The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

“We don’t say powers,” Fahima says. “We say abilities. You have to think of them that way. Extensions of what humans can do. That’s all they are. Otherwise you start thinking of us as something other than human.”

  “You call yourselves something other than human,” he says.

  “It’s our endonym; we get to decide. But it’s a bullshit position to be in. Deciding what you want to be called. If I call myself a Muslim American, I’m marginalized. I call myself an American and I erase my heritage. I call myself a Muslim and I’m labeling myself as a threat. All the choices fucking suck.”

  “Resonant Americans,” Avi says. He tests the words out. He sees them in 48-point type on the cover of the Trib.

  “Most Americans,” Fahima continues, “the first Muslim they ever heard of was Osama bin Laden. But the first openly queer person they encountered was on Will & Grace. That’s what we need. One of us to show up on a sitcom. We need to be the wacky neighbor or the sassy best friend. Before they meet people like Owen Curry.”

  “You think there are more like him?” Avi asks.

  “He’s not the first,” she says. “Bishop’s usually better at finding them before they cause trouble. I think that’s what’s got him shaken. Like someone was hiding the kid.”

  The flying duo swoops down close enough to ruffle Avi’s hair and flap the ends of Fahima’s hijab. Emmeline, giving chase, stops near Avi and Fahima. She’s out of breath from laughing and running.

  “Daddy, they can fly,” she says.

  “I know, Leener,” he says. “It’s pretty amazing.”

  “Do you think I’ll be able to fly?” she asks Fahima. Avi leans forward, hoping for a definite answer even if it only winnows down the options. Of all of them, Fahima seems like the only one who’s telling him anything.

  “I think whatever your ability is, it’s going to be fucking amazing,” says Fahima.

  “Fucking amazing,” Emmeline says. She laughs and sprints off after the flying kids.

  “Thanks a lot for that,” says Avi.

  “Swearing’s the least of your problems,” Fahima says. “Can I ask?”

  “Ask what?”

  “What happened to your leg?”

  “Lost it.”

  “You check under the couch?” Fahima asks. “Sometimes when I lose something, it’s under the couch.”

  “I checked,” he says. He’s grateful to her for the joke. It makes him feel a little more normal.

  “I could build you a better one,” Fahima says.

  “This one’s all right.”

  “Bullshit,” she says. “I bet it chafes something awful. And how does it respond when you don’t have your full body weight on it, when you’re pressing from the knee? Like on stairs? For shit, right?” Avi shrugs. These are downsides he’s come to accept. “I swear I could build you a better one,” Fahima says. “That’s what I do, by the way. I build things. If that hasn’t been obvious. I could splice the wires into your existing nerve endings. It could have intercoordinated muscle groups.”

  He’s not sure what some of the things she’s saying even mean. Nothing like that ever comes up in the forums he visits. There’s something scary about it, like the early parts of a science fiction story. A robot leg that slowly takes over the amputee’s whole body. “Maybe some other time,” he says.

  “Whatever you say,” Fahima says. “It’s your fucking leg. But listen, this shit is only as strange as you let yourself think it is. Telling yourself it isn’t real, that this isn’t your life, it’ll fuck you up. You and the kid both.”

  At the bottom of the hill, Emmeline lies in the grass, arms folded across her chest. Bryce, the tree kid, kneels down next to her. He whispers to the ground, and flowers begin to sprout and blossom underneath her. It reminds Avi of the time-lapse nature films they used to watch in school in which a dead raccoon putrefied in seconds. The stems of the flowers grow thick. Collectively, pushed by Bryce’s will, or his words, or his fourth-dimensional energy, they lift Emmeline a few inches toward the sky.

  The bell rings for the end of ninth period, and Carrie knows she’s missed her chance. She’s shit as a spy. But it’s like Waylon said: What does she have to say to him anyway? What makes her opinion so all-fucking important? She puts in her earbuds and clicks on a Sleater-Kinney album that blares into her ears, sweetly obliterating all thought. She’s about to head upstairs to self-recriminate when she spots the reporter in an empty hallway on the sixth floor. He leans back against the wall, looks both ways, then puts his head in his hands and sinks down into a crouch. She yanks the earbuds out. She can hear him breathing in deep, panicked breaths. She comes up to fully visible and squats down next to him.

  “Mr. Hirsch,” she says. “Are you all right?”

  Avi jumps, then turns to her, wiping his eyes. He examines Carrie’s face.

  “You were in Sarah’s class,” he says. “I kept…I kept almost seeing you.”

  Carrie shrugs. “That’s my thing,” she says.

  “You were invisible?”

  “More like ‘relatively nonperceptible,’ ” she says. “Where’s your kid?”

  “She’s with Sarah,” he says. “She’s getting a tutorial in Hivesomething.” He takes out a manila folder full of papers and pamphlets. Some of them Carrie’s seen before. The dull, information-heavy documents about the school given to prospective students, the shiny brochures given to their parents. The truth and the half-truth. It’s interesting they’ve handed Avi both sets. “I’ve got it in here somewhere. I feel like I’m learning a foreign language.”

  “They’re teaching her to form a Hivebody,” says Carrie. “It’s so she can talk to people in the Hive. It’s good. It’ll keep her connected to us after she leaves.”

  “I’m wondering if she should leave,” Avi says.

  Carrie looks around. Posters for field trips to the Met, movie night in the common room on the tenth floor, Spanish club. Sometimes Bishop is exactly like any other high school. Then Lloyd Tynion’s face phases through a sign-up sheet for choir auditions. He looks both ways down the hall, then emerges from the wall and runs toward the cafeteria.

  “It’s a good place,” she says. Avi nods, though he looks skeptical. Carrie knows this is her moment, the spotlight waiting, the microphone gleaming. She doesn’t have a thought formed, so she decides to start talking, to learn the road by walking it, just as Miquel knew she would.

  “The first thing anyone asks when you start here is, What was your first time like?” she says. “First week, you answer that a hundred times. The best thing is to get an audience. Tell everyone in one shot. Savvy noobs hold out their whole first day and spill in the student lounge postdinner. Or they wait until after lights-out, when anyone who’s not fucking or getting high meets up in the Hive to shoot the shit.

  “If you’re real lucky, you have a first-time story so bizarre that it spreads on its own. My friend Leticia, her first time was during her first time. Her other first time. She levitated the bed she was fucking on until her boyfriend’s ass was bumping the ceiling fan of her room. He screamed, then she screamed, then the bed came crashing down. Her mother was downstairs saying her rosary and busted in on them. Everybody knows that story. I think it’ll stay here after we’re gone. Like the way third-graders are always telling the same jokes you told when you were in third grade. You ever notice that?”

  Avi nods, but Carrie’s talking not so much to him as through him. He’s a line out, a conduit to the larger world she’s been quietly coerced into hiding from. “My first time is less racy, but it’s different enough that Fahima Deeb uses it as an example in her Ability Theory class,” she says. “Like a thought experiment. Can you have your ability fully manifested and not know about it? Your first time is an event. A bird talks to you. Your hand bursts into blue flames. You sprout a second face on the side of your regular face, and it starts singi
ng show tunes.”

  “Wait, is that real?”

  “Huh?” says Carrie, broken out of her trance. “Oh, yeah, Francis? He lives at the Commune. Obviously.” She watches Avi nod again, although the look on his face is still confused. “So after it happens, you react. You freak out. Or the people around you freak out. Maybe you get beaten. Maybe you go nuts. And then someone in the Hive spots you and tells you what’s happening. You’re saved.

  “I didn’t notice. Not all at once. I was thirteen. I lived in Deerfield, Illinois. It’s sort of near Chicago but not near enough. I started to notice people were paying less attention to me. I stopped getting called on in class or picked for teams in gym. I wasn’t superpopular or anything. Sort of in the middle. These things happen, and I didn’t think much about it. Then my so-called boyfriend ghosted me in the hall between classes. I texted him right from the next class. He said didn’t see you, but that was bullshit because he looked right at me. I thought at. I guess through. Anyway, I didn’t want to come off like a stalker. I texted k, and I didn’t think about it for a while.

  “It got worse. My parents started leaving me out of conversations at dinner. My brother stopped pestering me all the time. It was nice at first. Everything was quieter.

  “And there were the dreams. At least I thought they were dreams. Every night I dreamed I was at a huge party. It was packed with people, but none of them could see or hear me. The dreams wouldn’t come just when I was asleep. I drifted to the party in class or listening to music in my room. It made things worse, the isolation. Even in my dreams I was invisible.”

  Carrie pauses, remembering just how bad those weeks were. The worst parts get lost when you’re telling a story. The lesson of a story is that you lived to tell it. If that’s the end, how do you communicate the point where you were pretty sure you wouldn’t or didn’t even want to? The time in the middle when surviving was unlikely or even hateful? For weeks Carrie knew what was happening but didn’t have a name to put to it. She was fading out of the world and couldn’t find a way to stop it. And she gave up. She became convinced that she would disappear entirely and that this was the best outcome. The alternative was to stay as she was, a ghost, haunting her own life. Unable to voice that to Avi, she picks her story up on the other side.

  “Fahima and Sarah found me in a diner,” she says. “I used to go there because there was one waitress who would always see me. I used to try to figure out when she was working. Not because I was going to starve otherwise. It just felt good. Having her see me.

  “She wasn’t there that day, so I was just sitting. Fahima and Sarah stood out right away. Sarah had Cortex with her, which is a total health code violation. But they walked right in and sat down in the booth across from me. I remember Cortex snuck under the table and lay down on my feet.

  “Sarah said they’d been looking all over for me. We knew you existed, she said. We kept looking in the wrong place. Then Fahima said they had to look at all the places I wasn’t, and when they ruled those out, they knew I’d be here, in this booth at the diner.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Avi says.

  “No,” Carrie says. Being found was a miracle. The fairy tale quality of it, the dreamy strangeness of that day in the diner is precious to her. She never thinks to interrogate it, to make sense out of it. It’s enough that it happened. “They told me about what I was. That there were others like me. That they were like me. They told me about the Bishop Academy. Fahima said there was a place for me there if I wanted it. You grow up reading fantasy novels where some poor girl in a drudging life finds out she’s a princess. The whole world makes you ready for a moment like this to happen. Even before I started to disappear, my life felt ill-fitting, maybe, designed for someone else. I was attached to it because, you know, it was mine. Watching my own life from inside it, I saw its limits. My boyfriend was cute, but he didn’t give a shit about music or books or anything. My parents were nice, but they just ended up with kids, like you do. If they wanted them, they hadn’t wanted one like me. Fahima and Sarah offered me a way out. I never wanted anything more.”

  “So they just took you away?” There’s a look on his face somewhere between fear and anger. Carrie never thought about how it might feel from a parent’s point of view. No one worries about the farmer whose daughter, secretly a princess the entire time, finally is whisked away to the castle.

  “They didn’t just kidnap me,” she assures him. “They came to my house the next day. They were wearing business suits. They looked like salespeople. My mom let them in and told my dad to go make coffee. Fahima gave her a brochure.”

  “Like these?” Avi asks. He fans out brochures like he’s about to do a card trick.

  “Yep,” Carrie says. She’s starting to see why they brought him here. It’s not about him; it’s about the kid. They could have picked any reporter, but they picked this guy. It’s got nothing to do with him. He’s the get-one-free that comes with the buy-one. Carrie feels bad for him.

  “The Bishop Academy for the Gifted and Talented,” he reads.

  “That’s the one they used,” Carrie says. “Some kids’ parents get the Academy for the Arts pitch, but I’ve never been all that arty. My mother even asked what my talent was, and Fahima said, She falls more on the gifted side.” Carrie laughs, although it isn’t funny. It hurts to remember her mother essentially asking a stranger, What’s so special about my daughter? Weren’t parents supposed to know? Shouldn’t she have had a list? Just as bad is remembering the look of surprise on her parents’ faces when Carrie’s name was brought up. It was as if they’d forgotten her completely and were mildly inconvenienced to be reminded.

  “My mom asked how much it cost,” she said. “Nothing about college placement or extracurricular activities. I don’t even know if she asked where it was.”

  She clears her throat, pushing the worst parts aside. “I spent the rest of the week wrapping up things at my old school. There wasn’t much to do. I’d slipped off the radar of my friends. My teachers had to be reminded they had me in class. Boyfriend was dating someone else. My last day at Deerfield Middle, I walked through the halls, trailing my fingers along the lockers. Like I was trying to make good memories to come back to later. But it was just the place I went to school because my parents got jobs in Deerfield and bought a house in that school district. It wasn’t special. So I stopped.

  “At the end of my last day, I sat in a stall in the girls’ bathroom and wrote CARRIE WAS HERE and the date on the door in red Sharpie. It was a stupid thing to do. I watched the ink, thinking it would fade. When it stayed, I started to cry.”

  I should stop, she thinks. It’s all so fucking embarrassing, and she’s lost the point somewhere. There’s something in her story bigger than her, something that should matter to him, but she hasn’t found it. She can tell by the way his eyebrows are pinched together. Maybe the only way is to keep telling.

  “My parents drove me to Chicago for the flight to New York. I had one suitcase. They were supposed to mail me my books, but they never did. While we were waiting at the gate, my dad kept forgetting why we were there. My flight got called, and I hugged my parents and my brother. They all seemed relieved. Like it was hard work to notice me and they were glad they didn’t have to do it anymore. They could just let me go.”

  “It must have been better for you here,” he says. It hovers between a statement and a question. He needs to know that this place is the right choice for his kid, that the minute she arrives, everything will be fixed. She considers lying to him but doesn’t.

  “It was Deerfield Middle all over again. At first. Fahima promised we’d start training together, but she forgot. I got thrown into classes. People looked past me in the hallways. Teachers didn’t notice I was there. Then Miquel, he’s my friend. He’s an empath. He got a feeling when he walked by me in the hall. He stopped and looked right at me. He was the first person who
did. And he said, I’m sorry. You’ve been here the whole time, haven’t you?

  “It was special,” she says. “It meant a lot.”

  What she doesn’t say is that she threw her arms around him and cried into his shoulder, and he hugged her back without hesitation. She keeps that part to herself. Carrie’s never been able to separate her feelings for Miquel from the relief she felt in that moment. Sometimes she hears it thrumming underneath their conversations, a bass line: Thank you for seeing me. Thank you.

  “I want to make sure you know what you’re doing is important,” she says. “Superimportant. It’s going to decide how I live the rest of my life. I don’t want to go through my life hiding. I don’t want to worry every day someone will figure out what I am. It’s not that much to ask to be able to be who you are. To go through the world as a whole person without keeping a part of yourself back. But it’s important. I think.” She hates herself for adding this, for pulling something she knows to be a fact into the watery realm of opinion.

  “I want that for Emmeline,” he says. “For my daughter.” He shifts forward, peering down the hall as if she’s coming back. “Do your parents know? What you are?”

  Carrie stares at her shoes. She thinks about her parents’ befuddlement the month she went vegetarian. How they thought she was a lesbian because she went out for JV volleyball. “They didn’t know what I was before,” she says. “They weren’t those kinds of parents.”

  “Did they love you?”

  “That’s different from understanding me,” Carrie says. “They loved me even if they didn’t understand me.”

  “Do you wish you could tell them?”

  “I could tell them,” Carrie says.

  Avi nods. “So you don’t want to tell them.”

  Carrie thinks about it every time she calls home, which isn’t more than once a month. Her parents set up a debit account for her, and sometimes they need to be reminded to put money in. Other than that, they don’t talk much. She can’t imagine what she’d tell them. Her parents wouldn’t have the language for what she is.