Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

Internal bleeding he handled as soon as he could get her into the operating room.

Then there’d been the shock of losing her arm, and then of the arm’s return, the emotional and mental rigmarole that had gone hand in hand with all of that, but she kept that for herself. She could have handed that to the doctor, too, and maybe he would have handed her something back — a tranquilizer, maybe, or a hug. But that, the emotional thing that had happened back there, the weeping and sobbing into her shirt, the liquid feeling of feeling whole again — that she kept for herself.

But despite all of this, despite the pain of torture and hastily performed field surgery to remove her arm and despite the fighting and the reattachment, despite all of this, nothing had happened to her foot.

Her foot — both her feet — should have been fine.

By the time the doctor saw her the next morning, she couldn’t walk unassisted. She hobbled into the examination room using a crutch. Her breath rasped; her skin had paled. She had a fine, pungent sheen of sweat clamming to her face and neck and chest.

Not a few times during the night had she considered cutting off the foot herself, cutting it off just below the calf.

After an examination and X-ray, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong with her foot, and she considered punching him through his face.

Lately, she had been considering punching people through their faces a not-inconsiderable number of times.

So much did she want to punch him through his face, her mechanical arm had come up to punch-through-the-face level. Her fist was a closed and ready-to-punch fist.

She forced it down. She exerted a great deal of force of will to make it go down. When it did, it grabbed hold of the edge of the table in a serious and life-threatening way.

“Check,” she said. “Again.” She gritted her teeth. Her fist gripped the table hard enough to crumple the edge of it. She didn’t care. All she could do was grit her teeth or crush the table with her fist or crush the doctor’s skull.

He checked again. He didn’t know what was wrong. He gave her something to take for the pain. She looked at the bottle he handed her and shoved it back at him and in the same fluid motion grabbed him by his collar, her fist cocked and ready to punch again.

He gave her something much stronger.

By the afternoon, her foot was green. The entire foot from the tip of her toe to the top of her ankle.

Not a deep green, not a green you would call forest or sea turtle or even just green, not yet, but it wasn’t yellow either.

It was beyond yellow and was moving confidently into the green family of colors.

The sight of the green foot made the doctor blanch, made him stutter. He rubbed his hand through his thin hair and pulled it down tightly over his face. She grabbed him again and pulled him close and he smelled like sick, or sick and sweat, and she was desperate now.

People had to fucking carry her there, and she was now desperate.

“Cut it off,” she said. “Cut the fucking thing off and do it now.”

Not only is your mother still alive, but you have seen her and she has seen you innumerable times. It is possible that you and your mother have seen each other on a near-weekly basis now for the past seven years that you have been working for the Regional Office, working for Mr. Niles and Oyemi, working for the very people who took your mother from you.

Manuel Guzman and Nadja Prcic, while not the best of people, while guilty of a number of crimes and sins, and not exactly undeserving of being hunted down and smote by your lovely mechanical arm, had nothing to do with the abduction of your mother but were simply offered up by Mr. Niles — along with the other men and women you stalked and killed, men and women the Regional Office would have gotten around to dealing with eventually if not for you, so do not blame yourself for their deaths, which were hastened, surely, but not by much. Mr. Niles has, for this long time, been working to control you and your movements, all in an attempt to hide from you the very information you came looking for.

Your mother is much changed from how you would remember her. Have you figured it out? Have you guessed yet where your mother is, who your mother has become?

It is not our intention to be coy or to throw puzzles at you like obstacles in a training course, but it is simply our hope that if you can come to the conclusion on your own, if you can take the small pieces of this we have given you and pull together a full picture of what wrongs have been committed — against you, against your mother — then you will more likely believe this truth than the one you were fed by Mr. Niles.

It is not an easy choice we are asking you to make, we understand how hard this choice must be, the choice between a story you have told yourself again and again, that you have done right by your mother, by her spirit, have taken righteous vengeance against the men and women who stole her from you, and the story that you have done very little at all, have done less than very little in fact, have worked to advance the goals and livelihoods of the two people who deserved your vengeance most.

We navigate through this life with the good-faith hope that we are doing our best, that we are aimed in the right directions, that we are helping the helpless. Maybe we slip, maybe we mess up, maybe from time to time we do things that are less the right thing. Or we cut corners, or we make choices that serve our interests over the interests of those who depend on us, or we hide the consequences of the decisions we have made with the hope that those consequences will never be seen despite how often we make those same decisions. We go back to the ones we love when clearly they do not love us, or do not know how to love us, or show us their love in a way easily mistaken for hate. We are weak in the face of the hard work it sometimes takes to be strong. We convince ourselves (incorrectly) that silence is not a form of consent. We let good people die and sometimes we kill them ourselves and we hide and we hide and we hide and soon hiding becomes the thing we are best at doing, but it is time, Sarah.

It is time to stop hiding, Sarah O’Hara.

It is time to stop peeking out from behind the coattails of Mr. Niles, the flaring nostrils of Oyemi, the long reach of the Regional Office, to stop peeking out from behind your mechanical arm, to stop hiding behind your aunt and the tragedy of your childhood, time to stop hiding from what is real and painful and frustrating and all of the other emotions we find it so easy to hide from, and time to admit that you know, have known, have always known since the first time you saw her, bald and trembling and half-submerged in the milky-blue water of Oyemi’s Oracle Pool with her “sisters,” time to see your mother, time to stop pretending it’s not her.

The relief she felt when she came out of the surgery, when she came out of the haze-inducing anesthetics, was an ecstasy kind of relief.

The relief in having this part of her removed was almost as strong, in fact, as the relief she felt when she’d had that other part of her reattached.

It lasted for a day, for almost two days, and she wondered how strong the anesthetic had been. She didn’t take any of the painkillers the doctor had given her. She didn’t need them, she felt so fucking good all of the time now. She should have cut the other foot off, too, for good measure.

The lab was working on a new foot for her. The doctor had asked her to wait two weeks, three weeks, and then the foot would’ve been finished and they could’ve removed the bad foot and replaced it all in one operation, but she couldn’t wait. She wouldn’t wait. She would have cut it off herself if he hadn’t done it for her.