by Proehl, Bob
Owen snuck out the back. He walked back toward the bus station, near the middle of town, and got a room at a motor inn. The next day, he found another church nearby, called Salem Baptist. It was mostly empty, just the preacher and a secretary and some kid. Cattle. The preacher yelled at Owen to get out, and Owen dug the null up, tugging it upward from the center of him. He imagined it growing big enough to engulf the whole church, but he stopped it. He pulled it back before it took the secretary. He left her as a witness to what he’d done, to what he was becoming.
He walked back to the motel room. Lying on his bed, he waited for his friend. He knew he shouldn’t stay here, so close to the church, but he didn’t want to leave without instructions. He waited all night and the next morning, but his friend never showed. Owen tried to wake up the little piece of his friend that was in his head, but he didn’t know how. It wasn’t like a phone you could call out on. He had to wait. He bought a marble composition book and a bag of Bic pens at the convenience store and started writing down everything he remembered his friend telling him. He felt like the men who wrote the Bible must have, fumbling divine thought into clumsy words on paper.
After a few days with no word, Owen was worried. He had taken the wrong church. He hadn’t done what he was asked. He wanted to beg his friend for forgiveness, but how could he if his friend wouldn’t even talk to him? He sat at the window, peering out through the blinds at a man getting out of a minivan. There was something about him Owen didn’t like, something in the way he walked. He wondered if he could reach across the parking lot and feed the man into the null. He’d never done anything like that before, and it excited him, thinking about new things he could do with his ability. He needed his friend to guide him, to show him who he was going to become.
Owen thought about the dreams he’d had before they met. The shimmering room full of people. Something in the dream felt like the black bone room. Owen wondered if the two were connected, rooms in the same house. Maybe the shimmering room was where his friend was from originally. Owen tried to remember what it felt like to be in the shimmering room, and as easily as dropping backward into bathwater, he was there. It was different this time. He knew it immediately. People could see him.
“I’m lost,” he shouted. “I need to find my friend.”
Before anyone could answer, he felt the needle of pain in his head again. It was distant, because it was in his body and he wasn’t. As soon as he felt it, he crashed back into reality, back into the chair at the motor inn, waiting by the window. He scuttled up to attention, looking around the room, listening with his ears and with whatever in him heard the voice in his head. There was nothing. A trickle of blood ran out of his ear, and he got up to wash it off in the sink.
Over the sound of the water running, he heard a door opening in the other room. There were three people in his room, people he didn’t know. Two women and a man. One of the women wore one of those head scarf things. Owen had no problem with Muslims. Vibration was more important, and she had it. All three of them did. Owen’s heart leaped.
“Did he send you?” he said. “Are we going to be a team?”
“No, Owen,” said the head scarf lady. “We’re the opposing team.”
Something was very wrong. Owen panicked. He reached inside to null them all out, but the other woman, the blond one, put her hand on his forehead, and his thoughts scrambled, words skittering out of order like spilled Scrabble tiles. Null feed into them. Touch don’t me.
“You’re fucked, Owen,” said the head scarf woman. Owen tried to scuttle away from the blond woman’s touch, but his legs wouldn’t listen. Moving on their own, they walked him forward, through an open door. It didn’t matter that he didn’t want to go. It didn’t matter at all.
In the office of the Roseland Rest, a white woman in her seventies wages war on flies, watching infomercials at deafening volume. The Roseland Rest is a half mile from Planet Chicken. Owen Curry would have to be incredibly lazy or ballsy to hole up here, but Avi’s plan is to stop at every lodging in the direction the girl pointed him, and this is the first. It takes three rings of the service bell to get her attention. He shows her the picture.
“You a cop?” she asks. Her tone is exactly the same as the boy at Planet Chicken.
“Reporter,” he says.
She looks unimpressed. She examines the picture. “What’d he do?”
“He won a prize,” says Avi. “All expenses paid.”
“Hell he did,” she says. “The nasty little shit.” She turns around and takes a key off the hook. “Room 152,” she says, handing it to him. “Don’t kick the door down.”
“Why would I do that?” Avi asks.
She shrugs. “People do.”
Louis and half the Chicago Homeland office are at the church, five minutes away. One call and they come down like the wrath of god. Owen Curry goes into the system, and no one ever sees him again. Louis won’t be able to answer any of Avi’s questions afterward, even on deep background. They’re friends, but Louis is a company man. The story will be dead, and Owen Curry will be packed off to some government warehouse with UFO fragments and the Ark of the Covenant. The only way Avi will know what happened is to find Owen Curry and ask.
The room is on the second level, so Avi makes his way up. The stairs are metal, narrow. Avi is careful not to hook the prosthetic under the edges as he goes up. The upper balcony is Astroturf over concrete. Avi inches along toward 152. He can feel the pull he’s missed. The rush of knowing he’s near something terrible. An awful end. There are things about himself he’s had to pass through to get to this point. He’s walked through the dark room full of snakes. He’s looked at everything hateful in himself and said yes, come with me, let’s all step into the fire. The last words he said to Kay were a promise to call Louis. The last thing he said to Emmeline was a promise to pick her up from school. If he dies, they’ll remember him as a liar.
It matters less to him than what’s behind the door.
I thought I was cured, he thinks. I thought I burned it out of me and all it cost me was my leg. But it has to cost everything. It can only ever cost everything.
He slips the key into the lock of 152. He turns the knob slowly, but the latch clicks as it frees itself from the plate. He presses his shoulder against the door and pauses. He’s unarmed, but so is Owen Curry. Except Owen Curry can vaporize a whole building, whereas Avi has a flip-up notepad.
He enters like he’s coming into a surprise party he already knows about. The faucet is running in the bathroom, but there’s no one in the room. He moves along the wall and peeks around the edge of the bathroom door. Empty. The lights are harsh fluorescents, the shower curtain pulled back to show a lime-speckled tub. The motel room looks like a staging of Owen Curry’s room in Seat Pleasant, Maryland: clothes, papers, Planet Chicken containers. On the bed there’s a journal, a marble composition book. The blue-lined pages are scarred up with words, half of the journal full. Avi glances through it, catching certain phrases that repeat. The cattle. Vibration. The null.
He takes out his phone to call Louis and stops. He can’t explain being in the room. He should have called six steps back. He pockets the phone, grabs the journal off the bed, and walks out.
“Did you see him go out?” he asks the woman in the office as he gives her back the key.
“Who?” she says.
He hands her the printout again.
“I’d’ve told you if he wasn’t in there,” she says.
“How’s he been paying?” asks Avi.
“Crisp twenties,” she says. She rubs her thumbs roughly along the edges of her index fingers, miming the difficulty of separating fresh bills. “Fucking things stick together.”
Nothing comes together. Owen Curry’s journals are babble. Each page is titled in block letters: “VIBRATION = GODHOOD?” “THE TRUE LOCATION AND MEANING OF THE BLACK BONE ROOM.” Owen Cur
ry has built an entire world in his head. Diagrams of nonsense science, treatises on imaginary physics. When someone’s mind breaks off from the world as cleanly as Owen Curry’s, the writing takes on an alien aspect that is flat and opaque. Curry’s sentences are grammatically correct but unintelligible. Avi feels as if he needs a cipher key, a Rosetta stone, to begin to make sense of them. He keeps coming back to the word vibration, but it’s gibberish to him.
In the morning, after he drops Emmeline off at school, Avi heads out to Roseland. Homeland is wrapping up the scene at Salem Baptist, making room for the church to start the slow work of rebuilding. They’ll put it back exactly the way it was. No modernizations or improvements. Erasure of a wound is a form of healing. One of the things that bothers Avi about his prosthetic is that it reasserts its difference from what was once there. He’d prefer a less comfortable prosthesis that looked more “lifelike,” one that wouldn’t remind everyone of his handicap. From his phone, in the parking lot, Avi makes an anonymous donation to the Salem Baptist reconstruction fund.
He checks back at the Roseland Rest and at Planet Chicken. No one’s seen Owen Curry in days. Out of ideas, Avi drives home. He calls Louis to see if Homeland has had any luck finding him.
Louis laughs. “I can barely get permission to go looking for this fuck,” he says. “Officially, Owen Curry died in the Ballston mall bombing and we are looking for an identical suspect in the Salem Baptist bombing. The whole thing’s gone cold.”
“Until he blows up something else,” Avi says.
“I’m having trouble selling that argument to my superiors,” says Louis. “Maybe if there was some sort of public outcry.”
“You want me to publish?”
“It would move things on my end,” Louis says.
“The Trib won’t take it without a verified source,” says Avi.
Louis pauses. There’s no way he’ll go on record. No one from Homeland ever goes on record. Homeland speaks in press releases.
“Fuck it,” Louis says. “Use the footage. Don’t run it, but you can show it to an editor to verify.”
“It’ll be obvious it’s from you,” Avi says. Part of him doesn’t want to keep at this story. Maybe it’s the dead girl in the church, the fear that she’ll come to haunt him. That he’ll start to see her running around the living room furniture, playing in the backyard. Shadowing Emmeline. Maybe it’s something else. Last night he dreamed he was back in Mosul, in the JLTV. In the dream, Owen Curry hoists the vehicle over his head like it’s nothing. The other guys in Echo Company disappear, blinking out one by one.
“If this shows up in the Trib, it forces my boss’s hand,” Louis says. “I get to go find the kid. Right now he’s a ghost.”
Avi thinks about the Roseland Rest. The feeling that Owen Curry had been in the room a second before Avi opened the door. Maybe the kid is a ghost.
“I can’t guarantee the Trib will take it, even with the footage,” Avi says. He can’t guarantee Carol will pick up the phone. He hasn’t talked to anyone at the Trib since the sympathy calls dried up. He’s a ghost himself.
“Do what you can,” Louis says.
He gets up from the desk and puts a record on, laying the needle down gently. A stumbling drumbeat floods the attic space, one leg dragging behind the other, followed by the opening guitar and keyboard flourish of Bowie’s “Five Years.” The Ziggy Stardust album should clear his head, but as soon as it starts, he thinks of something Bowie said in some stoned interview from the seventies about the mythology behind the album. Bowie’s starmen were black hole jumpers. Creatures who leap from universe to universe. They come on like saviors, but they’re tourists. They can’t save anyone. He thinks of Owen Curry at the center of a blast, disappearing into nothing, popping up somewhere else. He wonders what that would feel like.
The side ends. He never minded the inconvenience of records until the first time he sat in his chair listening to the needle scratch along the label edge, unable to make the walk across the room. It was a motivator, a reason to move. Every second the needle scraped was a rebuke for his self-pity and laziness.
Avi flips the record and goes back to his chair. He picks up Owen Curry’s journal:
The entrance into the null is through me, and through my vibration. The null is not me. I am the gate that opens. I am the mouth gaping to swallow the world.
Black hole jumpers, Avi thinks. He wonders where Owen Curry goes the moment after the flash. Where he disappears to in the split second after everything around him blinks out of the world.
There’s a knock on the door.
His first thought is that it’s Kay pounding on the ceiling with the broomstick. That he’s drifted again, lost the day, and stranded Emmeline at school. But the album marks time, breaks it into pieces of twenty minutes a side. He looks across the room, checking for the sun in the porthole window.
Under the porthole, there’s a door that doesn’t belong. Dark wood and a burnished brass knob. The jamb stands out against the pale wood paneling of the attic, highlighting the door’s not-rightness. Its unbelonging. Avi closes his eyes and opens them again. The door is still there. He thinks of the Winchester House in San Jose, its metastatic architecture spawning staircases to nowhere, rooms inaccessible from anywhere in the house. This door would open to the outside, fifty feet above Jarvis Avenue. On the record, strangled saxophones fade out and die. Avi stands up, steps toward the door as if he’s approaching a rabid animal. Sidesteps. No sudden moves.
The knob turns. Under the music, a creak of metal hinges as the door opens inward. A young black woman looks out. Her face is round with high soft cheekbones. She has dreadlocks heaped precariously on her head, tottering to the left.
“Good, you’re here,” she says. “Last time we came by, you all were out. I’m Kimani Moore. This is all going to be a little strange.”
Through the door, where there should be only open air, Avi can see a living room that is not part of his house. The walls are bright orange with blue trim. Warm lights make the room glow behind her.
“Come on in,” Kimani says. “I’ve got coffee up.”
Avi walks to the door as if he’s under a spell. This is fairy tale stuff. A door in the air. A room that can’t exist. Kimani pulls the door open, and Avi thinks of Dorothy stepping into Oz, the burst of Technicolor scarring the sepia of her little world. He steps across the threshold, fingers trailing along the surface of the door to be sure it’s real, as if touch is truer than sight. The wood is smooth but solid. Kimani shuts the door behind him, and the music goes silent, not muffled but cut off. A blond woman sits on a couch, teasing a German shepherd with a knotted rope. Behind her, a tall white man with dark hair browses a bookshelf. Neither looks at Avi or greets him. Standing next to Kimani is another man, older, with a trim salt-and-pepper beard, round wire-rimmed glasses, and a pained expression he’s worn long enough to carve lines into his face.
“Mr. Hirsch,” he says. “I’m sorry to come into your home like this.”
“This isn’t my home,” Avi says, looking around. Avi’s house is furnished to be soft. Every piece of furniture was bought when Emmeline was small for her to bounce off unharmed. This room has clean lines and abrupt corners. There’s a Stevie Wonder poster on the wall, a concert from his Talking Book days. A print of a William Eggleston photo, the back of a woman’s beehive shot in a Los Alamos diner, the turquoise of the bench and tiles psychedelically bright under the lights. On the floor, there’s a bone-white rug, shag pile. No one with children owns a rug that white.
“There’s a lot we have to tell you,” says the man with the wire-rimmed glasses. “You should sit down.”
“I’ll stand,” Avi says. As soon as he says it, he becomes aware of the ache in his leg: a low thing that will expand.
“Here, sit,” says Kimani. “You’re making me nervous.” She takes his arm and leads him toward an o
ddly angled chair. Avi sits, looking from one person to the next.
“He’s spooked,” says the tall man by the bookshelf.
“Of course he’s spooked,” Kimani says. “He just stepped out the side of his house.”
“You came very close to being killed the other day, Mr. Hirsch,” says the man with glasses.
“That should calm him down,” says the woman on the couch.
The man with glasses shakes his head and smiles. “You’re right, Sarah. I’m going about this all wrong.” He puts out his hand. “My name is Kevin Bishop,” he says. Avi leans forward, takes his hand, and shakes it. It’s an automatic action, a script the body carries out reflexively when given the proper signal. The part of Avi’s brain that observes and reports notices that his hand is sweat-slick against this man’s cool, dry palm, while another part, frantic and barely coherent, shrieks that this man cannot even be here, that the room they’re standing in does not and cannot exist. Bishop lets go of Avi’s hand, and it hangs in the air, shaking nothing, before Avi becomes aware of it and tucks it under his leg. “This is Patrick and Sarah Davenport. They work for me. They’re teachers.”
“Siblings,” says Sarah. “He’s older.”
“And Kimani is…” He pauses, searching for the word.
“I’m your driver, Kevin,” she says. “Call it what it is.”
Bishop winces. “I don’t love the visual of me being driven around by a young woman of color.”
“You’ve also got me serving coffee,” she says.
“That visual is going to be the least of our problems,” Patrick says from the corner.
“Do you take cream?” Kimani asks. Avi shakes his head. The question is too normal, a leftover piece of some other conversation. Avi tries to retreat to that conversation as he takes the coffee from her. The heat of the cup startles him, and he drops it. He sees motion in the far corner of the room. Patrick reaches for the falling cup. His arm stretches across the room, elongating like pale taffy strung from shoulder to wrist. He catches the cup before it shatters. Avi stares down into the coffee cup, which is cradled in Patrick’s hand at the end of an impossible arm. Silver dollar drops spatter the white rug and bloom like time-lapse flowers.