Free The Occupation of Emerald City: The Worker by Ken Brosky Page A

and surrounding the green
space are blocks of three- and four-story concrete buildings, government
buildings, all with soldiers standing outside. Smoking. Clutching their
weapons. Moving in twos and threes from block to block. I’ve been to the court
building across the street, walked between its white Grecian pillars to serve
on a jury on two separate occasions. I lied my way out of both cases.
    “Where you go?” the soldier next to the bus asks.
    “What?” I say, shaking myself away from the distracting
sight. It looks like a dome of gray smoke is just sitting over the entire area
and the air tickles my lungs. It’s like they dropped me off in the wrong city.
In the wrong country.
    “Where you go?” The soldier can’t be older than twenty. He
has dark skin and thin nostrils that flare when he talks.
    “I don’t know.” I rub my lips against my teeth, thinking.
Where did I live? I can see my condo in my mind’s eye, right there in plain
sight, but the location is off. It’s floating in the middle of nowhere.
    “Hold,” he says, grabbing the man with the eye patch. Blue
Eye moves like a ragdoll, letting the soldier pull him next to me and Joshua.
“Where you go?”
    “C Street,” Blue Eye says. He smiles. “Then to God.”
    “Follow,” the soldier says, waving us to follow him as he
holds onto Blue Eye’s sleeve. Me and Joshua follow close behind them, weaving
between two very large tanks sitting idly on the street next to the old
two-story parliament building, its tall marble pillars jutting out of the front
like an old Greek temple and its green-tinted windows reflecting the gray
clouds overhead. I’m in another time, that’s what this is. The bus was a time
machine, just like an old science fiction book I read as a kid, only the bus in
the story didn’t have black windows and there were no soldiers and the
passengers were big stuffed bears.
    “Is the president still alive?” I ask the soldier.
    The soldier shakes his head. “President? No president yet. No
prime minister. Soon.” The words sound scripted, the accent polished out in a
way that could only be accomplished by repetition.
    “Repetition is the mother of all learning,” Mister Mantii
says in my mind. I picture him adding, “Then lies can become truth.” He said a
lot of strange things that I can distinctly remember because he repeated them
so often. Civil wars can bring positive change. The central bank controls the
economy. This country would never be invaded because it’s too important. Our
country is not like those other countries. Those other countries are dangerous.
Our country is not.
    I remember it all. And I remember I had a routine before I
went to work. I stopped and got a coffee. I followed the same route. If I can
find the street I used, I can find the power plant and my apartment.
    “There was a monument there,” I say, pointing to the large
open space of dead grass across the street. I remember the square covered with
lush green grass and in the center was a statue, the Unity Monument. There were
always flowers at the base. Beautiful flowers of all kinds, some that could
survive the winters and others that we pulled up and re-planted every spring.
    I can’t remember what the monument looked like. It was tall
and there were figures doing something together. Stressing “unity,” of course.
Everyone always stressed “unity” and I always used to hate it but now that the
monument is gone and the ground is covered with thick, muddy tire tracks, the
square makes me anxious. As if a needle had just pricked my skin when I wasn’t
expecting it.
    “It was ugly,” the soldier says with a thick accent, “so your
people tore it down. Very glorious.”
    We continue down to Unity Plaza, where large vertical
concrete barricades line the streets, the types that divide oncoming traffic on
freeways only twice as tall. A lot of the short business buildings running
along 13 th Street have been almost completely bombed out,