“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 stat
e 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.
There was a knock and a silhouette appeared in the door’s window. Nevel jumped. He rolled off the couch and crouched, the gun in one hand, trying to make out who it was. He’d already been spotted through the glass.
The door handle shook. “Nevel? I have something for you,” the figure at the door said.
Nevel tucked the gun into the front of his pants where it could be seen, then he tentatively opened the door the width the door chain would allow. The man on the other side slipped an envelope through the crack. Inside was a handwritten note: “Friends don’t forget friends,” it said. He knew the handwriting immediately.
“Open up, we have boxes.”
Nevel unhooked the chain and swung the door open. A short queue of shadows waited behind the man who handed him the note.
“This is my favorite part of the job,” he said gruffly, and Nevel stepped aside to let him in. He had a long mustache and a baseball hat, and looked capable of eating another man’s flesh.
The shadows filed in and put down boxes, which settled onto the wood floor with heavy thuds. They quickly stacked up. There were twenty-five boxes, in all. When they were done, the man with the mustache held his hand out and shook Nevel’s with vigor.
“Enjoy,” he said, and tipped his hat.
After the door closed, he stood over the delivery, bewildered. He cautiously broke the seal on one. Inside there were four full gallon-sized glass bottles and an equivalent portion of food rations. Nevel ran back to the door, but the truck was already gone.
He sat back on the couch and his heart sank as he realized that this was how he stood up for his family. Did others in the agency receive the same? He thought not. It was he who knew the mayor’s secrets, and secrets were worth something. Silence was expensive. This shipment was surely a pittance compared to what they were hoarding away for the wealthy, but to him it was a small fortune.
He stood and opened the door to the basement. He needed to get these out of sight before his wife saw them. The boxes were heavy, but in half an hour he had all of it deep in his tunnel, down a side branch, a cache of survival for end times.
Unpacked, they were gorgeous. In the beam of a flashlight he admired his glittering cave of rations. He was sullied now. Cora would be disgusted by these, by his acquiescence to the dirty work of the mayor. But he had a family to look after. He was the provider, and look at this. He swung the beam across the width of the hoard. He craved to fill the rest of the hole with them.
In a moment of sobriety he realized this hole would never stop hungering for its prize. He would have to keep filling it. He extinguished the light and fell to a crouch, each hand steadied on a gallon, and stayed in the dark for he wasn’t sure how long.
After Christopher went to bed and his advisors shuffled off to their own lives, Mayor Bartlett played video games. He played first person shooters mostly, and he was good. He liked control. It was one of the reasons he’d run for mayor—to be in control—and it was to his great dismay that he realized that the job was constantly out of control, in free fall, like driving a school bus full of vocal citizens down a snowy mountainside with several other would-be drivers wrestling for the steering wheel.
His video game obsession was a poorly kept secret. The city council knew why he’d show up once or twice a week with deeply bloodshot eyes, speaking each sentence as if there were a hairpin turn in the middle of it. He’d received as gifts, over his term, nine copies of games—mostly those that in some way or another resembled his job, SimCity or Civilization—games where you managed a city or developed an economy, and these sat unopened next to his console. He promised himself he’d open them someday. In the meantime, he preferred to shoot things.
On the night that a coffee barista assumed control of approximately one fifth of his city, he decided to spend the night killing Nazis.
“Coming to bed?” Christopher said from the bathroom.
“You go,” the mayor said. “I’ll be in soon.”
“No, you won’t.” Christopher lined his toothbrush with a toothpaste he loathed. The mayor insisted on purchasing it because it was made by a local factory and with local ingredients.
“Please don’t do this,” the mayor said.
“Think about what you’ve got to do tomorrow, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Chris.” The mayor lay down on the couch and put one hand over his face. In his other hand he gripped the console’s controller. “I have fought—screaming matches, really—with pretty much every person I regularly interact with over the course of my day. The only exception being you. And that’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m not fighting, ” Christopher called from the bathroom, his speech fuzzy with toothpaste foam.
The last phrase hung in the air, awkward and only vaguely resembling the truth, waiting for one of them to push on it either way until Christopher, finished with his tedious routine of brushing, flossing, face washing, fluoride rinsing, fingernail clipping and face picking, came and stood over the couch where the mayor was collapsed. He put his hand on Brandon’s head and caressed his perfect mayoral hair. The generator kicked on, filling the space with a comforting hum.
“OK,” Christopher said finally, “but don’t stay up too late. D
on’t hurt yourself.”
“I might get shot.”
“What?”
The mayor waved the controller weakly in the direction of the television. “Joke,” he said.
“Ah. Do you want to talk about it at all?”
The mayor paged through a few on-screen characters, picking an Allied machine gunner, and then launched the game.
“Talk about what? About riots springing up like sewer rats? That I lost a quarter of the city to a bunch of people wearing pajamas? You know this Maid Marian chick is calling it Sherwood now. Yeah, I’ve talked about it all day and just can’t get enough, you know?”
“Hey,” Christopher said.
“I know, I’m sorry.” The mayor’s Allied soldier charged kamikaze-like into a bunker of Nazis where he dislodged grenade after grenade until they’d shot him full of holes. Blood erupted in a flowering mist, a geysering ketchup across the supposed screen’s camera lens. “Fucking fuck,” the mayor said, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“I don’t understand why you can’t just go in and get her,” Christopher said.
“Oh, Chris. You should play these games. You could shoot things. It’d make you feel better. Believe me, if it were easy and clean to go in and shoot things up, I’d give it some real thought,” the mayor said. “And the council? Look, here they are—” The mayor called up the Axis soldier chooser on the TV and pointed at it: a huffing, serious German gunner swayed dully back and forth, some kind of coffee ground stain across his jaw, an apparent rendering of beard growth.
Sherwood Nation Page 20
