The
Suicidal
Factory

“A few more days and I’ll be dead.”

That was the last thing he said.

I never got to ask him the question I had carried into that factory: What is the meaning of carrying on a mission when you already know the ending is doomed?

I had gone there because a woman I used to work with had done me a favor.

In return, I agreed to go to the factory and find someone for her. She was relieved when I offered to go, partly because she would not have to go alone, though I would only understand the reason later. 

The factory stood halfway up a mountainside.

It seemed to be the company I had once worked for. They were racing to build a batch of cars.

Only after I entered did I understand the difficulty of what they were attempting.

The schedule was impossibly tight. The pressure was enormous. The environment was brutal and dangerous. 

Floor after floor had been built outward from the mountain’s flank: iron smelting, part-casting, assembly. Perhaps the pressure came from executives above, from a product launch, a strategy, some promise that had already been made to the world.

But the harder people worked, the more impossible the task became.

I waited at the edge of the mountainside, just outside the factory fence, and watched as the factory kept pushing its own borders farther outward, reaching toward the cliff’s edge.

The sliver of ground where I stood grew narrower and narrower, as though the factory itself were slowly pushing me off the mountain.

Then I went inside.

I met a man.

Almost immediately I felt that things were worse than I had imagined.

I asked him why they worked this way — under such pressure, in such suffocating, exhausting, dangerous conditions. Why were they risking a landslide? Why were they allowing the cast-iron towers to reach the point where they might explode into fire?

Then I saw his hands.

They were beautiful hands — strong, well-boned, with a certain elegance in their shape — but covered in wounds.

They were hands carrying their own story.

I asked if I could photograph them.

Just the hands. Not his face.

His answer was a kind of desperate, all-or-nothing surrender. I no longer remember his exact words. Only that he told me he had once been a man who had dreams.

He said he did not expect to die this way.

Then he left.

He disappeared through a door on the upper level.

Somehow, I understood.

This was not simply a factory with dangerous working conditions. It was, truly, a suicidal factory.

Every second the workers rushed to finish the cars, the factory’s fragile plastic walls pushed farther toward the cliff.

Eventually, one of these things would happen:

    the factory itself would become too heavy to hold its own weight and fall into the bottomless mountain;

    the dangerous casting stations would explode and crush everyone inside;

    or the flames from the smelting floor would rise and seal every living thing inside a mountain of fire. 

The truth was simple.

The closer they came to finishing the project, the closer they came to their own destruction.

And that man knew it.

I took a makeshift elevator down.

Someone was beside me — an assistant, or perhaps a friend — someone who seemed to have been accompanying me the whole time, though I had not noticed him until then.

On a lower floor we met an administrative girl.

I told her what I had seen, what I was afraid of.

She said this floor was safe.

She said it as though she genuinely believed it would remain standing when the rest of the factory came down.

From her I also learned that the man with the wounded hands might be the CEO, or some senior executive, the one I was supposed to look for. 

Then I met a young worker.

He was good-looking, but his face carried a subtle, deep sorrow.

His head was bent over some part he was assembling. Without looking up, he told me, almost casually, as though he had calculated the project’s timeline himself:

“In four to six days, we’ll all be dead.”

I tried to comfort him.

I told him this floor was safer.

He looked up at me.

There was something in his face — a calm, barely visible despair, the look of someone who had already seen through to his own fate.

For a split second, I saw in that face a rare moment of cinema.

And once again, I had no strength to lift the camera toward a despair that seemed to come from somewhere too deep in the soul to be filmed.

“A few more days,” he said. “And I’ll be dead.”

I knew he was right.

I could feel it — the hopeless, depressive energy of the whole factory, of a world walking itself toward the abyss, toward a ruin from which there would be no return.

And along with that man’s dreams, that young worker’s hopes, the secret loves and sorrows carried by every soul inside the factory — all of it would fall when the factory fell.

…

(Excerpt from a longer work. For the full text or to discuss publication or adaptation, please get in touch.)