The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (28 page)

She was in Mr. Niles’s office and his mother was cutting his hair and he was talking about the business of Regional and she couldn’t stop hopping from foot to foot. Mr. Niles was about to raise his eyebrows at her and say something about this, she knew, but then he was sliding into his car in the parking garage, which was only strange in that he usually had someone drive him, but he was sliding into his car and she was there holding the door for him and she was apologizing to him for a report he’d asked for that she hadn’t delivered yet and he didn’t care, didn’t care at all, and she was still shifting from her left foot to her right, left to right, right to left, and he was smiling and shaking his head and saying, Don’t worry about it, it’s fine, and she was still apologizing even as he closed the door and started the engine and she waited and watched as he pulled out of the garage and then, ending there, the dream would have been really no different than any number of other anxiety dreams she’d had about Regional, but it didn’t stop there because she turned and started to walk back to her office but tripped, stubbed her toe or her whole foot on the curb and tripped, and there was suddenly a sharp and burning pain in her foot, but in her real foot, too, and she woke up.

She stumbled to the bathroom. In the light, she couldn’t see
anything wrong with her foot, but it hurt like holy hell, and she gritted her teeth and squeezed her mechanical fist. Then she squeezed her normal fist. She took some ibuprofen and then more and then the bottle was empty and she was in her bed and the pain was such that breathing made it worse.

Blinking. Blinking also made it worse.

The pumping of blood through her veins. That, too.

Everything. Everything made it worse.

In the fall of 1993
, the letter continued,
your mother was abducted.

This is not something you do not already know. This is not something we need to remind you of, yet while you know a story about the abduction and disappearance and ultimate fate of your mother, you do not yet know the full and accurate story.

Let us begin, then, with the fall of 1993. Your mother had dropped you off at school that morning and had, on her way back to your apartment, stopped at a Duane Reade. Let us say she needed to buy a new hair dryer. Really, does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, no it does not, but let us say that we know for sure that what she bought was a hair dryer, a small pack of Band-Aids, and Tylenol PM.

It is important to us that you understand just what and how much we know about your mother and about the man and woman who abducted her, and about you.

Your mother was taken just as she left the store.

You have been led to believe that the man and woman who took your mother were the anarchists Manuel
Guzman and Nadja Prcic, that she was abducted by these two and returned to a secret location in Queens, where she was brainwashed, such that she forgot who she was, who you were, or that you were even a you to be forgotten about. After which, she was moved in secret to Houston, then to Managua, where she was trained to be a freedom fighter, and then, from there, was snuck across the Atlantic into West Africa, where she was given further instruction and deeper brainwashing. Then, during an operation—the attempted (and foiled) detonation of a bomb in the London Underground—your mother was killed.

You have seen the photographs.

You have read the dossiers.

You know the reports.

As far as you are aware, you have killed everyone involved in the operation but for one man who killed himself.

It is our unfortunate responsibility to inform you that in all of this, however, you are wrong, though only because you have been misled.

As of this moment—as we are penning this letter to you—your mother is still alive.

By the end of the assault it had been a minor miracle that she was standing still, much less fighting. Much less crushing skulls with her bare hand.

Even she had known that the arm had managed all the heavy lifting, had pulled her along, had made all of the decisions, moving her left or right, punching or not punching, crushing or not crushing, according to its own mysterious rubric.

And she hadn’t cared. Let the arm do what it wanted to do.

But when it was all over, she could barely stand, much less walk. Her arm held her up, propped her against one of the few remaining cubicle walls.

The doctor declared her unfit for anything but the emergency room and then stitched her up as best he could. Her busted lip. The bulging, purpling bruises on her cheek and over her eye. The cauliflower of her ear, which had been boxed again and again. He applied cream, a salve of some sort, to the places where they had placed the electrodes and the hot pokers.

Her ribs, three of them, had been broken. He couldn’t do much for those.

Internal bleeding he handled as soon as he could get her into the operating room.

Then there’d been the shock of losing her arm, and then of the arm’s return, the emotional and mental rigmarole that had gone hand in hand with all of that, but she kept that for herself. She could have handed that to the doctor, too, and maybe he would have handed her something back—a tranquilizer, maybe, or a hug. But that, the emotional thing that had happened back there, the weeping and sobbing into her shirt, the liquid feeling of feeling whole again—that she kept for herself.

But despite all of this, despite the pain of torture and hastily performed field surgery to remove her arm and despite the fighting and the reattachment, despite all of this, nothing had happened to her foot.

Her foot—both her feet—should have been fine.

By the time the doctor saw her the next morning, she couldn’t walk unassisted. She hobbled into the examination room using a crutch. Her breath rasped; her skin had paled. She had a fine, pungent sheen of sweat clamming to her face and neck and chest.

Not a few times during the night had she considered cutting off the foot herself, cutting it off just below the calf.

After an examination and X-ray, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong with her foot, and she considered punching him through his face.

Lately, she had been considering punching people through their faces a not-inconsiderable number of times.

So much did she want to punch him through his face, her mechanical arm had come up to punch-through-the-face level. Her fist was a closed and ready-to-punch fist.

She forced it down. She exerted a great deal of force of will to make it go down. When it did, it grabbed hold of the edge of the table in a serious and life-threatening way.

“Check,” she said. “Again.” She gritted her teeth. Her fist gripped the table hard enough to crumple the edge of it. She didn’t care. All she could do was grit her teeth or crush the table with her fist or crush the doctor’s skull.

He checked again. He didn’t know what was wrong. He gave her something to take for the pain. She looked at the bottle he handed her and shoved it back at him and in the same fluid motion grabbed him by his collar, her fist cocked and ready to punch again.

He gave her something much stronger.

By the afternoon, her foot was green. The entire foot from the tip of her toe to the top of her ankle.

Not a deep green, not a green you would call forest or sea turtle or even just green, not yet, but it wasn’t yellow either.

It was beyond yellow and was moving confidently into the green family of colors.

The sight of the green foot made the doctor blanch, made him stutter. He rubbed his hand through his thin hair and pulled it down tightly over his face. She grabbed him again and pulled him close and he smelled like sick, or sick and sweat, and she was desperate now.

People had to fucking carry her there, and she was now desperate.

“Cut it off,” she said. “Cut the fucking thing off and do it now.”

Not only is your mother still alive, but you have seen her and she has seen you innumerable times. It is possible that you and your mother have seen each other on a near-weekly basis now for the past seven years that you have been working for the Regional Office, working for Mr. Niles and Oyemi, working for the very people who took your mother from you.

Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, while not the best of people, while guilty of a number of crimes and sins, and not exactly undeserving of being hunted down and smote by your lovely mechanical arm, had nothing to do with the abduction of your mother but were simply offered up by Mr. Niles—along with the other men and women you stalked and killed, men and women the Regional Office would have gotten around to dealing with eventually if not for you, so do not blame yourself for their deaths, which were hastened, surely, but not by much. Mr. Niles has, for this long time, been working to control you and your movements, all in an attempt to hide from you the very information you came looking for.

Your mother is much changed from how you would remember her. Have you figured it out? Have you guessed yet where your mother is, who your mother has become?

It is not our intention to be coy or to throw puzzles at you like obstacles in a training course, but it is simply our hope that if you can come to the conclusion on your own, if you can take the small pieces of this we have given you and pull together a full picture of what wrongs have been committed—against you, against your mother—then you will more likely believe this truth than the one you were fed by Mr. Niles.

It is not an easy choice we are asking you to make, we understand how hard this choice must be, the choice between a story you have told yourself again and again, that you have done right by your mother, by her spirit, have taken righteous vengeance against the men and women who stole her from you, and the story that you have done very little at all, have done less than very little in fact, have worked to advance the goals and livelihoods of the two people who deserved your vengeance most.

We navigate through this life with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences
of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hide and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing, but it is time, Sarah.

It is time to stop hiding, Sarah O’Hara.

It is time to stop peeking out from behind the coattails of Mr. Niles, the flaring nostrils of Oyemi, the long reach of the Regional Office, to stop peeking out from behind your mechanical arm, to stop hiding behind your aunt and the tragedy of your childhood, time to stop hiding from what is real and painful and frustrating and all of the other emotions we find it so easy to hide from, and time to admit that you know, have known, have always known since the first time you saw her, bald and trembling and half-submerged in the milky-blue water of Oyemi’s Oracle Pool with her “sisters,” time to see your mother, time to stop pretending it’s not her.

The relief she felt when she came out of the surgery, when she came out of the haze-inducing anesthetics, was an ecstasy kind of relief.

The relief in having this part of her removed was almost as strong, in fact, as the relief she felt when she’d had that other part of her reattached.

It lasted for a day, for almost two days, and she wondered how strong the anesthetic had been. She didn’t take any of the painkillers the doctor had given her. She didn’t need them, she felt so fucking good all of the time now. She should have cut the other foot off, too, for good measure.

The lab was working on a new foot for her. The doctor had asked her to wait two weeks, three weeks, and then the foot would’ve been finished and they could’ve removed the bad foot and replaced it all in one operation, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. She would have cut it off herself if he hadn’t done it for her.

For now, it was disguised. They didn’t have the prosthetic on hand, and so it was disguised with wrapping and a boot, the kind people wore when they broke their foot. She had a story to tell in
which she was a klutz. People liked to hear about when you were a klutz, she decided.

But in all honesty, she didn’t care what people liked to hear about or what people thought about when they saw her with her boot and her wrap because all she could think about was how good she felt now that the foot was gone.

This feeling was a fleeting feeling, however. This feeling lasted not even two full days before it was gone and was replaced first by an itch at the base of her leg, around the place where her foot would have started if her foot had still been there, and was followed, not long after, by a sharp, but not as sharp as before, kind of pain.

At first, it was like she was being touched by a sharp piece of ice. And then it was like she was being jabbed by that piece of ice, or as if the sharp piece of ice were being worked into her skin, were working to gouge out some essential part of her there in that new and raw stump.

Or, and this was what she decided, it was like the sharp piece of ice was not on the outside working its way in, but was instead on the inside trying to dig itself out.

She unclipped the boot and unraveled the wrap and looked at the place where there had been a foot, but she couldn’t see what might have been going on.

She placed her fingers gently on the part of her that was still wrapped in gauze but couldn’t feel anything through the gauze and so she unwrapped the gauze, too, and tested the skin, the nerves, with the soft pad of her index finger and then with the rest of her fingers, and there she felt them.

She couldn’t see what they were, not yet, but she could feel them. With her fingertips, she could feel them pushing their way out of her stump, and they were sharp and cold and not ice but not unlike ice, either.

Not ice, no. Metal.