Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  The commander, he remembered, had even brought his own water with him. When the mayor’s assistant offered the commander a drink, one of his own tight-buttoned underlings swept forward with a glass and filled it for him from a canteen. Did the commander think the water from the office of the mayor was undrinkable?

  He sat on the couch and waited for Christopher. It was intensely sunny out and dry as a goddamn bone. The whole city out the window was a baking hot desert. There would be unrest to deal with, amid the normal schedule of concerns. He closed his eyes to ward off the sun glare on the television set. Christopher abhorred the commander, and had visited friends close by while the meeting was in progress. He wished he’d return soon.

  The only explanation that he could think of—it came to him suddenly—was that the commander suspected that he himself, Mayor Bartlett, might try to poison him. He held still, in mid-motion, his head tilted in revelation, as the discovery dawned on him, surprised at its implications and its possibilities. And then he laughed for a long time afterward.

  They’d never officially started sharing a room together—perhaps because of the foreboding, serious, and protective presence of Bea. Or perhaps they’d never shared a room because Renee was too preoccupied, or wanted to keep their relationship a secret, or because Zach had never demanded it.

  So he lived in the map room. He worked on the project obsessively and Renee would find him asleep at a table at one or two or three in the morning and take him to his makeshift bed, a ratty sleeping bag in the corner behind the couch, there she’d strip him down. Or she’d be wandering around the house early when all was still silent and slip into his bed and they’d fuck.

  An appropriate word for it, Zach thought: fuck. The word had its sexiness, but there was mostly a utility to it, a violence even. There’d always been a sort of violence to Renee—an unpredictable, usually charming suddenness, a physicality, but the job was changing her, he thought.

  The time he spent here was straight out of his teenage geek self’s wildest dreams. Sex at all hours with a wild girl, and a game-like puzzle where he was actually making a difference in the world. The chief of intelligence, the conductor of information. But as was the case with all teenage fantasies, he supposed, things turned out to be more complicated in real life.

  Of the nights they’d been together—and he had to sift back through his mind, through the string of late nights and early mornings, through the behemoth project, for the few nights they hadn’t been together—there hadn’t been any variation to them. There were no moods in their relationship anymore. There weren’t intimate, slow nights or nights of idle sex or much talking at all. She came to him and he could see how deeply preoccupied she was, transported and unreachable, exhausted beyond measure by the day’s work and the night’s nightmares.

  At first it was nothing. He held her while she slept, though he longed for a moment of slowness or tenderness with her. But more and more he felt he was only the object of a cold, endless hunger.

  He enjoyed it some, sure. But it haunted him, flustered his concentration when he should be working, made him pine for the early days of their relationship. It created a mass of sorrow in his ribcage, so that every time he saw her it ached and throbbed like some small animal living there, awake only in her presence.

  After, when she fell asleep finally against him, in the times where he could reach above his own self, he felt sorry for her. Her time was no longer hers, she was getting used up by the country she gave everything to, and so of course this was a sort of recourse, and he tightened his grip around her.

  They fought fiercely and often.

  He told her the new clinic was in the wrong spot, that she was too hasty.

  She told him nothing would ever get done if it was up to him.

  He explained how it wouldn’t have to ever get redone once it was done.

  She told him he was stubborn and that he never got out in the neighborhood, he was a goddamn homebody and it was leading to incompetence.

  He told her she was arrogant and regal, running a dictatorship like some queen, that her aggressiveness would lead to violence, that she was trying to build everything in a day and it would end in ruins.

  Is this about Sherwood or about us? she said.

  Sherwood, he yelled.

  You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, she said.

  Yes I do, he said, but you’re too megalomaniacal to see it.

  Then she threw her mug at him and struck him in the forehead.

  The two Rangers in the room disappeared through any available entrance like a wind.

  When Bea finally came in, Zach was sitting on the couch tentatively mapping out the new bruised terrain on his forehead, and Renee was standing at the window looking at the giant dead hedge that sat like a castle wall at the front of the house.

  “You OK, Zach?” Bea said.

  “It hurts,” he said honestly, rubbing the swollen spot. “She threw a cup at me.”

  Renee turned and walked from the room. Her footsteps retreated loud and angry down the stairs and out of the house.

  “She’s under a lot of stress,” Bea said.

  “I know! That’s what we argued about. More or less.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t mean it,” Bea said.

  Zach spread his hands and stood up, not caring who heard him. “She threw a cup at me.”

  “But Zach, you’ve got to understand.”

  “I do understand! I totally understand.” He started to pack his few possessions, stowed behind the couch, into his backpack. How long had he been there, waiting for a change? A month?

  “What are you doing?”

  “But you know what? I don’t have to be cool about it. She doesn’t get a special exemption. You don’t resolve arguments by throwing shit at people.” Zach winced as he saw Bea try to make some kind of rebuttal in Renee’s defense and come up with nothing. “Anyway.” He put his hands over his face. “Maybe she’d be better off with some solo time.”

  “Zach, please.”

  “Why are you in here making her case—I’m flattered, honestly. Not in a million years would she ever do this.”

  “Because, goddamnit—” Bea gestured to the walls covered in maps, to all of his work. “I’m not making her case, I’m making this case.”

  Zach looked up and felt an immense remorse, but he knew he had to leave, that he could not back down. It was devouring him, the house, the map room, Sherwood, Maid Marian. “I need to check on my house, Bea. I need to reset. When I hang out around her I feel like I’m a subject, like I’m competing for her love with forty thousand other people.”

  “So do I,” Bea said quietly.

  He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “You know what happens here, the Rangers do.”

  “Zach,” Bea said, and he was surprised at the tone of her voice, so often toneless. There was an edge of panic to it. She was afraid he’d leave. He wondered again if there was something he didn’t know, information he didn’t have. He looked at the walls, studied the trouble maps and resource indicators and realized that of course he didn’t have all the information. He’d been privy to the primary channel, the main floodgate of information, but there were other channels that went over his head. Renee could easily have her own spy network without his knowledge. She could be bribing public officials, could be bringing in weapons, operating with the government, anything. Would she do that? Perhaps there was even another map room. It was his shortsightedness that led him to believe his data was all the data. He stood there for a moment, stunned by this possibility.

  “What do you know, Bea?” Zach whispered.

  Bea looked taken aback. She turned away slightly, as if ready to flee. “I know you can reach her sometimes, that’s all.”

  “Is something else going on in Sher
wood I don’t know about?”

  Bea shook her head at him, her eyes steady and complex, and then she shrugged.

  Zach looked around the room again and tried to memorize it. No, he thought, this was an information minister’s paranoia, wasn’t it? This was only about him and Renee, that’s where the complexity was. It was too late for him to back down, he thought, for his own self. He realized that deep down it was tantrum instincts and pride that made him go. He wanted her to realize she needed him. The system here was delicate and finely tuned, and he didn’t know to what fate he left it.

  Looking at the resource indicators he saw they were all near the top. As a whole they said: The nation is thriving! At least according to the scale in which he’d drawn the indicators. They said: The government is rich and powerful. They said: We’re winning.

  “Bea,” he said, “do me a favor—redraw the scale on those indicators. All of them. Double or triple them. Understand? Like for water—draw it up to, I don’t know, a half million gallons.”

  “But we don’t have that much storage.”

  “Exactly—perfect. We don’t control the data, we control the data’s perception. It’s important, OK?”

  Bea nodded and Zach stuck out his hand and she awkwardly shook it and he pulled her into a hug.

  “Please. Are you sure?” she said.

  He nodded. “I’ll probably be back in a few days.”

  Zach turned and left, leaving Bea alone in the nerve center. His head hurt but it felt good to be outside. The dust was light in the air and the sun shone. A slight cold edge to the air was pleasant and he had to remind himself that autumn brought no rains any more.

  If you didn’t count the backyard, he’d been away from the house very few times in the last couple of weeks. He’d poured too much into the job, and he felt the knot of sorrow contract upon finding one of Renee’s arguments already turn to truth. He found his bicycle and set off for home.

  As he rode through the streets of Sherwood toward the border he observed the depth of the changes. There were no burnt automobiles or piles of garbage in the streets. Children played in their yards. At one corner ten people with paintbrushes painted a giant mandala, one of the beautification projects. But most of all there was a changed feeling in the air. A month was a long time.

  Jamal received word that his father wanted to see him. He wound his way through the big house to Gregor’s office and stood outside of the door for a moment in the busy hallway.

  “He’s in,” a Ranger said as he passed.

  “Thanks,” Jamal said and still did not enter. Being called into the office was rare, and there were only a few reasons for it. Jamal knocked once and then entered.

  Gregor sat behind an oak desk that had come with the house. He gripped his tobacco pipe in one hand, though he’d given up smoking cigarettes a decade earlier after heart surgery, and tobacco was difficult to find anymore. He liked having the pipe in his hand. The curvy bowl of it fit the circumference of his forefinger and thumb perfectly and he enjoyed having an object to point directions with, as if the pipe itself held some share in commanding the armed and unarmed forces of the government of Sherwood. Conductors had their batons, cowboys their pistols, professors their pencils, and so he felt justified in taking up a rod of some sort with which to execute his business.

  “Sit,” Gregor said, and with his pipe end pointed to the chair in front of the desk.

  Jamal’s relationship with his father was complicated, but his wholly separate—in his mind—relationship with the same man, as his general, was not. There were two separate tracks this conversation could ride on. One train was simple, direct, its compartments clean and uncluttered by familial ties and a mutual relationship with his mother. In the other train, each car held a different chaotic story, in which no clear understanding of the train as a whole could be gleaned. In that train his mother and older brother entertained court, aunts and uncles barbecued or fought, and in each played out a scene from the last thirty years that was on permanent archive in his mind.

  In one, he is walking through the living room, bearing a small bag of groceries his mother tasked him with carrying. There is a white woman lying facedown on the floor, her small skirt hiked up to her waist and nothing else on. She is asleep or unconscious or dead, and Jamal stares at her, wondering if perhaps she was a neighbor who had accidentally gone home to the wrong house. Or was this something white people do? She was pretty, but her mouth was open and the drool at the corner of her lip was unsettling. Mom? He called but she was still out at the car. Dad? There was a sound from the bathroom and in there he found his father, naked and in the tub. In the toilet there was the rank sloppy jumble of something thrown up. Dad? He said again. He remembered his father opening one eye falteringly, and then his eyes rolled back into his head and Jamal screamed.

  There was a whole era of drug addiction and infidelity to contend with, until his mother’s death straightened his father out.

  In another car he walks through as a grown man, serving tea to his father and his father’s enemy, a man named Barstow, as they finally agree not to fight any more. In this, he is angry at his father for not reaching out and snapping the man’s neck, the man who by proxy has been his own enemy for seven years, since his exit from adolescence. The man who had taken his brother’s life. Barstow was a wiry snake of a man, his hair in cornrows, his teeth full of gold. After surgeons had opened up his own heart, Gregor had had a change of heart about war, even as he’d won. He brought Barstow in for a truce, for peace in the neighborhood. Gregor’s presence—and that’s what Jamal remembers most, the presence of a man who could straighten out the most curved of wicked sticks—made his enemy trust him. In Gregor’s presence, a man became different, better. You wanted to please Gregor. And you did not want to be his enemy.

  Gregor tapped the bowl of his pipe on his desk, making a solid knocking sound. “Three Rangers have disappeared,” he said. “You know anything about that?”

  Jamal scooted in his chair, understanding which Gregor he was talking to, and feeling a nervousness over his charge. “When, from where?” Jamal said.

  “All three were working in the Woodlawn neighborhood. Two street watchers and one border patrol.”

  “What do we know?”

  Gregor waved his pipe in a dissatisfied, dismissive gesture. “They’re poorly trained. Who knows, they could have gotten lost. They didn’t come back yesterday and didn’t show up this morning.”

  Jamal waited for instruction with uneasiness. They, his father and he, had a history with Woodlawn.

  “They could be sleeping something off.” Gregor glanced then at Jamal, eyeing him over the top of his reading glasses, and Jamal saw the subtle concession, knew that they’d just seen through the train’s window a vision of that other chaotic engine running up the mountainside, as if to say, “some day we’ll ride that one.”

  “I need you to go find them. If we’re having defections, I need to know immediately. If someone is disappearing us, we need to know even sooner.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jamal stood up.

  “Take two of your own with you.” Gregor tapped his pipe on the desk and Jamal reached for the door, musing that he could never tell his general his pipe habit looked ridiculous.

  “And Jamal? Don’t go falling under some fantastic notion that this is happyland, OK? Everybody else here has gone all dizzy off their own self-satisfied euphoria. They are grudges out there. We’re recent from violence. The reflex runs deep.”

  Jamal went to the map room to pull the last week’s notes on Woodlawn before he went to investigate.

  When he entered there was a squabble going on between Bea and another woman about, as far as he could tell, handwriting legibility.

  “Everybody,” Jamal said in greeting and was roundly ignored. The map room was a place of wonder for him, but as far
as he could tell it made everyone batty who worked there, down to the last man. Zach was a nice enough guy, but sometimes he felt like he’d have better luck talking to a bear, were there any bears left and were one inclined to speak on national security issues. The man’s brain was turned inside out.

  He asked where Zach was.

  A quiet spread over the room.

  Jamal approached Leroy but the man moved away as if there were a pole attached to each of them, and Jamal’s forward motion pushed him an equal distance away. “Leroy?” Jamal said, one finger up in the air, but Leroy turned away again, as if he’d not spoken at all. Jamal stood awkwardly under the Woodlawn map and wondered if the map room had taken an extra dose of crazy.

  Bea continued to reprimand the Ranger, and Jamal waited his turn.

  “—but nobody uses the symbols. They don’t make any sense to me.”

  “Don’t make sense to you. Exactly! I don’t care if they make sense to you, just fucking use them. Can I help you Jamal?” Bea said, sounding like a diner waitress on the 3 a.m. shift.

  “Hey Bea—yeah—is Zach around?”

  “Zach is gone.”

  “Like disappeared?” Jamal said and a sudden shiver of fear went up his legs.

  “No no no, gone. He left, went home, quit.”

  Jamal noticed for the first time the changed demeanor of the room. The massive box of unprocessed notes, the chaotic work table, the floor covered in a coat of discarded data. “These?” he pointed at Zach’s dashboard of resource indicators, which he took much comfort in.