Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

“Maybe what?” Sarah asked.

Maybe they hadn’t ever taken it off to begin with. Maybe they’d tried to take it off — hence the queer way it didn’t quite line up with how it had once lined up — but failing that, they’d done their best (and had succeeded) to convince her that it had been removed.

“What better way,” he said, “to neutralize the largest threat than to convince the threat that it had been neutralized?”

He floated this idea out there as if it were a bubble, hesitant and fragile. She popped it, almost violently, emphatically, jabbing her mechanical finger into his very soft and pliable chest, because she had wondered much the same thing herself, had tried to think back to the moment when she’d seen it on the gurney in front of her.

And it was a thought she would rather not think.

But what if? What if her mechanical arm had been there the entire time?

“No matter,” he said, and there was something frightened in his voice and she tried to think calm thoughts, tried to remember Mr. Niles waving his arm at the destruction she had wreaked right after he had given her this mechanical arm. She smiled uncomfortably.

My, how they must have laughed at her. They must have laughed and laughed and laughed. She never even suspected, they would have said. She never even considered she might still have both her arms, they would have said. And then they would have howled. The thought of their laughing at her made her wish they were all still alive so she could kill them all again, and to settle her thoughts down, she thought of Wendy, of dead, frightened-eyed Wendy, and this made her feel better.

“The arm is in place and is still functional,” he said. “That’s great news.”

He scheduled her for another appointment, asked her to clear her schedule so they could cover it again. They didn’t have enough of her own skin to use but he could create a synthetic that would match almost perfectly. But at first she said no. She didn’t know why she said no but it felt necessary to say no to covering up the mechanical arm.

Then she said, “I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to cover it.”

And a week later, it was covered, and for days, she couldn’t pass by a mirror without staring at the mechanical arm and admiring once more how much it looked like just any normal arm would look.

For a couple of days, after she returned to the office with her new skin, people stopped and admired her arm. Just like new, they said. Or, It looks perfect. Or, Soon, we won’t remember which one was the mechanical one at all. But this she knew was a lie. How could it not be a lie? They remembered, all of them remembered, and would always remember, she thought, and that was a shame.

She was in Mr. Niles’s office and his mother was cutting his hair and he was talking about the business of Regional and she couldn’t stop hopping from foot to foot. Mr. Niles was about to raise his eyebrows at her and say something about this, she knew, but then he was sliding into his car in the parking garage, which was only strange in that he usually had someone drive him, but he was sliding into his car and she was there holding the door for him and she was apologizing to him for a report he’d asked for that she hadn’t delivered yet and he didn’t care, didn’t care at all, and she was still shifting from her left foot to her right, left to right, right to left, and he was smiling and shaking his head and saying, Don’t worry about it, it’s fine, and she was still apologizing even as he closed the door and started the engine and she waited and watched as he pulled out of the garage and then, ending there, the dream would have been really no different than any number of other anxiety dreams she’d had about Regional, but it didn’t stop there because she turned and started to walk back to her office but tripped, stubbed her toe or her whole foot on the curb and tripped, and there was suddenly a sharp and burning pain in her foot, but in her real foot, too, and she woke up.

She stumbled to the bathroom. In the light, she couldn’t see anything wrong with her foot, but it hurt like holy hell, and she gritted her teeth and squeezed her mechanical fist. Then she squeezed her normal fist. She took some ibuprofen and then more and then the bottle was empty and she was in her bed and the pain was such that breathing made it worse.

Blinking. Blinking also made it worse.

The pumping of blood through her veins. That, too.

Everything. Everything made it worse.

In the fall of 1993, the letter continued, your mother was abducted.

This is not something you do not already know. This is not something we need to remind you of, yet while you know a story about the abduction and disappearance and ultimate fate of your mother, you do not yet know the full and accurate story.

Let us begin, then, with the fall of 1993. Your mother had dropped you off at school that morning and had, on her way back to your apartment, stopped at a Duane Reade. Let us say she needed to buy a new hair dryer. Really, does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, no it does not, but let us say that we know for sure that what she bought was a hair dryer, a small pack of Band-Aids, and Tylenol PM.

It is important to us that you understand just what and how much we know about your mother and about the man and woman who abducted her, and about you.

Your mother was taken just as she left the store.

You have been led to believe that the man and woman who took your mother were the anarchists Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, that she was abducted by these two and returned to a secret location in Queens, where she was brainwashed, such that she forgot who she was, who you were, or that you were even a you to be forgotten about. After which, she was moved in secret to Houston, then to Managua, where she was trained to be a freedom fighter, and then, from there, was snuck across the Atlantic into West Africa, where she was given further instruction and deeper brainwashing. Then, during an operation — the attempted (and foiled) detonation of a bomb in the London Underground — your mother was killed.

You have seen the photographs.

You have read the dossiers.

You know the reports.

As far as you are aware, you have killed everyone involved in the operation but for one man who killed himself.

It is our unfortunate responsibility to inform you that in all of this, however, you are wrong, though only because you have been misled.

As of this moment — as we are penning this letter to you — your mother is still alive.

By the end of the assault it had been a minor miracle that she was standing still, much less fighting. Much less crushing skulls with her bare hand.

Even she had known that the arm had managed all the heavy lifting, had pulled her along, had made all of the decisions, moving her left or right, punching or not punching, crushing or not crushing, according to its own mysterious rubric.

And she hadn’t cared. Let the arm do what it wanted to do.

But when it was all over, she could barely stand, much less walk. Her arm held her up, propped her against one of the few remaining cubicle walls.

The doctor declared her unfit for anything but the emergency room and then stitched her up as best he could. Her busted lip. The bulging, purpling bruises on her cheek and over her eye. The cauliflower of her ear, which had been boxed again and again. He applied cream, a salve of some sort, to the places where they had placed the electrodes and the hot pokers.

Her ribs, three of them, had been broken. He couldn’t do much for those.