Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  The camera angle widened to include another news anchor sitting a few feet away at the same long desk. She was a young and heavily made up woman who, to Zach’s eyes, appeared as though she’d been dipped in some kind of liquid plastic.

  “Are we officially calling it Sherwood now? Isn’t that giving them some recognition they shouldn’t have?”

  Robert frowned. “Yes, that’s what they call their country, I don’t see why we shouldn’t refer to it as it’s named.”

  “Well, sure, a country needs a name, right?” the made-up woman said.

  Zach turned off the television and spent some time fretting. He went up to the roof and paced across its length, eyes toward Sherwood. He fiddled around with making a telescope, but did not have the tools or glass to complete it. Then he slumped back into his TV couch downstairs and waited. The power was off again and would be for some time. She’d been gone a long time.

  After the news a deep, unsettled quiet lay over the city as the mayor and the police and the new citizens of Sherwood tried to digest this unexpected turn of events. Arguments broke out at the policemen’s union, some arguing that the territory was a festering cesspool of crime, prostitution, and drug use, and good riddance. Others argued that Maid Marian was the biggest criminal of them all now and must be crushed, and many others made muted comments of relief, that policing of the area was now in someone else’s hands.

  In the nation of Sherwood, where there had so recently been rioting and violence, people poured from their houses to take a new, fresh look at the place in which they lived, as if simply calling themselves a different name allowed them a new perspective, a moment of reflection in which they might emerge, chrysalis-like, as someone else. Their fear turned to curiosity. Everywhere they turned there was another Green Ranger standing next to his or her bike or walking along with a unit gallon of water, offering a poured unit to whomever held out a cup. To all questions they answered, “Maid Marian will make sure there is peace,” or simply, “We haven’t been told what’s next.” There was a tentative and heady feeling of being at the threshold of deliverance.

  Nevel hid his family in the tunnel during the riots. While they were downstairs, he paced nervously from window to window watching for a sign the riot would turn toward their home. He’d purchased a handgun on the black market he had never fired, and he held it up as he paced, thinking that were some explosive branch of the riot to come toward his house he could at least wave the gun insanely in the air.

  No, he realized with sudden clarity, when they came he would break his own windows. He would howl and thrash about as if he were the alpha looter. He would employ the coward’s defense. He scanned about the room for the first things he might like to destroy, and after a moment he realized that to the last one they all belonged to his wife. The bland painting of a farmhouse, the strange statues, the knick-knackery. He thought about how he might crush the painting over the top of a gaudy ceramic vase she’d bought on a trip to Mexico. He picked up the vase and hefted it and realized he’d gotten it backwards—the vase would go into the painting. A far more satisfying crunch could be had there.

  “Hi, Dad!”

  Nevel spun to see his five-year-old Jason standing in the living room in his pajamas. Nevel quickly scanned the windows for signs of violence.

  “What are you doing with the vase?” Jason said.

  “You should be downstairs!” Nevel yelled, and then, after the downcast look his boy gave him, said, “I’ll bring the TV down, it’ll be like a movie party. When the power comes on.”

  “Yay!” Jason said and ran in place Road Runner style, and then disappeared back down the stairs yelling unintelligibly.

  Nevel carried the television to the basement. He strung the cord deep into the end of the tunnel where, sitting on beanbags on a plywood platform, lit by the light of flashlights, his children looked thrilled and his wife miserable and anxious. He set the TV down in front of them.

  “How are my stowaways?” Nevel said brightly.

  “Lovely,” Cora said. “Would you like a turn in the hold? I’m perfectly capable of waving a pistol around.”

  Nevel felt for the gun he’d tucked self-consciously into the back of his pants. He liked its presence there and admired its lines and hardness. The gun was his and he wanted the heroic job up in the living room. He switched on the television and found that most stations were already covering the riot happening outside at that very moment. It was a strange sense of alternate reality, where the faraway third world scene he watched on television was in fact a few blocks to the north. He watched with fascination and a detached compassion for anyone living in such a place where something like that could happen.

  “That’s Safeway!” He clutched his throat and watched the store get swallowed in flames. He feared at any moment he would see his own house, hordes of Molotov cocktail–throwing rioters at the doorstep. “I’ve got to get back up there.” Nevel touched each of their heads and his wife emitted a tired, fearful sound.

  Back upstairs he tried to place where he’d been. There was something about the tunnel that always reset him. There was a crash from across the street and the fear returned, but it was quiet enough through the windows that he wondered if people were rioting privately in the comfort of their own homes. Then he remembered where he’d been with the vase and the painting. He picked up the vase again.

  There was a terrific yell from the basement and the vase leapt from his hands. He clumsily bounced it from hand to hand in a futile attempt to regain purchase until it rebounded off of the front door, through the grip in his hands, and clattered heavily to the floor, confirming his suspicion that the ugly thing was unbreakable. There was another loud call for him and he worried suddenly the tunnel had collapsed. He sprinted back to the basement.

  The tunnel was lit blue by the light of the television like some strange route to the afterlife.

  “Look,” his wife said, “it’s her.”

  Nevel saw Maid Marian on the television briefly and then the newscasters were back on, showing a map of Portland with a red outline around a quadrant of the Northeast. In the center they’d written, Maid Marian claims Northeast Portland.

  “That’s us,” he said, pointing stupidly at the television map and feeling far from comprehending what was happening.

  “No, it’s across the street,” Cora said. “She just spoke. Northeast Portland seceded, it’s another country across the street now.”

  It had gotten late and the kids wanted to sleep in the tunnel. Nevel was thrilled with the idea. He could see it in their eyes already, how it calmed them, how their lids were heavy with the peace of it. His wife threatened to sleep by herself upstairs.

  “It’s a dirty hole,” she said, and then, when she saw she’d genuinely wounded her husband with the comment, said, “I mean it doesn’t go anywhere, you can’t call it a tunnel,” and then, in an attempt to patch things, offered to go get their sleeping bags.

  She left and did her grumbling out of earshot. These were helpless-feeling times, and she understood how a man might fashion a project for himself in which he could feel himself a hero, no matter how insane or inconsequential that project might be.

  She fetched the sleeping bags and pillows and camping tarps and returned to the tunnel where, she admitted, he had made significant progress. Wooden posts—salvaged from the porches of abandoned houses—lined the way in. The floor he’d covered with sand, from god knows where he got that—to the delight of the children. In spots, plywood lined the walls and the ceiling.

  Jason now claimed he wanted to be a tunnel builder when he grew up.

  She could not understand the motivation—were there the threat of a bombing, sure, a bunker like this could be useful, but it was a drought. It was like her husband hadn’t been able to match the disaster to the defense. And yet, she did feel a calm upon entering. Once she
quashed the claustrophobia its earthy silence relaxed some deep core of her.

  She helped Nevel lay out sleeping bags for the kids and they nestled down into them. Then they made their own beds there, and she felt annoyed at him all over again for making her sleep on an air mattress when her own comfortable bed awaited empty, two floors up.

  But once in bed it was more comfortable than she’d expected and so quiet, and because he was so thrilled to have them down here in his odd little space, he was extra kind. They talked about the new country that had opened up across the street, and about Maid Marian. He gave her a neck rub and told her how nice she looked in the candle-glow and then she saw what he was after and she rolled into him and they kissed. It had been a while—she couldn’t remember. A month maybe? Only the vaguest memory surfaced of their last time, of awkward clumsy limbs and distance. It was a comfort to find there was genuine interest now, in her own body. In the emotional battle that waged in her about her husband’s growing strangeness and his odd pet project, acceptance gained a notch or two in her mind. There, not five feet from their sleeping children, quiet and still as nocturnal animals, and deep in the earth below their house. Afterwards she stared into the deep black of the tunnel and for a spell the dread left her.

  Zach toiled at his office desk, researching enclaves, when he felt the place go tense. One of the partners ran down the hall. The mayor, he thought. The mayor was here.

  He stood and reflexively straightened his unstraightenable shirt. Be calm, he told himself. His mind was full of Northeast neighborhoods, of riots and secession. Then again, he thought, everyone’s was.

  One of the Patel & Grummus partners stood at the door looking haggard. “Come,” she said to him and the others in the hive. She jerked her thumb in the direction of the conference room, then turned and walked with quick, clicking steps toward where the mayor and his inevitable entourage of sycophants would be stationed.

  The mayor looked like he hadn’t slept in a few days. His eyes were bloodshot and tired and he hung his head at an unnatural angle, bent as if he carried a weight on the back of his neck.

  Zach extended his hand across the table. “Mayor Bartlett.” Zach forced a bravado, deeply aware of his new project, assisting a different leader of a smaller country. By Morse code, he’d received a laundry list to research, of ideas to vet, and pleas for his presence.

  The mayor clutched his hand in a steely grip. “What has happened to us?”

  Zach searched for words, trying to cast them so as to set the meeting on the right track. It came slowly to him that the meeting, again, was his to control were he focused. He shrugged. “It hurts, but we have gained an opportunity,” he said finally.

  The mayor squinted at him and then with a suddenness slammed his fist on the table. “I have completely lost popular support. I can’t maintain control over the city. Half of it is rioting, the other half—” he waved his hand vaguely toward Northeast Portland, as if there were not words that could describe what was happening there. “Explain to me how your agency has helped garner an opportunity!”

  “Sir,” the partner said, “I don’t think this is something any of us could have anticipated.” Her left hand trembled and Zach realized that the agency was at stake. This client kept the lights on. The one that granted them an extra allotment of power so they could even do their jobs.

  The mayor turned his gaze to Zach and stared hard at him. “I would like to hear our boy genius explain himself.”

  Zach cleared his throat. He managed the mayor best when he was brutal and honest with him, when he treated him like a little brother. “To be fair, in the Northeast your reputation is deserved. Or do you disagree?”

  The mayor seemed caught off guard by the challenge and did not answer.

  “Those neighborhoods are a wreck. There is no fantasy we could spin that would salvage your standing there. You should know that.” He could feel the firm’s partner, a few chairs to his right, begin to work at an interjection. The way Zach talked to the mayor had always alarmed her.

  “Everybody’s bad off,” the mayor said.

  “Not equally,” Zach said. “The news rarely even reports from there. They are scared. How many police do you have up there, what’s the National Guard presence? They drop the water rations and run, right?”

  The mayor’s face had gone red.

  “Cede the territory. There’s no other way,” Zach said. “Otherwise you dig your own grave.” Zach let this sink in and the room was quiet. “Put yourself out there for comparison. This is your opportunity to make us understand why a democratically elected mayor and a city council, with you at its head, is the ideal form of government for these times. Effect the change that we all need to see. That’s the spin control that’s needed most. Action.”

  “Um,” Nevel said, “if I could break in here a moment. Can’t you withhold their rations? Smoke them out, so to speak?”

  The mayor exhaled in frustrated disgust. “The rations are a humanitarian effort. I have no control over their distribution. Withholding people’s water would be political suicide, and anyway that’s the National Guard’s ball of wax, and they—who knows what they’re doing.”

  “So water trucks have gone there?” Zach said. “They’ve gotten their rations?”

  The mayor threw up his hands. “I told you, I can’t do anything about that. It’s the Guard’s pet fucking project, apparently.”

  Zach felt like crying with relief. They would have water.

  “Well,” Nevel said. “How about a pros and cons list, us versus them?”

  The mayor turned to the firm’s partner and held his hands out, as if to say this is the best you can do?

  “Totally,” Zach said. “Good one, Nevel. A pros and cons list. Pro: you are free in the city of Portland. Con: In Sherwood, you are at the mercy of a dictator’s whims. I think a poster campaign that compares and contrasts you with this Marian character is a great idea.” Zach, for himself, could think of nothing more damaging. What the mayor really needed was a bold action for the neighborhoods that remained, not the invitation of comparison. He could see the mayor on the edge of a decision. “Let’s do another campaign and talk about what you’ve done,” he said, “and in the meantime: do something. Let’s play to your strengths. Now that the Northeast is out of your control, it’s out of your responsibility. Someone has cut away your greatest liability. Use that liability unabashedly against her—point out the state of that neighborhood.”

  “Do you all understand the stakes here?” the mayor said grimly.

  “Absolutely,” Zach replied.

  “I want three proposals immediately. We’ll see where this goes from there.”

  Later that afternoon, as Patel & Grumus submerged deeply in the process of brainstorming, the creative staff breaking into mini SWAT teams, they received notice by courier that the city was no longer in need of their services, effective immediately. Zach smiled wryly at the news. The mayor was smarter than he’d thought and now the future yawned vast and frightening before him as he, too, would join the masses without a job. There was a flurry of panic; a few cried quietly at their desks. But since the city provided their power, there was no reason to come to work tomorrow. The agency was closed.

  At the end of the day Zach packed up what belongings he cared about. The lights flickered once, and then went dark. He had done this, in part, he knew. He had cost them their jobs. He looked around at his somber coworkers with guilt as they shuffled a few belongings into boxes. He cleared his throat to say something, but for once, no idea came.

  Nevel sat at home in the dark, freshly unemployed. He was like everybody else now. Perhaps, he thought, that was why he needed the tunnel. Who else had a tunnel? But he could not go there tonight, to work on a project that, in the end, was probably for nothing.

  The riot left in him a paranoia, and so he
lay on the couch, the gun on his chest, and listened to the night outside and for the rapid patter of children’s feet from the floor above, or perhaps his wife, unable to sleep, pacing about their room. But it was quiet. He turned the gun on his chest until the barrel touched the soft skin of his throat.

  It was an idle fantasy, he knew. He was poorly engineered for taking the easy way out. Men who take the easy way out do not spend years building pointless infrastructure under their houses.

  He rotated the gun back to pointing at the door and worried through a host of issues, chief among them: how he would provide for his family. It was time for him to claim the manhood that had always seemed far off as he integrated into cultured society, as he worked at an ad agency, as he planted an herb garden and raised toddlers. There was no manhood to be found in the purchasing of gas efficient foreign cars and eating artfully prepared foods. Now was the time where you grabbed the axe from the woodpile and went to hunt that hunk of flesh for your family. Kill or be killed.

  He imagined himself wandering through the streets in the dark in search of prey. The awful fantasy lasted no more than a few seconds, when his mind inserted a pack of roving men far hungrier and more manly than he, that tore his imaginary self limb from limb. For good measure, his mind taunted him with a scene of the men eating him on the spot. The thought rattled him.