In college, I used to comb through library computers to see if anyone had forgotten to log out. It wasn’t my idea. I just stumbled upon it one night, found myself on someone else’s Facebook, backtracked through their browser settings, and found everything. Passwords. I thought I was some hacker extraordinaire. Low-budget pilfering is what it was. I’d write the passwords down, then slink back to my room and log into people’s accounts. Emails. Student loans. I didn’t know what I was looking for exactly. I just liked looking.
My roommates would huddle around.
No fucking way, they’d say.
But they refused to even touch the computer. They’d point, and I’d click. Who the hell saves their passwords, one guy would say, and another guy would say what do you mean.
In the beginning, I dug at random. I never used the information. I just liked peering into people’s lives. Then I had an idea. The girl from Anthro 55, who spoke on the last day of class. Or the kid with the facial tic. Or Professor Pushkov, who was always swallowing burps and stopping his sentences short. Subjects of interest, so to speak.
I’d perch in the stacks and wait for my targets to leave their workstations, then I’d peel into their chairs like my mom used to do with parking spaces outside T.J. Maxx. I didn’t always get there first. Some idiot would beat me to it and log out then log back in under his own name. What a waste, I thought.
One night, I saw my friend Stan’s girlfriend printing off a paper in the basement lab of the library. She was always wearing pants with words on her ass. Sleepy. Namaste. We all thought she was shady, so when she got up, I pounced.
I wrote her passwords on a scrap of paper and whisked back to my room. The paper felt like it was burning a hole in my pocket.
That night, Stan arrived late to our powwow. He was curious, giddy almost, about what I had dug up this time. We just looked at him. He swam through the huddle and I gave him my seat.
We watched him open tabs and drag windows and cross-check and double-check names. I had never seen someone research anything so rigorously in their life. He kept mouthing something but no sounds were coming out. Then he climbed up out of his silo, calmy disconnected the power cord, and chucked my laptop out the window. He wanted to throw me out after it.
“You’re not going to make me feel bad,” I told him. He had me by the collar. “She’s a slut.”
“But you dug it up.”
“It was there all along.”
It being the dirt, the shit, the information.
“Not for me, it wasn’t,” Stan said.
When I first heard about the farms, I felt destined for them. Built for them. Not the CIA capital-F Farm––I’m talking about fluorescent, offshore content farms. I told everyone that I was leaving to teach overseas, which was half-true. I was leaving to teach Filipinos how to clean the Internet.
The company I worked for didn’t have Solutions in the name, because we dealt with a problem that couldn’t be solved. Our job was to protect websites, their brands. Monitoring, screening, filtration. The work went by several names, but the operative metaphor was always waste management.
My company created its own myth, like any good company. We were named after the fallout from dying stars. The fallout poisons astronauts and leaves streaks of light across the atmosphere, and the people that belonged to the earth thousands of years ago thought these lights were campfires of the dead.
I told this myth to our new hires, and they looked at me like I was some kind of oracle. This work might feel poisonous, I explained, but it was important, even heroic at times. This is something only humans can do, I told them, not machines. The Filipinos wanted experience. They’d get it.
The office reminded me of the computer lab from college, except the workstations were separated by walls, like urinals, and the monitors were oversized so workers could screen content faster. The images descended in tiles, like an adult game of Tetris.
Some of what you’ll see will seem offensive, I explained. But remember, people live differently in different parts of the world. I showed them how to adjust the profanity score, the spam score, the racy score. Some of what you’ll see is offensive, I explained. Extremely offensive.
I projected images on the wall so we could analyze them against the community standards.
“What do you think?” I asked, watching the grimaces.
The new hires thought I was superhuman, bionic. Somehow, I had built a tolerance for this line of work. Truth is, I loved it, playing in the world’s gutter. The work reminded me of trawling the bottom of the Internet when I was a kid, the dark wonder of it. How the most gruesome sites always had the most innocuous names. Steak and cheese. Milk and cookies. The websites that we screened had innocuous names, too. They were all about cupid, connection, and fish in the sea.
At first, workers braved the underworld together. They’d lean across their cubbies and huddle around a screen, like my friends and I used to do. They’d debate whether an image was a crotch or an armpit, or if the broken English in a user’s profile was scammer grammar. They found ways to make the work fun, intellectual even.
It was their job to monitor content and my job to monitor them. I studied their performance statistics and the size of the queue, a bottomless yellow bar on my dashboard that represented the pulse of an entire planet. I floated through the stalls like a warden. Empowerment, I’d say. I want to empower you to make decisions on your own.
Deflecting decisions, that’s what I really wanted.
The company put me up in a Marriott, which felt no different from any other Marriott in the world. I could have been in Ohio. I settled into the hotel’s orbit and its amenities. Sometimes, I’d invite girls I met online to come over to the hotel hot tub. I used the same websites to find them that I monitored during the daytime. The girls were usually American girls who were doing the same kind of work as me but for other companies. We’d talk shop, then retreat to my room. It was all very predictable.
After the first month, a man named Danny told me he was having trouble performing. He was ten years older than me, but this was his first job. His first real job, he said.
“Your numbers seem fine,” I told him. Workers were expected to screen 2,000 images per hour.
In the bedroom, he meant. His skin was bad and he couldn’t look me in the eyes. He was trying to tell me something about the work, how it was poisoning him.
“Tell me how that’s my problem,” I said.
They always approached me at the end of the day, when their coworkers wouldn’t notice.
“Bad thoughts,” another man said. “Can’t walk past a playground without bad thoughts.”
“You can’t take this work personally,” I told him. “You have to be clinical.”
“What’s ‘clinical’?”
“Like a machine.”
“Like a machine,” he said back.
One afternoon, I was outside eating lunch when a boy approached me. He couldn’t have been older than 18. He said something, but I couldn’t hear him since I had my headphones in. I was watching a show on my phone. I waved him off, figuring he wanted money, but he wouldn’t leave. I noticed a company ID card on his belt, so I removed an earbud.
“I hear things,” he said.
“What kinds of things?” I asked.
“Short, loud things. Like duct tape.” He pulled his hands apart to demonstrate. “At night.”
My mouth was full, so I nodded and made like I appreciated what he was saying. The boy prepared himself for whatever wisdom I’d bestow upon him.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Luz,” he said.
“Luz, I don’t know what to tell you. We’re in the business of images. Not sounds. Maybe you need to talk to someone.” I put my earbud back in, and Luz walked away.
There were fewer questions as the months wore on. Workers didn’t need my help anymore, or anyone else’s. There was less fraternizing, less leaning across stall walls. They were making decisions on their own.
Sometimes, workers would fold their arms and lay their heads down on their desks, like exhausted students. When I’d walk by, I’d find that their eyes were wide open, and they were staring at nothing. Sometimes, workers got stuck on small things. I’d see them fingering the laminate that was peeling off their desk, or concentrating on a corner of a ceiling tile that was broken out.
“What’s up?” I’d ask.
They’d scan me, up and down. I was just more content to them. They’d smile with their mouths closed, then retreat into their screens, like headlights in black water.
A girl worked at the office, just one. Her name was Mae, and she couldn’t keep up. The work affected her. She would blurt out words in her native language or press her eyes like she was trying to keep them from falling out. She was a bit dramatic, but I liked her. She had come down to this underworld that was made for men, by men, and was all on her own.
I walked by her one day and found her frozen on an image of a child, a toxic image. I think she was trying to desensitize herself. Her expression was dead, but her body was shaking. I got down on one knee. I was careful to never touch a worker while they were screening.
“Sorry,” she said.
“That’s okay. So, what do we do here?”
This was a teachable moment.
“Report,” she said.
“Right.”
I pointed at an icon on the screen, and she clicked “Report.”
She smelled like an indoor swimming pool.
“Good,” I said.
The next morning, I received an email from the FBI. It was their profile that Mae had reported. They were running an operation, and they hoped that we would cooperate and leave the profile online. We have an opportunity here, they explained. They were making me part of their We. A shot at a whole network, they wrote, not just one bad actor.
I marked the email as unread. I’d get around to it later.
I looked over at Mae. Everything in the office had a marbleized, cat litter finish, but she was wearing a long floral dress. She looked like a caged bird, all dressed up in her stall. I wanted to see her outside the office, I just didn’t know how.
I started composing an email and plugged her name in the address line, just to see how it felt. I was terrified but also hopeful that the email would somehow send itself. I stared at the empty draft when suddenly that young, disturbed boy, Luz, sniffed his way into my office. I quickly minimized the window.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Do you smell that?” he said, panicked.
“Smell what?”
“Smoke.” He flared his hand toward the ceiling.
I shook my head. Luz followed his nose to the power strip under my desk and tested it with the back of his hand.
“Is it hot?” I asked.
“No.”
He ran his hand along the wall just above the molding, waddling forward until he was out of my office and outlining the entire main floor with his palm. I saw him pause for a moment, a hotspot perhaps, before disappearing behind the stalls. A sense came over me that everything here, the whole operation, would soon be gone.
I returned to the blank email and titled it Company Retreat, but Mae was the only name in the address line. No one at the office seemed to talk to one another. I reckoned that no one else would find out.
I waited for her along an immense, stone wall that the Spanish had built centuries ago. She emerged in earthen tones, not her usual florals. It was as if she had walked right out of the wall. I had no idea how she got there, if she taxied or what. I had no idea where any of my employees came from, which parts of the city. They always just appeared.
Luz was there too, somehow. Mae must have told him about the email.
“Luz,” I said, and shook the young man’s hand. I nodded at Mae.
“Are we early?” she asked.
“Right on time,” I said, in my head plotting how we could ditch Luz. “I guess no one else is interested.”
In my email, I had mentioned a tour of the city. I was hoping Mae would take me to her favorite places, but she and Luz were too polite to refuse the jeepney tour, Manila’s equivalent of the garish, sightseeing double-decker. Mae and I sat next to each other and Luz sat by himself on the other side of the aisle. A large, British woman walked up and looked at the color of his skin.
“May I?” She pointed at the window seat where he was sitting. Luz conceded happily. There was something wild about him. He gaped point blank at the splotchy pigment in the woman’s cheek while she panted at the window.
The jeepney took us through the clean parts of the city, which weren’t all that different from the States. There was a mega-mall and a baywalk, which was just like the promenades in southern California. One street looked like it had been lifted right out of Santa Monica. It struck me that in all my months overseas, I hadn’t left the hotel once except for going to the office.
We were sitting in traffic outside a defunct emporium when Luz suddenly hurled down the aisle. Something outside had caught his attention.
“Not a stop,” the driver explained. Luz pointed out the window in distress and said something to the man in Tagalog and the man opened the doors. Mae and I looked at one another. Perfect, I thought. I finally had her all to myself. But she got up and went after Luz, and I went after her.
“No more hop on,” the driver said as I stepped off. “You understand?” His accent was impossibly thick.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but he pulled the doors shut and drove off.
Luz grabbed my arm and turned me toward the building.
“You see?” he said.
I read the sign overhead.
“Good Earth Plaza.”
“No,” he said, pointing. “Smoke.”
A fire truck shuddered past, and Luz tried to flag it down. The men in the truck had the same blank expression as everyone at my office.
“Purple,” I said to Mae. “A purple firetruck.”
“Yes,” she said. “Advertisement.”
Luz rushed into the emporium and Mae and I walked after him. He tried corralling a mother and daughter toward the door, but they shook him off as some kind of swindler.
“Hey buddy.” I grabbed him above the elbow. He was hunched over with his shirt collar over the bridge of his nose. “Breathe,” I told him.
He slowly let himself stand up straight and take in the plaza’s stale air. For all I know, his world could have been superheated and flashing over. Mae put her arm around him and ushered him toward the door.
“He’s sick,” she said.
I wondered why she had taken it upon herself to babysit him, if they were family, or dating perhaps. They seemed an unlikely match.
“There,” I said, pointing at another jeepney, though this one was much more understated and whitewashed. All the jeepneys, I realized, were old US military transport vehicles.
“He said hop on,” I said, referring to the last driver who had abandoned us. Our new driver threw his chin back like what the hell, and Mae and I hauled Luz onto the jeep and dumped him in a seat. He fell right asleep.
Mae and I smiled at one another. Neither of us had any idea where we were going next. She started to tell me a memory about the old emporium where Luz had his episode, how she used to buy candy there as a little girl. Gumballs and bananarama would arrive on a conveyor belt and she’d pluck her favorites. It sounded perfectly innocent, and at the same time, like a preparation. I thought about the bottomless yellow queue from work. After all these years, Mae was still plucking.
Her nostalgia deflated when she realized the jeepney was taking us north of the city. I wasn’t sure why. A stench started wafting into the vehicle and everyone put their windows up. The driver looked in his rearview and said, “Almost.”
We drove north along the water and as far as the streets allowed before they became impassable. Mae and I followed the group of tourists off the jeep, leaving Luz behind. He was still slumped against the window and sleeping soundly.
Outside, every surface was lined with cross-hatched plastic bands in a kind of greasy gingham. I caught my flip-flop on a band and realized everything, the whole world out there, was made of compacted cubes of trash.
We walked past a group of young, white documentarians who all looked very concerned. They refused to make eye contact with anyone in our group. I think we were ruining their shot. I felt a sense of competition out there in the slums. Everyone was acting like they were out there on their own, unguided and making first contact. Everyone wanted an authentic experience.
Mae and I worked our way to the waterfront, though there was no clear border between land and water. The ground just got wetter and wetter until we decided that’s far enough. Locals kept turning over the earth, which was a mix of trash and soil. They flipped over car tires and corrugated roofing and boulder-sized clumps of mud.
“What are they looking for?” I asked.
“People,” she said. She told me about landslides that had unhinged the slums.
“No one’s here to help?”
“It was long time ago. Still, the bodies matter.”
I watched a boy as he began to rummage through a patch of trash. He seemed like he didn’t know what he was looking for, only that he should be looking. A woman waved him off. She had looked there already. The smear of debris made it impossible to develop any kind of system, though each sifter seemed to have a deep memory of what they had already turned over. The people worked at a slow, methodical pace, as if tending a garden.
I thought about my empty apartment in the States. It had been empty for months, though I was still paying for it. I packed for the Philippines the same morning I left; now I was wondering if there was anything I should have tended to––household things, mail, utilities, making sure the pipes don’t freeze. But all that was taken care of by the building managers. They made it easy for people like me to disappear. The friends and family part, though, was outside their purview—not something that could be managed like dry-cleaning––and I neglected that part without fail. I was a serial ghost. I hadn’t given my friends a heads-up or my parents an address or a number to call. Never answered their emails. They only knew I was traveling for work and that I’d call when I was back and needed a ride from the train or the airport, and maybe not even then.
I felt Mae watching me. The slums had me ruminating, though I wasn’t hoping for clarity like the documentarians.
“People forget,” she said. I don’t know if she meant I’ll forget about the slums or what.
We stood for a moment and said nothing. Mae seemed at ease, so much more at ease in that vast slew of people than she was at work. I pretended like I could tolerate the smell, which was ungodly near the water.
“What happens,” she asked, “when we report?”
I had to remember what she was talking about. I tried not to think about work more than I had to. I explained the escalation protocol, how sometimes the authorities must get involved. Mae couldn’t understand the pipeline of people who maintained the websites, who had final say, and I wasn’t sure either. I told her about the FBI and the email I received, thinking it’d impress her.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Hard decision,” she said. She sounded like she already had her own answer.
“Yes,” I said, and the conversation died. Our day had been punctuated by these long stretches of silence.
“There’s a hot tub,” I told her, “at the hotel where I’m staying.”
Mae smiled that flat smile that all my employees had perfected. I thought about making myself clear, but I dropped it. It wasn’t what I wanted to say. I just didn’t know what to make of her, do with her. Some reckless part of me wanted to take her back and conquer her. The American part. But I wanted something more than that, something real. I hadn’t been with, I mean really been with, anyone in months. Present, connected, alive. Hadn’t met a girl organically. Not that any of this was organic––I was Mae’s boss, and this whole day together was a ploy––but it was unpredictable, and I liked that. I wondered if there was something distinctly American about that too: trying to get out of my own Americanness.
Luz woke up on the ride back to city center, slowly, achingly, as if out of a coma. I imagine he was fighting demons in his sleep. When he got a whiff of me, his body suddenly came back, and he lunged his nostrils at my shoulder.
“You go north,” he said. He must have smelled the slums on me.
“Yeah.”
“Why people like looking at mountains of trash?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
The jeepney dropped us back off at Good Earth Plaza. The three of us filed off the vehicle and stood in an awkward circle. They were waiting for a cue from me, some takeaways or next steps. This was a company retreat after all.
“Okay,” I said.
If I wanted Mae, I’d have to move on her with Luz there. He was wild, but he didn’t seem like a leak. He was too lost in his own world. He stood beside Mae, swiveling his head and clenching the lining in his pockets.
“Maybe sometime,” I started, “I can see your favorite parts of the city.”
“Yes,” she said. I don’t know if she was interested in me or her career, and that was as far as we got, because Luz started wandering off, and she had to go after him. Bye, she mouthed.
I took the metro back to the hotel, instead of ordering a ride. The metro was clean, above ground, and driverless, so I walked up to the front and looked out the window as the rail car slurred around the city. We passed a tower that looked like it had a shockwave frozen into its facade, as if any second the structure might ripple and burst. It felt like the buildings changed their posture when I looked away. One shopping mall scooped up toward the sky like a crowbar.
Just before the hotel strip by the airport, we slid under an overpass which was tagged with graffiti. Two questions in English were stacked on top of one another.
Are you helping?
Are you hurting?
Underneath, someone had responded in a different color.
Yes.
On Monday, I returned to the email from the FBI. I called an operations guy I knew from stateside.
“We’re not cops,” he said. “We put lonely people together. Those lonely people like to forget about the dark.”
“Right.” I hung up and deleted the feds’ fake profile myself.
The FBI called within the hour. They were less interested in teamwork this time. They’d keep building profiles, they insisted, until we relented. And they’d put the media on this. I said if they wanted to disseminate child porn that’s their call. They could do whatever they want. My mind was somewhere else.
I walked by Mae’s desk and took a knee. She was reading through a user’s profile. It only took me half a second to tell that the profile was clean. Anyone else, I’d have said let’s move, but I asked Mae what’s up. She read an excerpt from the screen.
I work at night cleaning site like this, making connection for people. Now want connection for myself. Want conversation, want nice day before dark.
The office was brutally silent except for the Geiger-like tick of computer mouses.
“Full circle,” I said.
“What’s ‘full circle’?” she asked.
“Full circle is ending up where you started.”
“Yes. Full circle.”
I touched her forearm as she clicked “Approve.”
“Can I see you again?” I asked. I felt reckless, pursuing her in the office. But I looked around and no one was paying attention.
She opened a new tab on her computer and typed in two cross streets. “Here,” she said, circling a point on the map with her cursor.
“What’s that?”
Meet me here, she typed in the browser’s address bar. She didn’t want to say it out loud. I said the cross streets three times over in my head, so I wouldn’t forget.
“When?”
8:00. Tonight.
I waited for her outside an old airport hangar that had been turned into a marketplace. I liked showing up early so I could see people before they saw me, but Mae still caught me from behind. I heard my name over my shoulder in her soft, elided English.
We walked inside the hangar, which was still exposed to the elements. Whole sections of tin roof were missing, and vendors arranged their stands around the shafts where rain was falling through. I pulled my jacket over my head whenever we passed through the rain, but Mae didn’t seem to mind.
The marketplace was shoulder to shoulder, but some idiot was waddling his moped through the crowd. The heat from his exhaust grazed my leg. “Hey,” I started, and he looked at me, like did I have a problem. I felt more eyes on me. My skin tingled with urgency––suddenly I wanted out, out of the whole situation, more language, different clothes, better gestures. I kept wiping the sweat from my mouth, which felt like an obviously American thing to do. Mae grabbed my hand, and my anxiety washed away.
“This way,” she said.
The man on the moped sank into the crowd, and we carried on. Mae bargained with a vendor for two sweets, two mangos on popsicle sticks. She was assertive, but respectful. She was older than me, though I couldn’t tell how old. I paid for the sweets, reluctant to let go of her hand.
The rain let up, and we walked outside the hangar and sat down on a curb. We volleyed pretend dating profiles back and forth.
I’m looking for someone who owns a helicopter. Who owns an island in the Maldives.
We started PG.
I’m a guy with a face. I’m a girl with two arms.
We rooted out clichés.
I’m looking for someone who is not down to earth. Who hates traveling. Who hates craft beer.
“What’s craft beer?” Mae asked.
“It’s just beer.”
I’m looking for someone who doesn’t want to own their own business. I’m looking for someone with a dead-end job.
Her answers got off-kilter, dark.
I’m looking for someone who doesn’t think you only live once. Who wants to have a bad time. I’m looking for someone who won’t murder me.
I wanted to course-correct, to ask her something personal.
“Do you like working for the company?” I asked.
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. I like helping connection. But I don’t like seeing the bad. I didn’t know about the bad, when I started.”
“One of my friends works for the government,” I told her. “He follows people on the Internet. Sort of like us. He sees everything.”
“How?”
“When you move through the Internet you move through…” I tried to think of the word, “gates. He follows people through the gates that they leave open. Like footprints. And if you try to erase your footprints, you only open more gates, create more footprints. At his office, people call these footprints ‘shadows’ and all of them together ‘life streams.’”
“Life streams,” Mae said.
“My friend says watching these streams is the most horrible and most beautiful thing in the world.”
“I can understand,” she said.
“Do you like working for me?” I asked.
“I watch screen. You watch me.” She laughed to herself.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not so secret.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Do another,” she said. “Dream profile.”
And so I carried on with the jokes. Man seeking woman. Man seeking robot.
Mae slapped a mosquito on my neck.
“Jesus,” I said.
“You sweat,” she said, wiping the blood off with the edge of her pinky. I was always sweating out here.
Man seeking woman to protect him, from mosquitoes.
She smiled.
I touched her neck. “You’re sweating too,” I said.
“It’s the rain,” she said. It was misting again. I hadn’t noticed.
Man seeking woman who will sit with him in the rain.
I scanned her up and down, trying to notice everything about her.
Man seeking woman who will sit in dress on the curb.
Man seeking woman with long middle toes.
She slapped my arm. I looked at her fingers. Man seeking woman who bites her nails. “Wow, you really bite your nails.” She curled them into her petite fists. I traced my finger up her forearm.
Man seeking woman with perfect elbows.
I noticed everything I could, and when I couldn’t notice anymore I said, “Wait, let me see your tongue,” and she confidently stuck hers out. She had a patchy, map-like tongue.
Man seeking woman with beautiful, geographic tongue.
No one had ever noticed that about her before, and now she was embarrassed. I showed her mine, which was splotchy just like hers. We stuck our tongues out at each other and studied them until we were kissing there on the curb.
Mae and I went days without talking, though I saw her every day at work. The office became electrical with her in it. The other workers disappeared into their stalls, hunched over, unmoving. Their clicking and typing muted into a far-off sound, like water hammer. Mae and I began sending emails back and forth, full of emojis, but never said anything in person.
Finally, after three days, she waved me over. I didn’t care that people saw us together. The thought didn’t even cross my mind.
“Look,” she said. I leaned over her shoulder, taking in the cedar skin along her boatneck collar. I just wanted to kiss her again. But her gaze was locked on the screen. She expanded a disturbing profile that was almost identical to the one we reported a week earlier. She wasn’t shaking this time.
“What happened,” she asked, “with FBI?”
“Take this down,” I told her.
“Should I report?” She hovered her cursor over the button.
“No.”
“You’re not helping?” she asked.
I pointed at the image. “Tell me, who is this helping?”
She returned to the flood of new content on her dashboard.
“Mae,” I said, but she had entered the dead zone.
That afternoon, I wrote her an “urgent” email. She took her time getting to my office.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “We can help.” I showed her an email I had written to the FBI saying we’d cooperate.
“Can I see you tonight?” I asked her. It was a Friday. She had a friend’s wedding, but maybe Sunday, she said. I said I’ll take anything.
On Sunday night, Mae came over to the hotel. She wanted to show me an old movie from Filipino cinema’s golden age. I could barely find it online. It took over two hours to download, because only two other people in the world were interested in that particular movie on that particular night. Mae and I speculated about those two strangers and what they might be up to. We made out for two straight hours while my laptop ripped the movie off the Internet. We made out, and nothing more. For the first time in a long time, that’s all I wanted.
The movie began in a slaughterhouse. The resolution was pitiful, and we couldn’t find subtitles. I was completely lost, though I didn’t care. Mae tried translating, but I cut her off and kissed her again.
When the FBI got back to me, they thanked me for my cooperation and copied my company’s stateside director of operations––a perfect little fuck-you since I hadn’t played nice from the start. I waited for the phone to ring.
“I just got a very interesting email.” It was the director of ops. We were fifteen hours apart.
“Okay,” I said, “let me just–”
“You on some crusade?”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what to do. You’re gonna write an email to your office. Are you writing this down?” I snatched a pen. “Delete all content that violates community standards. Do not report. And you’re going to copy me on it, so I know you followed directions.”
“What about the FBI?”
“Fuck ‘em. They’d turn these sites into a dump if they could, turn the Internet into one massive sting operation. That’s their problem. Your job is easy: keep these sites pretty.”
“Pretty.”
“Pretty,” he said back. “Write the email. Also, you work around me again, you’re gone. Goodnight.”
Over lunch, I talked through the dilemma with Mae.
“It’s not on us,” I explained, “to sponsor the FBI. And I don’t think it’s the FBI’s job either to play pretend with hazardous material.” I was talking too fast for Mae, but she understood the choice. She still thought it was a choice.
“You said we can help.”
“We can’t. Not really. The clients don’t want that shit on their sites, and if we don’t shut the pages down, someone else will. Out here, we’re just the first line. I’m a manager, a middleman. A field guy. I don’t have a real say.”
“What’s a ‘say’?” she asked.
“A say, like, you can change things.”
“But we say ‘what stays, what goes.’” That was my jingle around the office.
“For a little while,” I said. My phone vibrated. It was the director again. I just talked to him an hour ago. He was less patient this time.
“Where is it? I’m looking at my inbox. I’m not hanging up until I see the email.”
I looked at Mae. She looked at me like do what you want. I just wanted more time. All I knew was that I needed some way to stay in the Philippines, to stay close to her. Keeping my job was the only way I could think of.
“Alright,” I told my director. I put the phone on mute and rushed into the office. I wrote the email standing up––just a subject, no body––and copied everyone on it, including the director. I waited for the message to race across the Pacific. A few seconds.
“Goodnight,” my director said, and he hung up.
I looked up from my computer as Mae walked back into the office. She turned away from me and toward her stall. Floral, deadset, she sank into her chair. Back into the mines.
Mae began to drift from me as effortlessly as she had come into my life, all without going anywhere. The screen was her exit. She no longer snapped away from images in disgust. Stopped muttering. She became silent, stoic, like everyone else. Nothing offended her anymore except for me, my presence. I walked by and put my hand on her cold, taut shoulder. She shirked.
“Mae.”
She lifted her finger off the mouse and looked me in the eyes, trying to annihilate the idea of me, pixelate me. I let her slip back into her abyss.
A few weeks later, the director called. He was very matter-of-fact.
“You got a leak.”
“What do you mean, a ‘leak’?”
“Your operation. It’s out of control.”
I shot up from my desk and looked at the rows of monitors and everyone’s heads in front of them. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Everything looked under control.
“All sorts of shit,” he continued in sharp bursts, “is coming through your office. Out of your office. The sites are a dump, and of course now the media’s interested, because no one knew there were so many freaks out there. Users are flagging shit. Obvious shit. So I looked into it. Then I realized your office already had a pass at all this content.”
I put the phone down on my desk, and the director’s voice shrank. He was still going. I pulled up my management system and scrolled through everyone’s performance numbers. Mae’s were through the roof.
I looked across the office at her. She seemed hard at work, but when I walked up behind her, I saw that she was scrolling down her dashboard at high-speed, breezing through content. She was letting everything through, all of it out into the world. Kittens in a paint bucket. Men on their knees on the beachfront. A burning tire slung around the neck of a girl, her body like a pile of leaves. Mob justice. The horror.
I pinned Mae’s hand down so she couldn’t work the mouse.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
“People should know.” She yanked her hand back and continued scrolling.
“You just–” I grabbed her monitor and wrested it from the desk. Wires fell down like guts. Everyone in the office was watching as I hugged the screen to my chest.
“What?” I snapped at them, and they all plugged back in except for Mae, whose workstation I had eviscerated. She was just sitting there with her hand on the mouse and no monitor. I raced back to my desk and grabbed the phone. The director had hung up, so I called him back.
“Oh, now’s a good time for you,” he said.
“Everything’s under control.”
“I know it is. Your replacement is flying over as we speak. He’s cleaning house tomorrow.”
The kid arrived at the Marriott that night. He was just a kid. I watched him from the hotel bar. He looked like me, except a newer model. Collegiate, fresh-pressed, self-starting. A real finisher. I caught up with him as he gathered his luggage, so I could ride with him in the elevator. I wanted to smell him. I looked over his shoulder as he plugged the hotel’s wifi password into his phone. He didn’t notice me.
The kid had no problem asserting himself the next morning. Within the first hour, he fired me and everyone on the floor. All the workers were locked onto their screens when the kid circled round to the front of the office and said listen up. He must have said listen up a dozen times. I flickered the lights like a kindergarten teacher, and finally that worked.
People filed out of the building. They didn’t seem to want any explanation, but I got in the kid’s face.
“These people have rights,” I told him.
“No, they don’t. They’re contractors.”
“They have families.”
“That’s their problem.”
I walked into my office to gather my personal belongings, but there was nothing. No family photos. No postcards or letters. I hadn’t told anyone I was here.
Outside, I looked for Mae in the slew of workers that were just laid off. Several people were dragging high-performance mouses––gamer mouses––that they must have bought with their own money to improve their workflow. One man revved his mouse in wide arcs and slung it onto the roof of the building. Another was smashing his on the ground. A trackball rolled across the pavement, like a gouged eyeball. I saw a man lying on a patch of grass with his eyes closed and the high Manila sun beating down on him. He looked relieved.
I asked someone if they had seen Mae.
“Who?” they said.
I saw that impotent man, Danny, smoking a cigarette, and I asked for one.
“Now you smoke,” he said.
“Now I smoke.”
“She gone,” he said. I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a fact. He proceeded to tell me a fable about a man who told a secret into a tree, but his English was too broken. How do you say, he kept saying, and then he’d try fake words.
“Please,” I said, “stop.”
I tried walking back into the building, but the man at the front desk stopped me. He still had his job. Over his shoulder, I saw Luz, sick Luz, pull a fire axe off the wall. He carried it flat against his outside leg and walked by the security guard and me.
“Luz,” I said, but he ignored me, or just had tunnel vision. I imagined he was having one of his episodes.
“Sir.” The security man was holding the door for me. I quickly walked under his arm, after Luz. I kept my distance. I had no idea what the kid would do.
Luz paused in front of the crop of workers sprawled across the building plaza. I thought he was on the verge of a spree, but he ducked around the corner of the office building. I followed him.
He walked up to an electrical box, ran his fingers along the various arteries that fed into and out of it, then choked up on the axe, and delivered a clean, hard stroke to the Internet cable that had crawled its way across the ocean floor to poison this place.
“Luz,” I said. He cocked the axe. “Easy. Gimme that.” He gave over the axe like I was still his boss.
I surveyed the damage and looked at him. He had nothing in his eyes. Like this was an errand, an extension of his task as a content moderator. I took a wide grip on the axe and went at it. Meters, phone lines. I hacked at everything. Sparks glanced off the head of the axe as I came down against the building’s concrete footing. My hands were throbbing from the shock.
If only Mae had seen me. She’d be proud, I thought. Taking a stance. But she was gone, swallowed up again in this vast cityslide of people. I took out my phone and looked for her online, the axe still in my other hand. There were thousands of Maes with her same last name, but I found her. I sent her a request, and in doing so felt immediately like I had annihilated everything between us.
I looked over my shoulder. Luz had disappeared.
I slammed the axe into the earth and assessed the damage on the outside of the building. The severed cables. The mangled utility boxes. It all counted for nothing. Someone would make repairs, rewire the Internet tomorrow. The flood would never stop.