The Phone Company

by David Jacob Knight

  Except for his eyes, every part of the mascot was black, same color as the mat.

 

  Steve looked up when he felt the van come to a stop. “What’re we doing here? This isn’t my car.”

  “He lives here,” Bill said, pulling the van into MC Estates.

  “Bill—”

  “It was on the way.”

  “It’s miles out of the way. I need to get home!”

  “You told me you’d help me,” Bill said. “You promised.”

  Steve, once again, had to take the blame. He had to keep reminding himself that Bill wasn’t Bill, so Steve had to be diligently Steve. None of this zoning out.

  Because when he did zone out, weird crap like this happened: Bill driving halfway (the wrong way) across Burnt Valley, taking Steve even farther out of walking distance.

  “Just give me a sec,” Bill said. “I’ve got to drive around anyway.”

  What Bill said was true. It was too late. The narrow loops of the trailer park only went one way. What with the size of the moving van, plus the lack of power steering, Bill would’ve torn out half a lawn and part of a carport just getting turned around.

  “We can drive by,” Steve said. “Straight by, and nothing else. Do not stop. Do not . . .” Steve didn’t finish the sentence. Everyone knew if you didn’t pass Go, you were going to jail.

  Bill nodded as he drove past the first few trailers, scanning each address. “A drive-by and nothing else.”

  Keep him on track, Steve thought. No more crazy train.

  But then Steve’s mind wandered back to the logo, the one down there between his feet. He checked. It was still there. He wasn’t crazy.

  USCONN.

  As in US Connecticut, where the moving business first got its start. From there, it had grown as far west as Idaho, rebranding itself USCONT (cont. for Continental).

  It was a rather ambitious, self-important name for a business that had barely scratched the Pacific Northwest before going out of business altogether.

  Steve had forgotten all about USCONT, the way people forget until years later, long after the memory has ceased to matter in daily existence and therefore ceases to shine, when suddenly a new piece of data—like a coincidence or a strong smell—sparks our sense of déjà vu, and it makes us wonder.

  Could everything be connected?

  Steve had long ago abandoned those types of thoughts. Those were kids’ thoughts, the types of thoughts his students would pontificate about in their essays. Or, worse, the thoughts of a crackpot. Marvin’s thoughts.

  Whenever Steve did argue such things with himself (you know, when he was just the right amount of drunk, or when one of the medical marijuana faculty was throwing a party at their house), Steve had to admit the possibility that the universe might not be random; there might be some greater force manipulating reality into meaningful but large-scale patterns.

  If that was true, if The Phone Company was some hidden conglomerate from the dawn of telegraphy, shaping not just the infrastructure of civilization, but the connections of mankind itself, then it sickened Steve to think something so far-reaching would use its powers to corrupt so absolutely, stuff its hand so deeply into law enforcement only to murder conspiracy theorists and nearly drive a young boy (a young man) to mass murder, all before dive-bombing a passenger plane into a middle school.

  If that was the world they lived in, where the violence was completely random but for a purpose, Steve wanted no part. After all, USCONT’s main client had been known for relocating workers state to state, to any number of local shops with local names and local numbers across the continent. USCONT, formerly USCONN, had serviced the phone companies.

  Now, down in Louisiana, some other company, some other USconn, was killing workers who manufactured cellular phones. For The Phone Company. The name, the connection, had to be coincidence. Despite what Bill, conspiracy theorists, and student essays all claimed to be true, it wasn’t all connected.

  “Empty,” Bill said, driving the van past Graham’s trailer at MC Estates. There was a “For Rent” sign in the lawn. “She lied.”

 

  “Please, Bill, I just want to go home.”

  “She’s protecting him.”

 

  Bill looked to the left, as if the voice had told him to. “What . . .” he began, and Steve saw it happen. He saw Bill’s eyes lock on to the McCurdys’ trailer, only to dart away.

  The trailer, notorious for being suspiciously well kept, had been completely vandalized. The windows were shattered, the skirting kicked in. The porch railing dangled, ripped nearly halfway off. The front door wavered with the same cadence as the police tape.

  “What happened here?” Steve said.

  Bill glanced at him, as if hoping Steve wouldn’t notice the furtive look. “It’s like I said, she won’t tell me.”

  the voice said, and Steve could hear her disapproval.

  “Let’s get you home,” Bill said, suddenly interested in the road and nothing else, not even in the info splashed across his lenses.

  As relieved as Steve was to hear those words, “let’s get you home,” he stared at Rat’s trailer in the rearview while they left MC Estates, wondering, hoping: was Rat okay? What had happened to his trailer? And why was Bill acting so weird about it? Why was he acting so weird in general? Where had he gotten the revolver and the purple phone that could control cars?

  By the time they hit the home stretch, the sun had started to set like a coal above Mountain View, setting the sky alight and silhouetting graves. Steve hadn’t meant to leave Sarah alone for so long, not in her condition, completely debilitated by grief over the plane crash. He should have never left her in the first place. He was almost home, though. He just needed his car and he could leave.

  “What’s this?” Bill said, coasting right past the cemetery toward the church; the lot was packed with cars again, and a weird blue light ebbed and flowed in the stained glass windows. It looked like someone watching TV in the dark.

  “I don’t care,” Steve said. “Just take me to my car, then do whatever you want.”

  Bill wasn’t listening, though.

  He pulled into the church lot.

  Steve sighed. I’ll just walk to my car, then. He was close enough now. Screw Bill. Go home, check on Sarah, then drive straight to the sheriff’s office, bypassing their crazy new automaton.

  Looking out at the memorial wall, Steve noticed someone had repaired the corkboard since his first visit. They had set up sodium lamps to spotlight the photos and ads from below. All those faces, all those smiles. And right beside them, as if it could stake some claim to them, the new Tether.

  Despite the commercials, Steve was glad they’d fixed the board. Even though everyone in town hated him now, even after he’d lost a child, too, he felt terrible for breaking their wall. Especially now that it looked so likely JJ would end up on it.

  “He’s here,” Bill said. “Fenstermacher.” He pointed out a red convertible with vanity plates reading WNDOMKR. Bill parked in the drive right behind the car and got out, revolver in hand.

  “Hey, don’t take the . . .” Steve said, but Bill still wasn’t listening. Steve hopped out and glanced at the cemetery toward his car. Just leave, he thought. Go! Sarah needs you more. He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t leave Bill to his own devices. Not when one of those devices was fully loaded and half-cocked.

  Steve went running after him into the church. He burst into the antechamber and immediately stopped as the door swung shut behind him, sealing in the dark and undulating light.

  It was like he’d been dropped into the sea, leagues into the deep where things swam—anglerfish with their dangling lures; barreleyes with translucent heads; just dots of bioluminescence in all that liquid black.

  No one stood at the pulpit under the cross in front, but townspeople filled the pews and stood in the aisles, their faces underlit by the screens of their phones.

  “A g
ourd-and-twine device, over twelve hundred years old,” a man was saying. The parishioners were watching him on their screens, all listening to the same thing, so that the man’s voice spoke out of each Tether, echoing and all at once.

  Steve stepped up behind Bill, who had pulled out his own Tether to watch.

  “. . . oldest phone,” the man was saying with a heavy Mandarin accent, “found in Peru.”

  Steve recognized the speaker instantly. Not Graham, as he would have expected. No, Steve thought, this was the man from the factory who’d survived the mass suicide. This was Huan Kong.

  He glanced around but didn’t see Kong anywhere. The stage was empty. Kong could have been broadcasting from anywhere in the world.

  “We have been trying for long time to connect. When you are in need, who provides? When you need help, how you call? You need map? How you get map? How you reach out to someone when your heart is broke?”

  “The phone,” the congregation said as one.

  “Yes.”

  “Blessed be the phone!”

  “Blessed be. But what power your phone? What give to us unlimited connectivity? What allow us to store our lives, our minds, in unlimited data?”

  “The Provider,” the congregation said.

  “Yes.”

  “Praise The Provider!”

  “He who believes in me will forever be connected.”

  “Amen.” Kong bowed his head for a moment of prayer. “Now let us call our special one to the altar. Let us show him how to believe.”

  A boy, draped in white baptismal robes, walked onto the church stage. The congregation started to murmur.

  “. . . connected . . .”

  “. . . The Provider . . .”

  “Amen!”

  “JJ,” Steve said, taking a step forward, not sure whether he was seeing a ghost or the real thing.

  Bill blocked him with his arm.

  “Son!” Steve said, struggling against Bill. Now it was Steve who seemed to be the ghost; JJ didn’t hear him. No one did.

  That was his son, his boy! The boy he’d hoped would grow up to become a writer, or an independent journalist, or someone in the profession of telling the truth. He was alive! And all hope was alive with him.

  “Native American believes taking picture steals their soul,” Kong said.

  Steve shouldered his way up one of the aisles, shouting, screaming for the people to move. Their hulking, stinking bodies and clothes, their dresses and button-up shirts, didn’t easily part, not like in some closet where the clothes hung empty. Steve had to wriggle between them, between shoulders, elbows, hips, and other knobbed bones.

  “Please, let us take this young boy’s picture,” Kong said, and the congregants lifted their Tethers. “Let us store him in unlimited data.”

  The church filled with flashes and digital camera sounds, disorienting and stroboscopic, cutting Steve up into frantic, individual frames.

 

  “JJ!”

 

 

  “Please stop!”

  Onstage, JJ stood in the lights, robes flaring with each and every shot, their folds rumpled differently in every frame. In one instant JJ was staring down at Steve, who was stuck halfway up the pews in a knot of parishioners, and then—

 

  —the boy’s eyes were rolling back in his head, up to the cross above him. He seemed to stiffen, to become an arthritic limb beneath the robes, and Steve knew immediately what was happening.

  JJ fell to the stage. Each flash revealed him wrenched into a new position as the seizure wracked his body and his head pounded the floor.

 

 

  A single frame of blood flew from his nose.

 

  “Stop!” Steve cried, batting phones out of people’s hands as he thrust himself forward into the crowd, trying to push through them, or crawl over them if he had to, to claw his way to the front of the church.

  They turned on him—Kelli Anderson, Chad, Mary McPhail, and old man Becker, too; Mrs. Clement and her son the Dick; Mark Moore Jr.’s parents—all sneering, all pushing back, their faces lit from underneath so that Steve barely recognized them for all the weird shadows and caves of their temples and cheeks.

  He dug his feet into the carpet, but the people weighed more than a wave behind him, driving him out of the church. He stumbled down the stairs to the gravel, and the doors slammed shut behind him, dampening the camera sounds.

 

  Steve tried the doors. Locked. He pounded on them. He called for his son and cursed. He couldn’t even see inside; there was no window, not on the doors. All he could see were the flashes of light around the frame.

  After a few minutes, the camera sounds died down and Steve heard footsteps coming his way. Hundreds of them. He backed away from the doors, which burst open, and regular light, from a regular bulb, cast itself out into the parking lot as people, normal people, chatting, friendly, and dedicated to their church, came pouring out to their cars.

  “Where’s my son?” Steve yelled at them. “What the hell did you did to my son?”

  They just waved at him cheerily and left for home. Steve wanted to hit them. Wanted to grab them by their shirt collars and shake them, strangle them, choke the answers out of them; ask them why they were so damn happy when everything in town had gone to hell.

  Once the last of the people filtered out, Steve stepped toward the doors. JJ, Bill, and Graham walked out. Graham had an arm draped around the boy’s shoulders.

  “Where have you been?” Steve asked, grabbing JJ, taking him into a hug, relishing the smell of him, even if the boy was drenched in the stale old smell of the church and the richer scent of blood. JJ’s nosebleed had completely drenched, had completely baptized, the front of his robes.

  “Dad,” he said, pushing away. “I’m ready. I want to go home.”

  Wiping at his eyes, Steve nodded and took his boy’s skinny hand, leading him downstairs from the church.

  Bill stopped them. He read JJ’s face. He read something on Dragnet, too, as if the glasses were bifocals, giving him two different perspectives on the world. “Why’d you do it?”

  JJ thought for a second, and Steve wondered what the hell they were talking about, but who cared? He had his son! He was alive! Why didn’t Bill care about that?

  “For the coins,” JJ finally replied.

  Bill consulted some kind of graph in his bifocals.

  “You can go now, Deputy Biggs,” Graham said, patting Bill’s back. “You’re free to go.”

  Steve, casting them all a withering glare, including Bill—especially Bill—walked his son uphill to their car, wanting nothing more than to take him home.

  * * *

  “Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die,’ ” the pastor said, as morning rain dripped from the leaves and boughs.

  JJ stared at his mother’s casket in the ground. He saw a worm. He smelled the wet earth.

  “Then Jesus asked, ‘Do you believe this?’ ”

  “No,” whispered Dad in the seat next to JJ.

  Dad wasn’t joking. The way his face had hung ever since that day, staring only at the ground, JJ thought his dad might never tell a joke again.

  JJ hated him then, hated him that he didn’t believe. Dad had probably convinced Mom not believe too, hadn’t he? That’s why they’d stopped going to church. The same reason Sam Anderson had called JJ a heretic and had spit at him that day at lunch. Now Mom was dead because Dad didn’t believe.

  JJ realized he also hated himself. Of course he did. Her death was partially his fault. JJ had never wanted to go to church either, so he’d let her stay home, hadn’t convinced her it was all real, because, worse than that, it was boring. Because JJ didn’t believe in it himself.

  Now, glancing at his family in the seats, all in black, JJ re
alized all three of them, each and every one, would be dead soon as well. He might’ve cried like everyone else if he hadn’t convinced himself he didn’t care.

  The pastor read on, and JJ watched the earth steam all around them, fresh with graves.

  CHAPTER 35

  Sarah heard her brother’s ringtone and picked up. It wasn’t a phone call, it was a push notification. She had recently changed Love Potion to match her brother’s tone.

 

 

 

 

 

  * * *

  “Where were you?” Steve said, glancing away from the road. He had been so happy, so relieved to find his son, but then the questions had started to burn holes in his brain and he began to feel angry again.

  JJ kept texting on his phone. “What the hell?” he said when Steve snatched the Tether out of his hands.

  JJ swiped for it, but Steve dropped the phone into the compartment on the driver’s-side door. The earwig still blinked in JJ’s ear, but Steve left that alone. He didn’t need to get into a wrestling match behind the wheel.

  “Where have you been?”

  JJ stared out the window at the darkness that had taken Cracked Rock. His reflection glowed a dim green on the window from the dash lights.

  “I was worried sick,” Steve said. “I called you a thousand times, and you never picked up. I thought you were dead, or worse. And then I find you at the church as part of some deranged ritual.”

  “I want my phone back,” JJ said.

  “Absolutely not. Everything bad that’s happened seems to be related to these fu—”

  “It wasn’t the phone, it was drugs,” JJ said. He was still staring out the window, refusing to meet Steve’s constant looks.

  “Drugs,” Steve echoed.

  His lips felt numb. He had always known at least one of his kids would experiment. Alcohol. Pot. Steve was okay with those things. Those were things he understood, things he himself had tried at JJ’s age, and neither alcohol nor marijuana had driven Steve to pack a gun to school.