The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  Sarah’s upper body started to float.

  “Hold this!” Steve said, pressing Bill’s hand against the jacket. He reached over and dragged Sarah all the way under the awning, onto what little dry land remained.

  Still breathing, he thought.

  But choking.

  From breathing in water.

  She cleared her airway and breathed easy again.

  “They wanted it,” Bill said, holding something up in his bloody hand. His other hand had fallen away from the compress. Steve reapplied the jacket to the deep gashes and tears. “Don’t let them, don’t . . .”

  “Please!” Steve said. “Take it easy! Just—SARAH!”

  Coughing, Bill thrust the keychain into Steve’s hand. “My garage, it’s in my . . .” Slowly, Bill’s focus softened and his gaze drifted up to the halogen lamp, which reflected brightly in his washed-out blue eyes. “Huh.”

  “Bill?” Steve said. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you leave me too! Bill?” He snapped his fingers in front of his friend’s eyes, which had gone wide and terrified.

  “Oh God, Steve, he’s calling me, he’s in the garden and I. . . . Oh dear God, I’m so . . .” Bill sucked in a sharp, ragged breath, which came out as a trembling sigh, sodden and heavy and partly escaping from his neck, as if finishing the sentence was one of the hardest things Bill would ever have to do.

  He never did.

  Bill just stared into the light. Steve beat his deflated chest and screamed at him that it was all right, he forgave him, goddamn it, please just don’t leave him here alone!

  Deaf to it all, and unfeeling, the flood continued to break away the rock foundation beneath his knees.

  * * *

  JJ’s hoodie clung and shivered against him, afraid to be washed away with the wind and rain.

  He stood atop the bowl of cars in the Martian’s junkyard, staring at the hidden coins where he’d left Marvin’s body—where Bill had left his body.

  JJ remembered vividly how that had felt, killing Marv with someone else’s hands. He flexed his fingers now, dripping rain. He had blood on his hands. Not in reality. Virtual blood.

  The boy behind the screen had Marvin’s blood all over his hands, and JJ couldn’t wash it off. His real hands felt stained. This rain now, thick and warm; the blood never seemed to dry.

  Now, instead of Marvin’s body, the fortune was littered with the corpses of anglerfish and pink fish with fins like hands and feet.

  Water had begun to build up on the backside of the cars, dammed by all the loose change; leaks had burst out the far slope, washing away loonies, toonies, nickels, and dimes.

  JJ looked down at the earwig blinking in his palm. He had seen what had happened to Sarah when their dad burned her phone. He had watched her drop off the network.

  For JJ, being connected was like having compound eyes. Except instead of seeing the same thing repeated in each cell, he saw through someone else’s perspective.

  Instead of his own feelings and his own thoughts, he saw and felt everything through everyone else, as if each person connected to The Provider was just another extension of himself, his own body. An arm. A leg. Like he was an endless centipede coiled around the earth. And when his heart beat, it beat a few billion times.

  Sarah’s cell in JJ’s insectile vision had gone dark.

  So had Bill’s.

  The Provider could no longer see them, could no longer see into their minds, couldn’t feel what they felt when their lips touched. The flood of lust, fear, and joy. And shame. Confusion and disgust. Most of all, guilt.

  No matter how tethered you were to The Provider, no matter how strong the signal, it couldn’t totally silence the better parts of you, the parts that know the difference between right and wrong. It just brought out the darker parts, the rotten parts. The truer parts. The flesh of us, the parts that the good in us tries to cut out. But the rotten parts never change. No matter how much you live in the spirit, the flesh is always there, always hungry and infecting everything.

  JJ could see that now, with the earwig no longer able to whisper into his ear.

  The flesh is the worm.

  Below the ring of cars, the ground began to shake, sifting the top layer of coins, which rattled and clinked. JJ stepped back from the bank.

  It was happening.

  The true Cracked Rock.

  The Uncanny Valley.

  Graham had told him this would happen. Everything was about to be exposed for what it truly was. The false front was falling, the membrane thinning. Cracks revealed everything now. Cracks in everything.

  The water, the fluid, had washed open one of these cracks, directly beneath the Martian’s coins. With an odd beautiful sound, like hundreds of thousands of angels singing, the treasure began to swirl around and down like a whirlpool, like an hourglass, bright and harmonizing into the earth.

  JJ stepped forward to throw in his earwig. His Tether, too. To cut himself loose, to blind all his other eyes. To cut off his trillions of arms and legs.

  He raised his hand but found he couldn’t release. His flesh screamed at him not to.

  You need me, it said.

  You want me.

  And the truth was, he did.

  JJ wanted to feel guilty.

  Everyone did, secretly, he thought. Like some repentance for benediction. Some secret hair shirt worn beneath the flesh. JJ’s blood craved it, clawed at the walls of his veins to get at it. Because in some twisted way he believed that, to be saved, you first had to be lost.

  Marvin’s loose change had almost completely drained now, nothing but pocket change. A few stacks of cars on the far bank slid down, too, and the sinkhole swallowed them whole until there was just a deep black cavity in the earth.

  JJ came very close to jumping into the void. Just to end it, just to end this miserable life. The pleasure and pain, and the endlessness of it. He didn’t want to see what Graham had foretold, nor the things Mini Mark had shown him when JJ had visited him in the burn ward, the things in Buttcrack Rock.

  The Calling.

  The Sacrifice.

  The Coming of The Provider.

  Mini Mark’s Portal to the End.

  JJ wanted nothing to do with it. Then his leg buzzed, and he didn’t know how he could live without it. Without being connected. Without guilt.

  A figure stood on the cars across the hole from him. It was Graham, sort of. The real Graham. A tall man in a narrow suit, his face blurred by rain.

  Graham was calling someone on an old black phone.

  JJ put in his earwig and said, What’s up?

  LONG DISTANCE

  “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”

 

  “It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: Goodbye.”

  —Kurt Vonnegut

  CHAPTER 45

  Bill chucked the hammer. It bounced off the sliding glass door, and he and Steve roared.

  It had started with a claw hammer to the drywall and had ended with a gutted basement, gutted to the studs. They had decided, spur of the moment, to remodel the space. It’s how Bill did most of his home improvements.

  A wheelbarrow, heaped with a load of debris, sat outside where Bill eventually wanted to brick in a patio.

  “It didn’t even . . . barely left a mark,” Steve said, studying the glass.

  “Fuggin’ thing.” Bill picked up his fourth beer. “Fourth or . . . eighth?”

  “My turn,” Steve said and snatched up the hammer from the subfloor. He cocked his arm, squinted an eye, and stuck out his tongue.

  “Gonna miss.”

  “Heh,” Steve said, but slightly adjusted his aim. And his tongue.

  “Wait!” Bill said as Steve hurled the hammer.

  It hit the glass, which jounced and vibrated in its frame.

  “What?” Steve said.

  Bill shrugged. “Iuhhno, just wanted to mess you up.”

  They laughed, shaking their heads and si
pping beers, realizing that, yep, they both saw, not just one sliding glass door, but two. Three, at some points. That’s what had given Bill the idea.

  “Rip out the old door, install something like you see when you’re drunk.” Bill’s exact words. Abstract enough for Steve. And it included the word “drunk.”

  Double glass floor-to-ceiling windows, flanking two sliding glass doors—that was the plan. The doors would meet in the middle when closed, sealing against a load-bearing post.

  Open? Their glass would align with the windows, so you could still see the valley through multiple panes of glass. “It’ll look like a painting,” Bill said. He was always saying that. His view wasn’t a view, it was a painting.

  “So where’s Diane?” Steve asked. Bill had been seeing her a couple months now.

  “Who gives a shit?” Bill said, picking up the hammer.

  If beer was the reason they were remodeling, Diane was the reason they were drinking. Bill always found something wrong with his girlfriends.

  Steve stroked his chin and considered the glass. “What if you just . . .”

  Bill, nodding, mouth full of beer, picked up the hammer. He walked over to the sliding glass door, reared back his arm, and then, with a light tap, he shattered the glass.

  He and Steve looked at each other, then sprayed beer everywhere. They cheered, smashed their cans in a toast, and took a quick pee break out in the woods.

  * * *

  Wind and rain whipped at the trees as Steve cradled Sarah uphill toward Bill’s.

  The Sun Dial loomed above them, its windows brightly lit. They were so obscured by rain, it was as if Steve were peering through leaded glass.

  “Almost there!”

  Sarah’s wet dress smacked him in the face. It was so wet, so inundated by wind and rain, Steve began to drown. Coughing, cursing, waterboarded, he shook his head and blew the dress away from his nose and mouth.

  He tried to heft his daughter, tried to get a better grip, but his shoulders ached. His arm hurt like a son of a bitch, and his legs . . .

  It wasn’t bad enough Steve had hiked up to the presidents’ heads. Now he was wading against a foot of swift runoff, carrying an average-sized seventeen-year-old girl.

  The water had scraped all the gravel from Bill’s driveway and was eroding the hard-packed earth underneath. Someone, someday, in some valley miles away, would find it, a rich deposit of trash and debris from Cracked Rock.

  “Almost—”

  Steve tripped. A root or something, exposed by the rain. He and Sarah splashed down. Limbs and rocks and dead fish bashed into them, and the water tried to whisk Sarah away.

  It had washed Bill away. Barksdale, too. A big crack had opened to the dark. It had swallowed them, along with the awning. The hanging halogen light had whipped around like an anglerfish luring prey into the deep before its cord pulled tight and pulled out.

  Steve held on to his daughter and tried to lift her. He didn’t want the water, didn’t want the flood to wash his daughter into the crack.

  Something fat, something gelatinous and lined with stingers, slapped his hand. Steve cried out, flinging away the jellyfish, which clung to his skin for a second like a ball of snot.

  Grimacing, Steve hugged Sarah under her arms and hoisted her out of the stream. He didn’t have enough strength to cradle her. Not again. His arms felt like jellyfish tentacles, and his hand felt coated in stinging fire ants suspended in hot grease. So he towed her, letting her heels drag in the stream.

  The Sun Dial sat higher on the hill than Bill’s walk-out basement, but it ended up being easier to reach. The lower patio, which was closer, was flooded. The stairs leading down to it formed a series of waterfalls, and Steve was afraid of taking Sarah down them. He was afraid of dropping her and cracking her head on the exposed aggregate, afraid of losing her to the rapids.

  He hauled her up to the French doors and laid her down, then tried Bill’s keys in the door. Except they weren’t Bill’s house keys. There were only two on the ring, and one of them had a big rubber grip with some letters stamped into it: US.

  On his porch, Bill kept a huge ornamental agate on display. Steve used it to shatter one of the sidelights and let himself in. Sarah’s wedding gown left a mop trail on the hardwood floor as he pulled her across the Dial. Steve, on the other hand, left drops of blood.

  As gently as he could, he half laid her, half dropped her on Bill’s huge leather couch. He didn’t want to think about this, didn’t want to think about anything that had happened tonight, but Steve couldn’t stop his mind as the leather creaked. He had too big an imagination. He could clearly see Bill laying Sarah down on this same creaky couch, coming in to share her smile.

  Pain. Pain was the only thing that purified Steve’s thoughts. He focused on that. Physical pain was so much easier to deal with.

  Sarah’s hair looked ropy, ratty, but she looked okay. Pale, but breathing. The pulse in her neck, rapid but steady. No new wounds. Just some bruising from their fight over the Tether. Just the blisters burst on her hands.

  Steve assessed his own hand, the burning red stings. He grimaced at his bitten forearm, the tears, the puncture wounds, gleaming with the snot of the rain.

  Barksdale had held back, thank God. Something in the dog—instinct, loyalty—had kept him from sinking fang to bone. He’d bled Steve pretty thoroughly, though.

  The jellyfish sting. Was it pee that . . .?

  Don’t be an idiot.

  Steve went to Bill’s kitchen, grabbed some vinegar and dumped it over the sting into the sink.

  Outside the window, the wind howled till trees whipped around. This weather. Steve had heard of it raining fish before. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Strong winds could suck up aquatic life and fling it hundreds of miles. But this rain was marine life. Montana was two whole states away from the nearest ocean. Three, in the southwest.

  Pungent, reeking, but not as badly stung, Steve went to Bill’s bathroom. A woodsy-colored hand towel hung near the beveled mirror. Steve pressed it against the dog bites with one hand while he opened the cupboards.

  Gauze, medical tape, an antibiotic cream, tweezers—he grabbed a bunch of supplies, then stared for a second at the sink. The fun part, he thought, catching himself in the mirror.

  Bill paid someone to keep things clean. A local lady. She kept things pretty ship-shape, but this morning Bill must have left this toothpaste spatter on the mirror.

  His last toothpaste spatter.

  In the mirror behind the splat of Crest, Steve looked like a drowned, terrified rat. He almost lost it. Almost admitted it to himself right then and there, but he didn’t.

  God, he’d helped put in these fixtures.

  Pain, Steve reminded himself.

  Setting everything aside, he turned on the faucet and ran his forearm under the tap to clean it out. “Holy f—”

  * * *

  Steve sat on the couch next to Sarah, smoothing over the medical tape that held the bandages on his arm. He had popped a few of the pain pills he’d brought for Sarah, and they were starting to take effect.

  Sarah moaned and turned over on the couch. Steve had blotted her as dry as he could with one of Bill’s towels, but she was sweating.

  His head whipped toward one of the side windows, toward a deep groaning, cracking sound outside, followed by a huge thwump that rattled the house.

  Tree? Steve thought.

  Bill had clear-cut and terraced the slope in front of his house. He had opened up a beautiful panorama, but behind the Sun Dial, huge old growth climbed the hill. One of the giants must have fallen next to the house. Steve couldn’t tell how close. Everything beyond the windows of the Dial washed by in a liquid black. Rain pounded away on the roof, and the wind was so waterlogged it sounded like waves.

  On top of everything, the power had gone out. Bill’s backup generator had kicked on, but Steve had shut off the lights. Not to conserve fuel. A house like Bill’s, with such a great view of the valley, shone like a beacon at
night.

  After a while of cocking an ear toward the broken skylight, listening to the rain plop down like pads of fat, Steve began to nod off. The pills. They were numbing everything.

  He got up and went to the kitchen for coffee. He needed to remain vigilant, he knew that. He also didn’t want to dream, didn’t want his mind subconsciously working through everything he’d suffered that night.

  Using his phone as a flashlight, Steve opened the cabinets in the kitchen and frowned. Usually, Bill kept the normal stuff: cereal, spaghetti noodles, canned food, maybe some whey protein. Steve pushed aside a few bottles of whiskey to see if maybe there was something else behind them.

  Nope.

  Every cupboard he opened. . . . The lower cabinets held pots and pans, but everything else—the pantry, the refrigerator, even the freezer—they all clinked with bottles of booze.

  This here, this wasn’t Bill. Sure, Bill drank, but this? This was madness. This was The Phone Company.

  All of it, Steve thought, tempering himself from throwing every last one of these bottles through Bill’s windows. What good would it do? Bill was dead.

  “A lot,” Steve said. He got a dark thought and wiped at his mouth. These bottles. His pills.

  Sarah groaned again, holding her belly and constricting into a fetal position on the couch.

  No, Steve thought, shutting the refrigerator hard enough to make the bottles clatter. He’d felt this darkness before. It would pass. He just had to keep busy, and it would pass. He’d dealt with this before.

  For a long time he stood over Sarah, watching her sweat and toss and turn, clutching at her stomach. She’s what’s important now, he thought. Sarah, and pain.

  Steve put a hand to her forehead. Fever. Runny nose. It could have been the flu, but he doubted it. Her health had taken a hit the moment he’d burned her Tether.

  Ibuprofen, he thought.