The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (8 page)

The soldiers shut the metal door dividing the seats from the
bus driver. I look down and see that there are metal hoops in the floor to
chain prisoners.

“You still look nervous,” Joshua says.

“Aren’t you?”

Joshua shakes his head. “I don’t feel anything. I feel like a
robot.”

I shift awkwardly in the seat as the bus pulls into gear.
“Maybe I’m not so sure exactly where we’re going.”

Joshua leans back. “The black paint over the windows probably
isn’t helping things.”

“No, it’s not.” I run my finger along the streaks of black
paint that prevent any outside viewing—only dim, monotonous light streams
in. “I just can’t believe it’s been so long. I can’t believe there’s a soldier
sitting in the front row of this bus. I can’t believe we’re even
on
a bus.”

“It could be worse.”

I don’t say anything. How long since I’ve actually slept?
Everyone else seems to be dozing off in the quiet shade of the bus’s black
windows, but I feel wide-awake. Before all this, I could sleep on a dime. I
could lie down on a bed, stare into the darkness behind my eyelids, and rest
for a full eight hours. Only once, after I broke my nose six years ago, did I have
trouble sleeping. I remember it because the dull, throbbing pain slid down the
damaged bridge, settling in pools under my eyes and I had to breathe through my
mouth.

“I had a life before this,” Joshua says. “I used to write for
Web sites. I had a cat named Tiger. I can’t go back. I can’t see my cat dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. Then, because I don’t know what else to
say, I add, “I’ll help you get a job at the power plant.”

He doesn’t answer. His fingers pick at the seat in front of
him.

My parents used to have a cat, a chubby orange tabby. His
name was Winston, and I loved him to death when I was a kid. He was runt with a
little gremlin face and he liked to take clothes I left lying around and drag
them into the basement. I imagine Winston, alone in Joshua’s apartment, dying
of hunger, and feel like crying. But nothing comes out.

I turn away from the black windows. The young man with the
eye patch is looking at me with his bright blue eye. His mouth creases into a
smile, I can see fresh wrinkles in his cheeks that haven’t set deep into the
skin yet. He’s a young man aged a decade inside the prison.

“Does God talk to you?” Blue Eye asks.

“No,” I say.

“That’s a shame,” he says. “God can help you through the
darkest times.”

“If that’s what you want to believe,” I tell him.

“It’s what I
know
,”
Blue Eye says.

I stare at the white patch of gauze taped over his smooth,
pale skin. “Did they do that to you?” I ask, pointing to his eye.

He smiles, reaching up to touch the gauze with two fingers.
“This? No. This was an act of God. God works through us.”

“So the insanity plea works,” Joshua mutters.

“Did he tell you why he did it?” I ask.

Blue Eye smiles, clutching the back of the seat as the bus
takes a hard right turn. “When those bombs fell, I thought I was going to die.
I prayed and I prayed and I asked God what he wanted from me. He never answered
because he was disappointed in me. Why should I have even had to ask? I know
what he wants from me. He wants this country. It belongs to him. It belongs to
the Christians.”

“I doubt that.” I should have known just by the dorky short
blond haircut, the innocent face, that he was a certifiable fundamentalist.
Nowhere else on the planet, it seems, are the religious so fanatical. The fact
that the Coalition let him out of the prison is just more proof they don’t
really know what they’re doing.

“Some day,” Blue Eye says, “you’re going to see what I see.
And God will ask
you
to make a
sacrifice.”

The bus stops and two soldiers step inside, helping the more
comatose people out first. I make my way down the aisle last, surprised to find
myself outside in the middle of downtown Emerald City, next to the giant glass
Central Bank headquarters and surrounded by teeming crowds of black-clad
Coalition soldiers and armored vehicles that clog the streets; everyone looks
like they’re carrying out an order, their ranks peppered with contractors
wearing gray bulletproof vests with the Anodyne logo on the breast.

I have to blink a few times to take it all in. The air cools
the water coating my eyes. In front of me is a single city block of green
space, only now the grass is mostly brown or dirt and surrounding the green
space are blocks of three- and four-story concrete buildings, government
buildings, all with soldiers standing outside. Smoking. Clutching their
weapons. Moving in twos and threes from block to block. I’ve been to the court
building across the street, walked between its white Grecian pillars to serve
on a jury on two separate occasions. I lied my way out of both cases.

“Where you go?” the soldier next to the bus asks.

“What?” I say, shaking myself away from the distracting
sight. It looks like a dome of gray smoke is just sitting over the entire area
and the air tickles my lungs. It’s like they dropped me off in the wrong city.
In the wrong country.

“Where you go?” The soldier can’t be older than twenty. He
has dark skin and thin nostrils that flare when he talks.

“I don’t know.” I rub my lips against my teeth, thinking.
Where did I live? I can see my condo in my mind’s eye, right there in plain
sight, but the location is off. It’s floating in the middle of nowhere.

“Hold,” he says, grabbing the man with the eye patch. Blue
Eye moves like a ragdoll, letting the soldier pull him next to me and Joshua.
“Where you go?”

“C Street,” Blue Eye says. He smiles. “Then to God.”

“Follow,” the soldier says, waving us to follow him as he
holds onto Blue Eye’s sleeve. Me and Joshua follow close behind them, weaving
between two very large tanks sitting idly on the street next to the old
two-story parliament building, its tall marble pillars jutting out of the front
like an old Greek temple and its green-tinted windows reflecting the gray
clouds overhead. I’m in another time, that’s what this is. The bus was a time
machine, just like an old science fiction book I read as a kid, only the bus in
the story didn’t have black windows and there were no soldiers and the
passengers were big stuffed bears.

“Is the president still alive?” I ask the soldier.

The soldier shakes his head. “President? No president yet. No
prime minister. Soon.” The words sound scripted, the accent polished out in a
way that could only be accomplished by repetition.

“Repetition is the mother of all learning,” Mister Mantii
says in my mind. I picture him adding, “Then lies can become truth.” He said a
lot of strange things that I can distinctly remember because he repeated them
so often. Civil wars can bring positive change. The central bank controls the
economy. This country would never be invaded because it’s too important. Our
country is not like those other countries. Those other countries are dangerous.
Our country is not.

I remember it all. And I remember I had a routine before I
went to work. I stopped and got a coffee. I followed the same route. If I can
find the street I used, I can find the power plant and my apartment.

“There was a monument there,” I say, pointing to the large
open space of dead grass across the street. I remember the square covered with
lush green grass and in the center was a statue, the Unity Monument. There were
always flowers at the base. Beautiful flowers of all kinds, some that could
survive the winters and others that we pulled up and re-planted every spring.

I can’t remember what the monument looked like. It was tall
and there were figures doing something together. Stressing “unity,” of course.
Everyone always stressed “unity” and I always used to hate it but now that the
monument is gone and the ground is covered with thick, muddy tire tracks, the
square makes me anxious. As if a needle had just pricked my skin when I wasn’t
expecting it.

“It was ugly,” the soldier says with a thick accent, “so your
people tore it down. Very glorious.”

We continue down to Unity Plaza, where large vertical
concrete barricades line the streets, the types that divide oncoming traffic on
freeways only twice as tall. A lot of the short business buildings running
along 13
^th
Street have been almost completely bombed out, and men
wearing gray slacks and heavy gray coats are taking away the rubble, tossing
everything into massive red pickup trucks.

They’re foreigners.

That doesn’t make sense. The Unity government has strict laws
against hiring foreigners. They’re not liked. Workers don’t want to compete
with the cheap labor from Asia. So what are they doing here?

“They’re putting up a wall,” Joshua mutters.

“To keep themselves in or to keep people out?” I ask. I don’t
expect an answer.

The soldier gives a wave to the guards stationed behind the
concrete barrier at the intersection of 13
^th
and A Street. They wave
back, keeping the massive mounted machine gun lowered as we pass. The soldier
stops at the intersection.

“Be careful of stray bullets,” he says, and turns away.

“Stray bullets?” Joshua asks.

We cross the first street and suddenly the white concrete
wall of the building on the corner explodes into powder and the pop-pop of
machine gun fire penetrates my ears and rumbles through my chest. I drop onto
the street along with Joshua and Blue Eye, scraping both hands on the concrete.

The gunfire stops. I look at the building and see fist-sized
chunks torn out, lying on the sidewalk. There are a couple dozen holes and the
wide green-tinted window on the first floor is broken in one corner. I turn
back to the soldiers. They’re standing behind the sandbags, laughing. Hot smoke
pours out of the barrel of their machine gun.

“Fuck you!” Joshua screams, getting up on his knees. “Fuck
you!”

He stands and for just a brief moment, he looks like he’s
going to walk back across the street, toward the soldiers. They’re still
laughing. I grab Joshua by the arm and turn him around, pulling him onto the
sidewalk.

“Fuck you!” he screams again, pulling hard on my arm. “You
could have fucking killed someone in that building!”

I tighten my grip, pulling him forward. Blue Eye follows, humming
quietly, looking at the sidewalk.

“Are you insane?” I ask Joshua. “What makes you think they
won’t just lock us right back up? Or worse?”

“They’re playing with us,” Joshua says. His face is red.
“They’re having fun. Haven’t we been through enough?”

“Suffering is an honor,” Blue Eye says.

I let go of Joshua’s arm and the three of us walk down the
sidewalk. It’s littered with brown leaves and brown pieces of paper. There’s a
lot of garbage next to the curb: soda bottles, food wrappers whose colors have
faded. There’s snow near the trunks of the trees lining the sidewalk but it’s
all melting fast.

“I was hoping god boy would be a good luck charm,” I say to
Joshua.

Joshua grunts, half-smiling. It’s a start.

“We only need God,” Blue Eye says. “No luck is necessary
anymore.”

“I wish I had your faith,” I tell him.

“You can!” he says. “Oh, you can. Come to our church on C
Street. It’s a Christian neighborhood now, so you’ll be safe from the
insurgency. Michael Werth is our pastor and he has food and clothing. You need
that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I glance back at the guards, hunkered
behind the chest-high barrier, the older of the two clutching the handles of a
machine gun that looks like it could cut down a tank. I turn back to Blue Eye.
The center of the eye patch has begun to soak through. Red blood seeps into the
tiny openings of the gauze, spreading like an oil spill over the white surface.

“This isn’t the world you left.”

His words send a shiver down my spine. I look down the empty
street ahead. There’s a massive pothole in the concrete, like a crater on the
moon. The trees running along the boulevard are nearly bare. The sidewalks are
cracked in places.

“The Muslims will try to take over the new government,” Blue
Eye says. “They’re taking over neighborhoods. They’re murdering people. You’re
not safe alone.”

“Maybe there’s something of the old world left,” I say.

“Then come find us when you’re ready,” he says. “God has a
plan. We have a plan.”

I watch him turn and walk north, toward the freeway tucked
behind the buildings a mile away or maybe farther. It doesn’t matter—he’s
not heading to the freeway. I can see a chunk of it where the street runs under
it. I can see clearly that a piece of it is missing and lying in the street
below. There’s no way out that way.

Blue Eye hums to himself, the type of stiff song that comes
from a church. He walks past a blue gas station with white trim and a
new-looking curved canopy hanging over the six gas pumps. The price for a liter
of unleaded gas is an astronomical amount.

“How is that possible?” Joshua asks. “I mean, for prices to
skyrocket like that …”

As we walk closer, we get our first glimpse of humanity:
cars, lined up down the street to our left. More than a dozen of them, waiting
for the single functioning pump at the gas station.

We keep walking.

A middle-aged couple with brown skin walks to the other side
of the street holding hands, moving from building to building with a cautious
gait. The woman is wearing a veil. There were laws against veils before. It was
a precaution, according to the government. But it was really about fear. Fear
of the unknown. The Unity government was always a majority of Christians.

The glass buildings, varying from two stories to ten but all
with shattered windows in places … they each display a specific sign of
conflict: black burn marks, chunks of missing concrete, piles of damaged
furniture on the curb. The streets are dirty, littered with not just refuse but
a number of abandoned, damaged vehicles that sit parked next to the curb or,
worse, have been dragged out toward the middle of the street by a much larger
vehicle so that their bumpers are crumpled and their rear windows are cracked.