The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  I never looked back.

  From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

  Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

  When other scholars try to pin onto the first Oracle the blame for the fall of the Regional Office, these scholars often point to a moment that occurred early into her tenure as Oracle. Or they try to trace a link from the discovery of the first Oracle to the discovery of that first Oracle’s daughter to the fall of the Regional Office, a specious argument, at best.

  Anyone foolish enough to assign blame for either the rise or the fall of an organization as complex as the Regional Office to one source proves himself little able to understand the nuance of history, an understanding of nuance necessary for strong scholarship. History and complex systems cannot be boiled down to mere sound bites or taglines, but sadly recent published (and peer-reviewed) research demonstrates the current and dangerous trend of encapsulation that this paper hopes to speak against. The very people who will lay blame at the feet of the Oracle once known as Nell are no better than those who make illogical and obstreperous claims that Mr. Niles might be blamed for the spectacular failings of the overall Regional Office.

  After her transformation, the Oracle in question, the first Oracle, once known as Nell, remained in the office. She sat out front. She stared out the windows. She didn’t speak. She didn’t sleep, either. If she ate, Mr. Niles had never been a witness to that spectacle.

  Slowly, Oyemi gathered the materials she needed to build the Oracle a space where she could prognosticate in the time-honored manner of oracles littered all over B movies and pulp science-fiction and fantasy novels. A shallow pool of milky-blue water (check), a darkly lit room imbued with an eerie, sourceless blue-white glow (check), a bald and trembling and ageless woman connected by hoses or cables to a futuristic melding of computer and man (eh, more or less, if that’s what you’d call a few orange first-generation iMacs Oyemi bought secondhand and jerry-rigged herself). She gave up her office for the Oracle, set the turtle-shaped kiddie pool on a platform in the middle of the room so that the Oracle would still be able to look out the window at the traffic on the street and the buildings on the other side. The computers—there were four in all—were attached to a couple of printers. It was all still a trial-and-error sort of game, as far as Niles could tell. The few times he walked in on Oyemi, she was digging into the back of one of the computers or testing the cables out on other computers and the Oracle was seated quietly in a chair at the window.

  Mr. Niles did little to hide how little he thought of all this.

  He asked Oyemi if the Oracle had given them the Powerball numbers yet. He once walked into the office wearing gauze wrapped around his head and over his eyes, gauze he’d made to look cheaply bloody with red Magic Marker. When Oyemi didn’t notice, or noticed but ignored him, he pretended to stumble around the office blind and said, “Could you give me a hand here? I’ve stabbed my eyes out because I killed my father and fucked my mother.” And then, “Oh, if only I’d been warned of my horrific fate!”

  He knew he wasn’t being helpful or a good friend or a good business partner. He knew that he was slowly sabotaging their plans of saving the world, of rescuing and training at-risk but powerful, oh so powerful, young women, everything they had talked about, but he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want an Oracle. He didn’t want to believe in or rely on the Oracle, didn’t trust her or whatever machinations Oyemi had performed on her. And if he had been more honest with himself maybe he would have understood that what he had been against wasn’t the Oracle herself, but anyone or anything stepping in between him and Oyemi. Instead, he latched on to a lingering sense of unease about the fact that they had abducted the Oracle, though this had become dulled by the quiet, unsettling presence of her sitting unvaryingly at that window, and to this, he attributed his distaste for what was going on.

  Not that she seemed unhappy—or happy, for that matter—nor that she seemed to harbor any intentions of escape, and he was sure that no one who had known her would recognize her, or her them, and truth be told, the people who had once laid claim to her probably wouldn’t want her back, not anymore. Regardless, he felt that they—he and Oyemi—had moved too far afield from their original intentions. They’d made plans. After they had understood more fully the scope of Oyemi’s transformation, they had conjured together beautiful, brilliant plans. The world was in need of their help—it was clear—and they wouldn’t let the world down. They would build an army of superwomen. (There had been an unspoken agreement that they would only seek out women.) They would recruit and train these women to fight the evil forces of darkness. Together, they would root out evil, become an all-knowing and all-powerful force. And maybe, if they made some money along the way, what was the harm in that?

  They had all of this to do. They had a world—or worlds, even—to explore and exploit and make their own, and none of this Oracle business, none of this kidnapping rigmarole, seemed to fit in with any of that.

  But mostly, he felt jealous. Jealous of the attention Oyemi was devoting to this woman. Jealous of this strange, wordless connection they shared. And this jealousy needed an outlet. The fact that Oyemi had brought this person into their plans needed some reckoning. That she had done so without consulting him needed some reckoning. He needed to remind her, for his own cruel purposes, that this Oracle had once been a woman, had once had a life that Oyemi had diverted to her own agenda.

  To get back at Oyemi, then, he went in search of the girl in the photograph, the photograph he had found in Nell’s wallet the day they’d abducted her. He didn’t know who she was or where she might be, but he knew her name.

  Nell had written it on the back of the picture.

  Sarah. Her name was Sarah.

  Judging by the photograph, Sarah had been young. Five or six, maybe. She had dark hair and big eyes and a pretty face. He assumed she was the Oracle’s daughter. He went to the address on the driver’s license first, which turned up little more than Missing Person posters of Nell, which he tried to inconspicuously pull down, even though they were old and weathered and torn. Nell’s apartment was empty but the landlord told Niles not to get his hopes up, as it had already been rented, and thank God, since the last tenants had skipped out on the place almost two months ago, a woman and her kid, and who the hell knew where they’d gone off to.

  That had been his only lead. Once he’d found out that there had been no real effort to find Nell, he should have given up on the girl, gone back to Oyemi or moved forward to a new life, but he found his thoughts returning to Sarah whenever his mind was left to its own devices. He began to seek her out in newspapers, looking for mentions of the daughter of a woman named Nell gone missing now for eight weeks, twelve weeks, but there was nothing.

  By this time, Oyemi had finished building out her office space for the Oracle. She seemed reluctant to show it to Mr. Niles, though, which made him feel guilty. Ever since he’d started looking for the girl in earnest, he had barely stopped by the office, had said no more than ten words to Oyemi. Caught up in their own projects, they were growing apart, and Mr. Niles didn’t doubt that this would continue to an unsatisfying and regretful final split, but in hopes of making up for all of this, he expressed a keen and overindulgent interest in seeing the Oracle’s room when Oyemi told him it was finally finished.

  Little about the room had changed. It was warmer in there because of the bank of humming computers, Niles assumed. It was dark inside, dimly lit by some ethereal glow. Something about it all left him unsettled. Perhaps the hum of the computers or the heat or the strange way the room dampened their voices when they spoke or the fact that the Oracle still didn’t speak, that he didn’t realize she was even there at first, lingering just under the surface of the water, or maybe it was the connections, thick black cables running from the computers to the pool, disappearing into the underside of the pool, and into the Oracle herself, so he assumed, half
-submerged in the pool. Mr. Niles couldn’t say. Or maybe it was the crown of diodes or neural connectors wrapped around her bald head or the blue and red and gray USB cables jacked, somehow, into her pronated hands, which hung limp over the pool’s edge. Or maybe it was all of it. Or maybe it was simply that the not-rightness of Oyemi and her plans had finally been writ large, made so undeniably clear that all that was left for Mr. Niles to do was to mourn what had been his best friend.

  He glanced at Oyemi, only to find her looking at him. She was waiting for him to say something. Did you catch the Mets game last night? he wanted to say. Or, Affleck’s got a new movie out, want to go? Anything, really, that might bring reality, life outside, crashing down into this weird space she’d built, as if the presence of an outside world complete with a piss-poor Mets team and so-so Affleck movies would make Oyemi see the ridiculousness, or the wrongness, of it all.

  Maybe he could have tried harder. Redirected her, maybe. When she’d first asked him more than a year ago if he’d wanted to have some fun—with her new discovered powers, with her great-uncle’s money—maybe he could have suggested a ski vacation or a road trip to Mexico instead.

  “We can do whatever we want,” she’d told him. “We can change the world, can make it better, can change so many lives.”

  And he’d lied. He’d said, “I don’t know what I want yet,” when he knew, or believed, that what he’d wanted was her. This want of her had been with him for so long, in fact, since the sixth or seventh grade, that it had seemed eternal or like an extension of him. That it remained with him, even after the accident, even after the physical change, the revelation of her new special traits, only made it seem that much more permanent, so that when it slipped away from him, when he looked at her one day and she said to him, “We should do this,” and he realized the wanting had completely gone, he felt guilty, as if he’d betrayed not just her but some simple and necessary part of himself. So he said, “Yes, yes we should.”

  From that point forward, to practically everything she asked or suggested, no matter how insane or possibly evil, he said, “Yes, of course we should.”

  But faced with this bald and enigmatic figure floating in a turtle pool, he felt forming on his lips for the first time the word no.

  Then Oyemi left. A phone call or something, although later Mr. Niles figured out this had been a ruse, that Oyemi had simply wanted to leave Niles by himself with the Oracle. He waited, unsure of what to do or where to look. He wanted to sit down but there were no seats in the room. He considered sitting on the edge of her pool, tracing lazy eights in the water with his fingertips, but that thought made him shudder.

  He tried to think of different things to say to her, pithy, unconcerned remarks in case Oyemi was standing nearby listening in, if only to prove to them both—Oyemi, the Oracle—that he wasn’t bothered by any of this and that he didn’t buy any of it either. But the best he could come up with were the blandest of statements—how’s it going, how’s the view, what’s new in the Oracle business—and so he kept quiet, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and waited.

  After a minute she spoke.

  He was so unprepared for her to speak, so unprepared for what her voice might sound like, he didn’t hear what she said at all and dumbly said, “Did you say something?”

  Her voice had a property to it, distant and echoing, as if she were plugged into an amplifier with the reverb set to high, or as if she were more than one person talking at once. She hadn’t turned to look at him but it seemed as if her voice filled the room and he wondered if Oyemi had set the Oracle up with speakers or something.

  “Brooklyn,” she said again. “What you’re looking for will be in Brooklyn,” she said, and before he could say anything, before he could contest her, tell her that there was no way in hell that she would know a good goddamn thing about what he was looking for, she said, “You’ll find what you seek in Brooklyn.” Then the printer began to warm up and then it took a sheet of paper and printed out an address at the top of it, a map underneath. He took the sheet and looked at the address. He looked at the Oracle.

  “I know what this is,” he said. Then, louder: “I know what you’re doing.” Then, yelling: “Don’t think that I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to pull here.” Not at the Oracle. He didn’t say a word to the Oracle. Not that it would have mattered. She stared out the window and ignored him. Oyemi still hadn’t come back, but Niles took the slip of paper, folded it a few times, and stuffed it into his jeans pocket and left before Oyemi could return.

  It took him nearly a week to go to the address the Oracle had given him. In that week, he didn’t once call Oyemi or drop by the office. He kept the slip of paper in his pants pocket at all times. He worried his fingers over it when he was nervous or when his mind was preoccupied, and not a few times he pulled it out of his pocket forgetting what it was, thinking maybe it was an old receipt, something he should throw away. Seeing the address printed across the top, he would fold it back again and stuff it quickly away. He did this so often that the paper was soft and smudgy from his attention.

  When he finally went to the address that the Oracle had given him, he found himself at the corner of Avenue M and East Thirteenth, one of the many parts of Brooklyn wholly unfamiliar to him and where there was nothing more than a bodega. Inside, he asked about the address, which he couldn’t find, because the clerk claimed the street number didn’t exist.

  Of course, Niles thought. And what had he expected, really?

  He was about to leave, then, when the bell over the door chimed and in walked the girl, the one from the photograph. Sarah.

  Seeing her there, he panicked for no good reason. His first instinct was to run off before she could see him. Then he remembered she didn’t know him, didn’t know he had been looking for her, didn’t know he’d taken her mother from her and had turned her—or had been party to the turning of her—into the very same creature that had sent him here to find her, even though how the girl’s mother had known he was looking for the girl in the first place he couldn’t have said. Then he took a deep breath and pulled his shit together and stepped into one of the aisles and pretended to look like he was shopping, and he watched the girl. She was two or three years older than in the photo, but it was her, he was certain of it.

  When he was feeling good about himself, confident in his convictions, he would look back at this moment in the bodega and convince himself it was dumb luck that the girl happened into the store when he wasn’t even technically looking for her. The only other possibility—that the Oracle had known not just where the girl would be but that she had known where she would be when Niles would be there, had known that Niles would sit on the address for a week before seeking it out, or had not actually known any of this, had simply had a premonition that spat out an address that happened to lead him right to the girl—undermined too many firm beliefs he held about this world, his control over his own life.

  At the moment, though, seeing Sarah for the first time, he didn’t consider any of this. He watched and listened and waited and when she left, he followed after.

  For a long time, he followed after her.

  She was living with her aunt in a neighborhood deeper into Brooklyn. Her father had been absent for her entire life.

  She was not just a pretty girl, but was smart and could be funny.

  She was a third-grader at a middling elementary school in Sheepshead Bay.

  She had few friends, and just as few enemies, and despite being a rather pretty little girl, she moved through her life mostly unnoticed.

  She did not like bologna, or, at the very least, didn’t like it enough to keep for herself but instead fed it to stray cats whenever it was given to her for lunch.

  He found out all of this and he found out a number of other things and he found that he didn’t have the first clue what to do with everything he found out about her. But mostly he found
that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop worrying over the life he and Oyemi had boxed her into when they ran off with her mother. Thoughts of her kept him up at night—her crying herself to sleep or naming one of her dolls after her mother or lashing out at her aunt or cutting herself with tiny razors or turning to drugs and drinking or seeking out ways to slip through the cracks of a normal, healthy childhood. So it made him laugh once, long after he’d brought her to Regional, after he’d made her into a new kind of woman, when he asked her about her childhood, and she described for him as bland and normal and dully happy a childhood as he could have imagined. But at the time, as he waited for her to run out of school with the rest of the kids, as he followed her on her way back home, as he stood outside her apartment or tracked her to Coney Island or into the city, he imagined for her a wretched and untenable life.

  Looking back on it all, it was difficult for him to understand how he managed to spend so much of his day in pursuit of this girl, watching her, making sure that she was, on the surface at least, okay. He would set up a trust for her, he decided, find some way to make it seem like a prize or award she’d won. He would make himself somehow a silent part of her life, dub himself her Magwitch.