The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (30 page)

He would have sighed. The smoke and heat would finally have been too much. He would have thrown his car in reverse, turned the thing around. He’d have checked his rearview mirror, the sky lit by the false sunset of Oyemi’s compound burning out of existence, and he’d have wondered at how quiet it was, at how the road in front of him was nothing but peace and quiet and calm. Even as he
drove, he would have thought about Emma, looked for her out in the woods on either side of the road. He would have wished she were there beside him, and at once, the idea that she had slipped into the trunk of his car while he was distracted by the flames would have become for a second so real that he pulled over, stepped out of the car, and opened the trunk, but, of course, she wouldn’t have been there.

Maybe, then, he looked around, took a deep breath. And maybe, then, he got back into his car and kept driving, drove back into the city, back to the airport, where he should have gone to begin with.

But whatever the case: He missed his flight, and he scheduled another.

At the airport, he clutched his boarding pass and placed his shoes and his coat on the conveyor belt and walked through the detector. Something about this simple act released a tension that had been building inside of him since he left a dead Emma in a burning house, since he left the Regional Office.

It had been so long since he’d flown out of any airport but the Regional Office airport, so long since he’d had to stand in line, wait for a ticket, pass through security, wait for the boarding call, that he felt suddenly like a boy again, as if he were on some grand and mysterious adventure.

Feeling adventurous and boyish, he walked into a place called the Fuel Bar and found a seat and ordered a
cocktail—a peach concoction called the High Dive—and then he leaned back in his chair and smiled.

He looked at the time.

He tried to think of what he’d be doing right now if he were at the office. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what he’d put on his calendar for the day. Meetings, meetings, a lunch meeting, and then meetings. In between all of that? Filing something, probably, or training a Recruit. But then he thought about what had actually happened at the Regional Office after he left, what might be happening still. Now that he had left in such a spectacular fashion.

How mad would Sarah be?

If she were still alive, that was.

He had let them know that he would prefer it if she didn’t die, but he also let them know that ultimately it was up to them how they handled Sarah if she didn’t accept their offer, their way out, their way forward.

If they hadn’t killed her, then, how mad would she be?

He took a sip of his High Dive. It came in a heavy and fluted glass. It was too sweet and he should have ordered a beer or ordered nothing at all, but he didn’t care.

Today was a good day.

Today was the first good day, the first good day he’d had.

Today was the first of many good, good days.

The last good day had been some time ago.

Had been the time Emma stayed with him for two weeks in his apartment. Somehow she had fooled the Oracles, fooled Sarah and Mr. Niles, had made it seem like she was on assignment in Rio when in fact she was hiding out in his apartment, reading his books, listening to his records, eating his food, and sleeping in his bed. Sleeping in his bed with him.

Since that day. Well. He could argue there had been other productive days, days where he felt he’d done some good if the days themselves hadn’t been good.

The day he’d tapped into the Oracle’s network—a surprisingly simple task that, in its simplicity, made Henry wonder just how complacent Oyemi and her people had become—and then, shortly after, when he’d tracked down Wendy, who’d been living in Minneapolis.

He had felt good about all of that, or not good.

Good wasn’t what he’d felt.

Proud, perhaps.

Or not even proud.

As if he had accomplished a thing he needed to even if it was a thing he didn’t relish or really want to do. That was how he’d felt. How he’d been feeling the past few days. The past few years.

In ten years, of course, they’ll find him—Henry. They’ll come for him while he is getting a shave.

He will be leaned back in the chair with a hot, steamed towel wrapped around his face, will be breathing in the
slight, medicinal, clean, soapy smell of the towel, waiting to be lathered up, will be thinking of little more than what he should do for dinner after the shave when they, or rather she, will come up to him and lift the towel off his face, drop it in his lap, and say, “Hello, stranger.”

At first, he won’t recognize her.

His first thought, seeing her, will be, Why did they send a robot?

His second thought will be, When did they start using robots?

But it won’t be a robot. It’ll be Sarah, who will, by that time, only look like a robot.

By this time, he won’t have seen Emma in ten years. She will have missed their rendezvous point. He will have gone searching for her in the rubble of Oyemi’s compound. He won’t have found her or any sign of her, or Oyemi or any sign of Oyemi. He will have placed cryptic ads in the Missed Connections sections of hundreds of weeklies across the country, will have looked for her abroad and at home. He will have come home every day expecting to find her in his apartment the same way he’d found her all those years ago, wearing one of his shirts, reading one of his books, listening to one of his records, but he never will have. In all this time, he will never have once suspected that she is dead. And then he will see Sarah, and then he’ll know, or think he knows.

As soon as he figures out that Sarah herself has come for him, that she has probably already found all the
others (perhaps even Emma), he will hide his feelings, or do his best to hide them, and will focus on the fact that she is part—or mostly—robot. He will glance at her arm, her left arm, which has always been the arm he’s suspected is the mechanical arm, and he will think to himself, Aha! I was right! Because there it will be, her mechanical arm, naked and metallic and exposed and full of a strange, almost organic beauty, but then he will look at her other arm, her right arm, and it will be the same, almost exactly the same, and so he won’t be able to say which one was the original mechanical arm. For some reason, the fact that he will continue to live his life holding on to this mystery—even if not for very much longer—will sadden him even more than the fact that he has been found out, has been caught by surprise, and that his uncertain future now seems certain to come to a short and violent end.

Although to be completely honest about it, what will upset him most of all will be that he won’t be getting the massage that comes complimentary with every shave, and for a second, he will consider asking her, Can you wait, can you give me just ten minutes, can you wait ten minutes, please?

But that wouldn’t be for another ten years.

A lot could happen in ten years. Almost an entire life could be lived in ten years.

And as far as Henry knew, that life started right then, at JFK International.

Or better yet, that life would start when he and Emma met, which they would do. Not right away—situations had to cool down, everything had to pass them by—but soon.

He forgot how sweet his drink was and took another sip and then grimaced and then leaned back in his chair to wait and to think or to not think at all about anything, about any of it. He didn’t think about the future, and did his best to stop thinking, finally, about the past, and he worked hard to concentrate on just this moment, this moment right now, here in this airport, the freedom he felt or should have felt sitting there with the knowledge that things had gone not the way he’d wanted them to go—he’d never wanted things to go this way—but how he’d planned them to go.

He took a deep breath and looked around him at the crowds moving here and there to catch flights or grab luggage or a taxi and all he saw before him was a bright, uncluttered, simple future. A future that was spread out before him, that was waiting for him in Durham or Cape Town or Helsinki, but was waiting for him all the same.

Thanks to PJ Mark for reading this a million times and for not just helping me find the right home for the book but also helping me carve the right book out of the original jumble of words I sent you. Thanks to Megan Lynch and Laura Perciasepe for taking this book on and picking up where PJ and I left off, and to all the amazing folk at Riverhead Books for their continued support and enthusiasm and for telling everyone how much they like both my books and my pies.

Every writer needs a first reader. For years now, Bryan Dunn has been mine, and I can’t thank him enough for his thoughtful readings of my work. To his name, I now add both Emily Raw and Kerry DeMunn, and thank them both as well.

Many thanks also go out to E. Tyler Lindvall, Dinaw Mengestu, Owen Egerton, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Hillery Hugg for reading or listening to portions of this and offering me unbridled encouragement to keep moving forward.

Thanks to the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of Kentucky, my colleagues at both of these grand institutions, for their support, for great students to work with, and the time and space in which to write, test, and revise.

But most of all, thanks to my mom and dad and my sister, who put up with me and continue to put up with me for going on very many years, and for my kids, Anabel and Dashiell, who are only now realizing just how much work it takes to put up with me, and eternally—literally, for an eternity—thanks to you, Sharon. You make putting up with me seem clever and
fun.

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