Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

In six months, she and Mr. Niles would graduate from Rutgers University. In two months, her great-uncle would die — aneurysm — and would, much to everyone’s surprise, leave Oyemi the bulk of his sizable fortune. A surprise both because he and Oyemi had only met once, and because no one knew he’d amassed any kind of fortune, much less a sizable one.

People can be funny that way.

But at that moment, she was broke, barely paying her rent, arguing with financial aid to wrangle more money out of them her last few months of college. She could take the bus to IKEA for free with her student ID, could walk around for free, could bring a book and sit in a living room or a bedroom diorama and pretend she was home, although it felt perhaps more like she was in some strange zoo or amusement park, an exhibit for future generations to see: Poor College Student (Circa 1993).

After a while she left the store.

It is possible she was asked to leave.

Feeling restless and unwilling to wait for the next bus, she decided to walk home.

Here is where most accounts differ, despite the fact that all accounts from this time are Oyemi’s, namely because she was by herself when everything that happened happened.

Either in the parking lot or half a mile or three-quarters of a mile down the road, something happened: Oyemi was irradiated by an unseen alien force, or she was struck and subsequently irradiated by a small meteorite, or she was irradiated by an eighteen-wheeler that lost control of its cargo, jackknifed off the turnpike, and crashed, sending its oil drum of irradiated liquids spinning right at her and bursting open just before crashing over her, but no matter which story she told, each one ended with Oyemi irradiated, and, somehow, discovered in a small park near Rutgers University, twenty-three miles away from the IKEA.

A couple found her, naked and faintly glowing. They found her near a picnic table. The man called 911 while the woman looked for Oyemi’s clothes or a blanket or anything to cover her with, but finding nothing, the woman walked quickly back to her car, where she kept a blanket for picnics, and draped this over the girl (if that’s what this glowing, naked thing was) — only for the blanket to begin smoldering before catching fire and then burning to ash, which it did even before the woman could yell out to her husband, who was still on the phone with emergency services. This was also when the woman noticed that Oyemi, in a fetal position, lay in the center of a widening circle of bare earth, the grass and weeds on the outer edge of this circle shriveling into black tendrils and then to ash as the woman stood staring at them. Which was also when Oyemi woke up, opened one eye, an eye that glowed hotly, or no, not that, an eye that seemed a window, rather, like the window to an old furnace, so that the eye itself wasn’t glowing hotly, but that the inside of Oyemi glowed hotly. Seeing this, the woman screamed and ran and grabbed her husband, made him drop his phone and run too, before whatever had happened to their blanket, whatever had happened to the grass and weeds and ground, before any of that could happen to them.

Nobody, not even Oyemi, could explain how she made it back home, how she managed not to set all of New Brunswick ablaze, although until just recently, if one knew what signs to look for, one could trace the path she took from the park back to her apartment — a melted metal pole, a tree trunk singed in the shape of a woman’s handprint, a path of footprints where the earth had been burned to dirt that refused to grow back to grass for nearly twenty years — small markings of her passing that day.

Regardless of how she made it home, by the time she made it home, enough of the radiation had burned itself out of her that she could pick up the phone and call Mr. Niles and tell him to come back to New Jersey sooner rather than later before the handset melted around the pads of her fingertips.

Of course, a faction of scholars has formed under the shared belief that none of this happened, a faction that has, over the years, gained members and support and influence, which is why this piece of the history of the Regional Office often goes unmentioned, unexplained. And only recently, the faction itself has split into two separate groups:

Those who believe this never happened and that Oyemi always possessed the powers she possessed, who believe that she used this story as a way to reveal and contextualize these powers; and,

Those who believe she never possessed any mystical properties at all, possessed only the power to fool the powerful into following her lead.

If one chooses, one can seek out these theories on one’s own, though the authors of this paper assure one that they offer little but speculation, biased and unfounded.

Regardless, while Oyemi waited for Mr. Niles to return, she fashioned a plan. This plan became the foundation for an idea of what she could do now that she had changed. The possibilities opened up inside her even as her mind and the mystical properties of her expanded, even as she began to sense and see the power of the girls and women she would seek out and train to be her Oracles and her Operatives. The Oracles would find the Operatives. The Operatives would do what, she didn’t know, not at first. But while she waited and cooled, she began to think thoughts that became ideas that grew into what she and Mr. Niles would come to call the Regional Office.

Sarah’s time with the Regional Office had trained her to harbor certain suspicions, take few risks, set in place specific precautions, and so it was more than a surprise that there was an envelope waiting for her when she got home. It had been taped to the inside of her door. The locks hadn’t been picked or forced. The small piece of black thread she set in the doorjamb every morning when she left for work hadn’t been disturbed.

She’d once told Henry how she left her apartment every day before leaving for work — the thread, the locks — and he had laughed and he had told her she was too serious, that she worried too much, but see? She was right to be so cautious. Sure, her precautions hadn’t kept anyone from breaking into her apartment and taping an envelope to her door, but still. At least she’d had precautions set in place.

In fact, she only saw the envelope when she turned to dead-bolt the door. In other words, she hadn’t even sensed that someone else had been in her apartment. She should have at least sensed something, right?

Her name was written in black Sharpie across the front.

She stared at it.

Then she turned away and walked into her kitchen.

Ten minutes later, with a cup of tea in one hand, a cookie in the other, she walked back to the door to see if the envelope was still there.

It was.

She put the cookie in her mouth to free her hand and she pulled the envelope off the door. It peeled right off. She’d assumed it had been taped there, which had annoyed her because it was her experience that, no matter how hard you tried, the tape goo just never came off, but it had been hot-glued.

How considerate.

And strange.

She sat down at her breakfast table and opened it and slipped a file out of it and began to read what was inside.

This was at midnight.

It had been a long day. Mr. Niles had been acting strange. The Oracles had been unusually quiet. No one had seen Oyemi in almost a month. And Henry. Well. Henry had been acting a little strange ever since that last mission with Emma, the one that killed her. That had been two years ago now. She’d been covering for him, sure, because she was a friend, but still. They were going to have to have a chat. Enough was enough. They all missed Emma, but work was work. Sarah sighed. She stopped ranting in her head. She would skim through the file, see what kind of serious trouble it might mean, call the head of security and leave him a message, maybe call Mr. Niles, too, and then she’d be in bed by one, one thirty tops.