Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

When he finally went to the address that the Oracle had given him, he found himself at the corner of Avenue M and East Thirteenth, one of the many parts of Brooklyn wholly unfamiliar to him and where there was nothing more than a bodega. Inside, he asked about the address, which he couldn’t find, because the clerk claimed the street number didn’t exist.

Of course, Niles thought. And what had he expected, really?

He was about to leave, then, when the bell over the door chimed and in walked the girl, the one from the photograph. Sarah.

Seeing her there, he panicked for no good reason. His first instinct was to run off before she could see him. Then he remembered she didn’t know him, didn’t know he had been looking for her, didn’t know he’d taken her mother from her and had turned her — or had been party to the turning of her — into the very same creature that had sent him here to find her, even though how the girl’s mother had known he was looking for the girl in the first place he couldn’t have said. Then he took a deep breath and pulled his shit together and stepped into one of the aisles and pretended to look like he was shopping, and he watched the girl. She was two or three years older than in the photo, but it was her, he was certain of it.

When he was feeling good about himself, confident in his convictions, he would look back at this moment in the bodega and convince himself it was dumb luck that the girl happened into the store when he wasn’t even technically looking for her. The only other possibility — that the Oracle had known not just where the girl would be but that she had known where she would be when Niles would be there, had known that Niles would sit on the address for a week before seeking it out, or had not actually known any of this, had simply had a premonition that spat out an address that happened to lead him right to the girl — undermined too many firm beliefs he held about this world, his control over his own life.

At the moment, though, seeing Sarah for the first time, he didn’t consider any of this. He watched and listened and waited and when she left, he followed after.

For a long time, he followed after her.

She was living with her aunt in a neighborhood deeper into Brooklyn. Her father had been absent for her entire life.

She was not just a pretty girl, but was smart and could be funny.

She was a third-grader at a middling elementary school in Sheepshead Bay.

She had few friends, and just as few enemies, and despite being a rather pretty little girl, she moved through her life mostly unnoticed.

She did not like bologna, or, at the very least, didn’t like it enough to keep for herself but instead fed it to stray cats whenever it was given to her for lunch.

He found out all of this and he found out a number of other things and he found that he didn’t have the first clue what to do with everything he found out about her. But mostly he found that he couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t stop worrying over the life he and Oyemi had boxed her into when they ran off with her mother. Thoughts of her kept him up at night — her crying herself to sleep or naming one of her dolls after her mother or lashing out at her aunt or cutting herself with tiny razors or turning to drugs and drinking or seeking out ways to slip through the cracks of a normal, healthy childhood. So it made him laugh once, long after he’d brought her to Regional, after he’d made her into a new kind of woman, when he asked her about her childhood, and she described for him as bland and normal and dully happy a childhood as he could have imagined. But at the time, as he waited for her to run out of school with the rest of the kids, as he followed her on her way back home, as he stood outside her apartment or tracked her to Coney Island or into the city, he imagined for her a wretched and untenable life.

Looking back on it all, it was difficult for him to understand how he managed to spend so much of his day in pursuit of this girl, watching her, making sure that she was, on the surface at least, okay. He would set up a trust for her, he decided, find some way to make it seem like a prize or award she’d won. He would make himself somehow a silent part of her life, dub himself her Magwitch.

In the meantime, he resigned himself to watching over her, as if the simple act of keeping an eye on her were enough to keep her out of trouble, keep her safe, help her to become happy.

After nearly two months, Mr. Niles went back to Oyemi, the office, the Oracle. He didn’t know what to expect. He had long ago found an apartment of his own. He had lost contact with her, and she had left him to himself. No phone calls, no late-night arrivals on his doorstep. Either Oyemi had given up on Mr. Niles or she was so mad at him for ducking out, and for so long, that she’d cut him off entirely.

The front door was unlocked and he steeled himself to face her, but Oyemi wasn’t there. Instead, there was a note, folded over with his name written across the top of it. His name and the date. Maybe she wrote this sort of note every day, he thought. Maybe she expected him to show up unannounced any day of the week, and she left him a newly dated note every day. Unlikely, but maybe. The note was short, simple. “Back tomorrow. Oyemi.” Mr. Niles looked around the front office and then his own smaller office. Not much had changed. Then he went in to see the Oracle.

The room was dark, as the sun had begun to set, and everything in it was bathed in blues and greens and reds from the computers and printers, the glowing water. She stared out the window, even though there was less and less for her to see there, and for the first time he wondered what she was looking at, what she was looking for. He wondered if she even saw what was right in front of her, or if Oyemi’s administrations had taken that away from her, had made any kind of present sight impossible.

He cleared his throat. She didn’t move. He began to speak and then stopped and then started again, feeling self-conscious and like a boy in trouble, or in love.

“I found her,” he said.

“Sarah,” he said, though barely loudly enough to hear himself over the fans and motors running in the room. “Just so you know,” he said.

“Not that you wouldn’t have known anyway, I guess.

“Not that you need me to tell you what happened.”

She hadn’t moved. She didn’t look as if she could hear him, or as if she cared, or as if she had any sense of anything going on in this world. She looked as if she were trapped inside a world maybe not of her own choosing and that no matter what he said or did, she wouldn’t hear or recognize him, and so he turned to leave. And then the printer kicked into gear.

A small slip of paper fell into the tray.

Mr. Niles, unsure what else he should do, picked it up, read it.

How is she?

He should leave, he knew. He should open the door behind him and leave and take the slip of paper with him and never speak to the Oracle again; he knew all of this. Instead, he said, “Fine. I suppose.”

He said, “Not great, of course. I mean. Confused, maybe. Sad? But she’s with family, or. She’s making it.”

He looked at the slip in his hands. He felt he should say more. He had come to her, after all. The air between them begged for him to say something more.

“I’m going to help her,” he said. “I don’t know how, yet. But I’m going to take care of her. Keep an eye on her for you.”

He waited for the printer to start up again. It didn’t. He coughed and cleared his throat. He didn’t know how to finish things up here, so he moved to leave again, deciding that an, Okay, well, thanks for the assist, or whatever else he could come up with to say would feel like the worst thing he could say, worse than saying nothing at all.