The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  The audio on this file is better. Avi can hear the boy talking, but he’s facing away from the camera and Avi can’t make out what he’s saying. Pastor Baldwin looks up. “You can’t be in here, son,” he says. Interviewed afterward, parishioners at Salem Baptist remarked on the deep basso of his voice, the way it resonated through the church, shook something in them. The boy continues his approach. “Miss Henderson,” the preacher says. “Call the police.” The boy turns to the camera. “Don’t bother,” he says. His voice is flat, emotionless. Then the flash. Again, white.

  Avi scans back a couple of frames. The moment before the flash. A clear shot of the boy. Dirty blond hair. Eyes sunk into a hatchet face. Tan polo shirt.

  “Jesus,” says Avi.

  “You want to see the scene?” Louis asks. “I can send a car over.”

  “I can drive myself,” Avi says.

  “Meet me there in an hour,” says Louis.

  * * *

  —

  Reporting on bombings is a low art among journalists. Information is tightly controlled. Reporters are left to paraphrase press releases. Avi has a gift for rendering these incidents in a way that can affect an audience that’s numb to them. His old editor at the Trib called him the poet of the detonator.

  Avi’s obsession goes back to the first American bomb. Home sick from school, he watched coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. There was no live feed, no footage of it happening. Only aftermath, the Federal Building sundered. Its face torn away revealed the rough structure beneath. Avi followed the investigation in the Trib and on the nightly news. He stared at pictures of the bombers, who looked like guys he went to school with. He read the descriptions of their grievances, their plans. He read stories of the victims, the survivors, their families. He read up on the bomb itself, cobbled together out of stolen blasting caps, fertilizer, and racing fuel. The bomb compressed the past of its builders and the futures of its victims into a point. Everything led up to it, and everything emerged from it.

  Through college and grad school, bombs haunted Avi’s dreams. It was a good time in America to dream about bombs. Old guard reporters were cold war kids. Their nightmare bombs were nuclear and bloodless. They imagined vaporization. An aftermath of ashes. Crowds reduced to a pile of powder. They were unprepared for broken bodies. Pieces of limbs without identifiable owners. They thought in terms of blown away rather than blown apart. A nuclear bomb was an end to all things. America had failed to dream about a bomb someone could survive. Worrying about smashed atoms, they forgot about fertilizer and racing fuel.

  Avi got his first embed in 2003, a year before he met Kay. It was where he met Louis, whose company he was stuck with for two months. Avi was in the market in Kandahar when some idiot blew himself up. He spotted the bomber before it happened. People at the market meandered or darted. Buyers moved slowly, sellers dashed. The bomber plodded, unrushed but deliberate. Avi saw him open his jacket to reveal the bomb. Ethylene glycol dinitrate, a clear liquid. It registered for Avi as a belt made of water bottles around the man’s waist as the bomber raised his cell phone like a tourist taking one last selfie in the souk. Avi was far enough away from the blast to remain standing and unscathed, mentally recording people’s frenzied reactions. He saw the smoke within the blast radius settle and the destruction it revealed. He saw the chaos around it, people frantic to get away from an event that was already over. Surrounded by panic, Avi was a calm eye.

  The Washington Post picked up the piece he wrote. It won the kinds of awards that were being given to well-written war journalism at the start of things. Other assignments and embed offers came in. Sudan. Aleppo. When he started dating Kay, trips to war zones were part of the rhythm of their relationship. If anything, it sped things along. Avi was away so often, it made sense for her to move into his apartment. Any time the annoyances of cohabitation built to near the point of rupture, Avi was off to the other side of the world for a month. When he got back, they were both so relieved he was alive, the counter was set back to zero. In their wedding photos, he has a black eye from the butt of a Ugandan military rifle.

  He stopped when Emmeline was born. When he looked at his daughter’s face, the risk and the adrenaline were ridiculous. He threw himself into parenting, spending all day with Emmeline while Kay studied for the bar. At night, he’d lie awake half hoping to hear her cry. Needing a reason to spring out of bed. A minicrisis. A dim echo of sirens and blasts. A few days after Emmeline’s second birthday, he got a call from Newsweek about an embed in Damascus. Kay had landed a job. There was no financial justification for him to take dangerous work. She was making more than he had in his best years, and foreign journalism paid shit money. No one cared about a decade-old war. It was background noise. Page 10 fill. Avi knew all this and took the job like a dry drunk convincing himself he can handle one beer.

  When he got back, they had the talk. Kay proposed that once a year Avi could accept a foreign assignment. The rest of the year he’d cover domestic terrorism, school shootings, and subway station gas attacks. He’d pick up local murder stories for the Trib. Mostly he’d take care of Emmeline and the house. Kay gifted him those terrible vacations because she understood something in him that Avi couldn’t articulate. His need.

  A year ago, embedded with Joint Terminal Air Controllers outside of Mosul, their JLTV hit a roadside IED. A garden hose across the road for a trip wire, triggering buried paint cans packed with triacetone triperoxide. You could make it from nail polish remover, hydrogen peroxide, and battery acid. Three of the men in the JLTV were shredded when the blast went up. A column of flame lifted the eight-ton vehicle fifteen feet and dropped it. Avi’s left leg was burned away to nothing below the knee, the stump cauterized.

  The next day, doped up on pain meds in a military hospital in Kirkuk, he thought how he’d been chasing this bomb most of his life. You couldn’t even wait for it to come to you, he thought. You had to go get it.

  * * *

  —

  Salem Baptist is right off the interstate. Homeland has it tented, wrapped like a present. If the intention is to discourage curiosity, it fails. Traffic crawls by. Even in the cold, drivers roll down their windows and crane their necks as if they can peek behind the curtain. Only the locals remember what’s underneath. The bombing made the news, but people don’t keep track of the locations of these things unless they’re nearby. What difference does it make where this one went off? Where those kids were shot? The important thing is that it wasn’t your town. Wasn’t your kid. You wait for one you can connect yourself to second- and thirdhand so you can talk about it at parties. You heard it from your house. Your friend’s cousin is in a wheelchair for life. The other details blur into the next incident. As long as you and the people you love remain intact.

  Avi takes the right up the drive. Someone from Homeland is on him immediately, shooing his van back onto the road. His attire, thrift store parka over a ratty cable-knit sweater, does not scream professionalism. Avi rolls down his window and holds out his driver’s license.

  “Avi Hirsch for Agent Hoffman,” he says. The kid from Homeland snatches the ID. The department is less than twenty years old, and no one’s been in it since the beginning. They come in clean cut and young and leave broken and scruffy. Louis says the life span of a civilian recruit into Homeland is five years. They burn out and transfer to a desk job at the IRS, and no one ever hears from them again. The only people who stick around are ex-military. Those are the guys who bust doors down in a cloud of tear gas and flashbang, never the kids checking IDs at the gate. This kid sizing Avi up, comparing his picture to his driver’s license. He’s hard now, fixing Avi with a stare designed to reduce a suspect to tears. Avi’ll bet the kid didn’t see this scene until it was cleaned up. Somewhere down the line, something is waiting for this kid. A bloody mess. A dog’s dinner. Something he won’t be able to unsee. The hard will go out of those eyes, and he’ll put in
for a transfer to somewhere safe.

  “You’re the gimp expert,” the kid says. Faked military contempt for outsiders. Rookie badassery.

  “Expert gimp is better,” says Avi. The kid waves him through. Avi catches a look of envy from the drivers left in traffic behind him. As if Avi’s been ushered through the velvet rope into an exclusive club. The tent opens around the back, away from prying eyes. Louis rushes to help him out of the car. Louis knows other amputees, but he treats Avi as fragile, an invalid. Avi imagines what he looks like stepping out of the minivan. The mechanical plant of his left leg on pavement. The slow, careful shift of weight. He moves quickly to preclude assistance and has the door shut behind him by the time Louis reaches the van.

  “You’re early,” Louis says.

  “Lead foot,” says Avi. It doesn’t get a laugh. None of his jokes about the leg do. Kay laughs sometimes but won’t make jokes on her own. The forums online are full of jokes. The Endolite Elans are nice, but they cost an arm and a leg. Did you hear what the kid with no hands got for Christmas? I don’t know; he hasn’t opened it yet. Jokes soften the reality of it, but they also assert ownership. This pain is mine, and I will do with it what I choose. Avi wonders how he’d react if Kay did make a joke about it.

  Louis leads him into the tent. The white fabric amplifies the sunlight, turning it fierce. The whole space is a slide on a microscope. An array of spotlights hangs from the corners and edges. Light from every direction. Every shadow blotted out by light from a different vector. Louis puts on dark aviators. They make him look like a G-man in the movies, broad shoulders and dark blue suit, eyes obscured.

  “It’s ridiculous in here during the day,” he says. He gestures at the lights. “Techs say we can’t shut them off.”

  Avi squints up at the building. What’s left of it. It looks like God came down and took a bite out of the church. Half of it clipped away. A rapture in miniature, Avi thinks. His terrible swift sword. It’s an old church, one of those Black Baptist churches where they planned rallies against Jim Crow. How many bomb threats did Salem Baptist get over the years? How many bricks through the window? How many times did they have to paint over hateful graffiti on the front doors before Sunday service? How hard and often did they fight to exist, only to have some white kid blow it up?

  He approaches slowly. Destruction at this scale demands respect. It holds you in a sick sense of awe. He takes out his phone and brings up the footage, playing it back in slow motion. He holds up the screen and moves around the edge of the blast crater. He steps behind the last row of pews. When he gets to the point where the picture overlaps the reality, he stops.

  “Anyone else in the press seen the footage?” he asks.

  “You think I’d double deal on you?”

  “The woman who shot it,” says Avi. “Was the girl her daughter?”

  Louis shakes his head. “Preacher’s granddaughter. Her parents died when she was a baby.”

  That’s good, Avi thinks. He’s relieved there are no grieving parents for him to think about, empathize with. He walks forward toward the blast crater. He puts his left foot in and slips. The surface is slick. Louis is there to catch him, holding him at the elbow.

  “Everyone here’s gone ass over teakettle at least once on this thing,” he says. “It’s smooth as glass.”

  Louis guides him along the curve to its nadir. The blast ate two feet into the ground. At the edges, techs scrape and peer. This has become familiar. Not just to Avi but to the world of viewers. A building ripped open, its guts exposed. Rebar severed and pipes idiotically leaking fluids into midair. This one is different. There are no jagged edges. Once he notices this, Avi starts to notice the other things he isn’t seeing.

  “You sanitized the site?” he asks.

  Louis shakes his head. “This is how we found it.”

  “Where’s the debris?” says Avi. “Where’s the scorching?”

  Louis shakes his head again. It’s as if someone carved a sphere out of the world. There’s a symmetry to it. A perfection. The movement of a blast aspires to this, but the real world gets in the way. The blast expands haphazardly. Nibbling here and feasting there. It’s a collection of vectors moving at different speeds, each with a life span of nanoseconds, spending themselves in a race away from their point of origin.

  This is different.

  “Let me say that if you have anything on this,” says Louis, “it would be a huge help to me. Because a week in and I have whatever is less than zero as regards ideas.”

  “Is that why you asked me down here?” Avi asks.

  “You’re good with this stuff,” says Louis. “I thought you’d pick up a vibe.”

  “I’m not a hotline psychic.” Avi climbs up the other curve and lays a hand on the severed wall. Concrete, a foot thick. He traces a line from inner edge to outer. The barely detectable curve. The edge of a spheroid of lack, of void. “Tell me about the bomber.”

  “Are we going right to that?” Louis asks. “Are we skipping over the tonnage of debris that doesn’t exist?”

  “It’s the same kid that blew up the mall,” says Avi.

  “It would appear to be,” Louis says.

  “You think it’s, what?”

  Louis shrugs. “Twins? I like the idea it’s twins. Gives it a real murder mystery feel.”

  “It’s not twins,” Avi says.

  “The boys with the facial recognition software swear it’s the same kid,” he says. “They say telling twins apart is consumer-grade shit. It’s the same kid. Owen Curry, eighteen, of Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Perfect overlap of boring and crazy. Lived with his mother, who we haven’t been able to find. Worked as a fry cook at Planet Chicken in the Ballston mall food court. Bottom third of his class in school. No girlfriend. No friends. We ID’d him from witness statements. And the footage.”

  “But he didn’t have a bomb on him in the footage.”

  “Certain people were willing to overlook that in favor of having a shut case.”

  “You find supplies at his house?” Avi asks. “Bomb-making instructions? Anarchist’s Cookbook?”

  “Nothing,” says Louis. “Makes no sense. For one thing, angry white males tend to be shooters, not bombers. Bombing’s for believers. But then also, his place is clean. No bottles, no stray wire clippings. If you’re going to blow yourself up, why clean up afterward? Leave a mess, I say. Fuck, help us out and leave a note.”

  * * *

  —

  Sunlight from the porthole window creates a glare on the top of Avi’s screen as he watches the video from the church again. His brain picks it apart, like watching a magician do a trick to figure out how it’s done. He can’t be seeing what he’s seeing: a dead boy blowing up a church without a bomb. He tries to see something else, something that makes sense, but the reality of it persists.

  There’s a banging from the hatch. Kay keeps a broom in the hall for when she needs to roust him from work. It hasn’t been used in a year.

  “Avi!” she yells. “Where the fuck are you?”

  Avi jumps out of the chair, nearly toppling. He goes over to the hatch and gives it a push, too hard. It drops fast, swinging toward Kay. She catches the edge and lowers it.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Everything clicks into place. Avi returns to the world. The sunlight on the computer screen. Hunger growling in his gut.

  “What time is it?” he asks. He eases himself down the ladder. Going down is harder.

  “Six-thirty,” she says. “The school’s been calling you. I’ve been calling you. I had to get a cab from work and go pick her up.”

  “My phone—”

  “It’s in the living room,” she says. “Doing no one any good.”

  “Shit, Kay,” he says. “I’m sorry. This stuff Louis sent me—”

  “You said you were going
to pass on it,” she says. She stands with her arms crossed, watching to be sure he doesn’t fall but not helping him down. He doesn’t have anything to say. Once he’s off the ladder, she turns away from him. “We stopped at McDonald’s. You’re on your own for dinner. You should go apologize to her.”

  Kay goes into their bedroom and closes the door. The argument feels like a relic, something left over from the time before. Avi doesn’t want to be the person who forgets anymore. The one who climbs out of a bomb crater to discover he’s broken a promise. Tomorrow he’ll call Louis and tell him he’s got nothing. He’ll call Carol at the Trib and ask for assignments. School boards and common council meetings. Double homicides. Something local, safe.

  He stands outside Emmeline’s door. She’ll be over it by tomorrow. An apology is meaningful only right now. Inside, she’s talking to herself. He can hear the tone but not the content. The high musical cadence and bounce of his daughter’s voice, broken up by long pauses. Emmeline has always had imaginary friends. She retreats to her room to talk with them. There’s another pause, then she says, “I know you’re out there, Daddy. Come in.”

  Avi opens the door. Emmeline is sitting cross-legged on the floor, drawing a blackbird in crayon. She looks up at him. “You haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?”