Reclamation

by Gregory L. Beam

  Dresden squints at her. “Not the whole time.” He begins wagging a finger, like he’s just caught wise to something. “You had the door halfway closed when you went to the bathroom before.”

  “Oh, please. There’s no phone in the bathroom.”

  “Well, something is going the fuck on here!”

  “It was probably a noise complaint,” Val says.

  Dresden snorts. “The pig said it wasn’t. Says they got a call about some suspicious activity.”

  Val closes her eyes and sighs, gathering her patience. “Our neighbors are passive-aggressive like that.”

  “What do you mean, passive-aggressive?”

  “They’ll call the police because of the noise, but they don’t want you to know that they complained. So they just say there was suspicious activity in the area.”

  “Suspicious activity?” Dresden echoes.

  “They do it all the time,” says John.

  “The music is pretty loud,” says Stanley.

  Dresden stands there for a moment, looking ready to explode, then tromps over to the stereo and cuts the sound. He starts pacing back and forth. “Something’s going on here. I can smell it. And I don’t like it.”

  Stanley goes over to him. “Why don’t you call—”

  “I’m gonna put a call in to base.” Dresden looks around, head swaying like a hyena’s. “Now where the hell’d I…”

  Stanley nods to the bookshelf on the far side of the room, where Dresden set his phone earlier. Dresden gets the phone, dials, and holds it to his ear. A moment later, he flips it closed. “Went straight to fucking voicemail.”

  “Why don’t you leave a message?”

  “What would be the point in leaving a fucking message?” He gestures dramatically to the nearest surveillance camera. “He can see every-fucking-thing that’s going on in here! I’m telling you, man, something ain’t right.” He taps his foot in agitation, his face growing red, the veins on his neck bulging like just-fed snakes.

  Then, out of nowhere, a calm and steadiness come over Dresden. His foot stops tapping. His breathing slows. He looks up at Stanley with an expression that’s equal parts determination and mischief.

  “We gotta make a move,” he says.

  Stanley looks at him, aghast. “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re going ahead with the next phase of the plan.”

  “But we ain’t got the order yet!”

  “Look, Stan, we need to assume that the chain of command has been compromised. Which leaves us with two options: abort or move ahead independently. And you know I would sooner break my fucking legs than abort this operation. So the only option is to push forward, with or without orders. I say we send the transmission.”

  John watches dumbly as the men argue, making no attempt to hide their deliberations from him and Val.

  “But we don’t have the script yet,” Stanley says.

  “Script? Who needs a script? I’ve been swimming in this shit so much the past few months, I can talk better lines than frogger13, frogger20, frogger-fuckin’-a-thousand. I know exactly what to say.”

  “I don’t know, man…”

  “What other choice do we got, Stan?”

  Stanley thinks. “Maybe base is just temporarily out of contact. Maybe we should give it five minutes, see if they come back online.”

  “That sounds like some pansy shit to me.”

  “They could be pissed that we acted on our own.”

  Dresden sniffs. “Okay,” he says, “five minutes. And then I’m making the call.” He goes off into the kitchen. He returns a moment later with a fresh beer. As he pops the cap, his phone buzzes. He pulls it out and opens it. A puzzled expression forms on his face as he reads the message.

  “What does it say?” says Stanley. “Is it from frogger13?”

  Dresden shakes his head. “I don’t recognize the number. Says it’s ‘Mobile Outpost #4.’ It says, ‘Have been in contact with base. Momentary setback, non-fatal. Take no action until you receive orders otherwise. Repeat, TAKE NO ACTION.”

  Dresden stares at the phone.

  “Well,” says Stanley, looking relieved, “there you go. So we’ll just sit tight until—”

  “No,” says Dresden, slapping the phone shut. Stanley looks confused. “Don’t you see what’s going on here, Stan? This is a test.”

  “What?”

  “They’re testing us, see if we got enough brains and balls to do it ourselves.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Look, Stan, the whole idea behind this operation is that every unit is supposed to be able to function independently. The frogger13 I know would never ask us to stand down.”

  “You don’t know him. You’ve only—”

  “If we sit here with our thumbs up our butts, awaiting orders, then we’re missing the point. This is a test to help them figure out which operatives can bring the goods and which ones they need to cut loose. Either that or base has been compromised. Either way, this is our moment—the moment to prove how useful we are to the movement. Send the message up the chain of command that their boys here on Moon Drive, we got initiative, that we can get the job done without someone holding our hands.”

  A look of deep concern clouds Stanley’s face. “I don’t know…”

  “Look, Stan, we’re standing at the plate here. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let that ball fly past me. If I’m going out, I’m going out swinging.” He puts a hand on Stanley’s shoulder. “I’m telling you, man—we got this.” Dresden smiles up at Stanley, his eyes flaring with anticipation.

  Sheldon Merriwether is thinking about children again. Not his own (he doesn’t have any), but children in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Indonesia, and other impoverished parts of the world. Children with cleft palates, skin diseases, flies on their eyelids. Children with sunken cheeks and tattered clothes; children with no shoes.

  The thought has been intruding more and more lately, the latest and most insistent manifestation of an underlying anxiety, telling him that he ought to be doing something more with himself, that he ought to be helping people, trying to make a difference in the world instead of… instead of… what? How would he even describe what he’s doing these days? What he’s been doing for the past two years? Dithering? Foundering? Flailing? What does one call this: living with two loser roommates in Portland, watching their rent go up each autumn, cruising the clubs on the weekends, drinking tall boys of PBR, eating mostly vegan, joining a farm-share, signing up with the League of Young Voters and the Maine Green Party, occasionally volunteering for some local political candidate who seems marginally less corrupt than the rest of them? What does it all add up to?

  Nothing, that’s what. What a joke.

  A call comes in on line one. Sheldon presses the button to answer and leans back in his chair. “Thank you for calling WMME News 11, Real Maine News for Real Maine People. Do you have a newsworthy event to report?”

  The woman on the other end of the line sounds old and befuddled. “There are some men across the street. They’re doing something to the trees.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I thought you might want to send someone out here to check it out.”

  “Could you tell me exactly what these men are doing to the trees, ma’am? So far as you can make out.”

  “They’re sort of, you know, pruning them. Except I don’t know that they’re supposed to be. They’re using very large shears, and… I wasn’t going to say this, but they look like some of those refugees. The Somalis.”

  “Are these your plants the men are pruning, ma’am?”

  “No, I told you—they’re across the street.”

  “All right, ma’am, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you give me your name and phone number, and I’ll pass this along to our chief arboreal correspondent. If she thinks there’s a story here, she’ll give you a ring.”

  “I’m very concerned.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “They say th
at if you see something, you should—”

  “And you have. The community thanks you.”

  After pretending to take the woman’s contact information, Sheldon hangs up the phone. He shakes his head, chuckling, in part at the old bat on the phone, but more so at the course his life has taken—to be, at twenty-nine, a phone operator for a local network news agency in Portland, Maine (the “74th largest news market in the country!”), far from home or anyone he’s known for more than a couple of years.

  Why did he ever leave Brooklyn, his shared loft in Bushwick, the Gowanus start-up where he was beginning to put his masters in communications to good use? Why had he felt a burning desire to connect with “real folks,” only to discover that Southern Maine is giving the ‘Wick a run for its hipster money, with more craft breweries per capita than anywhere in the Western hemisphere and enough locally roasted coffee to coat half the coast in hazelnut & toffee notes? Why had he accepted his then-girlfriend’s offer to move back to her home state? Why has he stayed here since their break up two years ago, keeping a job whose honest description has shifted from “entry-level” to “dead-end,” his chief accomplishment to date being to procure a dollar-fifty raise (one big Andy Jackson an hour now—yah!)?

  In the meantime, the start-up he left has had its IPO, and the college buddy who brought him on board now owns condos in both Williamsburg and San Francisco. He recently tagged Sheldon in a Facebook post announcing that he’ll be taking his yacht on a long trip up the Eastern seaboard, just in case Sheldon feels like meeting up for a beer when he briefly alights in Rockland, before continuing on to Nova Scotia.

  (Sheldon politely declined. Boats, he said, just aren’t his thing.)

  The girl who had convinced him to come to Maine with her had desired, it turns out, to return not only to her hometown but also to her old boyfriend, and Sheldon had a week and a half to find a new living situation after she let the ax fall. He ended up in a dumpy little place up near the promenade that he can afford neither to fix up nor to move out of. It’s a good location, at least, but every time he looks out his window at the bay, he wonders what the heck he’s doing there. He thinks every day about cutting his losses and going back to NYC, but he can’t see what the point in that move would be, except to drain his piddling savings. His prospects there have dried up as surely as his prospects here never materialized. Maybe he should just head back home to Cincinnati (the obvious downside to that option being that he might literally kill himself).

  Then the faces of all the children he could be saving pop up in his imagination. He ought to join the Peace Corps. Or Teach for America. Move to Nepal and set up shop in some remote village, sharing what he’s learned as a member of America’s educated class (a bachelor’s from Amherst is still worth something, isn’t it?). He could teach them the ways of the West and receive in turn their ancient folk wisdom—the kind of things that aren’t written in any books.

  God, he needs… well, maybe not any of those things, but something. There’s got to be something more than this: being a generically progressive No-I’m-Not-a-Hipster, screening the calls coming into a local TV station, getting laid every couple of months after an emotionally groping Tinder date, the whole project of sexual conquest leaving him feeling like there’s a pile of pencil shavings slowly amassing in his belly.

  In short, Sheldon Merriwether does not like what his life has become.

  Line two lights up. He hits the button. The hollow echo of a sigh passes his lips. “Thank you for calling WMME News 11, Real Maine News for Real Maine People. Do you have—”

  His greeting is interrupted by a voice, speaking in a mechanically distorted bass register, the kind you sometimes hear on Dateline NBC or in Hollywood heist films. “You will listen, and you will report,” the deep voice says. “You will not ask questions. You will not make requests.”

  “Do you have a newsworthy incident to report?”

  A slight pause. “You will not ask questions. You will not make requests.”

  “Is this a prank call, or—”

  “We are representatives of the Reclamation, the largest coordinated effort in modern history to take back control of our country from the liars and the lobbyists holding it hostage. This night of September 14th, 2016, we make our presence known both to those forces that would oppose us… and to those who might join us. Do we have your attention?”

  Sheldon sits forward in his seat. He looks from side to side at the neighboring cubicles. The few folks who are in the office at this time on a Sunday aren’t interested in his conversation. “Yes,” he says, “you have my attention.” He looks at a light on the side of the phone to make sure that the conversation is being recorded.

  “Good. We have units deployed at strategic locations across the country, from Maine to Hawaii, ready to seize our nation’s seats of power. The voice you hear is an agent operating within your own area, stationed at a location yet to be disclosed. More details will be shared later on. For now, know that it is the home of certain perpetrators of civic, economic, and human rights abuses.

  “Let me be clear: we are not calling to make demands. We are calling to announce our presence and to let both the people and the powerful know that this movement, now that it has begun, cannot be stopped. I have no doubt that you will be receiving similar correspondences from others in our movement. We will ring the bell loudly so that all may hear. Whether or not your organization heeds our message and takes action to spread the news of this event is immaterial. You will hear and see and feel our presence before long. That is all for now. Expect to hear more from us soon. Transmission over.”

  “Wait a second!” Sheldon says. “Please, just tell me—”

  But the line is dead. The caller has hung up. Sheldon listens back to the conversation, and then again. It came from a restricted number. He has no way to determine the source and no reason to suspect that it was anything but a hoax. Of course it was a hoax. A stupid prank. There’s no way this could be real. Absolutely no way.

  But if it were…

  By God, something might actually be happening here. And if he plays his cards right, he could position himself right at the epicenter of it. If he can’t find work that’s meaningful, work that sends him home with his heart and soul filled at the end of the day, he can at least do something that will get him noticed. Get him some attention. Hell, that seems to be the only currency that anybody goes for these days. And if he can’t beat ‘em, then why not join ‘em?

  No. He chastises himself for allowing the thought to pass through his mind. He’s not about to slip-slide into that toxic YouTube culture, seeking his 15 seconds of fame, drying up before he’s wet, begging for someone—please, oh God, someone!—to notice him. That kind of thinking, that kind of lifestyle, is so far divorced from any idea of human well being that he’s willing to consider, it’s absurd. It’s literally insane, living to get noticed by other assholes who are living to get noticed by other assholes who are living to get noticed by… ad infinitum. A whole society of voyeur-exhibitionists out to monetize their own depravity—how could he consider, even for a second, getting on board that sensationalist, tabloidal circus train?

  Then again… this thing did just drop in his lap. It’s not like he went out looking for it. It’s not like he did anything unethical or personally compromising to get his hands on it. His hands are clean. And if he doesn’t capitalize on this thing, someone else is sure as hell going to. Perhaps he can put this lead to better use than the next guy, use it as a platform for more worthy endeavors. Make his name, and then make a difference.

  If he’s serious about this, he’ll have to find a way to do it outside the auspices of WMME News 11.

  He plays back the conversation once more, putting his cell phone against the earpiece to make his own recording of it. He’s not about to pass this one up the ranks and let someone else take credit for his scoop when it runs on the 6am news. He’s going to find another way to play this.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Black
Out

  11:46 p.m.

  Darkness. A moment of swirling, nauseous panic. Light flickering in her cloudy field of vision, sparks like fragmented synapses in her barely conscious brain.

  Coming to. Feeling cool, smooth concrete on knees, on hands, string of spit/blood/snot bubbles reaching down below her mouth. Arms thrashing against the confusion.

  Footsteps. Boots. He’s there. Not sure who he is, but knowing it’s bad. Blurred view of legs like tree trunks standing in front of her, then off to one side. Feeling them against her ribs.

  Get out of here.

  Can’t. Can’t stand. Pressure on the back of her neck. Moaning, grasping, blinking.

  Pain. Rising. Pulled up to her feet. Hair coming out in tufts. Rough hands on her scalp. Thin arms sweeping, pushing, resisting. No good.

  His gravel voice. His ashtray breath. His spraying spit.

  The words, heard as if through a drum, thrumming, distant. “I really thought you were smarter than to do a thing like that.”

  The memory, coming in flashes, audio fragments. Becoming clearer. The minutes before she blacked out.

  “We can outmaneuver these jokers. I’m sure of it.”

  “I hate to be the one to point this out, honey, but we’re kind of tied up at the moment.”

  “I’m sure they’ll move us at some point.”

  “And just imagine how stiff your legs are going to be after sitting in this position for two hours.”

  “I’ve been watching them—”

  “Val…”

  “—the big guy is clumsy. And slow. The other one has got about five beers in him at this point. His reflexes are getting dopey.”

  “Val…”

  “The next time we’re out of these chairs, I say we make a break for it.”

  “I am not comfortable with that idea.”

  “Oh? Are you comfortable being held hostage by a couple of redneck Guy Fawkes wannabes?”

  “If we can just ride it out until the morning—”