Toe the Line by Laura Bogner
from TIGHTROPE: a PUNK NOIR Magazine series
The power goes out in the factory. This is the third time this week. It’s not like in the movies, where there’s a loud boom followed by gears grinding to a screeching halt and chaos erupting. Instead, it’s quiet, like a funeral. We stand there watching a row of naked sex robots that we build for the tech bro billionaires who would rather fuck a robot programmed to tell them what they need to hear to get off, lying face up on the stalled conveyor belt. To me they’ll always be dolls. Their outdated robin’s egg blue eyeshadow and bright red lips wait patiently for us to shoot a shot of glue into blonde wigs made of human hair and affix them to their heads.
I throw my wig over my doll’s face and go find Jess. We make a break for the door, sneaking past the foreman screaming at his phone and go outside to where a few other free thinkers have gathered in the parking lot. We watch the sky, an eerie electric blue, with thick dark clouds rolling towards us. I watch the downy hairs on the back of Jess’s arms stand on end while she tilts her nose upwards, sniffing as she paces back and forth. “It smells like rain,” she announces right as the warm drops drench us with ozone. “No shit, Sherlock,” I tease as a flash of lightning strikes a cow grazing in the field across the street. It’s followed by a deafening crack of thunder that makes Brian jump with surprise even though we all know thunder follows lightning. We’re unfazed as we watch the black and white cow ignite. For a split second it’s a fiery hologram, subliminally spliced into our subconscious, and then it turns back into a cow as the downpour puts the fire out. The cow returns to all it knows how to do, chewing wet grass in the fenced field, unaware that it narrowly escaped being barbecued, and we go back into the factory knowing that we have no choice.
“I hear Muckerberg’s coming tonight to try his out.” Brian swishes along the top of the curb with the precision of a tightrope walker. He stops to knock the mud off his shoes before he enters the building. “See ya suckers.” He calls over his shoulder as his Converse squeak on the concrete floor. Jess and I sit down in the fiberglass chairs. I grab us each a pair of white booties from the bin to put over our shoes. They’re fanatics about germs here. Brian’s thumbing his nose at contamination protocol runs him the risk of being booted off the assembly line and reassigned to the backup generator. “I heard Zusk was here last week.” Jess whispers. “Oh yeah?” I whisper back. “Eliot told me Zusk is having his robot programmed to talk dirty.” We both look up, making sure the red light on the surveillance camera hasn’t gone back on yet. “Fuck me with your micro dick?” I whisper. And we both cover our mouths like we are having a coughing fit as we laugh hysterically.
I’m not surprised to see Brian coming back through the swinging door. He’ll never learn that being a rebel here gets you nowhere. Jess and I both look down at the floor while he angrily grabs a black rubber harness and a yellow slicker from the properly marked bin. The lights are on again and I go back to my station. I’m on the Blonde Bombshell line today. It’s the worst one for me to be on and they know it; that’s how they break you. Who would have ever thought a feminist dyke like me, minding my own business doing bleach jobs and buzz cuts for marines in 29 Palms, would be building sex robots against my will for tech billionaires? It is what it is until I can figure out how to get the fuck out of here without getting myself killed but least I have Jess.
I put my lab coat on and flash Jess a Desmond. I know in my heart she’s flashing me one back but she looks down at the ground as she takes her place on the East Asian line. She used to be a linguistic anthropologist at Berkeley studying queer language. We have to make sure we use the correct pronouns here, and by “correct,” the talking heads mean what you were born with and a fetishized Asian woman is their top-selling robot this month. It speaks volumes of what life is like here at the worker camp in Good Intent, Kansas. Speaking out loud is grounds for permanent termination, as in caput so Jess came up with our own sign language that we do with our eyes. The Desmond, as in Norma Desmond, is a quick indignant flashing of both eyes, which means ‘don’t let them steal our light.’
I look out the window and see Brian. God bless the child that is Brian now. He refused to listen to Jess and me when he got here and now it’s like watching a toddler stick a fork in a light socket over and over. They nabbed Brian from the Mac counter in the Bronx a couple years ago. He was Briana then and they were coming up in the ballroom scene, and honey, I’m not talking about the Dancing with the Stars ballroom. I’m talking about the House of Louboutin ballroom as in that ballroom. I watch Brian, with the others like him who refuse to comply, strapped to the turbine that powers the backup generator. They’ll walk miles in circles today along with the cows they breed for this purpose. Their forced labor will keep the power on in the storm so we can build robots but I got to believe that on the inside, Briana is dancing.
Laura Bogner is a writer and artist who left Los Angeles after many years and now lives in Joshua, California. Her writing and art are infused with satire and irony in response to the bizarre era we are living in now. She is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, where she spent a lot of nights across the river in Newport, Kentucky, at the Jockey Club, seeing some of the best punk shows ever that mangled her mind into what it is today. Her art and written words have been shown and performed at Live from Joshua Tree, La Matardora, Art Queen, and Furstworld galleries in Joshua Tree and have been published in the Los Angeles Press, Glendale Weekly, ADAD Zine, Space Cowboy Books podcast, and other publications that sadly no longer exist. Her goal is to live every day like it’s the last because lately, people around her are dropping like flies
Nicely done!