The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  On the way home, her father was disappointed by her lack of amazement. You have to think about the time that went into it, he said. All those hours setting them up, positioning them. It’s impressive.

  She didn’t have to think about the time—the results were all that mattered, and the results hadn’t amounted to much—but she tried it his way. It changed her reaction from underwhelmed to sad. She felt bad for the people who had spent hours on their knees, placing thousands of dominoes to amuse a room full of kids who’d rather be somewhere else. She felt like she’d failed those people and her father by not being forever changed by the sight. The only thing that made her happy was that it had worked: each domino in the sequence dropped as it was supposed to. She could imagine the embarrassment she’d feel on their behalf if the chain had been broken, the collective gasp as one misplaced domino failed to fall.

  If this fails, I’ll be a lot worse than embarrassed, she thinks.

  The kids at the Flagstaff mall are confused when she appears from nowhere, but Tuan is happy to see her. They seem older, as if adulthood came and took something from them while she was away. They throw a party to celebrate her return, although Emmeline suspects they’re using her as an excuse to throw a party. Some of the kids have been making wine out of the grapes grown in the makeshift greenhouse, and, reasoning that it can’t taste worse than gin, Emmeline tries some. It does, in fact, taste worse than gin.

  Emmeline asks about kids she remembers from the last time, and Tuan shrugs. “Bunch of people coupled off and split,” he says as he sips out of crystal stemware in the center concourse. Rain patters on the glass dome of the atrium, and one of Hayden’s albums plays over the mall’s main speakers. Designed for piping in Muzak, they make Hayden’s voice sound tinny. These aren’t songs to dance to, but people make a go of it, swaying like sea grass in rhythm with the rain as much as to the beat of the music. “Estella and Percy decided to head east and apply for repatriation or whatever. Like they’re going to show up and everyone’s going to be like Oh, you have zero dollars, yes, let’s get you set up in an apartment and shit.” He hiccups and slurps his wine.

  “New York has universal housing,” Emmeline says. “With all the people who left, they have space.”

  “Who says a couple is the best thing?” he says. “Who thinks they need to get back to nuclear family shit? Families break. They mess you up. Kids want to fall in love and move out to the suburbs? Who taught them that?”

  “It’s in movies,” Emmeline says. “It’s in books. They remember something good about it. It’s familiar, which feels like being safe.”

  “The older kids pair up and move out. The younger ones look at me like, Get out of the way, Dad.” He turns to look at her, and it’s a movie moment: the dimmed light of the mall concourse, music playing, reunited after time apart, across distance. “Maybe they’re right,” he says as he leans toward her. Emmeline hears the hiss of the mall speakers, the buzz of the fluorescents. She sees the blue stains on his teeth and the glassy haze in his eyes, tastes the ugly tang of the wine in her mouth. She turns her head so Tuan’s nose brushes her cheek. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean—like, we could just—”

  She puts her hand on top of his, flips his palm up, and holds it. “It’s okay,” she says.

  “I didn’t mean to weird you out,” Tuan says. “Like you said, it’s in the movies and everything. If you love something and it comes back or whatever. But it’s bullshit.”

  “I don’t think it is,” Emmeline says. “I’m not sure that’s going to happen for me.”

  “You bought into the other line of bullshit,” he says. “About how you’re a weapon.”

  “Will you sit here with me?” Emmeline asks. “You can think it’s whatever you want it to be, and I can be here. I’m barreling forward as fast as I can, but also I’m trying to stop and breathe and collect moments with people. It’s funny, but there isn’t much time.”

  “Why’s that funny?” he says, draping his arm around her, letting her head rest on his shoulder. “I told you that before.”

  She smiles a smile he can’t see. On the rim of the fountain, a couple gives up waiting for the music to speed up and starts dancing on their own to a song playing in their heads, shared. When Emmeline left here, Tuan told her there would be no time for any of them to grow up. Youth is untenable in the long term. There are things she wants to get rid of, limits on the things she’s able and allowed to do. Then there are things she worries she’ll lose. Emmeline wonders if there are ways she’ll stop being able to feel as she gets older, like not being able to taste salt or see certain shades of green. She imagines giving up this over time for that. She wants to build a self that’s the best of both: wiser and more powerful but with the same size heart. Tuan meant that nothing was coming, that an ending would intercede between them and those future selves, but it’s the opposite. Everything is on its way, and it will sever them from the adults they thought they’d be. Those selves will be outdated and obsolete.

  She wishes she wanted him to kiss her. His kiss might wake something, the way her ability came back after years away. Fairy tales hint at the act creating the desire, the kiss waking not just the lover but love. A kiss won’t change her, but it isn’t a handicap or a lack even if she can describe it only in those terms. Her heart isn’t broken. She snakes her arm behind Tuan’s waist, hooks her thumb through his belt loop.

  “You understand belonging to something bigger,” Emmeline says. “What you built here, you built by understanding that.”

  “Otherwise you’re alone,” he says.

  “Do you wonder if you’re thinking big enough?” Emmeline asks. “Alone isn’t enough. A couple isn’t enough. Are you sure this is enough?” She gestures toward the rest of the kids at their revels.

  “There could always be more,” he says.

  “Do you think you could belong to everyone?” Emmeline asks. She thinks about what people look like from outside time. When she came looking for Tuan, she cheated and looked ahead. His life spirals together with someone else’s. She catches the girls glaring at her. One of you is for him, she thinks. Each person Emmeline recruits, she’s taking something from, stealing who they would be. She wishes it was clear who she needs. She wants enough and nothing more. Worse than wasting people’s futures would be to end up short and waste everything for nothing. If a single domino is missing, the chain breaks. She crafts apologies in her head and sends them to each girl who watches her as if she’s a thief come to steal Tuan. You’re right, she thinks. I have come for him and for the thing you would have had, because I need it, and I am so sorry.

  * * *

  —

  After she first resonated but before her mother found out, Emmeline snuck onto the stairs late Christmas Eve and watched her mother set the stage for the next morning, putting the gifts and the stockings just so, taking careful bites out of the cookies and carrots she’d had Emmeline leave out for Santa and his reindeer. Her father sat on the couch drinking wine, looking mildly annoyed the way he did when her mother insisted on any tradition with Christian roots. Even though Emmeline no longer believed in Santa Claus, it was as wondrous as coming down to see a magical stranger in a red suit putting boxes under a tree. How much did you have to love someone to do this for them secretly, to do it and work to cover it up? Emmeline isn’t sure she has that kind of love in her, but she needs to summon something like it.

  She folds into Carrie’s empty apartment weeks ago and places the Polaroid of Carrie and Hayden and the twins on the fridge. This is a thing that always happens: she does it because she knows she must have done it. It isn’t worth it to worry over the paradox of how the origin of the idea disappears into the loop.

  She folds into the headmaster’s quarters on the thirteenth floor of the Bishop Academy. As she emerges, she has the feeling of something stirring, like a sleeping dog that twitches at a noise
but doesn’t wake. The building knows I’m here, she thinks, and the thought is both irrational and true. She feels it watching her from above, all those stories clad in black glass aware of her, not recognizing her but registering her presence. She goes to the big window and places her palm against the cool of the glass. It trembles at her touch. Dawn breaks in the window. On the street below, a film crew sets up lighting rigs. Fahima will need a reason to start, a sign it’s about to begin. Emmeline takes the camera out of her bag. She stands as close as she can to the window to minimize the glare and takes a shot of the street below. She finds a Sharpie in Fahima’s desk and writes in the white space under the image: 5:45 A.M. WEDNESDAY JUNE 8TH. She goes to tape it to the window, thinking about what the photo will say to Fahima. What if she decides that it means someone’s broken in, taken the photo, and left it for her? Emmeline folds back a week earlier. She tapes the picture that won’t happen for days to the window—the impossible thing Fahima will need to get her off her ass. As Emmeline turns to go, she sees a woman sitting in the armchair, staring blankly forward, her hand absently stroking the air above the floor at her side.

  “Hi, Sarah,” Emmeline says.

  “Hello,” says Sarah Davenport with no recognition on her face.

  Emmeline comes close so she can whisper and be heard by only Sarah, not Fahima, not the building. “Don’t tell Fahima I was here,” she says.

  “Fahima is here?” Sarah asks.

  Emmeline tries to read through Sarah’s eyes and determine what remains in her head. She looks as if she’s a complete blank.

  “Sarah,” Emmeline says, taking both of Sarah’s hands in her own. She wants to create as many paths to this moment in Sarah’s mind as she can—sound, sight, touch. “I need you to remember your brother. Whatever else happens, I need you to remember him.”

  Sarah smiles. Her smile is dazzling in its purity and a little scary—it contains not even a hint of pain.

  “I remember Patrick,” Sarah says brightly. “How could I forget him?”

  * * *

  —

  The apartment looks like the aftermath of a wild party, but closer inspection shows the malice with which it’s been disarrayed. Nurse novels have been cleared off the shelves but also torn down the spine, DVDs removed from their cases so they could be snapped in half. Most telling, the brass statuette of Ganesh has been melting into a pile of slag on the rug. Unobserved in a doorway, Emmeline watches Alyssa move through the ruins deftly, already used to this new geography. She wonders if Alyssa made one decision not to clean when she came back and found it this way or if she makes that decision over and over, confronting what’s happened and retreating.

  Emmeline clears her throat, and Alyssa jumps. When she sees it’s Emmeline, her expression twists. “You came back,” she says. Emmeline is unable to read the statement, whether it’s relief or annoyance.

  “I thought you’d still be with them,” Emmeline says. “I was surprised you were gone.”

  “That must have been new for you, being surprised,” Alyssa says. Self-conscious, she begins picking up broken things from the floor.

  “Let me help,” Emmeline says, squatting down.

  “Don’t,” says Alyssa. “Is there something you’re here for? I told Fahima I wanted out. I was hoping she’d send a memo to the rest of you.”

  Emmeline holds the head of a Precious Moments figurine, a cherub face obscured by a doctor’s face mask. The ceramic is all jagged edges around the neck. There was a part to play for Alyssa in what was coming, and although someone else could do it, Emmeline had hoped to avoid that. If she asks, Alyssa will do it. There are people whose nature is to protest until they’re needed, at which point they set their feelings aside. But whether Alyssa will or won’t, she shouldn’t have to. Emmeline thinks about her parents and how if they’d allowed themselves to step out of the story, they might have lived.

  “I came to say goodbye,” Emmeline says. “I didn’t get to before. And thank you. You didn’t have to do any of this.”

  “I think I signed on a long time ago,” Alyssa says, sitting on the arm of the couch, cradling the rest of the doctor figurine in her upturned palms. “You were little, and you needed help, and I jumped in with both feet. I didn’t know how big it would be. But now I can’t anymore. It’s time for me to stop.”

  The first time Carrie saw Hayden play live, she had to sneak out of Bishop to a club in Brooklyn. The show was supposed to be a secret, but it was listed in the Voice, along with Time Out, BrooklynVegan, Under the Radar, and a dozen other music sites. Carrie called Hayden out on it, but Hayden texted that they were ALL ON THE LIST and it was IMPORTANT that she be there.

  She can’t remember the name of the venue. The room was so full, it seemed impossible that the people on the line outside would fit. Everyone looked like they belonged here. Carrie lived in New York for years without becoming a New Yorker, staying within the confines of Bishop. Even after Resonants went public and were free to move around the city without hiding who they were, New York made her feel like a kid from the suburbs who should be home listening to records rather than hanging among the hip and beautiful.

  There was a red velvet curtain, dense and dark. The lights in the bar went down, and people cheered for the darkness. They faced the curtain the way crowds make choices that are their own and everyone’s. For the second before the curtain crept up, Carrie thought she could live in that moment forever, waiting for an event in which she had total faith.

  She feels the same way sitting on an old rug in the attic of the house on Jarvis Avenue, knowing that staring at a wall isn’t special but actually is. Hayden sits next to her, fingers intertwined with hers. Clay and his whole family are there, along with Waylon and Bryce. Carrie thinks of the speech at the beginning of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in which he tells the listener they are gathered together to get through this thing called life. Why else does anyone gather together ever? Why flirt and kiss and meet up for coffee and send thank-you notes and fuck and fight? Carrie knows what it’s like to fail at getting through alone. She’s remembering what it might be like to succeed at getting through together.

  “If she can time travel, why isn’t she here already?” Waylon asks.

  “Making an entrance is important,” says Hayden.

  On cue, a door made of dark wood appears on the wall beneath the octagonal porthole. It doesn’t open for a second, then swings inward, with Kimani holding it open for them. She looks tired; the seed of heartbreak Carrie saw on her face when Carrie came to take Emmeline away has bloomed through her whole body.

  “Hurry,” Kimani says. “She set something up to get them looking the other way, but they’ll see us if we’re here too long.”

  They file in until it’s Rai’s turn. He pauses at the threshold.

  “Can I go through?” he asks. “Even though I’m not—”

  “You can come in, honey,” Kimani says. “We take all kinds. She’s been asking about you.” Rai smiles and might even blush as he steps through.

  They enter into a room that feels like it’s the basement of somewhere. Kimani shuts the door, and everything lurches. Carrie feels as if all natural sense of direction has been stripped from her. Her feet are below her, but she isn’t sure she could point at them and say they are down. The sensation doesn’t last as her brain accepts a new set of cues to orient itself, but the disorientation means they’re in Hivespace, detached from the world.

  “Come on; she’s upstairs in Fahima’s office,” Kimani says. “She said there’d be more of you, but she said a couple people might not join in until tomorrow.”

  “Where are we exactly?” Waylon asks.

  “You could say we’re nowhere or everywhere,” Kimani says. “I’ve been hanging out with Emmeline long enough I’m talking nonsense. Fahima says we’re in Hivespace, and that doesn’t mean anything. Or she says we’re in
Phoenix, but that’s not true anymore. I think of it as my room even though it’s bigger than that. Some folks here have started calling it Haven.”

  They fall into single file without being asked, and Kimani leads them up a stairwell like an elementary school teacher being followed by her class. They walk into a room whose walls are studded with thumbtacks and pushpins, none holding anything up. Carrie thinks of the day she moved out of the Bishop dorms, stripping posters from the walls and leaving torn corners and stray tacks for someone else to deal with. Emmeline sits on a desk in front of a blank whiteboard, talking with Fahima, who clutches a dry erase marker, ready to elucidate a point. A woman Carrie doesn’t know stands close enough to Fahima to signal they’re involved. Emmeline smiles broadly as they enter, and Carrie recognizes the look of feigned confidence, a fake-it-till-you-make-it boldness that’s easy to spot if you rely on it to get through every high-pressure situation. Carrie’s not bad at it, but Hayden owns that look and calls Emmeline’s bluff before they’re through the door.

  “Oh, shit,” Hayden says. “One of you has a plan.”

  “All her,” says Fahima. She gestures at the blank walls.

  Rai squares up in front of Emmeline as if they’re about to play rock-paper-scissors. “Two days,” he says. “You?”

  Emmeline sighs. “It’s complicated.”

  “You two know each other?” Clay asks.

  “She’s my imaginary friend,” Rai says, grinning.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Emmeline says to Rai. She turns to Carrie and pulls her into a hug. “It’s not too late to stop,” she whispers.

  “Feels too late to stop,” Carrie says. “Are you sure whatever you came up with is going to work?”

  “Pieces won’t fall into place unless it works,” she says. “It’s tough to see. But kind of exciting.”

  “I’m about done with excitement,” Carrie says.