She hadn’t seen Colleen since, and hadn’t heard from Henry, not even once.
71.
She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry at a time like this, she knew. She shouldn’t be thinking of Henry or Emma or Colleen or Windsor or Wendy or any of them. She should be thinking of herself, and aside from herself, she should be thinking of Jason, poor silly Jace. Or her sister, though her sister never thought of her. Or Gina or Patty or her asshole of a father.
But she wasn’t. She was thinking of Henry.
She wished she had seen Henry, if only one more time. One time before all of this, before the robot, before the end.
She opened her eyes to look at that robot and that was when she saw the sword and then she wasn’t thinking of Henry, either, and was, much to her dismay, thinking of the director and his glove and the sword and what happened with the sword.
Rose wondered where it could have come from, where the robot would have hidden it. There didn’t seem to be any hiding places on that robot. But there it was, long and thin, gleaming and cold and sharp, though, really, with as much force as the robot could bring to bear, that sword didn’t have to be sharp, just strong. And it was both, she knew it was both sharp and strong.
Sharp enough, strong enough, anyway, to split a man in two.
“Is this how you did it?” the robot said in its nonrobot voice. “Did you toy with him? Did you throw him from place to place and toy with him like a doll?”
The robot didn’t have to say who the “him” was. It knew she knew. With that sword in its hand, the robot didn’t have to say anything at all, in fact, but it wouldn’t stop. “Did you beat him bloody in the very place he felt safest? You with all your strength and power, and him just a man. Did you do all of that and then with his own sword, did you cut him down?”
The robot stopped and held the sword down at its side. “Is that how it happened?” And maybe it was waiting for Rose to say something, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t think of what to say and knew it wouldn’t matter, though she did feel the desire to make note of the director’s rather powerful glove. It seemed all so very personal, Rose thought. Strange that something so personal might come out of a robot, and she looked at its face, really looked at the robot’s face, and wondered if it was even a robot at all.
No, she thought. That face, those eyes. That face is a woman’s face.
And then she knew.
Oh, she thought. It’s you. I always wondered about you.
Not that she spent nights awake wondering about the girl with the mechanical arm, just every so often she wondered what she looked like, if she had survived the assault, what her life must be like, what it would feel like to have a metal part of you swinging at your side. Now that she was face-to-face with the girl with the mechanical arm, she looked for that arm, but then caught herself because there wasn’t a mechanical arm anymore, or rather, all of her was mechanical arm now, or rather, mechanical everything, and then she felt embarrassed for looking at her so nakedly and for a second, the only thing she wanted to do was tell her, I’m sorry. For the look, for what she’d done, for all of it, but that urge quickly passed.
The robot had the sword raised up again.
Rose wished she’d figured it out sooner.
Not that she hadn’t known this thing had come for her from the Regional Office. Of course this thing had come from the Regional Office. Where else would it have come from?
Not that figuring it out sooner would have mattered very much. This thing wasn’t like anything she’d ever faced, wasn’t like anything she had been trained to face by Emma or Henry at the compound. This wasn’t some superpowered girl like herself, or an office slouch like most of the people at Regional. Even now, she couldn’t think of a move or countermove or strategy that might have disabled the thing or gotten her past it and now that goddamn sword.
But maybe—if she had known sooner, if she had figured it out sooner—maybe she would have fought differently. Fighting a thing simply on a mission is different than fighting a thing on a Mission. She would’ve fought differently, or maybe just harder.
From the very beginning, she would have fought harder.
But here she was, at what was most likely the very end, doing the only thing she could think of to do. Forget about the pain. Forget about the bones, broken if slowly mending. Forget about everything else and charge straight at that motherfucker, even if it would be the very last thing she’d ever do.
Which was what she did.
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
The second theory on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office proceeds in almost the exact same way as the first theory, except for the small but significant difference that Emma was not killed, that her death had been entirely faked.
SARAH
72.
The doctor wasn’t sure how Sarah’s shoulder and mechanical arm had come back together. He studied her, where the arm reattached itself.
“It’s not a perfect fit,” he said. She almost yelled at him when he said this. Nothing could have been more perfect than this fit. “I mean,” he said, warily catching a look in her eye, “it’s perfect now. But it’s not where we put it originally. Not how we put it originally.”
He was skeptical of the story she’d told him, she could tell. He thought maybe she’d had help reattaching the arm, but that seemed unlikely. Or maybe the stress of the situation, the pain and stress and instability of it all, maybe coupled with some pharmaceuticals and some neurological suggestive therapy . . .
“Maybe what?” Sarah asked.
Maybe they hadn’t ever taken it off to begin with. Maybe they’d tried to take it off—hence the queer way it didn’t quite line up with how it had once lined up—but failing that, they’d done their best (and had succeeded) to convince her that it had been removed.
“What better way,” he said, “to neutralize the largest threat than to convince the threat that it had been neutralized?”
He floated this idea out there as if it were a bubble, hesitant and fragile. She popped it, almost violently, emphatically, jabbing her mechanical finger into his very soft and pliable chest, because she had wondered much the same thing herself, had tried to think back to the moment when she’d seen it on the gurney in front of her.
And it was a thought she would rather not think.
But what if? What if her mechanical arm had been there the entire time?
“No matter,” he said, and there was something frightened in his voice and she tried to think calm thoughts, tried to remember Mr. Niles waving his arm at the destruction she had wreaked right after he had given her this mechanical arm. She smiled uncomfortably.
My, how they must have laughed at her. They must have laughed and laughed and laughed. She never even suspected, they would have said. She never even considered she might still have both her arms, they would have said. And then they would have howled. The thought of their laughing at her made her wish they were all still alive so she could kill them all again, and to settle her thoughts down, she thought of Wendy, of dead, frightened-eyed Wendy, and this made her feel better.
“The arm is in place and is still functional,” he said. “That’s great news.”
He scheduled her for another appointment, asked her to clear her schedule so they could cover it again. They didn’t have enough of her own skin to use but he could create a synthetic that would match almost perfectly. But at first she said no. She didn’t know why she said no but it felt necessary to say no to covering up the mechanical arm.
Then she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to cover it.”
And a week later, it was covered, and for days, she couldn’t pass by a mirror without staring at the mechanical arm and admiring once more how much it looked like just any normal arm wo
uld look.
For a couple of days, after she returned to the office with her new skin, people stopped and admired her arm. Just like new, they said. Or, It looks perfect. Or, Soon, we won’t remember which one was the mechanical one at all. But this she knew was a lie. How could it not be a lie? They remembered, all of them remembered, and would always remember, she thought, and that was a shame.
73.
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.
74.
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.
75.
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.
76.
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 hi
s 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.”
77.
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.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 26
