by Proehl, Bob
“Very good,” Bishop says. Fahima glares at him, sends the thought as loudly and clearly as she can: Don’t ever do that to her again. But the audience is cheering, the students still flush with the enthusiasm of a new school year beginning. Bishop steps out into the lights, waving energetically.
* * *
—
Alyssa goes over it with Fahima first. There are things in the results Alyssa can’t make sense of, things specific to Resonant biology. Fahima sends for a few items to be couriered over from her lab to fill in details. But they are all beside the point. The main issue is clear. There’s nothing special, nothing magical about it.
Fahima hands him their report, and he pages through it while she hooks up the contacts on the EEG helmet, a colander studded with nodes and strung with wires.
“Did you know?” she asks.
“I knew something was wrong,” Bishop says, flipping through the report.
“You’ve been fighting it,” says Fahima. “A war inside yourself that you’re not winning and you’re not losing. Détente.”
“For the moment,” he says, tapping a pen on one of the pages. Fahima nods and points to the monitor screen.
“Look at this,” she says. “You know what that little glowworm is?”
“My Resonance,” Bishop says. He has an annoying habit of saying Resonance as if it’s a holy word.
“Your parahippocampal gyrus,” Fahima says. “It’s glowing because it’s active. Your ability is actively engaged.”
“Always,” says Bishop.
“Fighting the cancer,” she says. “Maintaining détente. Let me show you something else.” She types in a command, and the screen splits, the image twinned almost. “This is your EEG scan six months ago. Last time you let me give you a physical. Look at your little glowworm back then.”
“Bigger,” he says. He leans in to confirm. “I’m burning out.”
“You are engaging your ability constantly,” Fahima says. “I’ve never seen anyone do that. The toll it must be taking.”
“I’m not tired, Fahima,” he says. The pen seesaws back and forth in his hand, quicker and quicker, slapping at the paper.
“Kevin, do you sleep?” The familiarity of his first name sounds strange to her. But if she can’t be informal telling him he’s dying, when can she?
“In my way,” he says.
She puts her hand over his, stilling it. “You’re burning out.” He looks up at her. She forgets sometimes how old he is, because he doesn’t wear all of his years on his face. But they’re in his eyes, years of hiding and fighting. Horrible actions taken for the right reasons. A ledger of his dead.
“How fast?” he asks.
She looks at the screen as if the answer is written there, but it’s only an excuse not to meet his eyes. “I’d be estimating,” she says.
“Estimate.”
Fahima sighs. She closes her eyes, tugs at the edge of her hijab. “You’ve lost a quarter of the mass of your gyrus in the last six months.”
“So eighteen more months.”
“Assuming a constant rate of decay.”
“More likely?” he asks.
“No way of knowing,” she lies. “Maybe weak cells burn off faster. Maybe it’ll speed up.”
“You’d say a year.”
There it is, the truth she’s been tap-dancing around. “A year, yes,” she says.
“And then what happens?”
She takes the capped marker, traces an imaginary circle around the glowing spot on the screen. “This region is classically associated with memory encoding,” she says. “You’ll be unable to form new memories.”
“But I keep my old ones?”
“You won’t be able to access them,” Fahima says. “It won’t be dissimilar to Sarah’s condition, but you won’t have a mechanism like Cortex to compensate. We’re talking endgame stuff, though. Severe late-stage atrophy.”
“What about the early stages?”
“You’ll start missing social cues,” Fahima says. “You won’t be able to detect sarcasm.”
“That might make our conversations difficult,” he says, grinning.
“Asymmetrical atrophy of the parahippocampal gyrus is associated with schizophrenia, and stop fucking around about this, Bishop,” she snaps.
“I’m listening,” he says calmly.
“You’ll be dead.”
“Yes,” Bishop says.
“When you lose enough mass in the gyrus,” Fahima says, returning her attention to the screen, “and we don’t know how much that is, you’ll lose your ability. You won’t be able to wage this constant cellular war on your cancer, and it will advance. Rapidly. And you will be dead.”
“Within a year,” says Bishop.
“Yes,” Fahima says.
They stare at each other in silence.
“You know what my mother used to tell me?” Fahima asks.
“What’s that?”
“She said it was important to find something only you could do,” she says. “You and no one else. And then do it.”
“I’ve had a school to run,” he says.
“Anyone could run this school,” Fahima says. “Sarah’s been basically running it since Public Day.”
“What about you?”
“I barely want to teach here.”
“Sarah can run the academy,” says Bishop. She can’t tell if he’s trying to convince her or himself that this is true. “A year?” he asks.
“Maybe less,” says Fahima.
He nods grimly, but the EEG helmet makes him look silly, a bobblehead doll.
“Then I have things to do.”
When Avi was on embeds, Kay would hold the phone so Emmeline could see her dad on the other side of the planet. Like most kids who grew up this way, at ten years old Emmeline has a knack for framing her shot: her phone is propped up against something stable, negative space on either side of her. Avi holds his too close. The thumbnail in the corner is all nostrils and white teeth.
“They have your book in the library,” she says. “They have lots.”
“I donated my author copies,” he says.
“Then nobody will buy them and you won’t make any money,” Emmeline says.
“I’ll be okay.” Emmeline’s eyes dart back and forth, watching other kids, communicating like bees as they pass. Her eyebrows send silent hellos. She taps her watchless wrist to indicate later. She twitches her head at the screen to say sorry, I have to finish this thing.
“I should let you go,” says Avi.
“No, it’s okay,” she says. “I have a couple minutes before class.”
“I’ve got to do this taping,” he says. “It’s going to take them a while to make me pretty.”
“You’re a TV star!” she says, throwing her arms in the air the way she did when she was little. “I’m going to stay up and watch. Some of the older kids said they’ll have it on in the common room.”
“You don’t have to stay up,” he says. “You know what I look like.”
“But you’re going to be pretty,” she says, then giggles. Out of frame, a kid says something to her, drawing her full attention. “Dad, I’ve got to go. Love you, okay?”
“Love you,” he says. Her image freezes, disappears. Avi pockets his phone and steps out of the green room into the NightTalk studio, where cameras, teleprompters, and lighting fixtures are being readied. Lakshmi goes over script notes with one of the show’s writers. She’s an NPR darling graduated to network. He’s interviewed with her a half dozen times, all for radio. She reminds him of Kay, the way she carries herself like she’s walking against a strong wind.
“Where’s the beast?” Avi asks, scanning the set.
“He brings his own makeup team,” Lakshmi says. “He says our people make him look ‘unmasc
uline.’ Which, by the way, is not a word.”
“Bringing your own makeup team is supermasculine,” Avi says.
“You know how it is with these guys,” says Lakshmi “If you want to know what turns them on, look at what they’re most afraid of. Look at what they claim to hate.”
“Why have him on the show?”
Lakshmi shrugs as if they both know the answer. “You talk to your kid?”
“I talked at her,” Avi says. “She’s busy with friends.”
“I was a boarding school kid at that age,” says Lakshmi. “Other kids are your whole world for the first couple years. It passes. She’ll come back. It’s good she has friends.”
Avi nods as the makeup people beset him. This is what they wanted for Emmeline, the thing she never had at her school in Chicago. They assumed it was the mixed-race thing, but now Avi thinks the kids there intuited something different about Emmeline. They pushed her to the margins. He loves watching her relax into her new world at the academy even if it means she’s moving away from him. Some days he wants to call Kay up and talk about it. Some days he brings up her name in his contacts before thinking better of it.
A door bangs open, and Jefferson Hargrave enters, yelling at a hapless lackey. He travels with an entourage, this lone wolf, this voice of the common man. He’s a bloated sack of wind whose rise to media prominence has run parallel to Avi’s. Or, better put, they’ve been entwined. Parallelism implies that their paths have never intersected, which is sadly not true.
Lakshmi comes up behind Avi, puts both hands on his shoulders. “You smell brimstone?” she whispers.
* * *
—
The taping hasn’t started, and Avi is perspiring under the lights. Someone dabs his forehead with a cloth. New droplets form. Jefferson Hargrave sits across from him, sweating like Nixon. The stage manager calls for quiet and counts them in. Lakshmi throws Avi one last eye roll before she dons a mask of professional neutrality.
“Good evening and welcome to NightTalk. I’m your host, Lakshmi Rameswaram,” she says. Her voice carries the sweet tonal quality of her NPR past. A Resonance, Avi thinks. It’s hard to make that word nonspecific in his vocabulary. A word he hardly ever used creeps into his speech all the time, like trying not to think of a polar bear. Resonance. Ability. The words are weighted. They’re scared out of their common meaning, permanently capitalized.
“With me tonight are two leading experts on Resonants. Avi Hirsch, author of The Coming Race: Resonants and Their Place in the World. Avi, nice to see you again.”
“It’s great to be here, Lakshmi,” Avi says.
“And also with us, host of The Monster Report on the Kindred Network, Jefferson Hargrave. Jefferson, thank you for joining us.”
“Thank you, my dear,” he says in the smarmy southwestern accent he adopted after he graduated Yale Business and moved out to the desert to live deliberately, or whatever half-ass Thoreau quote he took as his mantra. “I’m proud to be here to defend the rights of normal humans to live free of fears of violence and predation by these creatures who, for the moment, walk freely on our streets.”
“Jesus, Jefferson, are we not even going to get to the questions before you start?” says Avi.
“Mr. Hirsch, I think the company you keep has impaired your ability to keep a civil tongue,” says Jefferson.
“You want to talk civility?” Avi says, “Last week you called for Resonants to be forcibly sterilized.”
“I don’t see any way around it,” Jefferson says. “We already have an indeterminate number of dangerous individuals—”
“You can’t label all of them as dangerous.”
“I certainly can,” Jefferson says. “Just the other day I read a report about a veritable massacre out in Damascus, Ohio. Three dozen God-fearing Americans brutally—”
“How many Resonants were killed in hate crimes last year?” Avi asks.
“I object to the term hate crime.”
“They hung a kid from a lamppost in Pittsburgh last night,” Avi says. “In Wyoming, Samuel Guthridge and his mother and two little sisters and little brother were lynched by the very people Sam had saved from—”
“There’s no evidence—”
“There’s a confession!”
“From a man on trial for killing his own son.”
“They killed little kids,” Avi shouts. “They killed them because they thought maybe the kids were Resonants. Maybe. By definition, it’s a hate crime.”
“The police ruled it an electrical fire,” Hargrave says. “And you’re being hysterical. Now what I’m talking about, these people in Damascus were torn up. Pieces missing like they were attacked by animals. A man with a hole on the inside of his head. Wounds cut as smooth as glass.” The phrase triggers a thought Avi doesn’t have time to fully form. “Do they mean less because they don’t have wings or scales? Because they’re not special?”
“Resonants have never claimed to be special. They—”
“They don’t have to claim it,” says Hargrave. “They brag about their inhumanity and then cry when they get hurt.”
“The Guthridges didn’t cry, they bled,” Avi says.
“What color?”
The question shocks both of them into silence for a beat.
“Mr. Hargrave,” says Lakshmi. He waves her off.
“I’ve never seen one of them bleed,” he says to Avi. “I’m curious what color it was.”
“Mr. Hargrave,” says Lakshmi, “I’m wondering how you respond to accusations—”
“I am happy to hear they can bleed.” He leans back in his chair. He looks like a sated tick, bloated and ruddy-faced.
“About accusations that your program incites racial violence against—”
“See, there you go with race, dear,” Hargrave says, turning back to her, all smiles and gentility. “I love black people. I love brown people. People. The introduction of these individuals into our midst has done wonders healing the divide between the actual races.”
“In referring to Resonants as a race,” she says, “I’m respecting their stated self-definition as such.”
“That’s very respectful of you,” Hargrave says. “It doesn’t mean I have to follow suit.”
“So how do you respond—”
“I give people facts,” Hargrave says. “Mr. Hirsch prefers fluffy profile pieces. This one can slice you in half with her brain, but she loves puppies. That one can put the psychic whammy on your wife and daughter, but hey, he’s a Cubs fan, so he must be a swell guy.”
“I want the public to understand,” Avi says, “that these are people who—”
“See, right there is where you and I diverge,” says Hargrave.
“Where’s that?”
“You think of them as people,” he says. “A gun has no rights. A bomb does not get to vote. You want us to treat these weapons, these threats, like human beings. I am not willing to do that.”
“Mr. Hargrave,” Lakshmi says, “if we can’t start from the basic premise—”
“I sympathize,” Hargrave says. “I can’t imagine what it must do to a man to find out that what he thought was his daughter is a thing.”
Avi is up and out of his chair before he’s aware of it. He lands hard on his prosthetic leg at a bad angle and starts to fall. His fist glances weakly off Hargrave’s chin on the way down. Production assistants rush to help Avi up. Hargrave feigns shock for the cameras but looks down and throws Avi a wink as Lakshmi signals to cut to a commercial.
“I touch a nerve?” he says. All that western smarm is gone, icy Boston Brahmin in its place.
“Get him off my set,” Lakshmi shouts.
“I’m going to want a copy of that tape,” says Hargrave. He points at the nearest camera operator and snaps his fingers, as if she’s going to hand over a VHS cass
ette. “Personally, I can’t see filing assault charges for something so minor.” He rubs his chin. “But I’m not the one who makes those kinds of decisions. Good luck with the book, Avi. Come on the show sometime and we’ll talk about it.”
They’re supposed to meet some of Alyssa’s work friends for dinner. Not people Fahima likes much, but she agreed to it. She’s making an effort to be normal. To meet Alyssa in her otherwise normal life. Fahima’s packing up to go when Sarah’s scream blazes through the Hive.
In the time the elevator takes to get from the lab to the ninth floor, Fahima comes up with ways she could make it faster. A regenerative drive to capture the friction heat from braking and channel it back into the grid. A maglev system, like trains in Japan. Two fluorescent bulbs in the hallway are dying. They’re sorry they won’t be able to go on much longer. They’ve worked so hard. They want Fahima to know, and she wants to listen. But she has to hurry. In the room at the end of the hall, Emmeline is sobbing.
The residents of the ninth, second-years, most of them a little older than Emmeline, line the hall. They whisper among themselves. Some cry. Sarah hugs herself in the doorway as Cortex cowers behind her legs.
“I tried to go in. Help her,” she says. “When I touched her.” Sarah holds her hand up and stares at it. “It got stuck. It was going to pull the rest of me in. I couldn’t help her. I tried.”
Fahima steps past her into the room. Emmeline is curled up against the wall. She can hardly get enough breath to keep up her sobs. Emmeline’s roommate, Viola, stands near the desk. Emmeline likes Viola a lot. She’s told Fahima how kind Viola is. Viola picks up a glass of milk from the desk, holds it up, and examines it. Then the glass is back on the desk. Viola holds it up, examines it. It’s back on the desk. It’s like listening to a record skip or watching a computer program glitch. A piece of reality, hiccupping.
“Em, close your eyes,” says Fahima, squatting down so she’s face-to-face with Emmeline. “I need you to calm down. Deep breaths, Em. Deep. Breathe.”
Emmeline’s breathing slows, each inhale hitching at its apex. Eyes closed, she exhales into Fahima’s face. Her breath is sugary sweet.