Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.

“And now what?” she asked.

Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.

Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.

“Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that — a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise — but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oracles are Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink — why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about? — by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.

And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.

He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”

She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the newly stenciled name next to the door — both of which read SARAH O’HARA — and she had been there, for the Regional Office, for Mr. Niles, ever since.

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

When looking through the literature describing the process by which Oyemi and Mr. Niles gathered together not only their team of mystically inclined superwomen but also the famed and dreaded Oracles, who at once directed the movements and growth of the Regional Office and quite possibly predicted its downfall, one finds little more than stark conjecture and bland assumptions. In other words: One is faced with a wasteland of crackpot theories penned by junior research assistants. Still, the Oracles proved pivotal in the rise and fall of the Regional Office, and no serious study of Oyemi and Mr. Niles and their awesome accomplishments would be complete without some critical consideration of the acquisition of the Oracles.

Evidence of this process, however, is not easily found.

Clearly, dangers lurk in the shadows and at the edges for scholars who find themselves stretching beyond tangible and reproducible pieces of evidence, reconstructing conversations, the physical movements of people long gone, whenever they presume to obtain an understanding of the thoughts of great and horrible figures from history. Scholarship is scholarship. Art is art. To shoehorn one into the other is to invite confusion and bedevilment, and yet, there are times when one must push forward, must offer a narrative if only because there cannot be a void.

Nature abhors a void.

And so: Oyemi’s great-uncle died, money was passed down, and an office in Queens was illegally sublet. Then for six weeks, Oyemi and Mr. Niles sought out their first Oracle.

By whatever means — the reading of auras, probing the young woman’s mind, trying to see into her future based on the pattern of freckles on her face, etc., etc. — Oyemi peered at, judged, and found wanting what must have been over five hundred young women in the first six weeks she and Mr. Niles hunted for their Oracle.

An advertisement was not placed, flyers were not posted all over the city, girls did not line up outside the offices of Oyemi and Mr. Niles, though what a lovely image, the line of them circling the block as if each girl were hoping to be cast in some strange and dark Off-Off-Broadway show, or to care for the Banks children before Mary Poppins swooped in and blew them all away.

But no. They walked the city together, Mr. Niles and Oyemi, as Oyemi cast her new mystical glance down dark alleyways, in brightly lit lobbies, at girls on the subway or walking through the Sheep Meadow, or in a coffee shop or in a library or hailing a cab or anywhere at all, really.

Everywhere, in fact. She looked everywhere.

By the end of each day, Oyemi had exhausted herself so completely that Mr. Niles had to carry her home — to conserve the money she had inherited, they had decided to live in the same office they’d rented — where she would fall asleep on the sagging, smoke-stained love seat they had found on the street the day they had moved in. She fell into a heavy sleep no later than six o’clock each evening, out of which she could not wrench herself until nearly ten the next morning.

She lost weight. The dark, unearthly sheen of her skin turned a sickly, lackluster pale green. At night, while she slept, her nose bled, so that she would wake with a face crusted over by her own blood and snot. Her eyes watered and her ears itched and she broke out in hives once or twice a day, and Mr. Niles told her to stop, begged her to stop, worried that she was draining herself looking for whatever or whoever it was she was looking for. But Oyemi would not quit, until finally Mr. Niles told her, “One more time, I will go with you one more time and then I’m done, tomorrow is the last time, and after that, I’m gone, and you can come, too, and we can do some other thing with the money and power, or not, I don’t care about any of it, I care about you, but no matter what, this is the last time, because I’m not going to bear witness, not to this, not to the end of you.”

The next day, they found Nell.

She was walking out of a Duane Reade.

The procedure, up until that point, had been for Oyemi and Mr. Niles to walk around various neighborhoods and wait for Oyemi to “get a feeling,” and then Mr. Niles would approach the woman attached to this feeling and ask her questions — they had written a fake survey on the increased cost of living — with the idea being that Oyemi could then examine the woman unnoticed (despite how un-unnoticeable Oyemi had become), as all of the young woman’s attention, all her psychological and emotional defenses, would be trained on Mr. Niles. Oyemi, then, could sneak up behind the mark and close her eyes and proceed however it was she proceeded and then a minute or so later, open her eyes and shake her head and they would move on.