The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  These men had visited Tom in the hospital, where Lucy had held constant vigil. They took up a collection to help Lucy and the four kids, and they kept quiet when Sam, too young to grow a patch of beard if you gave him a month and a miracle, applied for a job in the mine. They’d been at Tom’s funeral and come to the reception after at this same house whose lawn they were trampling over.

  “It’s awful late, Danny,” Lucy said. She ignored the rest of them. “Is there something you’re needing?”

  “We came for Sam,” Danny said, avoiding her eyes.

  “Sam’s earned his rest. Don’t you think?”

  Danny didn’t answer. He stepped past her into the living room. The other men followed, crowding in until Lucy was pressed against the wall. Woken by the noise, the four Guthridge children stood in the hallway that led to their bedrooms. Sam was in a tee shirt and baggy shorts. He looked, Scott Lipscombe thought, like a boy. It was easy to miss that working alongside him, but now, thin limbs jutting out of clothes that were once his father’s, Sam didn’t look old enough to drive. His younger brother, Jeb, was in flannel pajamas, and the girls, Melody and Paige, were both in nightgowns. The three little ones huddled behind Sam, who held his hands stiff at his sides, fists clenched.

  “Come with us, son,” Danny said.

  “Not your son,” said Sam. He didn’t move. Paige coughed, shaking off a cold she’d picked up at school. Little Jeb patted her back and rubbed it, then put his hands at his sides, fists tight like his big brother.

  The room seethed with drunk energy. Marc Medina giggled nervously, and Alvin McLaughlin shushed him. Scott Lipscombe had his twelve-gauge hanging at the end of his arm, chambers full of rock salt. He felt a fat bead of nervous sweat roll down his temple, and he raised the gun to wipe it with his sleeve. That was when he saw it. He was sure he did. A blue glint in Sam’s eye. He remembered the smell of rock burning as the light cut through it. He imagined himself sliced in two and wondered what burnt-meat smell his own body would give off. If the smoke would hit his nostrils before he died.

  He emptied two chambers of rock salt into Sam Guthridge’s gut.

  Sam doubled over, the wind knocked out of him. Lucy pitched forward toward Scott, but Alvin McLaughlin grabbed her around the waist and spun her like a drunken dance partner. Paige, the littlest one, screamed. She held the side of her face where she’d been struck. She pulled her hand away to check for blood.

  There was none. Where the salt crystals had hit, seven on her cheek and forehead, bright blue light shone through punctured skin.

  “Shit,” said Danny, “it’s all of them.”

  * * *

  —

  When the fire burned itself out, the men dispersed. Most went home, where they lay awake next to their wives until dawn. Their minds were full of sounds that would wake them some nights for what was left of their lives.

  A small knot, Danny and Joe and a couple of others, took bottles to the mouth of Shaft L. It was blocked off. The fence was a row of sickly teeth. It was the only time the men would talk about what had happened.

  “Those lights in her head,” said Scott Lipscombe. “They reminded me of a toy I had when I was a kid.”

  “Lite Brite,” Danny said. “I thought that, too.” He could picture the lights, the way they traced jagged lines in the dim room as Paige Guthridge’s body hitched with sobs. Every time the men cut her, light poured out of the wounds. Danny Randall thought that when she died, the lights would fade like in a theater at the start of a movie. But they went out suddenly, like a candle.

  The phone on the nightstand buzzes and pulls Avi Hirsch up from a dream of being tossed in the air and falling, tossed and falling. The arc his body makes in the dream becomes a loop. He flails awake. The dream is recurrent, felt in his body rather than his mind. A year out of the hospital and he can’t remember on waking where he is. Kay has lost patience with this morning thrash of limbs and makes it a point to be up and out of bed before him. Avi grabs at the phone as it skitters toward the edge of the nightstand.

  “I sent you something,” says the voice on the other end. “A weird one. Take a look.” The voice pauses, waits.

  “Good morning, Louis,” says Avi. Louis Hoffman is Avi’s friend and occasional informant at Homeland Security. He works out of Homeland’s Chicago office, but he and Avi have known each other since Louis’s days as an army liaison. Louis hasn’t called since Avi got out of the hospital.

  “Look at it,” Louis says. “Right on your phone. I’ll wait.”

  “I’m in bed,” says Avi, rolling himself up to a seated position.

  “What happened to ‘the news never sleeps’?” Louis says.

  “That’s not a saying,” Avi says. “Besides, I’m not—”

  “Put your eyes on it and call me immediately,” says Louis, and hangs up. Avi sees the subject line on his home screen: Roseland/Ballston Common Bombings. His heart speeds up a little, that junkie rush. He thinks about opening it right now, before anything else. But Kay has let him sleep in, which sets them all behind schedule. He puts the phone on the nightstand, facedown. He picks up the sock from the floor and his prosthetic from its spot against the bed. The physical therapist says that over time, amputees start to think of their prostheses as part of their bodies. It feels like a foreign object to Avi. It looks like a plunger capped with a plastic foot. A half-witted piece of sculpture. He goes through the ritual of attaching it to his left leg below the knee. The process is boring while requiring close attention. A bad fit becomes painful as the day wears on, unbearable by lunch. In the beginning, Kay tried to help. The angles were better. It was easier for her to perfect the fit. But Avi was so angry in those first days home from the hospital. He yelled. Swatted her hands away. He apologized, and she assured him there was no need. It was important he accept his anger, understand it as justified. She knew that in time it would flow into the correct channel rather than spilling out at her like lava over its cooled levee. Eventually she stopped offering to help with the prosthesis. She stopped offering help with stairs or getting into the minivan in case assistance implied that she thought he was helpless. She leaves him this moment every morning. Alone with his leg.

  He hears the first click of the pin into the socket and eases his weight on it. There’s the deeper click, the one that echoes up his thigh. The one he can feel in his teeth. He rolls the leg of his sweatpants back down and examines his feet. The foot of the prosthesis is a shiny plastic foam, its color chosen to match Avi’s skin tone. It’s too pink, like cartoon flesh. The toes have toenails carved into them. He wonders if customers demanded this detail from the manufacturer or if the designers came up with it themselves. A little attempt at normality that makes the thing even stranger.

  The floor is cold against the sole of his real foot. Avi puts on slippers and goes downstairs. Kay is at the kitchen table in the rattiest of her several bathrobes, the lavender one that offsets her dark brown skin. Her hair is up in a green silk wrap, a few tight curls escaping. She’s reading a Nnedi Okorafor novel. The amount she reads amazes Avi. She works in immigration law, zeroing in on the minutiae of the government’s shifting edicts and decrees, then fills her spare moments with science fiction and detective novels. She takes the train into the city rather than accepting a ride for the extra hour with her books. As he comes in, she gives him a bored grin that says, oh, you’re here. It’s what Avi feels reduced to this past year: the guy who keeps showing up every morning, wanted or not.

  Their seven-year-old, Emmeline, is at the stove cooking eggs, standing on a stool to reach. She’s wearing an old apron over her school clothes. It’s so long on her that Avi worries she’ll trip over the hem. Her hair, a riot of dark corkscrews, is pulled back into a tie, exploding out the back of her head.

  “Did you teach her that?” Kay asks. There’s an accusation built into the question, and Avi is quick to defend himself. It will
be a long time before he invites Emmeline near the stove. Kay doesn’t cook. Avi taught Emmeline how to make toast, not much else. But here she is, flipping the eggs and folding them back on themselves, deft as a short order cook. Avi watches over her shoulder, then pushes her bangs back and kisses her forehead.

  “Where’d you learn to cook, Leener?” he asks.

  “They’re for you,” says Emmeline. “For your big day.”

  It’s a smooth dodge of the question, put forth with Emmeline’s strange assuredness. She fixes Avi with her eyes, blue made paler by contrast to her skin, darker even than her mother’s. Then she goes back to work. Around the girl’s icy irises runs a ring of navy blue. When Emmeline was born, Kay’s mother said that this meant she’d have second sight. Kay told her to can it with that hoodoo noise. But there is something ethereal about their daughter. She seems to know things as if she’s come prepared for all the big moments in her life, along with some of the small ones. On Emmeline’s first day at kindergarten, when Avi dropped her off, he told her she was going to have a great day.

  “No, I’m not,” Emmeline said, not sad but factual. “But you’ll come get me after I fall.”

  “Always,” Avi said. He thought it was a testament to Emmeline’s faith that he’d be there for her. A verbal trust fall, he said when he recounted it. After lunch, Avi got a call from the school. One of the other kids, some racist little shit, Kay called him, had pushed Emmeline off the top of the slide. Avi sped to pick her up. Emmeline wasn’t hurt or upset. Avi told the story to other parents in the vein of isn’t it funny how prescient they seem sometimes. No one ever responded with a similar story, and Avi stopped bringing it up.

  “Big day?” says Kay. She doesn’t look up from her book, but a smirk plays on her face.

  “Not that I know of,” he says.

  “Who was on the phone?” Kay says.

  “Louis at Homeland. He sent something. I’ll look at it once I’ve got you all out the door. It’s probably nothing.”

  Kay shifts her bookmark from its arbitrary spot near the back to where she’s at and closes the book. “Is it about the church by my mom’s?”

  “I don’t know what it’s about,” he says. “I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  “If it’s the church, you should pass it on to someone else.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I probably will.”

  “Avi,” she says, hanging on that probably. She looks at him, then at Emmeline’s back, then at him again. Her meaning is clear from the fact that she won’t talk about it in front of Emmeline: I don’t want you writing about dead black girls in this house. Avi wants to tell her it’s not her business what he writes about and it’s not her decision what he can and can’t handle. He doesn’t.

  “I’ll pass it off,” he says. “If that’s what it is.”

  Kay holds him with her eyes a second longer, then reopens her book.

  Emmeline clicks the burner off. “Today,” she says, half to herself. “Today things will start.” She scoops eggs off the skillet and onto a plate, which she hands to Avi. A moment of reversal, the child performing the action of the parent with uncanny accuracy.

  “None for me?” says Kay, trying to be playful, to wipe the tension away.

  Emmeline shakes her head. “You had toast,” she says. She points at the plate. “Try.” He obeys. Kay prefers her eggs a gooey, amorphous mass, so that’s how Avi cooks them. These are made for him, the way he’d make them for himself. Dry, overcooked so the snotlike quality that catches in Avi’s throat is gone.

  “They’re perfect,” he says. Emmeline nods. She knew they would be.

  * * *

  —

  After he drops Emmeline off at school, Avi trudges up the steps toward his home office. Kay wants him to move his office out of the attic. There are no railings on the drop-down ladder, and she’s sure he’s going to topple. She imagines him lying on his back for hours like a stranded turtle, waiting for someone to get home. But the office is familiar. It’s one thing that’s remained normal in his life since he lost his leg, and he needs it. A place to return to even if getting there is hard.

  This prosthetic, his third, is the best he’s had for walking over flats. He misses the last one when it comes to climbing the ladder or ascending stairs. His doctor says he’ll be ready for a permanent leg next summer. It takes time for the swelling to normalize. Avi reads up on prostheses the way some men shop for new cars. Kay says go all out. “Shoot the moon,” she says. She imagines something robotic. She sees him as a comic book hero, a cyborg. Avi reads articles on the torsional strength of certain plastics. He visits online forums for amputees that winnow into more and more specific groups. Vets stick with other vets. Users with prosthetic knees don’t have time for shin shoppers like Avi. Nested within every inclusive community is another whose losses are worse. Avi has settled into one of the outer circles of the group, his tragedy major but not as bad as it could be.

  He makes it up the ladder and pulls the hatch up behind him. He drops heavily into the chair at his desk, the one Kay bought at a yard sale the month after they moved in. Everything in the attic is secondhand. Bookshelves at staggered heights. Mismatched rugs, some chosen for ugliness, covering the wood floor he’s sanded but never finished. The computer is an ancient desktop, a glorified typewriter. It takes a minute for it to whir to life, another to open his in-box. Kay wants to buy him a new one. She wants him to know that they’re doing okay moneywise even though he hasn’t been writing since the hospital. Avi drums his fingers. The e-mail has been calling to him all morning, more loudly than he cares to admit. He turns on the space heater, and the room fills with the smell of toasted dust. The porthole high up on the western wall, opposite the desk, is the only place sunlight comes in, one octagonal shaft through the dust motes that creeps across the floor over the course of the day. If there’s sunlight on his computer, it’s time to stop working and return to the world.

  The message from Louis is the only one in his in-box. Two videos, one dated last week, the other the month before. He recognizes the dates. The older one was the bombing at the mall outside DC. Nineteen killed. Homeland identified the bomber as some angry white male, killed in the blast. The more recent one was in Roseland, an hour’s drive from here, near Kay’s mother. Salem Baptist, a black church. Two dead. The black community in Chicago was livid, the mayor caught hell, but the national press didn’t do much with it. These things happen too often to be newsworthy. Avi was surprised these fell into Homeland’s lap: the agency rarely was let loose on white indigenous terrorists. Louis called Homeland’s unrelenting focus on Muslims its “mandate for Mecca.” Avi had gone out for beers with Louis and his coworkers. Off the clock, they said they were more scared of being shot up by an angry white male than by an imagined jihadi. They all knew guys like that or guys who were one bad day away from becoming guys like that.

  Avi clicks on the first video. The mall. It’s camera phone footage, grainy and jittering. It pops up in a small window on his screen. A girl, early teens. She’s chubby and sweet-faced, ears newly pierced at the kiosk by the food court. She turns left, turns right. The stud catches the fluorescents and throws them at the camera. A flare, an x of bright pixels.

  Here is the truth of all evidence: it hides in the ordinary. The moment believes you can’t see it because it looks like everything else. Avi attends to backgrounds. He watches for glitches in the pattern. A van parked where it shouldn’t be. A man in the souk who moves through the crowd more slowly than those around him. Avi wonders about the camera’s operator. A boyfriend, maybe, or a best friend. His mind flashes to Emmeline, perpetually friendless, proudly alone. Then he focuses. A couple, boy and girl, argue in the corner of the frame. Escalating, drawing attention. The camera shifts. The glittering stud at the center of the shot hovers at its edge. The boy is shouting, but the audio is muddy. He’s skinny, hatchet-faced. Sunken eyes a
nd dirty blond hair. Avi leans in, searching for the vest. The belt. The detonator in hand. He expands the image until it covers the whole screen. The low resolution becomes more pronounced. People are stacks of squares. Colors move like storm fronts on a TV weather map. But there’s nothing. The boy and girl wear tan polo shirts, uniforms from one of the franchise restaurants in the food court. With better resolution, you could read their name tags. The boy holds out his empty hands like he’s begging her for something. His palms turn out, pushing her back. His hands are empty.

  There is no bomb.

  Then comes the blast.

  The frame goes white. As if the glint off the earring had been a precursor, a trial run. From this distance, the blast wave of an explosive device should be enough to blow the camera backward. But the person who’s filming holds steady long enough to show that the girl with the earring is gone. Everything that had been there is gone. The camera clatters to the floor. The screen goes black. In the dark, people scream.

  Avi watches the footage nine more times. He pauses the screen on the whiteout and calls Louis.

  “What did I see?” he asks.

  “Did you watch both?”

  “I’m watching the mall,” Avi says. “There’s no blast.”

  Louis chuckles. It’s a grim sound. Louis took a job with Homeland after three tours with army infantry and a year as a military press liaison. When Avi met him, he was the kind of guy who’d get drunk and brag about the shit he’d seen. Now when he has too much, he gets a deep blank stare as if something in him has shorted out.

  “Watch the other footage,” he says. “I’ll wait.”

  Avi clamps the phone between his ear and his shoulder and clicks on the other file. The one he was avoiding. It’s similar. Shaky cell phone footage. The nave of Salem Baptist, shot from the back. A little girl zigzags through the pews in the methodical way small children play. The camera follows her. She has short hair in cornrows, and she’s younger than Emmeline. Avi doesn’t conflate the two girls. He doesn’t put Emmeline in the picture. A boy, white, walks up the center aisle. The preacher, elderly, black, is at the pulpit. He’s wearing reading glasses. Leaning in close, so he doesn’t see the kid coming toward him. The preacher’s name is Marshall Baldwin. Kay’s mother talks about him even though she goes to First Corinthians. Baldwin was the pastor at Salem Baptist thirty-some years. Served on the Roseland city council. Started the community’s meals on wheels program, along with a garden beautification initiative. Avi has read about the bombing, about Pastor Baldwin. In every article, he skims over the name of the girl, refusing to let it into his head.