The electrician had a gift of touch. His hands, full of pockmarks and burns the size of coins, were more red and blue than brown. He felt life coursing through his fingers from the cords he handled, even with thick rubber gloves on.
He had spent his entire life holding onto cables. He worked every day regardless of weather. He had been working during the snowstorm of 1998. The world was bleached white. He was untangling wires in a meter of snow and he had proof he did. His middle toe on his left foot was severely frostbitten and amputated.
His mother was an electrician for the state. On a good day she was given an extra bottle of grain alcohol. On an average day, a bowl of rice and a white radish. The electrician then believed he shared the same fate as his mother—devoting his life to the state for a wimpy radish.
When the electrician was a child, his teachers were often sent by the state to the countryside hundreds of kilometers away to harvest rice. His mother taught what she knew when she had the time. Together, they spent afternoons climbing electric poles.
He recalled his first job with his mother. Out in the suburbs, monkeys had gnawed their way through the insulation. Beneath the lines lay corpses of sparrows, hawks, monkeys and a potbellied boy about 8 years old clutching a piece of copper cable. They cut out unusable sections and mended new wiring. There were no security precautions. No current ran through the cables most of the time. He held onto an active line with rubber gloves. He felt a searing pain, as though someone was slashing his skin from within him. He could hear a shrill wailing and felt it come from the cable. He screamed and dropped the cable. His mother told him to be quiet and still. She said he was making a scene. She said he wouldn’t die. He held the cable again. He could still hear the sound of misery. He thought his mother heard it too, but just didn’t talk about it.
Every time he held a cable, he heard a cry, a wail or a call for help. He became used to the agonizing sounds. It became normal.
When the electrician was 26, the state dissolved. He still worked every day, but for the new democratic government. He earned money for the first time. He could eat meat every night. Although after years of vegetables and rice, he had no taste for such a luxury.
Holding onto cables, jolts of laughter rang in his ears and poked the bottom of his heart. As he heard laughter repeatedly, he discovered his gift of touch—that the cable didn’t laugh, but the people utilizing the cable were laughing. The laughter felt odd to him, especially after years of hearing cries.
In a matter of five years, his everyday world had transformed from ramshackle houses wallowing in the darkness under tree canopies to high-rises along avenues built end over end forming in the twilight endless chains of fluorescent light. On every stretch of pavement was some sort of restaurant or food hawker. In the cables, laughter died down and was replaced with the slight vibrating hum of peace.
Now, at age 47, the electrician was on a bus home in the capital after a work-filled weekend. He arrived at a site in the mountains Friday night, clocked in early Saturday morning, fixed up old transformers, and rigged lines stretching over mountains and around bends for kilometers on end.
The cables were built by either the revolutionaries or the counter-revolutionaries. He couldn’t tell them apart. The wires carried their remains in anguishing cries and old propaganda songs about the state. Twenty-one years removed from the end of the state and the echoes of these songs that were transmitted from wire to mind through nerves touched him with nostalgia. Nostalgia for the radish at the dinner table and working with his mother under the heat of the summer sun. A part of him wanted to go back to a simpler time. During the era of the state, everyone cried in their dreams at night and smiled when facing each other, calling each other comrade out on the street. He missed the façade of happiness or rather he missed the familiar sight of it. He didn’t feel at home in the world he lived in—with the people around him locked onto phone screens appearing unhappy while texting loved ones, and the quiet cables.
It had rained all weekend. Fresh scars and burns stung harder in the warm rain. All the welts and wounds on his face and hands had etched away his cheeks and palms. He noticed in the mirror his own reflection in the bathroom sink at a rest stop. His hands were like masses of kneaded dough. His face was without shape. He knew his body was disappearing in time. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the state’s cables in the mountains and the lines now at peace.
Ravi Venkataraman is a Peace Corps Volunteer Teacher in China, co-managing editor of MaLa: the China Bookworm Literary Journal and a member of the public relations team at Newfound Journal. His fiction and poetry has previously appeared in Papercuts Magazine, That Lit Site and Journal of Microliterature.
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–Art by Menerva Tau