The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  “I mean, you should be proud of yourself. You took care of every last one of them.”

  She didn’t like this. “You should have told me,” she said.

  “I just did,” he said, still smiling.

  “Before. You should have told me before. I thought there would be more. There aren’t more?”

  “There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”

  “An accident?”

  “He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stole a car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.

  “We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”

  Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.

  “And now what?” she asked.

  Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.

  Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.

  “Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that—a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise—but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oracles are Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink—why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about?—by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.

  And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.

  He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”

  She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the newly stenciled name next to the door—both of which read SARAH O’HARA—and she had been there, for the Regional Office, for Mr. Niles, ever since.

  From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

  Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

  When looking through the literature describing the process by which Oyemi and Mr. Niles gathered together not only their team of mystically inclined superwomen but also the famed and dreaded Oracles, who at once directed the movements and growth of the Regional Office and quite possibly predicted its downfall, one finds little more than stark conjecture and bland assumptions. In other words: One is faced with a wasteland of crackpot theories penned by junior research assistants. Still, the Oracles proved pivotal in the rise and fall of the Regional Office, and no serious study of Oyemi and Mr. Niles and their awesome accomplishments would be complete without some critical consideration of the acquisition of the Oracles.

  Evidence of this process, however, is not easily found.

  Clearly, dangers lurk in the shadows and at the edges for scholars who find themselves stretching beyond tangible and reproducible pieces of evidence, reconstructing conversations, the physical movements of people long gone, whenever they presume to obtain an understanding of the thoughts of great and horrible figures from history. Scholarship is scholarship. Art is art. To shoehorn one into the other is to invite confusion and bedevilment, and yet, there are times when one must push forward, must offer a narrative if only because there cannot be a void.

  Nature abhors a void.

  And so: Oyemi’s great-uncle died, money was passed down, and an office in Queens was illegally sublet. Then for six weeks, Oyemi and Mr. Niles sought out their first Oracle.

  By whatever means—the reading of auras, probing the young woman’s mind, trying to see into her future based on the pattern of freckles on her face, etc., etc.—Oyemi peered at, judged, and found wanting what must have been over five hundred young women in the first six weeks she and Mr. Niles hunted for their Oracle.

  An advertisement was not placed, flyers were not posted all over the city, girls did not line up outside the offices of Oyemi and Mr. Niles, though what a lovely image, the line of them circling the block as if each girl were hoping to be cast in some strange and dark Off-Off-Broadway show, or to care for the Banks children before Mary Poppins swooped in and blew them all away.

  But no. They walked the city together, Mr. Niles and Oyemi, as Oyemi cast her new mystical glance down dark alleyways, in brightly lit lobbies, at girls on the subway or walking through the Sheep Meadow, or in a coffee shop or in a library or hailing a cab or anywhere at all, really.

  Everywhere, in fact. She looked everywhere.

  By the end of each day, Oyemi had exhausted herself so completely that Mr. Niles had to carry her home—to conserve the money she had inherited, they had decided to live in the same office they’d rented—where she would fall asleep on the sagging, smoke-stained love seat they had found on the street the day they had moved in. She fell into a heavy sleep no later than six o’clock each evening, out of which she could not wrench herself until nearly ten the next morning.

  She lost weight. The dark, unearthly sheen of her skin turned a sickly, lackluster pale green. At night, while she slept, her nose bled, so that she would wake with a face crusted over by her own blood and snot. Her eyes watered and her ears itched and she broke out in hives once or twice a day, and Mr. Niles told her to stop, begged her to stop, worried that she was draining herself looking for whatever or whoever it was she was looking for. But Oyemi would not quit, until finally Mr. Niles told her, “One more time, I will go with you one more time and then I’m done, tomorrow is the last time, and after that, I’m gone, and you can come, too, and we can do some other thing with the money and power, or not, I don’t care about any of it, I care about you,
but no matter what, this is the last time, because I’m not going to bear witness, not to this, not to the end of you.”

  The next day, they found Nell.

  She was walking out of a Duane Reade.

  The procedure, up until that point, had been for Oyemi and Mr. Niles to walk around various neighborhoods and wait for Oyemi to “get a feeling,” and then Mr. Niles would approach the woman attached to this feeling and ask her questions—they had written a fake survey on the increased cost of living—with the idea being that Oyemi could then examine the woman unnoticed (despite how un-unnoticeable Oyemi had become), as all of the young woman’s attention, all her psychological and emotional defenses, would be trained on Mr. Niles. Oyemi, then, could sneak up behind the mark and close her eyes and proceed however it was she proceeded and then a minute or so later, open her eyes and shake her head and they would move on.

  It is safe to assume that Mr. Niles understood little of what was going on and that, to him, the entire procedure was slipshod and inefficient and doomed to failure. So when Oyemi spied Nell stepping out of the store and tapped Mr. Niles on the shoulder and told him, “Her, quick, her,” he failed to notice the urgency in her voice, the heat from her hand when she tapped him.

  Mr. Niles walked over to the young woman, smiled his charming, useful smile, and asked her if she would mind answering a few questions for his survey. The young woman barely had time to answer “Yes” or “No, thanks,” before Oyemi clubbed her on the head from behind, catching her just as she fell.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Oyemi said. “Grab her, quick. We need to get her to the office.”

  They brought the woman back to their building. Oyemi carried her into her office and laid her on the floor, still unconscious. Mr. Niles searched her purse, found a wallet, and in the wallet found a handful of receipts; a photograph of a little girl, which he tucked into his pocket; and a driver’s license, which was how he discovered her name was Nell. He also discovered she was twenty-four years old (two years older than himself at the time) and lived on East Tenth.

  It’s unclear what Oyemi had done to the girl when she hit Nell over the head, how hard she’d hit her or with what. Regardless, Nell didn’t wake for almost three hours, during which time Mr. Niles and Oyemi sat in the front room of their office, Oyemi quietly and expectantly on the couch, and Mr. Niles, unsure what to do or where to sit, pacing around the room.

  It is safe to say he became increasingly nervous.

  Then Oyemi perked up and looked at the closed office door and said, “She’s awake. Finally.” Then she rushed into the room, closed and locked the door behind her, and didn’t come out.

  Let us conjecture that, at this time, Mr. Niles decided to go, to leave, to go where? Anywhere, really, and to seriously consider whether he could ever come back.

  When Mr. Niles first met Oyemi, the two of them had been children. Her name hadn’t been Oyemi and his name hadn’t been Mr. Niles; those were names they adopted to play a game, a prescient game in which they took over the world, or, rather, she took over the world. Oyemi, supreme ruler of the planet Earth, and her butler, Mr. Niles. Well, her butler at first, and then her superpowered butler, and then not a butler at all but her right-hand man, unless she was mad at him for any of a number of reasons that children become mad at each other, and then he was her butler again.

  Mr. Niles didn’t know what a butler was, so Oyemi pointed him to Alfred, from Batman, as a reference and that was who he pretended to be. Mostly, though, Oyemi had an odd sense of humor and thought the idea of a supreme ruler of the planet with a butler named Mr. Niles was funny, and while Mr. Niles didn’t always quite understand, he played along anyway.

  Then and until his death, he played along anyway.

  But knocking a woman unconscious, kidnapping her, that was where the line was drawn, obviously. This is what he must have thought to himself as he walked out of the office, down three flights of stairs, onto the street. What he must have thought to himself as he looked left and right, looked for signs of having been followed—even then, Mr. Niles would have been, to some degree, paranoid—looked for some piece of this world that still looked familiar as he operated under a new understanding of Oyemi, of this project he had signed up for, of the life forward he was staring at, and at his not unreasonable decision to leave it behind. But then something—the sound of Oyemi crying out, perhaps, a deep-welled, anxious, mournful sound in her voice, maybe, or a crash of glass and brick, or the welling up of some deep-seated and unfaded and urgent love he had nearly forgotten—called him back.

  Often, it is at this point in the story of the Regional Office that people ask the question: Was Mr. Niles in love with Oyemi?

  No one knows the definitive answer to this question. Mr. Niles left no diary or journal, no hoard of love letters he had received from Oyemi, nor letters written but never sent on his own part. Might he once have loved Oyemi, might he once have adored her, might she once have been his first true love, might he have been love-struck in the third grade, when they first met? Certainly any of this is possible, and it is possible he continued to love her, to be in love with her, even after she suffered the accident that should have killed her but didn’t.

  The far more interesting question, however, and the question no one can answer but for oneself, is this: Is love enough? Was love enough to justify or explain what happened next and then after that and then after that and then again until the end?

  Mr. Niles turned. He rushed back upstairs. By the time he burst back through the office doors, everything had finished, and Oyemi’s office door was open, and standing in the doorway was the girl, not Oyemi.

  To those who ask, Where is your evidence? Your proof that Mr. Niles harbored doubts, that Mr. Niles left at all, that any of this happened the way you say it happened?

  We say: How else could it have happened? Mr. Niles waiting patiently in the front office while Oyemi performed her administrations on the young woman, Nell? Mr. Niles with a newspaper or a magazine, or looking over the business strategic planning report for the Regional Office while whatever horrifying sounds might have been emitted by either Oyemi or the girl, or both of them, filled the small office? Mr. Niles brewing a pot of coffee because maybe it would be a long night ahead?

  The authors of this paper leave it up to the reader to decide which scenario is most reasonable.

  The girl looked fine, in any case, which surprised Mr. Niles. It is not difficult to imagine what he might have expected outside of fine. Ever since the accident that should have killed Oyemi but instead imbued her with mystical powers, a lot of things had been less and less right with Oyemi. The way she moved. Books could be penned simply about the way Oyemi walked after the accident, the fluid look of her as she stood up from a couch. The way she twitched. Her odd manner of speaking, the faraway look in her eyes, her smile, which grew ever more toothy. She flared her nostrils in the days after her accident, wider and wider. An affinity for raw meats, the nosebleeds, an ability to predict things five minutes into the future. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that what he expected to find were the remains of the girl, her skin-covering perhaps, crumpled in the corner of Oyemi’s office, the rest of her, the whole of her, sucked out of her skin by Oyemi, who would, after having feasted on the girl’s immortal soul and whatnot, reemerge as a creature vibrant and shiny-new. At the very least, he must have expected the girl to be frightened or confused or beaten up, that the whites of her eyes would not be white anymore. Yet she looked so untroubled, so at ease, that it took a moment for Mr. Niles to see the one thing that had changed about her, which was her hair, which had been shoulder-length and a dull brown color, and now was entirely gone.

  Not shaved, not as if it had been shaved off, but as if it had never been there to begin with.

  Mr. Niles said something to her like, “Is everything all right?” but she didn’t say anything back. She smiled serenely, not
at him but through him, and then made her way to the window, where she stared out at the traffic and the other windows across the street from them.

  Oyemi, stumbling out of the office behind Nell, looked the way Niles had maybe expected Nell to look. Scooped out. Pale, sweaty, exhausted, red-eyed. A smell wafted off her that made Mr. Niles self-conscious and uncomfortable. Oyemi struggled to get to a chair and then sat heavily down in it, and then she sighed, and then she smiled.

  “Whatever you do, don’t call her by her name,” she said. “Her former name.”

  She closed her eyes and let her heavy head fall heavily into her shaking hands.

  “She’s in. She’s agreed to come on board, to be part of our plans,” she said.

  With great effort, Oyemi pulled her head back up to look at the girl or maybe to look past her. Maybe she was looking at what Nell represented, the future that was even then being laid out before her because of this girl, or maybe she was looking at the same thing the girl was looking at, which seemed to be nothing and everything, and then she let out a long, ragged breath.

  “She’s the first,” Oyemi said. “The first Oracle.”

  And then she collapsed.

  ROSE

  27.

  Something—electricity, blue magicks?—crackled out of the director’s hand, the one that looked like it was covered by another hand, crackled in a way that reached out for Rose, for her face, for her neck. Like, there was this crackling fucking energy shooting out of the glove or hand or whatever and usually when you saw that shit in a movie or on a TV show, you knew, whoa, that crackling blue thing must be hot with some real fucking power, and sure there was some power there, she could feel it, but that wasn’t the whole story with that crackling blue energy, she could tell.

  That crackling blue energy was a living thing.

  It had a hunger she could sense. It had its own goddamn desires. To touch her face, to wrap itself around her pretty neck. Like, the energy was whispering shit into her ear, trying to bring her closer so it could caress her cheek, tickle the sensitive, ticklish parts of her.