The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  Avi sits down on the bed. He’s most aware of his handicap around Emmeline. She is of a size to be occasionally lifted and carried and tossed. She isn’t too old for them to play together on the floor. But he hates needing her help to get up.

  “I wanted to get you a hamburger,” she says. “But Mom was mad at you.”

  “She was right to be mad,” says Avi. “Are you mad at me?”

  Emmeline shakes her head. “Where were you?” she asks.

  “I was upstairs,” he says. “There’s a person who hurt a lot of other people. I was trying to figure out how he thinks.”

  Emmeline nods as if taking in information she already knew. “I bet his brain is a mess,” she says. “I bet a bad idea got pushed in and grew. Like roots.” She presses the heels of her hands together, fingers curled, then extends her fingers out until they are tree branches, antlers. Roots.

  Avi should have called Louis right away, standing outside their bedroom door so that Kay could hear his performance. Look what I’m giving up for us. Look at how I’m being better.

  But he waits until morning. Kay is on to a Chester Himes novel with a smoking pistol on the cover. Emmeline attempts a series of gambits to trick Avi and Kay into talking to each other.

  “I think our yard is big enough for a dog,” she says. “A small one. A yippee dog.”

  “If Daddy got arrested, Mom, would you defend him? Or would it be a conflict of interest?”

  None of them catch.

  Kay gives Avi a dry kiss on the cheek and hugs Emmeline long and deep before she leaves. In the car on the way to school, Emmeline says, “I’m not mad, Daddy.” Avi thanks her for saying so. “Are you going to catch the man who hurt people?” she asks.

  “I’m not trying to catch him, Leener,” says Avi. “The police will catch him.”

  “You think they will?”

  He pauses. He wants her to live in a world where the bad guys get caught and little girls don’t get turned into nothing while they’re at church. But he decided a long time ago to trust his daughter with the truth, no matter how unpleasant.

  “No,” he says. “I don’t think they will.”

  “Do you think he’s going to hurt someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  Emmeline nods and looks out the window. “If they were trying to catch me, they would look at all the places that serve French fries,” she says. “Even if I was hiding, I would eat a lot of French fries. You could check the hotels near French fries and you’d find me.”

  He watches Emmeline go up the school steps, then fishes his phone out of his coat pocket and plays the church video again. His head spirals back into the mess. He goes home and examines the photos Louis sent him of Owen Curry’s room in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. The room looks more like a proper bomb site than the bomb sites. There’s chaos in how boys that age exist in the world, as if they’re flinging themselves at it, hoping to break through to something better. Avi was that way when he and Kay met even though he was ten years older than Owen Curry is. He took a new assignment every month. He crashed back into Chicago in a mess of booze and drugs, trying to scrub his mind of the horrors he was writing about. He hired someone to clean his apartment while he was away, then let it degrade into squalor again, sink full of dishes, air rank with weeks of old takeout.

  Avi wonders about the smell of Owen’s room. It would be feral. It would hit you the minute you walked in. A trigger scent. Body odor and the grease off discarded fast-food containers. He thinks of what Emmeline said, about finding her eating French fries. His daughter on the lam, trailing ketchup packets in her wake.

  Avi takes another look at the pictures. Containers and wax paper from fast food lie around the room. Each one has a plump smiling chicken orbited by a star. Planet Chicken. The place Owen Curry worked in the mall food court. He was wearing his uniform in the footage from Salem Baptist. Avi thinks of Owen’s complexion, the flurry of zits on his cheeks.

  “Kid’s an addict,” he mutters. He googles “Planet Chicken Chicago.”

  Two results. One is out in Cicero. The other is in Roseland, within walking distance of Salem Baptist.

  * * *

  —

  Avi wonders who would laugh harder, Kay or Louis. Louis would laugh. Kay would worry for his sanity. Avi Hirsch, invalid investigator. Gimp gumshoe. One-legged detective. He parks the minivan in the parking lot of a strip mall a half mile past Salem Baptist, in front of Planet Chicken. He has a printout of Owen Curry’s senior high school photo, unsmiling, and a flip notepad to make himself look legit.

  It’s too early in the day for much of a lunch crowd. Three young black employees stand behind the counter. They’re wearing the beige polo shirts Owen Curry is wearing in the footage. On the chest, the fat chicken with the orbiting star, bright yellow and red. They make themselves look busy even though they’ve already done everything there is to do.

  “Welcome to Planet Chicken, can I help you?” asks the girl. The other two flank her, looking at Avi. He’s self-conscious about how long it takes him to make it to the counter, worried he’s hobbling.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he says.

  “You a cop?” asks the taller boy.

  Avi shakes his head. “Reporter,” he says.

  “If you’re a cop, you’ve got to tell us,” the boy says.

  “I do,” says Avi. “Except I’m a reporter. Like I said.”

  “Who’re you looking for?” the girl asks.

  Avi offers her the photo, and she takes it. The boys lean over her shoulders to look.

  “Oh, shit,” says the shorter boy. “It’s Employee Discount.”

  “You know him?” Avi asks.

  “He came in a couple times,” says the girl. “He’s got a shirt from another location. Looks like it hasn’t been washed all year. Every time he comes in, he asks me if he gets an employee discount. Like I didn’t already tell him no ten times.”

  “Kid can’t tell black people apart,” says the taller boy. “He pulled the same shit with me three times last week.”

  “How long has he been coming around?” Avi asks.

  “Week and a half?” says the girl. Two days before the church bombing.

  “Any chance he paid with a credit card?” Avi says.

  They all shake their heads.

  “Crisp bills, every time,” says the taller boy.

  “Paid with a hundred one time,” the girl says. “You could cut yourself on the corners.” She hands the picture back.

  “What’d he do?” asks the taller boy.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Avi says, avoiding eye contact.

  “Fucker did the church,” says the girl. The other two look at Avi for confirmation.

  “Yeah,” Avi says, staring down at his notepad. “Fucker did the church.”

  “So he’s blown to shit?” the shorter boy asks.

  “We saw him in here fucking yesterday,” says the taller boy. Avi looks up at him to confirm that he’s not bullshitting, but the taller boy’s not even looking at Avi. He’s reminding his coworker. Avi gets the rush of excitement and dread that comes immediately before something huge happens. It’s the feeling of seeing the bomber in the souk, of spotting the white van pull up to the curb. A coppery taste floods his mouth, one he hasn’t experienced since he felt the JLTV begin to lift into the air underneath him. He’s disturbed to realize he’s missed it.

  “You see him with anyone?” Avi asks. “You see him in a car?”

  “He walks out of here,” says the girl. “Heads that way.” She points away from Salem Baptist, down the road.

  “How do you know?” the shorter boy asks.

  “I knew he was a sketchy motherfucker, so I kept an eye on him,” she says. “Cops come around looking for somebody, you want to have someone to give them.”

  “You guys
have been a huge help,” says Avi. He fishes out his wallet and takes out two twenties. He hands one to the girl and one to the taller boy.

  “What about me?” says the shorter boy.

  “You didn’t know shit,” the girl says.

  In stories, when people find out they’re special, part of them already knew. Owen Curry didn’t have that part. His mother made a point of telling him how not special he was. How he was lucky to even have a job and to stop with his retarded talk about college. She sat at the kitchen table, smoking Parliaments and listening to James Taylor on the tinny speaker of her phone, expecting Owen to stand there until she finished running him down. When she started wheezing and coughing, he went upstairs to his room with a Dozen Bucket from the Planet and stared at the bubble gum–pink ceiling. His mother had painted his whole room pink, like a womb. Calming, she said, but the pink crept into his dreams. Owen was having weird dreams. He was in a room, a big shimmering room, like Cinderella’s ball. The room was full of people. He could hear them talking, but it was like background party noise in a movie. No words, just blah blah blah. No one noticed him. No one ever noticed Owen, even in his fucking dreams.

  No one trusted him either. In part because he couldn’t sit still. He was twitchy. He fidgeted. Also clumsy. Especially around girls. Even ones who weren’t superattractive, but more in his league. Amanda Smoot, who worked with him at Planet Chicken, was not a ten by any means. Nice, though. She spent her whole break driving to Starbucks down in the plaza for salted caramel lattes. One day, Owen decided to be nice. Not flirty or sexual. Nice. He stopped by on his way into work and picked one up for her. He brought it to her, and as he was holding it out to her: bam. Spilled all over Amanda’s uniform. He practically pitched it at her. Twenty ounces of hot sweetened milk over the front of her shirt and her jeans. Everyone laughed except Amanda. Amanda screamed at him. In the concourse, in front of everyone in the mall.

  Owen whom no one noticed, Owen whom no one trusted lost it.

  “You think you’re so fucking special?” he screamed at her. “You think you’re hot shit?” His insides were a tangle of anger and sadness. His stomach roiled with something that wasn’t different from hunger. He held his hands out to Amanda, who stepped back from him. “I was just trying to be nice,” he said, pleading.

  Amanda was three feet away when it happened. It came pouring out of his gut, white and cold. Time slowed, dilated, and Owen watched the edge of a sphere of nothing expand to include Amanda Smoot. It nipped away the tip of her nose, leaving a dark red circle like she’d dipped it in the Blast-Off barbecue sauce. The circle got larger, covering the whole nose, the high appley rounds of her cheekbones. It shaved away Amanda the way the mandoline they used to make the Planet’s fresh-fried chips sliced at a potato. It exposed bright red layers of her insides, leaving less with each pass until there was barely enough of Amanda to press against the imaginary blade. Owen saw the heel of her sneaker on the tile floor, a nub of bone, skin, and blood inside it, then only rubber and leather. Then that was gone, too. Then the tiles. Then the food court.

  Owen came to a second later in the first-floor hallway, between a Pacific Sun and a Build-A-Bear. Above him, he could see a circle cut through the food court, through the ceiling above it. The sky was milky with clouds. He scrabbled to his feet and bolted for the nearest exit. In the parking lot, he sat in his car, listening to sirens approach. His heart raced, but he felt drowsy, like after a big Thanksgiving dinner. A heavy downward pull. Owen Curry’s mind tumbled backward. He fell through the shimmering room, with its endless ghostly partygoers, and landed like a feather in a different room. It was as small and cramped as his bedroom, but it was clean. Instead of pale pink, the walls looked like they’d been carved out of black bone. A man sat in a chair made out of the same stuff, leaning back as if he’d been waiting for Owen. He looked like radio static sounds, like a plastic bag full of wasps. When he spoke, his voice bounced off the walls. It echoed in Owen’s skull.

  Owen Curry, he said. You are so important. You are so special.

  “No, I’m not,” Owen said.

  You are, said the man. That’s why you’re here. Only special people can come here. Only people with a certain vibration in them. Not many people have it. One in a thousand. But you do. It’s what gives you your ability.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Owen said. “I don’t know what just happened.”

  Tell me something, said the man. Are you hungry? Are you always hungry?

  Owen had to admit he was. There was something inside him, a void.

  That’s it, said the man. That’s your ability. You take the emptiness inside you and let it out.

  The man laid his hand on Owen’s cheek. It felt like a rubber glove full of beetles, but Owen held it there, savoring the way the surface of the man’s palm twitched against his skin. Then he fell again, upward, coming back to his car. Police cars and ambulances raced by, headed to the other side of the mall, the hole that Owen Curry had ripped in the world. Owen drove home with the radio off, hearing his friend’s words.

  You are so important. You are so special.

  When he got home, Owen looked at his house as if it had appeared from nowhere. It was neither important nor special. Another shithole in Seat Pleasant, Maryland. Shitty house in a shitty town, home of Owen’s formerly shitty life. The back door slammed shut behind him as he went in, a cue for his mother to start in on him.

  “What’d, you get lost?” she said. “It doesn’t take half an hour to get home from that fancy-assed mall. If you can’t come straight ho—”

  Conscious of it this time, reaching a decision and acting on it, Owen fed her to the null. He found it in his gut and brought it forth, an egg-shaped void that extended from his midsection and swallowed everything where she and her chair had been. A bite was missing from the Formica table. Owen was alone in the kitchen. James Taylor’s thin treble still sang about going to Carolina. Owen fed his mother’s phone to the null, a quick blip of nothing. The house was finally quiet. He went into the living room and sat on the couch, enjoying the silence. Then he turned on the news. They were at the mall, talking about terrorists and bombs.

  The television clicked off.

  “You’ve done an amazing thing, Owen,” said a voice from the kitchen. “I am so proud of you.”

  Owen jumped off the couch. The man was more solid than in the black bone room, but his face was like the surface of the grease in the deep fryer waiting for an order to drop. It wavered and bubbled, iridescent. “You can’t stay here,” he said. “They’ll find you. I have a place you can go to hide.”

  “Why are you helping me?” Owen asked.

  “Because I’m your friend,” said the man.

  His friend gave him gifts. A bus ticket to Chicago. A stack of money: crisp twenties and even a couple of hundreds. And one other thing.

  “So we’ll never be apart,” his friend said. He put his hand on Owen’s cheek the way he had in the black bone room. This time it was a cool liquid thing on Owen’s skin. A drop rolled upward into Owen’s ear. He could feel it moving, burrowing. Owen thought about the scene in Wrath of Khan. The Ceti eel. It used to scare him when he was little, and his mother would call him a pussy. This was like that, but it wasn’t scary. He trusted his friend. He accepted the gift.

  On the bus ride to Chicago, the little piece of his friend in Owen’s head spoke to him. It talked about plans, about the black bone room and how important people like Owen were. We’re here to be shepherds, his friend said. And if we’re the shepherds, what does that make them?

  “Sheep,” Owen whispered. The person in the seat next to him snored as the bus plowed through the night somewhere in the country’s flat midlands.

  They’re livestock, his friend said. Cattle. It’s important that you learn to think of them that way.

  He told Owen he wanted him to use his abili
ty somewhere particular this time. There was a church near Chicago. He wanted Owen to feed it to the null.

  “Why a church?” Owen said, whispering. A thin needle of pain shot through his head. He felt something warm and wet in his ear, and when he swabbed it with his pinkie, the finger came away bloody.

  First Corinthians Church in Roseland, said his friend. Tomorrow night. Take the whole church for me.

  The bus dropped him in Roseland, on Chicago’s south side, after the sun had gone down. He asked the driver for directions to First Corinthians, but the driver had no idea. He wished he’d kept his mother’s iPhone with the maps on it. An old black lady at the bus station gave him directions. She smiled sweetly at him. Owen tried to suss if she had vibration, but she was cattle, like his mother, like Amanda Smoot and everyone he’d fed into the null at the mall.

  Owen found his way to First Corinthians, a ten-minute walk in the cold. It was a church for black people. There were kids practicing for a Christmas pageant. Owen sat in the back of the church, rubbing his hands together to warm them. He listened to those kids sing about angels. There was a black lady down the pew from him who was a little younger than Owen’s mother but pretty. She was watching the kids, rapt. He couldn’t tell which one was hers, but he could tell how much she loved whichever one it was. He reasoned that he had a job to do and that someone had loved Amanda Smoot and all the other people in the food court. What Owen was part of was bigger than love.

  When he reached down to find the empty spot in his guts, he felt something strange, like an echo. Someone in the church had vibration. It screamed at him from every direction. He went into the black bone room, letting his head loll on his shoulders as if he’d fallen asleep in the pew, and he could feel it. Owen was sure his friend wouldn’t want him to null out someone like them. Someone special. He came back to. The pretty black lady was looking at him. She probably thought he was a drug addict. She had no idea what he was.