by
Al Bruno III
We
live in a world of surveillance, cameras, code numbers, and background
checks. Our every purchase and infraction is recorded by mindless
computers and soulless bureaucrats. Our births, our lives, and our
deaths are nothing more than information to be filed away.
It was
after I had quit the University that I found myself a part of that
never-ending process. I had secured steady and suitable paying
employment in the field of medical billing, cross-referencing
information for eight hours a day. The process was mindless enough; an
insurer would call, and I would find the correct records and pass the
information along. No names were part of the transactions, only numbers
curtly passed from one disinterested voice to another. From what I
understood, my fellow employees and I were merely there to correct
database errors and investigate irregularities.
I worked in a
wide room that was nothing more than a grid of half-cubicles and desks. I
wore a headset and hunched over a computer. I had long ago forgotten
that each sequence of numbers that passed from my lips was a life
encapsulated.
The morning of the impossibly heavy fog, I walked
into the building to find myself one of the few employees who had risked
the drive. That meant a crushing workload and mandatory overtime, but I
didn’t mind; I lived alone in a studio apartment that might have been a
cell; I never went out on weeknights and slept through most of my
Saturdays. Sometimes, I would treat myself to a movie on a Sunday
afternoon, but I always took great care to sit in the back row of the
theater, for if I spied a single blemish on the fabric of the screen, it
would be all I could focus on for the rest of the show.
The
first few hours of my shift passed slowly; the diminished staff had
created long hold times that left every caller with a litany of
complaints and a waspish tone. I kept my tone apologetic and respectful.
Somewhere to my right, a coworker was coughing endlessly; behind me, another banged his mouse on his desk in frustration.
When I excused myself to the restroom I realized to my discomfort that someone was crying in the bathroom stall.
My
lunch hour was quiet and lonely. I spent some of it outside smoking one
cigarette after another until the sight of the fog began to play tricks
on my eyes. It left me with a strange feeling of vertigo, as though I
was slowly spiraling into emptiness.
The second part of my shift
is when it began. The call was ordinary at first, but the voice on the
other end of the line cut me off mid-greeting with a demand for
information. I did my best to comply but had to ask the caller to repeat
himself several times.
The numbers he gave me were
wrong—completely wrong. Please understand that I am not talking about
faulty account information or transposed digits.
I mean to say that the numbers themselves were wrong.
They
were integers that existed outside the zero through nine that I had
been taught and lived with for all of my years, but I knew these were
numbers I was hearing nonetheless. I could almost see them in my mind,
impossible symbols that no human hand had ever drawn.
The caller
made an impatient sound as I stared at my keyboard in dismay. Could any
key express the characters the caller was describing? Though my college
education was incomplete, I had studied enough to understand the
concept of imaginary numbers, but this was more than that. These were
alien numbers, blasphemous numbers, and every time the caller repeated
them, I felt an ache in my head.
“I don’t understand,” I finally admitted.
The
caller simply repeated himself again and again, until the numbers
sounded like a prayer in an unknown language. I disconnected the call
and pulled off my headset. Shudders worked their way through my body. I
looked at the windows. The fog had blunted the afternoon light, casting
everything into shades of gray.
I heard the numbers again; I
looked at my headset, but it was silent. Standing, I listened to those
terrible syllables coming from the mouths of my coworkers; they murmured
them with easy familiarity. I cried in alarm, but no one looked up from
their work. I ran to find a supervisor, but he was also on the phone,
speaking facts and figures that made no sense at all. He didn’t look up
when I called his name; even when I touched his shoulder, he did not
react, and his flesh was clammy with sweat. I could see the veins in his
forehead throbbing as he spoke.
There was a loud crack, and the
lights flickered and went out. Something similar had happened the
previous year; a truck had crashed into a telephone pole, snapping power
lines and leaving us with nothing more to do but, while away, the
remainder of our shifts with small talk and gossip.
Despite the
dead phones and darkened screens, my coworkers continued to talk. In
fact, they spoke louder and faster, their voices finding a chaotic
rhythm.
I fled from the madness, leaving my job, apartment, and possessions behind.
As
I said before, the modern world has reduced us to numbers, but what if
the numbers we chose to do that with were the wrong ones? What if we
have unknowingly reduced ourselves to nonsense?
