by Proehl, Bob
“There were others who were bad?”
“Some,” says Bishop.
“And you killed them?”
“I did,” Bishop says. His voice is bright, as if Avi had asked him if he was enjoying his drink. “Part of me thinks I should have killed Owen Curry. I lie awake in my quarters, thinking I could go into the cell and end him and no one would blame me. What would your friend in Homeland Security do if I dumped Owen Curry’s corpse on his desk?”
“He’d give you a fucking medal,” says Avi.
Bishop nods. “Fahima told you about the effect baseliners have on our abilities,” he says. “Being around people who aren’t Resonants dampens them. It reduces what we can do. But the opposite is true, too. The more of us there are, the stronger we get. The school sits in a kind of balance. The students are stronger for being together but are held back by being in the middle of the city. The risk of one of us being too powerful frightens me. I was out hunting monsters, but I was also a population control. Which, when I say it out loud, sounds monstrous.”
“You were culling?” Avi asks. It’s not exactly the question he wants to ask, since he already knows the answer. He needs to know the circumstances under which Bishop would take a life. Would it have to be someone who’d gone bad, irreparably evil? Might it be someone who made a mistake? Or someone who was too powerful, as powerful as Bishop and Fahima believe Emmeline is going to be?
“I was willing to yank out a seedling that might grow to be a weed,” he says. “Abilities like ours in the hands of teenagers is a terrifying thought on its own. With the idea that those power levels would increase as the Resonant population increased…Well, I was more preemptive than I should have been. Too many of us would be too much.”
“Fahima says there are more of you.”
“Every day,” he says. “It’s a slow curve upward, but it’s speeding up. Maybe that’s good for the world. Maybe that’s what the world wants, if you can think of the world as having desires. My friend used to talk about the Source as if it were sentient. I don’t know that I ever believed it, but I had the sense I’d been picked for this. Even before it happened. Before the Trinity test. I remember putting my hand on the Gadget and feeling it wanted something from me. There was some plan in place that I was part of.” Avi thinks about the IED that took his leg, the feeling that that particular bomb had been waiting for him, that they’d been moving toward each other his whole life. “Planning indicates sentience, the existence of a plan. Why couldn’t the world be sentient, too? I’m not going to stop it by executing every thermic teenager who torches his middle school. It’s not for me to decide.”
“What about the decision to go public?” Avi says. “Why do you get to decide that?”
“I was the one who told them to hide,” Bishop says.
“And they listened?” Avi asks. It’s something he hasn’t been able to make any sense of. These people, these Resonants, have existed for almost seventy years. And in all that time, not one has gone rogue, not one has gone to the press and announced himself. You could argue that Owen Curry had, but Owen Curry only proved the point. He’d blown up twenty-one people, and the public didn’t know about him or that there were more like him.
“I’m going to tell you this because I don’t think you’ll understand it, which makes it safe to say,” says Bishop. “The Hive is like a place, but it’s not a place. It’s also like a conduit through which the energies that provide our abilities pass. It’s not necessarily transparent. That’s not exactly the word, but maybe you get my meaning.” He holds up his drink between himself and Avi so that the Christmas lights behind the bar twinkle inside it. “Light can pass through glass, but it’s bent in its passing. A lens carver knows this and can use the properties of the glass to shape light.”
“You’re right,” says Avi. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I like to think I’ve been a good influence, is all,” Bishop says. “I like to think that I’ve bent our light toward the good.” He lowers his glass. “Any other questions?”
“What’s Emmeline’s ability?”
“I can’t answer that any more than you could have guessed what she’d grow up to be on the day she was born,” Bishop says. “We look at them for hints. We jump to conclusions at each developmental milestone. He walked at eight months, he’s going to be an Olympic runner. She knows so many words already, she’ll be a novelist. But in the end, they turn out to be themselves and we can only sit by and watch. Anything else?”
“Do you have kids?”
Bishop smiles. “Hundreds. Thousands.”
“Why are you paying my wife?” Avi says. He expects it to be a question that stops time, but Bishop rolls over it as if it were nothing.
“I wanted her involved in a way she’d understand,” he says. “Same as you. I made a promise a long time ago to keep the two of you in the fold.”
“A promise to whom?” Avi says.
Bishop tips his glass all the way back, gulping the last bit of gin. His head clicks to the side, and he smiles, contented, then returns to the conversation, staring into the bottom of his glass. “Emmeline.”
“What does that mean?” Avi asks, setting his glass down harder than he intended. Of all the advantages Bishop holds, this one is the most unfair. Avi would trade every other answer to know what Bishop knows about Emmeline. But before his anger can build, he feels a cool wave wash over his brain. It’s as if he’s gotten his answer even though he doesn’t know what it is. It’s the first time Avi is aware of Bishop using his ability on him. It’s like being shoved away from the things you actually think while also being made to feel completely at ease with being shoved. Later he’ll understand what’s been done, and he’ll question every interaction he’s had with Kevin Bishop.
“These glasses are very large,” Bishop says. “The ones I’m used to are half this size. I think I’m a little drunk. Let’s pick this up again tomorrow or next week. I’m assuming we have time.”
“My editors think it should wait until the new year,” Avi says. He’s nagged by something he’s forgotten, a question he meant to ask. “They’re worried if it comes out around the holidays, it’ll read like some hokey Christmas miracle story.”
“These are the editors at the Tribune?” Bishop says.
“The first piece will be in the Trib,” says Avi. “The in-depth stuff will be in The Atlantic. First issue of the new year.”
Bishop slides his glass across the bar and signals for the bill. “That’s good. I like that,” he says. “Beginnings. Fresh starts and that kind of thing. It’s strange, knowing that people out there know about us. Not bad. New.”
The bartender arrives, and Bishop covers their drinks. Avi hasn’t asked him where the money comes from. How he bought a building on 57th and Lexington, how he pays faculty and staff without apparently charging tuition. There are so many questions left.
“What about the academy?” he asks. “Will you keep it hidden?”
Bishop smiles: an old New York grin full of slightly crooked teeth. “I haven’t decided,” he says. “I’m thinking it might not be my decision to make. Have a good night, Avi. Happy holidays if I don’t see you.” He signs the credit card slip and excuses himself, disappearing back into the men’s room and the door that waits for him there.
Kay tells him they’re going to meet her mother out. It’s unusual for Kay to drive, but she plays this off with a half-truth. “You’re too responsive in the snow,” she says. “You start to slide, and you slam the brakes and try to correct. You have to go with it.”
“Fine,” Avi says. He spends the drive fiddling with the radio, trying to find a station that isn’t playing Christmas carols. When Kay pulls into the parking lot of First Corinthians in Roseland, her mother’s church, Avi glares at her.
“What is this, Kay?”
“It’s not a
big deal,” she says. The moment they’re inside, Emmeline is whisked away by one of the church’s numerous old ladies, who separates children from their parents and herds them to the back of the church. Kay and Avi take seats next to her mother, who is buzzing with excitement. As the preacher starts in on the nativity story, Kay finds Avi’s hand and squeezes it reassuringly. He doesn’t respond, doesn’t return the ping she’s sent him. She has him trapped, with no way to express his anger. So he seethes, bolted into the pew.
A couple comes to the front of the church dressed in robes. His brown, hers blue. She holds a baby. When Emmeline steps out of the choir entrance, clutching a shepherd’s crook, a stuffed sheep tucked under her arm like a football, Avi’s hand gives Kay’s an involuntary squeeze. They will always be joined by the live wire of their daughter.
A dozen shepherds, none taller than Emmeline, mill about the front of the church, singing “Angels We Have Heard on High,” followed by “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” flanked by taller kids in brilliant white robes and paper wings. The sound they create, thirty kids without a tenor or baritone among them, has weight and light. It’s a physical thing, a new presence in the church, and for a moment, watching his daughter become part of it, Avi feels a calm settle over him, a thin sheath of joy protecting him from the world and the world to come.
After the pageant, families flood into the cold. Kay’s mother makes the three of them pose for a picture in front of the church. Kay and Avi huddle around Emmeline as if they can protect her from the cut of the wind. They close ranks on her instinctively, and the naturalness of the motion makes Avi think, We’re going to be all right. They should have been better than all right. On some parallel earth, versions of Kay and Avi lead fantastic lives. They communicate through telepathy rather than hand squeezes and glares. They have flaws, but they don’t feel broken. They don’t exhaust each other. When Avi smiles for the picture, it’s with resentment of and resignation to the state of being all right.
“I’m sort of hungry,” Emmeline says as they reach the van.
“It’s late,” says Avi. “We should get her home.”
“There’s a place right up the road,” Kay says, stepping around him to unlock the driver’s side and take the wheel. She drives them past the wreckage of Salem Baptist. In the dark, it’s only a lump of scrapped wood, but Avi wonders how Kay can fail to notice it. It glows in his awareness, a site that’s taken on such importance in his life that the last month feels as if it’s emerged from that crater, a new and stumbling thing fallen to earth. They pass the Roseland Rest and pull into the parking lot of a strip mall where the neon of Planet Chicken bleeds under the streetlights.
“I’ll wait in the car,” Avi says.
“It’s zero degrees out here,” Kay says. He’s earned some points with her by not complaining in front of her mother, but her threshold for annoyance with him is set low.
“Daddy, barbecue sauce,” Emmeline says as if Avi were unaware of the invention. Kay shuts off the car, and they go in. Planet Chicken is brightly lit, white fluorescent lights verging on blue. Emmeline orders nuggets, a mode of conveyance for barbecue sauce. The girl behind the counter slips Emmeline two extra packets, then looks up at Avi to take his order.
“Hey,” she says. Avi gives her a quick chin up of recognition and orders a wing combo, looking down into his wallet as he pays.
“I was disappointed you weren’t an angel,” Kay says in the booth. “But you were the most amazing shepherd I’ve ever seen. That sheep didn’t make a peep.”
“You have to whisper to them,” Emmeline says. She spoons deep crimson sauce into her mouth via nugget. “Quiet in their ears. Especially in front of big crowds. Sheep hate crowds.” Avi was so caught up thinking about the pageant as an attack against him, he failed to register its effect on Emmeline. The girl beams in a way they rarely see at home, where she usually only glows. The little candle of her happiness becomes a flare.
Emmeline isn’t a blip. She’s more like a flare.
Avi excuses himself and walks swiftly toward the bathrooms, his mouth swimming in saliva. He dry heaves, then checks himself in the mirror. His eyes are glassy with tears, the way they get when he smokes pot or throws up. Kay gives him a what the actual fuck look when he gets back to the table. He sits down and puts a napkin over the remainder of his wings. He doesn’t speak for the rest of the meal.
They wait until Emmeline’s asleep to have the argument. Whoever moves first decides what the fight will look like, what will be the terms and the limits. Generally this is Kay, but tonight it’s Avi.
“Was that supposed to be some kind of ambush?” he says. “Dragging me to church like that?”
“To see your daughter,” Kay says. “It was a surprise.”
“Bullshit it was a surprise,” he says. “You and your mother and your evangelical shit.”
“What are you even talking about?” Kay says.
“How did Emmeline know all those songs? Those hymns?” Avi says. “You’ve been indoctrinating her.”
“I’ve been taking her there to practice once a week all month,” says Kay. “Not that you fucking noticed we were gone. Besides, everyone knows those songs. You know those songs.”
Avi thinks of a Seder they took Emmeline to last year at the home of one of the partners at Kay’s firm. Avi, empty-stomach-drunk, tried to teach Emmeline the words to “Dayenu” even though he barely remembered the rapid-fire Hebrew lyrics. They laughed about it on the way home, the three of them shouting gobbledygook to the song’s bouncy tune.
On a parallel earth, he thinks, Kay and Avi are doing better than all right. On Earth-X, they are fantastically in love.
“What happened at the restaurant?” she says.
“Food poisoning,” says Avi, turning away from her.
“Bullshit it was food poisoning,” she says. He can tell she gets a little charge out of turning his phrase back on him. “Instant salmonella?”
“I felt sick,” Avi says. “Figure it was something I ate.”
“It’s what you put in your head,” she says. “It’s dead girls and bombs creeping out of your head and rotting your guts.”
“You sound like one of those books you read,” Avi says. He flicks his wrist at the paperback pile on her nightstand.
Kay picks up Avi’s phone from the nightstand and holds it out to him.
“Call Louis,” she says. “Tell him you’ve got nothing. Have you even talked to an editor about this story? Are you even getting paid? Or are you chasing ghosts on your own dime?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Call the Trib and tell them you don’t need the money,” she says. “Tell them your marriage is more important than—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he shouts at her. It echoes in the sleeping house, and they both stop, shocked by the volume of it. They wait to hear if Emmeline wakes the way they did when she was a baby and some loud noise ran the risk of startling her. The shared response strengthens a sense of their history together, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. If Kay presses now, he’ll fold. He has to. She could dig until what he’s hiding is revealed, until she’s won. But she has no interest in winning with him anymore.
“Go write your fucking story,” she says. Not knowing what else to do, Avi starts toward the door.
“You know you’re not going to solve this, right?” she says. “Whatever fucked up mystery case Louis dropped in your lap, you’re not going to figure it out. Even if you did, it wouldn’t save that girl in the church. Even if you did save her, she’s not Emmeline.”
It stops him, because all of this is an effort to save her. Even if Kay can’t see it, even if Avi doesn’t know what he’s trying to save his daughter from, the goal, the dream end product now is Emmeline, safe.
“I’ll be
in in a little bit,” he says. He closes the door gently behind him.
Avi takes a few steps down the hall and stands outside Emmeline’s door. Can you hear me? he thinks as loudly as he can. He holds the sentence clearly in his mind, like it’s printed on a page. When he doesn’t get an answer, he knocks quietly so Kay won’t hear. Again there’s no response. Avi eases the door open.
As soon as he steps into the room, he knows something is wrong. The sound of Emmeline breathing in her sleep is written into the base code of his thoughts. A hundred nights he’s stood in her doorway in the dark, listening to it, marveling at the fact she even exists, much less breathes. He’s sat up with her nights when her breathing was labored and hitched, struggling to draw through snot-clogged sinus passages, or when it rattled through inflamed bronchioles. He knows how it speeds up when she has fever dreams, the change in its cadence when she moves from one level of sleep to another, like a stone dropping through wet tissue paper into waiting water. Her breathing is shallow and quick in a way he’s never heard. He shuts the door behind him and crosses the room in the dark, crumbling her drawings underfoot. Standing by the side of the bed, he puts a hand on her forehead. She’s cool and clammy, like granite in spring. He tries to shake her awake, but she won’t stir. He knows this is not within the normal scope of illness. This is something to do with them, with the thing that’s strange and new about Emmeline. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and calls Bishop, but there’s no answer. He calls Kimani’s number. She answers after four rings, long enough that he almost hangs up and calls again.
“It’s late, Avi,” Kimani says, sounding sleep-fuzzy and annoyed. “What’d you need?”
“She won’t wake up,” he hisses, trying not to be heard. “Something is wrong, and she won’t wake up.”