The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (11 page)

I glance into the bedroom. The bed’s white sheets are still
tussled, hanging half off one edge, just as they were the night they took me. I
spent so much time thinking about my bed while I lay on soggy, urine stained
mattresses and now I can’t imagine lying down. I’m not tired. I don’t want to
close my eyes until the world stops spinning.

He comes out without washing his hands or flushing. “The
plumbing doesn’t work again. It did earlier,” he adds, as if he’s trying to
convince me.

I follow him back into the living room. Joshua is sitting on
the couch, staring at the blank TV screen. The laptop is closed, sitting on the
coffee table.

I don’t know what to say. My feet shift uncomfortably.

“She’s dead,” he says quietly. “What am I going to do? I … I
don’t even know what’s happening.” He gets up and paces in front of the couch,
glancing at the laptop. I know what’s about to happen, but even so I’m
surprised when he picks it up and throws it across the room. It hits the wall
next to the front door, flipping open and leaving a dent in the drywall.
“Goddammit!” he screams. “Goddammit!”

The old man clears his throat. He looks like he wants to say
something to Joshua to make him feel better. Instead, he looks to me. The
refrigerator turns off. The soft green digital display on the DVD player on top
of the TV disappears.

“What’s happening?” Joshua asks, looking around.

“The power is out,” says the old man. “It happens.”

I realize suddenly he must think we’re both insane. He has no
idea what we’ve been through. He’s never lived inside a box that tortures you.
To him, this place is just a home.

“I’m going to try and get my job back,” I say, turning to
Joshua. “And I’m going to try and get you one, too. I’m checking my bank
account, too. We’re going to straighten this all out.”

Joshua’s breathing slows. His face is red. He has crooked
teeth and the dark hair of his beard grows in soft swirls along his jaw,
disarming him. As if reading my thoughts, his face softens. He nods. “Okay. I’m
sorry. I didn’t … this isn’t me. I’m sorry.”

I take my sweatshirt off the coat rack,
my
coat rack, and put it on. I grab one of the gas cans, our ticket
back into this new world. “Maybe there’s still a way we can all come out of this
okay.”

“I hope you’re right,” I hear Joshua say as I shut the door.
In the hallway, the lights are out.

I walk down the street to the gas station and wait behind a
line of seven cars, rubbing my arms to stave off the cold. When it’s my turn, I
fill up one of the gas containers. Almost three fluid gallons, enough for now.
I go inside and grab a short black rubber tube for sale next to the automotive
supplies. The young dark-skinned clerk—a Muslim—takes my credit
card with suspicion and the register tape immediately prints, meaning there’s
no Internet connection, meaning he has no way of being sure that my card is
legit. He trusts me by look alone; a rather hefty compliment, all things
considered.

I hear a quiet cough and glance over the counter. A little
girl is sitting on a small plastic stool next to the glass cabinet holding
cartons of cigarettes, coloring in a little book.

“No school today?” I ask her. It’s supposed to come out soft
and pleasant but instead I sound threatening. My throat is hoarse. She looks up
at me with big brown eyes. She has long, thin eyebrows and dark hair squeezed
into short pigtails. She’s wearing a long white dress, too big for her so it
flows over her feet.

“No teachers at her school,” the man says. He clears his
throat. “Too dangerous, you know?”

“I don’t.” That out-of-place feeling grips me again. When I
was young, I traveled to enough places to understand how drastically the role
of the Jew can change from society to society.
 
The Unity government always kept the
religions in check, but that’s gone now. I don’t know what this man thinks of
me.

“Rain jacket,” he murmurs, not looking up at me. He’s
following my signature on the piece of paper. His beard is thick and black
except above his upper lip, where it’s thin and patchy. He has heavy bags below
his eyes that look thick and purple under the single functioning halogen bulb.

“Pardon me?” I ask.

He points to the packages of folded black raincoats sitting
in a large soda-shaped container with the Pepsi logo on it. There’s no soda
left. “Rain later,” he says quietly.

“Really,” I say, grabbing one of the packages. The concept of
being drenched in cold water sounds a little too much like something reserved
for that place I just left. I don’t ever want to feel that level of discomfort
again. I want to always be warm, wrapped in dry, clean clothes with deodorant
under my arms.

“I throw it in,” the man says. “Please buy gas here again.”

“I will,” I say, touched by the gesture. “I promise. Thank
you.”

“Please be safe,” the man says, still looking down.

I walk back down the empty street to my car and siphon out as
much of the old gasoline as I can with the tube, letting it pour out onto the
street and hoping no Coalition vehicles happen upon the scene and mistake me
for someone
bad
. I can hear the rough
diesel engines of the armored Humvees somewhere in the distance, lurking behind
the buildings, skulking from intersection to intersection. I can hear
intermittent explosions from far, far away. Suddenly, a car passes at the next
intersection, speeding down the center of the street and passing me with the
windows down but no music coming from inside. The driver—in the brief
moment I see his face—looks afraid, tired, unwilling to acknowledge me next
to the car and equally uninterested in slowing down to check for oncoming
traffic.

My heart beats inside my eardrums and can’t stop looking over
my shoulders. That car came out of nowhere.

The gasoline slows to a trickle and I pull the hose out of
the tank, stuffing it under my car and pouring in the fresh gas. When the can’s
empty, I toss it in the trunk and open the driver’s door. I can smell the
gasoline on my fingertips but also the familiar smell of my car (old fast food
wrappers) and I feel safe inside with the windows up. Two blocks ahead is a
twenty-four-hour dry cleaner, its lights out. In the side mirror, I can see a
miniature, distant version of the empty street behind me. At the intersection,
a fast blue sedan speeds through and disappears behind a bar whose lights are
out.

I’m tempted to go to the bar, have a few stiff drinks, hope
that maybe I can forget some of what I went through. But then I remember: the
bar operated in a
Christian
neighborhood. This isn’t a Christian neighborhood anymore.

The car coughs to life after a handful of tries, pushing
through the fresh gasoline very slowly. I pull onto the road and travel from
street to street, keeping my speed at twenty miles per hour and trying to
follow my old route to work. On J Street a black Coalition Humvee turns sharply
from a side street and heads toward me, so I pull over and wait for it to pass.
The barrel of the machine gun on the top of the vehicle points directly at my
windshield but I’m not scared. I don’t know why but I’m not scared. I feel safe
in my car.

There are white trucks that drive more erratically, and twice
I see them swerving wildly in the street to run over a stray dog attempting to
cross. Both times I watch in horror and yet it doesn’t surprise me. None of it
does, not the downed power wires lying like snakes on the sidewalks of G Street
or the broken windows or the fire-damaged buildings or the boarded-up
businesses or people scurrying away from vehicles like cockroaches.

I follow G Street to the edge of the city and turn onto the
unmarked road that leads to the massive coal plant. I stop at the thin white
guard box and wait for Bert to step out. When he doesn’t, I slowly inch my car
closer only to find that no one is stationed inside. The computer monitor is
gone, leaving only a small white desk and a stool that Bert never used. I pull
ahead and park in the front of the building.

I get out of my car, looking at the plant, noticing that
smoke’s only coming out of one of the three smoke stacks. The door leading to
the guest reception is locked. I ring the bell next to the doorknob.

“Look up,” a female voice says through the silver intercom
over the door. I look up, then left, then right until I see the small black
camera affixed to the gray brick wall underneath the small fabric overhang. I
don’t remember that. “Thank you,” the voice says. The door buzzes and I open
it, immediately feeling the familiar dry scent of burning coal grow a hundred
times stronger in my nostrils.

Home. I feel my heart relax a little inside my chest. I can
breathe this stuffy air even better than the fresh air outside.

The elderly receptionist sitting behind the white desk stares
at me, the loose skin of her face wrinkled into a frown. A thick wall of glass
divides the two of us. This is new.

“Can I help you?” she says through the small circular pattern
of holes midway up the glass.

“Can you please page Tasha from Human Resources?” I ask.
“Tell her it’s Miles.”

The woman looks down and grabs the phone at her desk, paging
through the auto-dial numbers. She speaks low into the phone, then hangs up.
“She will be out in a moment.”

I stand, waiting, expecting. The lights in this room seem
dimmer. One of the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling is out, but undamaged. It’s
probably a loose connection dating back to the bombing. I could re-route the
electricity to this room with a single days’ work. I know this entire floor
inside and out.

Suddenly Tasha bursts through the door next to the desk and
grabs me into her arms. She wails something into my shoulder between sobs. In
the brief moment I saw her face, it looked five years older. The smooth
features around her eyes had wrinkled considerably, with purple puffy bags atop
her high cheekbones as if she’d been crying for eight hours a day all winter.

“What?” I ask. “Tasha, I can’t understand a word you’re
saying.”

She pulls away, still crying but smiling, too. Her black eye
shadow runs down each cheek in black streaks. “I said I’m so glad you’re alive,
dear! I thought you were dead or worse. I didn’t know what to think. Where have
you been?”

“I was arrested,” I say, smiling. “It took a long time to
clear up.”

“Oh my god,” she says. “I can’t believe it. There have been
so many abductions all over the country, I thought for sure you were one of
them. People just disappearing and then showing up weeks later in a ditch. Are
you okay?”

“I’m … well, I’m as good as can be.”

“What happened?”

I have to think about that for a moment. There’s no need to
tell her the details. “I don’t remember much, actually. I don’t think I want
to.” It’s hard to find a word for what happened. “Abducted” sounds best. But
now I can’t actually remember much of what transpired the night I was taken.
Even now, staring at this woman who I was once so close to, my brain feels
heavy just trying to come up with her name a second time.

She shakes her head, clutching my shoulders with her long,
red nails. “Come outside with me so I can have a cigarette. Oh my god my nerves
are just shattered.”

I follow her outside and she lights up a cigarette, oblivious
to the cool weather. She glances back over her shoulder, watching the visitor’s
door slowly close.

“Okay,” she says, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Now we can talk
safely.”

“What do you mean?”

She takes a deep, greedy drag. “They have surveillance inside
the building now to keep an eye on the new hires.”

“Who?” I ask.

“The electric company,” she says. “A private company from
another country. They own the plant now. I don’t even trust the receptionist.”

I run a hand through my hair. “How is that possible? The city
owned the plant.”

She takes another wild puff. “There’s no real government
anymore. The Coalition just put together this Provisional Authority and they
sold off everything they could to pay off debt. The first thing to go was the
utilities. Then went the other stuff. Highways, roads, sewage, parks, lakes,
hospitals …”

“Tasha, slow down,” I say, grabbing her shoulders to keep her
from bouncing around. “Tell me about the Coalition.”

“They’re the countries that invaded,” she says. “A bunch of
countries, too. After they settled in they made a big deal of going to the U.N.
to state their ‘concerns.’ That’s why they called themselves the Coalition of
the Concerned.” She laughs. “It was a big dog and pony show. They haven’t left
yet.”

“Yeah, I got that impression.”

She shakes her head. “They just—poof!—got rid of
the Unity government and set up this temporary Provisional Authority to try and
keep order. The Viceroy goes around makes announcements and then everyone gets
mad.”

“Why is there still power out everywhere?”

“Because they don’t give a shit,” she mutters. “The demand
keeps going up so they keep driving up prices. There aren’t any
rules
anymore. The Coalition still
hasn’t held any elections and everyone’s running around pissed off.”

“I just can’t believe they’d sell the plant,” I say. “It was
run so well.” At least, that’s what my memory seems to be telling me. Maybe it
wasn’t, though. Maybe I wasn’t nearly as hard a worker as I remember. My head
hurts, right between my eyes.

“The Provisional Authority is doing everything it can to try
and jump-start the economy but nothing’s working. They’re so desperate that
they hired back the same guy who used to run the Ministry of Energy
to run the Ministry of Energy
. Even
though he was a member of the Green Party. The first thing he did was
deregulate everything. He sold off three power plants. One of the power plants
is shut down because it was attacked.”