The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  “Nyla thinks the coming attractions are hilarious,” Tuan explains. “All these movies they spent millions of dollars on, and they never got finished or no one ever got to see them or whatever. She always plays the preview reels.”

  He offers her popcorn, of which he assures her there’s a nearly infinite supply. On screen, an action star whose name Emmeline can’t remember leaps off a bridge and lands on the roof of a car. She remembers one movie they made about Resonants after they’d become public knowledge but before the war. She watched it in the Bishop common room with Viola and everyone else from their floor. It was a tense family drama about parents whose kid turned out to be a Resonant. The kid was the plot device, a reason for the drama rather than someone who experienced it. They’d watched it, cracking up at the corniness of the lines, the melodramatic angst of the parents.

  White letters on a black screen announce that the film is coming next summer, a summer been and gone. In the patch of quiet between the trailers, Tuan leans over toward her. Emmeline’s afraid he’s going to try to kiss her.

  “Do you want to stay?” he asks. “I mean, you could stay here with us.”

  “Did Carrie tell you to invite me?”

  He shakes his head. “But I can tell it’s why she brought you.”

  Something explodes on the screen. Looking at Tuan, Emmeline missed what the thing used to be; she sees it only as a fiery blast.

  Finally, the last of the previews ends, and the title card comes up for the actual movie. The audience cheers. Some of them sing along to the opening theme song, a big sweeping orchestral piece. As soon as a character speaks, it’s clear to Emmeline that all of them have seen this movie a million times and committed it to memory. Sometimes Kimani’s lips would move in sync with the dialogue of movies she especially liked. These kids aren’t so quiet about it. They speak every line. They heckle and argue with the characters, warn them when they’re making bad decisions. The characters continue on, oblivious. As the plot continues, the audience quiets down not because they’re tired but because they’re drawn in. The magic of it wins them over.

  The house lights come up suddenly, searing Emmeline’s eyes. The audience erupts in a chorus of what the fucks as the back door to the theater swings open, revealing Viola, who is wearing the same mean smirk Emmeline saw in the hospice in Boulder, and a man Emmeline deduces must be Kenny. Emmeline’s eyes dart around the theater, wondering where the other three are going to come from, the ones who restaffed the Bloom after Carrie killed the others, but there are only these two.

  Emmeline’s head fills with static, a loud buzzing and scraping that makes it hard to hold a thought. It’s Kenny throwing noise into her skull.

  “Hi, Emmeline,” says Viola. “I’ve been looking for you for so long.”

  “Everybody else out,” Kenny says. “We want the girl, and we give zero fucks about the rest of you.” Everyone is too scared to move, and Kenny rolls his eyes in annoyance.

  “Emmeline, come on,” Viola says. There’s something fundamentally changed about her. A light has gone out. Her smile is a sneer, a cruel thing for a girl who was never cruel. Emmeline can sense what it is, and she knows it’s her fault. The thing she did, the Pulse, soured something in all of them. It made them mean when they should have been kind. “It’s me. You know you can trust me.” Her hands glow in the dim like the coils on a stove. “Come here and give us a big hug.”

  “You’re not really like this,” Emmeline says.

  Viola takes a step toward her. The other door to the theater opens, and Carrie and Hayden are there. Carrie’s knife is already drawn, but as soon as she takes her first sprinting steps toward Kenny, she clutches her head and stumbles like a drunk.

  Zeroing in on one task, reaching through the noise, Emmeline grips the shackle on her wrist. Her fingers find the clasp, and for a second she doesn’t think it’ll come undone. It hasn’t come off in years; maybe it’s rusted shut, permanently attached to her arm. She hears a small pop as the clasp gives. She lets the shackle drop to the ground. For the first time since the day she caused the Pulse, Emmeline slips into the Hive, pulling Viola and her partner and everyone in the theater in with her.

  Her Hivebody crashes into a briar patch of black vines. They burn cold where they touch her but melt into air. Viola’s Hivebody looks the way Emmeline remembered her, petite and pale. The other man looks like a cloud of ticker tape raining down in an old-time parade, but his face registers the shock of being dragged into the Hive against his will.

  “You’ve got your ability back,” Viola says. “That’s great, Emmie; that’s really exciting.”

  “You’re not really like this,” Emmeline repeats. She sees it in them, a coil of darkness inside. It whispers to them, tells them they’re terrible and deserve nothing better than acting this way. It tells them nothing better than this is possible.

  “Emmeline, let’s go somewhere and talk,” Viola says, coming closer. “You never liked it in here, did you? We’re going to take you to New York. We’ll get coffee. Or cupcakes, like we used to.”

  “He put something in you,” Emmeline says. “I can see it, Viola. I can take it out.”

  “I don’t want it out,” she says. “It’s who I am.”

  “It’s not,” says Emmeline. “Let me show you. Let me remind you.”

  Emmeline can feel the part of Viola that isn’t her. She can feel it in both of them. She can reach out and touch it, so she does. It floods her head.

  Orphan, it says. Stupid little orphan girl, hunting for your parents in the graveyard, sleeping on their shrouds. It’s not just your parents, you know. Your friend Kimani is dead. Your little schoolmate’s a killer. And you, you’re not special. You’re a stupid little orphan girl.

  It speaks to her in her own voice, or tries to. But Emmeline has been hearing her own voice speaking to her for her whole life. She isn’t tricked by a tin-can devil. She grabs the thing in them that isn’t them and pushes against it. It holds fast. It’s strong, stronger than she remembers it. She’s been hiding, and it’s been expanding, building itself up. She hears a voice that is hers, her true voice, telling her she can do this. She feels the thing in them give, feels it let go so suddenly that the force she’s directing at it keeps moving outward, radiating.

  All around her in the Hive, the black flowers blow away like dandelion seeds, exposing the milky ground beneath. Hayden and Tuan look like they’ve come up from underwater, and Carrie falls to her knees, clutching her head. Emmeline feels something push back, as if she’s hit a wall, and moves toward the object, toward the blockage. It’s a spire, a tower she saw once before in a dream, a terrible vision she had once in Central Park with her parents before everything unraveled. It runs through the Hive like a skewer, pointing outward on either side into the real world, into the Source.

  The black flowers and their tentacles scrabble, spreading from the base of the spire, trying to reclaim purchase on the ground. She tries to hold the spire in her mind. She wraps her thoughts around it, and it creeps into them, the voice louder now and closer to the sound of her own.

  You scared your mother shitless; she thought of you as a creature, it says. Your father’s body lay unfound in the attic until it bloated and burst like a gangrenous balloon. He’d been there dead for days because you couldn’t be bothered to find him. His last thought was that all of this was your fault.

  It might all be true. It might be lies. Emmeline doesn’t care. She pulls back from the spire. She scoops up the little bits, the tiny malignant blooms inside Viola and Kenny and Carrie. She squeezes them with her grief and her love and her fear and her hope. She feels the cold burn of the black glass against her heart, and then they break. They shatter into a million pieces, and Emmeline remains whole.

  The house Waylon found for them is up in Rogers Park, a neighborhood that was once considered practically a suburb and is now home to
mostly harmless youth gangs that play elaborate ongoing war games in the abandoned houses. “But not this one,” he assured them. “Nobody touches this house.”

  “Why not?” Rai asked.

  Waylon and Bryce looked at each other for a moment. “The kids say it’s haunted,” Bryce said.

  The worst Clay can tell about the house on Jarvis Avenue is that it’s suffering from neglect. The lawn is waist-high, and hunks of the stucco siding have crumbled off, exposing the faded logos on the sealed Sheetrock beneath. Something domestic in Dom stirs to life as they enter the house. He’s never talked about home ownership before; it’s not something they could think about without leaving New York. Now, with a whole house that’s theirs, he has a flurry of ideas about design and repair, little fixes they can do. It’s a way for Dom to make this place feel permanent, but Clay can’t get excited the way he is.

  Unfortunately, Dom is all enthusiasm and no time, whereas Clay has nothing but time and zero enthusiasm. While Rai’s at his new school and Dom’s learning the ropes at Waylon’s bar, Clay mopes around the house, sometimes not showering until the last moment in the afternoon he can do so and be dried off when Dom gets home. Waylon sends Dominic home each night with enough food for the three of them, so there’s nothing Clay has to do during the day. His hours go pear-shaped, and he wants more than anything to call the Ruse, to see how things are going, to find out who’s occupying Theta Bay.

  He wants to know who’s been sitting in his Chair.

  At night, they listen to bands of youth rove the neighborhood, shouting taunts and catcalls, banging on every door in the neighborhood but theirs. Clay hasn’t seen any of them out during the day. He hasn’t seen them at all, but the sound of their games eases him to sleep.

  He explores the house on Jarvis Avenue, putting together the history of the family that once lived there from what they left behind. There isn’t much. They were a mixed-race couple with a daughter whose room Rai now occupies, but something about the house gives Clay the sense that the wife and daughter had left. There was a bachelor disarray to the house, one he recognized from the way he let the apartment degrade when Dom and Rai weren’t around for a couple days.

  On the second day he finds the drop-down door to the attic in the upstairs hallway. Thinking about wardrobes that lead to fairy kingdoms and beanstalks that stretch into the clouds, he climbs the stairs. The attic has been repurposed into an office with certain notes of a man cave: the record player and the dumpster-dive vibe of the furnishings. Feeling like he’s committing theft, Clay peruses the record collection and puts on A Tribe Called Quest, the lone hip-hop album he can find. Instantly relaxed by the sound, he feels licensed to intrude further.

  He boots up the ancient computer on the desk, tapping the keys impatiently as it struggles to come to life. The desktop is a clutter of document files. Clay picks one at random titled “NULL.” “On December 4th, a young Resonant named Owen Curry opened a hole in the world and fed nineteen people into it,” he reads. What follows begins like a piece of investigative journalism, but as it goes on, the writer becomes more and more integrated into the story until the story is no longer about a monstrous Resonant named Owen Curry but a sad, lonely man named Avi Hirsch who pursued Curry at the cost of his marriage and his friendships. The first time he sees the name, it feels impossible, but it’s quickly apparent that he’s in the house where Emmeline Hirsch grew up. He feels as if he’s violating sacred ground and tells himself he should shut off the computer, leave the attic, and move all of them to a less important place. Instead, he keeps reading.

  The A side of the album runs out, the needle scratching on the label. Before he can make it to the end of the story, Clay catches a reflection in the corner of the computer screen, a young woman with a headful of corkscrew curls. He whirls around in the desk chair, but the room is empty. Laughing at himself for being so easily spooked by Bryce’s mention that the house is haunted, Clay turns off the computer and the record player and goes back downstairs.

  That night Dominic comes home with a large tray of tiny hamburgers. “They found a body in Pilsen,” he says as he sets it on the counter. “Eito Higashi.”

  “Should I know who that is?” Clay asks.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Dominic says. He picks up one of the burgers and takes a dainty bite. “He was one of the guests at that thing the night of the bombing. Went missing after. Waylon’s guys say he washed up on the north shore of the South Branch this morning. He’d been…” Dominic looks at the burger in his hand as if reconsidering. He sets it on the counter, next to the tray, half eaten. “Bad stuff happened to him between then and now.”

  “Bad stuff’s happened to us between then and now,” Clay says.

  “Not all of it is bad,” Dominic says. “It’s new is all. And none of it is your fault.”

  “Tell the kid that,” Clay says.

  “You tell him,” Dominic says. “You’ve barely spoken to him since we moved out here.”

  “He’s barely spoken to me,” Clay insists.

  Dominic smiles at him. “But you’re the grown-up.” He puts a half dozen tiny burgers on a plate and holds it out to Clay. “Go be the grown-up.”

  Shoulders slumped in a posture Rai’s adopted too many times to count, Clay takes the burgers upstairs. From outside Rai’s door, he hears Rai talking to someone inside. He hesitates before knocking, but the talking stops. Clay knocks on the door. “Yeah,” says Rai. Taking it as an invitation, Clay goes in.

  “You on the phone in here?” Clay asks.

  “What phone?” Rai says, crossing his arms. “You all talk through the Hive, so who needs phones?”

  “I thought I heard talking,” Clay says.

  “I have to give some bullshit presentation tomorrow,” Rai says. “I was practicing.” Clay smiles, thinking about how even when Rai tries to rebel, he still does his homework. He holds out the plate.

  “Your favorite dad brought these home,” he says.

  “Don’t say that,” says Rai.

  “Calling it like I see it lately.”

  “It’s not like that,” Rai says.

  “So what’s it like?”

  “Why’d you fight in the war?” Rai says.

  “A lot of us—”

  “Why’d you?”

  Clay considers this. There are the reasons he tells himself, bullshit about injustice and oppression. But none of them feel sufficient. None of them ever did.

  “I grew up watching movies about people standing up for themselves,” he says. “All the movies. All the books. There’s a moment someone has to decide who they are, even if it’s a risk. People say things like If I was alive in Nazi Germany, I would have joined the resistance. You can say that, and it doesn’t cost you anything. Before the war, things were getting bad. Nazi Germany bad. And it was like, Here’s what I said I’d do in this situation. And here’s the situation. And I didn’t do anything. I went to a couple protests. I called my senators, and I donated money when I could. Then I stopped even doing that. I went online and complained and said how bad it all was, but that was all I did. I felt powerless. All the time.

  “Then the Pulse happened, and I wasn’t powerless,” he continues. “And the situation was the situation, and I always said I’d fight. Maybe it was because I hadn’t before. But I decided, Yeah, now I fight.”

  He looks at Rai, knowing his answers are insufficient. But Rai nods as if this jibes with what he thought he knew. He nods as if it’s okay.

  “That stuff you did in the Bronx,” Rai says. “It was scary.”

  “That was different,” Clay says. He sits down on the edge of the bed next to Rai, putting one arm around him in the way they’ve become comfortable with since Rai hit adolescence, then, impulsively, throws the other around him, pulling the boy in. “That time I was protecting you. That time I didn’t think about it at all.”
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br />   Buzzing with euphoria, the kids refuse to go to bed. They get the roadies to help them wire a phone into the amps and stage an impromptu dance party in the main concourse, thrashing and flopping around with abandon in their mangled formal wear. Carrie is alone on the balcony, leaning over the railing and watching them. She hears footsteps coming toward her, and all her instincts kick in; her hand goes to the handle of her knife. She’s angry the instincts are still there, wishing they’d shorted out along with the thing in her head. The ghost of a voice, the pulsating bit of hate that lived in her is gone, but it left behind violent neural paths that networked her body. It left guilt and recrimination and the blurred line between what that thing might have forced her to do and what she did willingly.

  “It’s me,” Emmeline says. “You okay?”

  Carrie nods halfheartedly.

  “The thing in your head is gone,” Emmeline says. “I squashed it. I think maybe that’s how they found us.”

  Carrie huffs a single laugh. “I was supposed to be keeping you safe, and I got you caught.”

  “I didn’t get caught,” Emmeline says. “I got my friend back.” She points at Viola down on the dance floor, her arms folded around her body as she sways gently to the music. She sees Emmeline and gives a wave, which Emmeline returns. “I helped you.” She’s asking, looking for affirmation she’s done the right thing.

  “You did,” Carrie says.

  “And now you’re going to go.”

  “I talked to Kenny,” she says. “The Faction is going to evacuate non-Resonants in Chicago. He says it won’t be as gentle as the last time, and the last time wasn’t gentle at all. My friends there are in trouble.”

  “Your friends here are in trouble.”

  “You can handle it. I think you can handle anything.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Emmeline says.

  “I know you can. Come here.” Carrie gathers the girl up in a hug, wondering at the slightness of her. “But you don’t have to,” she says. “Whatever they want you to do, you don’t have to do it. You know that, right?”