With the sun sizzling my back I walked through downtown, back to the MediCon business complex just off the main shopping street. The weather had done a full one-eighty, summoning skirts light as the wind, shorts pushing the boundaries of decency, crop tops and a general sense of attraction; a maroon veil had descended upon Mcity like a love-drunk filter, smiting hag and drag alike. I felt good. An object for the winks and twitching dimples clad on fags and females. It was my first day back on the grind. I’d popped uptown for a luncheon with Nell, sniffing out the scope of her rut, why she’d willingly moved back with Mom, but she wasn’t too keen on sharing. It wasn’t all in vain though. A free meal at a fancy place stacked with the upper echelon of Coommerce, courtesy of Kate Marrow (and very typical of Selma), gave me a reason to get away from the horde of telemarketers, now my kin, and their endless rundowns of deals almost landed. In the elevator, the lobby, at McDonald’s over Flurries, smokes, coffee, it’s all they talk about. Funny that is, nobody says a word about when they actually push a deal through the line. But when they got a hunch, based on some esoteric metric, that a fish got off the hook just as they were about to reel in, they’ll give you the full transcript.
I was uplifted by a sense of ownership. My step was mine, as was the air surrounding me. I didn't feel like a wage-slave. In fact, the timing was perfect. It marked the definitive end of an exercise regime spanning four months. A vocation of flesh—modifying myself for Nan's indulgence, spending every waking moment preparing body, mind and soul for her arrival, plowing books, biking out to the trails in the pine forests by the ocean, running the 5K at a pulse or 10K for endurance, lifting logs at the outdoor military gym, honing every inch of sinew and muscle, infusing myself with an electrifying anticipation ready to discharge the moment she came home. And now, as would’ve been the natural order of things, I was entering phase two: starvation. Degradation – rejuvenation – re-degradation. The eternity cycle. I looked like an army boy, jacked yet skinny, sculpted out of the tears of lardies, and now I would let it all crumble into a skeletal wreck. It's the philosopher’s stone. An off-brand variant of Burroughs' junk depraved cells. When you rob the cells of food they start to eat each other, killing off the weak, extracting rot and death, vacating space where life can grow. And so it goes. I wasn’t going around telling this to people though. I’m not insane.
Some days I’d walk down to the train station, wait for her train to roll in, read, watch the lorries from Poland zipping off and on the Swinoujcie ferry on the other end of the trainyard, getting hassled for smokes by Stajna, Pisstown’s most refined connoisseur of speed and weed. And all the books, good Lord I’d turn around twenty books a month. When Liz and I met, after she got comfortable calling me out, she said that my vocabulary was so narrow it was bordering on illiteracy. A dope dealer's lingo. Shortly thereafter she gave me A million pieces, a book on some junkie getting through rehab. It was an auto-biography, got picked up and shilled by Oprah’s book club, which made it all the more hilarious when the bubble popped and it got out that everything in the book was pure fiction. Needless to say, people got upset. All of it was for Nan in the beginning, my cultural education, drudging through the pages like the trenches of Verdun, all for her approval, but somewhere along the line I started enjoying it. It took on its own life. When I didn’t go pick her up, I’d have dinner hot and ready for her arrival, apartment looking spic and span, laundry done and folded. Before I cooked her that first meal I’d never even flopped a pancake. But I had a knack for it. Daddyo had enforced his culinary wisdom upon my deaf ears since I was twelve, thinking that it didn’t register. Apparently it did, or it’s a genetic thing. That, or she was lying through her teeth. It felt distant now. All of it. Like another life completely. A dream where lack was some alien concept. Three days we’d been in MCity. Three days and I’d already made a mess of our life. Pushed her away. But gaps can be bridged. The unfamiliarity of the situation, the subtle chills in her touch, the doubt and insecurity she inevitably must be feeling. But I had a plan.
On the office courtyard, schoolyard sectioning ruled supreme. Arabs in one corner, Suedis in one, old fucks in a third and lastly the team leaders – our prefects – huddled together in secrecy. Loners were sprinkled at random between them. I spotted Benny amidst the Arabs sucking down on a fag. He waved as I walked over.
“Ei look who's back for more eh! Pale blyat can’t get enough,” Hasan yelled, a tall, skinny Iraqi with horrible posture, thrusting his hand forward to initiate the usual slap n’ clap meet n’ greet acrobatics. This caught on to the rest of em' like a plague, accompanied by ei man's and sup suedi’s.
“He up there flyin' I swear. Fadhi say he already shipped six packages.”
“Ooooh shit! Calm down whitey. Save sum for us eh? Motumba got twelve kids to feed.”
“It's the dopedealer swag,” Muhdi said, punching me on the arm. “Real smooth bitch when he runs those lushy lips.”
“Pfft. I ain't holding,” I replied, held my arms up for a frisk check. Moustaffa took the bait and went searching, concluding the frisk with a surprise cock-tap.
“He's clean,” he said and winked all cheap, triggering a roaring response. Now I had to chase him down, slap him on the back of the head, punch his arm or return the cock-tap—customs be damned. I was faster than him and caught up quick, pounced like a puma on that oiled up head with a klatch bouncing kak-kak-kak over the courtyard, adding a broadsided kick staining his designer jeans-clad asscheek with a dirty footprint for good measure. Another salve of laughter drenched the courtyard, and then they all fell to silence, waiting for the Moustaffic response. As he turned to face me I blanked out, gave him the psychotic stare, leaned towards him with fists clenched. The usual brute routine. He just stood there, doing nothing. They were whispering behind us, holding their breath.
“Junkie sharmoota,” he snarled, grazing past me towards the building. Mudhi crept up from behind, put his arm around Moustaffa and sent a sly grin my way.
Mudhi was ok. We went to the same primary school for five years, him, Teddy and I, before it got shut down due to negligent management. Definition of a hustler, pure and simple. When me and Teddy started hanging out again Mudhi was still in scope, a typical character well liked by everyone on the scene, listed at every party, privy to every bit of fuss and drama played out at the finer tiers of Pisstown société. Places where Teddy and I weren’t welcome. It’s not like we were outcasts in any literal sense. There was always room for a stop-and-chat or a smoke whenever we bumped into crowds down at the net cafe, but we weren’t no Mudhis. Teddy and him grew up on the same block, a place commonly known for its population of less than ideal families lenient on parental supervision, focusing their efforts on the disciplinary branches. The Foundries gave birth to a special breed of rag-tags, like Teddy, Mudhi, Sezimanski, Gregory, the Orban Twins, CP John, Emo Thomski, Abdel and a horde of prime specimens best forgotten. The whole area was like a warzone. You never knew when a rock would come soaring through the air, splitting your head open cus’ a couple of guideless little shits had run out of PlayStation time. I spent part of my early youth there, before I got friendly with Teddy. Always on edge, always on the lookout for trouble brewin. So when Teddy and I rekindled our bond at the budding of our mid-teens, we weren’t without history. And that history can’t be told in full without Mudhi.
In highschool we used to tend Mudhi’s dad’s shop for a pack of smokes each, pranking in the front, wrestling in the back. We didn’t exactly consider it childlabor back then, it was just a means to pass time, and Mudhi’s daddyo wasn’t fostering a human right’s activist. One night when his Dad was manning the shop in his lonesome it was allegedly robbed by a pack of hooded hoodlums armed with a BB-gun, and Mudhi’s dad got shot in the arm, jacked for a whole month’s worth of sales. When he cashed it all back from the insurance company, plus a hefty medical insurance payout, it wasn’t exactly Cluedo figuring out who the culprit was. When the family car got stolen one night, found crushed at the bottom of a ravine four miles out of Pisstown, and the insurance company once again had to wiggle their coin sacks, it was shrugged off as another day in the struggles of Al-Hemza, Father and Son. Everybody knew that Mudhi pulled schemes left and right—mainly insurance fraud, and his current deal as far as I knew was this: Convince an upstanding citizen on paper to sign a two year phone subscription including some fancy-ass phone. Use a proxy or VPN, routing the connection via an internet cafe or other public wifi, when placing the order—just to make the fish think the metrics of the scam are all KGB level, covert and professional. A week later the phone arrives. You send a third party to pick it up with a fake ID matching the ID of the person who placed the order. Wait until the first invoice arrives, fish calls up the phone company, claims identity theft. By then the phone has already been cracked, unlocked, shipped to the Baltics – and the money is split 50/50 between Mudhi and the fish signing the deal. Mudhi pays up front, which is the punchlining subtlety of the scheme. Mudhi the Benefactor. Mudhi the Thrill. Mudhi putting 500 dollars in your pocket if you sign this paper. You could do it without the signee’s consent too. All you needed was their social security number. He tried it on me during my first day on the job, almost a year ago. But I had enough wits about me to decline on suspicion of tomfuckery—which was real proper. He confided that I was a good boy, that it was a test of character. Naturally he’d never bend me over. Naturally. Getting the phone company to actually believe that you were a victim of fraud was near impossible, and in the end the fish’d be paying seven times more than what it got just to avoid getting marked in some bailiff’s records. And Mudhi? Well this was all on the victim. The victim is the moron for not convincing the phone company. The IP was routed via Ljubljana len! He wouldn’t say how many people he’d fucked over, but by the look of his attire and swagger in his walk, he was doing good.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Benny lumbered over to me in his jolly wiggle, smile in his eyes. “Nice,” he said in his patented teddybear style.
“Right? Set the fucker straight.”
“Why are you up on the twelfth floor, man?”
“Clueless. Absolutely clueless,” I said as we started towards the door. It was common knowledge that the high rollers worked on the eleventh floor, which is where I’d been housed during my first stint at WeConnect.
“I’ll fix it. You know I’m the number one now right?”
“Yeah? Good boy.”
“Soaring baby. I’ll talk to Sara, hook us up. Get our own little corner, nobody to bother us and we can just chill, get rich. How does that sound?”
“Like I should suck you off.” We watched the elevator tick from floor to floor. I sighed, thought of Nan and the fist-sized pill I would inevitably have to swallow. Benny was a good boy, heart of satin he had. Naturally this was taken advantage of. Especially les femme pinned him as a stooge, milking him for fikas and drinks, wiggling ass just out of reach. People thought he was a toady dufus, which was a reasonable assumption in itself. Incorrect, but reasonable. He talked slow, had the frame of a retired lumberjack on the Spendrups cure, laughed at the dumbest jokes, quick to treat you proper on an outing. A riot. But you don’t make top peddler with a synapse deficiency. Na-ah. So his offer didn’t sound half-bad. Unlike the rest of them, he didn’t actually care about the numbers he pulled in. It’s like he was content just having a place to be.
When I got on the hotplate, the rest of em’ were already jacked in, hope gleaming in their faces. This would be the one. The session where they broke the factory packaging and charged the world screaming. Fadhi was leaning over one of the newbies, pushing buttons on her computer.
“Fadhi, I need to listen to some old recordings,” I commanded.
“You nuts? You sold six subs. Stop moping!” Fadhi stopped what he was doing and started pacing back and forth across the carpeted floor, looking at their screens, absorbing their voices, accompanied by the never-ending top 100 list blaring out of the speakers.
“Silver Fadhi. I sold silver fucking TV subscriptions and they’re worth jack shit. Just hook me up to the admin panel! You want more sales? Hook me up n’ I’ll give you more sales.” The rhythm wasn’t right in my calls. There was a disharmony with the tone, choice of words, structure. Could be anything. Bad planetary alignment. It didn’t feel magic, wasn’t all lubed up.
“Day one and you act like a boss,” Fadhi smirked. Then he pushed my chair aside, opened the admin panel, logged in. “Knock yourself out! Maybe you’ll save us. Mark and Marcia quit while you were out.”
He peered at the others, as if to make sure nobody was listening, and continued in a whisper. “We got Benny, Moustaffa and Larisa down on the A floor. Rest of em’ don’t sell. It’s bad. Really bad.”
“Well that’s your first problem right there. You put me up here with the toddlers? For what? Morale? Ten people sold one package in four hours. You slow in the head Fadhi? Put me with the A team. You wouldn’t park a Beamer in the projects just to raise the housing prices now would you? Cus’ it’s fucking dumb.”
“Mon frere, not my decision.”
“Geesh,” I said and pttrooed. “Hah! That why you so anxious?”
“I’m on sleeping pills and antidepressants. My fiancé wants to get a dog. The CEO got me on speed dial. Do your thing. Ok?”
“Inshallah.”
“Whatever. Maybe we’ll end on plus today.”
It wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined, being back there. Half the workforce had gotten sacked or left during my four month absence. Strictly business in the telecom industry. Quantity rules all. For every hundred youth walking through the doors at WeConnect, soaring with glee having landed their first full time job, there’s one golden boy who erases their deficit in a couple of months. One who makes bank. The rest of em’ get branded TRASH before even making their first call. WeConnect employed managers like Fadhi, who with seer precision sniffed out the weak, bullied them until they quit willingly, nullifying any legal claim to monetary compensation they would have if fired. Shit goes on all over the world. Rinse repeat. Every week there was a new batch looking for glory.
The work was ruthlessly dull until you got the hang of it, until you learned how to disconnect voice from mind and just blabber on and on and on, zoning out the hatred pouring over you every other call in between voice messages, pranks and people too polite to tell you to fuck off. In this regard, perfunctory manners never carried far. Listening to my old recordings I spotted errors; a keenness shining through when given the tell-tales of interest. Shifts in energy would scare off the prey on the other end like a sheep spotting tufts of wolf sticking out of knickers, but the tone was there most of the time. The monotonous grind. Senselessly boring to listen to, hypnotic. You can sell anything once you find your rhythm. My voice would wander off, speaking at 75 percent speed, following the script I’d written myself, and when I reached the call to action some five or six minutes in – “How about that Bert? You ready to upgrade?” – he’d be so fucking numb the choice was practically a coinflip. Once I realized that I was nothing but a technician listening to a machine on the production line, humming the tune of yes mam no sir, everything freeflowed. I sketched. Notebooks upon notebooks, filled to the brim with doodlings, haiku poems, profanity woven into grotesque faces and nightmare fuel, crossed out hate speeches, nudes bending over, chained to poles, decapitated animals, and the occasional Eureka-note where I’d lost a customer due to sheer stupidity.
I’d already filled three pages and the day wasn’t even close to done. The clock ticked closer to what really mattered. Repentance had to come from my end. I was drawing up a poem that would either place me back in the lapdog seat or burn the brittle floor beneath me. You could never tell. I was on the cusp of something grand that could tip in either direction, taunted by my own inquietude, knowing that the path was there, within the boundaries of my capacity. Blanking out, letting the raspy voice of myself soothe me into a lull, I let the lines splash onto the paper next to the anorectic fella sucking his own cock.