by Proehl, Bob
Fahima speaks into her ear, teeth gritted. “You never mentioned your mother was such a—”
“Total bigot,” says Sarah. “Was it the Muslim thing, the lesbian thing, or the interdating thing? You guys are a three-fer. I forgot how terrible everyone I grew up around is.” She hugs them both again. “I am so glad you’re here.”
Here turns out not to be the small family dinner Fahima expected but a gathering of a dozen wealthy, aging white Resonants. Fahima has trouble telling the guests apart, so she gives them little nicknames. Old Teddy Roosevelt. Captain Walrus Stache and his wife, Weird Neck Thing. Steel Hair. Oceanside Way is an enclave, a testament to what you can do with money. Everyone on this three-block stretch of beachfront is a Resonant and also rich. Oceanside’s residents think about the world in abstract terms because they don’t have to live in it. They’ve built their own world, a bubble of comfort where concerns about civil rights and the responsibility that comes with Resonance are topics for light conversation and not much more. Fahima met a few Muslims like this when she was a student at MIT. There was always an alum made good, some slick ‘am looking to adopt a promising Muslim student as his mentee. They invited her to the Back Bay brownstones and showed off their wives, silk-clad ‘ammes who thought of themselves like any other American wives and didn’t understand what everyone else was so worried about.
Seeing Sarah in this element recalls certain things about her that Fahima sometimes forgets. That she is funny, that she is rebellious in the bored way of people who’ve had to deal with mildly terrible things all their lives. When her mother starts to make a statement about breeding, Sarah heads her off. When Old Teddy Roosevelt informs Fahima that a Muslim Resonant is exactly what normal people are afraid of, Sarah counters, “What they should be afraid of is aging alcoholic telepaths with money and no ethics.” She keeps her eyes on her father as she says it, and no one in the room fails to notice. They go silent for what feels like a full minute before Mrs. Davenport chimes in with another “I think it’s wonderful.” The specific object of her wonder remains undefined.
Patrick is quiet and withdrawn. His father, trim, fit, and so tan that his ultrawhite teeth seem to glow, keeps pouring him whiskey, slapping him on the shoulder, and encouraging him to loosen up, but Patrick keeps to the corners. Abandoning Alyssa to the inquiries of Mrs. Davenport, Fahima goes to check on him.
“How goes the hunt?” she asks.
“You see Owen Curry’s head mounted on the wall?” he says. “I’m chasing smoke. I’m starting to miss teaching is how bad it’s gotten.”
“At least your parents seem horrible,” Fahima says.
“My dad is why there are all those stories about sons killing their fathers.”
Fahima stands on tiptoe and puts her arm awkwardly around Patrick’s shoulders.
“You’re not a total asshole, Patrick.” He laughs and reaches across his chest to pat her hand.
The food is amazing, although it seems as if it’s never been touched by human hands. Fahima imagines machines shaping mashed potatoes into a symmetrical sea of whitecaps, laying the green beans in crosshatched layers, and placing golden pats of butter at the vertices. Being the only sober one at the table, she has the pleasure of watching the conversation slide and slur its way into politics.
“It’s such a lot of fuss,” says Steel Hair. She looks the same age as Mrs. Davenport but has opted for an aesthetic more June Cleaver than Lynda Carter: powder blue gingham with white collar and cuffs. As she gets drunk, she starts to twinkle, little sparkles of light dancing around her eyes and under her chin. When she notices it, she concentrates and it goes away, but she notices it less and less with each glass of wine. “Why do they need to flaunt themselves that way? I’ve always been happy enough knowing what I am. I don’t need the whole world to know.”
“It was always built into the philosophy of that school,” says Mr. Davenport. “You can’t tell children they’re special and then ask them to hide. Bishop primed an entire generation for this…coming-out party for twenty years.”
“That’s exactly it,” says Steel Hair. “A coming out. So flamboyant.”
“It’s the culture he came from,” Old Teddy Roosevelt says. “Chelsea and Fire Island. Those men all throwing it in your face.”
“Do you have a problem with the fact Kevin Bishop is gay?” Sarah asks.
“No, not that,” says Steel Hair.
“No, never that,” Patrick mutters into his glass, smirking.
“It’s just the culture around it,” Steel Hair continues. “It’s so loud. We were never that loud when we were that age.”
“And we did all right for ourselves, didn’t we?” says Davenport. He laughs, a braying sound. In the sixties, Davenport used his ability to persuade all the homeowners on Oceanside Way to sell at a fraction of market prices, then sold the houses off to Resonants, pocketing a fair profit on each deal. To hear Sarah and Patrick tell it, most of his money came from psychically bilking people out of real estate. It’s part of what the people at the table object to about how “loud” the younger generation is. The publicity risks drawing attention to Resonants who’ve quietly used their abilities for personal gain. What happens to a man like Davenport when the world finds out how he’s made his money?
The moment plates are empty, Mrs. Davenport and the other wives begin to clear them to the kitchen. Mr. Davenport and the other men rise solemnly, as if drinking whiskey and smoking cigars in the solarium facing the ocean is a duty they must regrettably dispatch. Fahima hands off her plate to Weird Neck Thing, who huffs with affront. “Let’s do this, then,” she says. The men look at her, but only Patrick is smiling.
“Yes,” says Sarah, standing. “Let us discuss matters of the world. And sports.”
“Also the relative attractiveness of ladies,” says Fahima. “I am here for that.”
“No, you’re not,” Alyssa says. She kisses Fahima on the cheek. “I’m going to take a little postprandial nap.”
“It’s the tryptophan in the turkey,” explains Captain Walrus Stache. “It’s a natural—”
“Yeah, I’m a doctor and that’s a myth,” says Alyssa, balling up her napkin and tossing it on the table before she exits. The wives watch as Sarah and Fahima join the men. Fahima isn’t sure if they look offended or impressed.
“So how is Kevin Bishop?” Davenport asks once the air is thick with the shoe leather smell of cigars.
“Busy,” says Fahima.
“The whole thing’s ridiculous,” Davenport says. “Announcing ourselves to the world like we’re aliens who just landed. There’s power in the shadows.” He pokes his cigar at Patrick’s chest.
“Bishop used to understand that,” Captain Walrus Stache says.
“Raymond Glover understood that,” says Old Teddy Roosevelt. “Bishop was so holier than thou. Convinced we owed the world something.”
“Who’s Raymond Glover?” Fahima asks.
“One of the first,” says Old Teddy Roosevelt. “A true visionary. He was our Casteneda.”
“Glover was the one who taught us who we were,” says Davenport. “He’d gather big groups of us in the mountains or the desert. We’d consider the meaning of what we could do, not just the implications.”
“You’ve never told us about that,” Sarah says.
“I had a life before I had children, duckling,” says Davenport. He waggles his eyebrows suggestively. It’s pretty gross. “Raymond Glover’s retreats weren’t the kind of thing you tell your kids about. Glover left us a few years before you were born.”
“I like to imagine him in some castle in Europe, writing a great treatise that no one will ever have the pleasure of reading,” says Captain Walrus Stache.
Old Teddy Roosevelt nods sagely. “Figuring it all out,” he says. “Really delving in. Cracking the case.” He makes a gesture like breaking a stick in his h
ands, forgetting he’s holding a glass of whiskey, which he spills on his pants.
“Glover enlightened the adults while Bishop suffered the little children,” Davenport continues. “I brokered the deal for that building. Prime piece of real estate. Not that Kevin Bishop ever said thank you. There were other options, but the Bishop Academy was still the standard. Relentless class mixing. But he did teach them how to live within the agreement. To keep themselves quiet without going completely insane.” Davenport sips his drink. “He thinks of himself as our Martin Luther King, but at best he’s our Booker T. Washington. That school’s no better than vocational training. But my Sarah’s practically running the place now. She’ll whip it into shape.” He throws his arm around Sarah, who shrinks in his inebriated embrace.
“I’m on it,” she says.
“The thing is,” says Davenport, “you can’t be all things to all people. Bishop doesn’t get that. He wants to be the face of our people, and police the bad eggs, and run the academy like he’s Merlin to Arthur or Aristotle to Alexander. You can’t do them all and do them well. Assess your human resources and put them to work for you. Like Patrick here,” he says, slapping his son on the shoulder. “He’s not going to set the world on fire, but he’s a natural bloodhound. No shame in doing a small job well.”
Patrick pours himself a healthy refill of whiskey. Sarah rolls her eyes and holds her glass out. The two of them can have entire conversations in facial expression and gesture, a secret sibling language they share. Patrick’s arm stretches across the room, the bottle coming dangerously close to knocking the cherry off his father’s cigar.
* * *
—
“It’s the bedroom window,” says Sarah, pointing.
“It’s the bathroom,” Patrick says, adjusting the vector of her arm to a different window. His other arm is coiled around the half-empty decanter of whiskey they liberated from his father’s study.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
Patrick rolls his eyes. He hands the decanter off to Fahima, who caps it. His torso stretches up to the window on the second floor, and he pours up into it, liquid flowing back into a pitcher. Fahima watches closely, a thought occurring to her for the first time.
“We used to break in here all the time as kids,” Sarah says, grabbing for the decanter. “Patrick found it first, then he started bringing me. This was after he first resonated. Before I did.”
“Are you sure there’s no one here?” Fahima asks.
“Only the hard-cores are here in November. Bishop is strictly summer people,” Sarah says in a spot-on impersonation of her mother.
Patrick opens the sliding back door of the house to let them in. Sarah steps through the door as if she’s done it a million times before, which she probably has. Cortex hesitates for a second, then follows. Patrick stands, holding the door. Fahima pokes him in the ribs.
“Patrick,” she says, “do you breathe?”
He laughs, and Fahima leans close to try and hear an inhalation. No luck.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Do. You. Breathe?”
“Of course I do,” says Patrick.
“Maybe you don’t even notice you don’t,” Fahima says. “But what you just did—” She swoops her hand upward toward the window. “—I don’t think you have lungs.”
“That doesn’t make any—”
She pokes at him again. “A mass of undifferentiated cells,” she says. “All of them ready to carry out any necessary function. Even…” Fahima gasps a little. “Patrick, does your whole body resonate?”
Patrick blows a boozy breath in her face. “From my lungs to yours,” he says.
An undifferentiated mass of cells could create a cavity, a lunglike space, and inhale into it for show. She imagines Patrick as a huge parahippocampal gyrus wrapped around a breath.
“Come on,” Patrick says, smiling at her with teeth that have to be made of enamel and nerve showing between lips that must be skin rather than some cell pretending to be skin while acting as brain and muscle all at once. Fahima puts the idea out of her mind. She walks into the living room as Patrick turns on the collection of table lamps made out of kerosene lanterns. The room is full of kitschy maritime memorabilia. A half-scale ship’s wheel on the wall. A stuffed seagull staring dumbly from the shelf.
“It’s so quaint,” says Fahima. “I can’t imagine Bishop buying any of this stuff.”
“He didn’t,” Sarah says. “He bought it as a package. Knickknacks and all.”
Fahima looks at an astrolabe mounted on the wall, unable to think of its name. She tries to hear it, but none of these devices are real enough to speak to her. They’re replicas of machines.
“Patrick broke in here first,” Sarah says. “I think he used to hide in here and jerk off.”
“I jerked off at home like a normal kid. I came here to try my ability out.”
“Everybody on the street was waiting for us to resonate,” Sarah says. “I made Patrick promise we’d tell each other before we told our family. They were patrolling the Hive waiting for us to pop up. Patrick resonated first, and he found a corner of the Hive where no one could see him.”
“The onyx room,” Patrick says. “That’s what we called it.”
“How did you find it?” asks Fahima.
“Lucky,” Patrick says.
“His imaginary friend told him about it,” Sarah says, elbowing him in the ribs. “What did you call him?”
“Raygun,” says Patrick. “I had an imaginary friend who talked to me in my head, and I called him Raygun.”
“That’s some creepy The Shining shit,” Fahima says. She holds up her index finger. “Patrick isn’t here, Missus Davenport,” she croaks.
“I didn’t end up in a mental institution,” Patrick snaps back.
“Fair point.”
“Patrick and I used to meet in the onyx room to talk,” Sarah says. “Then we’d come in here to try out our abilities. Patrick let me puppet him around.”
“Hot,” says Fahima.
“We kept it secret for months,” Sarah says.
“Until the thing with the dog,” says Patrick.
“It wasn’t the dog’s fault,” Sarah says, rubbing Cortex behind the ear. When she was a kid, a dog had come off the leash and attacked her. New to her abilities, Sarah panicked and jumped her whole consciousness into the dog to get him to stop. She immediately pulled back, but a sliver of her mind remained in the dog. The owner apologized and took the dog home, but something in him pined for Sarah, that shard of her calling out to the rest. Sarah, for her part, became deeply absent-minded, forgetting names, entering rooms unable to remember what she’d come in looking for. One day, the dog showed up at Sarah’s doorstep, tongue lolling out cheerfully, thrilled to be back by her side. Sarah didn’t name him, but he came with her to Bishop. The initial fracture had left scars, and at some point in their third year at Bishop, Sarah began to lose memories, like an audiotape played so many times that it demagnetizes. Bishop came up with the idea to use the dog like an external hard drive. Sarah backed up her memories into the dog’s mind, trailing her hand back toward him to access them as she needed to. Patrick, sixteen and constantly smirking, had named the dog Cortex.
“What ever happened to Raygun?” Sarah asks.
“Nothing happened to him,” Patrick says. “I made him up.”
It’s a tradition that no one acknowledges has happened before. Every generation has to discover rebellion for itself. Otherwise what’s the point? One night, ideally the coldest night of the year, the final-years sneak out after hours and go to Coney Island. As if it’s suddenly occurred to them to do so, not because it’s been done before. They sneak out in small groups, each one with a separate plan.
“You sure you got this?” Bryce asks Waylon in the elevator.
“I got this,” he says, annoyed. Despite
their long-term business arrangement, Waylon’s always been peevish around Bryce. Waylon claims that it’s because Bryce flaunts his appearance: he’s a head taller than anyone else at Bishop and has skin like the bark of an oak tree that scrapes and grates when he moves. Carrie suspects that it’s because Bryce is openly gay, a hot item in Bishop’s queer community, whereas Waylon has barely managed to scrounge up a date in years here.
“We can just walk right past him,” Carrie says. “I can do that.”
“Let him have his moment to shine,” Miquel says. All of them are bundled against the cold except Bryce. He wears one of the beautiful silk shirts someone at the Commune custom tailors for him. Its deep green sets off the paper white of his skin. In the lobby, Waylon raps his knuckles on Shen’s desk to get the doorman’s attention.
“You kids headed out?” Shen says.
“We’re going for pizza,” Waylon says.
“Cheap slices or fancy?” Shen asks.
Waylon reaches awkwardly over the desk and lays a hand on Shen’s massive shoulder. He has to stand on tiptoe to do it.
“We’re going to go out in this weather for a cheap slice?” Waylon says.
“So you’re going to Rubirosa on Mulberry,” says Shen.
“We’re going to Lil’ Frankies on First,” Waylon says, hand resting on Shen’s shoulder.
“No,” says Shen, “you’re going to Rubirosa on Mulberry, and then you’re coming back and saying thank you, Shen, for saving me from my own ignorance. Take the 6 down to Spring, you come right up next to it,” says Shen.
Waylon pulls his hand back, scratches his chin. Then, with another awkward stretch, he touches Shen on the shoulder one more time. “We’ll try it,” he says. “You want us to bring you back a slice?”
Shen hardly ever leaves the desk. He survives on food brought to him by students and teachers who venture out into the city. He is a connoisseur of the leftovers of Manhattan and Brooklyn. So it’s a shock when he says, “I’m good.”
Each of them signs the sheet, and after specific menu recommendations, Shen sends them on their way.