The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  Doors barked at Benji to move.

  “What?”

  Doors peeled what looked like a film of dried glue off Benji’s triceps. “Stay away from the prototype! Sometimes I wonder how I hired such a meathead.”

  Benji rubbed at the spot on his arm and slinked around to the other side of the room. Zahra was now closest to a barely visible archway.

  “Dawn, you come with me. The rest of you, stay here and wait.”

  Later, Dawn told the others that this exercise was an example of Doors’ cruelty, but none of the rest agreed, because none of them liked Dawn’s super-corporate, serious-suit deal either.

  They waited for several minutes, long enough for most of them to pull out their PINAphones to take a photo or thumb in a quiet notation—and while they had the phone out anyway, to check e-mail, feeds, clips. They were hunched over these little screens when Dawn and Doors returned. Dawn was struggling to hold an enormous mammal—a fat beige body—which scratched and tore at her blouse like an infant trying to feed. When it finally scratched her across the clavicle with a little black paw, she screamed and let it go. Then they saw the bandit face.

  “You’ve got a raccoon trap out there?” Benji said. He was the only one who hadn’t been thumb-scrolling. He’d continued to feel around on his arm like a child who’d been slapped.

  The raccoon stood frozen on its hind legs, blinking at them rather humanly, and, as though it had a nervous tic, running its forepaws over its snout again and again.

  Doors shook his head. “Look at you idiots on your phones. You just proved how successful this could be with only the barest amount of spin. All right, little guy,” Doors said, scooping the animal up. He and the raccoon looked into each other’s faces, and the creature calmed—slowed its blinking, stopped its pawing, did not struggle against this forced embrace. “Let’s make history.”

  Doors deposited the animal onto the floor in front of the shimmering arch. It only took a few seconds to step, gingerly, under it. “Consensual, I told you,” he said, turning back to Dawn.

  All eyes were fixed on the space there; all hearts pounded.

  “Three, two, one,” Doors said and snapped his fingers. The raccoon was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Brandon slept until noon. Sometimes he thought he still smelled Zahra’s musk in his sheets and on the pillows. This was not impossible, since the group laundered so infrequently and used only the thinnest, most biodegradable scent-free detergents. Zahra had called his admiration for her puppy love, so perhaps he was like a hound for her, nose trained on the alluring balance of her pheromones. Of course, by “puppy love” she meant to demean, to tease, and to keep him in his place.

  “I’m thirty!” he had told her. “Eventually love is just love.”

  “Software engineers never fall in love,” Zahra said. “Neither do programmers.”

  “I’m neither of those things!” he said. It was only later he understood. She was a software engineer. She was a programmer.

  He was still staring at the white ceiling with its huge vent, which marked its previous existence as an office, when there was an urgent knocking at his door. He answered, and Suzanne nearly fell into his foyer.

  “Hello,” she said, steadying herself and then curtsying.

  “Why were you pounding like that?”

  “I’m a very energetic knocker.” She walked in and plopped into his red faux-leather chair, a copy of the red chair they all had. “I really wanted to thank you. I know you could have taken advantage of me last night, and…”

  “Oh, come on, Suzanne.”

  “But really. I appreciate it.”

  He turned on the console to start some water for the coffee beads. “Are you really an alcoholic?”

  She stared at him.

  “But why would you work in the moonshine department?”

  “Moonshine department!” She threw her head back, laughed. “You guys have no idea what we do down there.” When she said down there, he pictured the coal ovens of a ship. “I work on the kitchen side of the garden. I’ll give you a tour if you want.”

  The water sounded a ding, and he poured two cups of what tasted almost like an Italian espresso.

  “Listen, B.” She was wearing a long skirt slit up to just below her hip, and it fell open to reveal a luscious thigh. “I need to know if you’re into me, because if not, I’ve got to find someone else to waste time with.”

  “I’m into you,” he said.

  “But you know what I’m really asking, right?”

  He squinted at her and took a sip of his coffee. He thought of this as his Marlboro Man affectation.

  Suzanne said, “You are so weird-looking. I mean, you’re a catch, sure, you’re a good guy, would make a good partner and father and all that, but you’re not, like, you’re not a movie star or anything.”

  “So this is your land-a-man strategy, phase two: insult the meat?”

  She had taken a big sip of coffee but, forced to laugh, spit it all back into the mug. “I guess we should talk about this later. You’ve got lots of good things going for you. Not a bad body. Good teeth. Witty.”

  Brandon reddened and turned away from her toward the window, which, thankfully, was not currently reflecting his expression. “Some things you don’t say out loud to a person’s face, Suzanne.”

  “Oh, explain it to me.”

  “Hey, you’re the one who’s all about honesty this and transparency that.”

  “Fine. You’re right. Doors wants us to, like, settle down. Have babies. Plus couples are a better use of space. Frees up rooms.”

  At the mention of Doors, Brandon bristled. “We have more than enough rooms. He’s just into symmetry. And about three-tenths of the time, he’s full-on bullshitting.”

  Suzanne stared, startled. The door was still wide open, and the possibility that someone had heard these words made Brandon’s stomach lurch.

  Suzanne stepped back and kicked the door closed. Then she grinned. “Three-tenths of the time?”

  “He just likes the idea of people settling down, because this is supposed to be a new age of stability! Rah, rah, rah!” Brandon gestured like the lead baton-twirler in a parade.

  “You’ve gone bananas. Two days ago, you were singing the man’s praises. The man who’d changed the world.”

  “Listen. I just found something in the archive, and I’m still digesting it. If you’ll—” He was going to ask her to leave, but in a few sharp nanoseconds, he saw her face register intense curiosity and arousal, until she rearranged her expression to look simply flirtatious.

  What move now? She would want to hear what he had to say—for what reason he still did not know—and to appear indifferent to it. As though she was just some girl from the moonshine department! Really, she wanted to hear those deep secrets, his secret resentment of Doors. Possibly only because it was excellent gossip. Her only move would be—yes—here it came:

  “You just need to relax, Brandon. You’ve been working too hard.” Closer, closer, touching his leg.

  “You ever have sex with Doors?” He could see the answer in her face. “What do you call him in bed?”

  “I don’t kiss and tell,” Suzanne said, pouting obnoxiously, a hand still on his thigh.

  The difference between them—he and Suzanne, himself and Doors, himself and Zahra, himself and 98 percent of the population—was that Brandon couldn’t lie. He was transparent. He had no gift for intrigue and could not now ease into some kind of fake sex where they would both use each other, making power moves, making knowledge moves.

  Should he also be suspicious of sweet Suzanne?

  He pushed her hand away.

  It must have seemed like contempt, because she said, “Well, fuck you, then,” and left the room.

  Chapter

  8

  THE PERSUADERS

  A few days after port’s release into the wide world, with first-round launches happening simultaneously in the major cities of Europe
, North America, and the Pacific Rim, Doors had barged into Brandon’s office. He opened an article on his phone, handed the phone over, and sat on the couch, eyes squeezed shut. Outside, the sun was coming up on the bluish horizon, orange bleeding out from behind the wall of mountains.

  Brandon stood by his desk; he had already read the article, but he took Doors’ phone and glanced down at it.

  “No publicity is bad publicity,” he said.

  Doors opened his eyes. “This is not about publicity. This is far beyond publicity. I’m not just some hack with an app!”

  “I know.”

  “This is my life’s work. This is my legacy. It doesn’t seem to matter what I give to these people! Press releases and speeches and glad-handing and donations. All the fucking philanthropy, and still they hate me.”

  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown…?”

  “Don’t try to placate me with your allusions, Brandon, no matter how apt. I don’t want you to talk me down. I want you to fix this. People don’t understand port at all! They’re afraid of it! They think it’s—What’s the wording she uses?”

  “Ethically questionable?”

  “No. Yes, but what’s the other one?”

  “Possibly evil?”

  “Yes.” Then, “Possibly evil, Brandon? Possibly evil?”

  “People will always think what they want. You can’t stop them thinking it. But their behaviour’s another thing, right? Just like with the PINAphones. What are they doing to our brains? Are they killing the bees? And yet everyone bought one, right?”

  “But then we’re the ones who are ethically accountable. Since we know better than they do.” He moaned again.

  “Doesn’t matter. Can’t change it now. Can’t put a rabbit back into a hat.”

  “Is that really an idiom? Of course you can put a rabbit back into a hat. That’s all the magicians are doing. Pulling rabbits out, stuffing rabbits back in.”

  “Hm. Yes.” Brandon handed back the phone. “You’re right. That made no sense.”

  Brandon went to the counter, spooned some espresso grounds into a metal filter and began making two cappuccinos. “We make things. We devise things. It’s not our job to ask the ethical questions. So now the politicians are doing their job. The reporters are doing their job.”

  “They are incensing the public, that’s all. To get clicks. It’s sickening.”

  Brandon sighed. For years he had been working Doors’ persona. Doors did and said things, and Brandon disseminated the spin. When the documentary Behind Every Door came out, when rumours arose that Doors had impregnated and abandoned a princess from a small island nation, when people suggested that he was criminally hard on his employees, and of course, when factory conditions in developing nations were exposed, it had been Brandon’s job to face the media, to show the world that Doors was, while not a softie, a great leader who inspired the loyalty of those who knew him. He did not say that this loyalty was mostly due to the fact that Doors took so many risks and made his company so much money. It was Brandon’s job to call the public puritanical or to insinuate that reporters were shallow or had done poor research. It was his job to subtly discredit the filmmaker who had claimed that the intensity of Doors’ eyes was the result of a severe dependence on amphetamines.

  “Port is not about ethics—port is neutral,” Doors said. “PINA is neutral, at worst.”

  Lifting his cappuccino to his mouth, Doors was at his most vulnerable. Like a small animal at a dish, big-eyed and thirsty.

  “We don’t need to worry about it,” Brandon soothed.

  “But this journalist is calling for a full investigation! She says the Testifiers might have been lying. And you know we were sloppy. We got caught up in our own enthusiasm.”

  “Our enthusiasm is our greatest asset.”

  “People are pouring money they don’t have into buying ports.”

  “Too late in the day to feel guilt about that sort of thing.”

  “The protestors have already started gathering, Brandon. Look out your window.”

  “Okay,” Brandon said. “I see only two or three.”

  “Two or three at six in the morning. This is not a good sign.”

  Doors took a dainty sip of his drink, while Brandon stood staring through the lenses at the world beyond them. Security had thinned, and the smooth outer walls near the road were not climbable but not barbed with wire either. “We should get some men on the parking garage entrance,” he said. “Or they’ll be inside.”

  “Oh, let them come if they will,” Doors said.

  Brandon watched an old yellow school bus full of protesters pull up to the gate. Other lives went on all over the world without Doors, without him.

  “You need to contact her,” Doors said. “That writer. Rebecca What’s-her-name. Brandon. You must.”

  “Okay,” Brandon said, though he knew that she would only ask for an exclusive interview, a chance to see the grounds, and that whatever she wrote would change nothing.

  “We might have done more testing. They’re right about that.” Doors sighed again “We need to start thinking about getting off-grid now. While we still have a choice. Who do I contact about that?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  It occurred to Brandon that he had never known the man outside of enormous wealth and fame; Doors was already a phenom when they met. It was impossible to see in him the boy he’d once been, to imagine him as anything other than his present self. Fame and power created a mask; nobody, not even Brandon, could see under it.

  Doors leaned over, wincing. He put the cup down on the smooth, modular table in front of him. “Do you know that I spent weeks with a port in my bedroom, in my office, that I rarely left its sight?”

  “Its sight?” Brandon and his colleagues were used to Doors’ personification of port by now; they gently mocked it. Doors ignored this.

  “Have you ever had a vision before?”

  “You mean like a hallucination?”

  Doors frowned. “Let me tell you what I am fully confident about. I want you to listen carefully, Dreyer. The ports are not evil. They are not annihilating human beings or any creatures. How could that happen so quickly, with no trace? How could the ports, without the aid of radiation, do such a thing?” He stood up and walked to the window, picking up the PINoculars Brandon had left on the sill and putting them to his face. “The problem is the lack of a way to communicate once you get through the port. If not to come back, at least to send word. It’s the only thing we need to iron out. Ian in research has the remotes all ready to go. We have some time, right, we have time? If there was a way to haunt your family members or whoever you left behind…” He laughed in a way that invited Brandon to laugh along.

  “You spend some time with a port,” Doors said, “and you realize that you aren’t reading it. It’s reading you. Who would we be to get in the way of something so incredible?”

  For a moment, the reality of the room seemed to waver. Brandon could see through the scene, through Doors—into what? Madness?

  Doors clapped a hand to Brandon’s face. “Well, thanks for this. This was helpful. We did all we could, right?” As he stood and readied to leave, he reassembled slowly into the public face Brandon knew so well. His eyes bored into Brandon’s.

  “Right,” Brandon said.

  * * *

  —

  Now Brandon splashed himself with water, dabbed on a little mint cologne and left his room. There was no one in the high-ceilinged hallways. Along the way, he saw a few empty jars left on the bamboo flooring, and in the quad, one teddy-bear-speaker remained, shuddering its way around the tables. He picked up his pace, emboldened by the fact that people were still in the process of rising, that there was no special reason to rise. Only New Year’s yoga at two, and the commencement of a fast for those interested, a diet of greens and beets to announce to one’s cells that a new year had begun. He walked quickly to the first stairwell and pushed open the door to the second floor with
unnecessary vigor. He found room 222, knocked, jiggled the handle and knocked again. When there was no answer to his several attempts, he flashed his key over the lock and let himself in.

  He had seen the inside of this room only in the surveillance videos. Doors had shown him the footage: Kate Generato, who never left her bed. Kate Generato who claimed to have seen the other side and to be ill, who could not tell fiction from reality. Brandon and his colleagues knew nothing whatsoever about this woman. Her name sounded fake, that was for sure. She might have ties to any number of organizations, and she might have a history of mental illness. There was simply no way to know. They’d agreed, many months ago, that it was best to proceed as though she were a CIA operative and to keep her locked in. She’d be well fed, watered, cared for, but until they could figure out who she was and what her presence meant, she’d be a kind of captive.

  Brandon had seen her on screen, not long ago, her auburn hair the only colour in the frame; she was under white blankets and between white walls. She tossed and turned in a perpetual restless sleep.

  Now he opened the door quietly as a would-be thief, afraid that she would try to attack him and escape, but the room was empty and silent, even along the wall it shared with Doors’ room. Brandon presumed Doors wasn’t in. All the better, he thought, because Kate Generato’s empty room smelled not of bleach, not of recent urgent cleaning, but of disuse. He tried to remember how long ago, exactly, he’d viewed her on Doors’ screen. Two weeks ago? Three? Was that long enough to erase the smell of a living body? The bed was stripped, sheets folded crisply and piled with two pillows on top. The various tabletops were gleaming and bare. He knocked gently on the bathroom door, but there was nobody in there, just the usual warning tape over the toilet and sink, the many signs reminding people not to defecate or urinate or wash their hands.

  He opened drawers, hoping to find some proof of her, some answer to the question of what had happened, but the drawers were empty. Mouse droppings in the bottom one—his stomach lurched. No stains or hairs on the bedding, even. Nothing.