The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel by Manuel Gonzales Page A

was just shy of total wreckage. It’s fair to say what she found in that envelope had made her upset, or rather, it’s fair to say that upset was a far piece from what she was. Angry, let’s say. Infuriated. That, too. But also clarified. What she had found in that envelope had given her a clear path forward. A sense of what she needed to do next. She picked up what was left of the file, stepped gingerly through and around the rubble of what was left of her apartment. She sighed. She grabbed her keys and her security badge. She grabbed her shoulder bag, turned, and looked one more time at the wreck of her apartment—the eat-in kitchen’s table broken into thirds; the dishes smashed across the floor; the pillows and cushions torn, their batting ripped out—looked for perhaps the last time, and then stepped into the hallway.
    She ignored the small crowd of neighbors who had gathered there and who had been banging on her door for, oh, twenty minutes, and pushed past them so she could go downstairs and head for her office.

14.
    When Sarah first came to the Regional Office, the streets had been noisy and smoggy and the air damp and the day hot, made hotter still by the buildings, the concrete, the glass, the steel, which trapped all that heat and let it radiate out all day and most of the night. Sarah had missed the city, the heat and the noise and the smell, had missed it because she loved it.
    She had thought moving to California would have been a good thing, moving away from home (everyone moves away from home, right?), moving away from the look that people in the old neighborhood gave her, even still, because she was the girl whose mother had disappeared. Moving away from all of that had seemed a good idea, but she didn’t like California. The weather made no sense. The air, the sky, there was just too much of both. She hated driving, not that she had had a car out in California, but she had hated being driven around, too. The people were too easygoing, too smug for her tastes, and for a while now, she had wondered if the move had been a tragic mistake. It was good to be back in the city, anyway, even if just for a short while, and even if she didn’t know exactly why she had come back home, what she hoped to gain by coming back.
    Sarah had found the building and the office she was lookingfor—Morrison World Travel Concern—almost half an hour ago. She stood outside it and then walked away from it and bought a hot dog and a pretzel and a soda. She sat on a half wall just down the street from the travel agency to eat and afterward walked back up to the front door and stared at the scripted name, the travel posters in the window, and wondered what the hell she was doing here, what she hoped to find here for herself. Sarah thought about taking the train and then the bus to her aunt’s house. Her aunt would be at work and she didn’t know Sarah was even in the city, but Sarah could surprise her. She could pick up some food or grab some things from the store, bake her a cake. Her aunt loved cake. That was what she should do. Go back to Brooklyn, where she belonged, and make this a visit with her aunt and not a complete waste of her time. When she had received the letter from the Morrison World Travel Concern inviting her—directing her, more like it—to come to their offices on this day, a first-class ticket included, she had assumed it was a scam or a high-priced piece of marketing that had been mailed to her by accident. But then she saw her mother’s name in the letter and she read it more closely, and then read it again—information about your mother, etc., etc., unusual circumstances surrounding her disappearance, etc., etc.—and while she had no idea what a high-end travel agency could or would tell her about her mother, who was she to pass up a free first-class plane ticket back to New York?
    Now that she was here, though, she felt uneasy about the whole situation.
    She clenched her fists in resolve and