by Proehl, Bob
“Stochastic terrorism,” Bishop says. “Someone in a position of power or authority dehumanizes another, casts them as a danger in such a way that an impressionable member of their audience decides violence against that other is both necessary and acceptable.”
“Fancy word,” Hargrave says. He’s the kind of guy who got the shit kicked out of him at private school, then decided elites were scum. “How could I dehumanize you? You’re not human. You never get tired of telling us.” He sets his glass down. “I’ve heard our government has a device that can—” He makes a gesture like polishing a mirror that takes in Fahima’s entire body. “—shut all this down.”
Fahima flinches. She can feel Bishop’s eyes on her. “We have no such technology,” Lowery says, trying to reassure Fahima and Bishop. Bishop asks her the question in her head, but Fahima shuts him out.
“My employers may have…better sources of information than a junior senator,” Hargrave says. “But let me ask you, Miz Deeb. Have you ever tried not being a Resonant?”
Fahima drops her fork. “What the actual—”
“Now I’m being kind,” Hargrave says. “I could have insinuated that you have a disease and it would be foolish not to accept an available cure. But I’m using your words here. I’m talking in terms of ability. I’m an excellent singer, did you know? Almost went to Juilliard on a music scholarship.” He pronounces the school’s name to make his contempt for it clear. He sounds like a farmer calling in pigs. Jooooo-lliard. “But I don’t go around singing all the time. I don’t. Simple as that. So instead of floating in the sky, complaining you’re being dehumanized, have you considered keeping yourselves to yourselves? Maybe if you don’t bother us humans, we won’t bother you.”
“I don’t think anyone’s asking that,” Lowery says. “We want all Americans to be their best, true selves. Jeff, if you want to sing, there’s a piano in the next room. I’ve been known to tickle a little ivory myself.” Lowery twiddles his fingers in the air and laughs. No one joins him. “This nation is built on the talents of its citizens,” he continues. “That’s all these abilities are. Talents. Gifts. Like your singing voice, Jeff.” He crams some greens into his mouth, trying to affect informality. He points his fork at Hargrave. “I think you hit it on the head with that one.” Hargrave huffs, happy to be affirmed even if his point’s been missed.
“I can see that when it comes to philosophy,” Lowery continues, “we’re going to be…” He bumps his fists together. He nods as if this has deep meaning. “But I think there must be some common ground on a policy front. That’s where I live, at the level of policy. Let a man believe what he wants to believe. It’s the law that matters. And on that level, I think I have something.”
He pauses, waiting for them all to lean in. Despite herself, Fahima does, ready to be told a secret.
“Registration,” Lowery says.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding,” Fahima says.
“Miss Deeb, I feel where you’re coming from,” he says. He looks pained, gesturing at her with his thumb like he might press her nose playfully. “The movement to register Muslims in this country came at the end of a decade of profiling and Islamophobia.”
“You realize that shit’s not over?” she asks.
“A registry of Resonants could be created not out of public fear but for the public good. To demonstrate trust between our—” He fumbles for a word. Fahima can’t pick the right one either. Peoples? Nations? “—between you and the federal government,” says Lowery. “Kevin, I was thinking the other day about those kids you sent out to the great Pacific garbage patch.”
“Senator Lowery,” Bishop says, “this idea is not within the realm of things we’ve discussed.”
“Hear me out, Kevin,” Lowery says.
“We were talking about protections,” Bishop says. “About civil rights.”
“Let the man talk, Kevin,” says Hargrave. He’s grinning like the cat who ate the cream.
“Those kids,” Lowery says, shaking his head. “It was a miracle. A major environmental disaster. Insurmountable. The low-end estimate is it’s a patch of trash as big as the state of Texas. They cleaned it up in a day. One day. I speak on behalf of a grateful nation, a grateful world, and say that deserves recompense. But these kids, they’re not government employees. Government employees go through vetting. They have files. They’re in a database that indexes their talents. When a job opens up and someone in the database is suitable for it, well, we’ve got that information right there.”
“You want us conscripted?” says Bishop. “Our service for our freedom?”
“Conscription is a very negative way of looking at this,” Lowery says.
“Well, I think it’s a fine idea, James,” says Hargrave. “An excellent first step.”
“First step to putting us in camps,” Fahima says. “To mass deportation.”
“No one’s talking about camps, young lady,” Hargrave says. Fahima isn’t sure if she’d rather have him call her by her first name or young lady. “Regarding deportation, I do think the U.S. government should consider that this country overwhelmingly bears this burden. Why is this not a problem in France or Germany? Why should we be the only nation saddled with it?”
“We were born here,” Fahima says.
“Not all of you,” Hargrave says. “That school you run brings them in from all over the world.”
“See, I think that’s an opportunity,” says Lowery, turning to Fahima to make his case. “We’re the country that stands to reap the benefits of you.”
“And if we don’t want to be reaped?”
“Like you said, James,” Hargrave says. “We disagree on philosophical points. But as to policy, I think it’d make people sleep easier. This won’t surprise you, but a lot of my listeners are also gun enthusiasts.”
“Like the boy who opened fire on my students,” Bishop says.
Hargrave waves the accusation away. “When you say registration, they clutch their pearls. Same as Kevin and the young lady are doing. The gummint gonna come seize ma guns! But it doesn’t mean that at all.” The mocking tone he adopts and drops drives a fearful point home to Fahima. He doesn’t believe in shit. He’d throw them all on the fire to show he could do it. He’s playing genocide like a video game. Hargrave points two fingers at Bishop’s head, an imaginary pistol. “A registered gun still shoots.”
“We’re not fucking weapons,” Fahima says. Hargrave cocks an eyebrow, skeptical.
Lowery looks at her sadly. “I don’t know how to put this to you, Miss Deeb,” he says, “but some of you are.”
“Fahima, we should go,” says Bishop.
“You have to give up something, Kevin,” Lowery says as Bishop stands to leave. Bishop turns on him.
“Three of my students erased a man-made ecological disaster. Three,” he says. “We could power cities. We could stop earthquakes, save countless lives. But it won’t count unless we do it with collars around our necks and you holding the leash. You won’t have my support on this. I won’t take this to my people.”
“What do you think your support counts for, Kevin?” Lowery asks. He’s angry. He expected love would save the day or some shit. “Are you going to vote me out? Are you going to run against me? I’ve got to say, you don’t look like you’ve got the stamina for a political race.” Fahima winces. It’s the first time she’s heard anyone call Bishop out on the obvious decline of his health. “Resonants are barely a demographic blip,” Lowery continues. “I’d earn more votes calling for concentration camps. And someone will, Kevin. Some freshman congressman right now is out there crunching the numbers on an internment bill. Registration buys time.”
It’s the first thing he’s said that makes any sense. Everything now is about time. A collection of countdown clocks and fuses.
“I think we should go,” Bishop says. “Mr. Hargrave, I hope
you have a pleasant evening.”
“I hope you get ball cancer,” says Fahima. “In your balls.” She manages a sharp pivot away from the table on her heel.
Lowery grabs her by the arm on the way out. “Please, take some rolls,” he says, holding out a bread basket. It’s an awkward gesture. It makes no sense until words appear in Fahima’s head the way they do when Sarah communicates with her ability.
You have to convince him.
The words are shoved out of her head, plowed away like snow. Fahima glares at Bishop, who holds the front door open. She gives one last look at Lowery, then leaves.
“Where are we going?” she asks as she follows him down K Street. The night air is humid but cool, dense with oncoming spring rain.
“I didn’t want to wait for our ride,” he says. He sniffs, then wipes his nose with his sleeve, leaving a pale pink streak on the cuff of his white shirt.
“Was he right?” Bishop says. “Does the government have inhibitors?”
“He’s a talk show host,” Fahima says. “What the fuck would he know about it?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Then go into my head,” Fahima shouts. “Like you did in there. Scan my fucking brains and check.”
Bishop stops dead. They have an agreement that’s stood for years, and he’s broken it. “I saw him going in,” he says. “I wanted to be sure—” A fresh gout of pink pours out his nose, and he grabs on to a lamppost to steady himself. He doubles over, lets it drip down. The stuff evaporates when it hits the sidewalk.
“Hold on,” says Fahima. “I’ll call Kimani. We’ll get you home.”
Bishop crouches. He wipes his hands on his suit coat, staining it.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says. He looks at Fahima like a child with a broken toy. “I don’t want a war, and I don’t know that they’ll leave us other choices. There are so few of us. They’ll round us up and put us somewhere they can forget about us. We’re not something they have to reckon with.”
We could be, Fahima thinks. Something Lowery said. Barely a demographic blip. Fahima remembers a talk at Columbia last year about disability rights. The speaker was in a wheelchair after a car accident. She waited as undergrads removed the podium and lowered the mic stand to accommodate her. Then she gave the audience a sly grin.
“The issue of rights as related to disability is different from those related to race,” she said. “Those of you born white will never be black. You might have black friends or be concerned about racial issues in terms of abstract societal good. You will never wake up black. Never be at risk within that struggle. You may, however, wake up one morning to discover, with all the shock of Gregor Samsa, that you are disabled. And that day, the words you have said dismissing the disabled as a protected class or a people worthy of study? Those words will taste like ashes in your mouth.”
It will never be enough to help them or to be their friends, Fahima thinks. They’ll be afraid of us until they become like us.
After Owen liberates the circus, some of those he freed stay with him. Andre the skeleton and Maryanne with the tentacles. Little Gail. Wendy the Angel stays one night at a motel two hours’ drive from the circus. They steal Jake’s truck, and Owen has enough money to rent rooms for them all. He’s drifting off when Wendy knocks on his door. He understands it’s repayment. It’s only going to be this one time. She tells him so. She gives him her body but not her heart. Owen’s surprised that he’s not more upset when she leaves in the morning. He understands she doesn’t love him, and she understands he does love her. He’ll have the memory of that night, her wings folding around him, hiding them from the world. He can think about it while he touches himself and imagine it’s her again. It’s complicated, and it hurts.
He and the group keep west after Damascus. They meet up with others, people his friend sends to them. Darren, who can do a couple of useless things with televisions and reminds Owen of his manager at the Planet. There’s Oliver, who looks like a gorilla fucked a wolf and put pants on the baby. And the girls, Tabitha and Marita. Owen assumes they’re lesbians, but they’re not. At least Marita isn’t. She comes to him in the black bone room some nights. She likes to visit him right after she’s fucked Darren or sometimes Oliver. She promises that what they have in the black bone room is special. She does things to him there she can’t do in real life. She burns him all up until there’s nothing left, except he’s still there. He’s seen the red handprints on Darren. Scorched bits of fur on Oliver. “Little flames,” she says. “Not like you and me.” If her needs are anything like Owen’s, it’s dangerous to let her use him as a canvas. It’s only a matter of time before she burns him all up for real. Some guys might get off on that danger. Not Owen. He gets off a different way.
They spend a year this way, running missions. Tabitha calls them ops. Marita and Oliver broke her out of a military prison. The winter was long, all of them cramped in the van, in cheap motels. Now it’s summer, and they can sleep under the stars. They have room to breathe again.
They’re at a rest stop diner outside of Topeka. Yesterday they burned down a medical research facility where people were working on a cure for Resonance. After the building burned, they went to the lead scientist’s house and Owen fed him into the null. The stuff and the idea, all gone. Oliver and Andre and Maryanne stay in the van they stole near Jefferson City. It’s not fair, but they’re too scary-looking to be seen. Soon there’ll be no one to tell them shit like that. Owen thinks about Wendy. When she left weeks ago, heading north back to the Commune while the rest of them went west, she was wearing a massive trench coat, her wings cramped inside. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
On the television behind the counter, a reporter stands in front of a church. There is a massive cross lit by ground lights, Wendy nailed to it by her wings. The camera crews don’t get too close. There are shadows and that digital blurring television does, but you can tell she’s naked. Owen can see her face, the bruises and the cuts. She’s strobed in blue and red police lights. Two men from the coroner’s office reach up toward her. It looks like they’re asking her to come down, but they’re pointing at the spikes that hold her up.
“Oh, fuck,” says Gail. Her voice is a whisper in the front pocket of Owen’s shirt. “Oh, Wendy, no.”
They cut to the man who runs the school in New York, the one where they kept Owen in the basement.
“This is a hate crime,” he says. “Pure and simple. The police here fail to appreciate the gravity of this incident. People need to understand this is an attempt to terrorize and intimidate us. This girl was killed because of what she was.”
Owen will show him such a hate crime. He’ll make him understand what the words mean. But the friend in Owen’s head says no. The school is not to be touched.
After the man from the school, they show the other man, the fat one. JEFFERSON HARGRAVE, TALK SHOW HOST, the words underneath him read.
“This was an act of species self-defense,” he says. “You all want to hug it out with these things and pretend they’re not dangerous. But they are. I feel terrible for the parents of this pigeon girl or whatever she was. But I also applaud the individuals who saw a clear and present threat to their community and decided to act.”
That one, says the friend in Owen’s head. Him.
Owen looks around the table. These are the best friends he’s ever had. Even Darren, whom he doesn’t like. They’ve formed a bond. Like those guys who go to war and meet up fifty years later. Forged in fire. Marita catches him staring at her. Darren’s hand is in the back pocket of her jeans. The look she gives him is mean, twisted up. It reminds him how Amanda Smoot looked at him. Even though he just ate two cheeseburgers, something rumbles in his gut. Marita sees the change in his face, and hers softens. She’s never kind to him, even when they’re fucking. But she’s afraid of him, which is the right way to be.
“You get a message, O?” she asks. They all have the same sliver in their heads that Owen does. But Owen’s connection is deeper. Owen is a kind of chosen one.
He points at the fat man on the screen. “He’s next.”
* * *
—
Jefferson Hargrave gets bigger and bigger in Owen’s mind. Owen sees the fat man driving the spikes into Wendy’s wings, jowly face grinning as he does it. In the two days it takes them to drive to Arizona, Owen sits in the back of the van and practices his ability. He takes an apple and nulls shapes out of the inside of it, where he can’t even see. He cuts it open with a pocket knife to check his work. That’s what he’s going to do to Jefferson Hargrave. Take pieces of his insides. Cut him open to check the work.
Maryanne and Gail wait in the van. Ostensibly Maryanne is the getaway driver, but she’s just squeamish. “She needs to get bloody or get gone,” Marita said to Owen last night in the black bone room, Owen’s Hivebody blackened, smoldering. Owen doesn’t disagree, but he also doesn’t want to leave Maryanne alone. She’s family.
“Look at this fucking house,” Darren says. “Can we keep it, you think?”
“We can stay a couple days afterward,” Tabitha says. This is her plan. Her op. “My intel says he holes up here alone for two weeks. In his book he calls it recentering time.”
“You read this asshole’s book?” Darren says.
They stole a copy from a library in Boulder, along with a couple of books on the Manson family. Tabitha’s studied photos of Roman Polanski’s house from the night of the killings. The bullet holes in the ceiling, the writing in blood on the walls. Owen wanted to tell her that there wouldn’t be as much blood this time, that she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Tabitha barely spoke until yesterday, when it was time to lay out her plan, sequestering herself in the back seat of the van with pictures of a fifty-year-old murder scene.
Marita sneaks up behind him as he looks up at the big house. She slips her hand down the front of Owen’s pants and wraps her fingers around his cock. They burn a little. Owen isn’t used to the feel of her actual skin.