The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  “I’ve got folks on it,” says Alyssa. “They’ll call me as soon as they’ve got anything.”

  “Thank you,” says Carrie.

  “Don’t thank me,” Alyssa says. “Get your friends back east to send me a shit-ton of antibiotics. Or a shit-ton of morphine. If I can’t help people live, I’ll help them die.”

  She leaves them alone in the relative silence of the hospice. “So you’re like a drug runner?” Emmeline asks.

  “I get things where they’re needed,” Carrie says.

  “And I’m one of those things?”

  “There is a whole lot going on here, and the bulk of it is none of my business,” says Carrie. “Someone is paying me to come get you and take you somewhere, and that is the job. You are the job. It’s a shitty state of affairs, but that’s where we’re at.”

  “I don’t get to know where we’re going?”

  “You were at Bishop, right?”

  Emmeline nods.

  “How far’d you get? What year?”

  “Fourth,” says Emmeline.

  “Did you train with Sarah?” Carrie asks. “How to keep people out of your head?”

  “I was signed up for it the year after,” Emmeline says. She can remember all the classes she was registered for her next year at Bishop, the ones that never came. Psychic Defense with Sarah. The Ethical Community with Lesa Ferreira. Ability Theory with Fahima Deeb.

  “Your psychic defense probably sucks,” Carrie says. “That’s nothing personal. It’s a training thing; it doesn’t come naturally. I have to figure anything I tell you, a psychic could read off your head like a billboard. We have to keep information compartmentalized.”

  “It’s funny how you sound like you’re good at planning and everything but we’re stuck here where we started with no way out and people hunting us,” Emmeline says.

  “It’s a rough start,” Carrie says. “I’ve had worse jobs.”

  The part of Emmeline that thrilled when Kimani opened up a book to read to her, that hungers for stories, wants to hear all about those jobs gone bad. The rest of her takes offense at being reduced to nothing but a job and shuts down.

  “I’m going to sleep,” she says.

  “It’s three in the afternoon,” Carrie says.

  “What else am I supposed to do in a hospice?” Emmeline asks. “It’s sleep or die.”

  Carrie leaves her alone and turns out the light on her way out. In the gray-lit room, Emmeline takes her sketchbook out of her rucksack, along with a small purse of mechanical pencils she stole from a papeterie in Paris. She sketches Kimani’s face, noting that the details—the lines around her eyes, the odd angle of her front teeth—are fading from her mind.

  This is bullshit,” says Emmeline. “At least I was stuck inside a house. Now I’m stuck in an empty hospital, and I can’t even go outside.” She sits on Carrie’s bed, next to the bag of things Carrie took from her parents’ house. Malcolm begrudgingly agreed to wash their clothes, so Emmeline wears a billowing hospital frock over a pair of shorts. It keeps slipping off her shoulder. Carrie has trouble fixing Emmeline’s size in her mind. As she holds a mental picture of her from Bishop next to the reality of this young woman, Carrie’s first thought is a parental how big Emmeline’s gotten. When she compares Emmeline to the size of the real world, she looks too small, insufficient to whatever task Carrie’s employer has in mind.

  It’s been three days. Alyssa found a car but not enough gas. A couple people around the city refine denatured gas in their basements, like distilling booze. The output is minimal, unreliable, and expensive. Alyssa has an order standing for forty gallons, enough to get them at least back to Sioux City, if not clear across Iowa. With every refiner she knows devoting their full output to Carrie, it’ll be another day at least. Emmeline’s climbing the walls. She digs into the bag next to her, coming up with the Polaroid camera. She lifts it to her eye so it obscures most of her small face and trains it on Carrie.

  “I’ve never seen one of these,” she says.

  Carrie reaches for the camera. “Don’t click it,” she says. “The film’s—” She was about to say not cheap, the words her father spoke every time she took a shot, but before she can, Emmeline snaps a picture. The afterimage of the flash dances in Carrie’s eyes as the camera spits out the photo.

  “Sorry,” Emmeline says. Carrie can’t tell if Emmeline’s being sincere. She holds the camera out to Carrie, the photo hanging out like a cigarette poised at the edge of a lip. Carrie goes to take it, then stops. She thinks about the Polaroid crammed into her wallet, her and Hayden and two strange kids.

  “Keep it,” she says. “Take some pictures.”

  “Of what?” Emmeline asks. “Hospital beds?” She sets down the camera, taking out the photo and shaking it in the air, because she’s seen someone do that or because she heard it in a song.

  “That doesn’t make it develop any faster,” Carrie says. “It’s a myth.”

  Emmeline gives her a hard look and shakes the Polaroid more emphatically, checking regularly to see if the image has resolved.

  “I have this thing to do today,” Carrie says. “When I get back, we can go to the taco place on University Hill. My treat.” Carrie smiles. Emmeline doesn’t return it.

  “When can we go wherever we’re fucking going?” Emmeline asks.

  “Soon,” says Carrie. She worries it may not be soon enough. By now, the rest of the Bloom have found Martin and Thandi in the woods. Carrie’s been going out at night, eavesdropping in bars and restaurants near the capitol for rumors of Faction agents sniffing around. She hasn’t heard anything or seen anyone. Their best course of action is to get out quickly. The worst idea is taking an antsy teenager on a walkabout, invisible or not. She doesn’t know who the other three in the Bloom are anymore. One might pick up Carrie’s heat signature on the street, register her Kirlian aura or some shit. Invisibility isn’t an absolute. There are other ways to be seen.

  Emmeline holds up the photo, which is still milky and pale. Carrie’s face is half obscured by her hand, like a celebrity fleeing paparazzi. Carrie smirks. “Sit tight a little longer,” she tells Emmeline. “We’re on the road as soon as we’re gassed up.”

  Emmeline gives a full-body sigh. Carrie remembers making the same noise when she was that age. There’s a five-year window when a person can produce that precise exhalation, like the high-pitched tones only young people can hear. You evolve out of it.

  * * *

  —

  Waylon pulled strings to get them an apartment with separate rooms and a kitchen. He promised Carrie it was nice. When he said it, the grit of his teeth told her it wasn’t, but it was the best that could be done. A shitty apartment in Boulder beat a vast estate in the middle of nowhere, or in some dead town with no plumbing or electricity.

  The building is a dull brick among dull bricks along the southern border wall. It might as well be a dorm, Carrie thinks as she waits for the elevator. Three minutes of the up arrow blinking persuades her to take the stairs. At each landing, there are sleeping bags and belongings carefully arranged into personalized encampments. Tiny homes. She wonders about the delicate social contracts that allow these spaces to exist unattended, that protect them from being kicked to pieces by residents of the building tired of sharing space with squatters. She steps around them. She nods to the woman on the third-floor landing cocooned in her sleeping bag reading an old Red Emma comic, and the woman pulls her sleeping bag tighter around herself as if Carrie might steal it.

  Her brother Brian answers the door in a ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt and boxers. His blank expression makes Carrie think she’s forgotten to be visible.

  “Fucking prodigal sister,” he finally says.

  “It’s good to see you,” Carrie says. She opens her arms to hug him, and Brian stiffly submits to it. He’s too skinny and smells like he hasn’t s
howered in days. He leads her into the living room. Dirty clothes are scattered around the floor. On the coffee table, an old laptop is playing porn, the sound muted, bodies mechanically pounding one another like fleshy oil derricks. The kitchen counter is covered in used dishes. Carrie sees one of the double inhalers used to snort Rez. When the user shoves both barrels up their nose, they look like they’re wearing a fake mustache. Hong came up with the delivery system for the drug that way as a joke.

  “Dad’s in the back if you want to see him,” Brian says. “I think he’s almost done. Good days I’ve got enough painkillers to keep him out.”

  “Is today a good day?”

  Brian leans in to check the time on his laptop. “He’ll start moaning soon,” he says. “It’s not as bad as it was with Mom. Mom knew what was going on.” He slams the laptop closed, not embarrassed but done with it for now. “One of your spies tell you he was dying?”

  “I knew he was sick,” Carrie says. “I’m here for something else.”

  “Spy shit,” Brian says.

  “Yeah,” Carrie says. “Spy shit.” He clears shirts off the couch to make room for her. She hauls the bag up and onto her lap. “I brought something for you,” she says, pulling the Xbox out of the bag. “I stopped by the old house on the way out here. I was going to come right away, but I didn’t. I felt bad about not coming before. Every time I thought of coming, all I could think about was how long it’d been. And the house. I hadn’t been to the house since you left.” She hands it to him, and he examines it while she extracts the controllers and various wires.

  “Sweet,” he says flatly. “I’ll text all my friends and we can get a game of Fortnite going.” He drops the console on the floor next to the couch. Carrie wants to lock Brian and Emmeline in a room together until they sarcasm each other to death.

  “I thought it’d give you something to do.”

  “I have a job,” Brian says. “I work with compost, in case you wondered. Raking and stirring mostly. Shoveling when my back’s not bad. I’m off today.”

  “It is good to see you,” she says meekly.

  “You know what I think of when I see you?” he asks, turning to look at her for the first time. “I think of you standing in the doorway, telling me and Dad to get the fuck out of our house. I think about Dad asking what about mom and you stone-faced. So yeah, can’t say it’s awesome to see you. Go in and say goodbye to Dad and then go do whatever more important thing you have to do.”

  There’s no point arguing with him. She has no right to show up here as if she’s family. Whatever family she was a part of has been dismantled like the phone networks, denatured like gasoline. She leans across the couch and kisses Brian on his stubbly cheek. He bites his lower lip like he’s about to say something, then opens the laptop and stares blankly at the couple fucking on the screen.

  Carrie recognizes the smell of her father’s room. It hides under the other smells at the hospice, smothered in antiseptics and the heavy perfume of aging nurses. This is how death smells in the wild, bad meat intersecting with metal. It’s not human and at the same time intensely human, an element out of balance. This is what it smells like when something has been kept alive too long, Carrie thinks.

  When Waylon relayed the message that her father was sick, Carrie imagined it would be something exotic, something befitting the strangeness of the world as it is. She wanted to be the cause of his illness so his sickness could be part of her story. It happened so neatly with Miquel. His breakdown was a result of their history, a scene in the movie of her life. But Carrie’s father is dying of stomach cancer, the same as his father. He’d never been interesting in life. He’s no more interesting in death. Lying in the bed, rail thin and face twisted by bad dreams, he’s less a character in Carrie’s life than a piece of scenery. The coincidence that brought her here was only a coincidence; any meaning she tries to attach to his death is hollow and post hoc. She takes the wedding photo out of her sack and props it on the bedside table. She looks for space on the table for the books and, finding none among the pill bottles and the picture frame, piles them under the edge of the bed. She sits in the folding chair by the bed, letting time stand in the place where feeling ought to be.

  The raspy rhythm of her father’s breath lulls her to sleep, and when she hears voices, she mistakes them for a dream of strangers negotiating in another room. Moving with an oneiric plod, she goes into the next room to investigate. Brian is talking in heated whispers with two men Carrie hasn’t seen since the day they evacuated Deerfield. There’s something right about them all being together now. Kenny was her favorite from that second Bloom, which sometimes had too much of a locker room vibe until Kenny reined everybody back in. Justin was the worst. He tried to convince Carrie she should sleep with him for the sake of group morale, and when she told him to fuck off, he tried the same lines on Thandi.

  Carrie tries to push herself down into invisibility, but Kenny, who was always quick on the draw, extends his hand in her direction and her head fills with confetti. Her ability becomes a name she can’t remember; her consciousness flails at it with no effect. Feeling neon, screamingly apparent, Carrie drops to a knee to go for the short blade in her ankle holster. Justin points his finger at her, a child’s mimicry of a gun, and Carrie’s body lights up with electrical current, cold and sustained. Every muscle convulses and lets go, dropping her to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “Hey, kid,” says Justin, who called her that even though she had the longest tenure in their Bloom. “Long time.”

  She tries to form a question, to ask Brian why or what the fuck. Her mouth gawps like a fish’s as Kenny and Justin hoist her off the ground and drag her out, thanking Brian for his service and assuring him someone will be along to discuss his payment.

  Clay wears the pink Paul Smith button-down Dom got him three Christmases ago and a tight pair of midnight blue jeans and takes the B into Manhattan. They’re meeting at a Mexican place Dom likes on Orchard. They used to frequent it when they were dating, before the war. Clay worked for a publisher, and Dom planned parties for the city’s impossibly rich and dull. Neither had abilities; neither was special. Clay wondered what would have happened if the Pulse had changed one of them and not the other. None of the couples they knew split that way. There were couples who both resonated, couples who both didn’t. Dom arranged a going-away party for the latter before the evacuation of New York, and Clay wouldn’t go. He claimed someone had to watch Rai, but everyone knew he’d been in combat. There was no way to explain why he risked his life so some of their friends could be forced out of the city forever. Dom was relieved none of the soon-to-be evacuees showed up for the party. It’s better we all forget, he said.

  Everything about this lunch is planned to make Dom comfortable, but there’s a risk that all these things will be poisoned: the shirt, the restaurant. Dom took Clay out to a Thai place in Williamsburg the night he confessed that he’d been fucking one of his chefs. The food burned Clay’s tongue without tasting like anything. When they got home, Clay shoved the blazer he wore into the kitchen trash and threw up everything he’d eaten. This could be that all over again. Clay knows he’s being irrational; he’s put this off because the task will be painful. The aftermath will be better, but there’s a chance it will fall apart. Never rule out the end of everything.

  Dom got there before Clay, which already feels like a tactical disadvantage. He stands up when he sees Clay, straining not to run to him. Dom hugs him the way he used to when Clay came back from the front unharmed: a way that says don’t leave me again, a hug that implies never letting go.

  “How was your morning?” Clay asks as they sit down.

  “Putting out fires,” Dom says. “The wrap party for that war movie they’re making is tonight, and now the director wants it to have a DMZ theme.”

  “Nothing says party like a combat zone,” says Clay, sipping his wat
er.

  “He’s this twentysomething wunderkind, but the closest he’s been to war is an Oliver Stone retrospective at the Film Forum,” Dom says. Clay realizes a beat too late that he was supposed to laugh. “The party’s in a loft on Bedford,” Dom adds. “Rai has choir till late; you could come for the early part. They won’t break out the serious drugs until midnight.”

  Clay chuckles, which helps Dom relax. “No serious drugs?” Clay asks. “What’s the point?”

  “You and me, a night out,” Dom says, missing the rhetorical question, taking every opportunity to control which parts of the conversation are serious and which are playful. “You used to like parties.”

  The way he says it, as if a few years ago was the distant past, as if all of their relationship is dead on the slab, makes Clay angrier than is warranted. The waiter comes over at that moment but sees something in Clay’s face and finds other things to do.

  “There’s something I’ve been keeping from you,” Clay says, taking the conversational reins.

  “I got that,” Dom says. He sits up straighter, ready to take confession, ready to be left, to be hit. “Is it someone I know?”

  “It’s not anyone,” Clay says. “It’s about Rai.”

  Dom relaxes, not because he doesn’t worry about Rai, but because confused is better than sure. He can’t imagine anything worse than Clay leaving him for someone else, so whatever this is must be preferable.

  Clay tells him about the teacher’s conference and the talk with Fahima at the Ruse. He lets Dom understand the time he’s let pass, the duration of this secret. The waiter hovers nearby but has the decency not to interrupt. When Clay’s story is over, the ice in their glasses is melted and fruit flies investigate the untouched salsa. The first thing Dom says will tell Clay everything. He’ll know whether this has been a killing blow to them.

  Dom takes a deep breath. “What are we going to do?” he asks.

  “We’ll take care of him like we promised we would,” Clay says. “Like we always do.” It doesn’t matter that he has no idea how they’ll do it. What matters is they’ll be together in it. He slides his hand across the tabletop, and Dom grabs it, squeezing hard.