"Reach" by Mark Braidwood
A businessman finds a secret note stashed inside a robot toy and flies to China to find the factory worker who put it there.
Hello everyone,
I just gotta say, this week’s story is one of my personal favorites from After Dinner Conversation. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but something about it just speaks to me. Stories are like that!
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Reach, by Mark Braidwood
Jack Benson stands dissolved in an ocean of strangers, humans he couldn’t have known existed until forced to jostle with them for space and share odors. He recoils imperceptibly with each touch, eager not to offend or stand out any further. As a mass they flow like a tide, but he senses that, as individuals, each is preoccupied with being elsewhere.
He marvels at this accretion of humanity, at how in each moment, somewhere on Earth, such a mass of people goes about their day. Who are they? What do they want, feel, do with their lives? The man next to him smells of cigarettes and holds a child’s doll. He looks nervous. Perhaps it’s been a while since he saw her. He wonders if there is a set of personality archetypes such that it’s possible to know every type of person that has ever existed, if only you could map them onto the right template.
This thought had struck him while on the plane. He had sat next to someone—round-backed, in his forties and dressed in brown chinos and a blue turtleneck, no doubt middle management in some tech company—whom he felt he had met so many times before, the way he introduced himself unprompted, assured of the pleasure of his own company.
Finally, the customs desk looms above him, the throng’s singular objective. He hands over his passport.
“Mr. Benson, what is the point of your visit?” the immigration officer asks.
“Business.”
The officer stares at him and again at his passport. Was his suspicion an act or learned from experience? “How long?”
His cheeks redden and his heart quickens. What he’s doing isn’t illegal. Not where he is from. “A few days.”
The officer returns his passport and waves him through, his mask degrading briefly into indifference, boredom or perhaps fatigue.
His employer had arranged for someone to meet him. It hadn’t been difficult to justify this detour from his itinerary, the department head thinking it positive for their corporate image. They briefed him not to trust anyone, that there was every chance the people he met with would work for the party, whatever that meant.
A row of men in ill-fitting suits surround the exit, holding signs with names hastily scrawled across paper, some in English, others Chinese. He finds his name printed on a white placard, held by a muscular man with dark hair and tanned skin, standing a little apart from the others.
“Mr. Benson, welcome to Guangdong. My name is Wei. May I take your bag?”
His English is excellent, not the kind picked up begrudgingly in school or from watching reruns of American soaps, but the kind cultivated with prolonged effort. Did that mean he was good at his job or had another job entirely?
Jack thanks him. The man seems surprised at how light his bag is, perhaps used to fifty-pound monsters. But the only important thing, the reason he is here, is folded in his top pocket.
The car is parked at the pickup area. He sits in the back.
“Which hotel, sir?”
“I’d like to go straight to this address, please.” He holds out his phone and the driver squints as he reads. His eyebrows rise slightly, perhaps at the unexpected address or the distance.
“I can pay.”
“Thank you, but that won’t be necessary.” The man had a large flask from which he sipped constantly, the smell hinting at some kind of tea.
It was supposed to be easy, finding this place. Just ask Charlie Pringle, someone had suggested. Unlike his own workspace, which had a weeping fig in the corner and a print of Klimt’s Beech Forest on the wall, Charlie had arranged his favorite toys around his office. He had tried hard not to judge him.
“How can I help?” Charlie asked with bright eyes.
“Where do we manufacture the K-Bot? Need to chase something up.”
Charlie frowned, swiveled in his chair and tapped away at his computer. After a while, he turned back.
“As I thought. Don’t know.”
“I don’t understand,” Jack said.
“Same with most of our lines. We outsource it to someone on the ground.”
“I see. Can you ask them?”
Charlie shook his head. “They won’t know either.”
“Jesus, don’t we know where we make our own toys?”
Charlie’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m going to China to meet with our suppliers,” Jack explained. “Thought I might tour some factories while there.”
It took Charlie two weeks to locate it.
As they leave the airport, the city reads like a coming-of-age story in reverse. The downtown buildings rendered in sleek lines and gleaming surfaces, rows standing tall with the aggressive symmetry of collector’s cabinets, contents stuffed, segregated and catalogued. Did it ever happen that somebody confused their home for another’s, mistakenly entering a copy of their apartment? He smiles. Could someone accidentally adopt a new life, a new family? Glimpses of great gouges in the earth rush past the window, waiting to be healed by concrete and steel. Further along, older dwellings cling to the banks of a muddy river, a mosaic of color and shape, a jumble of crossed paths and perhaps shared fates. Occasionally he glimpses empty fields in the distance.
It was odd how long it had taken him to think of translating the note. He’d guessed that it was Chinese and had taken it to Jo-An in HR, who grew up there. She looked at the photograph he had taken of the small piece of paper, torn from a notebook. The original was too precious and might raise questions.
She squinted, her lips moving silently before she spoke. “OK. This is a short poem.”
“What does it say?”
She read aloud.
Thunder rolls
Leaves hang heavy,
I bow my head.
It wasn’t what he had expected and now even more out of place.
“Is that it?”
“Yep. Told you it was short. It’s nice. Who wrote it?”
“I… I don’t know.” He said. “My niece found it. For a school project. Just curious is all.”
“It is curious.”
“In what way?”
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