The Voice

An Allegorical Poem by Bear Sage

Photo by Brandon Bynum on Unsplash

The Voice

by Bear Sage

A Tuesday in October. Fourth and Main, 8:14 in the morning.
The light is grey and even. The crosswalk fills and empties. A man in a good coat comes up the block with a coffee in one hand and the other hand cupped around the phone, thumb going. He has done this walk a thousand times. Forty feet from the corner his feet start to angle left. His eyes stay on the phone. Thirty feet. Twenty. The angle gets a little sharper. At ten feet he steps off the curb line and into the gutter and back up, a small clean detour, and rejoins the sidewalk on the far side of the corner, thumb still going.
Behind him a woman with a stroller takes the same line. Then two guys in vests. Then a teenager, then a nurse in scrubs, then a man with a folded newspaper under his arm, all of them peeling left at forty feet, dropping into the gutter, coming back up. The line is worn into them. The camera holds on the corner they are all avoiding.
There is a body on the sidewalk.
On its back. One arm flung out, palm up, the fingers curled a little. A man, or what the weather has left of a man. The coat has gone stiff. There is rainwater standing in the open hand, a small clear pool, and a leaf floating in it. The shoes are good shoes. Somebody chose them once.
The newspaper man steps over the legs, eyes on the middle distance, and he is gone up the block, and the next person comes, and the next, and the pool in the hand sits there with its leaf, and the eyes of the city stay up and forward.

The Voice came through the phone.
It started as a clip somebody sent. Then it was every clip. Then it was just running, in the background, in the AirPods, all day, and people left it running.
It used their names. Not the names on their bills. The other ones.
They lied to you. Believe me, nobody’s been lied to like you, the most lied-to people in the history of this country, and that’s true, a lot of people are saying it.
You were the best. The hardest working, the most loyal, the best, and they treated you like dirt. Like nothing. Sad.
Keep me in. I’m the only one telling you the truth. The only one.
They kept it in. It told them they were the real ones. The ones who got skipped, talked over, priced out. The ones the country had stepped past for thirty years. It said I see you, and they turned it up and they left it up.

A break room. Fluorescent light, a sink, a poster about handwashing.
Two men by the coffee machine. The older one is talking, gesturing with a stirrer, and the younger one, Petey, has his back half turned, one AirPod in. The older one says something, a jab, the kind of thing that lands and waits for an answer. There is a pause. Petey’s mouth opens and hangs there, empty.
Then the AirPod feeds him. His eyes change. He turns full around and says it back, fast and clean and mean, and the older man rocks back on his heels and laughs and points at him like there he is. Petey grins. He puts the second AirPod in.

A kitchen. Dinner. A woman, a man, a girl of about eleven at the table with a full plate in front of her.
The man is talking. Both AirPods in. He is saying something about the people who did this to us, the people who took it, and his hands are moving and the words come in a rhythm, a rise and a drop, a rise and a drop, the same three-beat over and over. The woman nods along, her own AirPods in, her lips moving, a half second behind him, the same words.
The girl watches her father’s mouth. Her ears are bare. She watches the way his mouth makes the shapes, the rise and the drop, and she looks at her mother’s mouth making the same shapes a half second late, and she looks back at her father. She sets her fork down on the full plate. Their eyes stay on each other and on the middle distance. The man keeps going, the rhythm keeps going, and the girl sits very still in the one quiet seat at the table and watches them say it.

The corner again. A different day. The pool in the hand has a skin of ice on it now.
A young woman with a backpack comes up the block, AirPods in, thumb on the phone. At forty feet her feet start to angle left. But her eyes come up off the screen for a second, just drift up and sideways, and they catch on the corner. On the shape on the ground. She slows, half a step.
The murmur in her ears keeps going. That’s what happens to the weak ones. Her eyes drop back to the phone. Not your problem. Eyes up. Her feet finish the angle, drop her into the gutter, bring her back up on the far side. She is gone. The skin of ice sits in the open hand. The leaf is frozen into it now.

A living room, lamplight, a man alone on the couch with the phone close to his face. Both AirPods in.
And listen, I need you with me. I can’t do this alone, I need you, I need everything you’ve got, because we are going to win. We’re going to win so big. You’ve never seen winning like this, nobody has.
A red button comes up on the screen. A number under it, ticking. The man’s thumb taps it. The number jumps. He taps it again. Across the dark, in a hundred other windows up the side of the building, the same blue light, the same small motion, thumbs going, numbers climbing.
That’s it. That’s my people. The best people. They’ll never break you. They’ll never break us.

Maddie Reyes, 8:09 in the morning, the same block.
She works at the clinic two streets up, the front desk, she has the lanyard already on over her jacket. She buys the same coffee from the same cart and the man in the cart knows her order. AirPods in. She comes up the block the way everybody comes up the block.
Forty feet from the corner her feet start to angle left.
And she stops. In the middle of the sidewalk, short of the corner. People clip her shoulders going past, and she reaches up and takes one AirPod out, and then the other, and she stands there holding them in her fist.
The street comes in. A bus braking. A leaf blower somewhere. A guy laughing into his phone. A siren a long way off. All of it at once, flat, the plain morning noise of a city, no rise and drop under it.
She stands in it. Her coffee steams. The crowd parts around her and complains with its shoulders and reforms ahead of her. She looks down at her own hand, the two small white things in it.
Then she lifts her head and faces the corner and lets herself look. All the way. Her feet stay where they are.

She walks to it.
She stands over the body and looks down at it, long and direct. The frozen pool in the open hand. The leaf in the ice. The good shoes. The face the weather has been working on. She crouches. Her hands stay at her sides. She reads him, the coat, the hands, the way he is lying.
She stays down there a long time. She stands up slowly and holds still, her face open to it.
The crowd is still coming, still peeling left at forty feet, dropping into the gutter, coming back up, a smooth unbroken line of people with their thumbs going and their AirPods in. She turns and faces the line. She is standing between them and the corner now, the body behind her, and they split around the two of them, the dead one and the standing one, shoulders knocking her, the small flares of irritation at a person in the way.
From every set of AirPods on the block comes the same low murmur. The same three-beat. The whole street is saying it together, just under the breath, hundreds of mouths a half second apart.
Maddie says it to the faces closest to her. Soft. Flat.
“There’s a dead guy on the ground and we’re walking on him.”

The nearest faces turn to her.
For a second they go loose. Open. They hold on her, waiting.
Then the murmur in all their ears changes.
You hear that? The same calm three-beat. That’s them. That’s the enemy, and she’s not even hiding it, folks, right here, right in front of you. They want you weak. They want you small again. They’re not after me. They’re after you. I’m just standing in the way. You know what to do. Do it.
The loose faces close. One by one, the camera catching each as it goes, flat again, set, certain. A man near the front. A woman beside him. The two guys in vests. Their mouths start moving again, the half-second-late mouthing, the words coming back in.
The first hand reaches out and takes Maddie’s arm. Gently. The way you guide somebody back from the edge of a platform. A man’s hand, an ordinary hand, a wedding ring on it.
She looks at the hand.
The second hand comes hard. It takes a fistful of her jacket and pulls. A third closes on her other arm. The phones start coming up, one and then four and then a dozen, vertical, held high over the heads, the little black rectangles all turned toward the center where she is. The ring tightens. More hands. She goes down to one knee and the coffee cup hits the concrete and rolls and the lid pops off and the coffee spreads out flat and brown across the sidewalk toward the corner.
She gets her face up over the closing shoulders one last time. Into the ring of phones.
“He was a person. So am I.”
It comes out of a real throat, in its own rhythm, in nobody’s three-beat. The faces above her stay set. The hands keep working.
They close over her.
The phones stay up the whole time, vertical, recording, the ring of them swaying a little with the work of the bodies underneath. Then the phones tilt, one after another, up off the center and toward the sky, grey and even, and a couple of gulls going over, and that is the last frame any of them gets.

A phone screen, held in a hand on a couch. Evening.
The clip is playing. The bright ring of bodies, shot from inside it, shaky and vertical. There is a sound under it now, a piece of music somebody added, something with a beat. There is a caption. There is a number in the corner and the number is climbing, three million, three and a half, four.
The thumb double-taps. A little heart fills in red. The thumb flicks up.
The next clip starts.

A Tuesday in October, a year on. Fourth and Main, 8:14 in the morning.
The light is grey and even. The crowd comes up the block with the coffee and the phones and the AirPods in. They hold a straight line at the corner now. The drift is gone.
They come straight on, over the spot, the same flat unbroken line of them, thumbs going, their feet passing across the place on the sidewalk at a steady stride, morning after morning after morning, until the grey of her and the grey of the concrete have gone the same grey, until the shape of the open hand is a crack in the pavement at the corner, until the ground at Fourth and Main is just ground.
In every ear on the street the Voice is going.
They are mouthing along.

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