The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker

The Worker

The Occupation of Emerald City

By Ken Brosky

Published by Brew
City Press

Cover art by Chris
Smith

I’m sitting on the cold floor, in the darkness, in a room
with a small window that’s been boarded up from the outside, covered with thick
black bars and bolted to the frame on the inside. The air smells like body odor
and it seems to cling to my greasy skin. Goosebumps pop up on my bare arms. The
mattress in the corner is divided in two by a thin strip of light shining
through a crack between two of the window boards. When I sit on it, there’s no
metallic pop of springs, only the soft groan of air escaping the cushion.

I sleep intermittently with my arms wrapped tightly around my
chest, wake up in darkness, rub my eyes. I rub my eyes with my knuckles every
hour, just to see the shower of white sparks.

At some point, a soldier dressed in black fatigues walks in
and the light behind him burns my eyes. He leads me back out into the
clean-smelling hallway. It looks like an elementary school hallway, with long
red-painted stripes running along the otherwise white walls. There’s a single
fire extinguisher between two of the doors, which are spread out at five-foot
intervals and covered by a sheet of metal held in place by thick round rivets.

Cells. Whatever this place was before, it’s a prison now. The
man escorting me has a dark complexion—all I can see is his face, his
dark black eyebrows and his creaseless pale cheeks and dark brown eyes. One
gloved hand tightly grips my forearm. He’s strong, young, probably only
eighteen or nineteen. He’s an inch shorter than me, wearing a bulky bulletproof
vest underneath his black fatigues. The vest stretches the fabric around his
chest and making him look much larger than he must normally be.

He guides me to the end of the hall and through a wooden door
not reinforced with a sheet of metal, into a small room with bare white walls,
and other than the desk there’s only a small metal filing cabinet to fill the
room. A young pale man sits behind the desk. His smooth black hair is parted to
the left and the sleeves of his gray suit coat ride up his wrists as his hands
mechanically move papers around on the small wooden desk. He’s an ugly man, in
his mid-thirties with a wrinkled face and a big nose that monopolizes
everything else.

I’m shoved from behind and fall knee-first onto the hard
tiled floor. I feel a strong hand press against my shoulder, holding me in
place. There’s a folding chair in front of me but the hand pressing on my
shoulder won’t let me get up.

The door shuts.

“Please,” I whisper.

“What?” the man asks.

“Please!”

“Please what?” He has an accent, but at least he’s speaking
my language. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought. It’s all a big mistake,
whatever’s going on.
I’m not the type of
person who should be here.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I say.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” he mutters, walking around the table
and sitting in front of me. He tugs at the legs of his black pants and leans
forward. I feel the hand on my shoulder squeeze hard.

“Please,” I say. “This is all a misunderstanding. It has to
be.”

“You’re a terrorist,” the man says. He pulls off his suit
coat and sets it on the desk, then rolls back the cuffs of his white shirt.
They squeeze his forearms.

“No,” I say. “I’m a good citizen. I don’t even own a gun.”

“You’re a terrorist. You work for the government.”

“No. Yes.” I’m confused. I’m afraid to lie, afraid to tell
the truth. My sweaty hands feel slimy on top of the cool tiles.

“Yes, you’re a terrorist.”

“I work at the power plant. I’m not a terrorist.”

“You work for the government. You’re a terrorist.” He sounds
like he’s trying to hide his accent, but keeps slipping up on certain syllables
like the “teah” in “terrorist.”

“No, just a supervisor.”

“You were planning to detonate an explosive inside the power
plant.”

“No!”

The man sits back, pulling the waistline of his pants over
his bulging stomach. He looks uncomfortable wearing professional clothes. “We
can be here all night. All day. As long as you want. You were arrested on a tip
…”

“I wasn’t arrested.”

“You were arrested …”

“I was kidnapped!” I scream, loud enough to feel the sharp
air scrape my throat. I’ve been inside that cell for days and only received a
few bites of food. I’ve been gathering the saliva in my mouth, drinking it down
all at once to coat my dry throat.

“Shut up!” the man yells, louder than me, pounding his fist
on his thigh. “Shut the fuck up! You were arrested on a tip that you were
planning to sabotage the power plant. Do you understand?”

“No.”

“Why are you sweating?”

I lick my lips. The little piece of flesh under my nose
tastes salty. “I have anxiety disorder. I need medicine.”

“No medicine here, friend. You’re lucky you’re still alive at
all.”

I close my eyes. Wake up, I tell myself.

“You are an enemy combatant. Do you understand?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t even know what’s going on. I don’t even
know what that means.”

The man stands up and walks around his desk, sitting in the
chair and taking a sip from a big white mug. He leans over the desk, rubbing
his hands together. The dry skin hisses between each finger. “There have been
multiple threats on Coalition forces. You were implicated in a similar threat.”

“No. I work at the city power plant. I’m a supervisor. You
can check my identification. I’ve got a file at the Government Worker Database,
too ...”

He slaps the desk with an open palm. “Your government doesn’t
exist anymore, do you understand?” He walks back around the desk. He leans down
so his eyes are right in front of mine and I can smell his breath as he
exhales: raw onions and stale coffee. “The Coalition came in and they kicked
all your crooked politicians out and now the Coalition runs things, do you
understand?”

“No.”

“You see?” the man says, pointing two fingers at my chest.
“This is why your country was so dangerous. This is why the world doesn’t like
you. None of you understand what your country’s done to our world. None of you
could possibly imagine why anyone would ever want to attack your precious
country. Now the rest of the world has to come in and fix your fuck-ups.”

“I mean I don’t understand why I’m here,” I say. “I don’t
give a shit about my country.”

“You were arrested for planning an attack on the Coalition.
You’re a terrorist.”

The sweat around my neck feels ice cold. “I’m not … please,
just check the payroll … we can straighten this out if you just let me prove
who I am.”

“Tell me who you were working with.”

“I wasn’t working with anyone,” I say. Or does he mean my
co-workers at the power plant? My mind reels, trying to figure out what he
wants to hear so I can appease him. “I wasn’t doing anything. I don’t even have
friends. I don’t even like paying into our
union
,
for Christ’s sake!”

“Get this piece of shit out of here.”

The soldier behind me grabs under my armpit and pulls me back
out of the room, where another soldier is waiting. The other soldier looks
young like the other but with a thin red scrape along his bare right cheek.
Another soldier standing by the door has long black hair tucked under the
helmet, her feminine shape covered by the black bulletproof vest and bulky
pants. She has smooth, angular features and a prominent nose. She’s escorting a
short man—wearing a black hood and blue pajamas—into another room
with a steel door. The hallway is silent except for the quiet whimpering coming
from beneath the hood.

“Hold still,” says the soldier behind me. He speaks my
language in the choppy way many foreigners do. He puts a black hood over my
head and escorts me down the long hall, out a pair of doors where I’m greeted
by a burst of cold fresh air that carries a hint of smoke with it. My bare feet
press down on dry, hard dirt and small pebbles tickle my heel. In the sunlight,
I can see enough through the hood. I can see barbed wire surrounding one very
large tent, and a dozen people huddled under the tent in one solid mass.
Surrounding the barbed wire are more soldiers dressed in full black, wearing
helmets and black sunglasses, indistinguishable except for size and stature.

At a small makeshift gate, the soldiers stop me, take off my
hood, then shove me into the enclosure. I have to squint and my clumsy feet
bump into each other. I stand in the open, arms shaking at my side,
half-expecting a gunshot to end my life.

“Keep walking!” one of them shouts.

I walk to the tent.

“Sit down!”

I sit. A short man under the tent watches me with bright
brown eyes. Everyone is huddled together for warmth to stave off the cold air.
There are only a few large brown blankets spread over the bodies.

“Come here,” the man says. He has dark skin and wide set,
disarming brown eyes. “Come on now, we don’t bite.”

I shift a little closer. It’s so cold but I don’t like to be
touched.

“Just lean next to us,” the man says. He’s wearing a red
soccer shirt and sweat pants. “Can’t sleep sitting out there alone in the
cold.”

I move closer, leaning against his shoulder and the shoulder
of a young woman who flinches at my touch. She’s wearing a loose-fitting gray
sweatshirt and jeans. Her face doesn’t have makeup but it still looks smooth
except for the constellation of pimples near her forehead. It feels awkward to
touch her knowing she couldn’t possibly be older than eighteen, but the
collective heat from the others helps slow the anxiety running through my body.
I can feel my heart beating in my ears: it begins to slow its rhythm, and the
tension in my chest ceases. I sleep like this, with my body resting against the
man with the dark skin, with his body heat keeping my back warm.

They wake us up every hour to do a headcount.

We urinate in a bucket. One of the soldiers has placed a
photocopy of our country’s constitution at the bottom and it floats in the
urine. When I’m finished, I return to the group of people and lie down on the
hard ground. I listen to the soldiers laugh every time someone defecates and
then they toss around the hand sanitizer before handing it to someone under the
tent. I’ve taken to watching them because there’s nothing else to do and the
time passes so slowly. The soldiers are all kids, a good ten years older than
me. They’re afraid of me for some reason—they hold their machine guns
tight.

They wake us up to check everyone’s wristbands. I had
completely forgotten I was even wearing one. Someone put it on when I first
arrived and that’s all I can remember about it. I feel the hair growing on my
face, thick enough to tickle my fingers, and estimate it’s been at least a week
since I’ve shaved.

Some people cry so much that it becomes difficult to sleep,
even for an hour. One man deep under the covers of one of the blankets keeps
asking what’s going on, what happened “out there,” how a Coalition of countries
invaded but no one wants to talk about it. He wants to know how it happened. I
wish he’d shut up.

They wake us up to perform a body search, stripping me naked
in front of everyone else. I’m hairy. My stomach bulges out a little. They pull
each person aside one-by-one and use an electric razor to cut our hair and beards;
they joke about shaving my back. A young woman dressed in fatigues strips each
woman for the body check, and she looks disgusted at the hair growing on their
legs.

“Don’t lose
hope,” a man
whispers at night. I turn my head, afraid to move because I’ve managed to pull
a portion of a blanket off of a woman who’s already asleep and the nights are
so cold, cold enough to cause teeth to chatter. A symphony of chattering teeth,
like a drum line.

I’m beginning to worry that they’re simply going to leave
everyone out here to die.

“Don’t lose hope,” the voice says again, deep under the
blankets.

They wake us up again and this time the soldiers take a
handful
of people away. They don’t return. Maybe
they were released. I try to imagine what happens when people are released, to
visualize the future so I’m prepared. I imagine a cab ride home, then a visit
later from a stuffy-looking old man in a gray suit offering a very sincere
apology and a damn good explanation. So sorry, I imagine him saying … big
mix-up. Please sign this.

They wake us again and dispense a piece of buttered bread and
water to everyone. More people are brought into the compound. Three women and
four men. The women all look like housewives, wearing jeans and loose-fitting
t-shirts. The men all look in their late-twenties. One man, with short sandy
hair and large ears, darts his eyes in all directions every time he takes a
step. He sits down next to me and I shift away from him so our shoulders aren’t
touching. I don’t want to touch him because I can feel the anxiety crawling on
his skin and I’m afraid it may be contagious. I need my pills.

During the night, people start talking.

“It wasn’t soldiers that came to my door,” a young man
whispers next to me, poking his head out from under the blue blanket. “They
weren’t soldiers. They spoke our language.”

“Lots of countries,” another male voice keeps whispering.
“They went on TV and said this was for the best. Our country
needed
to be invaded. It was a
spectacle.”

Day breaks inside the compound and the sun slowly rises over
the two-story building surrounding the huddled mass. People wake up
intermittently, blink their eyes, then huddle closer and go back to sleep.
There’s nothing else to do. I sit with my back against a woman who’s curled up,
and use my finger to draw electrical circuits in the dry dirt.

Sometimes, during the day, the soldiers don’t perform their
hourly wake-ups, and I can feel dreams beginning to form. At night, they never
skip an hour.