I was yet to meet a man like him. He sauntered into the room with a gait that announced, Look! I’m here! And by the time the heavy pinewood door swung shut behind him, all my trainees—of which he was to be one—had their eyes glued towards this six-foot-five chunk of lean meat and healthy fats squeezed into clothes that barely did their job. Things that should be covered up protruded. And for someone of his stature, for a man whose footsteps still resound even on a carpeted floor, this unfortunately meant that he was close to being indecent. So, instead of asking him at once to introduce himself to the group, I just allowed him to settle on a seat at the far end of the room for the time being. He brought his bag down on the desk, almost on top of the keyboard of the computer. Then he sat on the swivel chair. By then the other trainees had turned to me again, although only because it had appeared to be rude not to do so. When it looked like the man was all settled down, I finally said:
“Glad you made it on time, Mr. Rivera.”
He did not. He was two hours late, which meant that I had the right to humiliate him in front of the others. I didn’t, though. I decided to be gentle and just say: “Did you have trouble putting on your clothes?”
There was scattered laughter, but most of them stuck with the silence I had earlier imposed upon the room.
Which did not apply to the receiving end of my question. To my horror, he said, with a grin that dripped with malice: “I did, and I may have trouble taking them off. Do you mind helping me, Sir?”
He said the last word with drawling emphasis and legs spreading open. Before he could reveal what he had to show the gawking young men, I interrupted him by saying: “No. I’m more interested in you introducing yourself and perhaps not talking for the next few hours.”
“Fine.” He crossed his legs. “Ruben Rivera. Thirty-five, not a newbie. Not really interested in anything but getting through this training and getting out of this building as soon as I finish my shift.”
“Fair enough,” I said, rather too quickly. “Then I believe you don’t need much recap, Mr. Rivera.” Having said that, I then addressed everyone. “As I was saying, you are all going to have to seduce, to reel these old people in, to make them avail of your service, of our service…”
The service involved intimate phone calls. My training session, called “Comms Skills 101,” is supposed to gauge the new hires’ ability to speak the English language. That had been true for the previous accounts where the company had shoved me. I was in a United States healthcare account before, followed by a financial one from Australia, and for both of them my job was to weed out those that the Human Resources mistakenly thought would have the capacity to string two sentences together without stumbling, crying, or throwing up.
That isn’t the case for Phone Love, LLC. Here, one talks as they please, or at least in a way that pleases the customers. And what usually pleases them had much to do with these agents being themselves. No accent training necessary, not even a brush with the basics of grammar. All they had to know was how to use their tone to entice the callers, when to push or to hold back.
“You’re selling a product,” I told them on the second day of training, when I was to talk more about the account and how it began in the U.S. as a one-man operation. “And that product is your time.”
On the third day, I told them that their time—this valuable product—is paid for by the callers in varying degrees.
“Some would ramble about their day and all you have to do is to hear them out. Then there are the others who would rather have you talk, whisper, and moan. The more sexual the call becomes, the better you get paid by the minute.”
At this point, it was the norm for one or two trainees to walk out and never come back. They were usually the ones deferred from other accounts—for whose interviews they failed to excel—and who only agreed to attend the training in the hopes that it wouldn’t be all too bad. That some of them thought otherwise was only to be expected.
That afternoon, no one walked away. The young men—most of whom were fresh out of college or had simply dropped out—even did well during the mock calls. Among them stood out the man named Ruben. He was older than me by half a decade, and a part of myself believed that his defiant nature was borne out of this need to assert the advantage of his age. I’ve been in the industry longer than you have been, he seemed to say with his challenging stares whenever my gaze happened upon him as I spoke to the group.
“Mr. Rivera,” I said just as he and the others were filing out the door at the end of the fourth day. “Do you mind staying for a while?”
He shrugged and walked to my desk, where I was sitting.
“Have a seat.” I nodded towards the chair I had set up in front.
“I’m good,” he said, making it known with his stance that he had no plans of being ordered around by the end of his shift.
“Alright, then.”
“Did I do anything wrong?”
“No, you really did well. How long have you been in this kind of account?”
“Almost twenty. Since I graduated high school.”
“I see. That explains how good you are at ‘selling yourself,’ if you could excuse that phrase.”
He responded with an expression that was almost blank, but not entirely, for I saw how his lips quivered a little. He was quick enough to prevent it from becoming so much apparent.
“You are so good at this, in fact, that I believe you’re a valuable addition to this class. The others are learning from your mock calls. And besides, I think I have to thank you for helping the ones struggling with the system or responses.”
It was obvious that he wasn’t flattered. He seemed smart enough to know that I wasn’t intending to praise him, but to say something that could affront him. “What do you want, Sir?”
“I’d like it if you don’t put on the airs.”
He smirked. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t have to explain myself. You know damn well what I’m talking about. And I’m telling you this not as a trainer, but an employee like yourself: you do not do that in this place, nor in the production floor. You deal with others like a decent person, whether they rank above or below yourself. Otherwise, you won’t last, you could be replaced just as easy as you think you could walk in my class with that attitude.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Some people could make your time in this company very, very difficult.”
Malice crept to his face. “Bring it on, then.”
“No. I don’t do that. But some will, some could. You should know, however, that I won’t be standing here if I allowed people like you to crush me so easily. It’s a tough world. This job could be difficult, but you don’t have to make it more difficult for others.”
He didn’t respond for a while. He stared right into my eyes, smirking, before finally saying: “I got on your nerves, didn’t I?”
“Is that the goal, Mr. Rivera?”
“No.”
“Then, what?”
“Just work.” He paused, then went on: “I couldn’t care less about people like you, if I have to be honest. In the same way that you or the company couldn’t really care about me. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that I’m just a number, a body.”
“Then why work here at all?”
“Why not? When it’s the only thing I know how to do, besides literally selling myself?”
It was my turn to ask, “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. And from what I could see, you could well be one of my customers.”
It was all I could do to wring his thick neck and yell be gone and never return. Instead, I said while gritting my teeth, “I have nothing else to say. You keep safe, Mr. Rivera.”
He started walking to the door. Halfway through, he paused, then turned to me. “You know what?” he said. “I like you. I really do.”
I was taken aback. I couldn’t tell if his smile was ironic or if he truly meant his words. If he was, for some reason, feeling some kind of fondness for me.
The next day was the “graduation” of the group. Unlike in the other accounts, everyone was expected to pass this training. And everyone did. Ruben was, unsurprisingly, the best one during the final mock calls. I had half expected that he wouldn’t finish the whole thing, but here he was, surrounded by the other trainees, celebrating with boxes of pizza bought with company funds.
“I’m happy that you all passed,” I told them. “I’ll see you in a few weeks in the prod.”
I made my way to the door. I was to lounge in the office, as usual, to take a breath before heading home. Suddenly, the rich and unmistakable voice of Ruben emerged from the babble of a happy room: “Sir, why don’t you celebrate with us? We’re all going out in a while.”
I looked at him to make sure that he wasn’t taunting me. I still couldn’t tell, couldn’t ascertain if his smile was sardonic or sincere. He was holding a slice of pizza with one hand and a paper plate with the other. In any case, I wasn’t inclined to join my trainees beyond the company-allotted hours. A few years back, when I had a bit more hope for the job and the people whose lives I thought I was to change, I went out of my way. I had given rewards likes trinkets and chocolate bars for the best ones and little candies for the others. I was generous with my praise, even more generous with my constructive critiques upon listening to their calls. I didn’t come up with excuses when invited to a drinking bout. But then as the years went by, I began to see myself and the trainees as the thing that we are: just things. At least for the machine we had chosen ourselves to be a part of. The company, this city. Money. So, the less that I care for the things that we are, the easier it is for me to do my part within this machine. So, I just smiled and told Ruben: “I have to be elsewhere. You guys have fun!”
“Alright, Sir.”
While the heavy door closed as I was heading out, I caught him looking at me, not as if he had anything smart to say. In fact, he appeared to be poised to finally say something un-ironic.
When I had no one to train, I was in the production floor. The “prod” took up more than half of the wide building level it occupied. It was set up like any other account—nondescript desktops, swivel chairs, and supervisors milling around among the two hundred plus agents who talked all day through headsets—the only difference being the empty cubicle space dividing every “lover.” (That was how the agents must call themselves. In the healthcare account I was once a part of, they were called “customer advocates,” while the ones in the financial firm were “bankers.”) The space between every station was supposed to keep the lovers undistracted. My place among these was a desktop near the entrance, and my job was to listen to the calls of the ones who received the lowest scores in the post-call survey. Within the six months that followed Ruben’s graduation, he never once tumbled to the list of underperformers. I once listened to one of his recorded calls despite my lack of reason to do so.
“Thank you for calling Phone Love,” the recording began, with his deep and inviting tone. “My name is Ruben, and I’ll be your lover for today. Am I speaking with Patrick?”
The old, phlegmatic voice that answered sounded hesitant. “Uhhh…yes, I am.”
“What a sexy name, Patrick. Before we proceed with your desires, I have a question. I see here on my screen that you’ve been talking to my friend, Henry. Do you want me to route this call to Henry instead?”
“Ugh, no. I mean, I think…I think I’d like to talk to you.”
“Well, I would love to talk to you, baby. You like that? You like me to call you ‘baby’?”
I also had access to customers’ account, confirming details in the call. A little section on the screen told me that Patrick would indeed like to be called “baby.”
“I’d like that. I’d… yes, please.”
“Alright, baby. Should we begin by…”
The call went on. Ruben had to work to get the stupified man to speak up, to tell him what he really wanted. It took him almost a couple of minutes’ worth of stubtle coaxing. When at last the caller opened up, it turned out to be one of those calls that goes all the way, that ended up with emphatic exhalations through the receiver. At the customer’s end, at one point, there appeared to be the sound of grunts and a wet hunk of meat being slapped in quick succession. Meanwhile, Ruben was helping the old man build towards a satisfactory finish with his deep groans and words of encouragement.
I shut the recording. Some sort of fire seemed to have been lit within me, and when I touched my face, my fingers felt the heat.
Without fully standing up, I peered above my station’s little wall and surveyed the prod, with its hundreds of agents peppered about. Ruben was standing at his station, a few rows away. He didn’t have a call. The mic on his headset was turned up and he was chatting with an agent who was also standing up.
As if sensing the weight of my gaze, he turned to my direction. His eyes looked friendly. He raised a hand, gave me a quick salute.
I was too baffled that all I did was sit and stare at the dark screen of the desktop.
A couple of months later, I did have to listen to his call. His supervisor emailed the recording, with a note that says: “Will you coach my agent? He might need a refresher about respectful tone. We never had problems with him before. Thanks.”
The call went like this:
“Thank you for calling phone love, my name is Ruben, and I’ll be—”
He was interrupted—mid-sentence— by a high-pitched voice of a man. There was something icy in its tone. It said: “Hi, Ruben.” The hairs at the back of my neck stood on end when he said: “Did you miss me?”
“—your lover…your…you…” Ruben then sounded like someone preparing for a battle cry. At that point, his voice was shaking, either in rage or nervousness. What he said after was almost yelled. “You! You stop hounding me! You son of a—”
The word was swallowed by the man’s laughter. I supposed the customer had a lot more to say, but the call was dropped. I was sure it was Ruben who dropped the call.
“I don’t think he needs my coaching.” I had walked up to the supervisor to tell him that. “This requires your attention, TL. Ruben knows what to do and he chose not to. This isn’t about skills, but about attitude—his or the customer’s, you decide.”
The Team Lead was a plump man in his forties who’s always flushed with needless cheerfulness. His response was uttered with his usual smile: “Nah. Coach him.”
I could see from his empty gaze that the matter was settled. He sat in his station—which was at the head of the row of his agents’—like a laid-back monarch who only exists to please his subjects. He had this habit of shoving his underperformers to me to show that he was doing something to help them be better. I had for a lot of times tried to push back, but I just couldn’t break his wall of cheerful apathy. So I just loudly exhaled through my nose before saying “Fine.”
And that was the reason for the sour mood I had when I stopped by the part of the row where Ruben was seated, which was a couple of stations away from his supervisor. He had a call, but he saw me, so I nodded my head towards my seat—indicating for him to go on AUX and to come to me upon finishing the call.
He came up to my station after a few minutes.
“I know the reason for this coaching,” he said as soon as he reached my spot in the prod. He still looked like someone, or something, that should be displayed in a classical art museum—along with other perfect and symmetrical stone figures. This time though, he looked troubled, and I had suspected that it was because of my frigid disposition. His eyes were wide and glassy.
“Good. Now please take your seat and we’ll listen to your call together.”
I played the short recording twice.
“Now help me understand what happened, Mr. Rivera.”
Gone was the proud way he thrusted his chest when he first walked into my class. He now slouched on the seat, our knees almost touching, and he was looking down on the lap of his denim pants. This sight dissolved my plan to let out on him the frustrations I had of his team leader. I made the effort of sounding kind: “Is there anything wrong?”
“All of this,” he whispered.
“Sorry?”
“I said,” then he spread his arms as if to mean the entire production floor was to be blamed for his troubles—whatever they may be. “All of this. This is just wrong. I’m tired.”
As I am, I would’ve said. But it was obvious that he was in no mood for a verbal joust.
“I don’t think I could do this again.”
“Do what?”
“Quit and apply in a different place.”
“Oh. Oh, no,” I said quickly, quite alarmed now. “I’m not here to fire you, Mr. Rivera. We’re talking because I’d like to know how to help you better connect with our customers.” I usually tell that to agents, but only halfheartedly.
He looked me in the eyes. “I have to quit after that call. You must understand, I have to.”
“You don’t have to. Our clients love that you are here, they appreciate your hard work.” I normally had the urge to puke whenever saying that, but this time it was true. The white folks who owned the business did recognize this agent’s skills for a few times during the monthly virtual meetings.
“You don’t understand.”
“So help me, Ruben.”
That seemed to do the trick. With halting and reluctant phrases, goaded on by my occasional push for him to “go on” or “continue,” he told me how he was stalked by a man who had claimed to love him. It all began with what he thought would be a normal phone call, back when he was employed by a different company a couple of years ago. A man called requesting for the kind of innocent conversation that rarely happened for an extended period in such a setup. As it happened, the caller was a Pinoy who struck gold when he met in a dating site a Russian expat who lived in the U.S. He was forty, the lady, sixty, and they later had what the man called a sad marriage, which compelled him to avail the service of a lover.
“That’s what he literally told me,” Ruben said, “that he was ‘sad.’”
And this sadness Ruben had tried to placate by simply listening. The first call went well enough that Ruben became the man’s preferred lover, a role he would go on to fulfill for more than a month. In the middle of the month that followed, their calls grew more intimate. The things Ruben was asked to do became frequent and intense that half of his incentives came from the calls he had with this customer alone. Sooner still, the man became aggressive and demanding. Their subsequent calls would end up with Ruben emotionally fatigued and almost physically drained. Late into the third month, the man demanded that Ruben provide details about his life. His last name, his residence, his family.
“I didn’t like it,” he told me, “Not the questions or the way he asked them.”
“What did you do?”
“I told my supervisor about it.”
“What did they do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I was raking up so much cash because of our calls. The customer was paying ridiculous amounts of money even for the tiniest of things he was asking me to do. So the management just told me to play along, but I couldn’t. I felt unclean from all those calls. But more than that, the man was crazy. He even told me that he would fly back to the country, meet me and my family and, when the Russian wife has finally died, he’d drag me to the U.S. to marry me.”
I had nothing to say. In the few years that I’ve worked with Phone Love, no customer had ever said something as deranged.
Ruben looked down then up again, fixing his eyes intently on mine as if to indicate that what he was going to say would mean so much more.
“The day after that call where he said he’d marry me,” he said, “I went AWOL.”
Ruben worked for a couple of other BPOs right after quitting the first one, for the same sort of account. That was what he was good at. Unfortunately, the man tracked him again, in both instances. He was clueless as to how the man did that. His guess had to do with money, and my guess was that he was right. Phone Love was the fourth account. And, still, he was found. No one had tried to help him in the previous ones.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him, and I meant every word of it.
“I’ve been told that before,” he said. “Nothing came off it.”
“I’m different, Ruben. I make things happen.”
“I’ll count on that. Thank you.”
That concluded the coaching, which wasn’t a coaching at all. The next day, when I caught him among the agents in the designated smoking area just in front of the building, I went up to him to reaffirm my promise: “I’ll be raising your concern to the management.”
Through the haze of cigarette smoke, lit by the rays of a sun about to set behind the other buildings within the business district, Ruben’s eyes twinkled with what appeared to be genuine appreciation. He blew smoke to his side before saying: “I’m grateful. I may not have to quit.”
The smile, this time, was warm. It was made more intimate by the fact that the air between the two of us was tinged by his visible exhalations. The light that filtered through the smoke revealed the true color of his irises, which were usually dulled by the flourescent lamps inside the prod. They were deep brown. They looked like little coins forged from drops of wild honey, and I was suddenly plagued with the longing to see myself reflected in them.
Ruben must have felt how intently I was looking at him, for he suddenly reached out to touch my wrist, gripping it ever so softly. “Thank you, Mervyn.”
My name on his lips echoed in my head, and his light touch felt like an electric bolt. I retreated my hand, making it look like I had to retrieve my handkerchief to wipe the sweat off my forehead. It was warm, anyway, and we were outside among other smokers. To further hide my embarrassment, I said, “What would you do if nothing could be done about it?”
“Like I said, I’ll quit. I’ll apply in another company. Continue my side job for my family.”
“You have a family?”
“Yes. A wife and a kid.” He showed me the lock screen of his phone, where a cherub-like girl smiled.
“She looks just like you.”
He chuckled. “Well, it’s for her and her mother that I’m doing this. This and whoring myself out on the weekends.”
“You really do that?”
“Why not? I know nothing else. And I have this—” he waved his hand in front of his body. “I might as well use it.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Diseases, for one.”
“I’m always careful. And I have limits, of course.”
We stood in silence for a while after that. After a few more puffs of smoke, he said: “You know what I’m more afraid of?”
“The customer?”
“The customer, yes.”
Ruben occupied my thoughts in ways I wasn’t really proud of. His having a wife and a child felt inconsequential, felt small against my huge and embarrassing feelings. Those feelings drove me to talk about his concern to his team lead—who, unsurprisingly, dismissed the whole thing as “only normal.” Those feelings later drove me to speak up in our monthly meeting with the clients, having failed to receive any resolution from the supervisor.
The plump man wasn’t pleased. He sat there in the conference room, red-faced, among the TLs and managers present during the video-phone call we had with the people in the U.S.
“Before I present my monthly training report,” I had said to the leaders and towards the live feed of our white bosses projected at a side of the room. Like us, they sat around an oval table, but in a room that was thousands of miles away. “I have an important matter to raise about one of your top performers.” I then delivered a condensed version of Ruben’s employment history. When I reached the part about the most recent call, the supervisor tried to interject. But I stood my ground. I insisted on being heard, for Ruben’s story to be told and be dealt with.
In the end, I wasn’t given the resolution that I hoped for—for the man to be banned from availing of the company’s services.
“We’re looking at the customer’s records,” Kurt—one of the middle-aged white men projected on the wall—said, “And nothing really gives us any reason to ban him. In fact, he has actually paid in advance for our services. But, because I trust your judgement, the least we could do is to place a note on this account that allows Ruben to redirect this call to another agent. Would that help?”
The thought that another agent may have to face the man didn’t occur to me. All I felt was the satisfaction from the prospect of having actually done something for Ruben. So I said, “That would really help, Sir. Thank you.”
Later on, while walking out of the meeting room, the supervisor caught up with me and hissed: “He is my agent. If there’s anything you think we should do for him, you tell me first.”
“But I did, TL. And you think nothing should be done.”
“And you should’ve honored that. I’m his supervisor.”
“How could I do that?” I stopped walking to face him squarely. He had the proportions of a stovetop kettle, and I towered like a steamroller about to flatten him to the ground. “How could I, when you want nothing to be done?”
Then I turned to leave. I left him there, fuming.
I walked from the lockers to the prod the next day feeling giddy, almost glowing with the warmth of the news I had to share. Ruben might have been told already, in which case I’d be happy to know what he had to say about my little intervention.
Because of the heated exchange I had with the supervisor, I resisted the urge to go to the bay where Ruben was. I went straight to my desktop and worked as I usually did. After lunch, however, I noticed how I never saw Ruben stand from his station or even go out of the prod. I would’ve noticed, given that my place was by the door. So I searched the workplace messenger and saw a gray button next to his name, indicating that he has not been “Active” since the end of his shift the previous day. I dialed his Avaya, just to test, and was answered by a voice that didn’t belong to him.
“He isn’t around, Sir,” the agent told me. “And I have some issues with my station’s phone, so TL told me to use Ruben’s for today.”
“Thanks,” I said. In truth, I had wanted to ask, Did he say anything? What happened?
If Ruben hadn’t told me about his previous accounts, I would not have been bothered. But because he did, and because I found myself suddenly hoping that he would always be around, his unusual absence compelled me to cast furtive glances at his occupied station—occupied by someone else.
When I came in the following day, the station was vacated. The agent’s phone must be working well again.
I couldn’t resist. Near the end of the shift, I walked to his supervisor to ask. It was fair to say that he wished to have no business with me. He didn’t smile, stand or even look me in the eyes when I went to him.
“Hi, TL,” I said, doing my best to sound harmless. “Any news about Ruben? I see he hasn’t been around for a couple of days now.”
“I called his number,” he said with a poker face. He kept his gaze at the monitor the entire time, typing and scrolling, perhaps even chatting with an agent. “No answer.”
“Alright, thank you.”
“Why?”
“I’d just like to make sure he knows what we did for him.”
He scoffed, before saying, “I’ll make sure to tell him that.”
“I appreciate it.”
I had no means nor the proper reason to reach out to Ruben. Unlike the other trainers, I never connected with my trainees through their social media accounts. I barely even used my Facebook. And besides, if I were to dial the number listed in the trainee records, what would I have told him?
He was absent for the entirety of that week. The following week, I had another batch of new hires to train, so I had the chance to set aside my unspoken feelings for him for five days.
But though unspoken, the feelings—shameful as they were—remained like a benign growth gestating within me. It was for a time a source of irritation. I wanted very much not to have to feed it as I dealt with the new employees, as I pointed things on the whiteboard, as I spoke about the company that I loathe and was ironically fond of.
It remained within me. And it grew to the extent that I felt the need to let it out, whatever Ruben might say, however it may affect our future interactions. I had resolved to talk to him.
But when I was back at the prod the following Monday, I was suddenly struck by an awful silence. For a while, I wondered if it had to do with my decision, my shame. The voice of the few agents who had a call stood out among the silence. The absence of the usual babble of unoccupied agents and supervisors lent the long bars of light tacked to the ceiling of the prod with a wan gray glow, and the thermostat seemed to have been set to freeze the entire place. It was among these that the people in the prod moved, as if suspended in a thick, invisible muck. There was something in the atmosphere that compelled them to be slow and meditative. One agent removed his headset, head bowed. Another walked towards the door with gleaming eyes.
“What happened?” I asked the product trainer who sat next to me. He had a thick pair of eyeglasses, a perm, and a perpetually hunched posture. He was the sort with whom I really had not much reason to talk, despite being a trainer. A flash of surprise appeared in the eyes behind the glasses, which was promptly replaced—as he turned to me—by a look of commiseration.
He then said, in a hushed voice: “An agent was murdered.”
I thought, of course, that I misheard. So I asked: “What?”
“He was one of yours,” he said.
“What?” Then I seemed to have a grasp of the words. “Who?”
“Ruben.”
“Ruben?”
“Rivera. Ruben Rivera. He was murdered.”
I thought I misheard, yet again. I said: “That doesn’t sound right.” But the pounding in my chest had grown so loud that it obscured what my colleague had to say.
Which was this: “Talk to his TL.”
I was shaped by events I had done my best to forget: my being left behind by parents who never wanted a child, the abuse I’ve endured for decades from an adoptive family, the death of a close friend from the pandemic two years ago, even the recent return to power of a despot’s clan in the country’s highest government positions.
I ought to have something to say about them, if only because I wouldn’t be so hardened had these events failed to exist. But hardened I was. They divorced me from the need to recognize the things I used to care so much about. The shock and the pain had all been too much that soon I learned not to care. The less that I did, the less that anything could bring me to my knees.
Ruben was a lapse of judgement. He must have tricked me, compelled me to be drawn to his world that when I heard he was gone, my mind was ushered in a state of denial. It brought me back to the time when the man who took me in his home—when I was kicked out of another—broke a bottle of rum at the back of my head. When my best friend’s mother told me the words “He’s gone” through the phone. When I stood, with trembling hands, before the television—seeing through the numbers a glimpse into my people’s understanding of democracy.
It didn’t make sense.
It was supposed to, but it didn’t.
But I did talk the supervisor. I went to his station, and he took me out of the prod, to the lockers, where he retrieved his phone to show me a news clip he saved in his device’s browser. He was too shocked that he couldn’t tell me much about it. It had in fact been too much that the row we had became a thing of the past, and our present revolved around the news of Ruben being murdered by a man from New York.
The supervisor held up the phone for the two of us. On it was the face of a lady reporter, who said in a grating voice: “Bangkay na nang matagpuan ng mga awtoridad ang isang call center agent sa isang hotel sa Quezon City…”
Ruben met his end in a place he may have thought of to be harmless. He was found in a cheap hotel, tied on a bed without clothes, his life gone for three days. He wouldn’t have been found if only the man who killed him had elaborate plans to dispose of his body. The suspect was a Filipino in his forties. He was a U.S. citizen, balding with a few missing teeth. He had been interviewed, behind bars, after surrendering himself to the police. In the same high-pitched voice as he had in his only call to Phone Love, he told the reporter: “I’ve done what I wanted, and just don’t know what to do next. So I might as well surrender.”
The clip ended with the anchor telling the viewers of the prison where the suspect was to be held for now.
When the screen turned black, I caught my own reflection. My face looked listless. The supervisor, meanwhile, was weeping. He returned the phone to his locker. Then he turned to me to say: “I wish I could’ve done something.”
Wiping his eyes, he returned to the prod. I remained rooted in the lockers.
I didn’t know how long I stood in the lockers, frozen, before I found the strength to move.
I take pride in my capacity to make things happen. So instead of doing nothing when I learned of the news, I wrote some letters, filled out some forms, and drove to where the man was held when the approvals came.
What was I doing here, in the white-walled hall where visitors could talk to inmates? The air was stale. Each of the fans on the walls groaned with weight of dust and years, and the plastic tables and chairs had cracks and tiny islands of grime on them. I sat across the man who murdered Ruben and he sat there smiling. That smile provided a peek at the abyss that lay behind the broken fence that was his teeth, revealing as well the bright sheen of his eyes that seemed to have never known what remorse was. He looked exactly like the suspect interviewed in the news clip shown by the supervisor. I was tempted to see him as a manifestaton of evil, not by the virtue of his crime, but simply by the way he faced me that afternoon. The smile. The puzzling appearance of youth amid the rot and decay that he exhibited. Even the way the orange shirt and trousers issued by the facility clung to his flesh, like a second skin on the verge of shedding.
He was waiting for me to speak. Instead of asking what I imagined to be the question he expected (Why?), I said: “How?”
The smile disappeared for a while, in his surprise, but it quickly returned to show that he wasn’t upset but pleasantly surprised.
“You’re asking me, my dear strange friend, how I killed your friend?”
I wasn’t here to investigate the man’s motives. The act was done, and no amount of explanation could bring my “friend” back to life, nor could my knowledge of it prevent another blameless person from being murdered elsewhere. Let the law be bothered with all the that. I was here because I wanted to see his face, to hear his voice. For here was a man, with whom I had no reason to sympathize, and yet who did something I felt I had to better understand.
He made something happen.
I said: “Yes.”
“I’ll be happy to tell you, my friend.” This man—who married a Russian lady to be a U.S. citizen, who now had buckets of money to spend for a lawyer—responded with an even wider smile: “Money.”
With money, he said, he had the resource to rent some hackers while still in the U.S. People who could track people by all means possible. Then, when the lady finally died, he took the chance to head back to his “beloved country.”
“To finally meet the love of my life.” There was loftiness in the way he said those words. “I didn’t need to pay so much once I got here.”
All he needed was a visit to BPO buildings in the city, a few phone calls, until he finally heard the voice of Ruben. No need for another call. Just a chat with other agents online to ask which company hosts the Phone Love operations in Manila.
“When I had my answer, I made the visit,” he said. “And sure enough, there was my love. Oh, my love, I still remember how he walked out of his building that afternoon.”
It had all been easy after that. He had been told about Ruben’s other job on the weekends, when they were still on speaking terms a few years back, so he logged on to the app where Ruben usually found his customers within a given area. The man pretended to be another person. He found him in the app, talked to him, and they agreed on a price. Then he rented a room and waited—like a black widow—for the prey to walk into the nest he had paid for, with men he paid for as well to prevent Ruben from fleeing.
“And the rest is history,” the man across the table said.
There was something simple and disturbing in all that he told me. When I left, as I drove beyond the barbed fence of the facility, as I later travelled through the constricted veins of the city—its highways and inroads—I was struck by a feeling of contentment. As if amid the sight of bustling pedestrians, the impatient motorists’ incessant horns, and the business towers erected from glass and steel, I figured out the answer to a question that long had nipped at the fringe of my conscience.
In between the time that I met the suspect and the day the supervisor took me out of the prod to show me the news clip, I did something I never thought I’d do for any of my trainees: a house visit. I had looked into my records for Ruben’s address. I never managed to rid my computer of the files that had to do with the batch where he belonged. When I drove and finally reached the address, I realized it was only then that I’d have an actual glimpse of the kind of person that he was besides the worker that he had been.
“Thank you for coming,” a beautiful woman in her late twenties—around my age—croaked to me as I stood before the opened gate of the residence. Ruben had lived in a fairly decent housing project, the kind that didn’t have a guardhouse but was well-kept by both the inhabitants and the local government. While there were shanties squeezed between houses with concrete walls, the potholed road was almost clear of garbage and animal excrement, and the puddles on the asphalt weren’t brown and stagnant. It simply had rained.
Ruben’s house had a carless garage where people now sat nursing solemn conversations, on green plastic chairs. The chairs faced the casket. The woman, obviously grieving yet mustering the will to smile, led me to where Ruben lay.
“He was a great agent.” I said as we both stood and looked at the body beneath the glass pane. My condolences had already been said, and I could think of nothing else to tell the lady. When I had walked up to her by the gate, where she stood looking at a distance, I had at once figured out she was the wife.
“You know,” she now said beside me before her husband. “I never really understood what happened.”
Had I made my visit to the prison before that day, I might still be at a loss. I just said: “It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re his trainer, you said?”
“I am.”
“What was it you trained him for?”
I said phone calls.
“And what kind of calls?”
“Uhm.”
She didn’t wait for my answer. “Was he good at whatever he did, at least?”
I told her the truth. “He was the best there was.”
“I’m not sure what to feel about that,” she hugged herself, then surveyed the people on the plastic chairs. A lot of them looked like neighbors or relatives: old men and women, housewives and men you might see on side streets downing gin bilog. But then on some of them sat younger men, whose sharp clothes became a stark oddity in the casualness of the other wake attendees. One of them sat on the front row. He had shades, a black denim jacket, well-pressed jeans, and gleaming boots. He was occupied with his phone. The wife said: “Men came to the wake. Men I haven’t seen before, young and old, men I don’t think I’d like to talk to but had to. They look unapproachable.”
What she said made me glad that I opted to wear a plain black shirt and the most unremarkable pair of pants and shoes.
“I wish I could’ve known more about him before he left us,” she said. By him she meant the giant with the broad shoulders lying still before us in a box of glass and wood. By us she meant her and her daughter—a little girl in a shirt as black as mine who sat as well on one of the chairs nearest to the casket. She didn’t have the cherub-like smile she had in Ruben’s phone wallpaper. She looked old enough to understand what death was, and so she sat there, primly.
“There’s one thing I could tell you,” I said.
The woman looked at me, with what looked like beleaguered hope gleaming in her eyes.
“I may not know him as much as you do, but I’m sure…I am really sure…he did whatever he could for the two of you.”
On the Monday that followed my visit to the prison, I had another group of new hires to train.
I went through that day on auto-pilot. I introduced myself, the company, and hinted on the job they were to do. I also had them introduce themselves but I did my best not to listen or be drawn to anything they had to share.
Much later, in the afternoon, I silently sat on my chair as the young men I was training filed out of the door. I was at peace.
When everyone had left, I began drafting a resignation letter. I used the company’s desktop to write this letter, which was brief, and which at one point said:
“I have a lot of reasons to quit. But I think I’d be happier to say that I finally have no reason to be a part of your machine.”
The entire time that I was writing, I was thinking of Ruben. His face, his gait, his confidence and the way he later looked in his own casket. Before that class where he belonged, I was yet to meet a man like him. And I don’t think I’d want to meet another.
