The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

In the middle of the wall the room shares with Avi and Kay’s bedroom, the door appears, visible in the dark by the warm light that seeps from underneath it.

  Fahima Deeb puts the kettle on and washes up in the kitchen sink. She lays out her prayer rug, deep emerald with gold cross patterns. Watching out the window as bundled pairs brave a December night in Prospect Park, Fahima hurries through the rakat on autopilot. Isha’a is more about slowing the gears of the Rube Goldberg device of her brain than communing with the divine. She likes the mechanics of it. She turns her head to the right, to the left, murmuring her As-Salaamu-Alaikums. She makes dua, palms up as if she’s about to be handed a brimming cup. Nearly inaudible in the empty apartment, she asks for the same thing she asks every night: more time. Allah, slow down the world for me. She stands. The water hasn’t come to a boil.

  Clearing off the kitchen counter, she stops at an odd bit of a drawing she’d made, scribbled over with notes. Her handwriting is a scrawl, illegible even to her. She examines the drawings, trying to make sense of them. An obelisk wired to a series of thrones or electric chairs. Something to gather energy from a group of Resonants, focus it.

  “Those handheld things with the blue lights guitar players use,” she mutters. “Like bowing one string at a time. Long monotone whine. Induced vibration on the string.”

  Her brain shifts, and she effortlessly imagines the inner workings of a device she’s only seen. A feedback circuit with a sensor and driver coils. A signal that moves something otherwise inert. Makes a dead string resonate. Connections begin to form, implication of the smaller thing upon the larger. If you could induce vibration in a string, could you induce Resonance in a baseliner?

  Alyssa arrives home from her shift at the hospital in a clatter of opened locks and kicked-off boots and breaks Fahima’s reverie. She comes up behind Fahima, wraps her arms around her waist, and kisses her neck. She’s half a head shorter than Fahima, and her kisses often land there, where shoulder becomes neck.

  “Working on a death ray, babe?”

  Fahima smiles and leans back into Alyssa. The buzz of the idea is gone. The kettle whistles.

  “Could be a freeze ray,” Fahima says. “Too early to say for sure.”

  “It looks like a very awkward vibrator,” Alyssa says. “I’m going to go clean up.” She and Fahima have been dating for three years, living together for one. Alyssa believes that Fahima works for a think tank downtown, a blue-sky idea factory with a mission statement about inventing the future now. Fahima never explicitly told her this, but she’s never disabused her of it either. Alyssa doesn’t know her girlfriend dreams of machines that don’t exist. She doesn’t know Fahima can hear the kitchen appliances lovingly telling one another good night.

  * * *

  —

  The day the FBI came to arrest Fahima Deeb’s father, there were still bootprints on the rug from the Homeland raid that took her uncle.

  Fahima and her family lived on a block in a Polish neighborhood on Buffalo’s north side. A handful of Lebanese families happened to live there, drawn together the way immigrant families often were in a new place, like droplets of water on glass. Her parents and uncle co-owned a kebab stand at the Polish market, a run-down building on Broadway and Gibson that once had been the province of Polish Catholic vendors but now housed soul food diners and halal butchers along with the standard kielbasa and pierogi. Fahima worked at the stand from the time she could walk. She’d chat with the babcias who ran the bakery and called her the Angel of the Market, or with Eva, who sold ropes of hair extensions and gave Fahima a leopard print shawl that Fahima’s mother wouldn’t let her wear as a hijab. Most of her time was spent in the kitchen, shaping ground lamb into patties and laying them on broad metal sheets.

  When she was ten, an idea came to her for a machine that could scoop lamb from the plastic tub and mold it into a patty. She’d been dreaming of machines for weeks. In the dreams, one piece of a mechanism floated in a field of white. Other pieces swooped in and attached themselves until they completed an elaborate apparatus. Fahima didn’t know the function of those gadgets. They faded when she woke up. She looked forward to the dreams. They were better than the others, the dreams of the big, crowded room. Those dreams felt like drowning to Fahima, who was already prone to social anxiety. But the dream of the meat machine stuck with her long enough that she drew a schematic on the classified ads while she chomped on dry Cheerios. Her uncle Muhair, who lived with them, performed a late and hasty fajr in the corner of the kitchen.

  “What’re you working on, habibi?” he asked, looking over her shoulder. Fahima covered up the drawings with her hand, then moved it to show him.

  “For the shop?” Fahima nodded. “You’ll put yourself out of a job!” He shook her shoulder and left her to finish. That night, after isha’a, her parents settled in front of the television, she showed Muhair the completed drawings. He was like a second father to her, sometimes kinder than her own father. He agreed to help build this dream thing of hers.

  They worked on the device in the shed in the backyard. Fahima told Muhair what they needed, and Muhair acquired parts. Auto junkyards in the suburbs, mail-order catalogs, the appliance repair place down on Hertel Avenue. Anything Fahima asked for materialized and was slotted into the meat machine, which came together as it had in her dream, piece by piece.

  When it was finished, it looked like a car engine with spider legs. Exactly as she’d dreamed it. This was the first of the dream machines Fahima had seen made real, and it was beautiful. More beautiful than a person could ever be. Muhair made Fahima promise not to tell anyone the device’s purpose until it made its debut at the market on Palm Sunday. It was the busiest weekend of the year, when all the babcias in the city descended on the market to buy butter lambs and crown roasts. It was the perfect moment to show off Fahima’s dynamo. The device sat in the shed for two weeks, covered by a half dozen old prayer blankets Fahima’s mother had deemed unfit for use but too dear to be thrown out. Muhair brought half the neighborhood, Lebanese and Polish alike, around to see it. He’d lift one sajjada for one group, exposing a single arachnid limb, and another for a second group, showing a complex of gears. Within the neighborhood, the meat machine was like the elephant assayed by the three blind men. People argued and speculated about its purpose, its appearance, and the likelihood it would burn the whole market down come Palm Sunday.

  Maybe it was Mr. Pryzborowski, who ran the appliance repair store on Hertel and sold Muhair odd bits of wire and gear over the previous month, who called Homeland Security. Or one of the neighbors who hadn’t been invited to preview the device but watched from behind curtains as Muhair and Fahima went out to the shed day after day. It was 2003, and people were wary of Muslims tinkering in sheds and garages and basements. Regardless of who made the call, Homeland Security agents, bulletproof vests over their dark blue suits, broke down the Deebs’ door one night in April as the family rolled up their prayer rugs after Maghrib. The smell of cumin was thick in the air from the pot of fuul her mother had on the stove all day. The men dragged her uncle out the front door; his heels left trenches in the living room carpet. In the morning, her mother pitched the contents of the pot out the back door into the yard, killing a patch of grass the shape of a tulip blossom.

  Her parents met with a Yemeni lawyer from the suburbs. Muslims had developed a cross-national immune system for random and senseless arrests. An envelope of cash appeared in the mailbox: donations collected at an Iranian mosque on the north side. Egyptians and Turks and Pakistanis Fahima had never met showed up on the doorstep with Tupperware containers full of food. Every ‘amme on the block had a theory about who had sold Muhair out, although no two agreed. They drank endless pots of tea with her mother while Fahima finished homework in the living room, convinced that the women could read the guilt on her like the tea leaves in the bottom of their cups.

  Not long after the machine dreams star
ted, Fahima began to hear the appliances around the house and at the market. They weren’t precisely talking, but she could sense feelings coming off them along with their radiant heat. The industrial mixer that blended the lamb, egg, and spices pined to be used each Saturday morning when Fahima and her mother arrived. The aging fridge understood that there was no rest coming for it and wanted only to die. In the days after her uncle’s arrest, a voice rose out of the soft clamor of the house. It was the desktop computer in her father’s office, which he used to keep the stand’s accounts and e-mail family members in Beirut. It called to Fahima. It said it could help.

  Her parents off with the lawyer again, Fahima sat at the computer in the empty house. It didn’t tell her what to do, but it guided her hand like the planchette of a Ouija board. First to the public website for Homeland Security and then, through a series of log-ins, deep into the site’s working guts. From within, you could access everything. The computer urged her toward her uncle’s name. Fahima marked Muhair Deeb as FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

  In their flirting days, Fahima told Alyssa a version of the story that left out the machine voices and painted Fahima as a gifted inventor and hacker. “It was poor timing,” Fahima told her. “By 2006, everyone at Homeland was so bored, they would have let something like that slip. Paperwork says let him go, let him go. But it was 2003, and they all had raging hard-ons to fuck brown people.”

  Homeland caught the change in Muhair Deeb’s status and called in the FBI to investigate the hack. They traced the IP address to Fahima’s father’s computer. As soon as the Deebs heard the knock, interrupting dinner this time, Fahima knew what it was.

  “Baba, I made a mistake,” she said too softly to be heard as the newly replaced door came down. The men, this time in black suits, grabbed her father out of his chair. Fahima screamed, “It was me! It was me!” Her mother, worried that the FBI would believe her, held Fahima around the waist with one arm and clamped the other hand over her mouth.

  With the second arrest, the outpouring of community support ceased. It was impossible that the government had erred twice was the consensus. Even if it had been a mistake, the family was bad luck, likely to be catching. The Deebs, now only Fahima and her mother, were ostracized. With the house empty and the kebab stand without customers, the machine voices got louder. Fahima’s ability to filter them diminished. She broke down in the lunch line at school, yelling at the soda machine to leave her alone. The ambulance came directly to the school, and Fahima was paraded into the back of it in front of her classmates by paramedics who held her by the arms. The scene resembled the one she’d seen twice before, and Fahima felt a moment of kinship with her father and uncle. Prisoners, all three.

  At the hospital, medical devices were a cacophony in Fahima’s head. They existed in a constant state of panic, their beeps and bells external signs that these monitors and defibrillators and imagers were undergoing a barrage of people’s pain. In oncology, two floors above the psychiatric ward where Fahima was housed, a husband flatlined. His wife picked up the heart monitor and threw it on the ground, kicking at it in a blind rage as nurses tried to resuscitate him. Fahima felt each blow as if it were delivered onto her own body. She cowered on the floor while upstairs the new widow savaged the hapless piece of equipment.

  Fahima was sent to Lakeview, an institution in central New York. She was catatonic by then. Lakeview was the best her mother could afford, which blessedly meant it hadn’t been able to purchase technology since the late 1980s. In the quiet, Fahima’s mind began to heal. It was three years before her thoughts felt coherent again, before she could keep all voices but her own out of her head.

  While she was unresponsive, the orderlies had taken her hijab. She asked Ms. Gudrun, the facility’s director of youth therapy, if she could have it back, and Ms. Gudrun told her the other patients found it “strange and upsetting.” The next day in the common room, when one of her fellow patients switched the television to an evangelist station at defeaning volume, Fahima shrieked, “Turn it off!”

  “Ms. Deeb, there’s no need to shout,” said the orderly on duty.

  “I find it strange and upsetting,” Fahima said.

  “It makes them feel safe,” the orderly said, gesturing to every patient who wasn’t Fahima. Fahima swallowed hard and nodded.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She went to the bookshelf, which contained only dated magazines. After a pause to give herself plausible deniability, Fahima told the television to shut off, and it did. The room erupted in cries. Fahima buried her smile in a copy of Good Housekeeping.

  Her best days were spent in a vegetable garden on the Lakeview property. Ms. Gudrun, convinced that Fahima suffered from claustrophobia, arranged for her to work, supervised, in the slim window of hospitable weather upstate New York provided.

  Late spring, when Fahima was fifteen, she was putting up wire rabbit fence around the cabbages. Because the wires were sharp, Ms. Gudrun was seated on a stool nearby, wearing a jacket and scarf against the chill. An orderly led a man through the garden, careful not to trample any of the sprouting plants. The man was in short sleeves despite the chill, pale skin over cables of stringy muscle. He had a beard like a cumulus cloud and little wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Can you turn your cell phone off?” Fahima called when they were twenty feet away.

  “Of course,” said the old man. The whisper that nagged at the edge of Fahima’s mind went dead. “Is it the signal?” He adjusted his glasses. “What you’re hearing?”

  “Fahima isn’t hearing anything,” said Ms. Gudrun. “Are you, Fahima?”

  What she’d heard was a chirrup, like a bird in the man’s pocket, telling her it was coming.

  “Interesting,” the man said. “Do you get a sense of an object’s history? Maybe you pick something up and you know things about its owner?”

  Fahima paused. Words swam in front of her like the blobs you get when you press the heels of your hands into your eyelids. You’re safe, the words said. My name is Kevin Bishop. I’m like you.

  “It’s not like that,” said Fahima. “Also, I dream of machines. Machines that don’t exist.”

  It was the first time she’d talked about the dreams to anyone. Even when she’d showed the schematics for the device to Muhair, she hadn’t told him she’d seen them in her sleep.

  Ms. Gudrun placed herself between Fahima and Bishop, a great wall of a woman. “I’m not sure who you are,” she said, “but we’ve been working very hard to help Fahima understand that these voices—”

  “You’ve been trying to shut her down,” he said. “You don’t understand what’s happening with her, so you want to make it go away. Make her dull like you, Ms. Gudrun.”

  “How did you—”

  “You wear your name and job title on your forebrain like a badge,” he said. “It’s all that holds your identity together. A mantra. I am Michelle Gudrun, director of youth therapy. I am Michelle Gudrun. Chugga chugga chugga chugga. A little train going around and around.” He was getting annoyed. The orderly standing behind him was limp, like a sleepwalker. His head lolled drowsily on his thick neck. “I’m constantly finding our people in places like this. Under the ostensible care of people like you. Now please, be quiet a minute.” Ms. Gudrun crossed her legs, sat down in the dirt between the cabbages, and fell asleep.

  “Ms. Deeb,” said Bishop, “I’m very pleased to have found you. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long.”

  Fahima approached Ms. Gudrun and carefully removed her scarf. The cloth was nubbly and cheap. She folded it into an approximate triangle, draped it over her head, and wrapped it around her chin. It wasn’t quite right, and she could feel air on the back of her neck. She made a triumphant huff and followed Bishop back toward the main building.

  Fahima Deeb left Lakeview that afternoon with transfer paperwork to an institution downstate, one that offered more opportuni
ties for outdoor therapy. This made Ms. Gudrun happy because it confirmed her diagnoses. Neither the therapist nor the orderly remembered the encounter in the garden.

  * * *

  —

  Alyssa screams from the shower, a quick shriek of surprise. Fahima rushes to the cry, throwing the bathroom door open. Alyssa has grabbed a towel and is using it to cover herself. The water is running, soaking the towel to a dark shade of purple. Across from Alyssa, in the sliver of vertical space between the toilet and the vanity, there’s a narrow door, barely wide enough to be a broom closet.

  “Where the fuck did that come from?” Alyssa yells. “I heard a pop, and I looked out, and there was a door.”

  “It’s okay, Lys,” says Fahima. She shuts the shower off and wraps the wet towel properly around her. “Wait in the bedroom. I’m going to figure this out.”

  Kimani calls from behind the door. “We need your help.” The sound of a voice from inside their bathroom wall further spooks Alyssa, but what worries Fahima is that Kimani is panicked, too. She’s the most cool and efficient person on staff at Bishop. Her room is a sanctuary and shrink’s office because even in a crisis, Kimani doesn’t shake. But she’s shaken now. “Fahima, please,” she cries.

  Alyssa’s face changes when she hears Fahima’s name. “You know what this is,” she says.

  Fahima has wanted to have this conversation from the start of their relationship, but it’s been impossible. When they decided to go public, Fahima vowed she’d out herself to Alyssa. It was going to happen tomorrow or next week. There was always more time. Until now, when there’s none.

  “There are things about my work that I haven’t told you,” Fahima says.

  Alyssa is scared, shaking. Fahima wants things to pause. Whatever the problem behind the door is, she can deal with it. The situation with Alyssa, she can deal with it. But she can’t do both at once. Something needs to stop.