The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  On the sidewalk, set back the legally required fifty feet, there’s a throng of the most dedicated worshippers, who are out here daily, no matter the weather. They call themselves “harmonics” or “latents” or “aspirants,” and they’re convinced they have the potential to be Resonants. They call out to students and faculty exiting Bishop to touch them. A touch, they know, they believe, will jump-start something within them. Carrie recognizes one of them, a girl with bright purple hair and vine tattoos that creep out of the collar of her Carhartt and up her neck. Carrie first saw her at one of Hayden’s shows, but she’s a regular with the sidewalk set. Maybe it’s her persistence that puts Carrie off, or the fact that the girl’s need feels familiar, not unlike Carrie’s own. She wants to tell the girl, It doesn’t fix you. She wants to say the need doesn’t go away, it only changes shape.

  The girl spots Carrie. She tries to hold eye contact, pleading silently. Carrie tugs at Miquel’s coat sleeve.

  “Let’s go this way,” she says, taking the long route to the liquor store. When she looks over her shoulder, the girl is huddled back in with the others, clapping her mittened hands together for warmth.

  “Did you see that?” Waylon says once they’re out in the street. “I made Shen refuse food. I am a mind control master. I’m a fucking Jedi.”

  “What’s with all the touching?” Bryce asks.

  “It forms a connection,” Waylon says, taking on the air of an expert. “Hypnotists do it all the time on TV.”

  “You’re learning mind control from TV hypnotists?” Carrie asks.

  “What I did was the psychic equivalent of a posthypnotic suggestion,” says Waylon. “In two hours, for reasons he cannot even fathom, Shen will sign us back in. Then, under cover of darkness, Carrie will sneak us through the lobby.”

  “You sure this will work?” Miquel asks.

  “The man said no to fancy Nolita pizza!” says Waylon. “He is completely in my thrall.”

  “It’s amazing that with this ability to put the whammy on someone you’re still a virgin,” says Carrie.

  “I am not a virgin,” Waylon says.

  Miquel mouths Yes, he is. Carrie and Bryce stifle laughs.

  Alcohol is easy to acquire. Thirty-four final-years, thirty-four methods for getting booze, ranging from felonious to unethical. Waylon’s deep-seeded a clerk at the bodega on 59th with the idea that he’s thirty-two, and she never ID’s him anymore. He and Miquel and Bryce chip in on four magnums of red wine, waving Carrie’s money away.

  Carrie puts her earbuds in but doesn’t put any music on. It’s a lesser form of invisibility, a way to eavesdrop in plain sight. Bryce hangs off one of the subway straps on the Q train. A young black kid, sitting in his mother’s lap, stares at him, jaw open. Not in fear but in wonder. His mother notices and pulls him tighter, but the boy squirms loose. On shaky legs, he approaches Bryce.

  “Mister,” he says. Bryce looks down at him. The boy stammers.

  “Dennis,” chides his mother, pulling at the back of the boy’s jacket.

  Bryce holds his hand out to the kid, palm down. “Go ahead, kid.” The boy rubs the back of Bryce’s hand. His eyes, impossibly, get even wider.

  “You’re so cool,” says the boy. His mother yanks him back into her embrace, whispering harsh words in his ear.

  “You’re so cool,” Waylon says, rolling his eyes.

  “A grown man asked to touch me, I’d knock him out,” Bryce says.

  Waylon smiles at him with a tenderness Carrie finds surprising. “No, you wouldn’t,” he says. Bryce looks down, embarrassed.

  At the Beverley Road stop, Hayden Cohen steps on to the train and holds out their arms, Christlike, waiting for applause.

  “Holy shit, I thought you had a show,” says Carrie.

  “I had an opening gig,” Hayden says, giving Carrie a hug. “Played a short set and left Jonathan to pack up the gear. I wouldn’t miss this.”

  “How did you find us?” Carrie asks.

  “I can always find you,” Hayden says. Miquel laughts into his fist.

  “You knew?” Carrie says.

  “We wanted it to be a surprise,” Miquel says.

  “We’re all thrilled you could grace us with your presence,” says Waylon. “Did you bring booze?”

  “I brought drugs, child, because we are adults now,” Hayden says.

  Hayden tucks in between Carrie and Miquel for warmth.

  “How was the show?” Bryce asks.

  “Boring as fuck,” says Hayden. “We’re the flavor of the fucking month. I want them to be afraid of me, but they’re not. We’ve got labels calling, can you believe it? They want to put our songs in Gap ads and shit. I wanted it to be dangerous for a while. It’s over before we had the chance to be scary.”

  At its last stop, the Q spits them into a tile-lined tunnel, a cavern in ceramic. All the shops are shuttered for the night, the last remaining people loading onto the inbound train, abandoning this place, ceding it to Carrie and the final-years. They walk down the tunnel, out into the freezing night.

  Carrie has no idea what they’re supposed to do now that they’re here, and neither does anyone else. But they’ve done it, all of them. Even though Eli Herrington is still pissed at Nolan Emerson for stealing his essay topic in ethics class two years back and Michele Summers started sleeping with Vince Cole before he and Rufina Dahl had technically broken it off. Even though Ruby Wallace has literally not left academy grounds since the day she started there, skipping every field trip, avoiding classes that ventured off site, even watching the Public Day parade from her dorm window, they’re all here, on a beach in the middle of February. Drunk. Together.

  Crowded in the shadow of the Ferris wheel, Carrie is halfway through her big bottle of red, and the pills Hayden gave her shift in her stomach like a cat searching for a perfect napping spot. Miquel makes them all feel warm, an effect he warns them won’t ward off hypothermia. Carrie uses it as an excuse to cuddle in under his arm as a source of actual heat.

  “I’m glad Hayden made it,” Miquel says. “It would have been wrong without them here. Incomplete.”

  “You thinking of how things might have been?” Carrie asks.

  Miquel laughs. “We kissed one time!”

  “You made out,” says Carrie.

  “Hayden’s too glamorous for me,” Miquel says.

  “I’m not glamorous?” Carrie turns to see his face. He’s got a big shit-eating grin. His face softens, and he stoops to speak into her ear.

  “It’s tough to be around Hayden,” he says. “They hurt a lot. I don’t think it even registers as hurting anymore, but it’s there. Spikes.”

  “What’s being around me like?” Carrie asks.

  “Like a heartbeat,” Miquel says. He gives her a squeeze, bringing her back into the moment.

  “Light it up!” Hayden yells at Nolan. He’s been standing at the base of the Ferris wheel for what feels like an hour, passing test sparks between his hands.

  “It’s a hundred years old,” he calls back. “I don’t want to kill it.”

  “By the time you’re done, I’ll be a hundred years old,” Bryce yells.

  “And I’ll want to kill you,” Waylon adds. This cracks the two of them up, and Bryce throws an arm around Waylon. To Carrie’s surprise, Waylon doesn’t move away but pulls in closer to Bryce. She can’t help thinking of Bryce in tree-related terms. His branch around Waylon, Waylon leaning against Bryce’s trunk.

  “You’ve got this,” Miquel shouts. Carrie gets colder as Miquel pushes confidence toward Nolan. He can push only one thing at a time. He holds Carrie closer to compensate.

  “All right,” Nolan shouts. “On three.”

  “Fucking do it!” Ruby screams. She never drinks, but someone fixed her something that tastes like Tang. Everyone laughs about this new uninhibit
ed Ruby. Not cruelly. Happy that finally, in these last few days together, Ruby is one of them. Their laughter becomes applause, becomes a chant of fucking do it fucking do it.

  “One two three!” Nolan shouts. He slams his hands onto the mechanism like a mad Amadeus at the piano and holds them there.

  “Nothing’s happening!” Ruby shouts.

  The Ferris wheel blazes to life, and the final-years lose their collective shit. The fliers hit the air, dancing through the spinning, shifting light. Lynnette Helms blasts a Beyoncé song into their heads. Carrie wants to tell her it’s perfect. Before she can, Lynette is somewhere else, dancing. The final-years couple off, group into tiny cliques. In the choices they make, the people they join up with, they reify their whole history at Bishop. Friendships that will survive their departure must be cemented here, and this is the last available burial ground for grudges. Anything they don’t leave behind now will be carried. Anything they don’t carry will be forgotten.

  Waylon grinds against Bryce’s trunk. Bryce grabs the sides of Waylon’s head and kisses him, and Waylon kisses him back desperately. This had to happen tonight, Carrie thinks. They were about to miss each other. These things come so close to not happening. She watches the two of them and smiles. None of the other final-years, even Miquel, sees. They are absorbed in themselves. They are caught up in the lights and the air and the end of everything they know looming over them. They’re caught up in freedom and terror.

  “This is amazing!” Miquel shouts. There’s no way to tell if he’s drunk or high on everyone else’s euphoria or genuinely ecstatic. Carrie needs to know which it is. Miquel and Waylon and Hayden have made plans to move to Chicago after graduation. Hayden says there’s a neighborhood in Wicker Park filling up with Resonant kids their age. Hayden says it’s like St. Mark’s Place in the seventies, which Carrie knows is intended to lure her along, although no one’s invited her. She’s waiting to hear about jobs in Boston and here in New York. She didn’t apply anwhere in Chicago. It felt too close to home. But if Miquel asks, she’ll follow.

  Miquel grips her by the shoulders of her heavy coat. His wide grin is lit in rainbow colors by the Ferris wheel behind her. “It’s like a Lou Reed song,” he says.

  Carrie played Lou Reed for Miquel when they were sixteen to cure him of Pink Floyd and the Dead and all the other lazy things he listened to stoned. She started him out in the deep end of the pool with “Heroin,” Reed wheezing and sputtering, guitars screeching over his vocals.

  “Hear that?” she’d said. “That’s dissonance. Can’t you feel it in your teeth?”

  Miquel smiled. His teeth were perfect. He wanted more, wanted every song Reed had recorded. Carrie gave them to him, and now he’s offering them back to her as something changed, new.

  “Which song?” she asks, yelling over the music Lynette is playing in their heads.

  “What?”

  “Which Lou Reed song is it like?” Before Miquel can answer, blue and red lights cycle across the boardwalk. Cops, attracted by the Ferris wheel lights. The final-years scatter. They run for the streets and take to the air. Miquel is ready to bolt, but she holds him.

  “Stay still,” she says. She pulls him in tight, pushes them both down, invisible. A cop sprints by, close enough to touch them. Two more, three.

  “I can see you,” Miquel says. His arms are around her waist, hers around his shoulders. Carrie lifts her face to his, her lips to his.

  Down the beach, the other final-years laugh. They fly and shoot fireworks into the dark from their fingertips.

  The cook raps a greasy knuckle on the flyer Owen Curry has been staring at for five minutes. “You been?” he asks.

  Owen is startled. He jostles his coffee, his fifth cup. It spills on the picture, a still from an old movie. FREAKS! the flyer declares. Welled on the surface, the drops look like pale blood. They soak into the paper dull tan.

  “Not yet,” Owen says. The cook is sweaty, unshaven. He smells like hamburger and that body odor cattle have. Bread soaked in soured milk. Owen feels nauseous being around so many of them. Couldn’t I—

  No, says the friend in his head.

  Owen crams cold pancake into his mouth and looks at the cook as he chews. “You?”

  The cook holds up three fingers, then leans in so close Owen gets a whiff of his stale breath. “Seriously fucked up,” he whispers. “They got this girl with tentacle arms. Normal except for that, but her arms are tentacles with suckers and everything. Imagine you saw her on the street. You’d check out her ass, because it’s like an easy eight. Maybe whistle or say something. And then, bang, tentacles.”

  “That’s fucked up,” says Owen. He knows this is how guys talk to one another. Girls’ asses rated like movies, thumbs up or down. His manager at the Planet gave three letter grades to every girl who worked at the mall, one for tits, one for ass, and one for face.

  “Worst thing is I can’t stop thinking about her,” says the cook, wiping his hands on a dirty towel tucked in his belt. “I get these nightmares of those tentacles touching me, but it’s like I’ve got to know what they feel like. If they’re warm or cold.” His eyes go out of focus. Someone’s fucked with his mind, Owen thinks. Someone like me has laid their mark on him. He wonders how long and how badly this hapless cow will be haunted. “Anyway,” the cook says, “you got to go. Bring a sick bag in case you get queasy. But you got to go.”

  Owen looks at the flyer. He points to the address, some county road. “How far is it?” he asks.

  “Twenty-minute drive.”

  “I don’t have a car,” Owen says.

  The cook stares at him. “How’d you get here without a car?”

  “I’m on a sort of walking tour,” says Owen. “Like a pilgrimage.”

  “Like Moses.”

  “Yeah,” says Owen. “Like Moses.”

  “Me and Jake are going to drive out there after work,” says the cook, cocking his thumb at the dishwasher in the back. “It’d be tight, but we could take you out.”

  “That’d be fucking great,” says Owen. Twenty minutes crammed in a pickup, the doubled stink of two cows’ obsolescence thick in the air. When I’m done, he thinks, I could come back here and—

  No, Owen, says his friend. You are my justice, my scalpel. Soon you’ll feed on cities. But for now you have to stay secret.

  Owen’s been secret almost a year. Not a single cow fed to the null. No one hurt. Hiding in one hotel room after another, gorging on takeout, and isn’t he a little thick in the middle lately? Hasn’t his face, once a flinty collection of sharp angles, softened until it’s cherubic? He used to have the face of a predator instead of a sheep. Owen’s spent three days frequenting the diner in Damascus, Ohio, population 578. Waiting for a sign. Getting soft. The best look for a predator is blood in the teeth.

  Annoyed, bored, defiant, Owen Curry reaches into the part of his belly where the null resides, ready to let it out, let it have this cook with his stained apron and milky bread smell, and Jake in the dish room, and the cop at the other end of the counter, and the old ladies stuffing envelopes in the corner booth. He’s about to open himself, like the cracking of a terrible egg, when pain stabs his head, a sword made of heat piercing his brain.

  Not. Yet.

  “You okay, guy?” the cook asks. Owen is white-knuckling the counter. He lets it go, rubs the spot between his eyebrows.

  “I’m good,” he says. “I’ve been getting these headaches.”

  “It’s all that coffee,” says the cook. He delicately removes Owen’s mug, his arm coming close enough that Owen could lurch forward and bite it. “I’m cutting you off.”

  * * *

  —

  Damascus isn’t big enough to have outskirts. If it did, this would be beyond them, into the interstitial wastes between Damascus and the next one-stoplight nowhere. In school, Owen learned that the universe i
s empty space spotted with dense bits of matter. America is like that, too. The cattle cluster and huddle in cities. Coagulate in small towns. The bulk of the landscape is fallow. Maybe that’s the solution, he thinks. We’ll take everything they built. They can have the wastes.

  The cook, Paul, is drunk by the time he picks Owen up from the motel. Jake the dishwasher is drunker. The truck careens along dirt roads. Headlights flirt with ditches and dead trees. Jake offers Owen a beer, and he accepts it, although it’s warm. Jake and Paul have each finished off two before Owen drinks his first.

  “We’re lapping you, O,” says Paul.

  “And we had a head start,” Jake adds. They decide Owen has to shotgun a beer, which he can’t do in a moving truck. They pull over and step into the glare of the headlights. Paul demonstrates, holding the can of beer up so the headlights glint off the aluminum. He takes his Swiss Army knife and punctures the base of the can. He puts his lips to the hole and cracks the top of the can, swallowing frantically.

  “You’re up,” he says to Owen, wiping foam from his chin. Owen takes a can and the knife. He lifts the can like Hamlet with that skull, then stabs it. He turns the knife to leave a dime-sized hole, like a bullet through a forehead. The liquid is suspended, held back with no air to displace it. He covers the hole with his mouth and pops the top, spraying lukewarm beer down his throat. He manages to glug it all down, but when it’s done, he’s coughing and hacking, tears in his eyes. Blood pounds in his ears. Jake and Paul laugh. It’s been a joke on him. Everything from the meeting in the diner to this moment, ridiculing him in the woods.

  He reaches for the null in his guts, and the pain floods his head again. He’s determined to push through it. His friend can turn his brain into jelly. Owen doesn’t care.

  Jake slaps him on the back. “That’s not bad, O,” he says. “Got it down and kept it down. Better than Paul did his first time.”

  “Launched my lunch,” Paul says. “Come on, let’s get going.”

  They come to a convoy of three trailer trucks and an RV drawn into a semicircle around a muddied stretch of dirt, stray patches of dead grass slicked down like a bad comb-over. There are a handful of cars and pickups parked along the road, maybe twenty customers milling around. Smoking cigarettes, lining up at the backs of the trailers. As Owen and his new friends approach, a young man with pale, delicate features and a powder blue suit spattered around the legs with mud comes up to them holding a cash box.