The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (15 page)

But mostly, those of us who wished he’d died did so because we dreaded the idea of spending the next few hours in here with Action Jackson—God, what a stupid name—incapacitated and possibly dying, but certainly not being helped by lack of proper medical administration. We imagined good odds on his dying before all this ended. And if he didn’t die, if he regained consciousness, we imagined his making demands we couldn’t fulfill. Or even if he were to lie there stoic and strong, how depressing would that be, the constant reminder of him? How bad for team morale? And while we didn’t have a good plan for what to do next, whatever plan we came up with would surely involve leaving him behind, and wouldn’t that be easier, we thought to ourselves, with him already dead?

We kept this to ourselves, though. We touched him gently on the shoulder or the cheek, careful not to move him or make him worse.

Then we moved away from him and by unspoken consent, we stayed as far away from that part of the room as we could for the rest of the time we were trapped there.

Then we heard loud laughter coming from the other side of the door.

This unnerved us, made us feel uncertain and more frightened than before. It was the kind of laughter you heard at a party or a bar or a reunion.

We couldn’t imagine, in other words, what had made them laugh so hard. Or maybe we could but would rather not have. And maybe this was what made Karen—quiet, unassuming, prudish Karen—say, Guess they found Richard’s monkey video. And this. This made us laugh, laugh so hard. Maybe because it was Karen who brought it up after making such a fuss over the video in the first place. Or maybe it was the idea of those goons huddled around one of the computers in the cubicles watching that video on YouTube. Or maybe it was just the stress of our situation, the urgent need for some kind of release. Whatever the reason, Richard’s monkey video had never been as funny to us as it was then. The video showed a chimp, a trained chimp, taunting a baby, first with a bottle and then with a squeaky giraffe and then the baby’s blankie, coaxing the baby to it each time with this thing or that, only to snatch the item away at the last second just before thumping the baby hard on the forehead. The baby fell for it every time and then wailed and screamed and cried this big openmouthed, toothless cry after the chimp thumped him on the forehead. It was a cruel but really, really funny video. Karen, who’d just had a baby four months ago, and was maybe a bit bitter coming back to work so soon, made a number of complaints about the video. She complained enough and to enough of the right people that we had to attend a seminar. Control software was installed onto our computers. Every minute of every workday was tracked. No more
social networking. No more personal e-mail. No more porn. Was it surprising that none of us really liked Karen all that much? She knew that we didn’t like her much, but she thought it was because of what she did, when really, and it is a nuanced argument, we admit, but we already hadn’t liked her because we’d already decided that she would turn out to be the kind of person who would do what she did.

So her joke here, in the middle of all of this, surprised us, made us reconsider her and our dislike of her, though the more honest of us knew that if we all got out of this alive, or even if only some of us did, including Karen, it wouldn’t be long before we shifted back into our established and familiar office roles.

But still. In that small, brief moment, each of us loved Karen.

Then the door opened and we shut up, afraid they were coming in there to make us shut up.

Hostages, we figured, weren’t supposed to break out in spontaneous, raucous laughter.

But they weren’t there for us. They were there to add to our numbers. Two men marched into the office holding a woman between them and then they threw her into the lot of us and left, shutting the door behind them.

William moved to help her up but stopped. He looked back at us, his face white. She’d been beaten up badly, we could all see that, but we couldn’t see what had freaked William out until he stepped back and then we saw what was utterly, horribly wrong with her, which wasn’t that she was black-eyed and bloody-browed, wasn’t even the long, thick gash down her arm that
extended from her shoulder almost to her elbow, but rather that her other arm was missing entirely. Her blouse had been ripped off at the shoulder of the missing arm. We could see the seams and the jagged edge of the material. We couldn’t see what was underneath the material, but it was in the shape of a shoulder, a truncated shoulder.

Then we got a glimpse of her, got a look at her face, and we realized who she was.

Sarah O’Hara.

We knew her, but the way she looked now, her eyes downcast, her face bruised, her shoulders slumped, jerking with silent sobs, we couldn’t believe how afraid of her we’d been, and we were once very, very afraid of her.

For one, she was generally very mean. She arrived out of the blue on occasion, stormed through our offices, yelled at our various managers, and stood haughtily over our shoulders as we made our calls, as we coaxed our clients into ever-bigger vacation packages, as we tried to up-sell the sixth Sherpa since no one, not since the Krakauer book, attempted Everest with fewer than six Sherpas. No matter what we said or how much we sold, we could never seem to do enough for Sarah O’Hara.

Once, she hung up Kelly’s phone, Kelly who shortly thereafter succumbed to a nervous breakdown and quit. Hung up Kelly’s phone in the middle of a sales call with one of her biggest clients. No one knew why. Not Kelly, not our manager, Benjamin, also no longer with the agency. None of us could figure it out. The call was going well. Before that hang-up, Kelly was our best
salesperson. She had convinced her client that there really was nothing more spectacular than to travel with one’s own hot-air balloon and hot-air balloon crew. You never know, she was in the middle of saying, You never know when you might want to go up in a hot-air balloon. Say you are casting about in the Antarctic waters south of Argentina and you want to take a hot-air balloon over the Perito Moreno Glacier. Unless you bring your own, she continued, and that was when Sarah O’Hara pressed her index finger down on the phone and hung up the call. Then she looked at Kelly, who had turned abruptly around to see what the fuck had just happened, and she waited. She waited to see if Kelly would say or do anything, waited for an outburst or tears, or something. With Sarah O’Hara, no one ever knew. Kelly turned back to the phone, not a word or a look, and redialed the number, which none of the rest of us would have had the balls to do, not with Sarah O’Hara standing right behind us. She redialed and then, with a smile on her face, she apologized, a mechanical issue, she had moved to another phone, wouldn’t happen again, and what did they decide about that balloon? And sure, credit where credit is due, she made the sale, but those of us who knew her best could hear the slight hitch in her voice. Just a tremor. A blip. Nothing at all. Sarah O’Hara made a note on her clipboard and then walked away. We consoled Kelly. Patted her gamely on the shoulder. She smiled and shook her head and gave out a long, relieved sigh. And then the next day the tremor had become a trill, and then a shake, and soon enough, she couldn’t talk on the phone without stammering or stuttering. She lost her clients. Had her breakdown. Quit and moved back to Kansas to live with her folks.

The week before all of that happened, she’d won a trip to Costa Rica for having the best monthly sales record three months running. She never claimed it.

What had poor Kelly done to deserve any of this? What, other than stand out as a brilliant sales associate? Kind and generous and glowing? Nothing. Nothing that we could see. Some of us speculated—she had made some cruel joke at Sarah’s expense (a lot of us had, but we couldn’t remember hearing anything of the sort from Kelly), or she had discovered the real agency below the fake agency (though she never let on anything of the sort), or she had e-mailed Sarah one too many times asking for a new order of Post-it notes or copier toner or a new mouse pad—but really, none of this made sense, and in the end, most of us decided it was all arbitrary, that Kelly was offered up as a sacrifice, an example to remind us how replaceable we all were, how powerful Sarah was, how unnerved we should be around her.

And we were. Unnerved. But the real reason, or maybe the other reason, some of us—not all of us, but those of us who knew something about what really went on there—had once been very, very afraid of her was because of a rumored mechanical arm, one she could use, the rumors went, with fearsome and deadly force.

Which seemed to us now both less of a rumor and less of an arm, having been indelicately removed.

She pulled herself up enough to push herself across the carpet and to the wall. She sat there, her knees against her chest, her arm draped over her knees, her head, sobbing and weeping, cradled in the crook of the only elbow she had left to her. We were at a loss. Even William, who never missed an opportunity to unsuccessfully
try to comfort someone. Even Karen, who believed her faith could heal all wounds. None of us knew what to say or do in a situation in which we were tasked with comforting a woman we hated about her superpowerful mechanical arm, which had been torn from her body.

We were surprised, then, when Laura took the lead in this. She moved past us and we caught a strange and unsettling look in her eye. This whole time, she’d hardly been there at all. But now she was back, mentally back among us, and had come back with a strange, some of us would say ferocious, look in her eye. She beelined for Sarah and who knew what she would have said or done, but she didn’t make it there before Sarah’s sobs came to a halt. She then whipped her head up to look at the closed door and then back to us—her long ponytail swinging all the way around so that stray hairs batted against her nose and lips. She then stood in one fluid and dangerous motion. She took a quick look at Jackson on the floor. Then she gave the lot of us another once-over and was clearly disappointed in what she saw. She recovered and resigned herself to us.

Wiring of some kind hung loose and useless from where her arm should have been.

Laura was about to say something, maybe William and Karen, too, but she stopped them with a look.

Then she said, “No time for chitchat.” Then she pulled a gun—a handgun, maybe a Beretta, maybe something else because we weren’t well versed on handguns—pulled this gun out of nowhere. She didn’t smile. She didn’t grimace. She didn’t look down
at where her arm used to be. Her face was smooth and unburdened and, suddenly, quite lovely.

Then she said, “I’ve got a plan.”

We all agreed it was a shitty plan but we also all agreed that we couldn’t say as much to the woman with the gun and the one arm and the entrails of another (mechanical) arm hanging from her shoulder socket. We couldn’t tell her how it was just like Action Jackson’s plan and look at what had happened to him, think of what might happen to us. She told us the plan and how we would charge out of here, overwhelming the big, strong, heartless men with guns by the sheer number of us pouring out of the office, and William, God bless him, asked her, “What about Action Jackson?” and then flinched when she said, “What the fuck are you talking about?” because who wouldn’t have flinched? But then, because William was William and William didn’t know when or how to stop himself, he pointed to Jackson on the floor and said, “Sorry, I meant Jackson. I meant him. What about him?”

She looked at Jackson on the floor and then said, with disgust and with the implication that he must have been some kind of idiot to be on the floor broken the way he was, said in a way that made us all hope that Jackson was dead or, at the very least, unconscious and unable to hear any of this: “What? The dead guy? We fucking leave the dead guy. That’s pretty standard, friend.”

Maybe we should have pulled together, let bygones be bygones, become a stronger unit in the face of outside adversity, but Sarah was just so mean and angry, and maybe she had the right to be angry, what with her whole life coming under assault and her
mechanical arm stripped from her body, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it, couldn’t bring ourselves to play along. And so when Michael—poor Michael—called out to the guard that we needed help, that the one-armed woman they’d brought in here was having some kind of fit, and the guard opened the door, opened it but didn’t step inside, we did not rush him, did not overwhelm him with our underwhelming numbers. We stood there and, we’re ashamed to admit, a couple of us nodded with our eyes at Sarah standing with her gun on the other side of the door. It wasn’t unlikely that we saw the guard roll his eyes at us, at the situation, at the foolishness of this foolish plan, and he swiveled around the open door, his body inconceivably lowered and small, out of range of the gun she was aiming where his head should’ve been but wasn’t, swiveled around the door and up close to and behind her, grabbing her with his larger, strong hand in the shoulder socket where once there had been an arm, and he squeezed.

When she screamed, we felt maybe the worst about what we’d done, or not done.

We were impressed, though, by her ability, amidst all this pain and what we assumed must be deep-rooted sorrow, her ability to break the guard’s knee with a swift kick, and then his nose with a balled, backhanded fist. We also felt like dummies for not helping her out because, judging by her skilled performance, by how quickly she dispatched the one guard who knew where she was and what she was waiting to do, we might have stood some chance of escaping if we’d helped. And sure, those of us who were just travel-agency schmucks, we didn’t know what to make of her “plan,” but those of us from the Regional Office, we should have known,
did know that she was supposedly some fearsome fighting dynamo, but we’d never seen her in action and had always chalked her reputation up to the mechanical arm, which we weren’t entirely sure even existed, and if it had once existed, it certainly wasn’t a part of her anymore. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late, as three more men streamed into Laura’s office, batons swinging at Sarah, poor, one-armed Sarah, who did not give up, who was not the kind to give up, even as they dragged her away and hit her. She screamed and bit and flailed, and three men weren’t enough, but then two more swept in, and, for what it was worth, five, five men was what it took to carry Sarah out of the office, and two more men to help the first man, who was covered in blood and seemed to be in serious pain, and then, at the last minute, at the last possible minute, not all of us, but a few of us ran.