The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  “Time,” Alyssa says.

  Fahima opens the fridge. The bowl of chicken salad, the stuff of potential future sandwiches, sits on the middle shelf. She shuts the door. “This sandwich is fucking me up.”

  “Are you worried about the sandwich?”

  “I’m thinking about what it means to be able to move in three directions across a two-dimensional plane,” Fahima says.

  “I can see where that would be concerning,” Alyssa says, mocking her.

  “No, you don’t,” says Fahima. She picks up the Bed Bath & Beyond ad. “The way I drew this is a drawing,” she says. “Like when you draw a hexagon with some lines in the middle and say it’s a cube but it’s a representation of a cube in two dimensions.”

  “Does this end with origami?” Alyssa asks.

  “It ends with this,” says Fahima. She takes the Sharpie and stabs a hole through the ad. “That’s what it looks like to move in three dimensions across a two-dimensional plane.”

  “And if Emmeline can move in four directions through a three-dimensional plane—”

  “Three-dimensional space,” says Fahima.

  “You think this nine-year-old is poking holes in space?” Alyssa asks.

  “I think she’s poking holes in time. I mean, think about the sandwich.”

  Alyssa smiles at her. “I am taking this beer to bed,” she says. “You should join me when you’re done worrying about a tween Swiss-cheesing the space-time continuum.”

  She kisses Fahima on the neck and goes to their bedroom, throwing a come-hither look over her shoulder as she goes. Fahima misses it, contemplating the Bed Bath & Beyond ad skewered on a Sharpie. By the time she comes back from her wandering thoughts and goes to bed, Alyssa is already asleep, her body propped alluringly on a pillow, tee shirt pulled and stretched to expose one shoulder, head lolled onto the other. Fahima kisses the bare shoulder as she turns out the light and goes to sleep.

  Carrie can’t miss the note in her mother’s voice when she calls to say she’s coming home. She plays that Oh over and over in her head for weeks; each time she hears something different. Surprise. Challenge. Fear. Missing from that list: joy at the prodigal’s impending return.

  “Was it a question or an exclamation?” Miquel asks. “Like ‘oh, wow!’ or ‘oh, you think so’?”

  “Both at once,” Carrie says.

  “It’s messing you up,” he says. “You’re upset that you’re upset. It’s a knot.”

  Miquel’s working on his empathic ability, seeing emotions in shapes rather than colors. It’s more nuanced, the difference between seeing pressure fronts on a weather map and standing in the middle of a thunderstorm. The analogy worries Carrie. He doesn’t talk about it, but Miquel is exposed by his ability. He gets inexplicably sad when they watch Marx Brothers movies in the common room with Hayden and Jonathan, and he knows it’s someone else’s sadness. Or he flies off the handle at Waylon for leaving clothes on the floor, a sin they’re both guilty of, then apologizes, looking out in the hall to divine who his anger came from. Carrie feels like a failure because she can’t provide whatever calm he needs. She can’t be the eye of his storm.

  “I’ll go with you,” he says.

  “No,” says Carrie. “My family is terrible.”

  “It’s them or a shit ton of Jung,” he says. Miquel’s family lives in the Bronx, but his mother kicked him out when his abilities started, shouting brujo at him as she chased him down the street. He said it meant something between wizard and witch doctor, and nothing good. He hasn’t spoken to them in years.

  “I’d take the Jung,” Carrie says. She worries about the emotions he’d be exposed to if she dragged him back to Deerfield with her for protection. She’s also embarrassed by her bland suburban roots. It’s impossible to explain to him what it means to come from a nowhere place, to invent yourself out of nothing. Hayden knows what it’s like; they’ve done a better job than Carrie building a version of themself that bears none of the dull marks of where they come from or who they used to be. Hayden and Carrie don’t talk about these things. One of the rules of reinvention is that you never speak about the person you’ve been out of fear you’ll summon that person like a ghost.

  Just past noon on Thanksgiving, Carrie sits in the back of a cab in front of her parents’ house, listening to a wistful Springsteen song about getting out of your shitty hometown. She wishes she had taken Miquel up on his offer. The driveway is full, and Carrie identifies each car. The dark blue Suburban belongs to her aunt Chloe and uncle Jim, with their three little kids. The Mini Cooper is Susie, her divorced aunt from Chicago. The late-model compact with the Domino’s Pizza light perched on top must be her brother Brian’s, although the idea that he’s old enough to drive makes her squirm. The family station wagon, spots of rust around the wheel wells and the edges of the hood. It reminds Carrie of cramped legs and the smell of fast food. Family vacations driving someplace none of them wanted to be. Counting cows with Brian until their tally hit four digits while her mother picked CDs no one loved or hated and her dad stared fixedly out at the road like a trucker indifferent to his cargo.

  Carrie lets her fingers trail along the station wagon’s bubbling blue paint, its flaking faux-wood paneling. It’s proper in this situation for her to ring the bell, request entry into what she thinks of as home. She feels the urge to disappear as she pushes the doorbell but wills herself to stay visible. She’s relieved when Brian answers, although he doesn’t look all that happy to see her.

  “Hey,” he says. Adolescence has him over a barrel. His face is spotted with acne, and his body is assembled from mismatched parts. He’s growing like Jekyll becoming Hyde: in fits and starts. They stand at the door, unsure if they’re supposed to hug. “You have bags?” Carrie pats her army messenger bag. Brian nods and lets her in. Strains of Christmas music come from the living room. Her father spends Thanksgiving morning lugging holiday records out of the attic while her mother preps the turkey. “Mom and Uncle Jim are already drunk,” Brian says. “Aunt Susie’s on her way there. And the kids are fucking awful.”

  “They were always fucking awful,” says Carrie.

  “They got worse,” he says. She’s grateful Brian is taking her into his confidence this way. It reestablishes a sibling bond.

  As proof of their awfulness, one of the cousins comes barreling out of the dining room and into the hall, blasting between Carrie and Brian with no regard for either. Carrie expects someone chasing behind him, but no one comes.

  “Is that my daughter?” her mother calls from the dining room. She emerges, glass of red wine sloshing in her hand, a flush rising in her cheeks. She holds her arms out wide. “My little baby’s all grown,” she coos. Carrie allows herself to be embraced, enfolded. Through the salon-sculpted curls of her mother’s hair, naturally thick and straight as Carrie’s own, she sees the rest of her family watching this show. She hears that one syllable on the phone. Oh. Oh? Oh.

  Oh: is that what you think you’re doing?

  Oh: you’re still alive.

  Oh: what will they say about my daughter the freak?

  Uncle Jim, a ruddy-faced account manager for a meat company in Chicago who smells like cigarettes and salt, pushes past her father, standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a foot taller,” Jim says. “Skinny as a bone. Don’t they feed you at that place?”

  “They feed us fine, Uncle Jim,” she says, her face pressed into the armpit of his sweater.

  “Matt, go get your daughter a beer,” says Jim. Her father turns toward the kitchen to comply.

  “She’s in high school, Jim,” says her mother. Her father stops dead, a robot with a command glitch.

  “We drank like fish in high school,” Jim says, wiping his gin-blossomed nose.

  “We don’t know what effects alcohol has on special people like our Carrie,” says A
unt Susie. She’s Carrie’s favorite. Brian’s, too. She has the two best qualities you could ask for in an aunt: a tendency to give cash rather than gifts and a willingness to have them stay at her apartment in Chicago a couple of weekends a year when they were kids. She took them to museums and Indian restaurants and Cubs’ games. Things Deerfield couldn’t offer.

  “I saw a special on NightTalk the other day,” she continues. “They were talking to that man from your school, Carrie.”

  “Headmaster Bishop,” Carrie says.

  “It’s not fucking Hogwarts,” Brian mutters quietly enough only Carrie hears.

  “They were saying how they don’t know what the differences are in physiology between people like Carrie and people like us,” says Susie.

  “I can drink beer,” Carrie says. “I won’t explode or anything.”

  “See that, Suze?” Jim says, poking his baby sister in the ribs. “They’re not any different from normal people. Matt, where you at with that beer?” Carrie’s father vanishes into the kitchen. “Kids,” Jim bellows. “Come see your cousin before she disappears.”

  * * *

  —

  During pie, a discussion about crime rates in Chicago boils over into something ugly, one of those arguments that aren’t about what they’re about. Carrie’s discovering she has a secondary ability to become subtext. Every racial dog whistle Uncle Jim throws at Aunt Susie points at the new other he’s been forced to accept, one more foreign or threatening than the black kids he’s okay railing about as long as he calls them “urban youth.” He mentions something he heard on the radio, and Carrie knows what radio show he’s talking about. She’s been listening to Jefferson Hargrave’s Monster Report since Public Day. They found dozens of episodes archived on the shooter’s laptop. She wants to know where their hatred comes from, but as she listens to her uncle, she understands the disconnect. He can hate what she is while loving who she is. The issue is impersonal for him in a way it can never be for her.

  Carrie’s mother is a guitar string tuned taut. She takes her wine in massive gulps. Carrie’s father hasn’t spoken to Carrie since she arrived. As Uncle Jim gets ruddy-faced, edging closer to saying what he really thinks, her father leans over to Brian.

  “You and your sister go play with your cousins in the other room,” he says. He doesn’t look at Carrie, but she’s grateful for his intervention. With a sigh of teenage inconvenience, Brian leads the three small kids out of the dining room. Carrie tags behind. In the living room, Brian clicks on the television.

  “You guys like video games?”

  The kids erupt in a clamor of yeses.

  Brian turns on his Xbox. The sharp white letters of the logo burn in the black of the screen. “Keep the sound low,” he says. “If I hear you fighting, I come turn it off.” He turns to Carrie, makes an okay sign, and presses it to his pursed lips, the universal sign for do you want to smoke up? Carrie follows him upstairs to the room that used to be hers. Brian has marked his territory. High school textbooks wrapped in brown paper covers, Red Emma comics, and discarded socks litter the dark green rug Carrie picked out to make her room feel like Fangorn Forest. Her bookshelf is gone, and there’s hardly a patch of wall that isn’t covered by posters of bands Carrie can’t stand. She notes the Dark Side of the Moon poster, the same one Miquel used to have. They must issue it to boys when they buy their first dime bag.

  Brian cracks the window and sits down on the floor next to it. Carrie sits across from him, cross-legged on a mound of tee shirts. The air through the window bites at her wrists. He pulls a cigar box out of a desk drawer. Inside is a Ziploc bag full of gray pot, a glassie and lighter, and the obligatory homemade blow tube: a toilet paper roll with a dryer sheet rubber-banded over one end.

  “It’s ditchweed,” he says, packing the glassie. “This guy that works in the kitchen at the D grows it. He’s a shithead.” Carrie winces to hear him call Domino’s Pizza “the D,” one of those nicknames each generation of Deerfielders claims to have invented. “You must smoke better stuff in New York.” He hands her the gear first.

  “I get good stuff off a friend of mine,” Carrie says.

  “There’s a carb on the side,” Brian says, trying to take the pipe back to show her. She yanks it away and glares at him. She presses her thumb over the tiny hole of the carb and circles the flame around the little pile of weed. It burns too fast when she inhales, tinder dry, and she coughs like a rookie. “Here,” Brian says, handing her the blow tube and taking the pipe. Carrie blows pale smoke into the toilet paper roll and out the window, ostensibly scrubbed of its telltale smell.

  “Christ,” she says. “That’s awful. Are you sure he didn’t sell you pencil shavings?”

  Brian shrugs and lights the pipe. It’s the kind of shrug you see from people when you ask why they’re living in their hometown; equal parts don’t know and don’t care. If I hadn’t left, would I have noticed this passivity of his growing? she wonders. Would I have been able to stop it?

  “They never talk about you,” Brian says. “Mom and Dad. I think before you called they forgot you existed.”

  “I talked to them in January,” she says. “When the news came out.”

  “Yeah,” says Brian. “I saw the pictures on the Internet.” His hand drifts to a pile under the desk, then pulls back. Sticking out of the stack, Carrie sees the corner of the Atlantic issue that ran the photos of the parade. The one of Nolan towering over the shooter. Carrie saw it from the same angle, crouching with Emmeline just under the photographer’s lens. Every time she sees the photo, there’s an echo of what she was feeling, terrified and protective. Like an echo, it gets weaker with each iteration. Someday she’ll be able to look at the photo without feeling anything at all.

  “So are you going to show me?” he says, watching the smoke drift toward the power lines outside. “Your superpower or whatever?”

  “We don’t say superpower,” Carrie explains. “We say ability.”

  “Here on Planet Earth we say superpower,” he says. “Let’s see it.”

  Carrie nods and slips down into invisibility. The visible world shimmers when she’s not part of it, as if she’s looking at everything through frosted glass. Brian stares gape-jawed at the spot where she is, the vacant space in his vision. She smiles, enjoying the voyeuristic thrill of watching his expression without being seen. She reaches across and plucks the glassie from his hand. This part requires concentration: objects close to her when she’s invisible disappear as well. Otherwise there’d be an empty set of clothes walking around whenever Carrie sank down. Focusing on the points of contact between her fingers and the glassie, she keeps it outside her field, so it floats in the air. She does the same with the lighter. Suspended in nothing, the lighter flicks twice, catches, and traces little orange circles on the pot. Carrie inhales deeply, and a second later, a plume of smoke emerges out of nowhere. Then she rises up, visible again, offering the pipe and lighter back.

  “That’s fucked up,” he says.

  Carrie shrugs, because yes, it is fucked up. It’s also her life.

  “So how did it happen?” Brian asks. “Did you like get hit by lightning or something?”

  “I think we’re born like this,” she says.

  “Then how come you and not me?” says Brian. He laughs after he says it, but he stares at her, waiting intently for an answer she doesn’t have. She wishes that she could gift it to him, that Resonance was a virus she could pass or a door she could open and invite him through. But there isn’t a way, and without it, they’re on opposite sides of that door. She can show him the world where she lives now, but he can never visit, much less live there.

  After the rest of the family’s gone, her mother shows her to the guest room as if Carrie doesn’t know the house anymore. Her mother kisses her on the forehead and retreats to her own room. Carrie can hear her parents through the wall. Not every word but
enough. She doesn’t disagree with them. It would have been easier if she’d never come back.

  Carrie goes into the Hive. Not because she wants to be there but because she doesn’t want to be here. She paces among itinerant ghosts. The Hive feels crowded, and Carrie wonders how many Resonants there are in the world. Once, in Ability Theory, Fahima said the numbers were increasing, but she never said what the numbers were. Carrie has trouble thinking of Resonants outside Bishop, working regular jobs or whatever. She wonders about the ones who don’t end up at Bishop or at the school out west. There have to be lots who say no, who stay out in the wilderness on their own. To the extent that Carrie feels like part of a community or a race, the feeling comes from Bishop rather than from a connection to something larger. Who would she be if she didn’t have that? If she’d stayed in Deerfield? Who will she be when her time at Bishop is up?

  “So how bad was it?” Miquel asks, stepping out of nothing to be there in front of her.

  “How did you find me?” Carrie asks. Did I call you without meaning to? she wonders. Thoughts are dangerous here. They have a way of not staying in your head where they belong.

  “Just lucky,” says Miquel. He gives her a hug, and although there are no bodies to press together, it carries a physical kind of relief. “Were china plates thrown? Wineglasses shattered?”

  “We’re Midwesterners,” she says. “We don’t throw plates. We quietly seethe.”

  “Sounds nice,” he says. Carrie imagines Miquel’s mother, cursing him down the street.

  “How’s Bishop with no one there?”

  “Dead,” he says. “I walked around the neighborhood. All of Manhattan’s deserted. Now I know what it’ll be like after the end of the world.”

  “Did you break into Dylan’s Candy Bar and gorge yourself?” she says.

  “I walked to Central Park,” he says. “Fed the geese.”