The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  “I don’t want to give them more than they can handle,” she says.

  Avi glances back toward the faculty cafeteria. “I don’t know how to talk to her about it.”

  Carrie laughs. “She doesn’t know how to talk to you about it either,” she says. “I guarantee it. Be there for her when she’s ready. That’s the best you’ll be able to do.”

  A trample of feet heralds the kid’s arrival, barreling down the hall toward her dad.

  “Daddy, I almost did it,” she says, throwing her arms around him. He totters but rights himself with his hand. “I can’t talk in there yet, but I can hear what people are saying instead of just wah wah wah wah.”

  “That’s great, Leener,” he says. “You ready to go?”

  “I guess. If we have to,” she says. She stops, noticing Carrie for the first time. “You’re the invisible girl from the art class.”

  “I was being superinvisible,” says Carrie. “And you saw me anyway.”

  “Maybe I have x-ray vision,” Emmeline says. She narrows her eyes down to little slits and stares hard at Carrie, who grins at her.

  “Anyway, welcome to Bishop,” Carrie says. “Glad you survived the experience.”

  “I had fun,” says Emmeline.

  “I hope I see you around sometime.”

  “I hope I see you around sometime,” Emmeline says, pointing from her eyes to Carrie with two fingers. Then she grabs her dad’s hand and hoists him up off the floor, steadying him when he momentarily wavers.

  Kay brings home two plastic bags heavy with Chinese food and sets it out for them. When Avi asks what’s the rush, she says she wants to take Emmeline Christmas shopping, which is not a thing they ever do. The fact they’re keeping secrets from him is less troubling than the idea of Kay and Emmeline spending the evening together without him there. He worries she’ll slip and say something that hints at where they went last week. As if she knows, Emmeline gives him a smile of feigned innocence. Whatever they’re scheming, it’s minor and harmless.

  “I’m meeting someone later downtown,” he says, “but I can take a cab.”

  “Hot date?” Kay asks.

  “It’s for this piece I’m working on,” he says.

  “I noticed you’re working this week,” Kay says. What she means is that the house is a mess. “What’s the piece?”

  “It’s for the Trib,” he says. “Nothing big.”

  “That’s the way to get back into it,” says Kay. Dinner is friendly, full of small talk, but they’re dancing around each other like boxers at the start of a bout. Kay and Emmeline are out the door a second after the fortune cookies are cracked, and Avi heads to the attic to go over his notes one more time. He’s just gotten the ladder dropped when his phone rings. He stares at Louis’s name on the screen, wondering how he’d managed to forget about the Homeland agent this entire time.

  “I wanted to check in,” Louis says. “I’ve got a department meeting tomorrow morning, and I was hoping you had something for me.”

  “Nothing’s adding up,” Avi says. “I don’t think I’m going to be any help.”

  There’s a pause. “You sure?”

  “It’s that girl,” Avi says. “The girl in the church. She was Emmeline’s age. I can’t have that in my head right now. I can’t get close enough to this to be any help.”

  The pause is longer this time. Avi’s lie hangs on the line between them.

  “What’s a Resonant, Avi?” Louis asks.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Avi’s pulse speeds up, and his palms seep sweat, making the phone slippery in his hand.

  “The attachment I sent you had a Trojan horse,” Louis says. “We don’t let information like this out without keeping tabs on it. I’m remote into your computer right now.”

  “What the fuck, Louis?”

  “It’s the job, Avi,” says Louis. “You’re not a virgin, so stop acting like it. What’s the academy? What the fuck kind of cult is Owen Curry part of? Have you been contacted by members of his group?”

  “I haven’t been contacted by anyone,” Avi says.

  “Did they threaten you?” Louis asks. “Did they threaten Emmeline and Kay? We can bring you in. We can protect you. You can’t deal with people like this, Avi. You can’t trust them. They don’t think like we do.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We can protect you. You need to let me help you on this.”

  “You can’t,” Avi says.

  “Do you know where Owen Curry is?”

  Avi hangs up the phone and turns it off. The call came from Louis’s office number. It’s a half-hour drive from here to there. Avi wonders how likely it is that Louis will hop in his car and drive out to Rogers Park to arrest him or that he made the call with a team already waiting outside. He listens to the house on Jarvis Avenue. Sometimes he thinks of the house as an extension of himself, like a snail’s shell, something he’s grown to protect his fragile body. He knows the spots under the hallway carpet that have too much give and the stairs that protest when you step on them. He knows how it sounds when the breeze batters it, the creaks it makes as it settles in for the night. He listens for a knock at the door, for the sounds of them breaking it down. After a few paralyzed minutes, he goes up the ladder and prints out everything he has about the Bishop Academy, about Resonants, then deletes the files. He prints the half-finished article and the e-mail exchange with Carol at the Trib and Richardson at The Atlantic. He shuts the computer down.

  Tomorrow, he thinks, I’ll buy a laptop and transcribe the article.

  I’ll buy myself a gun.

  * * *

  —

  Bishop let Avi pick the bar, but there’s a difference between choosing the setting and being allowed to choose the setting. Avi chose the Magician, a crowded hipster cocktail bar in Wicker Park. Everything about this sit-down is dictated by Bishop. Every move he makes broadcasts that Bishop holds the power in their relationship. Journalists have nothing to do until their interview subjects show up, and most savvy interview subjects intuit this. The fact that Avi’s had to wait a week for a one-on-one meeting is testament to the fact that this is Bishop’s world Avi’s wandering around in. The man holds no office more imposing than high school principal, yet Avi thinks of him as a representative of all Resonants, their leader.

  Avi’s late, but Bishop’s a half hour later. He steps out of the men’s room and stands at the end of the bar, assessing the place rather than looking for Avi. As with every time Avi’s seen him, he wears a suit coat and jeans, dress shirt open to the second button. He has the taut skin Avi associates with ascetics and long-term prisoners, and it makes it difficult to place his age except as anywhere between fifty and seventy. Kimani must have dropped him off in one of the stalls. Insisting Bishop come “all the way to Chicago” was a power play on Avi’s part that amounted to nothing.

  Bishop steps out of his office to wherever he needs to be, Avi thinks. Not all doors connect to the room adjacent. He wonders if the lines are worth writing down. He files them in the part of his memory that stores fragments, where they float detached like half-remembered snippets of melody.

  “This is such a relief,” Bishop says as he sits on the stool next to Avi. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been to a bar? When you’re away so long, they seem magical. You speak the name of the thing you want, and it appears before you.” He turns to the bartender, who smirked through this speech. “I’d like a gin martini. Something middle shelf. Dry, up, with olives, please.” The bartender sets to making his drink, and Bishop grins like a kid about to get ice cream.

  “Isn’t it like that for you all the time?” Avi asks. “Do you have much trouble getting what you want?”

  “Have we started?” Bishop asks.

  “I was thinking we’d get a booth,”
Avi says.

  “No, let’s stay here. I’m worn out on cloak-and-dagger meetings. Let’s be overheard.” The bartender delivers Bishop’s drink, then disappears. “And no,” Bishop says. “It isn’t like that for me all the time. It could be, but it isn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you go around punching everyone in the face to get what you want?” Bishop asks.

  “Of course not.”

  “But you could.”

  “I could.”

  “Exactly the same thing,” says Bishop. “A difference of degree rather than kind.”

  “So what is your ability?” Avi asks.

  Bishop leans over the bar and sips from his drink. “It’s rude to ask,” he says. “It’s considered rude. We have an etiquette about these things. You develop for yourselves etiquettes and ethics. The closest I can think of would be it’s like asking someone flat out if they’re gay or pregnant. It’s just not done.”

  “The benefit of being ignorant is you get to ask rude questions,” says Avi.

  “But not necessarily get them answered,” Bishop says. “For you, I’ll make an exception.” He plucks an olive from his glass and slices it in half with his front teeth. Without any warning, all movement in the bar stops. Men making important points sustain hand gestures while their dates keep gazing off past their ears. The bartender pours a glass of wine until the glass overflows, the bottle emptying onto the back bar. The piped-in electrojazz in the background is the only sound that continues except for the whir of ceiling fans.

  Avi swivels on his stool. The woman next to him has her drink halfway to her lips. The glass is tilted. The liquid sloshes gently, short of the rim. He reaches out to touch her, wondering if she’ll be cold or hard. He puts his hand on her bare arm. It’s warm flesh, nothing unusual. He grips it and can feel her brachial pulse, steady. He lets go and turns back to Bishop.

  “I’m in their minds,” Bishop says. “All of them at once. At the academy, we split telepaths into readers and writers, although most can do a little of both. Some writers can only suggest. Others can command. I am, strictly speaking, not a telepath. I’m an omnipath.”

  Bishop chomps on the remainder of his first olive. Motion returns to the bar with a lurch. Only the bartender notices the pause, cursing the inexplicable puddle of wine dribbling onto his shoes.

  A drop of blood falls from Bishop’s nose into his drink. It expands into a pink nebula and hangs suspended. Bishop’s hand goes to his nostril. He wipes away the trickle that runs down to the edge of his lip. He turns his hand outward, two fingers up like a Boy Scout pledging. The fingertips are smeared with a pale pink liquid. “Too light to be blood, right?”

  “What is it?” Avi asks, leaning in to look.

  “The closest correct answer would be to say it’s my thoughts, running down my nose like snot,” Bishop says. “Another answer would be to say it’s my Resonance. My ability.” He takes the spear that impales his olives and stirs the drop of blood into his drink until it’s no longer discernible. “Or you could say it’s Resonance. Not mine specifically but ours in general. The shared source of our abilities.”

  “Running down your nose like snot,” says Avi.

  “With some old-fashioned blood mixed in for color. When you find out how the magic happens, it’s never as magical as you hope.”

  “How does the magic happen?” Avi asks.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Bishop says. “It’s a frustrating thing for a scientist not to be sure.”

  “You’re a scientist?”

  “I was,” he says. “I was a mechanical engineer.”

  “There’re no records of you anywhere,” says Avi. “It’s like you don’t exist.”

  “Yet here I am, existing,” Bishop says, holding out his hands as proof. “I worked for the government during the war. When we were done, some of us became public figures. Oppenheimer. Fermi. Bethe. Some of us disappeared. It’s likely I would have disappeared afterward anyway. Taken an academic job somewhere. Pined for the bomb like an ex-lover. Many of those men and women went on to lead very sad, very dull lives.”

  “You worked on the Manhattan Project?”

  Bishop nods, and Avi’s heart leaps. This is the mother of all bombs, the God bomb. He’s read book after book on the Manhattan Project, biographies of all the major scientists, memoirs of women who did computation at Los Alamos, transcriptions of the security lecture Robert Serber gave to new arrivals. He has a hundred new questions for Bishop, but none of them relate to the story at hand.

  “How old are you?” he asks.

  “Too old,” says Bishop. “We should die when our ideas become obsolete. A red jewel in your hand should blink, and someone takes you off the board. It’d be a mercy.”

  “Did the bomb give you your abilities?”

  “I assumed it was radiation for a long time,” Bishop says. “It was the fifties. We had no idea what radiation could do. We thought it would mutate ants and scantily clad women until they were monstrously large. We thought it would make us glow in the dark. Why couldn’t it give me abilities? I taught myself genetics so I could comb my genes looking for the glitch. I expected to find something entirely new. A fifth nucleotide. Gene X. I spent years looking before a friend of mine pointed me in another direction.”

  “Who was this friend?” Avi asks.

  “A colleague. A close friend,” he says. “Another scientist on the project. He was a physicist. Theoretical stuff. Beautiful man, like a film star. And brilliant. Maybe not as brilliant as Feynman or Szilard. But beautiful. It happened to him, too. His abilities were similar to mine. Moving things around in people’s heads. But his thinking on it was different. He thought the bomb was like a tuning fork struck against a glass. That it set certain people in tune with something elsewhere. There was a vibration that served as a connection. A conduit. Once there were more of us, this made more sense. There was no genetic link between, say, me and a kid in the Ozarks who could produce perfect duplicates of himself, like an amoeba dividing. If the genetics were insufficient, the biology was even more so. Where did the matter come from to produce those duplicates? Where did the energy come from that shot out of Sam Guthridge’s eyes?” The name startles Avi: the dead boy in Wyoming Patrick told him about. He sees pain pass over Bishop’s face mentioning it, and he wonders if Bishop remembers the names of all of their dead. “The human body can’t produce that on its own. It would burn itself up. We had to be drawing it from somewhere.”

  “A source,” says Avi.

  “With a capital S,” Bishop says. “I’ve always capitalized it. We thought of it as a place. A physical location outside of our current dimension. We tried to access it directly with no luck. That’s how we created the Hive.”

  Avi notices the repeated use of we but decides he’ll dig into it later. “I don’t think I understand the Hive,” he says.

  “It’s a place. Something like a place,” Bishop says. “It’s between here and there. There are things I won’t tell you about it and things I can’t because I don’t know. A long time ago, I stopped trying to figure out where our abilities came from and focused on what we could do with them.”

  “What about your colleague, what was his name again?” Avi asks, knowing Bishop hasn’t mentioned the name. “Did he keep trying to figure them out?”

  “My friend’s investigations into the Source led him far afield,” Bishop says. “Eventually it got him killed.”

  “How did he die?”

  “I killed him,” Bishop says. Bishop signals to the bartender for another drink, then turns back to Avi with a face that indicates he’s finished with this subject. This is the reason to be afraid of him, thinks Avi. Not because he’s someone willing to kill. Because he believes every decision he makes is justified. Avi’s met true believers. Government agents. Insurgent leaders. The object of belief is irrelevant b
ecause ultimately the object of belief is themselves. They can be incredible forces for good, but they’re easily suborned, led wrong by their self-confidence. He wonders if Bishop is a man he can hand the care of his daughter over to, then realizes with a chill that even if he doesn’t send Emmeline to the academy, the rest of her life will be spent in a world populated by Kevin Bishop’s disciples.

  “Why did you hide?” Avi asks.

  “It was what I knew,” Bishop says. “I moved back to the city after the war. Lived there most of my life, when I wasn’t traveling. People forget or they have trouble imagining it, but people were being arrested for being gay well into the seventies. In New York. We had to keep ourselves secret, but also we had to be able to recognize one another if we didn’t want to be alone. We developed languages, ways of seeing and signaling. We had to be legible to one another and illegible to everyone else. We built a world within the world.

  “The way Resonance works, the way we can instantly know our own, combined with the implicit threat we present to others. It seemed to me the only answer was to hide. We could have one another. We could be loved without being afraid.”

  “Why not change everyone’s minds?” says Avi. “Why not take over the world?”

  Bishop laughs, a bold thing that comes from deep in his chest and spreads out into the room. After a few seconds, it breaks into coughing. He recovers in time to thank the bartender for his second drink.

  “I can barely keep the school in order,” he says. “Why the fuck would I want to rule the world?”

  “You could be a philosopher king,” says Avi. “A benevolent god.”

  “At best, I’m a gardener,” he says. “I tend to my charges. I bend them a little toward the light.”

  “You pull out the weeds,” Avi says.

  “Owen Curry,” Bishop says, looking down at the bar. “Will Owen be in your article?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. Not right at the beginning,” Bishop says. It isn’t an order, only an expression of preference, but Avi feels the force of it. “We’re learning how to police our own. For a long time, my methods were less humane.”