The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  Carrie was the first to speak up.

  “This is happening,” she said, “and we should be part of it. The school can be the face of Resonants to the whole world. We can show them this is who we are. We’re people learning to be better, to be the best we can.”

  Ruby Wallace, a fifth-year lithic and, Waylon later told Carrie, undiagnosed agoraphobic, argued against it, saying it would make Bishop unsafe, especially for the younger kids who hadn’t mastered their abilities. Ruby came by her fears honestly; she had arrived at Bishop bloodied and bruised. Her left eye pulled slightly downward, a permanent mark of how the outside world had greeted the revelation of her abilities. She imagined mobs at the front doors. Daily bomb threats.

  “How do you think it’s going to go?” she asked Carrie, tears welling in her eyes. Carrie didn’t have an answer. All she knew was that everything had to change. She looked at Ruby, whose Hivebody was a collection of flat surfaces like tectonic plates. She felt sad that Ruby had been born too early, that she’d had to suffer through this process. She wanted to tell her the world on the other side of this would be unimaginably different, but she was struck silent by the hurt on Ruby’s face, damage Ruby would carry with her into whatever new world emerged.

  Others rushed to fill the space. The upperclassmen, who were allowed to leave campus, had been using their abilities regularly in public, although they made a point of never doing so near the academy. Tired of the insular dating scene at Bishop, they hung around city high schools or even Cooper Union and swore the baseliner kids flocked to them. There were some skirmishes, most notably a ten-on-ten brawl outside a school in Brooklyn that had been broken up by the cops. But as Darren Helms pointed out, “It’s not like we can’t fuck them up.” His Hivebody was hulking. Black smoke poured off him like steam off dry ice; he was sublimating, becoming gas. Carrie could see him shrinking and puffing back up to full size in a cycle, like breathing. She worried about this logic, not least because it came from Darren Helms. It assumed a fair fight. If something happened, it wouldn’t be fair.

  “We’re better coming out than being outed,” Hayden said. Hayden’s Hivebody was unstable, although not as volatile as Darren’s. They rotated through aspects of themselves, like turning a gem to admire its facets. Hayden said that was what it felt like to be inside their ability all the time. They’d never bothered putting enough effort into their Hivebody to stabilize it. Carrie and Hayden had this in common. If Carrie wasn’t concentrating, her Hivebody was a dotted line around an empty space in the shape of a girl.

  Isidra Gonzalez made the point that students and all Resonants of color were most likely to bear the brunt of violence. A dozen boys white-knighted in to say they’d stand by her, and Isidra laughed them off.

  “How’s the room?” Carrie asked Miquel.

  “Light blue,” said Miquel, as if that held clear meaning.

  What swayed things finally was the underclassmen. Prohibited from leaving campus without chaperones, they’d never used their abilities in public. They didn’t take kindly to coddling from their elders, particularly homebodies like Ruby Wallace.

  “This is happening,” said Viola Wilkerson. Her Hivebody burned blue at the edges and white at the center like the gas flame on a stove. When she said the words, they didn’t have the argumentative tone they’d had when Carrie had spoken them. They had a sense of wonder. Carrie had asserted that these things were going to happen whether the assembled students liked it or not. Viola said it was magic to be here in the middle of all of it, with change not inevitable but present, a moment threatening to slip by them into the past.

  “This is happening,” her classmates agreed. They spoke the words to one another. A pledge.

  And the decision was made.

  “You should get credit for the motto,” Hayden said to Carrie.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Carrie said. All that was left was to pick a day, select a moment, and wait for it to arrive.

  When it does, they throng in the lobby. Shen expands to his maximum size, holding them back until the clock hand clicks up to twelve. The doors of Bishop Academy open, and the students spill out onto 57th Street. Carrie holds back a second. She grabs Miquel’s wrist.

  “Is it real?” she asks.

  He smiles and pulls her forward into the street. They’ve been told all their lives to hide what makes them special. Out in the open for the first time, they fly and glow. They shift fluidly from shape to shape. They puppet elaborate golems made of discarded newspapers and empty coffee cups with their thoughts. They juggle balls of light, launch fireworks from their fingertips, trail streamers of pure energy as they dance. It’s a parade, a coming-out party. For Carrie, whose ability is to hide, it’s enough to walk alongside her friends as they peacock and strut. She catches the cartoonish mental images Waylon throws at the crowd like Mardi Gras beads. She watches Isidra Gonzalez trace a lemniscate of molten silver, weaving it around her body. Hayden and Jonathan peform acoustic covers of what Hayden calls the queer classics, anthems of coming out, along with some post–civil rights movement say-it-loud songs Bryce suggested. Waves of positive emotion pour off Miquel like heat.

  Carrie passes Avi Hirsch and his daughter on the sidewalk. They’re tight together until other kids snatch Emmeline away, pulling her into the street to jump, dance. The reporter watches her go. He taps the photographer next to him. “Get a shot of her for me,” he says. The photographer trains his camera on the girl’s back, clicking as she becomes part of the crowd.

  The sidewalk is lined with spectators and the press. Those in the back stretch phones as high as they can to get pictures of the students in the street before they notice the show in the air above. They turn their eyes upward, eclipse watchers, UFO seekers. They search the skies for wonders and are rewarded.

  Bryce works the edges of the crowd. His head is a crown of calla lilies. His shoulders blossom lilac and hyacinth. A puffy necklace of peony blooms under his chin. On the curb, a little girl, maybe three years old, jumps up and down, struggling to reach one of the flowers on the top of Bryce’s head. Her mother holds her back, whispers in her ear. The girl stops leaping, her face sad and slack. Bryce kneels down in the gutter. He bows to let the girl pluck a lily from his scalp. Behind him, Shane Goss suspends a perfect globe of light in the air in front of him. A knot of people gather to watch as he shapes it. Four thin veins descend from the globe. A bulb develops at one end and becomes a neck, a head. Details come into focus, take shape, and there is a horse the size of a small dog crafted entirely of light. They always do a horse, Carrie thinks, remembering boys in the common room showing off horses made of light, made of metal, to try to impress girls. Like zoetrope images, something about the mechanics of the horse’s movement makes them a showcase for a new medium. The horse gallops in place, legs pedaling, the muscles at its shoulders rippling. Shane’s face twists in concentration. The legs move faster and faster until they’re blurred with speed, and a young boy watching begins to clap, enthusiasm bursting uncontrollably from him. Shane beams at him. Carrie can’t help watching them, intruding on a moment that should be only theirs. She has the sense that all of today’s moments are shared. They belong equally to everyone here, Resonant and baseliner, spectator and spectacle. It’s the last time she’ll ever have this feeling. An echo will come back to her, but never with the surety she has right now.

  Someone jostles her, breaks her attention. When she turns, she’s face to face with a boy she doesn’t recognize. He’s sweating even though he doesn’t have a coat and it’s freezing out. He pushes by her and ducks into a walkway. Carrie turns back to find Shane and his assembled audience. Carrie sees the red dot before Shane does, zipping around his face like a mosquito looking for a place to settle. Shane’s eye twitches as the dot skitters across it. He swats at it, then turns toward the source of the light. His happiness at finally being able to share his ability radiates from him as the bull
et turns his head into a red mist and the horse disperses into nothing.

  Carrie screams as another bullet goes wild and hits the asphalt, spraying macadam at the kids on the curb and the startled student revelers. A third catches Doug Shaw in the meat of his thigh. Carrie reaches out and grabs Emmeline, who happens to be the nearest kid. Carrie folds Emmeline in her arms and forces them both down into invisibility. It’s the first time Carrie’s made someone else invisible with her, and a bright spark of pride fizzles in a cool pond of panic. Emmeline struggles against her grip, and Carrie hears the kid’s father calling out for her, but she holds Emmeline tight. Nolan Emerson, Shane’s roommate since first year, rushes to the body, shaking Shane as if he can wake him, but Shane is clearly dead. A memory comes to Carrie of their field trip to the Museum of Natural History, Shane making a translucent penguin dance across the tundrascape of the Inuit diorama. She starts to laugh, the nervous tittering of a much younger girl. It’s only the hitching breath of Emmeline’s body against her, small and fragile like a bird’s, that steadies Carrie and returns her to the horror of the moment.

  The crowds bolt, running for cross-streets. The students and faculty are paralyzed, caught in a kill zone. A fourth shot shatters the window of a bank. Sarah, calm in the middle of the chaos, closes her eyes. When she opens them again, she points to the top of a building at the northwest corner of 57th and Lexington.

  “There,” she shouts.

  Michaela Michelinie, who teaches first-years and who Carrie thinks of as a kindly grandma, jumps into the air. Five fliers follow, falling into formation like fighter jets. They rush toward the rooftop. Shots worry their approach, a slow, cruel drumbeat. One bullet passes close enough to Carrie and Emmeline that Carrie feels the hem of her shirt flutter. Another hits Pamela Briggs, ten feet away from them, in the gut. She staggers into the arms of Leticia Hartman. The air ripples with a ring of heavy gravity that Leticia puts up around them for protection. Carrie wishes she was within that circle instead of here, invisible but exposed.

  Marian Scholl, a third-year flier, reaches the shooter first because she doesn’t waver and dodge. She, too, is a bullet. She snatches him up like a hawk catching a mouse. The rifle falls onto the rooftop. Marian swoops back toward the crowd and drops him. As he plummets, Eli Herrington snatches him from the air. The fliers continue like this, catching and dropping like a malicious trapeze act, and each time Carrie hopes the shooter will fall. She wants to hear the crunch of him against the ground so badly that it’s a hunger. Rufina Dahl, who started at the academy the same month as Shane, tosses the shooter onto an open patch of pavement in front of Nolan, who cradles Shane’s body. In the still moment, they see the shooter in a heap, a fetal ball that births itself. He’s a kid, no older than they.

  Nolan comes up off his knees. His right fist is clenched and begins to spark. He approaches the shooter, fist wrapped in a cloud of angry blue flecks of electricity, like wasps around a stirred nest.

  “Fucking do it,” screams the shooter. He’s out of breath from the fall and from sobbing. He holds his face forward to Nolan, as if waiting for a kiss. “You’re just a fucking animal, so fucking do it!”

  Nolan’s face writhes with pain and rage. Do it, Carrie thinks. Do it and no one will try to hurt us again. Nolan raises his hand. Carrie hears the buzz his ability makes, the hum and crackle. She smells ozone drifting off him. His whole body courses with current searching for ground, sparks visible around his hand.

  Nolan towers over the shooter, a god with unknowable power, a human victim at his whim. Nolan is crying. The tears glint like sapphires. Avi’s photographer trains his lens over Carrie’s invisible shoulder, over Emmeline’s concealed head, catching the moment exactly as the two of them see it. Every breath is held.

  Nolan lowers his hand. The charge in him dissipates, spreading out into the asphalt with a crackle like cellophane crushed inside a fist. He stands at the center of a web of scorch marks as police rush in from the sidelines and tackle the shooter. When he’s upended, Carrie sees that the knees of his pants have been burned away, the skin beneath angry red. As the other cops drag the shooter away, one goes to pat Nolan on the arm but stops, worried that Nolan is carrying current.

  Carrie leans down next to Emmeline. “You okay?” she asks.

  “I’m okay. Go take care of him.” Carrie steps away from the girl and puts her arm around Nolan. She cloaks them both, this newfound ability second nature now. She leads him back toward the academy.

  “He just fucking killed him,” Nolan says. “Why is this happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Carrie says as Shen shepherds them back inside.

  The next day, the image is all over the papers and the Internet. When people see it, they imagine themselves as the shooter. On their knees. They hear the crackle of sparks next to their ears and know this punishment is just. It’s due for what they’ve done or would have done given the chance. Out of fear or jealousy. To protect their children. To deny there are people like Carrie and Nolan in the world. Dozens of newspapers and websites run an article by Avi Hirsch. They all run the picture with the same headline, one word in type huge enough to bear its meaning:

  MERCY.

  Avi’s apartment in New York is on the cheap side because it’s small and inconvenient to everywhere. Gowanus is one of those neighborhoods people end up in because it’s more affordable than where they want to be. They tell their friends in more desirable neighborhoods how great Gowanus is. Everyone here is ten years younger than Avi. Most have jobs that don’t require them to be anywhere specific. The neighborhood is studded with coffee shops where young people work diligently at whatever young people work diligently at. Avi gets his coffee to go and comes back to his studio apartment, where he can control the noise except the clanking of pipes in the morning and the boys next door who have no jobs except loudly fucking midafternoon.

  He hasn’t furnished the apartment. He occupies a triangle within it, vertices at the couch, fridge, and desk. Gowanus is convenient to Ikea. Avi’s cabbed back and forth a couple of times to purchase the desk and chair, some kitchen stuff. A bed for Emmeline sits unassembled, a trio of long, flat boxes open like coffins in the small, bare area that’s meant to be hers. Anything more would make this feel permanent, which it isn’t.

  There’s a picture on his desk in a simple frame from the Public Day parade almost a year ago: Emmeline joining the crowd, skipping away from him.

  Avi straightens his tie, smooths his lapels. If Kay were here, she’d tell him not to wear a suit. Everyone in a courtroom is used to wearing suits, she’d say. They know how to do it. You look like you dressed out of your dad’s closet. Being around young people has taught Avi that he’s no longer able to pull off youthful insouciance as an aesthetic. His days of walking into newspaper offices in ripped jeans and faded, pit-stained tee shirts are behind him.

  He picks up his cane. It’s a requirement lately. He’s been falling asleep with the prosthetic on. Proper care and maintenance are necessary, he reminds himself every morning he wakes up with his leg throbbing. He suffers through days and ends up collapsed on the couch, too exhausted or drunk to take the fucking thing off.

  A door appears on the bare wall. Avi grabs the two coffees from the desk and tugs the door open. Kimani’s holding the knob on the other side, and Avi surprises her, almost pulling her out of the room and into his apartment. She catches herself on the door frame, regains her balance. He wonders what would happen to her if she stepped out. Would she disappear in a puff of smoke or burn up like a vampire in daylight? Or would she become a grainy black-and-white image of herself, Dorothy Gale leaving her Technicolor Oz for a drab Kansas?

  “In a rush?” Kimani asks.

  “I brought you coffee,” he says, holding out the cup. A tongue of steam seeps through the lid.

  “Four-dollar coffee to save yourself a three-dollar subway fare,” she says, taking the c
up.

  “It’s not the cost,” he says. “It’s the time. The F is a crawl.”

  “Yeah, your time’s precious,” she says, almost inaudible. She’s on the edge of tired where she’s making an effort to hide it: her hair is in a tower of curls, but her clothes are rumpled.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s cool,” she says. “I’m just ragged. Bishop’s got me running around.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  She hesitates, then shakes her head. “New students,” she says. “Thank you for the coffee.” Avi shrugs it off. “What time do you need to be there?”

  “Not till this afternoon,” he says. “I was going to go by the academy first. Take Emmeline to lunch.”

  “That sounds nice,” Kimani says. She shuts the door behind him. Avi doesn’t understand how the decor changes in here, and he can’t bring himself to ask Kimani about it. It’s furnished better than his apartment. Kimani is the kindest of them, but her kindness is a way to avoid talking about herself. Everyone else has explained their abilities at length, but Kimani’s seem like magic. She sits in a wicker papasan chair, takes the lid off her coffee, and inhales deeply before venturing a sip. “Nice suit,” she says. “Remind me why I’m taking you to Montana.”

  “There’s a woman on trial there,” he says. “One of you. Harper’s is going to pick up the story.”

  “That’s great, Avi,” Kimani says. “It’s great for us. I hope it has been for you.”

  “Pays the bills,” he says. “I’m doing what I can to help.”