“It’s not you!”
“You can’t hear him, Janice,” Graham announced. More privately to Steve, he said, “She can only hear me.”
Janice started freaking out. “Honey? Are you there? Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”
“He can hear you, Janice.”
“Steve, honey, please. Say something.”
“It’s not her,” Steve said, but deep down he knew. He remembered that conversation (stage four) like it had just happened, as if time had folded so that five years ago and today were the same thing—Janice a corpse in bed and fading fast. It was her voice, he knew it.
She had always sounded different on the phone. This was her phone voice. The same voice that had called to tell Steve she was having the baby and to get his ass home, the voice that called to say his dad had died, Aunt Jessie had just called to tell her. The voice that, so many times, had called to say I love you, Happy Birthday.
“You can’t even hear me!” Steve said, projecting his voice toward the phone. “It’s not you!”
“Steve?” Janice said, as if, indeed, she couldn’t hear him. “Steve, please!”
“If that’s Janice, why can’t she hear me?”
Graham shrugged. “You’re not connected.”
“Janice, I’m here!” Steve said. He turned back to Graham. “See?”
“Hearing and connecting are two separate things.”
Steve stared at the rusty gramophone-style bell, where Janice’s screams echoed out. He remembered what Sarah had said, that she’d talked to Janice, too. He suspected what Graham had said was true. At least in certain contexts. Everyone in town but Steve had been living this secret second life, and they were all in on it. Being connected was different, afforded you different things.
“Tell her something,” Steve said, wishing there was a better way. “At least tell her I’m here.”
“She knows that already.”
“Then tell her the kids are . . . tell her we’re safe. Tell her that,” Steve said, gesticulating at the phone.
Graham relayed the message.
“Oh my God, thank God!” Janice said. “Honey, please! Tell them I love them!”
Steve didn’t respond, eyes ticking back and forth.
“He will,” Graham said.
“Janice,” Steve began, but then he remembered and addressed it to Graham. “Ask her something.”
“Okay. Do you have a specific question you’d like me to—”
“No, I can’t . . .” Steve frowned at the table, trying to think this through. He had seen The Phone Company read minds. He didn’t know whether they could read his, too, considering he was outside their network. But he couldn’t take the chance. Whatever Janice told him had to be a complete surprise.
“Just something only she and I would know. No one else in the world. Tell her that. Tell her!”
“Sorry, you want her to . . .?”
“Just something only the two of us would know.”
“Okay,” Graham said. He turned to the phone. “Janice? Steve has a message for you.”
“Steve, I’m here! I’m here, honey! What is it? I love you!”
“He wants you to tell him something only the two of you would know.”
“Something no one else knows,” Steve clarified, but Graham didn’t relay that critical part. Steve opened his mouth to insist, but he shut up when Janice spoke.
“I don’t . . . Steve, honey, what does that mean? I’m sorry, I . . . Steve, are you there?”
“We’re here, Janice.”
“Steve, what does that even mean?”
“Tell her,” Steve said. “Now!”
Graham nodded. “Janice? It means tell him something about your honeymoon. Something like that.”
“No!”
But Janice was already talking, and Steve was already thinking of that night, ruining everything. She laughed and cried as she spoke.
“I remember, oh, God, it was the best day of our lives, and I remember . . . Steve, he took us to the ocean with a view of the sea, and he was so romantic that day, so nice, and I said, heh, I told him, I felt so bad, ‘Steve, honey, can we go home?’ I spoiled everything, but he was so good about it. It just felt so lonely there, and so cold, and with everything eroding all I wanted to do was go home. I’ve always loved it there. All I want to do is come home.”
By the time she finished, Steve’s eyes were hot and streaming. He had fought it. He had clenched his whole face until it trembled, because he didn’t want to crumble in front of Graham, didn’t want to dignify his smugness with any weak response. But what Steve wanted didn’t matter.
There was something broken inside him, something that had been broken since the day he’d lost her, and no one could ever know how personal that pain was, how unique or how deep; not even the kids, and Janice had been their mother. No one could ever know. It was the deepest, densest, and most fibrous pain he’d ever felt.
“See, this is what we can offer you,” Graham said. “This type of connection, people kill for it. And it’s unlimited. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Steve,” Janice said. “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Honey, are you there?”
“Yes,” Steve said again.
Graham offered up his Tether. “Bring her home, Steve.” One huge button filled most of the phone’s screen. There wasn’t a choice to decline, just one big green button:
ACCEPT
The only other button was a tinier one below, to the service agreement.
“I want to see it,” Steve said, pointing. “Tap it.”
Graham pressed the link, and some writing appeared. Steve had seen end-user agreements before. They went on for pages in the finest print. He had never read through one all the way, they were so dense; denser than any act of Congress. PCo’s service agreement, on the other hand, was simple.
in whatever way she desires.>
“Do you agree?” Graham asked, switching screens back to the giant green button.
Janice repeated the word, muttering. “Agree? I’m not sure what you. . . . Where’s Steve?”
Graham ignored her. “It’s the same agreement on everything,” he assured Steve. “Everything you’ve ever signed. Ours is just a lot clearer.”
The wording. Steve thought about the wording, trying to figure out everything those few simple words could mean.
He had seen the Tethers cure Mrs. Hayworth’s infirmities, had seen them transform his best friend into a monster. He’d watched as the technology swallowed his family, and he had nearly drowned when it flooded his town. What else did they mean by “use you”? He just knew that, whatever they planned, you had to give up your rights for them to do it. They couldn’t violate you unless you invited them in.
“Janice,” Graham said, tilting his head again toward the old phone. “Would you like to speak with your husband?”
“Yes! Really? Steve, are you there? Oh my God, Steve? Will I be able to hear him?”
“She wants to speak with you, Steve,” Graham said, talking under Janice’s hopeful, frantic pleas.
For the first time since Barksdale bit him, Steve felt feverish, infected. He had finally seen through the agreement.
“One thing,” he said.
“Anything. Name it.”
“There’s no promise.”
Something in Graham’s expression slipped. He had looked so consolingly supportive before. The look hadn’t even slipped that much, but the difference was huge. He might as well have shucked his suit, his face was so naked.
“It doesn’t stipulate that I get to talk to my wife,” Steve said. “So what am I really agreeing to?”
“Do you agree?” Graham said, only this time the question was entirely rhetorical.
Steve felt the burning tears again, welling up with the fever and the chills. He met Graham’s eyes anyway. He didn’t give a crap what this man could see.
“I decline.”
Graham stared at Steve as Janice continued to cry out for her husband, crying out his name so many times the word began to sound strange and lose its meaning.
Graham didn’t retract his phone, the big ACCEPT button. “What do you gain from this? What’re you protecting? Your privacy? Please. There’s a reason we never shut off the phone you’ve got there in your pocket, Steve.”
Another sick chill. Steve’s hand twitched toward his jacket, but didn’t touch it.
“Usually when people keep phones as old as yours, it’s not because they like their phone; it’s because they’re afraid. Of change. Of the future. Of us. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re with us or not, Steve. We are the future. Everything that goes through our tower, we see. Why would we want to give up our wiretap on the competition? There is no privacy. There never was.”
“I don’t give a crap about privacy,” Steve said.
“Then what? Your family, your town? The minute you press CALL, we’ve wired your signal to detonate bombs all over Cracked Rock. The school. The library. Marvin’s junkyard. The whole suburb. Your house, Mini Mark’s; Meg Disney’s, too. Mountain View, the whole refugee camp. And guess what? I lied. JJ isn’t running errands. He’s right out there, right now, right out that back wall, where you’ve parked your little bomb. That’s where we’re holding your son and your precious daughter. So it’s up to you, Steve. Reunite with everyone, or kill us all.”
Steve couldn’t let himself blanch. Sick, he was so sick.
Bluffing, he thought. Graham had to be. Steve hadn’t talked about anything over the phone or through their goddamn tower. Nothing about the bomb, anyway.
“Listen, Steve, I’m trying to help. I’m trying to protect you. We don’t need you, Steve. Not now. We’ve met our quota. The fullness of the time has come. The birth pangs have begun. The water has broken, and now things must dilate. If you let us help you, if you agree to our help. . . . You’ve seen it yourself. The Provider puts special emphasis on philanthropy. And forgiveness. We’re here to help people, Steve. We like to help people stay connected. Please. Join us. Reach out and embrace your wife.”
“Steve?” Janice said. Scratchy. Distant. Desperate.
He didn’t reply. To either of them.
Graham retracted his phone. “Janice, I’m so sorry. I have something to tell you.”
“What? Where’s Steve?”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“No, that’s impossible—Steve!”
“I’m so sorry, Janice.”
“Steve, please!” She broke with the word, her torso wrenched by sobs. It sounded like there was nothing left inside her, just pieces of her former rock, washing away in the flood as every hope inside her completely drained away, leaving only the crack, the abject loneliness. And in the background, because of the age of the technology, because the call was long distance, a hiss, like the sea.
Followed by a wet coughing.
“Goodbye, Janice,” Graham said.
Steve’s hand went to his clamshell, still intact in his jacket. His finger sought out the tactile bump of the CALL button.
Bluffing, he thought again.
From the switchboard, Graham pulled one of the plugs, and Janice was gone, her scream echoing. He turned. And then Steve’s hands were clamping down around his throat.
Graham laughed. Steve could feel the pressure of it, the Adam’s apple trying to bob against his hand. Even as the esophagus began to crumple like a vacuum hose, Graham continued to laugh, a pinched, mechanical sound.
He grabbed Steve’s throat, too, and pushed him back against the front wall of the data center, lifting him off his feet. Steve’s vision began to crackle black around the edges, and he knew he’d messed up trying to save everyone—trying to save himself. Graham was too strong.
One of Steve’s hands fell away, almost too limp to work. This was it. If he didn’t do it, if he didn’t press this button right now, even at the risk of blowing up everyone he knew and loved, Graham would kill him, and there would be no one left to stop The Phone Company.
Steve tried to shove his limp hand into his pocket, but his fingers got caught up. His body wasn’t working right, and Graham was still cackling. Steve raised a leg and kicked him in the chest. Graham stumbled back, and Steve fell to the floor.
There! he thought and he found the phone, found the raised button. He laughed, too, despite the pain it caused, despite the tears streaming from his eyes, which he could barely feel.
Ring, ring! he thought and pressed CALL.
CHAPTER 57
“Did you know this?” Janice asked, highlighting a passage in her text. Her hair brushed Steve’s shoulder, and his dorm room bed creaked. They were both propped up on their elbows, reading.
“I didn’t,” Steve said. Janice had signed up for a bunch of religion courses that semester, all electives. Everything was an elective with Janice. Everything was also highlighted.
The fan kept blowing her hair against his shoulder. She smelled like sweat and something sweet.
Steve read the passage:
Old City Jerusalem is surrounded by impressive battlements. One of the gates leading into the city, the Golden Gate, is sealed by rule of an Ottoman sultan. The sultan meant it as a strategic move to bar the Jewish Messiah from arriving and fulfilling prophecy. A Muslim graveyard is also involved.
The text went on to describe this graveyard, how it was believed that a Kohen, the Jewish word for priest, couldn’t enter the grounds of it.
“Interesting,” Steve said, and went back to some crap by Stephen King.
One of his professors was lobbying to teach this crap in class, as if it could stand up there on a shelf alongside Steve’s dog-eared copy of Finnegans Wake. Steve had helped form a student group against it, of course. Pure crap.
“Don’t other religions say that any other Messiah—you know, other than their own—is really a false Christ?” Steve asked, lightly reading SK. “I mean, if one religion’s savior is another one’s end of the world, someone crazy enough could just blow up the gate, right? Let whoever it really is in? Whoever’s really knocking?”
Janice fell silent. Their shoulders parted, and they went back to reading their separate books and sweating their separate sweat.
Crap, Steve thought. He was always messing it up with Janice over this type of crap. Couldn’t. Keep. His skinny-assed mouth shut. She had been angry about his stance on Stephen King as well. Between scripture and pop scripture, Steve had a problem with kings.
Then something other than Janice’s hair slipped along Steve’s shoulder, and suddenly they weren’t studying any longer, once again sharing their sweat. After all, this was college. They were both slippery and hot.
* * *
The back of the data center disappeared in a bright, blinding puffball of light.
Steve felt himself get thrown back, a flash-burn to the skin, then little else. He woke up to burning pain and a searing cough. Suddenly he was rolling around screaming on the gravestones until the little fires on his clothes went out.
“Marvin, you imbecile!” someone shouted, laughing the same way a maniac swerves a car.
Steve thought maybe the sound had come from within his own mind, the cackle was so muffled and ringing. Or maybe he himself had said the words and laughed. He couldn’t tell. His chest felt heavy.
He ran his hand over his scalp and winced. Only tufts of hair remained. He could feel it now. Kind of. The pain. The rest of his body felt all stuffed up with anesthetized cotton and shock.
“You stupid idiot! You moron, Marv!”
Now Steve could sense where the voice came from, could pick up on the vibration of it. He peered into the swirling haze of red and black and coughed up smoke.
“Sarah?” he said, trying to scream but managing only a dry rasp. “JJ?”
He could hear stones tumbling down, could see a black hole opening up in the floor ahead of him. Beyond that, where the back wall had been, back wher
e he’d parked the van and where PCo had supposedly taken his kids, Steve saw fire and jagged silhouettes. Nothing else.
“You didn’t listen to little old Lucky Chuck, did you, Marv? Didn’t follow his precise instructions!”
Steve could see now, the laughing, jeering figure behind the voice. Graham, what was left of him, sat, just a smoking silhouette of a man in a suit, ten feet away from Steve where the blast had thrown him. Behind him, the switchboard and the entire First Step was tilting and falling in.
Graham’s laugh tittered at such a high frequency, it blended with the ringing in Steve’s ears. He couldn’t tell the two apart. Now that Steve was really focusing his damaged hearing, he could pick up on Graham’s phone, as well, the multilingual hello. It was going crazy beneath everything else.
“You should’ve listened!” Graham said. “Should’ve finished your edumacation, you ignoramus klutz! HAHAHAHA!”
All in different voices.
More of the data center slid off in tectonic plates into the black abyss, echoing into a deep stone throat. The First Step slid even farther in. Parts of the old telephone went skating off the edge.
Steve flinched as, right at his fingertips, an edge of one of the gravestones popped up from its grout. A crack in the concrete floor. It was going. It was all going in.
“Do it!” Graham said. “Come on, you can do it, you chunk of shit-dirt!”
Grating, shattering, crunching, clattering, the First Step broke loose and disappeared with a jangle of old telephone bells and the scatter of rocks.
“Yeah! Rawk on! In your face, Buttcrack Rock!”
Lying directly below the door where the bomb had shoved him, Steve reached up, tried to yank it open. Couldn’t. The only way out was through the crater. Past Graham. Whatever was left.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!”
The Phone Company Page 52