The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker (5 page)

And then, things got better. While I’d been in college and
later during my first few years as a supervisor at the plant, I would come home
early in the morning and wander from chore to chore. I’d do dishes, go
shopping, drive down to
the hardware store, shop
on the Internet for PC parts to stay busy. Once I got used to the meds, I could
sit on my couch and watch TV without feeling like I was missing something
somewhere. I could sleep easier, even though the tossing and turning never
fully went away.

Too many bad memories. Too much thinking about my parents,
hoping maybe they would see that I just wasn’t cut out for the type of work they
did. Hoping they would accept that I didn’t want to finish college.

I pick up the thread and place it next to the bucket in the
corner, grabbing the blanket and folding it up like a pillow. I lie down and
put my arm over my closed eyes. All I can think about is what’s going to come
next: how long before they try cutting me? Or worse? What
can’t
they do at this point? I wonder what they would do if I
pretended to lose it, just really start going crazy the moment they tried to
drag me away. Maybe they’d talk about it on their lunch break, about the skinny
detainee in the room without a mattress who started screaming like a monkey in
the hallway.

When I open my eyes again, there’s a glass of orange juice
and a piece of white bread next to the door. I turn to the bucket—it’s
empty and clean, and the thread is gone. I’m not sure if I’d been sleeping or
just stuck in a daze.

“You there?” I call out to the vent.

No answer.

“Hello?” I call out louder.

I’m alone again. The realization hits hard and I curl up on
the floor to try to force some heat toward the center of my body. I’m not
hungry or thirsty anymore—maybe I’m too used to it.

There’s nothing to do in the cell.

Staring. Staring at the
concrete wall, counting my breaths to measure time going by.

Nine hundred and thirty.

Nine hundred and thirty-one.

Nine hundred and thirty-two.

Nine hundred and thirty-three.

Nine hundred and thirty-four.

Nine hundred and thirty-five.

Nine hundred and thirty-six.

Nine hundred and thirty-seven.

The anticipation of another barging entry, of another black
hood and more pain, all of it prevents my muscles from loosening. The room
smells like body odor because my entire body refuses to stop sweating.

“Hello?” I call out again. You had to argue with the guy,
didn’t you? All he did was say he loved his country—is that really such a
bad thing? Why can’t I see that there are some people who truly love their
“country”? Just because I’m alone with my thoughts all the time doesn’t make me
more
right
about anything. And where
has it gotten me? If not for my job, no one would even realize I’m missing.

But maybe that’s better. Maybe knowing someone is missing me
somewhere would be even worse.

The door bursts open. Three soldiers rush in and pin me down
quickly, cuffing my hands and putting the hood back on. I thrash wildly, this
time actually managing to push away one of them with the sole of my foot. The
soldier returns and wraps one hand around my throat to hold me back and they
work together to pull me out of the room. He won’t let go of my throat and I
can feel my delicate muscles bruising but still I fight back and kick as the
floor, screaming as loud as I can and hoping against hope that someone who
actually cares will hear.

They bring me back into the same interrogation room. They
take off the hood but keep my hands cuffed. A middle-aged man with a small,
round face is sitting at the desk. He has a dark blue suit on and has tight
features and short-cut hair and dark brown eyes. Medals hang from the breast
pocket of his coat, the kind found on military uniforms of generals. He has
pale, thick fingers with uncut nails.

“You admitted to being a terrorist,” he says. He doesn’t
sound fluent in my language.

I turn my head to the right, far enough that it hurts my
neck, so I can’t even see him in my peripheral vision. I hope he’s read up
enough on our culture in the Emerald City to know how insulting it is to turn
one’s head.

“Tell me what you planned to do.”

“Nothing,” I say. “I would never bomb the power plant. I love
my job.”

I love my job so much that, when the bombs started dropping
and everyone went outside to watch, I was the first back in. It had been
surreal, seeing the Capital cityscape lit up with flashes of red and orange
that looked like popping bubbles. The only third shifter who had cried was
Tasha, who worked in the control room. She’d been standing behind the men, and
when I was sure they wouldn’t turn around—they were too in awe of seeing
their city in flames—I moved beside her and held her close for a few
seconds. I didn’t want to touch her for much longer because we’d dated a few
times and our schedules had never lined up right, and I was afraid I might send
the wrong message. Imagine that: sending the wrong message during Armageddon.
How was such a thing even possible? I should have stayed out there. I should
have held her closer.

But the power plant needed bodies to operate it, and staring
at the burning city wouldn’t help anything.

The interrogator sits stiffly in his chair. His eyelids are
drooping; probably the only thing keeping them open at all is the pack of
cigarettes sitting next to the stack of crisp white papers. The desk is very
neat, very organized: next to the stack of papers are two black pens and next
to the pens is a blue ashtray.

“Tell me about the night of the invasion,” he says.

“I was at work,” I say. “And then the spaceships came down
and the aliens starting firing laser beams at the Parliament building.”

The general very slowly reaches for the lit cigarette sitting
in the ashtray. He takes a long drag of it, staring at the cherry for a few
moments. “Please excuse my poor language skills. I did not get the same school
as my friends. I worked in a farm. Cigarettes,” he says, holding it out. “I
smoked many cigarettes. Then I joined army. Then I quit cigarettes.”

“I was at work,” I say. “I was fucking working. That’s all. I
swear to God.”

Blake came up to me while I was running a spot check on the
furnaces and told me to come outside, quick, there’s fires all over the city.
So I ran outside with him and just as I did, two jets screamed overhead, so low
that the roar of their engines made my ears ring. Everyone cheered because they
thought the jets were ours.

“Tell me about the train.”

“It crashed.” He must have looked it up. He couldn’t possibly
think I was responsible for
that
. My
ears feel hot. I feel guilty and have to fight the urge to apologize.

“How did it crash.”

“It was coming in later in the evening,” I say. “After the
bombs started dropping. I went outside to meet it when it was scheduled to
arrive.”

Everyone had left by midnight. They were afraid, they wanted
to go home to find their families, they wanted to just
go home
.

Fuck this job, said Mike. Thirteen years on the job. A fat
old guy in his fifties with dirty gray whiskers who had a bulging stomach that
hung over his belt and an ex-wife who clung to his wallet. Close to a coveted
Green Party pension.

Fuck this job? I asked him—Fuck you for not doing your
job.

I stayed, along with Blake and Tasha, to run a skeleton
shift. Blake operated the primary furnace, I shut down the rest of the plant
and Tasha ran around the offices frantically trying to contact representatives
from the city. The train whistle blew at two minutes past midnight; we were all
in the control room trying to re-boot some of the systems that had
shut down during a very close explosion that hit the
military base just down the street. I felt it under my feet and when the three
of us ran outside to check for damage, we could see the thick flame rising up
from the base a couple hundred yards away, fading like a ghost and then it was
darkness again—no smoke, nothing but a broken, blackened building.

The whistle blew again and I walked out to the back of the
building where the tracks cut across the empty concrete loading lot. The dark
shadow of the long coal train very slowly snaked its way around the obliterated
army base. The two large circular lights on the locomotive in the front
illuminated ten feet of track ahead. The locomotive was fifty yards away and
had begun to slow down, its wheels screeching.

“It exploded,” I tell the interrogator. “Just … we were
watching it come in, and then one of the middle cars exploded. We ran back
inside.”

“Did you see what hit it?” the general asks.

“No,” I say. “It was pitch black, except for the lights on
the horizon. The fires, I mean. In the city. We ran to the center of the plant
just to be safe. It sounded like trucks crashing into each other outside.” I
wait for him to say something but he just stares at me. “I don’t know what else
I can tell you.”

The general takes a drag of his cigarette. He’s calm,
thoughtful. “Then what did you do?”

“I went back outside,” I say. “There were three hopper cars
laying sideways in the parking lot. The rest of the train was derailed, too.
Some of the coal was burning at the edge of the parking lot, and some more in
the field next to the parking lot.”

“Did you find the … ah,” he snaps his fingers together a few
times. “The driver?”

“The engineer? Yes.”

“Did you ask him what happened?”

“He was dead.” Strapped in his seat inside the crumpled
locomotive, his neck bent at an awkward angle. He was a young dark-skinned man
with a barrel chest
and fat arms and dark black
freckles around his nose. I had spoken to him once during a delivery about
putting together a PC. He wanted something that he could use to talk to his
daughter in Africa.

“Did you bury him?”

“No,” I say. But I
did
bury something. Small gray discs that looked like hockey pucks, three of them
near the locomotive half-buried in the hard dirt. They were near the tracks,
and for some reason I took the coal shovel and spread dirt over each of them as
if they were unfinished graves. Or maybe they reminded me of tombstones,
jutting out of the soil halfway. I think they were bombs.

“Then what?”

I lick my dry lips. “We wheeled out one of the old conveyor
belts. Then we started shoveling coal to get it inside in case things got
worse.”

Which they did. An hour later, a jet flew so low overhead
that I could feel my eardrums vibrating and I could see the open hatch in its
belly. Both Blake and I ducked for cover under the conveyor, the rubber belt
humming and moving directly above our heads. Instead of an explosion, pamphlets
began floating to the ground. We stepped out from under the belt and grabbed a
handful. They were all the same. On one side, it read:

The
Coalition will not attack non-military targets. Please stay in your home.

On the back, it had a picture of a tall commercial building
and words that read:

Your
goverment poses a threat to the world.

“Government” was misspelled and the picture looked like a
cheesy cutout from a tour guide. Blake took one home with him and promised to
return as soon as he got a hold of his parents. He promised to come back with
answers, but I didn’t want answers, I wanted bodies to shovel that coal inside,
as much as possible because keeping the plant running was the only thing that
made sense. I told Blake sitting around worrying wouldn’t help anything, but he
still left.

The sun was coming up and I kept working. There was coal
everywhere, lying in piles on the concrete, between the rails, and more sitting
out on the open field. I felt guilty for not trying harder to convince my
workers to stay. They were my responsibility, and now they were driving through
empty streets in a burning city, ducking bombs that fell out of the dark sky.

Just when I was beating myself up the hardest, Bert the
security guard stopped by to help. The old security guard who looks like my
grandfather with a white mustache, and sits in a little white box at the edge
of the parking lot on the front side of the building next to the only entrance
into the parking lot. He told me he was sick of watching the city burn in the
distance, sitting around listening to people on the radio praying to their god
and trying to figure out why the Emerald Guard wasn’t fighting back. No one had
any concrete answers and after the phone lines went down the radio host
couldn’t stop sobbing on the air.

So the two of us worked. Bert shoveled a little bit, then
stopped for a breather, huffing loud wet breaths with his mouth wide open. Then
he started shoveling again. The afternoon was quiet, and no one showed up. By
mid-afternoon, we had barely shoveled enough coal to keep one furnace running.

“You shoveled,” the interrogator says. “Then what?”

“I shoveled until it got dark,” I say. “Then I slept in the
break room and when I woke up, I started again.”

“Then what?”

“Then I shoveled some more.”

“When did you go home?” he asks, stamping out the cigarette
on the ashtray.

“The third or fourth night,” I say. “I don’t know for sure. I
just slept when I was tired and worked when I wasn’t.” Bert had stayed, too.
The old man helped—sure, he slept a lot more and he couldn’t shovel worth
a damn, but at least he tried his best. Me and Bert sat in the break room with
Tasha and ate the food from the two employee fridges. The first night, we had a
veritable feast of microwave meals: macaroni and cheese with Salisbury steak
and a heaping side of teriyaki rice.

No one brought up the fact that the three of us, deep down,
were probably sticking around because we didn’t have anywhere else to go. No
one to run home to. Three sad people married to their jobs, although I’m pretty
sure I was the only one who had actually
chosen
that fate. Bert’s wife was gone. Tasha talked about dates sometimes during
breaks but never talked about boyfriends.