by Proehl, Bob
“No,” Avi says. “I’m good. Thanks.”
“Since you’re here,” says the man, standing at the base of the stairs, looking up at Avi. “I admire the work you’ve been doing. It’s amazing. But this house is listed as your address? Online? And someone has made it public.” He glances at the door. “We’ve been getting threats.”
“Threats?”
“Taped to the door,” he says. “Left on the stoop. It’s nothing. Jan freaks out. I keep telling her, It’s nothing. People like this are cowards. But if you could change that? Online? There’re a couple spots. There are websites you can go to—”
“I’ll take care of it,” Avi says. “You shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
“Yeah,” says the man. “Anyway, if you need a hand.”
“I’m good,” Avi says. “Maybe coming back down. I’ll yell for you…”
“John,” says the man. “John and Jan. Can’t get more forgettable than that.”
“Thanks, John,” says Avi. “I’ll yell.”
The upstairs hallway is lined with vacation photos. John and Jan at the Acropolis. John and Jan at Aztec ruins. Each photo is of two beautiful people with their faces pressed together in front of something they were supposed to see, a place they were supposed to visit. A checklist that made up a life. Avi thinks about the places he’s been, alone. Basra. Kabul. Aleppo. Kigali. Laundry list of horrors. There are no photos of him from any of them. He was there to be an eye looking out.
He yanks the pull string, and the ladder comes down, raining dust. Except for a handful of boxes, the attic is as he left it. A time capsule. All of his things, all of Emmeline’s. A few boxes of Kay’s the movers missed that she’d never sent for. Emmeline didn’t want any of her things either, and Avi didn’t need any of his. He wonders why they’re keeping any of it.
On the desk is the journal he took from the motel room in Roseland. Owen Curry, on the run and pouring hate onto the page. He feels sympathy for the boy. Not for the monster who blew up the food court and the church, who wiped out the life of that little girl. For the boy immediately afterward. On the run and broken.
He starts up the old computer, going to the shared drive he stores pieces on. There’s the book in all its various drafts. Avi opens a document file titled “NULL.” He reads it, giving it the kind of once-over he does before sending a piece out. It’s perfect, the prose tight, the gaze of it unflinching. He’s memorized the first line: On December 4, a young Resonant named Owen Curry opened up a hole in the world and fed nineteen people into it. In a ritual he’s repeated any number of drunken nights, he creates an e-mail to Carol at the Trib. He attaches “NULL” to it. The text of the e-mail is simply, here. The cursor hovers over the send button for a second, two, before he deletes the e-mail.
Avi looks at the wall under the porthole. The place Kimani’s door used to appear. He feels Sarah’s hand on the side of his face, his skin tender to the touch, the bruise starting to take on form and color beneath the skin. She could have made me forget, he thinks. She was already in my head. She could have erased it all. It would have been better.
Avi takes out his phone. The screen cracked during the fight. He hasn’t been paying much attention to anything the last couple of days. He hasn’t been taking care of himself or the things that belong to him. He scrolls through his contacts and dials.
“Look who finally came home,” Louis says. “I saw you on the news last week. Where the fuck did you learn to punch?”
“Why haven’t you arrested me?” asks Avi.
“It’s been too long,” Louis says. “We’ve moved on to bigger things. There’s a war on; didn’t you hear?”
“Is that how Homeland sees it?”
“More or less,” Louis says. “We all read your book. Your new friends sound real nice. I notice you left out our mutual acquaintance.”
Avi touches the wood paneling of the western wall. There was a door there once that led to a room that led to a whole world, but it’s gone, as if it never existed.
“You want to find Owen Curry?”
Fahima will never admit the amount of time and money she spent on the look of it. A certain bulk is necessary to house the mechanism, but she wanted it to be something a ten-year-old would want to wear. Not knowing much about the aesthetics of ten-year-olds, this meant thinking in terms of what she might have wanted to wear at that age. She wasn’t the kind of girl who pined after jewelry, but she remembered an armband Aunt Majeda wore: a broad piece of engraved silver studded with ovals of blood-red carnelian. The engravings looked like calligraphic Arabic but were much older Turkmeni symbols that stood for mountains and rams. She’d found an image online, not the same piece but something similar. She found a jeweler in the Diamond District on West 47th who could get carnelian cheap and had someone who could do the metalwork. While she waited on that, she worked on making the mechanism smaller. She ran into the same problem she’d had when she made the gun for Patrick: the best design, the ideal form of the thing, was minuscule. But it would have to be tucked in alongside the parahippocampal gyrus, emitting a small countersignal directly at the origin point of a person’s Resonance. It was an elegant and permanent solution. Emmeline would have to settle for a device the size of a watchband that fit perfectly into a beautiful housing. Still, Fahima can’t help thinking of it as the Shackle.
Emmeline undoes the clasp on the older model, and it clunks to the counter. The sound makes Emmeline jump. She must have expected the world to end as soon as she took it off. They both pause. Fahima hadn’t ruled out the possibility that they were venting a container whose contents were under pressure. Emmeline’s ability might be like soda in a shaken can. No one had been exposed to inhibitors long-term except Owen Curry, and he hadn’t stuck around for a physical. There was no way to predict what ending that exposure would look like. But the Shackle lies on the counter, two leering grins connected at a hinge, and nothing happens.
“No quantum singularity,” says Fahima. “No rip in space-time.”
“You thought there might be?” Emmeline asks.
“There was a chance,” she says.
“But you took it off anyway?”
“It was ugly,” says Fahima. She holds up the new one. It’s half the size and a quarter of the weight.
“It’s pretty,” Emmeline says. Fahima isn’t sure if she’s being honest or trying to make her feel good about her efforts. Emmeline’s warmed in her time here, but there’s a persistent strangeness to her affect, the sense that she’s here and somewhere else at once. Fahima attaches the bracelet around Emmeline’s right wrist, which she’s measured already. Emmeline holds it up, admires it, then rolls the sleeve of her sweater down over it. Fahima rolls the sleeve back up to expose it, and Emmeline pulls her hand away. She’s very self-conscious about her burn scars even though Fahima has seen them. Fahima reaches out and takes Emmeline by the wrist. She lifts one of the pieces of carnelian to reveal the switch.
“I forgot,” says Emmeline.
“Don’t forget,” Fahima says. She turns the inhibitor on, trying not to notice Emmeline’s wince. It only hurts at the start, she tells herself. Emmeline said the second model wasn’t as uncomfortable as the first and didn’t bother her teeth the same way. This one should be better. Whether it’s actual discomfort or the memory of discomfort, the wince is there.
“It’s got a kinetic charging mechanism,” Fahima says. “It gets power from you moving it. But you need to check it before you go to bed.”
“Where do I check it?” Emmeline asks. Fahima lifts another carnelian, showing a small digital clock. She clicks the jewel back into place. “How do I know which one is which?”
Fahima points to the word carved into the carnelian. Three Arabic letters: nuun, miim, nuun. Nuuns like bowls with diamonds floating over them. Miim a sailboat, traversing the space between them.
“Zaman,” says Fahima. “I
t means ‘time.’ ”
Emmeline runs her fingers over the engraving, accepting the bracelet as part of her skin, a new scar.
Emmeline is helping Fahima reduce the overall entropy level of the lab when Fahima’s phone buzzes on one of the desks. SARAH, the screen reads.
“What’s up, boss lady?” Fahima asks.
“I need you up in the lobby right now,” Sarah says, then hangs up.
Fahima starts to tell Emmeline to wait for her here, but she knows the girl better than that. Emmeline drops the trash bag she’s holding, and the two of them run toward the elevator. They look like a gender-switched Batman and Robin from the old TV show, headed up an elevator instead of down a fire pole.
When the elevator reaches the lobby, the door is eclipsed by Shen’s extended back, a broad expanse of dark suit coat. Fahima has always wondered how Shen’s clothes expand and contract with him, even considering the possibility that they aren’t clothes but a part of Shen himself.
“Go back downstairs,” he says.
“Sarah called me up,” says Fahima.
Shen looks over his shoulder. “Sorry, Miz Deeb,” he says, stepping aside. Sarah stands in the middle of the lobby, staring down three government agents. Fahima can recognize feds by their cheap almost-matching suits. This was only a matter of time, she thinks.
“You FBI?” Fahima asks as she crosses the lobby.
“Homeland Security,” says the man in the middle. He’s older than the men flanking him, sliding softly into the warm pool of middle age. Growing pudgy and hasn’t shaved in a week. The other two are cookie-cutter white boys, crisp pleats in ill-fitting pants, fresh haircuts.
“You guys used to wear blue shirts,” Fahima says.
The older government man smiles nostalgically. “We haven’t worn those in ten years,” he says. “Only TSA wears the blues now.”
“I’m thinking farther back than that,” Fahima says. The men who took her uncle wore blue, like cartoon cops. These men were dressed more like the FBI agents who took her father. Maybe those departmental distinctions didn’t matter anymore.
“I called our lawyer,” says Sarah. As if summoned, a woman strides into the lobby, heels clacking on the tiles.
“Mom!” Emmeline shouts. She runs across the lobby toward her mother, and Fahima feels a tiny umbilical tug. She can’t tell if she’s pining for Emmeline or missing the feeling of having a mother to run to. She sees one of the Homeland agents’ hands twitch toward his gun. Another takes a step as if to restrain Emmeline, but the older one holds him back. Emmeline grabs her mother tightly around the waist, and her mother returns the hug, if not as enthusiastically.
“Hey, Leen,” Kay says. “It’s great to see you. I need to take care of this thing, okay?”
Emmeline releases her mother, who takes one step and regains her composure. By the second step, she is no longer the mom with the kid wrapped around her knees. She is a shark with a whiff of blood in her nostrils.
“Louis,” she says to the older agent as she marches toward him, “you’d better have the most impeccable warrant or you can hop a plane right back to Chicago.”
“Hello, Kay,” he says. “It’s nice to see you. We have evidence this school is harboring a known terror suspect.” He regards Kay coolly.
“I didn’t hear the word warrant in there,” Kay says.
“An anonymous informant told me Owen Curry was being held at this school,” he says. “He’s wanted in connection with two bombings. The church back home, Kay.” Kay flinches, and Fahima wonders how much Avi’s told her about Owen Curry. Then she wonders how much Avi’s been told about Owen Curry, and in that moment she knows the identity of the anonymous informant.
“Why would you think he’s here?” Sarah says, trying to step in.
“I was told. By someone I trust.” He never breaks eye contact with Kay, and Fahima’s suspicion is confirmed. Sarah looks at Fahima. She knows, too. She told Fahima about the incident with Avi in the lobby earlier in the week, trying to force his way in. That’s what Avi’s been doing since he met them. Sarah’s just the first one to literally shut the door on him.
“You’re not getting anywhere without a warrant,” Kay says, crossing her arms. “So you can pack up your goon squad and go find a judge that’ll take an anonymous informant as sufficient cause.”
“Fine, Kay. We were hoping the folks here would be willing to cooperate, is all.” He turns away from them to the loose knots of students hanging out in the lobby. “Owen Curry is responsible for the deaths of twenty-one people,” he announces. “He is a bad, scary man, and we have reason to believe your teachers are hiding him here at this school. We’re going to come back tomorrow. And every day after that until we find him. Maybe you want to check the closets? Under the desks? Maybe you want to think to yourself, do we have a secret set of jail cells in the basement where we’re illegally holding a wanted man in custody? And if you realize the answer is yes, give us a call. Or tap me on the shoulder, because I’m going to be right here.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Fahima says.
“That’s not helping,” Kay says.
“Feels good, though.” She’s lived with the sense that the government was watching her since they day they took her uncle. None of this feels new, just bigger. A change in degree rather than kind.
The agents file out, giving everyone in the lobby menacing looks over their shoulders as they do. Once they’re gone, Kay gives Sarah her business card.
“When they come back,” she says, “and that is when, call me directly. I won’t be here as fast as I got here today, but I’ll be here.”
Emmeline tugs at her sleeve. “Can you stay a little bit?”
Her mother looks around as if she needs another emergency, a reason to escape. Fahima can tell that Kay isn’t comfortable with all this. What her daughter is now, the world she’s stepped into. But what tethers mother and daughter is the same in both worlds, the old and the new.
“Of course, Leenie,” she says. “I can stay as long as you need me.”
Emmeline smiles and wraps her arm around her mother’s legs, a full circle. Behind her mother’s knees, Emmeline flicks the Shackle with her fingers so it makes quick orbits of her wrist.
Avi and Bishop agree to meet at the Magician. This time, Bishop is waiting for him. It reinforces the same power dynamic as the first time. Bishop is making it clear he has no time for this shit. Arriving from the shitty hotel he’s been staying at out in Cicero, Avi limps across the room to Bishop like a penitent, a child who must explain to his mother about the broken lamp.
“Order something,” he says as Avi sits down. It sounds like a dare. He spins the olives in his glass on their skewer. He doesn’t take his eyes off them.
“I’m good,” says Avi.
“You’re not,” Bishop says, sipping his half-finished martini. “You want a drink so bad, your eyeballs itch. I can feel it from here. We’ll both feel better if you have a drink.”
Avi came here to apologize and seek absolution, but something in Bishop’s tone curdles his guilt into anger.
“Are you trying to say something?” he asks.
“I’m saying get a drink,” says Bishop. “Or don’t. You make your own decisions, Avi.”
“You sure?”
“I understand you’re upset, but I can’t figure out why.” He holds his hand up for the bartender. “This gentleman will have a whiskey.”
“What’s your poison?” the bartender asks Avi.
Avi stares at Bishop. “You tell me,” he says.
“He’ll have your cheapest shit,” Bishop says, looking up from his drink for the first time. He twirls the olives again. “The better to flagellate himself.” The bartender gives Bishop a weird look, then pours Avi a double from the rotgut well liquor.
“You put my academy at risk.”
&nb
sp; “I didn’t mean to do that,” Avi says.
Bishop shrugs. “It was a predictable outcome,” he says. He’s right. Avi has tried to convince himself that he’s done the right thing, that he was correcting a mistake he made at the motel in Roseland by not calling in Louis as soon as he located Owen Curry. But that wasn’t it at all. He’d been spiteful and drunk and wanted to see someone get hurt. The academy was a stand-in for Bishop himself.
“Did they find him?” Avi says.
“Owen Curry isn’t at the academy,” Bishop says, looking away.
Avi is confused. “Did you move him?” he asks. “Did you kill him?”
“Someone let him out,” Bishop says. “Patrick’s been searching for him a year now with no luck. Personally, I hope he wandered in front of a truck. But it seems unlikely we’d be that lucky.”
A rush of fear and anger floods him, so overwhelming that it nearly drowns out a small thrill, a dark hope. It’ll be me, Avi thinks. I’ll find him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
“Why didn’t you trust me?”
“Because you’re not one of us,” Bishop says. “You’re playing a game. You’re having an exciting adventure. I am not. And I cannot trust those who are.”
Avi slams his hand on the bar. “It’s not a game to me,” he says too loudly. The bartender looks over at him, a caution. Avi lowers his voice. “I’m practically one of you. My daughter—”
“We should talk about Emmeline,” Bishop says. Avi searches his face. They are clearing up final things now. Avi may not be a psychic, but he sees what’s coming.
“You can’t cut me off from her,” he says.
“I could,” Bishop says. “I could make you forget you have a daughter.” Avi thinks about Sarah’s hand on his face, how much he wished she’d make him forget everything. When he imagined it, what he saw was not forgetting but the careful excision of everything about Resonants and the Bishop Academy from his life. What would be left behind would include his marriage, intact, and his daughter, no longer a stranger to him. “But that would be cruel,” Bishop continues. “I’m making concerted efforts not to be cruel anymore.”