by Proehl, Bob
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“Viola knocked over the glass,” Emmeline says. “It broke, and it spilled everywhere. I fixed it. I put it back on the desk. Viola was looking at it. She got stuck.”
“Can you stop it, Em?”
“It’s a loop,” Emmeline says. “I can see it in my head, but I can’t straighten it out.” She opens her eyes wide. “I can see it in my head. It’s me. I’m doing this.”
“You are, Em,” Fahima says. “But it’s not your fault. Stay with me, okay?” She puts out her hand, and Emmeline grips it. Fahima leans toward the doorway so she can see Sarah. “I need you to go to my lab. There’s a device sitting on the big table. The one that has blueprints all over it. Not the one that has the bag of chips on it. It’s a bracelet. It’s metal. I need you to get it for me.”
Sarah runs down the hall.
“Viola’s going to be mad at me,” Emmeline says. “She won’t want to be my friend anymore.”
“I’ll be your friend,” says Fahima.
Emmeline cracks a smile, although she has trouble holding it. “But you’re old.”
“I have unlimited access to snacks,” Fahima says. She thinks of Sarah in the slow elevator. A shaft of variable gravity.
“I wanted to fix the glass,” says Emmeline. “I did. I fixed it. It was nearby and insignificant. Like the sandwich.”
An Einstein-Rosen bridge with off-ramps like a highway, one at each floor.
Sarah returns with the bracelet. It hangs open like the mouth of a hungry bird.
“Can you close the door?” Sarah obliges, leaving Fahima and Emmeline alone with Viola, stuck in her loop.
“Em,” says Fahima. “This is something I’ve been working on. I’ve been calling it the Shackle.” She started working on it for the people Patrick was hunting down. The idea of putting it on Emmeline makes her sick. “It dampens abilities. It shuts them off.”
“Will it hurt?” Emmeline asks.
“It might,” says Fahima. “I tried it on myself, and it didn’t. But my ability isn’t like yours.”
“Will it help Viola?”
“I think so,” says Fahima.
“Okay,” Emmeline says. Fahima takes her hand, examining her skinny wrists.
“I have to put it around your bicep,” she says. “Can you roll your sleeve all the way up?”
Emmeline hesitates, then obeys, pushing her long sleeve up until her whole arm is exposed. Her forearm is a swirl of shiny keloid tissue, a map of the ocean in flesh. Fahima stares long enough that Emmeline notices. She places the Shackle around Emmeline’s arm. It’s still too big. It slides down and rests at the crook of her elbow. She clicks it into place and secures the clasp.
“I’m going to turn it on, okay?” says Fahima. Emmeline nods. Fahima slides a panel open and flips a switch inside. Emmeline’s body tenses, and Viola drops the glass of milk. It shatters, spraying its contents across the tile floor. Viola looks down, flustered.
“I dropped it again,” she says to Emmeline, sounding full of regret. “After you saved it for me.”
“It’s not your fault,” Fahima says, rolling Emmeline’s sleeve down over the Shackle, over her scars. She reaches out, taking Viola by the arm and pulling her away from the desk. She feels a strange resistance as she does it, as if the air is thicker. As if time is moving more slowly within the affected space. “It’s not anybody’s fault.”
“Hi, Professor Deeb,” says Viola. She sounds like she’s waking from a dream. “I thought you and Emmeline had special class on Wednesdays.”
“I got my days wrong,” says Fahima.
Viola nods. “My dad’s a scientist, and he forgets things all the time,” she says. “I’m going to go find a mop.”
“I’ll get one,” Emmeline says, looking at the door. All their classmates are in the hall, waiting to see what happened. The moment Viola steps out, she’ll know what Emmeline did.
“I’ll show you where they are,” Fahima says. She opens the door and ushers Emmeline out. She puts her finger to her lips, shushing Sarah, then shoos the kids to their rooms. None listen. Sarah makes the same motion, and they flutter off like sparrows.
Fahima kneels down by Emmeline outside the door. “How does it feel?”
“It hurts my teeth,” Emmeline says.
“It’s temporary,” says Fahima. “We’ll figure out something better soon, I promise.”
“Is Viola going to be okay?” Emmeline says.
Fahima doesn’t answer. She thinks of a trick Sarah pulled once at a beach party at Sarah’s parents’ house when they were kids. Steven Huff was being a drunken asshole to Fahima. Tugging at her hijab. Asking if the Koran said it was okay to eat pussy. Sarah tapped him on the forehead and implanted a loop command in his brain. Every time he opened a beer, he’d drop it on the ground and sprint into the freezing cold water. Then he’d trudge out of the surf, unaware that he was soaked, and go find another beer. As soon as he opened it, he’d drop it in the sand and sprint back into the ocean. It was fun to watch until Steven started to turn blue. April Carroll, a fourth-year thermic who wasn’t all that skilled with her abilities, had to warm him up. She left scorch marks on his biceps and thighs, bright red handprints. There was enough culpability involved that no one reported it to Bishop. Sarah felt awful, and Fahima loved her for it.
What Fahima had seen upstairs wasn’t Viola performing a loop task. Time around her was looping. Thinking about it in terms of Steven Huff and the ocean, it would be as if Steven ran in only once but his running in happened over and over again. From the outside, it looked repeated, but Steven would experience it once. There would be no hypothermia, no blue flush to his lips. When he exited the loop, he’d be aware only of one idiot rush into the surf, like Viola thinking she’d dropped the glass and nothing more.
So the question isn’t whether Viola would be okay. Nothing happened to Viola. The question is whether the world around Viola has been harmed. If it has, is it a wound that will heal?
Avi waits in the Five of Cups on Fifth for an hour. Long enough to know what’s coming. The decision to meet back at the same bar where they got drunk after the taping was ridiculous, trying to make a meet-cute out of a one-night stand. This is what he’s supposed to be good at, making narrative out of wreckage. The problem isn’t the time it’s taken to get a response from Lakshmi. Since the NightTalk footage leaked, a half dozen interviews and appearances have been canceled. The book’s been out a week, and there’s complete media silence surrounding it. At least it feels that way. Avi’s on his third drink when the text comes.
“I’m sorry,” it says. “I should have shown up in person. But the optics are bad. The network isn’t happy.”
He puts the phone back in his pocket without bothering to text her back. He looks at the television behind the bar, and there she is, interviewing Kevin Bishop. He understands it was taped earlier, but there’s a visceral response as if she texted him from that seat a second before starting the interview. They’ve caked Bishop in makeup, filling the age lines of his face, making him flat and bland. Harmless, Avi thinks. Maybe that’s the idea.
“Can you turn the sound on?” he asks the bartender.
She reaches for the remote, but another patron stops her. He’s wearing a navy Brooks Brothers suit, tie loosened. He’s surrounded by guys dressed exactly the same. It reminds Avi of one of the Bishop students he met who could create perfect duplicates of himself. “Leave it off,” he says. “No one needs to hear anything that freak has to say.”
“I do,” Avi says. “Turn the sound on, please.”
“I know you,” says the suit.
“You don’t,” Avi says, looking down.
“Leave him be, Gerald,” says the bartender.
“I saw him on TV. He’s an expert. I want to talk to an expert about this shit.”
“Let me help you out,” says Gerald, bending down to pick up the cane. He holds it out to Avi, then pulls it back when Avi reaches for it.
“You know what? Let me show you to the door,” he says. He takes Avi by the arm and drags him across the bar. Everyone watches, and no one says anything. Gerald gives him a shove on the sidewalk, hands him the cane, and turns to go back inside. The best way to handle this is to keep quiet and limp away, Avi thinks. But there’s so much anger he carries around with him every day. Here is a moment when it’s justified. Here is a worthy and appropriate target. What else is anger for if not to use?
“I know what you’re afraid of,” Avi says. Gerald steps toward him again. “You’re afraid of being replaced. You’re afraid of not being special.”
“Fuck off,” says Gerald.
“You should be afraid,” Avi says. “You’re not special. You. Me. We’re dead ends. We’re not special like them. We’re—”
He’s about to say Damps when Gerald’s fist crunches into his right eye. He feels something burst, a sharp stab wrapped in a dull thud as he goes down, landing in the crust of a snowbank. His cane clatters on the sidewalk. Gerald picks it up, holds it in the air over his head. Avi wants it to fall. He wants to be hit again and again until he crumbles into pieces on the sidewalk. Gerald pauses, and Avi knows it won’t happen. He swings, striking Avi hard in the fleshy part of his left side: below the ribs, above the pelvis. Bruises, no breaks. Gerald spits at him but misses. It plunks on the sidewalk. He turns and goes back into the bar.
“Hey, mister,” says one of the kids smoking out front. “You okay?” He’s been standing there the whole time, making no effort to stop this.
“I’m fine,” Avi says. He picks up his cane and leverages himself back up to his feet.
“You want me to call the police?” the kid asks.
“Are they going to unpunch me?” Avi’s vision swims. It returns blurry and lopsided. He closes his right eye, and everything is clear. He closes his left, and the world is a smear of color and light.
* * *
—
One tree trunk arm wraps around Avi’s waist, keeping him from making another run at the elevator, holding him a few inches off the ground. With a finger the size of a beer can, Shen presses the intercom button. After a few seconds, Sarah’s voice comes through, crackly with static.
“What is it, Shen?”
“Sorry to wake you. We’ve got a problem in the lobby.”
“I’ll be right down,” Sarah says. The intercom clicks off.
“Why’d you have to call her?” asks Avi.
“Ms. Davenport’s acting headmaster,” he says. “Headmistress. You’re her problem.”
The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. Sarah is in sweats, her hair up in a topknot. Cortex runs out ahead of her and attempts to nuzzle one of Avi’s dangling legs, but Shen lifts Avi away and the dog retreats. Shen gives Avi a squeeze to remind him who’s in control of the situation, then sets him down.
“I need to see her,” Avi says, straightening his clothes.
“What happened?” Sarah asks.
“I got beat up,” Avi says. “I was standing up for you people, and I got the shit kicked out of me. Now I want to see my daughter.”
“We don’t need you to defend us, Avi,” says Sarah.
“You did,” he says. “You asked me to.”
“We never asked you to.”
“Let me see Emmeline,” he says. “Let me upstairs to see her.”
“You don’t want her to see you like this, Avi,” Sarah says. “Go home.”
“I don’t have a home,” he shouts. “You people took that. You took my wife, and now you’re taking my daughter. What does that leave me with? What do I get for all this? For everything I did?”
Sarah puts her hand on his cheek, below the bruise on his eye. He feels her push into his mind. Her presence makes him aware of his mind as a space, a geography. It’s hot and confused, the pain from his eye spreading out, filling his thoughts. Her mind expands into his, projecting cool, calm. Like turning the burner down on a gas stove: the flame in Avi’s mind contracts but doesn’t disappear.
“Go home, Avi,” she says. Hearing the words, the idea takes seed in his mind, an imperative.
Go home.
* * *
—
There’s something about the bomb Avi never told Kay. Louis knows because he was there. He doesn’t understand it the way Avi does and probably blames himself. But it wasn’t his fault. It was Avi’s.
Mosul was quiet when Avi landed the embed with Echo Company. No one thought the fighting was over, but it had moved elsewhere. The day after he arrived, a routine patrol in one of the eastern neighborhoods was taken out. The whole sector fell, and forces started expanding west, block by block, to the center of the city.
Louis told Avi it was a minor flare-up. He kept shunting Avi off on side projects. A week of inspecting every well in Tel Skuf, thirty klicks north of the city, or overseeing a training camp for Turkoman soldiers in Erbil, which had been secure for two years. Avi was used to being embedded with companies that had low combat priority, but he wasn’t some rookie stringer at his first dance. Everyone in Echo knew they were being called up the next morning. Over cards and beers, they performed the mix of swagger and reverent fear Avi had seen a dozen times. “Gonna see some fireworks,” Garcia said, clapping Avi on the back. After lights out, Avi heard Garcia mumbling prayers in his bunk, his voice cracking like a teenage boy’s.
In the morning, the men suited up. Avi went to the quartermaster to get himself a vest, but no one had requisitioned one for him.
“No chance,” Louis said. “You’re going north with Bravo to keep eyes on a med base.”
“Bullshit,” Avi said, standing as if at attention. “I’m part of Echo, and I’m staying with the guys.”
“Let him come along,” Garcia said. “He’s one of us.” Too tired to bother with something so minor, Louis scribbled a requisition note and passed it off to Avi.
“You’re in the JLTV with Hex Squad,” he said. “Watch your ass.”
Hex Squad headed into the city from the northwest. Recon said there was a weak spot; forces had gone slack at their initial incursion point, and a small group could get right up in there. No one considered that the eastern edges had been held for days. Enough time to seed the ground with IEDs. Avi remembers Garcia sitting across from him, singing “Call Me Maybe,” a summer hit Stateside two years before enjoying an afterlife in Iraq that month, when the JLTV lifted into the air. This model of Joint Light Tactical Vehicle was armored up the ass, as the men in Hex Squad bragged, but there was only so much armor you could slap on a glorified jeep before it was a tank, and tanks were no good on the roads out here. The desert was dotted with tanks from Gulf War One, where they’d gotten mired in sand and been abandoned. The JLTV was impervious to mortar fire, but a directed explosion to the back of the drivetrain that was near and severe enough to puncture the gas tank could blow through the undercarriage. Which, in this case, it did. Garcia went up like flash paper. Avi’s leg, extended casually into the center aisle of the vehicle, looked like a wooden match burned down to the holder’s fingertips: a blackened shinbone with the flesh seared away.
Of all the ways he cursed himself later, there was one that he kept secret. He never shared it with Kay, or the shrink, or Louis. You fucking child, he thought to himself. So afraid of being left out. Had to rush off to die with everyone else.
* * *
—
Avi gets to LaGuardia early so he can drink. Even in New York, it’s tough to find a beer at six in the morning. He has two whiskeys on the plane and another at a bar in O’Hare on his wa
y out. There are so many choices; the airport is a city in miniature. He picks one called Good Judgment, because the name stings and because it feels more like a movie set for a bar than an actual place. It’s somewhere to lose track of time, not just minutes and hours but years.
By the time the cab drops him in front of the house on Jarvis Avenue, it’s late afternoon. He should be picking Emmeline up from school. He imagines a world where she is jumping into the back seat, telling him about math classes and science projects. It hasn’t snowed in Chicago, but the lawn is dead. The car in the driveway is tiny, fuel-efficient. It could fit inside their old van. Avi thinks of the pieces of his life that way now. Old van. Old house. Old wife. Old daughter.
Avi trudges across the slick dead grass to the front door. He fumbles with his keys, then decides to knock. The man who answers could be a younger version of himself. Taller, paler, less broken. They’ve only talked on the phone. Avi can’t remember his name. Professor of something at Loyola. Married. No kids.
“Can I help you?” the man asks.
Avi’s eye is blackened; the cornea swims with blood. The clothes he’s been wearing for thirty-six hours have been tossed into a New York City snowbank and slept in.
“I’m sorry,” he says. I should have that tattooed on my forehead, he thinks. “This is my house.”
“I think you’ve got the wr—” The man looks more closely. He sees Avi under the blood and bruises and stubble. “Mr. Hirsch, I’m sorry. Come on in. If you could take your shoes—”
Avi starts up the stairs, tracking water and mud. “I’m sorry to crash in,” he says. “I promised my daughter I’d pick up some of her things while I’m in town.”
“No, of course,” says the man who lives in Avi’s old house. He eyes Avi’s tracks on the floor. “We’ve been using her room as a guest room. We moved her things up to the attic for storage. Do you need a hand getting up there?”