by Proehl, Bob
“So what, then?”
“I don’t want you in the building ever again,” Bishop says. “If you want to talk to Emmeline, you call her. If you want to see her, you set up a time and a place through me. If she needs to travel, she can call Kimani and ask.”
“I can call Kimani—”
“I don’t want you to call any of my staff,” Bishop says. His anger spills over the edges of his words; Avi can feel it in his head. A tiny flame Bishop quickly shakes out.
“You can’t—”
“Fahima and I are the only ones who know it was you,” Bishop says. He’s collected now, calm. He’s scarier this way. “Sarah suspects, and I’m sure Patrick will put it together. Patrick never liked you.” He plucks the last olive out of his drink and regards it. Avi wonders if Bishop chose martinis as his drink of choice to give himself stage business in conversations like this. Ways to look casual while destroying someone outright.
“Emmeline was there in the lobby when your friends from Homeland showed up,” Bishop says. “Did you know that? Do you realize how lucky we are they came in with their guns holstered? The situation between us and them is a powder keg, and you flicked matches at it.”
The full weight of what he put at risk hits Avi, along with something he’s failed to realize fully. He can’t threaten Bishop, threaten them, without endangering Emmeline. Her fate and well-being are tied to the rest of them more than they’re tethered to him. He never should have stopped fighting for them, not for a second. It meant he stopped fighting for her.
“I’m sorry,” Avi says.
“I have fuck-all time for your sorries,” says Bishop. “I know you’re unhappy, but I’d like to gently remind you that you were unhappy when we found you. At some point, it might be worth admitting the problem is you.” He produces a bill from his wallet and lays it on the bar. Avi expects some sort of good-bye. A handshake or at least a nod of acknowledgment. Bishop walks out without another word.
Once there was a girl who whistled and brought the wolves down. When the wolves came for her father, the girl tried to offer herself up in exchange. She would have fed her body to the wolves to keep his flesh from their mouths. But wolves are choosy. When they have a scent, they stay on it. Their heads won’t be turned by another. Even if the girl confessed she was the one who whistled for them, if she squeezed the words around the press of her mother’s hand, the wolves would have passed her by. You have to distract wolves before the smell is in their nostrils. You have to be their first, best option for blood.
This is her reasoning when she asks Kimani to door her into Louis Hoffman’s house.
The living room is dark, lit by a television’s glow off to the side of where Fahima is standing. Louis is lying on the couch under a blanket. A small head peeks out from under its edge, a boy, sleeping. Louis doesn’t register her at first. He’s nodding off. When he sees her, his hand jumps to his hip, reaching for a gun that thankfully isn’t there.
“It’s okay, Agent Hoffman,” Fahima says, holding up her hands. “I’m here to talk.”
“You don’t have a phone?” he says, a hissing whisper. Things explode on the television. Fahima cranes her neck to see what’s on. It’s one of those prestige movies about World War II, shot with handheld cameras near the actor’s ankles, sprays of mud and blood spattering the lens. Louis mutes it.
“I have an offer to make,” she says. She holds up a thumb drive.
“Unless you have Owen Curry trapped in there, I’m not making any deals.”
“How would you detain him?” Fahima asks. “This is someone who can create black holes. How are you planning to keep him in custody?”
“Maybe we’ll put a bullet in his head,” Louis says.
“You refused to conduct a warrantless search of the school,” she says. “You showed up at our door without kicking it down. I don’t see you summarily executing a suspect. So how will you hold him?”
“No one knows,” he says. “There are fifty-three Resonants in police custody across the country as of close of business today. I get a report on my desk just before I come home. Any one of them could walk out of their cells tonight. Phase through the walls or blow the doors off or mind-wipe the guards.”
Fahima holds up the thumb drive again. “This is how you keep them,” she says. “These are schematics for a modified arbitrary waveform generator and a low red light source. A high schooler could build it with parts from RadioShack. Set the waveform generator to the specs in the documents, and it inhibits abilities within a five-foot radius of the source. More if you build it in a sound-reflective space. I’m a fan of ceramics, myself. You’ll need one generator per cell, definitely. The red light will up melatonin levels, which keeps your guests dopey. Melatonin seems to interfere with abilities. My thinking is that we were set up that way so no one’s ability goes off when they’re dreaming. I’m not a hundred percent on that. Anyway, it works.”
“And you’re going to give me this?”
“I’m going to tell you Avi Hirsch was wrong,” she says. “We don’t have Owen Curry. We have people looking for him, and they will work with you. If they find him before you do, they’ll hand him over.”
“They won’t kill him?”
“Not my department,” Fahima says.
“How long have they been looking for him?” Louis says. “Since he blew up a mall and a church or since we came knocking?”
“Not my department,” Fahima says. “You know the guy in the Bond movies with the gadgets?”
“Q,” says Louis.
Fahima nods. “That’s me,” she says. “I sit in my lab and invent cool gadgets. Other people chase the bad guys.”
“So what do you want?”
“You leave the academy alone,” she says. “You don’t come into my school with guns ever again.” She thinks of the agent’s hand moving toward his weapon as Emmeline ran across the lobby to her mother. “We watch our own. If one goes bad, we’ll hand them over. But you get off our front lawn and you stay off.”
“And if we don’t?”
“I designed this,” Fahima says. “You think I didn’t build a back door?”
“I have guys that can shut it.”
“You don’t.”
“How long?” he asks.
Fahima looks at the drive. Her father used to talk about the war between Muslims and the West. Not in terms of jihad or any of that bullshit but in the adopted terms of American politicians. Maybe there were places it could be called a war, places where combatants met on a field of battle and the outcome was determined by luck and skill and strength of arms. In America it wasn’t like that. The government had all the weapons: it had the prisons and the courts; it had oubliettes to put you in and boats home to put you on. Bishop talked about the possibility of war, saying that some day they might have no choice but to fight. “If it happens,” he said, “the biggest weapon they’ll have is numbers.”
Now they’ll have this, too: an off switch. Fahima can work out the numbers thing, work it so that even an off switch won’t matter. She just needs time. She can’t do it with a boot on her neck. She doesn’t know Louis Hoffman, but she knows men like him. She’s seen men like him drag her father away from the dinner table and disappear him out of a world where the law could keep him safe. And her father and uncle were on the lucky side. For every disappeared man Fahima heard about growing up, there was another gunned down, bleeding out on his prayer mat in front of his family. That agent could have pulled his weapon, shot Emmeline, and kept firing. Fahima has a mental list of every student in the lobby that day. Eleven of them. She knows how close they came to being lost. These are not men governed by laws. They may not even draw a distinction between the law and themselves. But they can be reasoned with, tricked and appeased, and sated.
“Forever,” says Fahima. “I give you this, and you stay away forever.”
/> Louis nods. They both know they’re not talking about forever. Sooner or later, someone will give a nod and someone, maybe Louis, maybe a man just like him, will knock down the doors. “I build it and test it, and if it works, I pull my guys out of your lobby and never send them back.”
“You pull your guys tomorrow,” Fahima says. “You build it and test it, and if it doesn’t work, I will come to your place and smack the stupid out of whoever couldn’t read the specs.”
“And I tell Miss Davenport my source reconsidered and I apologize for any inconvenience,” he says.
“That’s obvious?”
“We’re talking in my living room in the middle of the night,” Louis says. Despite herself, Fahima sighs in relief. She’s been thinking about when she’ll have to tell Sarah, or Bishop for that matter. Kimani knows, but Kimani’s kept worse secrets. If everything goes as planned, this will be a funny story they’ll share after everyone is safe.
“One more thing,” says Louis.
“No more things. This is the deal.” She has drawn an exact line, how far she’s willing to compromise herself.
“I get that,” Louis says. “This is a favor.” He pauses, stares intently at the war movie for a few seconds. Fahima can see tears building in his eyes. “My kid. He’s amazing at math. Like do I send him to a special school where he learns nothing but math? That kind of good.”
“That’s wonderful for you,” Fahima says. She’s not sure if it is.
“His mother couldn’t balance a checkbook,” Louis says. “And every time one of my guys puts in an overtime request, I’ve got to pull out a calculator to figure time and a half. This with him, it’s out of nowhere. Which makes me wonder. Can that be an ability? Being good at math?”
“You want to know if he’s one of us,” Fahima says.
“It shouldn’t matter,” says Louis, looking down at the boy.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “He’s your kid.”
“If I knew, I’d know how to talk to him,” Louis says. “I could deal with him better if I knew.”
“Knowing won’t make it any easier to talk with him,” Fahima says.
“I need to know,” says Louis. “I’ll keep your secret. But I need to know about him.”
Fahima walks across the room. Behind her on the screen, the survivors smoke. They set up camp. She can tell which ones are going to die because she doesn’t know the names of those actors. Fahima sits on the coffee table and faces the kid. She goes into the Hive to find him. This young, he’d be faint at best, a ghost of a bird. A coherent bit of breeze. But there’s nothing there. The kid is a normal prodigy, an average genius.
“He’s not,” she says, coming back into the room. “His gifts or whatever, they’re his own.”
Louis lets out a sigh. Fahima thinks about the flip side of what she’s said. If the kid’s talents are his own, who do Fahima’s belong to?
“I’ll call my guys off,” Louis says. “And this should go without saying, but if you show up in my house again, I’ll shoot you dead.”
“Same goes for you, boss,” says Fahima. As she stands to go, she does a little pistol motion with her fingers, shooting from the hip. She opens the door, letting light from Kimani’s room fall onto the boy’s face. He stirs but doesn’t wake. As Fahima closes the door, she hears the sound go up on the television, a new battle starting.
“How do I look?” Fahima asks, twirling to model a new purple dress and a hijab so expensive that when she clicked the buy button, Fahima could practically hear her mother sucking her teeth. “I’m going for ‘sexy terrorist.’ ”
Kimani sips on the beer Fahima brought for her. “Mission accomplished.”
“I don’t even know why I’m going,” Fahima says.
“Bishop’s growing into his celebrity status,” says Kimani. “He’s got his driver. Now his personal assistant-slash-arm candy.”
“Is that an actual thing straight people say?” Fahima asks.
“I saw it in a movie,” says Kimani.
“You realize it’s a trap,” Fahima says. She tries to make sense of her distorted reflection in the silver sculpture on Kimani’s end table. “We’re going to show up at Senator Smith’s house, and the FBI will be there waiting for us.”
“It’s Senator Lowery,” says Kimani. “And it’ll be Homeland Security.” She pauses the movie. “Also, it’s not a trap. I’ve met Jim Lowery. I brought him to the school a half dozen times. He’s concerned about the state of things, same as we are. He wants to help.”
“Or he says he wants to help and it’s a fucking trap.”
“He’s been working to set this up for months,” Kimani says.
“He’s playing the long game.”
“Stop being paranoid,” Bishop says as he steps through the door. He’s dressed in a gray flannel suit that fit him perfectly once. Now he looks like he’s slowly shrinking inside it. “James is a good man and sympathetic. He’s the highest-ranking ally we have right now. So be nice.”
“If you want nice, bring Sarah,” Fahima says.
“I’m bringing you,” Bishop says, attempting to end the discussion.
“Senator Lowery is allergic to dogs,” Kimani says.
Fahima glares at Bishop. “I am going to invent tiny itchy bugs and let them loose in your bed,” she says. “Microlice. Nanoscabies.”
“Fahima, please,” says Bishop. “There are things at stake here. No more mention of roboscabies.”
“Roboscabies is better,” Kimani says.
“I don’t like either of you,” Fahima says, hiding her smile. None of them get to joke anymore. She has to hold on to moments like this to remember what the fuck they’re even fighting for. For stupid jokes and the right to pay too much for a pretty hijab. To feel like a person and not a point of contention, all day, her whole life.
Kimani opens the door into Senator James Lowery’s foyer. It’s one of those high-ceilinged rooms you find in DC brownstones so deep that they can afford to waste vertical space. Senator Lowery, a handsome young black man, rushes in from the next room in a flurry of handshakes and greetings.
“I’m so glad we put this together,” he says. “So glad. I’ve been on Capitol Hill two years now, and you know what I miss? Dialogue. People talking to people. Did you know the Democrats and the Republicans have separate commissaries? That, to me, is Armageddon. That’s the point where you say no, it’s broken. It’s busted. When you can’t break bread and engage in civil discourse, it’s all over.”
He takes a deep breath, about to start another conversational sprint, when the doorbell rings. “Our other guest,” he says. “Right on time. Not as punctual as you but not bad for traveling by conventional means.”
“Other guest?” Bishop asks. But Lowery has already opened the door. The other guest is stocky, a guy who used to be fat and may end up fat again but has committed to the advice of some stern taskmaster of a trainer. He offers Lowery a bottle of red wine with a nondescript label that means it’s either very expensive or very cheap.
“Senator, I can’t thank you enough for inviting me into your remarkable home,” he says. The voice is familiar, silky and practiced, an accent that pivots from down home to genteel on a dime.
“Kevin Bishop, Fahima Deeb,” says Lowery, “I’d like you to meet Jefferson Hargrave.”
“It’s a fucking trap,” Fahima mutters.
* * *
—
Fahima’s no psychic, but she can see through the senator’s thinking. It’s a standard ally line of thought: Have the homophobe and the queer sit down for a cup of coffee together! Get the Klansman and the Black Lives Matter activist to go out for a beer! Heal the world one conversation at a time. It ignores a major inequality. The queer person doesn’t walk into the coffee shop wishing the homophobe would die. The Black Lives Matter activist may hate the bel
iefs, the actions of the Klansman, but she doesn’t threaten his right to exist as an individual. Come on, the ally says to the oppressed person. Show him you’re human. Convince him you deserve to live and we can make everything better. The ally assumes these are viewpoints, meeting on equal ground. No. One person is right, one is wrong. One person wants to be, one wishes the other was dead.
“Isn’t this great?” Senator Lowery says despite the situation’s obvious not-greatness. A servant of some kind pours wine, and each time she says no, thank you, Fahima dies a little inside. “I think conversation is so important. It’s a lost art.”
Fahima eyes her butter knife, determining that it’s insufficient to cut Hargrave’s throat.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t sit down at a proper restaurant like normal people,” says Lowery. Hargrave snorts. “The rumor mill in this town. If I was seen with either of you, the Post’d have a field day. And both? Hoo boy.”
He doesn’t bother to mention Fahima. She isn’t present any more than the guy pouring the wine or the woman making dinner in the kitchen. Kimani’s right: Bishop is building up an entourage, a crew of invisibles to float behind him, indicating status, strength. Fahima is less than a pawn; she’s a prop.
“I’ve been trying to arrange a sitdown with Kevin for ages,” Hargrave says. The sound of Bishop’s first name in the man’s mouth makes Fahima reach for her butter knife. “I’ve invited him on the show a dozen times with no response.”
“You threaten and terrorize my people,” Bishop says. He sounds calm, as if he’s talking about Hargrave’s prize hydrangeas. “I’m not going to sit down and chat with you about it on air.”
Hargrave laughs. “I have never terrorized anyone in my life.” He puts air quotes around the word with his thick sausage fingers. “You’ll be surprised to hear it, but my employers at the Kindred Network keep me on a fairly tight leash. FCC regulations and such.”