The Nobody People

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The Nobody People Page 21

by Proehl, Bob


  “Why did you stop rolling the dice?” the prosecutor asks.

  “They shot that boy in the street,” Janet says. “At the school in New York. That boy was brave enough to be who he was in public, and that other boy shot him. And I was letting people die to keep my secret.”

  “People like Donald Morena,” says the prosecutor.

  “Do you want their names?” Janet asks. “I can name every one. I can tell you if they came up a three or a four. Should I tell you what I called my system?” The prosecutor looks at her blankly. Janet turns to the jury. One of them, juror number four, nods. “I called it the coefficient of failure. Except that’s not how I thought of it. I thought of it as the coefficient of death. I swore I would remember the names of every person who died on that table so that I could keep going. Let one die to save two more. But the ones who live never pile up. I don’t remember their names or their numbers. They send Christmas cards, and I throw them away without opening them. They invite me to dinners and weddings and baptisms. They friend me on Facebook. And I remember the ones who died.”

  Avi watches the jury. He watches Kay school her face, trying not to show how the scaffolding that holds her case up is coming apart. He looks at Janet, who insisted on a trial. She needed to crucify herself to feel whole. She needed to let herself be punished for all her dead. After the prosecution is done, Kay will parade Janet’s miracles through the court. She will bury the jury in a pile of living bodies, people who would be dead if not for Janet Goulding and Janine Coupland.

  It may keep Janet out of jail. It won’t heal her.

  Fahima has work to finish. It’s difficult to take a functioning device and make it smaller. The right idea came to her last night. Alyssa picked up an extra shift, and so Fahima got to spend the whole night in the lab. Sometimes absence is the best gift a loved one can give.

  The problem is focus over distance. The inhibitor’s countersignal dissipates quickly as it moves away from the source. It’s easier to imagine an inhibitor knife than an inhibitor gun. What would be ideal would be an implant nestled against the parahippocampal gyrus. But that would require Patrick to apprehend Owen Curry and perform quick, clean brain surgery. The thought is not without its appeal. What she comes up with is bulky, the size of a leaf blower. But it can be aimed and should be effective up to fifty yards.

  She tries Patrick’s phone, but there’s no answer. Grudgingly, she sits down and goes to look for him in the Hive.

  Without meaning to, she manifests next to the shattered abscess where Emmeline was held. The Hive isn’t spatial; there is no “there” there. Still, she lands on the same spot. On the ground, there are shards of something obsidian, pieces of the cage Emmeline was in. Cautious, remembering what happened last time, Fahima picks one up. She’s braced for another terrible memory, some emotional wound ripped open. Instead, a hundred images flash on the dark surface, people and places she doesn’t know. The flicker of images speeds up, blurring. The shard vibrates in her hand. Fahima drops it as if it’s hot. She looks at it lying on the ground: it’s still. She steps back, pushes herself away from this place to someplace neutral. Someplace that’s not full of questions she can’t answer.

  She’s never been any good at searching for people in the Hive. Sarah’s tried to teach her, but it’s like shouting while simultaneously bouncing around the room. She calls out to Patrick through the Hive, focusing all her attention on an image of him, a concept of her friend. The landscape around her condenses, like zooming out on a smartphone screen, and there is Patrick, standing as if he’s been waiting for her all day.

  “Sorry I missed your call,” he says. “I was caught up.”

  “I’ve got your gun,” Fahima says.

  “Great. Now all I need is someone to shoot it at.” He sounds as tired as she feels. No one’s gotten much rest. Bishop’s handling interview requests and taking meetings with senators in DC. Kimani’s picking up new students at an alarming rate, along with busing Bishop and Patrick around. Sarah’s running the day-to-day of the school, dealing with the influx of new students. She’s excellent at it, a born administrator. Much to Sarah’s horror.

  “Where are you?” Fahima asks.

  “I got distracted,” he says. “I found a little terrorist cell outside of Denver.”

  “Us or them?”

  “Us. Four or five kids putting Kill All Damps bullshit on the Internet. I spoke with them. Convinced them of the error of their ways.”

  “You didn’t take them off the board?” Fahima affects her best imitation of Bishop, his slightly nasal Brooklyn Brahmin tone. Patrick does a great impression of him. Less accurate but funnier.

  “I made myself big and scary,” Patrick says. He looks too bored to be either. “It usually works.”

  “And when it doesn’t?”

  “I buy them off,” he says. “I enlist them in our cause using the persuasive power of my bank account.”

  “You are a credit to capitalism,” Fahima says.

  “There are lots of these little knots out there,” Patrick says. “I have to wonder what’s going on with Bishop. Usually he’s on top of these things.”

  “He’s busy here,” says Fahima.

  “He’s missing something big. I’m not sure these groups are unconnected. Someone’s recruited them. That’s who I should be looking for. Not Owen Curry. I’m playing Whac-A-Mole out here.”

  It’s strange that she misses him. They’ve spent half their lives as friends who don’t particularly get along, a thing you can be when the pool of potential friends is limited. Patrick and Sarah were late bloomers, and Fahima spent her first years as a Resonant in Lakeview. When they arrived, within a month of each other, the three of them were set apart from the rest of the first-years by age. What brought them together was a shared teenage contempt for the Bishop Academy. In the first years, they were the only ones who deemed themselves too cool for school. Fahima because it didn’t give her the answers she demanded. Patrick and Sarah because the sanctuary it provided wasn’t new to them or even necessary. They’d never run from a farm town lynch mob or seen horror dawning on the faces of their parents. While the others existed in a constant state of pep rally, Fahima, Patrick, and Sarah stood apart, smirking.

  Teenage Fahima, bitter at the time that had been taken from her and experimenting with personalities and sexual identities in a rush to catch up, loved Sarah in a way that made attraction seem tiny and hated Patrick less than she hated everyone else. She watched them with the envy only children have for sibling bonds, the deep desire to insert herself into it. Patrick was the first person Fahima came out to, after a clumsy and halfhearted pass on his part. His easy acceptance of who she was earned a trust that preceded real affection, served as the ground it could grow in.

  Despite their teenage sneering, they all found their way back to Bishop as adults. Sarah said that it was meant to be and that they’d found the best place for themselves. Behind her back, Patrick whispered to Fahima that the three of them were too fucked up to hack it in the real world, which felt closer to the truth. It’s Patrick, not Sarah, with whom Fahima can be unsparingly honest. Worn out by the need to be upbeat about the way things have gone this year, she’s pained by the lack of his candor in her life.

  “When can you come home and pick this thing up?” she says.

  “No rush, I guess,” says Patrick. “What took you so long?”

  Fahima laughs. “My mind wandered in the opposite direction,” she says. She thinks about a sketch she made the night before. A kind of a bomb. A burst transmitter that wouldn’t inhibit Resonance but jump-start it.

  “Trail’s cold here. I’ll have Kimani come pick me up,” Patrick says. “Maybe the four of us can have a drink before I head back out.”

  “Make it back tonight and we can watch Bishop on Late Night,” she says.

  “He doing his we are just like you, we
only want to be loved routine?”

  “Beats the there are dark forces rising against you, and we lost track of an angry white boy who could swallow Boston in one gulp routine,” says Fahima.

  “It’s a bad idea. He’s painting a target on us.”

  “He’s painting it on himself,” she says. “He’s making himself a target so he’ll know where they’re aiming.”

  Patrick sighs. “I’ll be back tonight to get the gun.”

  “If you find Owen Curry, will you use it?” Fahima asks. “Bring him back to his cozy little cell?”

  “No,” says Patrick. His voice is casual, easy. “I’m going to kill him.”

  * * *

  —

  With a showman’s flourish, Fahima opens the minifridge in the lab. Emmeline stares into it. An EEG helmet totters on her head like a colander, her dark curls peeking out from under its edge.

  “You need more food,” Emmeline says.

  Fahima doesn’t remember when their sessions became playful or developed a rapport that borders on shtick. They hadn’t started out that way. Emmeline was skittish and shy her first month at Bishop. Fahima took on special sessions only with students whose abilities presented threats to themselves or others. Carrie Norris, who Fahima worried might dissipate into nothing. Roberta Draper, whose natural body temperature hovered near zero Kelvin and who couldn’t share a room with another student, let alone be touched. Fahima had nightmares about Roberta’s first kiss as a replay of the flagpole scene from A Christmas Story. And Emmeline, who can do things in the Hive that Bishop says are impossible but has only hinted at a fully manifested ability so far.

  “I don’t need more food,” Fahima says. “I already ate. Before you came in, there was leftover lo mein in this refrigerator, and I took it out and ate it.”

  Emmeline nods. “You didn’t even heat it up, did you?”

  “Do you know that, or are you guessing?” Fahima asks.

  “I’m guessing because you are gross,” Emmeline says, grinning at her.

  “Which you know,” says Fahima. She likes running these sessions as farcical versions of her sessions with Bishop years ago. Give me facts. Tell me what you know. Empiricism empiricism. That Fahima believes in the importance of these things doesn’t diminish the comedy.

  “I ate a pint of cold lo mein,” she says. “And I am not ashamed to admit it. That’s not the point. The point is, the lo mein was in the fridge.”

  “Okay,” says Emmeline.

  “An hour ago,” Fahima says.

  “Before you ate it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Got it,” Emmeline says.

  Fahima pauses. What comes next is risky. Abilities can be daunting, especially when they come early. When Fahima first got a sense of what she was becoming, her mind ran screaming. She has to tread carefully if she doesn’t want to risk breaking Emmeline. But if Emmeline can’t accept and take control of her ability, there’s a risk she’ll break everything else.

  “I want you to get the lo mein,” Fahima says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Fahima shuts the fridge and hops up onto the counter next to Emmeline. “This is what I think,” she says. “If I had lo mein in the fridge right now, uneaten, and some other kid came in, I could tell them the lo mein is in the fridge and they could go get it.”

  “So could I,” says Emmeline.

  “They could walk across the room and open the fridge and get the lo mein.”

  “Okay,” Emmeline says.

  “And I think that I can say to you, ‘The lo mein was in the fridge an hour ago,’ and you can go get it, exactly the same way.”

  Emmeline looks at Fahima. Fahima sees that spark of fear, the exact thing she was worried about. It’s unavoidable, but she needs to keep it small.

  “You think I can time travel?” Emmeline says.

  “I think you have,” Fahima says. “Or will have. The grammar around stuff like this is a mess. But yes, I think you can time travel. Remember what you told me about what you saw in the park? The tower?”

  “My mom and dad saw it, too,” says Emmeline.

  “Exactly,” Fahima says. “If you were the only one who saw it, I’d be working with the theory that you’re precognitive. But I think your parents saw it because they went with you. For a second.”

  “To the future?”

  “This is what I think,” Fahima says.

  Emmeline scoots away from her. She looks at her shoes. “I can’t,” she says.

  “Maybe you can,” says Fahima.

  “I’ve tried.”

  Fahima nods, adding this information to the mental file she keeps on Emmeline. They’re friends, but Emmeline is also a subject. If Fahima is right, the girl presents a risk not only to herself or the people around her but to the structure of the world.

  “You tried to go back,” she says.

  “Yes,” says Emmeline.

  “Way back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You tried to fix your mom and dad,” says Fahima. “And it didn’t work.” Emmeline doesn’t answer. Fahima jumps up, goes to a dry erase board, and grabs a marker.

  “Two possibilities,” she says, holding up two fingers. “Time—” She draws a line with arrows pointing in either direction. “—assuming it’s linear and simple, which is, in this case, an unsafe assumption, the unwed mother of a massive fuckup.” Emmeline giggles. Fahima draws a stick figure toward the right end of the line. “One,” she says. “You were trying to go too far.” She draws a huge arc from the stick figure to the left end of the line. “You’re new to this, and you tried to jump back a week or a month when maybe you could only go back a couple minutes.” She erases the arc. “Or two,” she says, drawing another arc, this one landing in the middle of the line. She circles where the arc and the line intersect. “You were trying to change something so big, changing it would change you.” Fahima creates another line, branching off from the intersection, headed down. A new timeline. A separate reality. “It would make it so you were never in the place you left from.” She erases all the initial lines from the point of intersection to the end. She erases the stick figure Emmeline. The arc hangs above the empty space. “It’s a paradox.”

  “Pair of—”

  “We’re going to try something closer, temporally,” Fahima says. “And insignificant. The lo mein makes no difference to you. You’ll be here regardless of what happens to the lo mein.”

  “You like saying ‘lo mein,’ ” says Emmeline.

  “I do like saying ‘lo mein,’ ” Fahima says. “Are you ready?”

  “I can’t time travel,” Emmeline says.

  “Humor me. Go steal my lo mein.”

  Emmeline scrunches up like she’s wishing for something with all her might. Fahima watches her face, her concentration. Something on the screen catches Fahima’s eye. A flare-up: the parahippocampal gyrus, burning bright for a blip. She looks back at Emmeline, who’s holding a Tupperware container and grinning.

  “Here,” she says, handing it to Fahima. Fahima looks at the Tupperware, then at the empty takeout container in the trash can, chopsticks jutting out of its mouth.

  “This isn’t my lo mein.”

  “It’s your lunch from tomorrow,” Emmeline says. She bends down to look through the clear plastic bottom of the container. “I think it’s a sandwich.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “Sometimes I’m already there,” Emmeline says. “I’m here now, and I’m there then. Like the way in the Hive you can be in two places or all the places?”

  “Most of us can’t do that,” Fahima says.

  “I can,” says Emmeline. “I think I could do anything I want in there.” Emmeline shrugs. The impossible is no big deal.

  The casualness of the gesture scares the shit out of F
ahima.

  * * *

  —

  Fahima performs isha’a while Alyssa sits at the kitchen counter sipping a beer. The night prayer is the only one Alyssa watches her do. Fahima’s considered asking her to stop. Being watched changes the nature of the prayer. It cancels it out, forces Fahima’s mind outward instead of in, and she never makes dua while Alyssa is watching, as if there’s a small piece of her faith she needs to keep secret. But it’s Alyssa’s one bit of white girl fascination with the mystical other. When Fahima was growing up, the Polish ladies asked her mother to show them how to wrap a hijab, buffeted her with questions about stonings in the square or some bullshit, and her mother suffered through it with grace. You make allowances to keep people in your life.

  She finishes her rakats the same time Alyssa finishes her beer. Alyssa goes to the fridge for another. Fahima catches a glimpse of a Tupperware bowl full of chicken salad.

  “Something’s on your mind,” Alyssa says. “You aren’t as fluid as you usually are.”

  “Are you critiquing my rakats, infidel?” says Fahima.

  “How’s it going with Emmeline?” Alyssa asks.

  “Scary,” Fahima says. Alyssa comes over and leans against her. “What do you think would happen if I ate a sandwich from the future?”

  “What kind of sandwich?” she asks.

  “Chicken salad.”

  “I made some chicken salad this afternoon,” says Alyssa.

  “I know,” Fahima says. “Tomorrow, you’ll make me a sandwich. Except that sandwich is already in my fridge at work. Emmeline has served me a paradoxical sandwich, and I’m not sure what to do with it.”

  “You think she can time travel,” Alyssa says.

  Fahima can’t resist. She grabs a Sharpie and the Bed Bath & Beyond ad that came in the mail yesterday. She uncaps the marker. The acrid scent is like brain fuel. “You and I move along two axes,” she says, drawing a cross. “Forward to back, left to right. We can jump or go up and down stairs and elevators.” She draws a third line through the center of the cross. “So three.” She looks up at Alyssa. “I think Emmeline can move along a fourth.”

 

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