by Proehl, Bob
The German shepherd nuzzles Avi’s knee, trying to get his attention. Avi looks down at the dog.
“Mr. Hirsch,” the dog says in the blond woman’s voice, “my friends and I are very special people. And we want you to tell the world about us.”
The dog looks at him quizzically as if Avi is the thing out of place here. Which he obviously is. The problem isn’t talking dogs or floating rooms; it’s dull, ordinary Avi Hirsch, spilling his coffee on the rug, with nothing to say to a talkative German shepherd. Avi lets out a high-pitched sound, something between a nervous laugh and a panicked yelp.
“If the two of you are done showing off,” Bishop says, wiping his glasses on his shirt. The dog trots back to Sarah’s side. Patrick places the coffee cup on the table next to Avi. His arm retracts into the sleeve of his dress shirt, and he shoves his hand in his pocket as if embarrassed.
“I’ve read several of your articles, Mr. Hirsch,” Bishop says. “I liked the piece about the bus bomber in Tel Aviv. I liked that you interviewed his family. Not a lot of reporters bother with that kind of thing. It’s not the normal way to cover an incident like that.”
Avi remembers the boy’s mother. She was so hurt and so ashamed. What god was worth doing this to me? she asked Avi, sobbing. She showed him pictures of the boy when he was younger, playing soccer in the same square where he’d blown himself to pieces. At the end of the interview, she gave him the picture. Take it, she said. That boy was never real. That boy was a lie.
“Most people save their sympathy for the victims,” Avi says. He feels comfortable talking about his work. It’s a reflex response, no different from putting out his hand to shake. By the couch, the dog huffs and lies down to sleep.
“But not you,” says Bishop.
“The boy was a victim, too,” Avi says.
“What about Owen Curry?” Patrick asks.
Avi pauses, trying to summon up sympathy for Owen Curry. It doesn’t work that way. Once he has to try, he’s playacting, fooling himself into thinking he’s a better, kinder person than he is. He tries to imagine Owen Curry as a boy deserving of love, but he sees the girl zigzagging through the church pews. The flash of white.
“Owen Curry is like us,” Bishop says, gesturing to the others with an open hand. “He has abilities. He’s also a very sick young man. We’ve worried for a long time that someone like Owen Curry would be the first the world would hear about us. If he became the public face of our people, we’d all be branded monsters.”
“We will be branded monsters,” Patrick says. “You think a nice write-up in The Atlantic means they won’t come for us with pitchforks?”
“Let the grown-ups talk, Patrick,” says Sarah. Another yelping laugh slips out of Avi at the thought that he’s one of the adults in the room. He has the childhood feeling of being adrift in a sea of incomprehensible things.
“It’s become apparent that it’s time to go public with who and what we are,” says Bishop. “It’s increasingly difficult to keep our existence a secret, and it’s only a matter of time before some other Owen Curry is exposed. Before that happens, we’d like to provide the public some context. We’d like your help.”
“What are you?” Avi asks. He stares at Bishop, trying to see what strange ability he’s hiding. Bishop smiles as if he knows what Avi is thinking.
“We call ourselves Resonants,” says Kimani. “We can do things, but we’re people. Like you.”
“When you talked to that boy’s mother,” Bishop says. “The bomber in Tel Aviv? Were you surprised how normal she was?”
“I had no reason to think she’d be anything but normal,” Avi says.
“We’re normal, Mr. Hirsch,” Bishop says. “We have families and jobs.”
“Owen Curry has killed twenty-one people,” Avi says.
“You would have been twenty-two,” Patrick says, “if we were two minutes slower.”
Avi remembers the hotel room. The feeling that someone had just left.
“You know where he is?” Avi asks.
They all look at one another, assessing the weight of a secret.
“He’s off the board,” says Bishop.
“We need to show Avi,” Kimani says. “Demonstrate some trust.”
“Based on what?” asks Patrick. “He’s working with Homeland Security. What makes you think he won’t turn us in?”
“I don’t work for Homeland,” Avi says.
“He won’t turn us in,” Kimani says.
“We should wipe his memory and throw him back,” Patrick says.
The idea they could erase his memories of this conversation hits Avi for the first time as a possibility. A vertiginous panic unsteadies him, makes the floor waver out of focus under his feet until he’s sure he can see the snow-flecked lawn one story below. The possible is defined by its limits, with everything that can happen bordered by another, scarier world of things that can’t. What can I know now? Avi thinks. What can I be sure is real?
Bishop nods to Kimani, and Patrick slumps his shoulders, defeated. Kimani goes to the same door she brought Avi through and opens it into somewhere completely new.
The lab is brightly lit. The stark white walls are covered in tacked up pieces of paper. Schematics and notes and equations on graphing paper, cocktail napkins. Tables full of wires and takeout containers. The ceiling is lined with hexagonal chicken wire, like a metal honeycomb. Avi notes that there are no computers, a trend he’s heard about in people’s offices, a pushback against the encroachment of constant access. A dam against rivers of information. The clutter reminds Avi of Owen Curry’s hotel room. In the corner, a woman is hunched at a workbench, wearing a lab coat and dark goggles over a red hijab. The blue spark of her welding torch sputters.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” she says, drawing the profanity out. “Kimani,” she yells over her shoulder, “did you know when you door in, it fucks with the air pressure? My fucking ears popped.”
“Avi,” Bishop says, “this is Fahima Deeb. Our resident genius.”
“Your beleaguered tech support,” Fahima says. She swivels on her stool. She takes off her goggles and rubs at her eyes. “I told you not to door into my lab, Kimani,” she calls. “Use the fucking elevator. Or the fucking phone.” Kimani smiles at her from the doorway. “This is the reporter?” Kimani nods, and Fahima swivels again, pointing at Avi with the acetylene torch. “You have any experience in science writing?”
“No,” says Avi.
“Physics, genetics, nothing?”
“No.”
“Fuck,” Fahima says, slouching her shoulders. “I’ll have to translate my notes into idiot.”
“We need to show Avi something,” Bishop says.
Fahima glares at him, unsure what he means. When she figures it out, she frowns. “That seems like a terrible fucking idea.”
“That’s what I said,” says Patrick.
“Fuck, now I’m agreeing with Patrick,” Fahima says.
“He needs to know what’s at stake,” Bishop says.
“Why do we trust this guy?” Fahima asks.
“You know why.” Bishop gives her a thin smile. Avi may have misread him as the kindly uncle of the group. His smile has a threat in it, and it’s effective.
Fahima sighs, resigned, and turns to Avi. “Come meet Prince Charming.”
She goes to one of the room’s actual doors. They’re heavy steel, in contrast to the rich wood door Avi came through. She punches in a long string of numbers on a keypad, and the door cracks open with a hiss.
“Take him in,” says Bishop. It has the unmistakable tone of a command.
“I’m not going in there,” Patrick says. “Those lights make my eyeballs itch.”
“Scaredy-cat,” Fahima says, smirking.
“Come on,” says Sarah. “Let’s get this over with.” She takes Avi’s arm and moves
him toward the open door.
“Let the ladies handle this,” Fahima says.
They enter a short hallway, and immediately Avi knows the kind of place he’s entered. His first time in a makeshift jail was in Kirkuk. Army intelligence was holding two dozen suspects in the basement of a school. Charges pending was the euphemism, but none of the men would be charged. The platoon threw up cinder block walls to separate the prisoners, with sheets of chicken wire in place of bars. Nothing physically kept the prisoners from breaking out. The structure of a jail, the word jail, and the idea behind it held them in place.
This room has the same shape and feel, although it’s permanent, better built. The walls are glass, and there are empty cells behind them. Everything is lit with a sickly green light that pulses like an artery. The lights buzz loudly, more organic than mechanical or electric. Sarah makes a noise when she steps in like she’s going to be sick.
“Fuckwit’s at the end,” Fahima says, pointing to the one occupied cell in the hall. Owen Curry sits cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth. He has on the brown polo shirt, which is filthy from a month of wear. He has the patchy stubble that curses blond boys that age, more like an accumulation of pale dirt than a beard. His sunken eyes float over deep, bruised bags. He stands when he hears them come in. He steps to the glass and presses his hands against it. Clouds of condensation form around the points of contact: the meat of his palms and the pads of his fingers.
“I won’t talk to him,” he says. He snarls at Avi, showing rows of uneven teeth. “You’ve given me time to think. And I am only talking to people like us from now on. If you want to have a conversation, get him out of here.”
“No one wants to talk to you, fucker,” Fahima says. “No one needs to hear anything you say. We’re here to gawk at you. Like an animal in the zoo.”
But Avi wants something more, something so big he can’t name it or speak it out loud. It’s what pushed him up the stairs at the Roseland Rest, pressed the door of Owen’s room open when he knew an ugly, meaningless death might wait inside. It was the thing that drove Avi to tour army munitions factories to see bombs being manufactured. For context, he told himself, but it was for this feeling. Proximity to something that could destroy him. Standing close to a bomb was a way of being judged, although it was forever unclear to Avi who a bomb found wanting, its victims or its survivors. That was what he saw in Owen Curry: a bomb that spoke.
“I want to talk to you, Owen,” Avi says. His voice is soft and cajoling. He steps closer to the glass. Owen is sheened in sweat. He looks sick, as if they have him in quarantine rather than a jail cell. “Where did they go, Owen? All those people, where did th—”
“Shut off these lights and I’ll show you where they went!” Owen screams. Spit flies from his lips. He bangs his forehead onto the glass, and it cracks, a spiderweb spreading from the point of impact. Sarah jumps back.
“They’re nowhere,” Owen screams, blood trickling down his forehead like the roots of a tree. Avi shivers when he makes the involuntary association, a flash of Emmeline dancing in his vision. “They’re in the null, where nothing lives. Where all the cattle go.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Sarah says. She tries to pull Avi back, but he shakes her off. He stands against the glass, annoyed that she’s even there. He’s the one who worked for this, hunted this moment across war zones and killing fields. This moment is his by right. Owen Curry is his.
“Why did you do it, Owen?” Avi says. His voice is calm and even. “Why did you kill that little girl in the church?”
Owen flinches. There’s something human in him. It flickers in his eyes, guilty, then is gone. “Because it’s a war,” he says, baring his teeth. “And we won’t win until we kill every last one of you. My friend told me all about you. You’ll kill us if we don’t kill you first. He told me what I had to do.”
Owen turns away, slumps hard against the glass, and starts sobbing.
“You don’t understand,” he yells. “I could feel him in my head, and now I can’t feel him anymore. It was so beautiful. You put these lights on me and you killed him. You killed my imaginary friend, you fuckers.”
“Any other burning questions for our guest?” Fahima asks. Owen looks like a bag of broken sticks. In the video from the mall, there was a way he reached out to the girl, a way his hand stopped short of touching her. Avi knew that gesture and the feeling behind it. He felt that way with Kay sometimes, as if he were holding his hands out to her, waiting for her to bridge the rest of the gap between them. He imagined he could understand Owen Curry. Seeing him now, there isn’t enough of a person here to understand. Owen Curry isn’t a bomb. He’s just a monster, the kind you can find anywhere. The thing that’s in him, that Avi is actually hunting, can’t be questioned any more than he could interview an IED or an atom bomb. Owen Curry is the shitty container it walks around in.
“Let’s go,” Avi says.
Fahima leads them back into the lab and locks the door behind them. “Sweetheart, isn’t he?”
Avi takes a deep breath, trying to reset himself. There is mercifully familiar ground he can stand on here. He can be a reporter, run the professional script. Everything is easier to handle if you have someone to be. He slaps his back pocket, wishing for the notepad that’s sitting on his desk, in his office, in another world. “How long are you going to hold him here?” he asks.
“Indefinitely,” Bishop says.
“You can’t keep him locked up,” says Avi. “You can’t keep him in there.”
“We can’t turn him over to the police,” Bishop says. “The lights are the only things inhibiting his ability.”
“Thank you very much,” Fahima says, taking a little bow.
“They’re hurting him,” Avi says. With grim pride, he realizes he’s managed to sympathize with Owen Curry.
“Good,” says Patrick.
“There’s no jail that could hold him other than this one,” Bishop says.
“We should kill him,” says Patrick.
“No more killing,” Bishop says.
Avi stares at Bishop, registering the implication of the word more. Something vague and dangerous about Kevin Bishop is confirmed. Out of the group, the only ones Avi trusts are Patrick and Kimani. Her because she seems kind and honest. Him because he seems like an asshole. You know where you are with assholes.
“Someone is moving pieces around,” says Bishop. “I doubt Owen Curry was an angel before, but someone’s been in his head. He was pushed to do those things. Even if he wasn’t pushed very hard.”
“Why?” Avi asks.
Bishop shakes his head. “To force us out in the open?”
“Worked,” says Patrick.
“There’s no reason for me to be involved,” Avi says. “I write about wars and school shootings. This is…I don’t even know what this is.”
“We are trying to preclude a war,” Bishop says.
“We’re busing ourselves to the killing fields,” says Patrick. Avi can sense the longevity of this argument, the way it’s been buried only to rise back up.
“We need your help,” Kimani says.
“I haven’t written anything in a year,” Avi says. “I’m not on staff anywhere. I have no platform. Walk into the newsroom at the New York Times and say, Hey, we’ve got superpowers. Who wants to interview us? They’ll line up.”
“We don’t say superpowers,” says Patrick.
“There’s something else,” Kimani says from the doorway. Bishop shakes his head, but Kimani ignores it. Avi recognizes the sadness in her face. He’s never gone on a death notification, but he’s seen military officers prepare for them, readying to deliver the worst news a family can get. The mix of solemnity and compassion is how Kimani looks at him as she says, “When we came to your house the first time, you weren’t the one we were looking for.” Avi stares at her, his fa
ce blank.
Bishop sighs. “Your daughter is one of us,” he says.
“She can’t be,” Avi says. As he denies it, he knows it’s true. That’s them, he thinks. That’s them in your head making you believe them. But it isn’t. It’s everything he’s ever known or suspected about Emmeline confirmed. What they’re telling him is the answer to all the things he’s wondered about her, and it turns out he didn’t want answers. He wanted to keep her strange and ethereal without it ever needing to mean something larger. As the mystery of his daughter ossifies into something definite, he’s grieved by the death of the mystery. He clutches at that uncertainty, begging it to come back and replace this awful new knowing.
“How could you know that?” Avi says. “You’ve never met my daughter.” He doesn’t say her name, as if he can keep it from them. They know, he thinks. They know everything in your head.
“It’s difficult to explain,” Bishop says.
“Try,” says Avi, a panic welling in his chest. None of them speak. Then Fahima clears her throat.
“You and I are going to be having a lot of conversations that don’t make any sense,” she says. “So why not start? When someone begins to resonate…” She trails off. She sounds like a parent trying to have the talk with her kid but unsure what the most basic building block of the talk should be. “There’s a space, like a shared psychic space, that all of us have access to. It’s like a chat room just for people like us. We call it the Hive. When someone’s abilities manifest, they start to show up in the Hive. Usually they can’t talk to anyone else. It takes a while to learn how to communicate in Hivespace. But we can see them. Like a blip on a radar. Emmeline showed up maybe two weeks ago. She may not even know she’s going there. But she was there.”
“And you saw her?” Avi asks. “You saw the blip?”