“You heard me,” she said, and then felt bad about how short her tone had been. “Emma. She sends her best.”
“Emma? Emma’s dead.”
“Apparently not dead enough,” she said, and then she lunged at him, lunged past him, lunged as hard as she could lunge, the sword held in both hands and flush with the horizon, and before he could say anything else, before he could even know for certain he was dead, the top half of him toppled one way, and a second later, the bottom half fell the other.
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
While what is known about Oyemi, both before and after her transformation, is limited, often obfuscated by competing accounts and flimsy theories, many of them posited or spread by Oyemi herself, the life of Mr. Niles is much more accessible. Books could be written on the life and times of Mr. Niles, though this paper will only account for what is germane to the purpose of offering a brief history of the rise and fall of the Regional Office, the events that brought Mr. Niles and Oyemi together, what worked to break them apart, and how these events conspired to destroy the thing they’d worked so hard to build.
Once he and Oyemi abducted the woman named Nell, it stands to reason that Mr. Niles became nervous, apprehensive. Stands to reason that he paced the office more than usual, even for him. That he woke often throughout the night—sensitive to every sound from the street below, every creak on the stairway above—woke so often that he might as well have not slept at all. He had involved himself in a kidnapping. Anyone not a sociopath and not Oyemi would have become nervous and apprehensive once the act of kidnapping happened.
Let us first clarify: The future Operative Recruits were never kidnapped. Oyemi and Mr. Niles, and later, Henry, made each Recruit an offer: remain in this quotidian life or train to fight the forces of darkness.
Not so the Oracles.
Nell and the other two (whose names have been lost to history) were not made offers, were not given choices, were simply kidnapped and then altered.
It stands to reason that this unnerved Mr. Niles.
In college, he had majored in economics. Before that, sure, he had dropped out of high school and engaged in some small-time robberies to get by. Nonetheless, nothing in his life had prepared him for this, for aiding and abetting the physical and mental and supernatural transformation of strangers, young women no less. And, to be perfectly honest, there is extensive evidence that Mr. Niles never cared for nor wanted to involve oracles, or soothsayers, or palm readers, or fortune-tellers of any stripe, in his plans for the Regional Office.
Mr. Niles, in fact, harbored strong feelings against the desire for foreknowledge of this sort. Mr. Niles, in fact, very much did not want to believe in oracles, a desire made more difficult to fulfill if Oyemi planned to surround herself—and him—with them.
His father believed in oracles, specifically in a prophecy that his life would be cut short by a fire, something he learned, no doubt, from some sideshow carny. But his father was devoted to this prophecy; it was his favorite story to tell, the story of his future demise. Mr. Niles would listen to his father and his father would tell him how he was going to die and Mr. Niles would ask his father how he knew this and his father would claim that it was all in the prophecy, clear as day, that it was straight from the oracle’s mouth. Mr. Niles would ask his father why he simply didn’t do something about this prophecy to prevent it from coming true, and his father told him, “Well, son, I’ve thought about it, I have, but that’s what the Greeks did, you know.”
His father said, “You know the Greeks, son? Great people, the Greeks. But the ancient Greeks, not like that Greek son of a bitch who runs the gas station.”
He said, “Smart people, the Greeks. Inventors of the wheel and time, but dumb about prophecies.
“Take Oedipus, for example,” he said. “The king heard a prophecy that his son would murder him and marry his wife and so the king, he tried to get smart, he tried to fix things so the prophecy wouldn’t come true, like leave his firstborn son on a hilltop to die, or in the woods to be eaten by wolves, or something like that, it doesn’t matter what, because in the end, whatever he did, this king, it didn’t matter.”
He said, “Whatever they fixed, the Greeks? It only worked to make the prophecy come true. No matter what you do, a prophecy is a prophecy is a prophecy, and you can’t do anything to change it that won’t make it happen.”
“So what are you going to do?” Mr. Niles asked his father.
“Nothing, son,” he said. He smiled at his own brilliance. “Don’t you get it? You do nothing and the prophecy doesn’t even matter. Do nothing and you’ve beaten the system.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to die in a fire, then?” Mr. Niles asked.
“Nah,” his father said. “It’s just a theory. I’ll probably die just like the oracle said I would.”
All of which confused Mr. Niles, made him feel a heavy sadness when he was a boy, and then pity for his father as he grew older. But the idea of prophecies and fate’s hand controlling a person’s life wormed its way into his head, and soon he came to the decision that someone or something held the knowledge of his future, too, and that there was nothing he could do to change any of it. It was all preordained, whether he’d been told about it or not, and no matter what he did, the secretly held prophecy about his own life couldn’t be altered. And this led him from one bad decision to another, so that by the time he was supposed to be graduating from high school he was instead spending his nights standing outside in the dark parking lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery store mugging people.
Mr. Niles tried to be fair about the muggings.
Mr. Niles had always believed in fairness.
By his own admission, he targeted the beer-bellied middle-aged bachelors who shopped early in the morning, at two or three a.m., approached them as they were walking out with two grocery carts full of cereal boxes and Top Ramen and dollar bags of moldy apples. These were men, he thought, who could have avoided the whole mess—being robbed, that is—if only they’d have gotten married, settled down, made a few kids, and started shopping at the normal hours of the day when normal people shopped.
He waited outside until a guy came out of the store, until he walked through the parking lot in between his two shopping carts, until he was just reaching his car. And that was when Mr. Niles would step out of the shadows with a gun he’d found in his father’s locked file cabinet, moving so quickly that by the time he had his gun pressed up to the guy’s fleshy stomach, pressed into all of that fat until the tip of the barrel was right under the guy’s rib cage, pressed hard so that the guy would know he wasn’t fooling around, the guy was too surprised to do much else but what Mr. Niles told him to do, which was usually to lie down in the trunk.
He thought about his father whenever he shut the trunk on the guy and took the keys out and dropped them into his own pocket. He thought about his father and the Greeks. He placed his ear to the trunk and listened for whimpering or heavy breathing or all-out sobbing. He wondered whether the guy had once heard a prophecy about how one night he would find himself locked inside a trunk and if then he had taken steps to remove all trunks from his life. Like Sleeping Beauty with all the spinning wheels. And then if the guy, forgetting there was a trunk attached to his car, thought he had fixed it by removing all trunks and all possibilities of trunks from his life. By avoiding all flea markets or specialty import stores or antique shops. Thinking the whole time he had fixed it, tricked the prophecy, won the game, but instead he had somehow led himself to this moment. Instead, he had led himself to the parking lot of this grocery store, to a life that was loveless, childless, and that necessitated shopping at odd hours of the night only to wind up, finally, locked inside his own trunk.
“You should’ve not done anything,” the young Mr. Niles would yell through the hood of the t
runk. He’d bang real hard on the top of the car. “You should’ve just left it well enough alone,” he would yell, louder, banging even more, banging to punctuate each word.
After a while, when Mr. Niles became tired of robbing these men, and when the date of his father’s prophesied death came and went, leaving his father still very much alive, he gave up on oracles and the preordained nature of life. He tested for his GED and enrolled in a junior college; transferred, at Oyemi’s insistence, to Rutgers; and then left New Jersey after graduation and moved to the city. By then, the stirrings of the Regional Office were stirred and then they kidnapped the woman named Nell, transformed her, and held her captive.
We were already at a loss—tired and scared and confused—when they grabbed Harrison by the collar, sharp enough we could hear the seams of his shirt rip, and then stood him up and then shot him in the head. They did this and we wilted, the bunch of us, like lilies in high heat. Some of us screamed or sobbed, but the rest of us looked on in silent shock.
Then they shuffled us out of the conference room, where they’d been holding us, and into a smaller office—Laura’s—which made Laura feel better at first, to be in a familiar setting, until one of us reminded her that she’d probably die there, and while a lot of us used to joke about how we spent so much of our time at work we’d probably die at our desks, too, none of us—Laura least of all—liked how this joke was playing out in real life.
All of us were frightened at this point but a lot of us were confused, too. A lot of us still thought that we were nothing more than agents for an exclusive travel concern catering to the ultra-rich and famous and didn’t know that our jobs, our physical bodies, even, were a cover for what really went on here, went on downstairs, nearly a mile below us. When we split into two factions—those who wanted to devise a plan of escape or attack and those of us willing to wait until they let us go or shot us like they shot Harrison, whichever came first—we were also split, though not all of us realized it, by what we knew and what we didn’t know. Those of us who knew the truth about our jobs, about the travel agency and the real agency below us, were willing to wait. Maybe we didn’t know exactly what was in store for us, but we had a good general idea, and for us, knowing what we were up against, there seemed to be little else to do but to wait. While one half of us were thinking about our families, our friends, and what we were going to do when we got out of there, the other half were wondering how long it would be, really, before they shot us all or simply piped some noxious gas into Laura’s office through the vent.
Were thinking, in other words, only of ourselves, and how long we had to be ourselves.
Still. We didn’t do anything to stop those of us who wanted to escape. In fact, we decided, why not just tell them the truth? We would have wanted to know, right, that the men we were fighting against were part of some dark, evil force bent on the total destruction of the planet and all its innocent peoples, that if we were going to die, we were going to die for something important, something bigger than us. Sure, we had been sworn to secrecy, but we decided in the end, What’s the harm?
What’s the harm in telling them? What’s the harm in planning our escape?
We’ll probably be shot anyway. Might as well be shot for planning a foolhardy and imperfect escape as for anything else, right?
We made an announcement. Those who knew, who maybe were still uncertain about the rightness of what we were doing, shuffled uncomfortably, refused to make eye contact. The others, well, they laughed, they clapped their hands together like we’d just made a funny joke, said, “You’re funny. Why didn’t I know how funny you are?” And that was that. Maybe they believed us, maybe they thought we were keeping things light, keeping spirits up. Regardless, we got to work.
We ransacked Laura’s desk and cabinets and collected three boxes of paper clips; a number of dull pencils; two staplers; a gauzy blue-colored rock Laura used as a paperweight; two pair of scissors, one of which we noticed she had stolen from Larry in accounting; and a key-ring pepper-spray canister.
We considered the paper clips and made a joke about chewing gum and MacGyver, but then we were stumped.
Someone picked up the pepper spray and tapped the nozzle, which must have broken after so many years bouncing around inside Laura’s desk, and a wide expanse of pepper water spat out in all directions, and for a moment, we were coughing and wheezing, our eyes were red and blurred by tears, and we swore at whoever used the goddamn pepper spray, but the swearing, our anger, didn’t last. We were too spent to shout or swear or rail for too long.
Too spent from our morning commutes and the drudgery of booking yearly world tours for snarky, overprivileged douchebags who owned yachts big enough to contain every one of the possessions we’d crammed into our shitty apartments in Queens. Too spent from the pain in our lower backs and the false promise of lumbar support, from the soreness in our hands, the carpal tunnel syndrome that made it impossible to open mayonnaise jars, and from, finally, this. This last worst insult. Not just the men in black with their guns and their shoving and pushing, the bullet through Harrison’s skull, the strong urge to piss ourselves, the sore dryness of our throats, the drips of sweat running down our backs to pool at the waistbands of our underwear, the meager tools for our escape, the small chance that we’d make it out of this alive. Too spent from not just all of this but now the pepper spray, too, which had left us winded and undone, and all discussion of escape fell away as we sat in a huddle, gasping and rubbing our eyes.
They had taken away our cell phones, our watches, too, and shot the crap out of Laura’s computer, and for an excruciating eternity, none of us knew what time it was. Then Milo remembered his pedometer, which was surreptitiously clipped to the inside of his belt, and which doubled as a watch. What was more surprising than the fact that Milo’s pedometer was overlooked was that Milo, a truly fat fuck, had a pedometer at all, the poor thing clipped inside his pants—who knew he could have fit anything inside his pants?—and he was proud of it, we could tell, even though we made him explain what it was a couple of times and why he had it. We asked him, What time is it? and Milo looked at the pedometer and then he shook it and he pressed a couple of buttons and we figured he’d never really used the thing, figured it had been giving him false readings this whole time because he hadn’t set it up, had just clipped it to himself and figured that was that, but then he let out this deep, heavy sigh.
It’s five till, Milo said, and, groaning, we demanded, Five till what, asshole?, and he sighed again and said, Ten, and we were dumbfounded.
Hours had passed, we had thought. Many, many hours must have passed. We knew this, were certain of this. Our stomachs growled because we’d missed not just lunch but that break in the middle of the afternoon that we all looked forward to when we sent Jenny across the street to pick up some coffees and bags of chips. It had to have been late afternoon, at least. We were sleepy and worn out because the day was coming to a close, and we’d been thinking to ourselves, What will our families think, what will our friends around the city think when we don’t show up at home, at that great little bar in Red Hook, at our dinner date; we had been thinking, When will demands be made, what will the nightly news cover about us, when will our loved ones receive the phone calls asking for the interesting details of our lives, for recent photos?
But no. It had only been forty-five minutes and already we’d grown restless and irritable, and it would be hours and hours still before anyone missed us, before anyone even noticed we were gone.
Holly suggested we play a game, to pass the time better. The rest of us ignored her or made faces behind her back. We considered the idea of escape again, and with nothing better to do, no recourse, no e-mail or Internet or smartphones to pass the time with, with only each other and nothing much in common—how many more times would we have to listen to Carl go on about the square-dancing class he’d started taking in Bushwick, really?—even those of us who had
been against planning an escape were on board now, and with the earnest resolve of the truly desperate.
William took charge because he was that guy, the guy who took charge but to whom no one paid the slightest attention.
He snapped his fingers at Laura and demanded a legal pad and pencil, even though they were right there on the desk in front of him. He drew a map of the office and stared at it. He said things like, So what we need to do first is, and Okay, okay, this is good, this is great because, and, I wonder if maybe instead we should. He obviously had no fucking clue what to do next but was trying to make it sound like he was unknotting some thorny but brilliant plan. We let him at it with the sad understanding that this delusional activity was all the glue holding poor William together.
In the meantime, Jackson, who played shortstop in our softball league, and whose batting average was consistently in the high .300s, and who, it was once rumored, could have gone pro, and whom some of us called Action Jackson, though never right to his face because we didn’t want to come on too strong, huddled a group of us together and said, stage-whispering, So, what do you think? How about we tell them that one of us is sick and when one of the guards comes in to investigate we smash him over the head with that blue paperweight Laura’s got on her desk? Take his gun, go from there?
We looked at each other and then at Laura’s paperweight and then back at Action Jackson and then nodded and said, Sure, why not?
The thing was this: We all knew the plan was doomed to fail. Most of us didn’t think it would work even so far as to get someone to come into Laura’s office to investigate. It was such an obvious ploy. The men in black outside Laura’s office, if they were even within earshot, would know exactly what we were up to. If they had seen any kind of hostage-situation movie clip made in the past thirty years, they would ignore us once Jackson started yelling through the door.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 13