The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker Read Free

Everyone’s staring at me.
    Later in the afternoon, a middle-aged man with a pasty bald
head stands up to stretch his legs and the soldiers yell. A woman starts crying
quietly with her face in the dirt and the soldiers yell. It reminds me of tense
afternoons at home when I was a teenager, after my parents got into a fight and
staked out territory in the house. I’d sit on the couch and my father would sit
down next to me on the couch in a huff and start rifling through his paperwork.
If I turned on the TV, he’d yell. If I got up, he’d find a reason to yell. I
had to sit, perfectly still, until he sighed heavily and left the room.
    “They can do anything,” someone whispers during one night,
any night, it doesn’t matter because every hour feels the same.“They can do anything our government has done and get
away with it. Our government has done some bad things.”
    The guards wake me up while it’s still dark and grab me by my
arms, pulling me over to the barbed wire. I follow their shouting commands: lie
down, hands over my head, don’t fucking move. They cuff my hands with cold
metal, wrap a black hood over my head and guide me back into the building. It’s
warm. My skin prickles.
    They pull me into a room with a concrete floor and take off
the hood before shutting the door. I fall forward, unable to stop the momentum,
crashing into the gray wall immediately. It’s small, not even enough space to
sit. I have to stand to stretch my legs and wonder if this used to be anything
or if they built this themselves—it could have been a small closet, cut
in half. It smells like vomit . It’s impossible
not to touch any of the brown stains lining the wall and floor.
    This place could be anywhere, and that frightens me. I like
to be in control, so I can predict the future. I like knowing my schedule ahead
of time so I can plan meals in advance. I like knowing the hours of
neighborhood stores so I can be sure what’s open and what isn’t when I’m going
out to run errands. I like taking my anxiety medication at 4:30 p.m. every day.
Some people might not want to know what the stains on the wall are, but I do.
    What do they want from me? I can remember arriving for work
at 4:50 just like I always did. The day had started out the same as any other
day. Only with more tension. I could feel it between Deon and Ramirez and Blake
in the boiler room and at first, I thought they’d gotten into a fight somewhere
outside of work. They all went drinking most mornings after third shift, and
sometimes they fought. It was my job to make sure they didn’t fight on the job.
I thought that day was probably the kind of day where I’d have to keep them
separated.
    But then Blake came up to me in the break room. When he
talked to me, he narrowed his eyes and spoke in a low voice, scratching
nervously at the pale, dry skin on his square chin. He stood close and told me
he had heard things on TV about an invasion, a real honest-to-god invasion of
Our Country. He told me he had a gun stashed in the trunk of his car.
    I remember shivering violently.
    The air blowing in through the vent in the ceiling begins to
warm. It gets hotter and sweat breaks out on my forehead. My entire body begins
to glisten. The warm air travels down my esophagus. It dries out my lungs, my
throat. I have to scream. I pound against the wall, panicked. It’s gotta be
something else, there’s gotta be something in the air and now they’re going to
kill me because they’ve got me confused with someone else and everything’s
going to hell and now I’m going to die.
    The ceiling vent releases a burst of cool air. I open my
mouth, wiping at the sweat across my face, pulling down my pajama bottoms to
provide reprieve for as much skin as possible. The air gets colder. It only
takes a few minutes for the wet sweat on my skin to beginning chilling me right
down to the bone. The tips of my fingers numb first. Goosebumps break out and
pop up like pimples between the