The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (18 page)

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.

In the meantime, he resigned himself to watching over her, as if the simple act of keeping an eye on her were enough to keep her out of trouble, keep her safe, help her to become happy.

After nearly two months, Mr. Niles went back to Oyemi, the office, the Oracle. He didn’t know what to expect. He had long ago found an apartment of his own. He had lost contact with her, and she had left him to himself. No phone calls, no late-night arrivals on his
doorstep. Either Oyemi had given up on Mr. Niles or she was so mad at him for ducking out, and for so long, that she’d cut him off entirely.

The front door was unlocked and he steeled himself to face her, but Oyemi wasn’t there. Instead, there was a note, folded over with his name written across the top of it. His name and the date. Maybe she wrote this sort of note every day, he thought. Maybe she expected him to show up unannounced any day of the week, and she left him a newly dated note every day. Unlikely, but maybe. The note was short, simple. “Back tomorrow. Oyemi.” Mr. Niles looked around the front office and then his own smaller office. Not much had changed. Then he went in to see the Oracle.

The room was dark, as the sun had begun to set, and everything in it was bathed in blues and greens and reds from the computers and printers, the glowing water. She stared out the window, even though there was less and less for her to see there, and for the first time he wondered what she was looking at, what she was looking for. He wondered if she even saw what was right in front of her, or if Oyemi’s administrations had taken that away from her, had made any kind of present sight impossible.

He cleared his throat. She didn’t move. He began to speak and then stopped and then started again, feeling self-conscious and like a boy in trouble, or in love.

“I found her,” he said.

“Sarah,” he said, though barely loudly enough to hear himself over the fans and motors running in the room. “Just so you know,” he said.

“Not that you wouldn’t have known anyway, I guess.

“Not that you need me to tell you what happened.”

She hadn’t moved. She didn’t look as if she could hear him, or as if she cared, or as if she had any sense of anything going on in this world. She looked as if she were trapped inside a world maybe not of her own choosing and that no matter what he said or did, she wouldn’t hear or recognize him, and so he turned to leave. And then the printer kicked into gear.

A small slip of paper fell into the tray.

Mr. Niles, unsure what else he should do, picked it up, read it.

How is she?

He should leave, he knew. He should open the door behind him and leave and take the slip of paper with him and never speak to the Oracle again; he knew all of this. Instead, he said, “Fine. I suppose.”

He said, “Not great, of course. I mean. Confused, maybe. Sad? But she’s with family, or. She’s making it.”

He looked at the slip in his hands. He felt he should say more. He had come to her, after all. The air between them begged for him to say something more.

“I’m going to help her,” he said. “I don’t know how, yet. But I’m going to take care of her. Keep an eye on her for you.”

He waited for the printer to start up again. It didn’t. He coughed and cleared his throat. He didn’t know how to finish things up here, so he moved to leave again, deciding that an, Okay, well, thanks for the assist, or whatever else he could come up with to say would feel like the worst thing he could say, worse than saying nothing at all.

Then she sat up.

Not all the way up. The cables, the cords, the diodes or neural monitors, whatever was attached, however they were attached, wouldn’t let her sit all the way up. She struggled to pull herself higher out of the water and he worried that she would pull something out, break something, short the building, electrocute herself.

She turned. Again, not all the way. But she turned from her window and she looked right at him, not through him or past him or at the world or worlds she could see around him. She was pale and trembling and covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and she was crying, had been crying.

“Can I see her?” she said, not through the printer, but with her voice, and not her Oracle voice, full of thrumming portent and hidden wells of power, but with the soft, mousy, simple voice he remembered from the unassuming girl he’d spoken to outside of Duane Reade.

He shook his head, but just barely, slight enough you could have missed it.

“Can you let me go to her, go to see her, can you let me go, please?”

He moved now, slowly but deliberately, for the door. He inched his way there, avoiding sudden movements, as if she were a pack of wild dogs or a bear. He didn’t shake his head or nod or tell her soothing lies. He hoped that if he simply stopped responding, she would stop talking.

She didn’t.

Two months before, three months before, if she’d asked him to set her free like this, if she’d made even the slightest movement toward escape, he would have helped her. Oyemi be damned, he would have let her go. But not anymore. She had suddenly proved herself to Mr. Niles, had maneuvered him to Sarah and shown him how powerful she could be, and maybe she hadn’t known that this was going to happen, maybe she had printed out that address with no knowledge of what was going to happen, but she had given him that address, had made herself seem far too real, and as much as it pained him to say so, and as often as he would, in the future, deny to himself the validity of her predictions, Oyemi was right. They needed her. They had her. He wasn’t going to be the one to let her go.

She didn’t raise her voice or try to pull herself out of the pool. She simply sat there, halfway out of the water, halfway turned to look at him, connected in her unsettling way to the computers and printers and who knew
what else, and spoke her plea to him with soft, unending persistence: Please, please let me see her, let me go to her, let me see her, please, just to see her, just to hold her, please, let me go, can’t I go see her, can’t I go be with her.

He opened the door, stepped out of the room, and closed the door. Oyemi had done something to the doors and the walls because it seemed as if he had stepped into a vacuum. All the sound from the other room cut off, and the sudden silence made him nervous. He pressed his ear to the door to listen, to see if the Oracle had stopped pleading with him when the door had closed, but he couldn’t tell. He couldn’t hear anything at all but his own shallow, labored breath. His neck hurt and his shoulders felt sluggish and sore. He needed to sit down, to sit and catch his breath, let his body, which wouldn’t stop shaking, recover, but he couldn’t stand to be there, afraid she might try to disconnect herself and come tumbling after him from the pool, wet and naked.

He went home. He waited up all night. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t get her voice out of his head, but mostly couldn’t stop thinking of what ramifications this might have, what consequences he might suffer at Oyemi’s hands if he’d somehow damaged the Oracle, broken her, made her unusable.

She might kill him when she found out. Kill him or worse.

When Oyemi called him the next morning, though, it was simply to tell him about a lead on a girl outside of
Chicago. She acted as if they hadn’t just lost two months between them. She didn’t ask him what he’d been doing all this time, didn’t yell or guilt-trip or threaten or beg. And when he asked her about this later, Oyemi confided in him: She had known. The Oracle had told her that very first day they’d brought her back to the office, had told her that Mr. Niles would seem to be lost, but that he would return, that she should let him be lost for a while, confident that he would return.

That morning, though, she only told him the Oracle was already hard at work, had already found a girl. “She’s in Peoria,” Oyemi told him. “I’ve got the details on her at the office. Pick them up on your way to the airport. I’ve got you on the ten forty-five out of Newark.”

After that night, Nell faded away. Maybe, Niles thought, that night had been her last gasp. For a while, he worried that she might resurface, might ask him again about her daughter, but she never did. From that moment forward, she was an Oracle and nothing else, and was soon joined by the others, and there were days when Niles forgot entirely who she had once been.

As for Sarah, she grew older. She moved effortlessly from elementary school to middle school, excelled in science and math, was accepted into Bronx Science, the prestigious magnet school. She played volleyball and ran track. She made the National Honor Society and won a small prize for a robotics competition when she was fifteen, and by the time she entered her senior year of high
school, she’d been accepted at Caltech. The very real possibility that she would leave the city, would leave Mr. Niles’s sphere of influence, loomed over him and frightened and saddened him. This was when he first tried to work her into the list of credible Recruits for the Regional Office. When that didn’t work, he came up with the idea of feeding her information about her mother’s disappearance. He varied this just slightly from the truth, namely in that in his new version, Nell was abducted by someone else and was eventually killed. Then he left Sarah a trail to follow that led her, finally, and just as she turned twenty, back to him.

He took her in. He made her promises. He made her strong and powerful and tied her to him. He gave her a mechanical arm. It was the only way he could think of to bring her into the fold, to make her as much like the Operatives as possible, to give her power and control over her own life. He trained her in deadly arts. He entrusted his organization to her and convinced her to entrust her future to him, and when her mother and the two other Oracles made their prophecies, he and Oyemi paid attention.

When the Oracles singled out a girl imbued with latent mystical properties that, when honed, when unleashed, would make her powerful, they paid attention. Every single time, every single girl, he and Oyemi paid attention.

When the Oracles pointed them to Henry, living in Buffalo, working as an underpaid, overworked bike courier, they paid attention. They collected him, brought him
to the Regional Office, though they had no idea what they were supposed to do with him. (They gave him a job in the mail room, where he stayed for almost a year, underworked and overpaid, and Mr. Niles and Oyemi remained in the dark about what to do with him until one day Mr. Niles discovered him sitting in the stairwell sharing a cigarette with one of the new Recruits. The new Recruit showed great promise, according to the Oracles, but Mr. Niles had made little headway in her training. She abused the other Recruits and belittled the martial arts trainer and no one liked her and she lied and cheated and stole from the other girls, even the other Operatives. And until Mr. Niles found her sitting in the stairwell with Henry, he and Oyemi had assumed she hated everyone in the entire office. Her name was Jasmine. Afterward, Mr. Niles found Henry and asked him what they had been talking about and Henry told him, “Not much, really, just stuff.” Then Mr. Niles watched Henry and Jasmine more closely under the suspicion that Henry was hoping to become romantically involved with Jasmine. Instead, what he found was a remarkably improved Jasmine: in her training, in her attitudes. What he also found was that Henry spent time chatting with all of the Recruits, and the Operatives, too. But. They came to him. They found him. In the mail room or in the break room or as he was getting out of his car or as he was riding the elevator down to B4. They found him and talked to him and asked his advice and showed him what
they had learned and he showed them how to do what they had learned even better. “Do you have experience with martial arts or weapons training?” Mr. Niles asked him, and Henry shook his head and said, “Not really, no,” and he took Henry to meet Oyemi, and Oyemi, who had never been as strong when reading men as she was when reading women, shook her head, too, and shrugged her shoulders, and said, afterward, “If you think it’s the best move, Mr. Niles, then, by all means, take it.” And so Mr. Niles did, and the next day, Henry was moved out of the mail room and into an office, and that afternoon, he flew with Mr. Niles to Shreveport, where Mr. Niles was to collect a new Recruit, a girl who knew nothing of the latent powers within her, knew nothing of the evil forces of darkness surrounding her, and at the last moment, he turned to Henry and said, “You take it from here,” said, “All you need to do is get her to the Regional Office,” and Henry shrugged and said, “Sure,” and he said, “Any words of advice?” and Mr. Niles said, “Try not to scare her,” and Henry laughed and said, “Me? I don’t scare anyone,” and within ten minutes, they were back in the rental car on their way to the airport on their way back to the Regional Office, the girl sitting close to Henry in the backseat, the two of them joking as if they’d been best friends since preschool. It had been the smoothest recruitment Mr. Niles had ever witnessed, and after that, Henry was given control of recruitment and outreach.)