Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Nell had written it on the back of the picture.

Sarah. Her name was Sarah.

Judging by the photograph, Sarah had been young. Five or six, maybe. She had dark hair and big eyes and a pretty face. He assumed she was the Oracle’s daughter. He went to the address on the driver’s license first, which turned up little more than Missing Person posters of Nell, which he tried to inconspicuously pull down, even though they were old and weathered and torn. Nell’s apartment was empty but the landlord told Niles not to get his hopes up, as it had already been rented, and thank God, since the last tenants had skipped out on the place almost two months ago, a woman and her kid, and who the hell knew where they’d gone off to.

That had been his only lead. Once he’d found out that there had been no real effort to find Nell, he should have given up on the girl, gone back to Oyemi or moved forward to a new life, but he found his thoughts returning to Sarah whenever his mind was left to its own devices. He began to seek her out in newspapers, looking for mentions of the daughter of a woman named Nell gone missing now for eight weeks, twelve weeks, but there was nothing.

By this time, Oyemi had finished building out her office space for the Oracle. She seemed reluctant to show it to Mr. Niles, though, which made him feel guilty. Ever since he’d started looking for the girl in earnest, he had barely stopped by the office, had said no more than ten words to Oyemi. Caught up in their own projects, they were growing apart, and Mr. Niles didn’t doubt that this would continue to an unsatisfying and regretful final split, but in hopes of making up for all of this, he expressed a keen and overindulgent interest in seeing the Oracle’s room when Oyemi told him it was finally finished.

Little about the room had changed. It was warmer in there because of the bank of humming computers, Niles assumed. It was dark inside, dimly lit by some ethereal glow. Something about it all left him unsettled. Perhaps the hum of the computers or the heat or the strange way the room dampened their voices when they spoke or the fact that the Oracle still didn’t speak, that he didn’t realize she was even there at first, lingering just under the surface of the water, or maybe it was the connections, thick black cables running from the computers to the pool, disappearing into the underside of the pool, and into the Oracle herself, so he assumed, half-submerged in the pool. Mr. Niles couldn’t say. Or maybe it was the crown of diodes or neural connectors wrapped around her bald head or the blue and red and gray USB cables jacked, somehow, into her pronated hands, which hung limp over the pool’s edge. Or maybe it was all of it. Or maybe it was simply that the not-rightness of Oyemi and her plans had finally been writ large, made so undeniably clear that all that was left for Mr. Niles to do was to mourn what had been his best friend.

He glanced at Oyemi, only to find her looking at him. She was waiting for him to say something. Did you catch the Mets game last night? he wanted to say. Or, Affleck’s got a new movie out, want to go? Anything, really, that might bring reality, life outside, crashing down into this weird space she’d built, as if the presence of an outside world complete with a piss-poor Mets team and so-so Affleck movies would make Oyemi see the ridiculousness, or the wrongness, of it all.

Maybe he could have tried harder. Redirected her, maybe. When she’d first asked him more than a year ago if he’d wanted to have some fun — with her new discovered powers, with her great-uncle’s money — maybe he could have suggested a ski vacation or a road trip to Mexico instead.

“We can do whatever we want,” she’d told him. “We can change the world, can make it better, can change so many lives.”

And he’d lied. He’d said, “I don’t know what I want yet,” when he knew, or believed, that what he’d wanted was her. This want of her had been with him for so long, in fact, since the sixth or seventh grade, that it had seemed eternal or like an extension of him. That it remained with him, even after the accident, even after the physical change, the revelation of her new special traits, only made it seem that much more permanent, so that when it slipped away from him, when he looked at her one day and she said to him, “We should do this,” and he realized the wanting had completely gone, he felt guilty, as if he’d betrayed not just her but some simple and necessary part of himself. So he said, “Yes, yes we should.”

From that point forward, to practically everything she asked or suggested, no matter how insane or possibly evil, he said, “Yes, of course we should.”

But faced with this bald and enigmatic figure floating in a turtle pool, he felt forming on his lips for the first time the word no .

Then Oyemi left. A phone call or something, although later Mr. Niles figured out this had been a ruse, that Oyemi had simply wanted to leave Niles by himself with the Oracle. He waited, unsure of what to do or where to look. He wanted to sit down but there were no seats in the room. He considered sitting on the edge of her pool, tracing lazy eights in the water with his fingertips, but that thought made him shudder.

He tried to think of different things to say to her, pithy, unconcerned remarks in case Oyemi was standing nearby listening in, if only to prove to them both — Oyemi, the Oracle — that he wasn’t bothered by any of this and that he didn’t buy any of it either. But the best he could come up with were the blandest of statements — how’s it going, how’s the view, what’s new in the Oracle business — and so he kept quiet, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and waited.

After a minute she spoke.

He was so unprepared for her to speak, so unprepared for what her voice might sound like, he didn’t hear what she said at all and dumbly said, “Did you say something?”

Her voice had a property to it, distant and echoing, as if she were plugged into an amplifier with the reverb set to high, or as if she were more than one person talking at once. She hadn’t turned to look at him but it seemed as if her voice filled the room and he wondered if Oyemi had set the Oracle up with speakers or something.

“Brooklyn,” she said again. “What you’re looking for will be in Brooklyn,” she said, and before he could say anything, before he could contest her, tell her that there was no way in hell that she would know a good goddamn thing about what he was looking for, she said, “You’ll find what you seek in Brooklyn.” Then the printer began to warm up and then it took a sheet of paper and printed out an address at the top of it, a map underneath. He took the sheet and looked at the address. He looked at the Oracle.

“I know what this is,” he said. Then, louder: “I know what you’re doing.” Then, yelling: “Don’t think that I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to pull here.” Not at the Oracle. He didn’t say a word to the Oracle. Not that it would have mattered. She stared out the window and ignored him. Oyemi still hadn’t come back, but Niles took the slip of paper, folded it a few times, and stuffed it into his jeans pocket and left before Oyemi could return.

It took him nearly a week to go to the address the Oracle had given him. In that week, he didn’t once call Oyemi or drop by the office. He kept the slip of paper in his pants pocket at all times. He worried his fingers over it when he was nervous or when his mind was preoccupied, and not a few times he pulled it out of his pocket forgetting what it was, thinking maybe it was an old receipt, something he should throw away. Seeing the address printed across the top, he would fold it back again and stuff it quickly away. He did this so often that the paper was soft and smudgy from his attention.