by Unknown
One after another, the disassembler butchered his placoderms and hung them from the shelf. When he was finished with them all, he turned a sweaty face toward the president and asked for his signature on the statement of delivery/completion-of-work report. As he did so, he shrank backward, however.
With a single stride, the president came forward, stood over the disassembler so as to entirely overshadow him, then pinned down his trembling shoulder and jammed a fat finger deep into one of his rapidly blinking eyes. The disassembler stopped moving, panted out short, steady gasps of air, and when he had endured the signature all the way to the end, he departed with languid footsteps and a hand pressed over one eye.
The president lifted up one section of the grated floor. The ominous, armored heads still had their jaws clenched tightly. One after another, he kicked them down into the darkness of the pit.
The worker took the mucous-clogged glass receptacle, affixed it to the bracket that stretched out from the pillar, covered his eyes with a pair of slitted protective goggles, waited for the president to stretch out to his full height in the usual place, and then turned the control lever hanging down from the ceiling with his fingertips.
A single shaft of light fell onto the crown of the president’s head. The beam was instantly refracted through his translucent body and shone out of the middle of his face, becoming a jittering point of light on the surface of the glass container. The worker gauged the level of turbidity in the mucous, adjusted the lighting aperture, and when formation was completed, pulled a number of solidified clumps out of the container.
Once he had wiped off the mucous that clung to them, the president’s chest swelled out and let loose a NVo that sent several scales and a sulfurous odor dancing though the air. Shortly thereafter the top of his head began to foam. It was gas being released from the qizhong being digested inside him, most likely. The worker locked the next container into place. Although he endeavored to continue his work free of distractions, the beam of light veered wildly off course and touched his own shoulder, causing him to shut the aperture involuntarily.
The stinging pain lingered in his shoulder, and he was seized with an urge to fling the glass cylinder right at the president’s face. Even if he did so, however, it wouldn’t cause him any pain.
The president stuck a fingertip into his own face and began to slowly stir it about. His powers of concentration had reached their limit.
However, the job of solidifying the mucous still wasn’t finished. Even so, the president reached up to the highest shelf and took down a skinbag shaped like a palm frond, pressed it against his ear, and squeezed it with both hands, injecting its contents into his corpuscyte. The fluid could spread out through his entire body in a netlike pattern.
The worker couldn’t hold in a sigh. It was still during working hours; moreover, they were in the middle of a job, yet here he was drinking! Actually, it was not certain that it was liquor the president was drinking—it could have been some substance his kind needed to replenish in order to survive—but that eye-stingingly volatile aroma was clearly that which was peculiar to alcohol, and even if it wasn’t, the president’s careless actions became so awkwardly sluggish that it was embarrassing even to look at him.
The president straightened himself up, so the worker opened the aperture again. The beam of light refracted and spilled down onto the container, but its movements were slow and erratic. To make matters worse, the president interrupted him again midway through in order to gulp down liquor from a new skinbag. The worker felt like he was going to be drunk to the point of sickness from the aroma alone, but he somehow held together until the fourth batch of solidification work was finished.
Even after light returned to the workshop, afterimages of the beam remained in the worker’s field of vision.
The president’s upper torso turned toward the worker, leaned forward, and stopped just when it seemed he would tip over. Reversing direction, he turned back and slammed right into the shelves. Glass bottles filled with powerful chemicals rolled from the shelves and fell one by one. One of them broke and yellow bubbles spilled out. No sooner did they drip down below the grating than a cry arose like an alarm whistle, resolving itself into a voice saying, “Your mind is wandering.” The worker’s back broke out in gooseflesh.
It was a parrot. The creature was clinging pitifully to the underside of the grate, having crawled up from the bottom of the pit in hopes of partaking of some share of their leftovers. You could kill them off and then kill them off again, but eventually they would always show up again, incoherently imitating the voices of the worker.
The arm that the president had reached out with to pick up the fallen bottle was knocking tools off the workbench one after another, prompting the worker to rush to pick them up, saying, “It’s all right! I’ll get it!”
His skingloves blistered on contact with the powerful chemicals. He felt a terrible itching deep within his eyes, his feet swelled up, and his joints stiffened.
He wished that the workday could just end here, but the job of finishing the project still remained. It wasn’t that he was being forced to complete it by day’s end, but the calendar on the middle shelf, which resembled a globe covered in synthorgans, indicated who would be coming in tomorrow. Should the product not be ready on time, the one who would literally be cutting his own stomach open to get them over the finish line would be none other than the worker himself. He shuddered, remembering the kinds of things that had happened to his colleagues as clearly as if they had been his own experiences, then furrowed his brow, realizing that he had never even met those colleagues.
The worker lined up the misshapen, beam-hardened blocks on the workbench. The light was dim around him since the sun was beginning to set. He could see the president’s body, thoroughly relaxed, sinking into blackness like the surface of a river at night. The worker took out a pair of torchburrs, each about the size of a fist and bound up tightly with pin-nets. Giving each a good shake to make them glow, he hung them from the bracket. The synthorgans on the middle shelves convulsed abruptly.
Bathed in green light, the worker applied an iron file to one of the rough blocks and started shaving away the unneeded parts. Once a winged, batlike outline had appeared, he switched to a finer file and set about finishing the complex, hollow interior.
Suddenly, the worker’s wrist leapt up, and he dropped his file. This was because a wing that was supposed to have already been processed had started to vibrate in the space between the metal net and the torchburr.
Using tweezers, he plucked off the wing, and with it came vivid, sunset-pink muscle tissue that had been connected to the wing axis. It was still expanding and contracting. Frightened, he threw it to the floor. The wing with its attached flesh traced out a parabola through the stagnant air as it fell to the grated floor. There it stuck to the grate for only a moment before being snatched away by a tentaclelike appendage from beneath.
The worker set to the task of polishing the curved surfaces of the block using an emery cloth. To the steady sound of his polishing there was added another sound, as of some liquid coming to a boil. Despite a growing sense of puzzlement, he reached for the next piece and took it in his hand. The boiling sound grew louder, and he looked over at its source, which was the president. Beneath his clothes of knitted meat, great bulges suddenly swelled out from his chest or side, then receded, then bloomed again.
Having surmised what was about to happen, the worker turned his face away. The grated floor resounded with a shrill noise, and he felt in his feet the vibration of something heavy crashing against it. The area filled with grayish white smoke, and though he switched to mouth breathing amid the nausea-inducing stench, his throat was still affected, and he started coughing very hard.
Turning back toward the workbench, he gave up all thoughts of cleaning the place up at quitting time and devoted himself instead to the work of polishing. The president’
s feet were behind the workbench, and it was his good fortune that he was unable to see them. He finished the second piece and tried to connect it to the first one he had shaped, but they would not fit together well, so he picked up the file again and pushed it inside once more. Next time, they fit together perfectly with a pleasant snap, so he then injected a buffering agent into the cracks using his needler.
The president wandered around the fogged work area. Having nothing in particular to do with himself, he stared meaningfully at the synthorgans on the shelves. The worker rubbed at his chest; a kind of white noise to which he felt an instinctive revulsion was making it hard for him to breathe.
“Everything left to do is my work …” the worker said, suppressing a cough and clearing his throat. “… so I, ah, don’t mind if you want to go on ahead.”
But for all his words accomplished, he may as well have been talking to himself.
At some point his legs had started to tremble. The cold air that came crawling in from below seeped into his pores and took root in his marrow, and even a slimecake—warm with advanced decay—wrapped snugly around his ankles could not have driven it out, let alone the tattered scrap of a blanket he actually had.
The worker had been complaining about the cold to the president in various ways for a long time. He had tried shivering exaggeratedly and he had feigned being frozen to the point of immobility, but in the end his meaning had failed to get through, and an acquaintance of the president (a psychologist, apparently) had come in for a visit. That had been when the counseling sessions—or perhaps they were something entirely different—had commenced.
The translucent physician had sat down in front of the worker and encouraged him to speak using gentle gestures of fingers that swelled out heavily at their tips. The worker’s puzzled face had cast a dim reflection onto the faceless, anthill-shaped head towering above him.
Relying on the nodlike gestures the physician would occasionally send his way, the worker had made a desperate appeal, explaining just how horrible an environment it was he was made to work in.
“It’s important not to interpret everything pessimistically. Let’s stay on the same medication a while longer and see how things go. Try going in to work tomorrow as though it were your very first day.”
The worker was remembering the time he had taken off work for a medical examination. Had that been at the company where he had worked previously?
“No, haven’t you always been told your only saving grace was your perfect attendance?”/ “That’s right, it was because of that bunch who accepted leave that so many” / “I could see right through that, so I was the one who had to bear the guilt I might have otherwise …”
The physician had stared at the worker, though he lacked even eyes for doing so. The worker had blushed, realizing that he had not only been reminiscing, but also speaking to him aloud. Simultaneously, both of his arms dropped with a sudden weight and he returned to himself. Supported by both of his hands, the unbroken chain of the thick spinal column he had completed was arching downward.
Before his eyes, the president was bending down to inspect it. The worker raised and lowered his hands in turn to make the spine undulate, and even as he was demonstrating the smooth motion of its moving parts, he felt all the more puzzled, lacking as he was any memory of having completed so much of it. He pushed out a sigh from deep within his lungs.
The president’s head moved like a tongue as it followed the curve of the spine.
Even after he had consulted with the physician, there had been no improvements in his workplace environment. Which was exactly why he was shivering even now.
“Bring me my samovar,” said a sudden voice that the worker did not recognize.
“I’ve never heard of it,” said somebody else.
“It must be some kind of anti-anxiety medicine,” the worker muttered himself.
Making small talk, the worker moved the tips of his frozen toes. Like the fake red nose of a clown, he could feel nothing with them. And he wondered: what kind of creature was a clown?
The feeling of a cold wet nose returned to his cheek.
I wonder if that was a clown? Wagging its bushy tail—that was definitely a dog—no, aren’t dogs those hideous bugs with the exoshells that live underground? At any rate, I was raising a stem pet with a cold wet nose. Kyoro, John, Mukku, Rick … Several of them, even dozens of them. Even when they barked, all you had to do was rub their backs or their bellies and they would be as gentle as could be. Now, though, even the innocent interaction of calming a dog was something he remembered only as a symbolic sort of give-and-take to which neither thought nor emotion was attached.
Rather like the physician’s counseling. At times when the assimiant displayed unusual behavior, he would be sat down across from him and made to start talking about whatever he felt like. The physician would at suitable moments shake his head or make a show of dropping in an appropriate word or two. Mutual understanding did not occur. The worker was humiliated to know that in a corner of his mind a part of him was longing for the next session, because in spite of everything his mind would feel a little clearer after it.
Walking backward, the president slid away from him and melted into the darkness of the corridor. Perhaps he was satisfied with the completion of the spine.
The moment the president was gone the workshop grew very quiet, and sounds the worker had not noticed all day—of bubbles in dependency tanks, of the dull beating of the synthorgan he had completed this morning—became audible.
The worker lay down on his side, fitting the pointed projections of the vertebrae into their grooves in the shelf, and when he turned around, he saw a heap of excrement lying there like a rotting corpse, in a pile nearly as high as his waist. Broken bones peeked out here and there, and at the dungheap’s base a number of trails and a scattering of holes remained, suggesting that it had been scavenged from beneath the grating in the floor.
The worker let loose in a groan what could not be expressed in words, and forgot to breathe in through his mouth. His sinuses were assaulted by a powerful, pungent stench, and tears welled in his eyes. Why did the president have to do it right here and not go to the bathroom? Or was that stuff not excrement? And even if it wasn’t, why not lift up the grating first? Who was going to clean this up?
The back of his head was so tense that it hurt, but when he reached back to rub it, he found a solidified mass of piled eggs clinging there, with a number of short, needlelike things sticking out of them, writhing about. Lice legs?
With a sharp cry, the worker suddenly pulled his hand away. When he looked at the palm of his hand, he saw several red spots welling up, swelling into drops of blood.
Until that moment, he had doubted that lice really existed, so he had paid little mind to the story that went around about them—that late in the night their nymphs would hatch from the eggs all at once and consume entirely their host’s soft tissues—but now that rumor suddenly took on a shade of plausibility that terrified the worker.
I’ve got to finishing cleaning this fast so I can get back to my sleepsac, the worker thought. He lifted up one of the grated floor plates next to him, pulled out a floor brush from under the workbench, and started pushing the sticky, heavy excrement over the edge. Amid the excrement a tube that was apparently a tenant started to move, so he squelched it with the brush. Though it was cold enough to make him shiver, that was all forgotten as his forehead broke out in a sweat.
“Everything left to do is my work … so I, ah, don’t mind if you want to go on ahead.” Overcome with horror at his own words coming back to him out of nowhere, he held the brush upside down and jammed the point down between the bars of the grating. Out of breath, he tried to drive the unseen presence of the parrot into a corner, though perhaps in reality the worker was merely moving around by himself.
The legs of the lice bit into his skull. He wiped his swe
at and turned back toward the last of the solid waste.
Sprinkling some pesticide on the nematodes that had erupted from the mass, he scrubbed it all through the grating with the brush as though it were a sieve, pulled out the hose, and sprayed down the floor, wishing fervently all the while that he could resign right now.
It always happened, however, that the end date of his contract would pass and then automatically renew before he realized. Try as he might to remember, the date always disappeared into an oblivion of forgetfulness. From the start, the sequence of events by which he had come to work at the synthorgan company and the manner in which he had contracted with them were all a blurred haze. For some reason, an image rose up in his mind of himself being carried by a preacher and submerged in a river.
What had ever become of that colleague of his who had set out for the office of the Labor Standards Administration to file a complaint? Ah, wait. He came back long ago. Someone had told him that. So where in the world … ?
“Well, your story’s hardly unusual, you know—” He had a memory of being brushed off in that manner “—Everybody exaggerates how harsh their conditions are, but the preposterous things you’re saying are just a little … you know. You make your president sound like a total nutcase.”
The worker put a hand to his forehead. A memory of his monologue in front of the physician came back to him. It occurred to him that the distinctive assimiant features reflected in that translucent anthill had both resembled his own and looked nothing like him. Could it be that that face had been the physician’s true image, viewed through a phantom anthill?
His former workplace in his old hometown had come to appear frequently in his dreams, and the worker had grown to suspect that he might still be working there, undergoing some kind of treatment or other. I’m having a hard time dealing with my reality, he chided himself. It’s made me weak, and I’m swapping it out with fantasies of bizarre creatures, like directors called “human beings.” He squeezed the lever at the tip of the hose. That hypothesis was itself an escapist fantasy, the most impossible part of which was that the people living in that town were all dreaming of being allowed to work at the synthorgan company in his place.
