The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  In order to grasp the full consequence of both the rise and fall of the Regional Office, in order to better understand where these women—both the Operatives of the Regional Office and their attackers—came from, what wellspring delivered them their mystical properties, how Oyemi and her partner, Mr. Niles, sought them out when these mystical properties manifested, why Oyemi focused her energies only on these women, in order to understand what had been lost when the Regional Office lost its way, one must know one’s history.

  When it comes to the history—the complete and accurate history—of the Regional Office, one might begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi met, back in the third grade, back before their names were Mr. Niles and Oyemi, even. Or one might move farther along in time to the day Mr. Niles devised and drew up the plans for the Black Box, which was instrumental in guiding both Oyemi’s mystical properties and the focus of the Oracles when seeking out new Recruits and which brought them Jasmine, one of their most successful early Operatives. Others endeavor to begin with the day Mr. Niles and Oyemi “recruited” the first Oracle, a young woman named Nell, whose recruitment sent ripples, far-reaching ripples, into the fate of the Regional Office. Some scholars focus their attentions almost entirely on the Golden Age of the Regional Office, on the exploits of the likes of Jasmine (for obvious and sophomoric reasons, her battle against Mud Slug never fails to find its way into almost every scholarly study of the Regional Office); and, before her, Gemini and her long-running battles against Harold Raines; on the missions conducted by Emma, on Emma’s mysterious death, and so on, these authors favoring the flashier (but shallower) accounts of the Battle of Blanton Hill; on the capture of the interdimensional terrorist Regency; but ever failing to delve into the deeper history of the organization and the ramifications of choices made by the less visible operators.

  This paper, hoping to offer a more nuanced and complete consideration of the Regional Office, will assign the beginning of the Regional Office to the accident that should have killed Oyemi but didn’t. The accident that didn’t kill her, but in fact imbued her with mystical properties. The accident that happened on a Tuesday, at or near IKEA.

  Oyemi was shopping at IKEA, not because she needed anything but because she was bored. Mr. Niles had left town for a week and she had few other people—i.e., no other people—she called friends, and walking through IKEA killed more time than anything else she could think of to do. Not to mention, it was heated and she couldn’t afford to run the heat in her own apartment.

  In six months, she and Mr. Niles would graduate from Rutgers University. In two months, her great-uncle would die—aneurysm—and would, much to everyone’s surprise, leave Oyemi the bulk of his sizable fortune. A surprise both because he and Oyemi had only met once, and because no one knew he’d amassed any kind of fortune, much less a sizable one.

  People can be funny that way.

  But at that moment, she was broke, barely paying her rent, arguing with financial aid to wrangle more money out of them her last few months of college. She could take the bus to IKEA for free with her student ID, could walk around for free, could bring a book and sit in a living room or a bedroom diorama and pretend she was home, although it felt perhaps more like she was in some strange zoo or amusement park, an exhibit for future generations to see: Poor College Student (Circa 1993).

  After a while she left the store.

  It is possible she was asked to leave.

  Feeling restless and unwilling to wait for the next bus, she decided to walk home.

  Here is where most accounts differ, despite the fact that all accounts from this time are Oyemi’s, namely because she was by herself when everything that happened happened.

  Either in the parking lot or half a mile or three-quarters of a mile down the road, something happened: Oyemi was irradiated by an unseen alien force, or she was struck and subsequently irradiated by a small meteorite, or she was irradiated by an eighteen-wheeler that lost control of its cargo, jackknifed off the turnpike, and crashed, sending its oil drum of irradiated liquids spinning right at her and bursting open just before crashing over her, but no matter which story she told, each one ended with Oyemi irradiated, and, somehow, discovered in a small park near Rutgers University, twenty-three miles away from the IKEA.

  A couple found her, naked and faintly glowing. They found her near a picnic table. The man called 911 while the woman looked for Oyemi’s clothes or a blanket or anything to cover her with, but finding nothing, the woman walked quickly back to her car, where she kept a blanket for picnics, and draped this over the girl (if that’s what this glowing, naked thing was)—only for the blanket to begin smoldering before catching fire and then burning to ash, which it did even before the woman could yell out to her husband, who was still on the phone with emergency services. This was also when the woman noticed that Oyemi, in a fetal position, lay in the center of a widening circle of bare earth, the grass and weeds on the outer edge of this circle shriveling into black tendrils and then to ash as the woman stood staring at them. Which was also when Oyemi woke up, opened one eye, an eye that glowed hotly, or no, not that, an eye that seemed a window, rather, like the window to an old furnace, so that the eye itself wasn’t glowing hotly, but that the inside of Oyemi glowed hotly. Seeing this, the woman screamed and ran and grabbed her husband, made him drop his phone and run too, before whatever had happened to their blanket, whatever had happened to the grass and weeds and ground, before any of that could happen to them.

  Nobody, not even Oyemi, could explain how she made it back home, how she managed not to set all of New Brunswick ablaze, although until just recently, if one knew what signs to look for, one could trace the path she took from the park back to her apartment—a melted metal pole, a tree trunk singed in the shape of a woman’s handprint, a path of footprints where the earth had been burned to dirt that refused to grow back to grass for nearly twenty years—small markings of her passing that day.

  Regardless of how she made it home, by the time she made it home, enough of the radiation had burned itself out of her that she could pick up the phone and call Mr. Niles and tell him to come back to New Jersey sooner rather than later before the handset melted around the pads of her fingertips.

  Of course, a faction of scholars has formed under the shared belief that none of this happened, a faction that has, over the years, gained members and support and influence, which is why this piece of the history of the Regional Office often goes unmentioned, unexplained. And only recently, the faction itself has split into two separate groups:

  Those who believe this never happened and that Oyemi always possessed the powers she possessed, who believe that she used this story as a way to reveal and contextualize these powers; and,

  Those who believe she never possessed any mystical properties at all, possessed only the power to fool the powerful into following her lead.

  If one chooses, one can seek out these theories on one’s own, though the authors of this paper assure one that they offer little but speculation, biased and unfounded.

  Regardless, while Oyemi waited for Mr. Niles to return, she fashioned a plan. This plan became the foundation for an idea of what she could do now that she had changed. The possibilities opened up inside her even as her mind and the mystical properties of her expanded, even as she began to sense and see the power of the girls and women she would seek out and train to be her Oracles and her Operatives. The Oracles would find the Operatives. The Operatives would do what, she didn’t know, not at first. But while she waited and cooled, she began to think thoughts that became ideas that grew into what she and Mr. Niles would come to call the Regional Office.

  SARAH

  13.

  Sarah’s time with the Regional Office had trained her to harbor certain suspicions, take few risks, set in place specific precautions, and so it was more than a surprise that there was an envelope waiting for her when she got home. It had been taped to the inside o
f her door. The locks hadn’t been picked or forced. The small piece of black thread she set in the doorjamb every morning when she left for work hadn’t been disturbed.

  She’d once told Henry how she left her apartment every day before leaving for work—the thread, the locks—and he had laughed and he had told her she was too serious, that she worried too much, but see? She was right to be so cautious. Sure, her precautions hadn’t kept anyone from breaking into her apartment and taping an envelope to her door, but still. At least she’d had precautions set in place.

  In fact, she only saw the envelope when she turned to dead-bolt the door. In other words, she hadn’t even sensed that someone else had been in her apartment. She should have at least sensed something, right?

  Her name was written in black Sharpie across the front.

  She stared at it.

  Then she turned away and walked into her kitchen.

  Ten minutes later, with a cup of tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, she walked back to the door to see if the envelope was still there.

  It was.

  She put the cookie in her mouth to free her hand and she pulled the envelope off the door. It peeled right off. She’d assumed it had been taped there, which had annoyed her because it was her experience that, no matter how hard you tried, the tape goo just never came off, but it had been hot-glued.

  How considerate.

  And strange.

  She sat down at her breakfast table and opened it and slipped a file out of it and began to read what was inside.

  This was at midnight.

  It had been a long day. Mr. Niles had been acting strange. The Oracles had been unusually quiet. No one had seen Oyemi in almost a month. And Henry. Well. Henry had been acting a little strange ever since that last mission with Emma, the one that killed her. That had been two years ago now. She’d been covering for him, sure, because she was a friend, but still. They were going to have to have a chat. Enough was enough. They all missed Emma, but work was work. Sarah sighed. She stopped ranting in her head. She would skim through the file, see what kind of serious trouble it might mean, call the head of security and leave him a message, maybe call Mr. Niles, too, and then she’d be in bed by one, one thirty tops.

  Three hours later, her apartment was a shambles, or not a shambles, really, as the word itself—shambles—implies something with more charm and less total destruction to it. So let’s say more than a shambles but shy of totally wrecked. And so: Her apartment was just shy of total wreckage. It’s fair to say what she found in that envelope had made her upset, or rather, it’s fair to say that upset was a far piece from what she was. Angry, let’s say. Infuriated. That, too. But also clarified. What she had found in that envelope had given her a clear path forward. A sense of what she needed to do next. She picked up what was left of the file, stepped gingerly through and around the rubble of what was left of her apartment. She sighed. She grabbed her keys and her security badge. She grabbed her shoulder bag, turned, and looked one more time at the wreck of her apartment—the eat-in kitchen’s table broken into thirds; the dishes smashed across the floor; the pillows and cushions torn, their batting ripped out—looked for perhaps the last time, and then stepped into the hallway.

  She ignored the small crowd of neighbors who had gathered there and who had been banging on her door for, oh, twenty minutes, and pushed past them so she could go downstairs and head for her office.

  14.

  When Sarah first came to the Regional Office, the streets had been noisy and smoggy and the air damp and the day hot, made hotter still by the buildings, the concrete, the glass, the steel, which trapped all that heat and let it radiate out all day and most of the night. Sarah had missed the city, the heat and the noise and the smell, had missed it because she loved it.

  She had thought moving to California would have been a good thing, moving away from home (everyone moves away from home, right?), moving away from the look that people in the old neighborhood gave her, even still, because she was the girl whose mother had disappeared. Moving away from all of that had seemed a good idea, but she didn’t like California. The weather made no sense. The air, the sky, there was just too much of both. She hated driving, not that she had had a car out in California, but she had hated being driven around, too. The people were too easygoing, too smug for her tastes, and for a while now, she had wondered if the move had been a tragic mistake. It was good to be back in the city, anyway, even if just for a short while, and even if she didn’t know exactly why she had come back home, what she hoped to gain by coming back.

  Sarah had found the building and the office she was looking for—Morrison World Travel Concern—almost half an hour ago. She stood outside it and then walked away from it and bought a hot dog and a pretzel and a soda. She sat on a half wall just down the street from the travel agency to eat and afterward walked back up to the front door and stared at the scripted name, the travel posters in the window, and wondered what the hell she was doing here, what she hoped to find here for herself. Sarah thought about taking the train and then the bus to her aunt’s house. Her aunt would be at work and she didn’t know Sarah was even in the city, but Sarah could surprise her. She could pick up some food or grab some things from the store, bake her a cake. Her aunt loved cake. That was what she should do. Go back to Brooklyn, where she belonged, and make this a visit with her aunt and not a complete waste of her time. When she had received the letter from the Morrison World Travel Concern inviting her—directing her, more like it—to come to their offices on this day, a first-class ticket included, she had assumed it was a scam or a high-priced piece of marketing that had been mailed to her by accident. But then she saw her mother’s name in the letter and she read it more closely, and then read it again—information about your mother, etc., etc., unusual circumstances surrounding her disappearance, etc., etc.—and while she had no idea what a high-end travel agency could or would tell her about her mother, who was she to pass up a free first-class plane ticket back to New York?

  Now that she was here, though, she felt uneasy about the whole situation.

  She clenched her fists in resolve and nodded as if coming to a hard-won decision and half-turned to head back to Fifty-Ninth, back to the subway, back to a real life, but before she could change her mind again, she stepped inside.

  A shiver ran through her, which she blamed on the air-conditioning.

  A pretty, young receptionist smiled at her. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking to, um, book a trip to Akron, Ohio?” Sarah said.

  Sarah had looked up the Morrison World Travel Concern before coming. She couldn’t find a website for them but had read a number of stories—many of them in magazines like the Aston Martin Magazine and the Robb Report. She knew the kinds of vacations booked here, which were not the kind of vacations one took to Akron, Ohio. She expected the receptionist to frown at her, or to look at her blankly, or send her to Travelocity or something, or worse yet, to book her a trip to Akron, Ohio, where Sarah had no intention of going. Instead, the young woman held her pretty smile and said, “Great. I’ll let them know. While you wait, can I offer you something to drink? Water? A glass of champagne?”

  Five minutes later, another woman escorted her to an elevator and told her, “Someone will be waiting for you,” and smiled at her as the doors closed and the elevator began its descent, which was a long descent, and then a few minutes after that, when the doors opened, there he was: Mr. Niles.

  15.

  It was almost five in the morning by the time Sarah made it back uptown, back to the Regional Office. She would’ve been at the office sooner if she’d taken a cab, but she didn’t trust a cab—or much of anyone at this point. She could have called one of the Regional Office drivers. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, mostly for the Operatives, whose assignments often required oddly timed comings and goings, but she wasn’t sure she could trust their dr
ivers, either—their own drivers!—not to mention, calling for a car at this hour would have drawn unwanted attention, might have tipped off someone she didn’t want tipped off. Not just that she’d received their envelope, but that she’d refused to accept their offer, which had been contained within that envelope, but not only that: She was preparing to take action against those who’d made the offer.

  So she took the trains. The F train was murder. The 4 was worse. But the platforms and the cars, aside from the occasional drunk passed out on a bench, were empty, and she would see anything weird or out of sorts that might be coming for her.

  Not to mention all the waiting, all the time she spent stewing, helped to clear her head, helped her relax.

  Still.

  What a drag.

  Not what she’d had planned for her Tuesday morning. Or her Monday night.

  She unlocked the first-floor office door and then punched in the elevator code, started the long descent.

  No one else was in, at least. Even the cleaning crew had long since come and gone.

  When she first started working for Mr. Niles, she came in early every morning, hoping (and failing) to impress him and the Operatives—Mr. Niles, if he even noticed, never said anything, hadn’t cared, and the Operatives hazed her for it, but back then there hadn’t been much that they hadn’t hazed her for. She would come in before sunrise and use her key to Mr. Niles’s office—which she had kept even after he had given her her own office—and sat at his desk and watched the sun rise over Manhattan through the three tall video screens that were built to look like windows, the pictures on them so vivid, so real, that there were moments when the rising sun would force her to shade her eyes, when sunlight seemed to stream into the room, when she almost forgot she was a mile, at least, belowground.