The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  He wonders about Owen Curry’s mother. What decisions had she made that produced him? Was it that she couldn’t love what he was? Or understand it? Did she fail to give him a context in which to see himself? A word for what he’d become? How do I save my daughter from becoming like him? he thinks.

  He takes out his phone and enters the number Kevin Bishop gave him. It was not, he noticed, the same as the one on the check to Kay. Avi takes some pride in this, graced with the direct line.

  I want her to meet you, he types. Then adds, all.

  Monday morning, Avi offers Kay a ride to the El station, and she accepts because it’s viciously cold out. At the station, Kay leans over the emergency brake and kisses Avi good-bye. They understand that this must be done. Neither can leave the other without a kiss even if they’re angry. Even if they’re not speaking. A marriage runs on love initially, but as it gets polluted with battles and betrayals and resentments, it relies on rules. Rituals. Parts of their life together have a workmanlike quality to them, but it works. It holds them together on days when they don’t share a grand passion and gets them through to the times when they feel that again. Drive and structure. Fire and skill.

  Kay gets out of the car and goes to Emmeline’s window. Emmeline’s been quiet since she got up. She stared into her cereal bowl, then went upstairs to get a sweater. She sat on the bench in the front hallway, waiting for Avi and Kay to be ready to leave. She rolls down her window and kisses her mother, a loud smack. A stage kiss.

  I made it through the morning without lying to my wife, Avi thinks as she dashes through the station doors. It’s a teenage thought, relying on technicalities to absolve him. His omission is so large that it can’t be called anything but a lie.

  “You want to hop up front?” he asks Emmeline. She’s too slight to ride in front, but the car is one area where he and Kay have both adopted a we did it that way and we grew up okay approach to parenting. Settled in the front seat, Emmeline looks like a toy.

  “You want to talk?” Avi says. Emmeline shakes her head. Avi turns up the radio, the classic rock station whose scope includes bands Avi listened to when he was a teenager. A song comes on he hasn’t heard in years, “Drain You” by Nirvana. Avi remembers the first time he saw them on television. Cobain’s sullen magnetism. A charisma that shone through all the singer’s efforts to cover it up. Maybe he was one of them, Avi thinks.

  He makes the turn onto North Clark, heading home.

  “I’m not going to school, am I?” Emmeline says.

  “You can if you want,” Avi says. “Some people are coming by the house who’d like to meet you. People like you.”

  “Are they going to take me away?” she asks.

  “No, honey,” Avi assures her. “No one is going to take you away.”

  It isn’t a lie or an omission on his part. Simply a mistake.

  * * *

  —

  Emmeline hasn’t been up to the attic since she was tiny enough Avi could strap her into the baby carrier and climb the ladder. That magical time he could set Emmeline down in a circle of toys and books and the girl would exist there, happy, for hours.

  Avi sits in the red chair and watches as Emmeline, still wearing her puffy purple coat with the mittens attached to the cuffs, investigates the space. She flips through his records. She plays with the orange tassels along the edges of a rug. She opens a drawer on the file cabinet, peers in, and shuts it. Seeing it through Emmeline’s eyes, Avi is aware how shabby his office is. What he thinks passes for kitsch might be junk. The threadbare furniture. The ugly rugs. How do you explain ironic furnishing to a seven-year-old?

  “Leener,” he says, “they’ll be here in a minute.”

  “Should we go let them in?” she asks.

  “Wait,” says Avi. “Come here.” Emmeline climbs into his lap, and he swivels the chair so it faces the western wall. “Watch,” he says.

  The first time Kimani arrived, Avi hadn’t seen it coming. Now the two of them watch the spot where the door appeared. Avi imagines a point of light at the floorboard, a sparking little star, rising up like an acetylene torch burning through sheet metal, tracing a molten line six feet into the air then turning, traversing, descending.

  It’s not like that at all. There is no door. Then there is.

  Emmeline gasps like it’s a magic trick, and Avi is relieved. He needs all of this to be strange to her, too. If they can’t discover it together, if Emmeline has come preloaded with the ability to make sense of all this, he’s lost her already.

  Kimani opens the door and pokes her head out. “Is this her?” she says.

  “Leener, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” he says. “Kimani, this is my daughter, Emmeline.” Emmeline hops out of his lap and helps him up, then shrinks back, hiding half behind him. Nervously, she takes one step toward Kimani.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Emmeline says. “In the shiny room.”

  “I saw you, too,” Kimani says. “Out on the edges. You should’ve come and said hi.”

  “I didn’t know how.”

  “You’ll learn,” Kimani says. She beckons Emmeline into the room, and Emmeline follows. For a split second, Avi is sure Kimani will close the door and take off without him, but he crosses the room and joins them.

  “Where’s everyone else?” Avi asks.

  “They’re meeting you there,” Kimani says. “I’m sure Kevin’s got your whole day planned out.”

  Emmeline examines this room as she had the attic. The room is different from the day before. Avi might not have noticed if Emmeline wasn’t exploring it. All the furniture has been replaced. The harsh, knifelike corners on the tables are smooth, unthreatening curves. The couch is plush, cushy. The walls have been painted, a cooler blue, calming. Emmeline touches one of the silver sculptures lightly, and it shifts its shape, wriggling like a fish on a line. She gasps and pulls her hand back. The sculpture stops moving, held in a strange shape halfway between what it was and what it was trying to become.

  “They don’t bite,” Kimani says. “My friend makes them. She’s a kid not much older than you. Look.” She lets the palm of her hand hover above the silver, and the sculpture reshapes itself, straining upward to form a ring around Kimani’s hand. Kimani removes her hand and holds it up to show Emmeline it’s unharmed. “I’ve got to tell you, though, it’s pretty disgusting to watch Isidra make them.” She leans over to Emmeline like they’re sharing a secret. “She pukes up all the silver stuff.”

  “It’s a puke sculpture?” Emmeline asks. Kimani nods. “Gross.”

  Kimani gets down to one knee and puts a light hand on Emmeline’s shoulder. “Some of us have abilities that aren’t too nice to look at,” she says. “They can’t all be as good-looking as the two of us, huh?” Emmeline smiles. “I wish you could spend all day with me here. But Mr. Bishop gets very upset when I’m late.”

  “Where are we going?” Emmeline asks.

  “New York City,” Kimani says. She opens the door again, this time onto an alleyway, behind a Dumpster. “Not the most scenic drop-off spot,” she says. “But it’s right out the alley and down the block: 136. Doesn’t look like much.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” Emmeline says. Kimani smiles at her, and Avi is aware of an instant bond, something forged by unity in difference. Something he’s on the outside of.

  Avi hasn’t spent much time in New York, but one of the things he loves about the city is the way every block is a mishmash of architectural styles, of eras. Chicago holds on to its past, keeping pockets of time preserved. New York discards yesterdays as soon as they’re useless. It molts, revealing shiny new skin beneath. Situated on 57th between Third and Lexington, the Bishop Academy for the Arts is one of those throwaway bits, a piece of late-sixties optimism that didn’t pan out. It sits, nondescript, sandwiched between two newer, sleeker dreams. You wouldn’t notice it unle
ss you were looking for it. Which must be the way Bishop wanted it.

  A tall set of revolving doors lets Avi and Emmeline into the lobby. Doric columns line the walls, and the Deco tile floors have waves of dried salt tracked in from the sidewalks. The front desk is staffed by a broad-shouldered man with a body-builder physique and a name tag that reads SHEN in large gold letters.

  “Can I help you?” he asks. He steps away from the desk, forming a second door between them and the rest of the building. Avi wonders if it’s possible he had increased his size. All things are possible here, he reminds himself.

  “Avi Hirsch,” he says. “We’re here to see—”

  “Shen, this is the gentleman we’ve been talking about,” says Bishop, hurrying across the lobby, straightening his tie, half the collar of his blazer folded up. The temporary disarray feels like an affect, a way to make himself seem softer. Avi thinks of military men he’s known, the two faces they keep for war and for family. The impulse is to try to determine which one is real, but the truth is always that both are real in equal measure. The best of them can switch on a moment’s notice. This is Bishop’s face for family, but Avi’s seen his war face.

  “Avi, glad you could make it,” Bishop says, patting him on the shoulder with false chumminess. “And Emmeline.” He turns to her as if he’s forgotten Avi is there. “I’m so happy to have you join us.” With obvious discomfort, he lowers himself to one knee and extends his hand. Emmeline takes it. Avi imagines a rapid, massive flow of information between them. A mutual download. A Vulcan mind meld. Bishop lets go of Emmeline’s hand, and Emmeline continues to watch him, unsmiling. “This is a school I started for people like you and me,” Bishop says.

  “It’s very nice,” Emmeline says quietly.

  “This is only the lobby,” he says. “This is the part anyone gets to see. We keep all the best parts hidden. Would you like to see more?”

  Emmeline nods, and once again Avi finds himself trailing behind, an afterthought, as Bishop leads them across the cavernous lobby. He can’t help but think about Willy Wonka opening up his factory to the public for the first time. The most memorable parts of the movie, the reasons Kay’s deemed it too grown up for Emmeline, are the ones in which Wonka’s facade of genial showman falls away to reveal something frightening underneath. Avi goes to put his arm around Emmeline, but she’s a step ahead with Bishop.

  Before they get there, the doors of a brass Deco elevator open. A teenage girl bounds out and past them, floating a few inches off the ground, a pale aura of purple around her.

  “Marian,” Bishop says quietly. “No abilities below the second floor.”

  “Why is that the rule?” the girl asks, hovering in the air, arms crossed defiantly.

  “No abilities below the second floor,” Bishop repeats.

  “This is bullshit,” the girl mutters. She settles to the ground, and her aura goes dim before she exits the building.

  “It’s amazing we’ve kept this place a secret this long,” says Bishop. “Five hundred teenagers. It’s like herding magical cats.” They step into the elevator. “We’re having breakfast with some of the staff,” he says, “then a little tour of the facilities. Just something to start off, to give you a sense of the place.”

  The doors close in front of them, leaving the normal world behind, and Avi is sure beyond any doubt that Bishop is talking to Emmeline and not to him.

  Carrie Norris busts into the boys’ dorm room.

  “Headmaster Bishop is a dick,” she proclaims.

  Waylon Winans drops the lit joint Miquel Gray just passed him. The cherry fractures on the hard industrial carpet and dies in pieces. The boys sit cross-legged on the floor. Miquel holds the toilet paper tube capped with a dryer sheet Waylon thinks deadens the smell of smoke. He’s wrong: the eleventh-floor hallway is rank with the skunky odor.

  “Shut the door, shut the door,” he says.

  “What are you up in arms about?” Miquel asks.

  “About she doesn’t get to talk to the reporter guy,” Waylon says, relighting the joint.

  “Get out of my head, you creep,” Carrie says, shoving her thick, half-combed brown hair back from her face and snapping her fingers to call for the joint.

  Waylon holds up his hands defensively. “It’s like a neon sign on your forebrain,” he says. “Miquel could see it if he wasn’t staring at your ass.”

  “Fuck you,” says Miquel, taking the joint and passing it to Carrie along with a lighter.

  “Why are you even here?” Waylon asks. “You have a room, right?”

  “Hayden and Jonathan are practicing in there,” Carrie says. “They get to perform a special little concert for our guest.”

  “Practicing,” says Waylon, putting annoying air quotes around the word. “Those two are totally fucking.”

  “Shut up, Waylon,” Miquel says. He made out with Hayden at a party last summer while Carrie was back home in Deerfield. Both of them texted Carrie to apologize the next day. Neither made it explicit why it was necessary to apologize, although Carrie obviously knew. “Hayden’s a good choice,” Miquel says. “Nonthreatening.”

  “I am nonthreatening,” says Carrie.

  “You could sneak up behind somebody and kill them.”

  “She could sneak up in front of somebody and kill them,” Waylon says.

  “Hayden can look like anyone they want,” says Carrie.

  “But they don’t,” Miquel says. “They look like Hayden.”

  “Well, I haven’t snuck up behind anyone and killed them.”

  “Yet,” says Miquel, smirking.

  “What if you were fucking Hayden and she switched back into a guy?” Waylon asks. “You would be instantly gay.”

  “You are instantly gay,” Miquel says.

  “Hayden would never fuck you, Waylon,” Carrie says, not bothering to correct his pronouns and instantly feeling bad about it. “And they don’t switch. Ever.” She tokes hard, leaning back against the door. She holds the joint out to assess it. Waylon spends an inordinate amount of time worrying about becoming gay. Boys like Waylon have to put up a front of masculinity for some imagined audience all the time. It must be exhausting. But he is a deft roller. The joint looks like a chrysalis.

  “Bryce grew this?” she asks.

  “Mmm hmm,” says Waylon.

  “So it grew, like, on him?” Carrie asks.

  “It’s gross, right?” says Miquel.

  “It’s amazing,” Waylon says. “You’re both such prudes. Why don’t you fuck already?”

  “We’re essentially smoking his body hair,” Carrie says.

  “His body hair that gets you completely fucked up,” says Waylon. “Give it back if you don’t want it.”

  “No,” Carrie says, taking another hit.

  “So why is Bishop a dick?” Miquel asks.

  “I wrote that article last year for the paper about how we should go public,” she says. “And now it turns out I’m a hundred percent right, and they’re bringing in a reporter to write about us.”

  “And they don’t want Carrie anywhere near him,” says Waylon.

  “So what the actual fuck?” Carrie says.

  “It’s not just you,” Waylon says. “No one’s supposed to talk to him. No one’s allowed to use their abilities all day. It’s basically like when the board of ed inspectors come.” He makes gimme-gimme gestures for the joint, which Carrie ignores. “We’re supposed to look like Juilliard. They want our best face forward.”

  “I’m a great face!”

  “You’re a volatile agitator.”

  “I have opinions that could—”

  “So go,” say Miquel.

  “What?” Carrie says.

  “You’re like a fucking superninja spy thief and you’re complaining you’re not on the guest list? Go. Get in there next to
this guy and tell him what you think.”

  “She doesn’t know what she thinks,” Waylon says.

  “Get the fuck out of my head.”

  “She’ll know once she says it,” Miquel says. Waylon snatches the joint from Carrie, taking one more mighty puff.

  “Late for Ethics,” he says, chest puffed out. He exhales and grabs a stack of textbooks off the desk. “Light a candle when you two are done banging. I don’t want to come back and have it reek of fucking in here.”

  “Dick,” Carrie mutters.

  When the door closes behind him, Carrie climbs up and sprawls out on his upper bunk. The sheets have never been washed and hold the deep fug of concentrated teenage boy. Salt and earth. Goat stink and vegetables going to rot. Miquel says the reason he gave Waylon the top bunk is that smell rises. Miquel is meticulously clean; he smells like soap and a candle that’s been put out.

  He plays music through the tiny speakers on his desk. Sleepy vocals fill the room, and Carrie starts laughing when she recognizes the song.

  “Please tell me you don’t always listen to Pink Floyd when you smoke,” she says.

  “It’s good,” says Miquel.

  “It’s a stereotype,” she says. “You’re like the cartoon of a high school stoner.”

  “So put on something else.”

  Carrie pulls the iPod out of her pocket. It’s an old one, seventh generation, objectively the best. Last model with a click wheel. She scrolls through artists’ names, trying to find one that’s safe, something she knows he’ll like. But she keeps coming back to a song that feels unsafe, too weird. It’s one of her favorites, but she’s never played it for anyone, not even Hayden. She hops down and plugs the iPod into Miquel’s speakers, then clambers back up as the song starts. A cello line trips through the air, spirals downward, and recovers. The singer’s voice trembles as if he’s making up the words.