not back off that ledge right now, then just jump—all of you! That’s the only way you’re leaving this place. There are plenty more where we got you from, believe me! Now get back to work!”

  “No!” one of the workers cried out.

  Then all of them were shouting it.

  “No!”

  Hsiu Mei was still crying up at Kong, but he could barely hear her over the roar. “Kong!” she said, pulling off her hood to unleash silken black hair. “Hong Kong! Wo ai ni!”

  Someone down the line of protestors leapt.

  Miguel.

  Bone cancer, Maria had told Kong. But Kong had heard through the Union that Miguel really had leukemia.

  Everyone’s head whipped around, and they fell silent as Miguel plummeted to his death. A woman wailed as his body cracked against the concrete.

  More of the workers jumped, one after the other, in a line, pulling each other down, hand in hand. Like a reel. Maria looked at Kong again as the wave of jumpers broke toward them.

  Still crying, still smiling, still holding Kong’s hand, Maria leapt, but Kong tore free and she went screaming into the abyss without him.

  Kong stepped back as the rest of the workers leapt, too. Their bodies hit with a rhythmic thudding and cracking sound, and blood spattered and pooled everywhere.

  Some of the workers landed on each other, and some of them weren’t even de
ad yet, just lying there moaning or keening over broken bones while Randy ran around, screaming in their faces, spittle speckling the touchscreen of his phone.

  “Kong!” Hsiu Mei cried. “Wo ai ni! I love you!” This whole time she’d been pleading with him, she’d also been recording everything on her phone. It was now aimed at Kong, waiting to see if he’d jump. “I love you! Please!”

  Weeping, yet still feeling nothing, feeling absolutely mechanical inside, Kong looked down and saw Maria looking back at him, still smiling, coughing up blood.

  His leg buzzed again. Only this time the ringing in his ears resolved into an actual ringtone.

  He saw movement and looked out past the fence to a church that had lost most of its steeple. There in the weedy street, a tall man in a black suit stood next to the fallen cross, holding something to his ear.

  Something big and black.

  Like an old phone.

  CHAPTER 2

  “What the hell’s wrong with this country?” Steve said as the news unfolded on TV above the diner bar. The last factory worker, Huan Kong, stood on the USconn roof, weeping over hundreds of bodies.

  Everybody at Hayworth Diner that morning stared at the screen just like Huan Kong stared at the sky. Even Cathy, the waitress, had stopped to watch, with plates of biscuits and gravy steaming on her tray, coffee mugs dangerously off level.

  The story had started with a compelling hook: “A brutal cell phone factory. Lethal pollutants. Illegal workers committing mass suicide. A developing country? Or America?”

  “Twenty bucks says he jumps,” Bill said, bringing his hot coffee up for a sip.

  Steve shot the deputy sheriff a look from across the booth.

  “Sorry,” Bill said, lowering his cup an inch.

  Steve picked up his own coffee. “You’re always having to say that.”

  “Can’t help it. Shrink calls it a defense mechanism.”

  “What, saying sorry? Yeah, I bet that is the only thing keeping you alive.”

  A grin tugged at the corner of Bill’s lips. “Maybe you ought to see a shrink.” He took a sip and looked back to the TV.

 

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