Once he and Oyemi abducted the woman named Nell, it stands to reason that Mr. Niles became nervous, apprehensive. Stands to reason that he paced the office more than usual, even for him. That he woke often throughout the night — sensitive to every sound from the street below, every creak on the stairway above — woke so often that he might as well have not slept at all. He had involved himself in a kidnapping. Anyone not a sociopath and not Oyemi would have become nervous and apprehensive once the act of kidnapping happened.
Let us first clarify: The future Operative Recruits were never kidnapped. Oyemi and Mr. Niles, and later, Henry, made each Recruit an offer: remain in this quotidian life or train to fight the forces of darkness.
Not so the Oracles.
Nell and the other two (whose names have been lost to history) were not made offers, were not given choices, were simply kidnapped and then altered.
It stands to reason that this unnerved Mr. Niles.
In college, he had majored in economics. Before that, sure, he had dropped out of high school and engaged in some small-time robberies to get by. Nonetheless, nothing in his life had prepared him for this, for aiding and abetting the physical and mental and supernatural transformation of strangers, young women no less. And, to be perfectly honest, there is extensive evidence that Mr. Niles never cared for nor wanted to involve oracles, or soothsayers, or palm readers, or fortune-tellers of any stripe, in his plans for the Regional Office.
Mr. Niles, in fact, harbored strong feelings against the desire for foreknowledge of this sort. Mr. Niles, in fact, very much did not want to believe in oracles, a desire made more difficult to fulfill if Oyemi planned to surround herself — and him — with them.
His father believed in oracles, specifically in a prophecy that his life would be cut short by a fire, something he learned, no doubt, from some sideshow carny. But his father was devoted to this prophecy; it was his favorite story to tell, the story of his future demise. Mr. Niles would listen to his father and his father would tell him how he was going to die and Mr. Niles would ask his father how he knew this and his father would claim that it was all in the prophecy, clear as day, that it was straight from the oracle’s mouth. Mr. Niles would ask his father why he simply didn’t do something about this prophecy to prevent it from coming true, and his father told him, “Well, son, I’ve thought about it, I have, but that’s what the Greeks did, you know.”
His father said, “You know the Greeks, son? Great people, the Greeks. But the ancient Greeks, not like that Greek son of a bitch who runs the gas station.”
He said, “Smart people, the Greeks. Inventors of the wheel and time, but dumb about prophecies.
“Take Oedipus, for example,” he said. “The king heard a prophecy that his son would murder him and marry his wife and so the king, he tried to get smart, he tried to fix things so the prophecy wouldn’t come true, like leave his firstborn son on a hilltop to die, or in the woods to be eaten by wolves, or something like that, it doesn’t matter what, because in the end, whatever he did, this king, it didn’t matter.”
He said, “Whatever they fixed, the Greeks? It only worked to make the prophecy come true. No matter what you do, a prophecy is a prophecy is a prophecy, and you can’t do anything to change it that won’t make it happen.”
“So what are you going to do?” Mr. Niles asked his father.
“Nothing, son,” he said. He smiled at his own brilliance. “Don’t you get it? You do nothing and the prophecy doesn’t even matter. Do nothing and you’ve beaten the system.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to die in a fire, then?” Mr. Niles asked.
“Nah,” his father said. “It’s just a theory. I’ll probably die just like the oracle said I would.”
All of which confused Mr. Niles, made him feel a heavy sadness when he was a boy, and then pity for his father as he grew older. But the idea of prophecies and fate’s hand controlling a person’s life wormed its way into his head, and soon he came to the decision that someone or something held the knowledge of his future, too, and that there was nothing he could do to change any of it. It was all preordained, whether he’d been told about it or not, and no matter what he did, the secretly held prophecy about his own life couldn’t be altered. And this led him from one bad decision to another, so that by the time he was supposed to be graduating from high school he was instead spending his nights standing outside in the dark parking lot of a twenty-four-hour grocery store mugging people.
Mr. Niles tried to be fair about the muggings.
Mr. Niles had always believed in fairness.
By his own admission, he targeted the beer-bellied middle-aged bachelors who shopped early in the morning, at two or three a.m., approached them as they were walking out with two grocery carts full of cereal boxes and Top Ramen and dollar bags of moldy apples. These were men, he thought, who could have avoided the whole mess — being robbed, that is — if only they’d have gotten married, settled down, made a few kids, and started shopping at the normal hours of the day when normal people shopped.
He waited outside until a guy came out of the store, until he walked through the parking lot in between his two shopping carts, until he was just reaching his car. And that was when Mr. Niles would step out of the shadows with a gun he’d found in his father’s locked file cabinet, moving so quickly that by the time he had his gun pressed up to the guy’s fleshy stomach, pressed into all of that fat until the tip of the barrel was right under the guy’s rib cage, pressed hard so that the guy would know he wasn’t fooling around, the guy was too surprised to do much else but what Mr. Niles told him to do, which was usually to lie down in the trunk.
He thought about his father whenever he shut the trunk on the guy and took the keys out and dropped them into his own pocket. He thought about his father and the Greeks. He placed his ear to the trunk and listened for whimpering or heavy breathing or all-out sobbing. He wondered whether the guy had once heard a prophecy about how one night he would find himself locked inside a trunk and if then he had taken steps to remove all trunks from his life. Like Sleeping Beauty with all the spinning wheels. And then if the guy, forgetting there was a trunk attached to his car, thought he had fixed it by removing all trunks and all possibilities of trunks from his life. By avoiding all flea markets or specialty import stores or antique shops. Thinking the whole time he had fixed it, tricked the prophecy, won the game, but instead he had somehow led himself to this moment. Instead, he had led himself to the parking lot of this grocery store, to a life that was loveless, childless, and that necessitated shopping at odd hours of the night only to wind up, finally, locked inside his own trunk.
“You should’ve not done anything,” the young Mr. Niles would yell through the hood of the trunk. He’d bang real hard on the top of the car. “You should’ve just left it well enough alone,” he would yell, louder, banging even more, banging to punctuate each word.
After a while, when Mr. Niles became tired of robbing these men, and when the date of his father’s prophesied death came and went, leaving his father still very much alive, he gave up on oracles and the preordained nature of life. He tested for his GED and enrolled in a junior college; transferred, at Oyemi’s insistence, to Rutgers; and then left New Jersey after graduation and moved to the city. By then, the stirrings of the Regional Office were stirred and then they kidnapped the woman named Nell, transformed her, and held her captive.
AN INTERLUDE: THE HOSTAGE SITUATION