The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  “I needed to hear you say it,” Fahima says.

  “To see if I was lying?” Fahima nods. “And can you tell? Is that one of your abilities now? Maybe you should have brought a psychic.”

  “I believe you,” she says. “You know anything about it?”

  “We’re an island out here,” he says, chuckling at his half-assed joke.

  “You’re not in touch with anyone out west?”

  “Via what?” Olsen asks. “Smoke signal? Pony fucking Express?”

  One of the lumberjacks nudges him in the shoulder, a motion Fahima isn’t supposed to see but does. Olsen’s brow knits, considering something. “There’ve been people coming in,” he says. “A handful. I don’t know how they get here. They don’t show up at meetings, but they’ve approached our people. They promote a more…zealous vision of what our organization should be.”

  “Have they made inroads here?”

  “I wouldn’t know if they had,” Olsen says. “Our people are freethinkers, not some sort of Hive mind.” He smirks, pleased with himself.

  “We can’t have the Faction coming in here,” Fahima says. “You understand that?”

  “Because it’d be bad for you?” Olsen says. “Think how bad it’d be for us.”

  “So keep your people quiet,” Fahima says. “Calm them the fuck down.”

  “They aren’t mine,” Olsen says. “The network’s a support structure. Like one of those groups you join when your pet dies and you can’t cope. We’re helping people through it.”

  “By encouraging them to riot?”

  “They don’t need encouragement,” he says. “The riots are about material conditions. The riots are slaves asking for better treatment from their masters. Nothing more. The network aids with less material issues. We help people come to grips with the fact that we’re the last generation of humanity.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “The fuck you don’t,” says one of the lumberjacks.

  Olsen holds up his hand for silence and lets them all sit in the quiet for a beat. “Our children are being born like you,” he says. “Every child who’s hit their teens since the Pulse has resonated. All of them. We won’t know for another couple years, but most of us believe that children conceived after the Pulse will be Resonants as well. Our own children won’t be like us. That’s the theory. It was enough for me to get myself snipped, if you know what I mean.”

  “That is way outside the scope of this meeting,” Fahima says.

  “You came here to accuse us of an act of hatred, and I am telling you we aren’t angry anymore. None of us have the energy to be angry. We are grieving. We are grieving our own deaths. We don’t have it in us anymore to give a single fuck about any of you. And I don’t delude myself that it will matter. I don’t think for a second it will stop you and yours from using this attack as an excuse to wipe us out. Because you have the time and the energy to hate us. You have that luxury, among so many others. I envy you your hate.”

  Fahima stands up, and all four of the lumberjacks twitch. She holds up her hands. “Thank you for your time,” she says. “I’ve got some people coming in tomorrow. Healers. They’ll be at Temple Emanuel near St. Mary’s Park all day.”

  “No one goes near the park,” says Olsen. “The Faction holds most of the South Bronx.”

  “They’ll pull back for the day,” Fahima says. “Tell everyone it’s safe.”

  “Thank you, master,” Olsen says, bowing his head. “Much obliged.”

  Clay stops to rest, and time around him reintegrates with its normal flow. The air in Lab Bay Theta is warm and thick, and condensation fogs the observation window. That never happens when the Omars are working. There must be something they do to balance the heat generated by Clay’s exertions, the friction between time inside his bubble and outside of it. Dominic says the membrane is like a push of hot air moving constantly outward from Clay’s body, trying to keep the rest of the world at bay.

  He strips off his spandex down to his boxer briefs. He grabs a towel and wipes sweat from his forehead and chest, then uses it to get rid of some of the fog from the window. The lab is shut down for the night. He asked Omar Six to fudge his clearance, claiming he had ideas he wanted to try out, ways to shape his affective field so it interacted with the Chair differently. It was bullshit; he had no more ideas today than he’d had when Fahima hired him. Omar Six grumbled how exciting it would be to come in and find heaps of data already waiting for him, what a pleasure to start every day behind, but he adjusted the clearance so Clay could come and go as he pleased. Being the only one on the island reminded him of the book he read to Rai in which two kids ran away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and hid out at night. Quotidian spaces become wild when abandoned. Every child knows this. As an adult, Clay forgot. He imagines mischief he could get up to when he hears a door clicking shut. Someone emerges from a janitor’s closet and walks toward the unused Alpha Bay.

  Clay puts on his shirt, pulls on his jeans, and pads out of Theta barefoot, easing the door shut behind him so he doesn’t alert the other person to his presence. The intruder hunches over the terminal, hunting and pecking at keys, a hijab obscuring her face.

  “Working late, Ms. Deeb?” he asks loudly. Fahima startles, her hand going to her hip like a gunslinger.

  “Fucking hell, Clay,” she says. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “No one’s supposed to be in here,” Clay says.

  “Yeah, but I’m the boss of here, so I get to be here whenever I want.”

  “Omar changed my clearance,” Clay says.

  “Six?” Fahima asks. Clay nods. “He’s my least favorite.” She shuts off the terminal before Clay can see what’s on the screen and eases herself into the chair. “So what’s got you here in the middle of the night?”

  “Honestly?” Clay says. He pulls up a chair next to her. “I didn’t want to be at home.”

  “Wife mad at you about something?” Fahima asks.

  “Not any more than he usually is,” Clay says. Fahima holds up a hand to apologize for not knowing. It’s funny that he knows she’s queer but she didn’t know it about him. He’s had bosses invested in the personal lives of their employees and others who saw the people who worked for them as appendages. He imagined Fahima in the first camp, although she’s never given him reason to think so. Their brief but chummy conversations on her visits to the Ruse had the contours of a friendship but none of the substance.

  “My ex and I both had work. Too much, constantly,” Fahima says. Because they aren’t exactly friends, the quiet, darkened lab becomes a confessional. “It was an understanding. We never needed to sneak away or make up an excuse. We had work as a legitimate excuse, and we took it when we needed to. Until we didn’t. Maybe we wouldn’t have lasted as long if we hadn’t had it the whole time. Maybe we would have lasted forever.”

  “I have something I’m not telling him,” Clay says. It’s an opportunity to voice the thing fit to burst out of him. “And I should.”

  Fahima nods. “Does he know what you do here?”

  Clay shrugs. “He knows I do research. He thinks I’m some kind of a scientist, which is hilarious. I was an English major. I can’t bring myself to tell him I’m a lab rat.”

  “That’s not true,” Fahima says. “That’s not what any of you are. You’re the operators. You make the Chairs work.”

  “We don’t, though,” Clay says. “How long now and none of us can make them work?”

  “That’s on me,” Fahima says. “It’s not you that’s wrong. It’s the machines.”

  “Bullshit,” Clay says. “You made it work at least once.” She smiles. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “If it works again, will it do anything for people who didn’t get it the first time?”

 
Fahima shakes her head. “There are people who won’t be affected no matter what.”

  “Not everybody’s special.”

  “Not everybody’s a Resonant,” Fahima corrects. “It’s not a sin, being normal.”

  “Go tell that to folks in the Bronx,” Clay says. “Nothing we do’s going to make things any better for them.”

  “We can make things more comfortable. Easier,” Fahima says defensively.

  “Easier and more comfortable is what you say to your parents when you put them in a home.”

  Fahima flinches as if Clay has hit a nerve. “Some days I wish I could turn everybody on,” she says. “Others I wish I could turn everybody off. Mostly I want things to be nicer for all of us.”

  Clay hesitates. He’s ready to tell her about Rai. Whatever else Fahima is, she’s a problem solver. She’ll look at the situation coolly, without the emotional baggage Clay brings to it. Without a heart in the way. She could fix it, fix Rai. Make the whole thing go away.

  But it’s not only what Fahima is, it’s who she is. She’s an authority, the head of the Bishop Foundation, which is the smiling face that masks the Black Rose Faction. You don’t get to the big chair by breaking rules on behalf of the hired help. She’d be obliged to run Rai’s case up the chain, hand him over to the Faction for the exact test looming in their future.

  “I’m going to get back to it,” he says, jerking his thumb toward Theta Bay.

  “You should go home,” Fahima says. “The Chair’ll be there in the morning.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m in it now,” he says. “Wouldn’t get to sleep anyway.”

  “Maybe we could take a look together,” Fahima says. “Tweak the Chair. Save the world.”

  Clay smiles. After some time together, it’ll be safe to share his situation with her. “I’ve got nothing else going,” he says.

  Fahima rises from the seat, rubbing her hands together eagerly. Clay wonders how much of this she gets to do now that she’s effectively running the entire country. “So let me ask you,” she says. He hears the sound of a phone buzzing in her pocket, a sound that feels outdated, like a dial-up modem or the scratch of a needle on a record label. “Shit,” Fahima says, looking at the screen of an old-school flip phone. It’s quaint seeing one again; in the postwar rush to restore infrastructure, cell networks were written off as unnecessary. The Hive already connected everyone instantly, and so there was no reason to risk colony collapse in the country’s bee population for the sake of sending a text. He’s about to poke fun at her, but her face is serious. “I’ve got to take this.”

  “Saving the world’s got to wait?” Clay asks.

  Fahima nods absently, staring at the phone. “Have Six send me your data tomorrow,” she says. “I’ll take a closer look at what you’re putting out.”

  “I’m going to have it all worked out by tomorrow,” Clay says, trying to get a laugh. Already on the phone, Fahima nods and gives him a dismissive wave as she makes her way back around the circle of lab bays. Clay turns and looks into Alpha Bay, where the Throne sits, permanently empty. He knows it isn’t true, but there’s part of him that’s convinced if only he were better, stronger, more adept, he could fix Rai and put all these fears to rest.

  Carrie wanted to be on the road before dawn, but her clock is off, and she wakes to late-morning light coming through the curtains. She leaves some bills under the pillow and gathers her things, hoping to leave without another conversation. When the front door creaks open, Peter calls to her from the kitchen.

  “Hey, sleepyhead. I’m making breakfast.”

  Carrie shuts the door and slinks back into the house.

  “I made coffee,” he says. “Chicory, mostly. Tricks my brain into believing there’s caffeine.”

  Carrie accepts a mug of steaming brown liquid that resembles coffee in appearance only.

  “I can’t eat,” she says. “I have to hit the road.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said last night,” Peter says, flipping an egg. “It wasn’t fair to you. You’re one of the good ones.”

  Carrie thinks about all the ways one of the good ones has been used. The guards in Topaz Lake used to say that about Miquel even as they explained tragic accidents that befell Resonants who weren’t good ones. She thanks Peter and passes on breakfast, resolving never to stay here again, to throw herself on the riskier and more public mercies of the Hotel Irma downtown. Peter piles eggs on Reuben’s plate and carries her bag out to the car. She sits in the driver’s seat exhausted again, as if all of last night’s sleep has drained from her.

  “You should come out around Thanksgiving,” he says, leaning on the edge of the open window. “Terry down the road’s been raising turkeys. I’ve got dibs on one of them. It doesn’t have to be the exact day. I’m sure you’ve got family back east.”

  She looks up at the house and sees Reuben watching her from the porch. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and rolls up the window. She gives a wave and turns the keys. The engine struggles once, twice, and a third time. On the fourth it catches, but Peter’s already tapping on the glass.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” he says.

  “I’m thinking of trading it in,” she says with a forced smile. “Is there a Lexus dealership around here?”

  His laugh is as fake as her smile. “There’s a shop out by the highway,” he says. “I don’t know if the guy’s any good.” He gestures to the garage that once housed cars but now stables the horses. “You should have him take a look. You don’t want to die out there.”

  She knows he means she doesn’t want the car to die out there, and she corrects it in her head. Peter writes down the address for her, and she thanks him as she pulls out of the driveway. Reuben rushes down to the end of the drive to wave to her as she heads off.

  The edge of Sioux City is a tangible border. The city has no suburbs, not even the encampments that orbit the larger settlements. Beyond a radius, the city drops off into nothing and the plains open up like a sea. The front of the mechanic’s shop doesn’t fill Carrie with confidence; it’s a tin-roof shack with a cinder-block office attached. Neither does its proximity to the city. She considers driving past, chancing that it was only a hitch that caused the engine to sputter. But if the car dies in the middle of nowhere, she’s dead with it. She pulls the Kia into the driveway, startled by the sound of the service bell as it rolls over the warning tube.

  An ancient-looking man emerges from the office, hunched over so severely that Carrie wants to slip a cane under his hand to support him. She turns off the car and gets out, but he barely looks at her, moving slowly and directly toward the car.

  “This little gook piece of shit giving you trouble?” he asks.

  Carrie is taken aback by the sound of a racial slur she hasn’t heard since her grandfather passed away. She recovers and explains the problem she had starting the Kia that morning.

  “Alternator most likely,” he says. “Did it sound like this?” The old man does a shockingly accurate imitation of her car, with a deep warble in the back of his throat and a precisely modulated raspberry blown through his thin lips.

  “That’s it,” Carrie says. The old man nods, rests his hands on the edge of the hood, ignoring the heat it gives off, and points with his wattled chin for Carrie to pop the hood latch. When the hood’s up, the old man sucks in a deep breath through his nose.

  “Smell that?” he says. Carrie sniffs the air but registers nothing. “Like a burnt fuse,” he says. “Alternator, like I said. I got one around that’ll work.” He sizes her up with his gimlet-ringed eyes. “Cost ya,” he adds.

  What he means is he knows what Carrie is and he’s going to gouge her for the work. She can’t begrudge people out here their acts of rebellion, but she worries he’s going to fuck her on the work as well. She hopes there’s a mechanics’ code of ethics to prevent him from fixing
the Kia enough that it gets her out of town but dies on the plains.

  “Whatever it costs to get it right,” she says.

  The old man nods again. He lifts one hand, a talon twisted by arthritis, and points to a folding chair next to the office, sitting in full sun by a bin of food scraps.

  “Have a seat,” he says. “Take me about an hour. Ain’t as quick as I used to be.”

  Carrie eases herself onto the hot metal seat. She puts in her headphones and cues up a playlist full of rockabilly and country. She puts her sunglasses on and leans her head back, soaking in the music, the sun, the stench of the scrap pile. Terrible material circumstances can be endured, even enjoyed. There’s a moment when everything is so awful it obliterates her, frees her from the burden of self. Skin baking and nostrils full of stink, Carrie is present, without history, a thing enduring this situation second by second and nothing more.

  The screech of tires pierces through a Johnny Cash song. A pickup truck, the kind you buy when you don’t need a truck but want to be the kind of guy that drives one, all noise and no real guts, pulls in behind the Kia, leaving two crescent moon skid marks behind. Work boots emerge from the driver and passenger sides, and men continue to pile out of the truck’s cab like clowns out of a Volkswagen.

  At final count, there’s a half dozen. They stand out front of the tin-roof garage, watching Carrie. They aren’t the finest specimens of humanity. An image flashes in her head, a short movie in fast forward in which she kills all six before the first one hits the ground clawing at his slit throat. Sometimes she feels violence like a pleading thing inside her, asking to be let out. She stands and steps out to talk to them, swaggering on road-weary legs; one hand rests on the handle of her knife, and the other is out, showing them her empty palm.

  “I’m passing through,” she says. “Should be out of here within the hour.”

  “This man is our kindred,” says one of the men, weak-chinned and scrawny. He shapes the word kindred with his lips as if what these men are is a secret and he’s gifting her a hint. “Any harm done unto him is as harm done unto us.”