The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (12 page)

That feeling of everything being a bad dream begins to feel
closer again. “I paid a fortune for a few gallons of gas and I can’t even be
sure what was in it. I could have stalled in the middle of a firefight, for
god’s sake.”

She shakes her head. “I know, dear. There are a lot of angry
people running around, and no one seems to know how to fix things.”

“We should find Bert,” I offer. “Bring him back. This place
needs some kind of security if there are threats on the power plants.”

Her lips pout. She draws out a long breath. “Bert was the
first one to be fired.”

“What about my team?” I ask. “The boys?”

“They were all fired.” Her eyes begin tearing up. She looks
away, wiping carefully with one finger. “They fired so many people when they
took over. They killed the union. They cut the labor budget and made me hire
only people on worker’s visas. Half of them don’t even speak our language.
Doesn’t matter—two of the furnaces don’t even work anyway. It’s all an
illusion.”

I stuff my cold hands into my pockets. “I can help. I met a
guy who can help, too. We can fix this place up again. I don’t even care how
bad the wages are. We can fix this place up.”

She presses her hand against her mouth to stifle more tears.
“Honey, we don’t
have
supervisors. ”

“But how?” I ask. “How can this place even function at all? I
put in forty-five hours a week, five under the table without the union knowing,
just to keep everything in place for my team.”

“Output is barely at thirty percent,” she says. “And that’s
on good days. They’re just sucking the money out any way they can. Those
fucking
bastards
who own the company
probably live in a gated community a hundred miles away and don’t even know
what’s going on.”

I take a deep breath. “I need to go. If you see Bert, tell
him I’m okay.”

Tasha tears up again and falls onto my shoulder. “Honey, Bert
is dead!”

“Bert …” I feel my chest tighten. “Not Bert.” In my memory,
he’s always smiling. His white beard hid the corners of his lips, but the way
the loose skin above his cheekbones wrinkled was always a dead giveaway
whenever he was really amused by something. When I imagine him laughing, it’s
because of a particularly raunchy joke I’d told him the day after New Year’s
when both of us had to pull the early shift and needed a good laugh. A joke
about a tapeworm, an apple, a cookie and a mallet that ends with the tapeworm
asking, “Where’s my cookie?” I can remember this clearly.

“He disappeared a month ago,” she sobs into my jacket. “Some
of us had kept tabs on him after he was let go. Christians took over his
neighborhood and kicked out the Muslims. Bert held out. And then the Coalition
found his body on the side of the expressway. Sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

“Ah, Bert,” I mutter. I didn’t even know he was a Muslim. I
can’t cry. I
can’t
. I grab Tasha by
the shoulders and gently push her back to look into her eyes. “I have to go.”

“You don’t.” She holds out a limp hand.

“I have to. I need to find a job. I need to find a way to
survive.” I need to work. I need to get back into my groove, that nice little
slice of life I’d carved for myself where I went about my business and left
everyone else alone and they did the same to me.

But it’s impossible now. Maybe it always was.

“Okay,” she says. She wipes gingerly at the tears again.
“Please be careful. Everything’s different now.”

“I’ll be careful,” I say, giving her a strong hug. I turn to
walk back to my car.

“And stay away from the white trucks!” she calls out.

I pull out of the parking lot without glancing over my
shoulder at Bert’s empty guard box, trying not to think of the sweat
accumulating on my hands. Now that the sun has begun to set, driving doesn’t
feel safe anymore. Every intersection is a crapshoot. There are a lot of Stop
signs affixed to the poles of disassembled streetlights. Twice I see cars blow
the stop signs outright, and in one of the windows I can clearly see a man
wearing a dark mask of some kind. Could he have been the one who burst through
my door months ago? Are there more like me, still out there, still waking up in
the middle of the night only to be abducted and taken away for god knows how
long?

“No,” I say, gripping the steering wheel. No point in
thinking about those people. But I can’t
stop
thinking about those people because I feel a connection to all of them. I want
to drive this car around and pick up those poor souls I met on the bus who are
probably still wandering around the city like zombies.

It could have been me.

I park in front of the bank a mile from my house. I don’t
want to get out of the car. The entire block is silent. Deserted. A black trash
bag gently glides across the concrete sidewalk and it evokes a flood of
memories from the old cowboy movies I used to watch with my dad. He loved
cowboy movies and stories of ancient Rome and World War II films about
desperate little towns in Axis countries saved by Allied soldiers who came in
and protected them.

I’m about to open the door when I catch something in my
rear-view mirror. A white truck, an old Ford Bronco that looks like it’s been
brushed over with house paint. There’s a gunner sitting on the top, pointing
the heavy machine gun down toward the street. I slink in my seat, watching the
vehicle approach quickly, wanting to hide but not wanting to make it look like
I’m
trying
to hide. The vehicle
passes me and quickly turns left at the next intersection. Its rear tires skid
and the back of the pickup hits the yellow streetlight pole, popping the
affixed Stop sign out of place and sending it rolling on the ground like a
wobbly Frisbee.

I get out of the car and hurry over to the ATM machine, whose
screen is on and reads “Welcome” in bright green letters. So at least some
people are getting power on a regular basis. That means the plant is diverting
as much power as it has to the commercial districts, maybe the government
buildings as well. Then whatever’s left trickles into the residential areas.

The buttons are covered by a thick glass case that won’t open
until I put my card in the reader. On the glass, someone has written in
scrawled black pen: “I’m Sorry.” I slide my card in and the glass slides up.

1-0-2-5.

Balance Inquiry.

I glance through the large double-paned glass window next to
the ATM machine. The bank’s main room is dark, no one at the teller booths.
Near the windows, I can see nail-sized holes in the beige carpeting with thick
dust outlines of where cubicles used to be. The cubicles have been moved toward
the other side of the building, near the teller booths and away from the
windows overlooking the street. The inside of two of the cubicles can be seen
from the window, the long metal desks providing little cover for whoever is
brave enough to sit at them during the day. Both desks have a computer on them,
a small metal cup for pencils.

No Godzilla bobblehead. I remember that from the day I signed
my mortgage to buy the condo, the plastic head bobbing up and down while Samir
the Lender—a nickname he chose—typed violently on the old keyboard
on the desk. The keyboard didn’t have any plastic covering and so each key had
accumulated a brown layer of sweat and dirt. I spent most of the lending
process listening to Samir’s iPod, his own music that he composed at home on
his laptop. I humored him and listened to a couple songs, not really sure if he
was expecting a thorough critique or not so I just took off the headphones
after a while and gave him an awkward nod. I was so anxious to get that
mortgage, to be out on my own with my own private Fortress of Solitude that no
one could penetrate.

I don’t remember music very well. It’s a void now.

The machine spits out a piece of paper. I look at the
numbers: barely enough to buy a week’s worth of food. I withdraw all of it and
hurry back to my car, starting it and pulling out only after checking my
rear-view mirror twice. I drive slowly down the street, marveling at the vast
array of wires that have been strung up between the small houses to my right.
They’re electrical wires, siphoning electricity from each other and anything
else nearby. They look like black spider webs, a veritable death trap for any
birds passing between the houses. All of it is illegal, no doubt. Or
was
illegal before the occupation.

Back at the condo, both Joshua and the old man sitting in
front of the TV. The power’s still out and now the room’s much colder.

“Nice to see you two getting along,” I say, hanging up my
coat.

“There’s nothing to do,” Joshua says.

I stare at the old man until he turns his head. The dry skin
of his neck wrinkles around his shoulder. I hold out my bank receipt. “This
says I still have money left. Which means the bank was and is
still
taking out mortgage payments on
the condo. Which means this is my condo. Which means you’re a trespasser.”

“The people who gave this to me …”

“I don’t care about them,” I snap. “Do you hear me? I don’t
care about the Muslims or the Christians or any of their land claims. This is
my home.”

“I was desperate.” His fingers move and I see that Joshua has
used some string from the kitchen drawer—
my
kitchen drawer—to tightly tie his wrists together. His
skin looks red and enflamed by the tight material. String I normally used to
cut and tie together to practice Jack in the Pulpit, an obsession that started one
night during an electrical storm. It’s a memory I don’t want, a reminder of
just how little I did when I wasn’t working. Where are the memories of my
actual
life?

Didn’t I have anyone who cared about me? Who I cared about?

“Why were you desperate?” I ask. “Just … level with me. I
deserve that much.”

The old man takes a deep breath. “I met a group of men at one
of the shelters that was set up during bombing. They told me they would pay me
if I knew of anyone who might pose a threat to the Coalition. I said yes and I
picked your condo. I picked a number.”

“That’s it?” I ask, stunned. I feel my fist clench. “That’s
how you tore apart my goddamned life? You closed your eyes and pointed?”

“Fucking pathetic,” Joshua says.

The old man looks down and shakes his head. I can’t help but
get the feeling he’s just going through the motions of feeling sorry, doing
what I’d expect him to do. “I lost my home … it was a nice house. I had no
money. I needed money. The only merchants selling food were selling it at such
a high price that no one could afford more than scraps.”

“That’s no excuse,” I say. I press my finger into the soft
couch cushion right next to his face. “This is
mine
. This is
my
Fortress
of Solitude.”

“I think they were aiming for the military base,” the old man
says. “The one about a half kilometer away from my home. The bomb exploded in
mid-air and all of the little pieces hit the houses on my street. Some of their
soldiers came by and they gave us medical supplies. They explained why they
were doing this, and they apologized.”

“I’m sure they were very cordial,” Joshua adds.

The old man ignores him. “The Mullah of my mosque told me
this neighborhood was being purged of Christians. He said this land was once
Muslim land. He said it has become Muslim land once again and this was God’s
will.”

“Go home,” I tell the old man.

He stares at me for a moment. The skin under his eyes is
bunched up, balancing atop his cheekbones. “This is my home.”

“Then go somewhere else,” I say. “Go anywhere but here.”

“There’s nowhere to go,” he says. “I don’t have anyone.”

I rub my eyes. The lids feel crusty and dry and they itch. I
feel like I want to sleep, but there’s too much anxiety coursing through my
body. This place used to bring me peace. Now it feels like a hotel room.

“You are the one who must go,” the old man says. “If the
Mullah’s men see you here, they may kill you. They have killed Christians who
refused to leave.”

I think about the young man down the hall I played cards
with. He was a Christian. An immigrant like me.

“Throw him out,” Joshua says. He looks at the old man,
wearing the same look he had when he shouted at those soldiers. I know exactly
what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too: this old man doesn’t deserve
mercy. He deserves to be hurt. These feelings scare me.

“We need to find jobs,” I say. “We need to find a way to
survive.”

“Where are you going to find a job?” Joshua asks. “Were you
walking down the same street as me this morning? This entire city is in a state
of atrophy!”

“I’m not going to turn into a criminal!” I shout.

“You’re not the criminal!” Joshua yells, pointing his thin
finger at the window. “Those companies like Anodyne are the criminals! They’re
the ones who started planning how to make a profit even before the first bomb
hit! They’re the ones who are cooperating with the Coalition or the Provisional
Authority or whatever the fuck they call themselves!”

I close my eyes. It’s too much. I can’t deal with this. He’s
right. There’s no point in looking for a job. There’s a good chance simply
staying here in my own home will get me killed.

Because it’s not my home anymore.

“The blackouts around here have gotten less and less
frequent,” the old man says. “They’re making
progress
.”

“Yes, I suppose we have to take your word for it,” Joshua
says, “since the two of us were trapped in a fucking cell strung up like
slabs of fucking meat
!” He stands up and
sets one foot on my coffee table. He rolls up his left pant leg, and even in
the dying sunlight I can see the dent in his shin. “You see this? You see it?
This is from when they took me into a little room with a metal table and a rag
and a bucket of water and the moment I realized what they were going to do, I
tried to run. One of them hit me with his baton and did this. I can
still
feel it.”