Sherwood Nation: a novel

by Benjamin Parzybok

  Even without her, with her personal end—say, a marksman’s bullet taking her down—there was no end. She was only time’s helper, a temporary worker.

  She ate the breakfast a Ranger brought her in the map room. No one else was yet in the room and this was when she loved it best. When all of Sherwood was only hers. It was in the early morning when she composed her notes to Sherwood. Later they were printed by her team in a fury in Sherwood’s computer room, so many to a page, in the hour of electricity, or when their batteries were charged, or hand-lettered en masse when technical difficulty made it necessary.

  Her breakfast plate was divided into sections, rations on one side—a mottled piece of tinned fish and a clumpy bit of bulgur or something of its ilk—and on the other a fried egg, given to her by some grateful citizen and cooked with reverence by some other Sherwoodian. She tore into the egg. A surprising number of chickens were found in the territory, and they were also on her list. They needed roosters. Surely there was at least one lucky rooster in the territory. They needed a flock. These are no end-times. This is the beginning of time.

  And then it hit her: This was the beginning, and time needed to reflect that. She pulled the calendar off the map room wall and stared at it. She would make July 17 the new independence day, the day when the nation of Sherwood rose up. But the year bothered her, sitting at the corner of the calendar with its four ungainly digits, its two-thousand-year baggage. She didn’t want that tacked onto any Sherwood holiday. She grabbed a marker from their meeting table and scratched a black patch over the year. Beside it she hesitated: was it the year zero or the year one? How does time begin?

  In binary numbers, she remembered, 0 was off, 1 was on, 1 was yes. And so she wrote a big, chunky 1 on the calendar. Yes.

  Dear Sherwood, July 24, Year 1, she wrote. Welcome to the end of week 1, in the year 1, of your new country.

  She doodled in the margin for a moment as she thought back on her week of faith. She had nailed it. She had so nailed it. She fidgeted at the edge of the paper there trying to figure out how to word things, in the way an A-student futzed with the margins of a perfect essay before turning it in. A moment of reflection to delay the praise that was sure to come. Informally, her approval rating was in the nineties. Water delivery and street safety were now a given—in a single fucking week. There’s no way the citizens of Sherwood would go back.

  As security issues began to resolve, Zach set in on Renee’s second wave of projects—clinics, schools, and farms—and he finished the last of his indicators. They were fine work, if he did say so himself. There were indicators for water level, Rangers, money, crimes, and food. Because he loved the numbers, he searched about for a few more he might add to the mix. He hit upon one that he thought might be a perfect indicator of Renee’s popularity: immigration versus emigration requests. At the time of his first tabulation they were 19 to 1.

  Using the water carriers to query citizens, Zach put together a skills roster for the nation, and he developed a symbol system so that bikers and Rangers could quickly mark up each message with metadata, which greatly enhanced the efficiency of the information processing. This would not, he thought, be a nation that took its data processing lightly.

  Among his other pet programs was something he called the “research department.” He’d tried to remember all the water-saving projects he and Nevel had come up with over hours freighted with the knowledge that the mayor would shoot down one after the other. Each of the department projects hung from the wall of the map room on a single clipboard. Some of them he got the official OK to put together a team to pursue, and some languished there. Along the top of each clipboard was the initial proposal:

  Garden techniques—plastic sheeting and water drain-off, high density gardening, water recycling via elevated, cascading beds. Build series of greenhouses.

  Urophagia (drinking urine)—issues: salt danger to kidneys, marketability for mass consumption, instructional manual for population. Benefits: extreme recycling! Or: Urine filtration for other uses (boil + steam runoff?).

  Rain dancing—Seriously, why the hell not? Needed: team of four to hunt down anthropological books mentioning the subject for possible techniques. Seek out any elder Native Americans in the territory that might have a connection to traditional rituals. Evidence of efficacy? Mass institution? Ritualize it? Dance party?

  Well digging—secure location closer to Columbia River. Previous attempts moderately promising, yielding a trickling amount of water after substantial digging.

  Cloud seeding—(i.e., rain making through chemicals!): in need of silver iodide or dry ice.

  Employment metrics—guarantee that every citizen works for pay at least one day a week.

  Independent Press—crucial, but govt. hand must be absent. Suggest meetings w/ former journalists?

  Distillery—Improve upon ration-distilling techniques, consult gardener. Make some small portion available. For sale? As part of distribution?

  In the meantime he began a surveying project, sending a dozen or so water carriers off with questionnaires in order to measure the satisfaction of the citizens with their new government.

  It was not at all unlike a small village, Zach thought, one in which the populace’s survival dangled by a thin thread of interconnectivity. The slightest of tension and that thread breaks, and people die. All of them were hyper-dependent upon each other, and upon outside forces.

  Pulling down a sheet of scratch paper he penciled SHERWOOD at the top, and then spent a half hour idly drawing trapezoids below it.

  In a village, he thought, much of the security and functional nature was dependent upon its small size. The smallness led to an increased familiarity and mutual dependency and thus trust. With their nation, much larger than a village, he set out to duplicate these aspects of a village, while attempting to keep some of their scale. The government must feel as though it is familiar and known to its citizens, humanly recognizable, the arms of it going deep into the citizen’s lives, or conversely, the sensation that each citizen holds a marionette string straight to the top.

  Below the trapezoids, he wrote:

  Cannot exceed the level beyond which citizens are human-processable by the government.

  On the side of his unit gallon he stared at the phrase he’d asked them to write on the side before they went to mass production. “That which is measured improves.” It was more true now than ever before.

  On Saturday, August 18, Jason helped his father with the tunnel while his sister napped upstairs. His mother, Cora, was talking to a neighbor across the street. His job was to take loads of dirt up to the backyard. There were great mounds there now that he knew his mother didn’t approve of, but his father had promised to make a series of raised beds from the dirt. Step gardening, he’d said brightly, as if it were a feature she’d always wanted, as if any sort of gardening was possible. For when the drought is over! He’d managed to get grudging approval.

  Jason had two plastic beach buckets and he took them to the end of the tunnel to be refilled.

  “Ready for another load, sir?” Nevel said. His tunnel had at first snaked its way toward the street in front of the house. It was the way the wall faced and digging straight out felt right. Then the tunnel took a subtle bend to the right and Nevel knew it was because of the highly attractive woman who lived across the street and one house up. There were no definitive plans—none, other than, Nevel had justified, if you are going to tunnel, tunnel toward beauty. He liked the idea of sitting in the tunnel below her house, the feel of her sleeping up there somewhere. Obviously, he knew, this was deeply perverted shit to get into. It was not a fantasy to share with your family, who could scarcely understand your motivation for digging a tunnel in the first place. But he was nowhere near that destination yet and had kept himself from thinking about it in too precise terms. Lately, however, a side tunnel
had made some marked progress in the direction of Sherwood. He looked down from shoring up a wall. His son Jason was contentedly embedding a toy car into the dirt at three feet high.

  “All right, let’s get you another load.”

  “Do other houses have tunnels, Dad?”

  This was a startling question and Nevel froze for a moment, listening to the earth, wondering if just beyond any of the walls he worked on there were the ends of some other neighbor’s tunnel. Perhaps all men dug beneath their houses. Perhaps he was simply another victim of some mental illness epidemic brought on by the drought that turned fathers into moles. Perhaps the beautiful woman in 3416 was working on one and their two tunnels would meet. A tunnely tryst may await him already!

  “Huh . . .” Nevel said, gripping the tunnel wall in a brief moment of vertigo. “I don’t know. We should ask your mom, wouldn’t she know?” After a moment he said, “No, let’s not ask her. I’m going to guess no, right?”

  It would be a beautiful thing if it were so. He liked the idea of a secret shared closeness with his neighbors. Some mutual passion they could not speak of.

  “What about your friends—do you know if any of them have tunnels?” Nevel asked. For not the first time he fretted about which other parents might know of his tunnel, none of whom he spoke with personally, but from whom he received news via the arcane facts gossip network of their children.

  Jason shook his head and Nevel wasn’t sure if it was a “no” or “I don’t know.”

  “Well, our tunnel is a secret, eh?”

  Jason nodded automatically. He’d heard his father repeat this in one way or another often enough his lines were memorized. Still, he couldn’t resist asking of his father the question that evoked a different answer every time. “But why is it a secret?”

  “Oh,” Nevel said and sat down in the dirt, coming closer to eye level with the boy. “We have a lot of reasons for our secret. Sometimes it’s nice to have a secret. It’s like buried treasure. You keep it inside your mind and know it’s something special that’s just yours, as long as you don’t speak of it.” Nevel worried his simile was going to work against him, for there was a pirate’s treasure in this tunnel, hundreds of bottles of water, squirreled away in an obscure side-hole. He didn’t want the boy down here digging by himself. “Also, the parents of your friends all think I’m a relatively sane person, right? Digging a tunnel under the house might be seen as somewhat ha ha.”

  “Somewhat what?”

  “Let’s say quirky.”

  “Calden thinks you’re weird.”

  “Yeah, well, Calden, right?” Nevel gave Jason an elbow nudge and Jason smiled.

  “When will we be finished?”

  “Digging the tunnel? December seventeenth, around four thirty in the afternoon, just in time for dinner.”

  “Dad. Tell the truth.”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe when we discover what it’s really for or find something at the end of it or maybe when we get tired of it or reach some kind of digging satori, you know, like uh, higher consciousness, like a super power. Maybe we’ll build a giant robot over our house then. Maybe we’ll be done when we’ve taken it under the length of the city and we can stroll underground into the forest. That’d be nice, right? When do you think we’ll be done?”

  “We could really build a giant robot?”

  “Sure—but, you know, after the tunnel is done. All right! Back to work, soldier.” Nevel filled Jason’s buckets and handed them back. “Careful now.”

  Jason gathered the buckets and set off back up the tunnel. Nevel watched him go, feeling honored that the boy would help him on the tunnel voluntarily and happy for the company—good father-son time, he told himself. And yet there was a guilt at sucking the boy into his mania, of making a five-year-old carry buckets of dirt out a tunnel.

  He wished, for the boy’s sake, that a clear purpose as to what he was doing would reveal itself. Something the boy could learn from. Remember all that hard work, boy? But look what we’ve built! For now, and for him, the reward was in the process, to be doing something—anything—active with his hands, a forward momentum in a time when everything else remained mired in the doldrums.

  There was a clattering and then a large crash from the front of the basement and Nevel jumped to his feet.

  “Dad!” Jason yelled and there was a trapped scream in his voice.

  Nevel sprinted the length of the tunnel and to the basement stairs. Jason was in a heap of dirt and buckets at the bottom of them, his left arm bent underneath.

  “Oh, bud,” he said, failing to keep the anger out of his voice, the strange presympathetic emotion, for being clumsy; for the toil and derailment a child’s wound took. He picked the boy up and Jason’s mouth opened and no sound came and the boy’s arm swung loose and odd, like an appendage attached in afterthought. There was dirt in his teeth and hair, at the corners of his eyes and nose. Nevel rushed the boy upstairs, despising every molecule now of his own lazy, greedy self, that would load his son up with dirt for the basement stairs. He heard himself repeating “Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!” and realized with his parent’s third eye that that was particularly not what was required of him now. He took him to the car, which he thought might have a gallon or two of gas left, and laid the boy down in the backseat. Jason cried hysterically now. “It’s going to be OK,” Nevel said, “it’s going to be OK, we’re going to fix you up.” He stood and turned and let out a panicked bellow into the neighborhood. “Cora!”

  He peeled out of the driveway, holding the horn down, looking for his wife, but she did not come out of whichever neighbor’s house she was in. He remembered his daughter sleeping in the upstairs of the house and cursed and honked again and then saw that everyone at the small border crossing was turned toward him. There had to be a closer clinic in Sherwood, he realized. He’d seen their new clinics on the news. He pulled forward into the intersection and a city officer came to his driver’s side window and a Green Ranger to the passenger side, each of them dutifully enacting their made up border-patrol duties, as if they were actors in some local drama. He rolled down the windows and they both looked at Jason, who continued to howl in the backseat.

  “His arm is broken, let me through, for god’s sake.”

  “You have a Sherwood permit?” the city policeman said.

  “No!”

  “City won’t let you enter without one. Or a Sherwood card? Do you have one of those?” said the Ranger from the opposite window.

  “Fucking fuck the Sherwood card!” Nevel yelled. “Look!” He jabbed his thumb backwards at Jason. “I’m going to the clinic!”

  “I’m very sorry, sir, the closest city hospital is on Williams,” the city policeman said.

  Nevel revved the engine. “Come to your fucking senses,” he yelled.

  The city policeman rested his hand on his rifle. “I cannot let you pass. The hospital is that way.”

  Nevel eased up on the brake pedal and stared forward. His face was burning up and he was having trouble thinking about anything except ramming through the makeshift barrier. He thought he could race through it. He knew what awaited them at the city hospital. The crying stopped from the backseat. Jason was staring fixedly at the ceiling.

  “Jason!” he yelled.

  “It looks like shock, sir. Get him to the hospital. If it’s just an arm they can patch it up,” the Green Ranger said.

  Nevel nodded at them, acquiescing, hating them both. He backed the car up. In his rear-view mirror he realized Cora was running toward him.

  He yelled out the window, “Luisa is asleep, Jason broke his arm, these fuckers won’t let me through!” Then he put the car in first gear and tore off, leaving Cora standing in the street, and that was something else to hate himself for. The car dissatisfyingly gripped the pavement without fishtailing or leaving b
urning smoke in the air, as a father desperately trying to do the right thing might hope, leaving a show of super-heroic dramatics in his wake. He studied the right side of the street for an alley or intersection to veer off into, but each was blocked. Cyclone fencing covered half the entrances, Portland Police and Green Rangers like chess pawns from either side guarded the others. Which side doesn’t want you to come in, he wondered. At each crossing the car was slowed to a crawl as people milled about it, looking in, curious to see what an automobile was up to. They stared at Jason with vacant eyes. Nevel was in a full sweat now; his eyes stung as it dripped down his forehead. He beat on his steering wheel and honked his horn and felt like an orangutan among the walking dead and wished he had a gun to fire into the air to scare off these monkeys made slow and dull and bored by thirst.

  He turned onto a city thoroughfare and raced toward the hospital. The wind kicked up a great whirling cloud of dust in front of them and before he had time to roll up the windows they were in it. He heard Jason cough from the back seat and croak out “Dad.”

  “We’ll be there soon, bud, we’ll get you taken care of, you just close your eyes.”

  Renee sat with her tea to meditate—meditation being a practice, she admitted, she found completely inane, the antithesis of action, just this side of comatose, but Zach had teased her about being all action xand no premeditation and with her new sense of obligation came a nagging feeling of the necessity to be wise and to make non-impulsive decisions. Whether meditating helped with that, she had no idea—mostly she found her legs ached while some scrap of song echoed hollowly in her mind.