The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  The camera was pointed at the bed. The green light still blinked: go. He stood in front of the camera and shrugged theatrically, since it didn’t matter now, since Doors would know, if Doors cared to know, that he’d been in here. He pulled out his log and wrote Kate Generato under Nellie Young. Then he left the room.

  What he needed was to get at the archive of footage, to find the tale it told, but he’d have to develop a tidy reason for why he needed access. It shouldn’t be too hard, but he was a little unnerved, lacking his usual calm. He could see this reflected in the curious expressions on the faces of those few early risers who passed him in the hall.

  Brandon lifted his hands to his cheeks and scratched at his growing stubble. So he’d head to the port-hall, instead, and find out for himself what was going on with the machines.

  Because Nellie Young must have been wrong. And Doors was always exaggerating. Brandon had been around enough ports to know that they were inert. They did not interfere with your free will; they could not suck you in as a black hole would. Those who left chose to do so. Consensual. The zippers could not unzip themselves. He’d go find the port, and he’d confirm.

  He put the little Moleskine log in his shirt pocket and walked quickly, his long arms stiff pendulums at his sides. A couple of guys wearing security badges nodded at him as he passed. Why did PINA have so much security anyway? At the gates, fine. But why were these security guards stalking the living quarters like armed hall monitors? He broke into a slow jog and then began to sprint (the floor caving gently with each step), and nearly smashed into Simon, who was also wearing a security badge and a holster at his hip, with a heavy-looking handgun. Its snap-on cover was unsnapped.

  Brandon saw Simon noticing that he had noticed the gun, and coughed to hide his surprise. Who would guns be for? It was just them.

  “You heading to yoga?” Simon asked.

  “Uh, yeah,” Brandon said. “I was supposed to meet someone.”

  Simon nodded. Brandon resisted the urge to say more. Simon did not ask, What’s the hurry? Instead, he grinned and said, “That was some party last night.”

  “Huh. Yeah,” Brandon said, walking on past with an apologetic wave.

  The green lights along the hall flashed with a faux-friendliness. We’re watching. We’ll keep you safe. We’re watching. He resisted the urge to knock them down, and when at last he reached the outer door, he burst into the quad.

  The tables from last night had been collapsed and stored, and over the turf was a rainbow-colored brickwork of yoga mats. Hundreds of Stablers were already arranged like origami: bent at the waist in the curved triangle of downward dog, or folded into lotus flowers, foot over knee, or balanced on one leg, in tree pose. He scanned for Doors, who was sure to be looking for him, about to pop out of nowhere with a fatherly clutch on Brandon’s shoulder. Maybe by now Suzanne would have talked to Doors, warned him that Brandon had discovered something and turned disloyal. Or perhaps Doors had already watched the footage from Kate Generato’s room, or tracked what Brandon had been searching for in the archive.

  Brandon circled the bodies, daring Doors to appear. People folded and unfolded. Children played in a corner, some of them also trying out their parents’ poses. Brandon knew exactly what Doors would say: It’s a beautiful thing we’ve created, Brandon. Don’t take beauty for granted. He would point at the cloudless blue above. And he would be right. Clear skies could be read as cosmic approval.

  Brandon made it to the other side of the quad and reached the innovation wing without spotting Doors. Or Zahra, whose tree pose he would have known anywhere, whose long arms and legs gave deeper meaning to the word limb. He would stop in at port-hall, and after he was done there, he’d find her. Maybe he’d get on his knees, pose like a hopeful knight. A gesture to mean: You are the love of my life. Come with me. “Don’t you want an adventure?” he’d say, and she wouldn’t be able to resist. Doors’ imagined words to him and the proposal to Zahra both ran through his mind now, long lines. You are the love of my life, come with me. We have a long road ahead of us. You are like a son to me. Don’t do what you imagine you should do. Darling. Daddy. Do what I tell you, good boy.

  He continued on, robotic, efficient, not yet feeling in his mind the urgency pounding in his chest. Finally he entered port-hall. Even now he expected that Doors would be standing inside waiting for him, but the hall was as hushed as an empty cathedral.

  The port stood in the center, nearly invisible, opalescent on its stand.

  Brandon laughed. It was phallic. A vibrator. A joke. The sound echoed, shrill and unmanly. He felt, as though he were a hound sniffing out a trace, that someone else had been there recently. He walked up next to the port, as close as he could get.

  There was one coppery hair on the pedestal. He picked it up.

  * * *

  —

  People had left in trickles. For a long time, their leaving had barely been noticeable—until things began to collapse: workers not showing up to clear debris on the highway, police not coming when called. What PINA called “the first wave” had included a flood of think pieces and blog posts and interviews and rants, and an unholy number of tweets about the merits of leaving or not, comparing the act of leaving to suicide. Protesters had surrounded PINA, like the Israelites marching around Jericho, hoping that by their will, the walls would fall. Some of them had camped in the surrounding woods for months, but none managed to get inside.

  One percent of the population left and you hardly knew it. But the so-called “second wave” was more frightening. The grip of society fell lank, like the hands of a patient whose anesthesia was taking effect. Even close to the PINA campus there was, along with the clicking of crickets and the howls of god knew what—mountain lions, bears?—a nightly chorus of gunshots and squealing tires. Then came the third wave: the grid went down and darkness expanded in every direction, until only Stable had power and light.

  PINA folks tried to make the best of the situation. New couples formed out of grief.

  “We did this,” Zahra had whispered to Brandon, only once, in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  —

  Brandon stood next to the port in the great hall, thinking of his last year of high school, when skinny, pale Brandon had lost his father. The man had gone into hospital for routine gall bladder removal and come out septic. His shivering and the protrusion of his wide eyes made him look like a person who had seen a terror from which he could not recover, and then, just as the fever seemed about to subside, he developed pneumonia. Brandon’s mother, after witnessing her husband dying in this crude and accidental way, just around the time Brandon was receiving his acceptances to Yale and Stanford and Princeton, took a leave from work and began a daily bourbon habit.

  “I’m in mourning!” she slurred on the phone.

  “Don’t look at me like that, you bitch,” she yelled at her sister, Elaine, who came over to the house with casseroles.

  “I can talk in front of him however way I want,” she said, clutching Brandon at the waist from her near-permanent seat at the kitchen table. “You don’t get to tell me.”

  Brandon floated through those days, unable to feel anything. He didn’t notice rain until it was dripping down his nose. One day his aunt Elaine picked him up for a drive on a Sunday morning. “You need to get out of that house for awhile,” she said. “It’s not healthy to be around that kind of grief.”

  That kind of grief. No word about his own grief. Unspoken between Brandon and his aunt was the concern that his mother’s mind would run off a cliff, into depression, into mania.

  Aunt Elaine took him to a place called Cross of the Fire, which turned out to be a church.

  “Mom wouldn’t like this,” he told her.

  Aunt Elaine wore her hair short and butchy, and she smiled at him in a way that resembled his mother’s, but with less sincerity. Meanwhile, Mom was alone at the table with her mug of acid. Aunt Elaine’s cheeks were like hamster cheeks, swoll
en with something hidden. She said, “Your cousins and your uncle don’t want to come to church either. But it’s wrong to dismiss a thing you haven’t tried for yourself.”

  Beware of religious zeal, his mother had told him. He said this to himself under his breath as he entered the building, a hex to counteract the manipulations of the usher in the suit who was smiling and shaking his hand, to counteract the effect of the poetry of the bulletin’s heading: Zeal for your house will consume me.

  “Do you think you are not worthy of God’s love? Who told you you were not worthy of God’s love?” This was all he could remember of the handsome preacher’s words. He argued in his head: My worthiness is not the issue. Chanting and swaying began. Beside him his aunt was sweating insanely, embarrassingly, as though she’d been poured over with oil, face slick, chin dripping, eyes squeezed shut. A man in the bank of seats ahead of them had turned around and they were clutching each other’s hands, talking in a language he didn’t understand. Later he found out this was speaking in tongues. The Holy Spirit was a flame that burned invisibly above your head, giving you powers. At the front, the preacher touched a woman on the forehead, and she fell down. It went on for hours. Heat emanated from Aunt Elaine’s body, and Brandon recoiled when she tried to take his hand.

  In the car afterwards, she acted as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. But he didn’t want to see her chubby-cheeked, overly familiar face. It was as though he had witnessed her doing some exotic sexual manoeuvre he hadn’t yet discovered in the dark and horny backrooms of his brain.

  “See, Brandon,” she told him as she shifted the car into gear, “God just wants to love you.”

  * * *

  —

  Through his years at Yale and into PINA, Brandon got daily e-mails from his mother. She told him always how proud she was, but he saw, too, how lonely she’d been since Dad died. Most of the time there was nothing new to say, and the e-mail was just a virtual wave of the hand. Rarely did they speak on the phone or in person.

  B,

  I don’t begrudge you for going to Yale, of course you had to go, I don’t begrudge you for taking the PINA job. I miss you a lot, though, and sometimes I think I should have come with you. Dad always said I was stubborn. Uncle Peter bought a port with god knows what financing, and of course Elaine is off sweating and praying and gibbering. What’s PINA not telling us? Do you know what’s going on with these things?

  Love, Mom

  Even with his own mother, he’d had to be careful what he said. He knew as well as anybody how not-private e-mail and phone calls were. In an early TED talk, his first viral one, Doors had proclaimed, “Privacy is the costliest, deadliest aspect of the American experiment. Good riddance!”

  So Brandon told his mother that the ports were very new and expensive, and it wouldn’t hurt to wait, and he hoped she understood what he meant.

  She wrote a month later.

  B,

  I miss your dad worse every day. Started working out and getting facials. You can probably understand why. You plant an idea like time travel in a grieving person’s head…I know it’s been eleven years. I’m stuck. I don’t know how it’s been so long. Visit soon.

  Love, Mom

  That e-mail sent a flare of anger up Brandon’s spine. His mother needed a proper friend and confidante. It was inappropriate for her to lay her pain on him. Later, guilt would take the place of rage; guilt would deflate him.

  B,

  I’m losing my resolve. Your Uncle Peter took off either through port or with that dental hygienist he’s been boffing or with the hygienist through port. Anyway, he’s gone and Aunt Elaine is blaming everybody but herself and God.

  What a strange time to be alive. I’m going to come out to see you, if you can’t get away. So proud of you. Hope you’re okay.

  Love,

  Mom

  * * *

  —

  PINA’s front atrium had once been a source of pride, the first face any important visitor to the campus would see. Light poured in from three storeys of glass, and commissioned works of art—pineapple sculptures in bronze and silver and glass—were arranged near expensive groupings of couches and chairs. Huge colourful canvases hung from the only wall, over the elevators. But around the time of that last e-mail from his mother, the atrium was peopled not with loungers but with guards—undertrained guys Doors had dressed in security uniforms. Sometimes Benji even took a shift. It was becoming difficult to leave or to come in uninvited.

  Brandon thought the security was paranoid, but he had needed to leave so he obediently flashed his badge and his key, gave his details, waited while the guard called Doors directly to confirm permission.

  He hadn’t heard anything from his mother in a couple of weeks, but the silence didn’t necessarily mean anything. She had said she would come out to see him, and he had urged her to follow through, suggesting travel by bus and train. The last e-mail he’d received was her ticket confirmation. Phones were down, Internet was increasingly unreliable, the late-in-the-day promise made by one company never to stop providing signals clearly broken—but at least he knew the ticket had been bought. So he drove out to the train terminal, alarmed by the quiet of the streets. At the terminal, pigeons hopping and loudly flapping were the only evidence of life.

  Clearly, at PINA everyone had been protected from the news. The Internet was an intranet, and nobody could find a newspaper or a reliable anchor on what was left of the intermittent broadcasts. Fox News was the only holdout, the only group still publicly frightening anybody. There was a joke at PINA that Fox News holding out only proved that to resist port was to be backward. Brandon had an image of he and Zahra and the rest of the twelve as the final crew of the Titanic, although things were of course not as catastrophic as that. There were ports aplenty, plenty of lifeboats to go around. Brandon had thought, back then, that they were just awaiting Doors’ word.

  He walked along the sidewalk up to the terminal, trying to trigger the automatic doors, which, it soon became clear, were not going to open.

  “Where the fuck is everybody?” The word everybody dangled, unheard. He ran around to the other side of the building, looking for a door to pull open here, or here, or here. He nearly tripped over a man with a suitcase curled up against a wall.

  “Ain’t nobody in there, man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that.”

  “My mom bought her ticket, like, a couple of weeks ago.”

  The man shrugged. “A couple of weeks is a long time.” He did not otherwise move. Sunglasses concealed his eyes, and the red cords of a first-gen PINAplayer trailed from his ears.

  “How did I not know about what’s happening here?”

  The man sized him up lazily. “Ain’t my job to make you believe.”

  Brandon reflexively pulled out his phone (ask PINA: Where did civilization go?). But of course there was no signal. In the rafters, the pigeons sat in a row, darting their heads. He tried to figure out how long it had been since he’d last left the compound. He’d not gone home to sleep in—holy shit—weeks.

  “Can it all change that quickly?”

  “Weren’t quick at all.”

  Brandon became aware of the man’s sour smell. “Are you okay?”

  The man smiled, revealing black teeth.

  Brandon felt around in his pockets and left a few dollars in the man’s cap. As he drove away, it dawned on him with hot embarrassment that the money was worth nothing to anybody anymore.

  * * *

  —

  Zahra was beside him when, days later, Doors gave his last public speech to the remaining 10 percent. “Welcome to a new, better, more optimistic age. For all of you who have stayed with us, I congratulate you on your intelligence and foresight and good luck. To us!” People leapt out of their seats like worshippers in that Pentecostal church. Tears were streaming, arms raised, and there were even a few frenzied screams.

  Zahra’s thin fingers were loose
in his hand, and he absently pressed on them one by one. He had felt numb since his return, without his mother, from the terminal.

  “You have not been abandoned!” The people’s excitement fuelled Doors. “You have persevered!”

  * * *

  —

  Brandon realized suddenly, as though startled into waking up, that his hand was on the port’s zipper. Small nub, like a clitoris. His finger and thumb squeezing it. He thought: You want to go home. You can go home. Back to the place where you belong. With detachment, he watched himself unzipping the port, slowly, erotically.

  All the people everywhere, they had simply gone through it. It was so restful; it was so easy. His mother had found peace there, perhaps, had slipped into one and gone away. His aunt, his uncle, his cousins, his first love, Cecile, all his later loves, everybody with whom he’d played dodgeball, sat in labs, opened up the cavities of dead animals, tried to write code, read poetry. Every single incidental player in his insignificant life. Even the man sweating with his aunt in the church, maybe even that preacher with the high forehead. Had the Fox News anchors resisted, in the end? Would he ever know if they had?

  The philosopher Berkeley had believed—preposterously—that things existed only if they were perceived. But now this idea didn’t seem so preposterous. The people he remembered had only existed when his gaze was on them; he had removed his gaze and—no—no—now he was thinking like a megalomaniac; now he was thinking like Doors. Still, it was as hard to believe in the existence of the sweaty man in the church as it was to believe in the existence of strangers.

  Do not be afraid. The sentence seemed to hold him there, his finger and thumb on the zipper’s nub. A port had never tempted him before, and now it was hypnotic, nearly irresistible, the edge of a cliff on which he barely had a toehold. With great effort, against a current, he pushed himself to walk to the other end of the port-hall and out.