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The Nobody People

Page 26

by Proehl, Bob


  “Twenty for the strange, forty for the weird, fifty for the full bizarre,” he says. “That’s the suggested donation. You’re welcome to give more.” He puts his hand on Paul’s bare forearm as he says this, and Owen watches Paul pull out five crisp twenties. The boy gives Paul three tickets and thanks him. Jake sees this, too, and shakes his head as he gives the boy twenty bucks. “Only the strange?” says the boy, reaching for him. Jake twitches away.

  “I’m good with the strange,” Jake says, taking his ticket.

  Owen hands him twenty dollars. As he does, the boy brushes Owen’s index finger. Owen takes another twenty out of his wallet and hands it over.

  “Thank you,” the boy says, smiling and backing away.

  “She’s usually in the bizarre trailer,” Paul says. “I’m starting out there—”

  “And staying till they kick you out,” Jake says.

  “—but if you guys want to start at the first one.”

  “We’ll give you two some alone time,” Jake says.

  “It’s not like that,” says Paul.

  “Is so,” Jake says. “Come on.” He tugs Owen by the arm. They head for the trailer on the left. The strange. There’s a wooden set of stairs with a railing on one side that leads up into the back of the trailer. A ticket collector sits on the middle step, engrossed in the glow of his phone.

  “Beyond lies the strange,” he says flatly. He gestures to the shabby piece of industrial carpet draped from the trailer’s roof, weighted with cinder blocks. “Tickets please.”

  Owen and Jake give him their tickets. He stands with visible effort and pulls back a corner of the carpet. Enough so Jake, who’s done this before, can lift it to let them in.

  The trailer is dim lit with black lights. Their buzz puts Owen’s teeth on edge, reminding him of his cell, the green lights that pushed down on him, that felt like someone shoved bees in his mouth and duct taped it shut. The black lights pick up garish fluorescent signs hanging above a row of standing shower stalls. Each is fronted with two-way glass, mirror side out. THE SKINLESS GIRL! screams the first sign in hot pink horror movie lettering. Paint drips from the dot of the exclamation point. THE LIVING SPECK! THE BONEYARD! THE WOLF-FACED GIRL! At the end, a larger cell, a double wide, with red curtains hung over it. THE ANGEL OF SILENCE, the sign proclaims. The words are rendered with care. Each letter has rounded little feet. Owen steps toward it immediately, but Jake holds him back.

  “Save her for last,” he says. “She’s something.” He presses a doorbell button on the first cell. An overhead light comes on. It’s too strong for the room, making Owen blink. In the cell, there’s a girl whose skin is transparent, a thin slick of clear snot over her muscles and blood vessels. She holds up one hand to shield her lidless eyes from the light. With the other she covers as much of her body as she can. She retreats to the back corner.

  “Does the light hurt her?” Owen asks. Jake shrugs. The possibility has never occurred to him. The null twitches in Owen’s gut. Jake points to the next sign, THE LIVING SPECK. Under it, there’s a card table with a two-eye microscope like the ones they used in chemistry class.

  “That one’s boring,” Jake says. “She’s little, but she’s also fat. So what the fuck?”

  Jake steps up to the booth that contains THE BONEYARD. Owen walks past him to the end of the trailer. THE ANGEL OF SILENCE. He presses the button, and buttery yellow light pours into the cell. Robed in white, there’s a girl, her dirty blond hair done up like a woman in a gladiator movie, a mountain of spiraling braids. Her head hangs, and she eyes Owen like a puppy that’s been kicked. Her arms are wings, gray and wide, folded across her chest protectively. Owen can see the layers of feathers on them: soft down that extends from her shoulders and biceps, a tufty band below that, and then the long ones, like fingers splayed wide. It hurts to see her cramped into such a small space. Owen wants her wings spread. He wants her in the air. He puts his hand on the glass.

  “She doesn’t talk,” Jake says. The words are barely out of his mouth when Owen’s mind is caught on a hook, dragged out of his body into a vast, shimmering room.

  “What the fuck?” he screams with a mouth that is not his mouth. The Angel stands in front of him, wings tight around her body. “Where the fuck are we?”

  “The Hive,” says the Angel. “You’ve been here before, right? I mean, you’re one of us.”

  “This isn’t what it looks like,” Owen says. He walks a small circle around her, watching as people appear and fade out in the shimmering room. “It’s so big. Where’s the black bone room?”

  The Angel looks at him, confused.

  “Why are you here?” he asks her. “Why are you in a cage?”

  “It was my boyfriend. Bobby,” she says. “We started out with the circus idea. We lived in the Commune, and we were seeing Resonants on late-night shows, doing stupid pet tricks for laughs. Like circus animals, Bobby said. He was born in the Commune, but he didn’t have to stay. He looked normal. Not like the rest of us. It was his idea to go on the road like a freak show. It was going to be subversive. Confront people with who we were. It was going to be some fucking art project. Bobby was the manager. Because he’s the pretty one. The one who looks normal.” Owen struggles to keep up with this barrage of new terms. The Hive. The Commune. We have our own language, he thinks. There’s a pang of betrayal, too. If they have their own language, why hasn’t his friend taught it to him? Why is he learning it only now? “Bobby can make you do things, want things, by touching you,” the Angel says. “That’s how he got me to even date him. He’s such a skeev.”

  Owen thinks of the brush of a finger on his, the urge to fork over more money for no reason. The boy in the powder blue suit. Bobby.

  “He made me want to get into the cage,” she says, crying. “It looked so beautiful. He held me by my wing and said, Wendy, step in, I built it for you. Then he closed it behind me. I was the first. He brought us in here one by one: me, then poor little Gail, then Andre. We were all so happy when he put us in here.”

  Owen is half drunk on how beautiful she is, on how beautiful this place is. The Hive, she called it. It feels the same as the black bone room. But this place is different. There’s air to breathe, space to move. The black bone room is like this place in the way they vibrate, the way they’re gauzy to look at. But it feels like confinement. This shimmering room must belong to everyone like Owen. For all he’s thought about the cattle, for all he’s thought about enemies, he’s never thought about people like him except the friend in his head and the ones who kept him in the cell. The one he loves most and the ones he hates. He’s never imagined having real friends with abilities. Angels and skinless boys.

  “I’ll get you out,” he tells her. “No one should be in a cell.”

  “You can’t,” she says. “He touched you, didn’t he? He can make you do whatever. He’ll put you in a cage with us.”

  “I’ll get you out,” he says again. He feels a hand on his real, actual shoulder, reminding him that he has a body, and the shimmering room is gone. There’s the Angel behind the glass, the twin reflections of himself and Jake hanging like ghosts over her face.

  “You got a crush there, O?” Jake says. “You went all spacy for a minute.”

  “Freaked out,” says Owen.

  “I don’t know what your bankroll looks like,” Jake says, leaning in close, “but there are arrangements you can make if you can pay for it.” The Angel turns away. Owen wonders if she can hear them. “Paul talked to that boy out front about it. For his tentacle girl. If he wasn’t dropping a hundred bucks at the door every time, he could afford to fuck her out back or wherever. They let you do all kinds of shit.”

  “Like what?” Owen asks.

  “Eddie who tends bar at the Eight of Swords paid three hundred to beat on bony there with a bat,” says Jake. He jerks his thumb at one of the other cells, where
the lights are fading on a boy with gray nubs of bone protruding from his joints. Owen can see ossified ridges at the boy’s shoulders and hips. “I threw in fifty, and they let me watch.”

  “You paid to watch your friend beat him,” Owen says. Not a question, a reckoning with the fact. Jake gives him an idiot nod.

  You see now, Owen, says the friend in his head. Why I brought you here. What you’re meant to do.

  Owen turns his back on the Angel and faces Jake full on. The null roils in his gut, hungry for this one. But the pain stabs in his head. He’s gotten it wrong.

  “What’s going on with you, man?” Jake asks. “You look like shit.”

  From behind Jake, there’s a little sound. Owen’s never heard it before, but he knows what it is. Bone tapping on glass. Owen peers over Jake’s shoulder. He stretches the null out, shapes it so it’s broad and flat. He feeds the null the glass that holds the bone boy back. It doesn’t fill the null, doesn’t sate that hunger at Owen’s core. But he smiles as the boy approaches Jake from behind, raising an elbow that ends in a jutting gray blade. It plunges into Jake where the shoulder meets the neck, and Jake the dishwasher dies with a disappointing burble of blood in his throat. Owen opens the other cages, leaving the Angel for last. As she steps out, her wings spread to half their span.

  “Stay,” Owen says. “Wait.”

  “Where’s your friend?” asks the ticket collector as Owen comes down the stairs. Owen glances back over his shoulder.

  “Still staring at that tiny girl?” Owen says.

  “Every guy comes here’s got some twist,” says the ticket collector. “Busy nights I go in once an hour to squeegee jizz off the glass.” He sizes Owen up. “What’s your kink, kid?”

  Owen makes a show of shyness, examines his shoes. “That Angel is something.”

  “She sure is, Vanilla,” says the ticket collector, bored with the predictability of Owen’s fetish. “See the office trailer over there?” He points to the RV at the end of the row. “Go ask Bobby, in the suit. He can set you up some time with her. She even talks.” He smiles. “If you want to talk.”

  “Thanks,” Owen says. The ticket collector holds out an open palm. Owen stares at it, then realizes what’s being asked. He pulls a twenty out of his wallet and folds it into the man’s hand. He’ll take it off the body later.

  “Thank you, Vanilla,” says the ticket collector.

  Owen walks across the muddy field toward the RV. As he crosses, Paul steps out of the trailer on the right, the truly bizarre. “Where’s Jake?” he calls.

  “In the strange,” Owen says. “You should check on him.”

  Owen speeds his steps. There’s not much time. There will be screams soon, and Owen wants a minute alone with Bobby. He has a special place for jailers. He knocks on the door of the RV.

  “Come on in,” says the boy’s sweet voice. Owen couldn’t not come in. Something in the voice compels him: the spot where Bobby brushed his finger tingles. The Angel said, He can make you do whatever. Owen steps into the office.

  “Did someone send you?” Bobby asks. He’s sitting behind a small pine desk with stacks of bills and coins. “Is there a Resonant police force after me now?”

  “Passing through,” says Owen.

  “Stay right there,” Bobby says. Owen obeys. Bobby stands up, comes around the desk. He moves slowly, no reason to hurry. Owen wonders if Paul has found Jake’s body yet. “That is some seriously bad luck on my part. The megabucks lottery of shitty luck.”

  “Let them go,” Owen says.

  “No, Moses, I don’t think I’m going to let your people go,” says Bobby. “I think I am going to keep them in their cages until people are no longer paying to see them.” He reaches behind his back and pulls a small gun out of his waistband. He puts it on the desk. “I also think you are going to wander about an hour into the woods and then shoot yourself in the face.”

  The gun glitters. It will feel perfect in his hand. The cool of it pressed against his forehead. The relief as the bullet pushes through his brain and his body falls back into a pillow-soft layer of dead leaves. Bobby smiles approvingly. Owen wishes he could tell the Angel what he’s going to do. Sorry, he’d say. I would free you, but first I need to—

  Owen, says the friend in his head. You’re stronger than him.

  All I want is the gun, Owen thinks.

  Get rid of the gun, says his friend. Owen looks at it. The sculpted metal. A perfect play of cylinder and line. Bobby’s hand rests next to it, fingers on the handle gently, lovingly. Owen wants to touch it. Hold it.

  He reaches out with the null. He forms it into a circle that devours the gun, a chunk of the desk underneath it, and two of Bobby’s fingers up to the first knuckles. Bobby draws his hand up in front of his face, staring at the lack, at the smooth edges where the fingers end. He screams. An animal sound. Outside there are more screams. Bobby slams his mutilated hand on the desk, and Owen can sense Bobby’s ability welling up, aimed at him.

  “Fucking di—”

  Owen is inside his head, rooting, looking for that glowing little bit where Bobby’s ability lives. He finds it in the middle of Bobby’s brain and feeds it to the null. It’s inelegant surgery. A baseball-size sphere of brain comes along with it, and the null growls appreciatively as blood spurts from Bobby’s nose and wells in his eyes like tears. Bobby pitches forward onto the desk, twitching.

  Owen steps out of the RV. People run wildly around the patch of dead grass, their paths chaotic like those of flies. The Angel swoops overhead, tracing a figure eight against the night sky. The ticket collector is facedown in the mud, deep gashes on his back. Paul sprints to Owen, shirt torn open. His torso and the left side of his face are covered in perfectly circular red welts. Sucker marks.

  “We gotta get out of here,” he screams.

  Owen holds his shoulders as if he’s trying to calm him down. “Wait,” he says.

  Can I? he asks his friend.

  All of these are yours, his friend says.

  Owen smiles, a wolf again at last.

  Fahima and Patrick have a text chain of names for it. Kevin Bishop’s Victory Lap. The Peace and Unity Tour. Electric Kool-Aid Resonance Test. Fahima stopped following Bishop’s slate of lectures and media appearances because she has her own life to worry about and there aren’t enough hours in the day. Alyssa insists they go to his talk at Columbia, the first in a semester-long series on posthumanism. Along with colloquiums on issues of consent for sex robots and the potential barriers to diplomatic relations between humans and extraterrestrials with non-logic-based linguistics is Kevin Bishop, speaking on the shadow history of Resonants hiding in plain sight through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The lecture title is “The Nobody People.”

  Alyssa works nearby, so she meets Fahima at the lecture hall still wearing her scrubs. They’re shuttled backstage, where Bishop is pacing in the wings, doing a series of verbal warm-ups Sarah taught him that contort his face into funny shapes.

  “Nervous, Bishop?” says Fahima.

  He smiles. “This is my alma mater,” he says. “I was one of Enrico Fermi’s first graduate students. I don’t want to let the old man down.”

  “Name-dropper,” says Fahima. “Some day I’m going to get you so drunk, you’ll tell me your whole life story.”

  Bishop smiles his frustrating, enigmatic smile, then turns his attention to Alyssa. “Doctor Pratt,” he says, extending his hand. “It’s so very good to meet you.”

  “Alyssa, please,” she says.

  “Then you should call me Kevin.”

  “You should call him Bishop,” Fahima says. One of the organizers comes by and whispers something in Bishop’s ear. “Kevin doesn’t carry any weight.”

  “We all do the best with what we’re given,” Bishop says.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing you
speak,” says Alyssa. “I feel like I don’t know how to think about all this.”

  “None of us do,” Bishop says. “That’s a good thing. Our thinking should be constantly evolving. Always learning. Always—” He shakes his head as if a gnat has buzzed into his ear. “I’m sorry,” he says. He grabs Alyssa’s shoulder, leaning on her for support. A thin trickle of pink fluid dribbles from his left nostril.

  “Mr. Bishop?” Alyssa says. She’s gone instantly into her doctor voice. Bishop’s eyes are distant for a second before coming back into focus.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again, wiping the spot under his nose. “I’ve been having these headaches.”

  On stage, someone is introducing him, using the kind of hyperbolic language deployed at academic lectures. Visionary. Revolutionary. No one man has had the impact. Only this time they’re accurate.

  “How long?” Alyssa asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “How long have you been having headaches?”

  “They’re occasional.”

  “I think you just had a seizure.”

  His hand on her shoulder gives her a patronizing pat. “You’re young. You don’t know how common little spells like that become at my age.”

  “I’m a doctor,” Alyssa says. “I know a seizure when it’s in front of me. We need to get you to a hospital.”

  Fahima feels the quiver in her mind that occurs whenever Bishop uses his ability. He’s so powerful, his ability has to be held in check. When even a little of it vents into the world, it rattles any mind nearby.

  “We’ll go after the lecture,” Alyssa says. Her voice is flat and mechanical.

 

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