Justin Taylor - The Gospel of Anarchy

I took my headset off and paused the machine’s dialing mechanism, because I could feel that I was being watched. I turned around to face Steven, the shift manager. He was five nine, heavyset, broken out, and about my age, but somehow very grown-up looking. He wore ugly sweaters in all weather, to hide his man-boobs. Today’s was maroon.

“Come on into the office, David,” he said.

He spoke in an angry hush. His breath smelled, but not like anything. It just smelled. I followed him out of the calling room, a quick walk of shame.

“You know what you did,” he said. “I assume you know.”

“I know what I did,” I said.

“Nobody here is out to get you,” he said. “We monitor our callers at random. This is nothing you don’t already know.”

“To ensure quality, I get that. You have to do your job.”

“And you have to do your job, David. Yes?”

“Yes, but—”

“You stopped reading the questions. You filled in answers. You tampered with results.”

“If you were listening to that part of the conversation then you heard that woman’s voice. Did you hear her voice?”

“David, people hire this company because they expect a certain level—”

“Hey,” I said. “I wasn’t going to make an old woman cry. You can’t make me do that. Your survey’s all fucked.”

“Don’t raise your voice, David,” Steven said.

“Look,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You look. The surveys come to us from tech. Copy produces the questions; tech does the coding and builds the survey. You conduct the survey. Processing processes the results. That’s what this job is. It might not be glamorous but that’s what it is.”

“An old woman,” I said. “Crying.”

“I’m sending you home for the day,” Steven said. “Go grab your stuff and then clock out.”

“I broke a rule, I get it, okay. You want to send me home, okay. But at least tell me you heard that woman on the phone. You heard what I heard.”

“I asked you to leave, David. And now I’m telling you.”

He wouldn’t say it. I went back into the calling room to get my backpack, which didn’t have anything in it except the keys to my bike lock and the keys to my house. When I’d begun here I’d always brought plenty to read. When had that stopped, exactly? And why was I still bringing the empty bag? It didn’t matter, but then, not much did. I slung the weightless, shapeless thing over one shoulder. I left.

I had some pictures of my own. Three, exactly — Polaroids of Becky. We started dating sophomore year, lasted through early junior spring. Ancient history now. She’d sent them to me the previous summer, when we were apart from each other. Not that we suffered and yearned so much. She went back to her parents’ place in Tallahassee, and I stayed in Gainesville. Three hours’ drive, more or less, from here to there. We spent most of our weekends together, in one town or the other, and though we obviously both preferred my very parentless apartment, I can honestly say that I didn’t dislike spending time with her folks, a pair of liberal do-gooder doctors who had met in the Peace Corps and were almost as still-with-it as they thought they were.

Our only real separation occurred in the month of August, when Becky and her whole family left for three weeks in Europe to celebrate the happy combination of her parents’ thirtieth anniversary and her older brother’s entering medical school that fall. The weekend before her departure she had planned to come down to Gainesville. But then on that Thursday she’d accidentally backed into a light pole while parking her car at a movie theater. The damage was only cosmetic, she was sure, but her father wasn’t going to let her take the thing out on a highway until he’d had it looked at, and since they were leaving in just a few days it would not be looked at until after they got back. Neither would he let her have one of the other cars to make the trip with.

I offered to come to her, but that wasn’t good, either. Her brother was home, and everyone was in a tizzy with packing, and it was just too much trouble, her parents felt. We settled for long daily talks on the phone, until she left the following Tuesday. Two days after that an envelope addressed from her to me arrived in the mail. Inside of it were the three Polaroids, with one word written in black marker on the back of each one. I’LL. MISS. YOU.

When we broke up, better than half a year later — now nearly half a year ago — she did not ask me for them back. Probably, they had slipped her mind entirely, as they had for a long time mine.

The first was a head shot: smiling, bare shoulders shiny, hair wet. The second picture was a right-facing profile of her torso. She had small breasts almost overwhelmed by her large dark areolae, but her nipples themselves were small, too, and flattish. They hardly stood up, even when she was at her most aroused. She had arched her back. I wondered — not for the first time — how many pictures she had taken before settling on these three. What had gone through her mind as she’d done it? And why this? I had never asked her to pose for me. It was all her own idea. She had one of those small sexy bellies that skinny girls have, the ones they’re always talking about trying to get rid of and you never know what you’re supposed to say back. It wasn’t even a belly, really; it was more like a slight grade — the organic slope of her torso out toward her belly button, that little jewel of space, that niche, and then back in toward her sex, which was not depicted. She was wearing a pair of my boxer shorts, the waist of which had been folded down several times so that they rode low beneath her prominent hip bones, and the very top edge of her pubic hair peeked out from the fabric. The third picture was a close-up. Her vulva held agape by the first and third fingers of her left hand — the nails had been recently manicured, but not painted any color, only glazed — and the middle finger dipped inside herself up to the second joint.

I held the photographs in my hands and flipped through them. I spread them out on the computer desk in front of the keyboard. I plugged in my scanner.

I was suddenly tired — exhausted, sick —of playing the vulture, the hyena of intimacy. Well, I had had a life too, once, and here was the evidence. Let some other lonely asshole debase himself over my artifacts, my souvenirs.

I scanned all three photographs, opened the first one as a bitmap file in Paintbrush, drew a rectangle over Becky’s eyes, then filled that space in with solid black. I saved the file, converted it back to a JPEG, and then sent all three pictures out to the next list I found myself on. A little traveling pack.

Two days later, on a different list, she came back to me. Someone had passed her along, billed as his own current girlfriend. What was interesting, though, was that the guy had sent only that first one, the one with no actual nudity. The bare shoulders, I guessed. The shiny skin. The blackout rectangle. Yes, I could see it now, how that was the most alluring, how it hinted at things no triple-X full-reveal ever could.

Or maybe he was just a wheeler-dealer looking to pique interest and make trades. Hey man, I’ve never seen her before. You got any more where that came from? Yeah, man, but what do you got?

I downloaded the picture. I had sent the images out as “exgf” 1, 2, and 3, so as far as cyberspace had known she was nameless. But her name was Ramona now, according to the file. I let the light that was her burn through me. I pretended she was someone I had never known and tried to scare up some plausible fuck fantasy about her, like I had gotten into the habit of doing with all the other girls. It wasn’t cunt I was interested in, not anymore. It wasn’t tits or the hot wet dark of her mouth. It wasn’t any of the things the lists or the sites wanted me to think about her — these things I already knew for certain and yet struggled to remember and then, remembering, could no longer believe because of who was telling them to me. I knew now they all were liars. And not just that they were, but how . The thick line across her eyes was everything. To have spared her that much, even if only just that much. But in so doing I had made her anybody — nobody. She was raw material now. She was YOUR FACE HERE.