The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (9 page)

We both start at the sound of an explosion a few blocks away.
White smoke billows out from behind the short commercial buildings to our
right.

“What do you think that was?” Joshua asks.

I shrug, staring at the smoke. “It had to be big. I felt it
underneath my feet.
Input Force
times
Frequency Response
equals
Vibration
.”

“Where did you learn that?” Joshua asked.

“It’s helpful for measuring sound,” I say. “Comes in handy
when you’re surrounded by forty-ton steam turbines and need to know how to
protect your workers.”

Joshua looks up at the street signs. We’re at D Street. “We need
to head northeast. I think I can get us to her place from here.”

“That’s good, because I don’t recognize any of this. Wait.” I
stop Joshua on the sidewalk. Across the street—on the next block—is
a pharmacy. “I need to go there.”

Joshua smiles. “For what? Toiletries?”

“I need my pills,” I say. Maybe I just
want
them. I push that thought aside. Taking my anxiety meds is
familiar. Maybe it will jog some of my memory and loosen the cobwebs.

Joshua follows me across the street. I stop at the sidewalk,
watching two black armored Humvees roll through the intersection. The windows
are tinted but I can feel the pairs of eyes on us inside. Scrutinizing the two
men wearing sweat pants and t-shirts, their arms crossed to stay warm. Who are
we to you? Are we suspicious? Do you fear us?

The glass doors of the pharmacy are covered with brown paper.
I step onto the rubber mat but the automatic door doesn’t open. I grab the
handle and the slide the door open. Inside, the store smells like photo
solution. Only one row of lights—hanging over the candy and toiletries
aisle—is on. There’s a middle-aged white woman standing behind the cash
register, both of her hands under the counter, and I wonder if she’s got a gun.
There aren’t any cigarettes in the plastic racks behind her.

“Is the pharmacy open?” I ask her. I lay on the polite tone
just in case she really
is
packing
heat.

“Yes it is,” she says with a smile. She has gray hair pulled
back tightly in a ponytail, long silver hoop earrings and pink skin free of
wrinkles. I remember seeing someone just like her huddled in a mass outside
during the internment. She’d been tucked under one of the blankets, crying
periodically. All she’d wanted was a tampon, but the guards had said no.

Damn it. Why can I remember that place so well, but I can’t
remember my life
before
it?

I walk down the candy aisle, taking note of the missing boxes
of candy and ripped bags of chips. It looks like nothing’s been stocked in over
a week, except for the stack of periodicals sitting on a small table next to
the pharmacy window. I glance at the man on the cover: he’s wearing a tight
blue overcoat buttoned up, the collar up and his black driving cap covering the
top of his head. His head is turned away as he crosses an empty street, his
dark brown eyes meeting the camera and his low eyebrows cinched together in a
frown. Below his feet, the caption reads: “Pastor Michael Werth: A Threat to
Peace, or a Savior?”

The pharmacy’s window is closed. I knock on the counter and a
short man with thin glasses peeks his head around the large empty white
cardboard allergy medicine display. It’s the kind of display that’s usually
sitting out next to the little table, along with free samples.

He opens the window a crack and immediately I catch a whiff
of spicy deodorant.

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

“I have a prescription,” I tell him. “But you’ll need to call
my doctor.”

“You don’t need a prescription,” the pharmacist says.

And now he’s looking at me like
I’m
the crazy one.

“What do I need?” I ask. “I don’t have any identification on
me.”

“Just a valid credit card. But we don’t have much left right
now. We haven’t had a shipment in two weeks.”

“Anti-anxiety medication,” I say, reaching into the pockets
of my sweatpants. There’s nothing in them, naturally. I’ve been so busy taking
everything in that I forgot the last time I was home, I was torn away by force.

“We don’t have any anti-anxiety meds,” the pharmacist says.
“I’m sorry.”

I slowly pull my hand out of my pocket. He’s got his hands
under the counter, too, and I can’t shake the feeling that every single worker
in the store—including the college-age girl standing behind the photo
booth—is armed and
expecting
trouble. They’re like actors, going through the motion of populating the store
but they’re not actually interested in selling anything.

“Where are you from?” the pharmacist asks.

I smile, fighting the blackness in my memory. “Ah, the …”

“Are you from the west side?” He sounds suspicious now and it
makes my skin crawl, as if answering wrong could lead to some sort of
punishment.

“The west side,” I mumble. My brain tries to fit the puzzle
piece of my condo into the west side neighborhood. No … it doesn’t fit there.
“No.”

The pharmacist’s body seems to loosen up. “Good. You know
there’s a cholera outbreak there, right? Did you hear about that? There’s no
fresh water on the west side. Hasn’t been for a week.”

“No fresh water …” The words are alien. This country has
fresh water everywhere. It has lakes. It has reservoirs. It’s the one thing our
government has always done well: getting fresh water to
everyone
.

“Do you have a radio?”

“A radio ...” Yes. I definitely have a radio somewhere at
home. A clock radio. That much I can clearly remember. I smile warmly. “Of
course! I just ran out of batteries is all.”

“Better get some fresh ones,” the pharmacist says. “We’re out
of D’s, though. Everyone buys up the D’s.”

“Sorry to bother you,” I say, turning and walking back to the
front door. I walk outside, standing next to Joshua on the corner. He’s staring
at the commercial building across the street. The wide windows on the first
floor are boarded up. The windows on the second and third floor are dark, but I
can see shadows moving around inside. Are they ghosts? Do they remember the
world before all of this? Are they
used
to it?

“This doesn’t even feel like our country anymore,” Joshua
says. The cool breeze nips my skin and I rub my bare arms. The temperature has
dropped. It feels just above freezing. The sidewalk and road are wet from
melted snow.

“I didn’t know countries had a feel,” I say. We hurry across
the street. Behind us, a blue BMW speeds through the intersection, heading
north.

“I think they do,” he says.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I ask him. I’m not
particularly interested in admitting that this country does indeed have a feel.
It’s the smell of fireworks on a warm day, the sight of a BMW parked next to a
Honda on a paved road dividing two silver skyscrapers. It’s the sound of a
subway, of voices walking past me on the street. It’s the taste of water with
just a hint of iron.

“Can’t miss it,” Joshua says. “She lived in one of the
prettiest apartment buildings I’ve ever seen in this neighborhood. Brand new
two-story condos, the inside hallways smell like pine trees … well, they did.”

“Keep your hopes up,” I tell him.

Joshua looks at me and I can tell by his low shoulders that
he’s expecting something bad. “Why?”

“Because I’m not an optimist,” I say. “One of us should be.”

We walk the next two blocks in silence. The curb is lined
mostly with sedans. No parking tickets, no parking signs—just a metal
pole jutting diagonally out of brown overgrown grass next to the sidewalk.
Grass that was weighed down by snow for a winter. I missed the winter.

“Must not have anyone to enforce parking regulations,” Joshua
says.

I walk past the metal pole. Parked at the curb is a blue
Toyota, both of its passenger’s side windows smashed out and replaced with
filmy plastic. Two cars ahead, there’s an old boxy white Chevy in the same
condition.

Joshua stops. I turn back to him and follow his gaze to the
end of the block. The entire block is lined with soft-colored two-story
condos—red, beige, brown, blue—but not a single one looks
undamaged. The red condo’s large double windows are all broken and covered with
plastic, black tape hanging off the white frames. Next to it, the beige
building’s entire second story had been charred black, empty window frames
leering over the empty street like empty black eyes.

We walk closer. From far away comes the sound of an
explosion. It jars me, makes my entire body shake violently for a moment.

“I can’t go closer,” Joshua says. “I’m just … I can’t.”

He points to the brown building, third from the corner.
Whatever had caused the fire next door had come from this building, its entire
second story scalped clean off leaving long, black jagged concrete teeth around
the exterior.

“Stay here,” I say. I walk up to the path leading to the
small black staircase. It smells like wet mold. The oak front door is mostly
undamaged, sitting off the top hinge. The cold metal doorknob is locked but the
frame’s cracked and when I gently tug on it, the door opens in about halfway
before jamming.

I don’t have to walk inside to know there’s nothing here.
What was once two condos divided by a hall has been replaced by a single large
room, concave in the center where something massive has dropped down from the
sky, burning the inside of the building black. A long, charred couch sits
behind half a wall, its right legs dipping down into the split wooden
floorboards.

There’s something else, too: a single, dark purple flower
sitting in the dirt where the family room used to be. It’s beautiful, with
three long purple petals that each have one strange, dangling tail or something
like it. The inside is a fiery yellow and … there’s more, too. I didn’t see
them before but it looks like there’s at least a dozen more just beginning to
sprout from the dirt. They survived the short winter somehow. They grew
after
whatever happened here. The
nervous electricity in my body escapes like a shock. For a moment, just a
moment, staring at the flowers, I feel calm.

I shut the door, hoping the next person to open it feels the
same way I do.

Joshua’s standing on the sidewalk with his back to me,
watching a blue Dodge truck slowly pass on the street. Black exhaust spews out
of the tailpipe, rolling off the wet concrete.

“If my building’s intact,” I say, “maybe we can get an
Internet connection. We can look up her name and see if she’s safe.”

“Yeah,” he says, tucking his hands in his pockets. “I guess if
we’re
still alive, anything’s
possible.”

I look around, taking in the colorful condos. None of their
windows have the city’s trademark green tint—a lot of the newer buildings
have clear windows now, as if the city’s unique history of green glass is something
to be embarrassed of. There’s a mailbox on the corner, and across the street
from the mailbox is a tall green newsstand, shuttered, lined with dark brown
stains near the sidewalk.

I remember that place. I got coffee there, every day on the
way to work. I parked next to the stand, leaned over my passenger’s seat, and
paid the boy who walked up and delivered it through the open window and
sometimes slipped me a sugar cookie, too.

“I can get us home,” I say. “Come on.”

The two of us walk to the end of the block and turn right.
Unity Park is on the left. It’s two blocks long and looks like unclaimed
wilderness. Grass and weeds are growing despite the cold weather. Suckers have
begun poking out of the bases of the trees. Garbage—plastic bags and
bottles of alcohol and colorful food boxes—litter the concrete walk and
stick to the skeletal brown limbs of bushes.

“I remember,” I say. “This place used to be clean. Everyone
used to brag about this park. It was the pride of the neighborhood.”

I walk down two more blocks of long, two-story condos that
were new just a few years ago. A renovated neighborhood built with decent
materials, not the cheap particleboard and refurbished iron used on cheap condo
projects. As we pass a two-story condo burned to the ground—a black gap
between beige teeth—I wonder what the street would look like if the
buildings were houses, houses made of wood with cheap shingles. I wonder what
the houses in the poorer sections of the city look like now.

“I went condo shopping just west of here,” I tell Joshua.
“Didn’t like the way they were built.”

“Yeah,” he says, eyeing the gap between 1233 and 1237. “The
whole ‘ash-black’ look really doesn’t fit in well in this neighborhood.”

“None of the cabinets closed all the way and the carpets
smelled awful,” I tell him. “I told the realtor she was crazy to try and sell
the place at such a high price when everything inside was a chemical factory.”

Joshua says nothing.

That was it. The only thing I could think of saying to try
and get his mind off that woman. I haven’t had a real friend in years, not
since I first dropped out of college. I buried myself in my work, dated only
when I felt sorry for myself, and stayed away from society. Of course I don’t
know what to say to make him feel better.

“Wait.” I hold Joshua back with my hand. At the next
intersection a block ahead, a tall man wearing a black mask steps out from
behind the bank on the corner. Three more men follow, all dressed the same,
wearing jeans and black shirts and black masks. I feel the core of my body
freeze. This is it. They’re coming back for us.

The men run across the street. One of them turns and aims his
handgun in the direction they came from. The shots reach my ears and Joshua
pulls me back against the wrought iron fence surrounding an abandoned cafe. The
men disappear behind the Royal Hotel on the corner. It had once been over ten
stories tall but now it looks more like a cracked porcelain bowl, with long
hairline fissures running along its concrete exterior. The trees surrounding
the building are all blackened and bare.