The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  The man extends his hand, hanging it in the air like a dead fish. Carrie wants to explain that not all Resonants know one another, but instead she smiles politely and shakes his hand, repulsed by its clamminess. “Cedric,” he says. “Nice to meet you Miss—”

  “Liz,” says Carrie. His name rings familiar, but a warmth pulses through his hand and the memory is gone before she can retrieve it.

  “You’re in from Chicago, yes?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure I want to say.”

  “Oh, there’s no need for that now,” says Mayor Pam, fluttering her hands like she’s drying them off. “That’s what Cedric is here for. We’ve made wonderful progress together. A sort of détente. It’s starting here, but I can’t help but think bigger things are yet to come.” She looks expectantly at Cedric, who raises his eyebrows to indicate that all things are possible. “But you must be starving, Liz, driving all that way,” she says to Carrie. “There’s a wonderful place right near here; we’ll get you something to eat.”

  Carrie allows herself to be pulled along, one arm hooked into the mayor’s elbow, the other hand resting lightly on her knife.

  For all Fahima’s effort, people still die in New York. The murder rate has crept upward. Some people attribute it to how easy it is for Resonants to murder one another. As bigots love pointing out, some Resonants are human weapons. It wasn’t difficult to murder someone before; people managed without abilities for thousands of years. Fahima wasn’t naïve enough to think improved economic conditions would eliminate violence, but she expected a drop in the murder rate when people had the things they needed. New Yorkers find reasons to kill one another with depressing regularity. Fahima has theories about the uptick in violence, one of which she’s pursuing in the office of the medical examiner on East 26th Street.

  In the lobby, a receptionist with shaggy fur regards Fahima with one dark marble of an eye.

  “Can I help you, miss?” she asks.

  Fahima is not cut out for detective work. Her spit feels syrupy in her mouth. She’s closer than she’s ever been to an answer, and her nerves are kicking in. She wants to pet the receptionist’s fur to see if it’s soft or bristly. She roots in her pocket. Her arm slides deeper and deeper in until it feels like she could grab her ankle. She comes up with a high-level Bishop Foundation ID she printed up that morning. She displays it to the receptionist, who is unimpressed. “I’m here to see Archie Gibbons,” she says.

  “Archie’s in the basement,” says the receptionist. “Take the stairs at the end of the hall. Keep going down till you abandon all hope.”

  Fahima mumbles thanks and rushes out of the lobby. The fluorescents in the stairwell flicker violently, a paparazzi worth of flashbulbs. She can hear them struggling to hold on, asking her for relief. There are times she wishes she’d worked harder at Bishop to develop this side of her ability, but when machines speak to her now, it’s a garble, ramblings in a language she used to understand. If she could calm them down, she’d be less likely to miss a step and tumble to an ironic death outside the door of a morgue. She grips the railing and eases her way down.

  “Mr. Gibbons?” Fahima says as she comes to the bottom of the stairs. “A friend of yours sent me. A couple friends.”

  Archie Gibbons stands up at his desk, almost dropping his sandwich. He’s in his fifties, with a physique Fahima associates with grandfathers: stocky without being fat, sturdiness covering up whatever health-related time bomb ticks inside him. He has an old Brooklyn face, round and rosy. He wipes greasy hands on his apron. Given the state of the apron, this can’t make them any cleaner.

  “You’re Omar’s friend?” he says quietly. Fahima nods. Archie shakes her hand but stops in midpump. “You’re not one of them, right?”

  “Faction?” Fahima asks.

  Archie nods. “You have to tell me if you are. Otherwise it’s entrapment.”

  “No, it’s not,” says Fahima. “And no, I’m not.” There’s a comforting myth about the Faction that they’re bound by laws restricting the actions of the police. They’re restricted only by what they can do and what they’re willing to do. “That bear lady upstairs doesn’t like me,” Fahima says. It’s not okay to refer to Resonants with permanent physical manifestations like that, but Fahima is too exhausted to be a decent person. She’s happy Archie doesn’t judge her for it but judges him a little for his failure to do so. We all have to get better, she thinks.

  “Ulrich doesn’t like anybody,” says Archie. “People whose looks changed after the Pulse are bitter as shit about it. I sympathize. I mean, her husband walked out on her right off. Took the kids. But it’s not my fault the lady’s got paws.”

  “You’ve got a body?” Fahima asks.

  “Yah,” Archie says, thick Brooklyn accent coming to the fore. He leads Fahima through the office and into the morgue, talking the entire time.

  “I’m a Pulser myself,” he says. “I was with the police department, in evidence. One day I pick up a stapler, and it’s like I can see everyone that’s ever touched it. I’m telemetric, is the word.” Since the Pulse, there’s more vocabulary around abilities. Groupings are like guilds or castes. Thermics and lithics. Empathics and readers. Physicals and ethereals. “Working with bodies is easier. Organic matter doesn’t carry the same charge as objects. I can be up to my elbows in someone’s stomach cavity and get nothing.” He smiles, a piece of lettuce screaming green at Fahima from between his front teeth. “It’s a relief.”

  The wall of silver doors makes Fahima think of library card catalogs. Relics from before the new world arrived. Archie opens one of the doors and slides the drawer out. The body under the sheet consists of the tattered remains of a young woman. The fluorescents make her skin pale as fish belly. She’s smaller than when Fahima saw her at the party and looks distended, her features not right, her torso flattened, and her arms and legs uneven. Her entire body is badly burned.

  “Meet Heidi Pryzborowski,” Archie says.

  “No one else knows she’s here?” Fahima asks.

  “Omar,” says Archie. “He and my son are kind of a thing.” Omar, you beautiful slut, Fahima thinks. “I didn’t approve at first. But Archie Junior’s happy, which is new. Anyway, I told Omar if I could ever help.”

  “You have,” says Fahima. “This is very helpful.”

  “You want me to stick around?”

  “I’m good,” Fahima says. Archie shrugs and returns to his sandwich as Fahima takes a slow lap around the body. It’s easy to forget to sympathize with members of the Black Rose Faction. A lot of them volunteer. Maybe Heidi had signed up enthusiastically, yipping hooray for fascism as she handed over her better self. But maybe she was pressed into service against her will. Some Faction recruits are “reformed” criminals and dissidents. Fahima whispers the dua for the dead girl, however she got here.

  “O Allah, forgive Heidi Pryzborowski,” she says. “And elevate her station among those who are guided. Send her along the path of those who came before and forgive us and her, O Lord of the Worlds. Enlarge for her her grave and shed light upon her in it.” She hates how robotic the dua has come to sound, how casual she’s become about speaking it over the bodies of people younger than her, people she feels charged to protect.

  She pulls out her phone. Like the ghost phone she made to talk to Ruth, this one communicates across an impermeable boundary dividing a country from the straggling remnants of what it used to be. There’s no enforced policy of noncommunication, but from a practical stance, it’s difficult to talk with anyone in the Wastes. Her ghost phone network, a collection of jagged lines and winding paths, grew exponentially every day, as networks are prone to do. After a few rings, Alyssa’s annoyed voice answers.

  “I’m right in the middle of something, hon,” she says. The endearment is a reflex. Alyssa will drop it once the shock wears off.

  “Hey, Lys, how’ve you b
een?” Fahima says, attempting to sound light. They’ve spoken only a few times since the breakup; Alyssa accepted the phone as a condition of the end of things. Fahima imagined she’d throw it into the Colorado River at her first opportunity, so it was a surprise the first time Alyssa called. It set the tone for every call that came afterward. Alyssa barked out some demand, something the hospital needed or something she left in the apartment in Brooklyn. Fahima promised she’d take care of it, then Alyssa hung up. Every time. There’s no catching up or checking in, and this is the first time Fahima is the one to initiate contact. It’s the first time she needs something from Alyssa rather than the other way around, and it isn’t a dynamic she loves.

  Alyssa gives a deep sigh. “We’ve been having rolling blackouts for about a week,” she says. “Last night someone broke in and stole our month’s supply of painkillers. This morning the whole hospital was at a dull moan.”

  “I can make some calls.”

  “We have our sources,” Alyssa says. “None of us are out here waiting for your help.” It has a toothless snap to it, more venom than Alyssa intended. “Sorry. What do you need?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Of course you do,” Alyssa says.

  “If I needed to extract a person’s parahippocampal gyrus, how would I do that?”

  There’s a pause. “You want me to walk you through brain surgery.”

  “The patient is already dead,” Fahima says.

  “That makes things easier,” Alyssa says. “Take a bone saw and pop the top off.”

  “The top of the saw?”

  “The top of the head.”

  Fahima looks at the trays and racks full of horrifying tools. One terrifying silver thing calls out to her. Here I am. It looks like a wheel of sharpened teeth balanced on the tip of a spindle. Fahima pulls the trigger, and the toothed wheel spins with a high, vicious whine. Fahima grins, forgetting for a moment what she’s about to do, lost in the noise of a powerful machine.

  “Are you doing this right now?” Alyssa asks.

  “That’s why I called,” Fahima says. She wedges the phone between her shoulder and her ear. She pinches Heidi’s cheeks and turns her head from one side to the other. “How much should come off?”

  “Parahippocampal gyrus is fairly low in the brain,” Alyssa says. “I’d say slice above the eyebrows, then dig down through the middle.”

  “Reach in and dig?”

  “This is one of those times when not knowing what you’re trying to do makes it impossible to help you,” Alyssa says.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Oh, good, it’s Fahima’s greatest hits,” she says. “Do I can’t keep you safe. That one’s my favorite.”

  Fahima doesn’t want to fight with her, but if she wanted to avoid it, she shouldn’t have called. Too late for that now. “I’m sorry, Alyssa.”

  “Yeah, I like that one, too, but you can’t dance to it.”

  “Are you doing all right? Is there anything you need?”

  “You want me to tell you it’s not that bad out here. I can’t do that. It’s that bad. Good luck with your skull.” The line goes dead. Fahima puts the phone down among the sharp and awful things.

  With the whirring discus of the bone saw, she cuts off the crown of the dead woman’s skull, slices the brain like a ham, and digs down with gloved fingers, rooting until she feels something alive, squirming. Coiled around Heidi’s parahippocampal gyrus, a little black worm wriggles and twitches even after its host has expired. It responds to Fahima’s touch, curling around her fingers like she’s its new host. It’s the length of a finger, and it has the same flat matte darkness as the black flowers that grow in the Hive. She drops it into a jar of embalming fluid and holds it up to the light.

  “Hello, little fucker.”

  Carrie wonders if Boulder was always a gated community. You don’t have to build a wall to keep people out. If you’re clever, you make it so there’s no place for them inside.

  There were kids at Bishop who came from money. Darren and Lynette Helms invited everyone out to parties at their parents’ beach house in Oyster Bay. Carrie went to a few of them with Hayden and Miquel and Waylon and later with Bryce, but it was clear the invites weren’t meant for them. The parties weren’t to share what the Helmses had; they were to show it off and call attention to the fact that life would never be like this for Carrie or her friends. Some kids arrived at the parties and felt at home, stripping down to designer bathing suits and jumping into the pool. The enthusiasm that had built up on the drive out was quashed as soon as Carrie got there. She sulked in corners drinking lukewarm vodka and juice out of Solo cups because she couldn’t imagine joining the others in grabbing champagne out of the ice-filled tub, shooting the cork into the air, and stumbling around with the bottleneck gripped in her fist. She felt like she was on the opposite side of a piece of glass, a zoo exhibit none of the rich kids bothered to look at.

  Dinner with Mayor Pam and Cedric Joyner evokes the same feeling of falling into a world where she doesn’t belong. The menu items are unintelligible, and, taking pity on her, Cedric orders for the table. Plates arrive in front of her with items she has no idea how to eat, and Cedric provides gentle correction, suggesting a spoon where Carrie has chosen a fork, modeling the way certain things are scooped up to the mouth with the fingers. She doesn’t enjoy anything she eats, too aware of all the mores she’s breaking, every little thing she’s doing wrong. The waitstaff stands nearby, smirking. It’s the same as it was with the mechanic: her ability gains her nothing here; all the power is theirs.

  “It’s been the most remarkable breakthrough,” says Mayor Pam as she slurps down something gooey and uncooked with the consistency of raw egg. “More than we’d let ourselves hope for. We hadn’t hoped.”

  “We must always have hope,” says Cedric, skewering a paper-thin piece of pink meat and popping it into the back of his teeth.

  “It seemed to me it was a problem built into the system,” Mayor Pam says. “A contradiction at the heart of the Armistice. Because what was the dividing line between us? Was it the arbitrary boundary? Or was it Resonance itself?”

  “It was both,” Cedric says. “Therein the contradiction.”

  “And so it was a surprise when the Bishop Foundation sent Mr. Joyner to extend a sort of olive branch.”

  “An opening gambit,” Cedric says.

  “A Path to Return,” Mayor Pam adds.

  “None of that’s been approved,” Carrie says. “It’s a figment. A proposal.”

  “Proposal, exactly,” Cedric says, pointing his two-tined skewer at Carrie in a way that makes her feel like it’s destined for her eyeball. “Consider that word a minute. When you propose marriage, it’s not a public event. It’s between two parties. Same here.”

  “So what’s the proposal?” Carrie asks, sipping her wine.

  Mayor Pam looks at her quizzically, as if the details have suddenly escaped her. Cedric puts a hand on her arm.

  “It’s all very complicated,” he says. “But essentially, we’ve set up a screening facility for local youth and teens to see if they have Resonance. Those who do, we repatriate.”

  “Exactly,” says the mayor, confidence returning to her face. “These young people are given a chance to live up to their potential.”

  “And what about the rest of you?”

  “We’re fine here,” says the mayor. “And the Bishop Foundation has promised us a steady flow of certain supplies.”

  “Items they previously had to purchase through your black market networks,” Cedric says, his eyes following the arrival of a new plate and avoiding Carrie’s.

  “That’s not an accusation,” Mayor Pam assures her. “We appreciate the work you’ve done.”

  “So does the Bishop Foundation,” says Cedric. “But it’s no longer necessary. A
t least not here. When you get back, you can tell your friends that Boulder no longer needs anything. All is being provided for them.”

  “Like what?” Carrie asks.

  Various utensils stop in midair, and again the mayor looks as if she’s forgotten what she came into the room for.

  “Whatever they need,” Cedric says. “Think of it as a grand experiment. First here and then across the rest of the Wastes.”

  Mayor Pam looks at him, shocked to hear the word come out of his mouth. Everyone out here knows what this part of the country is called back east, but they refer to themselves as the West or they still think of it as America. Cedric’s hand falls over Mayor Pam’s. His index finger raises slightly and makes a tiny circle in the air. Her indignant expression disappears, replaced by a bright smile.

  “We could be one nation again,” she says. “Your famous singer, Hailey Cohen, will be here next week with her unity concert under joint approval from my government and yours. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Hayden,” Carrie says. “And it’s their unity concert.”

  “Whose?”

  “Hayden’s,” says Carrie. “They use neutral pronouns.”

  “How neat!” Mayor Pam says, barely restraining herself from clapping her hands. “But theirs is exactly the message we’re looking for right now. All of us together again. Different but united.”

  “Separate but equal,” Carrie mutters.

  “I think that’s a very cynical way of looking at things, Liz,” Cedric says. “Aren’t you from Chicago? A great experiment of its own?”

  “I’m sorry,” Carrie says. “I’m just…road tired, you know?”

  “We have a room ready for you,” says Mayor Pam.

  “Are you staying long, Liz?” Cedric asks.

  “I’m not,” she says. “It’s funny, the thing is, I’m not on a courier run. Or I am, but not in the way we’re talking about. Somebody paid me to come get something he left here. A family heirloom. He went away to fight and never made it back here. I wouldn’t normally take a job like that, but we all have to work, right?”