Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

It is safe to assume that Mr. Niles understood little of what was going on and that, to him, the entire procedure was slipshod and inefficient and doomed to failure. So when Oyemi spied Nell stepping out of the store and tapped Mr. Niles on the shoulder and told him, “Her, quick, her,” he failed to notice the urgency in her voice, the heat from her hand when she tapped him.

Mr. Niles walked over to the young woman, smiled his charming, useful smile, and asked her if she would mind answering a few questions for his survey. The young woman barely had time to answer “Yes” or “No, thanks,” before Oyemi clubbed her on the head from behind, catching her just as she fell.

“Don’t just stand there,” Oyemi said. “Grab her, quick. We need to get her to the office.”

They brought the woman back to their building. Oyemi carried her into her office and laid her on the floor, still unconscious. Mr. Niles searched her purse, found a wallet, and in the wallet found a handful of receipts; a photograph of a little girl, which he tucked into his pocket; and a driver’s license, which was how he discovered her name was Nell. He also discovered she was twenty-four years old (two years older than himself at the time) and lived on East Tenth.

It’s unclear what Oyemi had done to the girl when she hit Nell over the head, how hard she’d hit her or with what. Regardless, Nell didn’t wake for almost three hours, during which time Mr. Niles and Oyemi sat in the front room of their office, Oyemi quietly and expectantly on the couch, and Mr. Niles, unsure what to do or where to sit, pacing around the room.

It is safe to say he became increasingly nervous.

Then Oyemi perked up and looked at the closed office door and said, “She’s awake. Finally.” Then she rushed into the room, closed and locked the door behind her, and didn’t come out.

Let us conjecture that, at this time, Mr. Niles decided to go, to leave, to go where? Anywhere, really, and to seriously consider whether he could ever come back.

When Mr. Niles first met Oyemi, the two of them had been children. Her name hadn’t been Oyemi and his name hadn’t been Mr. Niles; those were names they adopted to play a game, a prescient game in which they took over the world, or, rather, she took over the world. Oyemi, supreme ruler of the planet Earth, and her butler, Mr. Niles. Well, her butler at first, and then her superpowered butler, and then not a butler at all but her right-hand man, unless she was mad at him for any of a number of reasons that children become mad at each other, and then he was her butler again.

Mr. Niles didn’t know what a butler was, so Oyemi pointed him to Alfred, from Batman, as a reference and that was who he pretended to be. Mostly, though, Oyemi had an odd sense of humor and thought the idea of a supreme ruler of the planet with a butler named Mr. Niles was funny, and while Mr. Niles didn’t always quite understand, he played along anyway.

Then and until his death, he played along anyway.

But knocking a woman unconscious, kidnapping her, that was where the line was drawn, obviously. This is what he must have thought to himself as he walked out of the office, down three flights of stairs, onto the street. What he must have thought to himself as he looked left and right, looked for signs of having been followed — even then, Mr. Niles would have been, to some degree, paranoid — looked for some piece of this world that still looked familiar as he operated under a new understanding of Oyemi, of this project he had signed up for, of the life forward he was staring at, and at his not unreasonable decision to leave it behind. But then something — the sound of Oyemi crying out, perhaps, a deep-welled, anxious, mournful sound in her voice, maybe, or a crash of glass and brick, or the welling up of some deep-seated and unfaded and urgent love he had nearly forgotten — called him back.

Often, it is at this point in the story of the Regional Office that people ask the question: Was Mr. Niles in love with Oyemi?

No one knows the definitive answer to this question. Mr. Niles left no diary or journal, no hoard of love letters he had received from Oyemi, nor letters written but never sent on his own part. Might he once have loved Oyemi, might he once have adored her, might she once have been his first true love, might he have been love-struck in the third grade, when they first met? Certainly any of this is possible, and it is possible he continued to love her, to be in love with her, even after she suffered the accident that should have killed her but didn’t.

The far more interesting question, however, and the question no one can answer but for oneself, is this: Is love enough? Was love enough to justify or explain what happened next and then after that and then after that and then again until the end?

Mr. Niles turned. He rushed back upstairs. By the time he burst back through the office doors, everything had finished, and Oyemi’s office door was open, and standing in the doorway was the girl, not Oyemi.

To those who ask, Where is your evidence? Your proof that Mr. Niles harbored doubts, that Mr. Niles left at all, that any of this happened the way you say it happened?

We say: How else could it have happened? Mr. Niles waiting patiently in the front office while Oyemi performed her administrations on the young woman, Nell? Mr. Niles with a newspaper or a magazine, or looking over the business strategic planning report for the Regional Office while whatever horrifying sounds might have been emitted by either Oyemi or the girl, or both of them, filled the small office? Mr. Niles brewing a pot of coffee because maybe it would be a long night ahead?

The authors of this paper leave it up to the reader to decide which scenario is most reasonable.

The girl looked fine, in any case, which surprised Mr. Niles. It is not difficult to imagine what he might have expected outside of fine. Ever since the accident that should have killed Oyemi but instead imbued her with mystical powers, a lot of things had been less and less right with Oyemi. The way she moved. Books could be penned simply about the way Oyemi walked after the accident, the fluid look of her as she stood up from a couch. The way she twitched. Her odd manner of speaking, the faraway look in her eyes, her smile, which grew ever more toothy. She flared her nostrils in the days after her accident, wider and wider. An affinity for raw meats, the nosebleeds, an ability to predict things five minutes into the future. It is not unreasonable, then, to assume that what he expected to find were the remains of the girl, her skin-covering perhaps, crumpled in the corner of Oyemi’s office, the rest of her, the whole of her, sucked out of her skin by Oyemi, who would, after having feasted on the girl’s immortal soul and whatnot, reemerge as a creature vibrant and shiny-new. At the very least, he must have expected the girl to be frightened or confused or beaten up, that the whites of her eyes would not be white anymore. Yet she looked so untroubled, so at ease, that it took a moment for Mr. Niles to see the one thing that had changed about her, which was her hair, which had been shoulder-length and a dull brown color, and now was entirely gone.

Not shaved, not as if it had been shaved off, but as if it had never been there to begin with.

Mr. Niles said something to her like, “Is everything all right?” but she didn’t say anything back. She smiled serenely, not at him but through him, and then made her way to the window, where she stared out at the traffic and the other windows across the street from them.

Oyemi, stumbling out of the office behind Nell, looked the way Niles had maybe expected Nell to look. Scooped out. Pale, sweaty, exhausted, red-eyed. A smell wafted off her that made Mr. Niles self-conscious and uncomfortable. Oyemi struggled to get to a chair and then sat heavily down in it, and then she sighed, and then she smiled.