by Proehl, Bob
The boy with the glowing light in his chest brings Avi’s coffee. He looks over Avi’s shoulder at the computer screen, the cursor blinking on the blank page.
“Writer?” he asks. It’s the first time the boy’s talked to him other than to take his order.
“Journalist,” Avi says.
The boy makes a face of mild disapproval. He taps his breastbone above the glowing hole. “Poet,” he says, expressing both pride and burden. Avi feels a tug at the base of his brain. It would be imperceptible if he hadn’t learned to expect it. The boy tries to Hivescan him, to figure out if he’s a Resonant. Coming up empty, the boy gets bored and returns to the counter.
Avi spends an hour working on a piece for the Reader about North Avenue zoning disputes. It’s the last one he’ll do for them. His editor thinks they shouldn’t hire baseline stringers to cover Resonant issues any more than they should hire white stringers to cover community meetings in predominantly black neighborhoods. He’ll be back to the Trib, where the wheels of cultural change grind slowly. The Trib wants blood, and Avi’s had his fill. They were livid when they got pipped on the Hargrave murder, but Avi’s managed to weasel back into their good books. He prefers working for the Reader even if it pays for shit. But the reasons he likes it are forcing him out.
A half beat apart, his laptop dings and his phone buzzes, reminding him of his appointment. He’s canceled three times. If he doesn’t go today, he’ll stop rescheduling. From the coffee shop, he can see the second-floor apartment where he’s supposed to be. Three times he’s watched the boy peek out to scan the street below, looking for the client who hasn’t shown. Avi packs up his laptop and notes. He places his empty mug in the bus bin and crosses the street.
The buzzer for the second-floor apartment reads RADICAL EMPATHY STUDIO and under that NORRIS/GRAY. It squawks when Avi presses it, and the approximation of a voice shouts at him, static and blur.
“Mizzer Hurts?” it says. “Elbows you win.”
The lock clicks, and Avi lets himself in. The kid holds the door open at the top of the stairs. Avi needs to stop thinking of everyone younger than him as a kid. This one has a face made handsome by the feelings and thoughts that animate it. He must look bland in photos, but in person he radiates attention and kindness.
“I’m glad you finally made it, Mr. Hirsch,” he says. “I’m Miquel. Come on in.”
They enter a small living room, the walls floor-to-ceiling with shelves of books and records. It reminds Avi of his attic, which he hasn’t been up to since the day he told Louis where to find Owen Curry. When he works from home, he sets up at the kitchen table. It’s not as if there’s anyone to bother him.
“The studio’s back here,” Miquel says. A curtain partitions the living room from a sitting room where two plush chairs sit facing. Miquel doesn’t indicate one or the other. This show of equanimity bothers Avi for some reason. He takes the one facing the curtain, and Miquel takes the one facing the windows, which are slatted with blinds.
“So Mr. Hirsch,” he says, pausing afterward.
“Avi,” says Avi.
Miquel smiles. “Why are you here?”
Avi cocks an eyebrow. “Aren’t you supposed to know?”
“I’d like to hear you tell me,” Miquel says.
“Emotional healing, right?” Avi says. “That’s what you’re selling?”
“Are you wounded?”
Avi’s hand falls to his knee, above where his leg was amputated. “Aren’t you?” he asks.
“This time is for you,” Miquel says. “You can fight if you want. It’s better than not showing up. Either way, you pay for the hour.”
“I’m here because I’m wounded,” Avi says after a pause.
Miquel leans forward, elbows on his knees. “What I’d like to do, if it’s all right with you, is come into your head a little. It’s called—”
“Reading,” Avi says. “I’ve been read before.”
Miquel nods. “What I do is a little different,” he says. “I’m not a psychic. I can’t read your thoughts. So don’t worry about keeping secrets. I’m an empathic. Which means I’m reading your emotions, if that makes any sense.”
“As much sense as anything else.”
“Exactly,” Miquel says. “It’s easier to do if you let me in.”
“So come in,” says Avi. Miquel nods and closes his eyes.
Something opens up behind Avi’s forehead. There is a feeling like warm water sluicing into his skull. His thoughts float on a rising tide, drifting and unconnected. He sees Emmeline’s birth, blood and fluid, and then this screaming thing in the world, a raw red semicolon crying out for him and the urge to take the child from the nurse, wrench the baby from her hands even as she offers it to him, kiss the fury of its little face, but he’s fumbling with a girl, not Kay, someone before her whose name is lost on the whitecap of a different wave, but her tongue is warm and wet in his mouth and her hand creeps down into his teenage disbelief that anyone will ever touch him, and the JLTV hits a bump, a pothole probably but part of him knows already it isn’t as the vehicle lifts into the air and a metal panel slices Garcia in half but Kay is talking about class while he makes dinner, days they ate for survival rather than taste but she says this is great and has seconds, even comes home from class starving so she can wolf down whatever he cooks and the wine tastes coppery but everything is better with her and all of them at the big school say the same thing which is go home, Avi, we did not ever need you and yet you are here go back to somewhere we do not care where but you are not were not were never the hero of this story and that you ever thought you were is making us sad now, and Emmeline says, I’ve got to go, Dad, I’ll call you this weekend, and Kay says nothing because she’s a smooth wall with no handholds or grips and everyone else is polite and cold and the warm water feeling spirals down a tube, a path Owen Curry is carving through the inside of Avi’s neck, and it drains away and Avi opens his eyes.
“You’re okay,” Miquel says. His hand is on Avi’s knee, steadying. “I mean, you’re not. You’re kind of a mess. But you’re here. You’re in the studio. We’re on North Avenue, and none of those things you were feeling are happening now.”
“They’re always happening,” Avi says.
“That’s true, too,” Miquel says. “I’m sorry. I would have warned you, but that’s not usually how it goes. Mostly, I read someone and it’s passive. Everything in your head was knotted together. I gave a tug, and it all came loose.”
“So put it all back,” says Avi. “Put things back where they go.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Believe it or not, you’re better off with it all rattling around. Things get lodged into place. We stop being able to see them. We can’t take them out and examine them and put them into a better place.”
“Then let’s start reorganizing,” Avi says, tapping his forehead.
“Our time is up for today,” Miquel says.
“It’s been two minutes.”
“I’ve been in your head for an hour,” Miquel says. “For clients it doesn’t feel like much time has passed. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like any time has passed. You were reexperiencing old emotions, moments you knew. This can register as all of them happening at the same time. But I was in there like a funnel, making sure they didn’t come at you all at once. It’s more than the mind can handle. Even the body isn’t equipped for that kind of massive emotional aggregate.”
Avi can feel the truth of this. He’s bone-tired, the way he might feel hitting his bunk at the end of a long day on an embed.
“So what do I do now?” he asks.
“You come back,” says Miquel. “You spend some time in your head. You pick up what’s broken. And you come back.”
* * *
—
The poet with the glow in his chest is off shift. The sun goes down over the building
s across the street. Avi stares at the half-finished piece for the Reader. He’s had too much coffee and not enough to eat, which accentuates the feeling of a nest of sparking live wires in his head.
At the center of it, a still eye, sits a moment that feels to Avi like the last time things were right between him and Kay. It’s the two of them sitting on the couch, reading comics. It’s the one before he asked her to look at the footage from Salem Baptist, before this world and his marriage smashed into each other. Everything after that felt inevitable. That was the last time Avi feels like he could have stopped it all.
He wants to call Kay but instead decides to call Emmeline, to let no excuses from her keep them from talking, seriously talking. Better, he’ll fly to New York, catch a red-eye, and surprise her with bagels before class in the morning. He’s typing in a search for cheap tickets when something on the street catches his attention. A white van, unmarked, pulls up in front of the apartment across the street. Three men in dark blue suits load out. Avi recognizes the shade, the deep navy Homeland Security agents used to wear, back in their early days. They go to the door of Radical Empathy Studio. One faces the door. The others watch the street. Two let themselves in.
Avi gets up, knocks into his table, and spills coffee precariously near his laptop. He weaves through patrons and stands in the doorway, watching the entryway across the street. An agent comes out, then Miquel, then another agent. The van door slides open. Avi looks around to see if anyone else is seeing this, but no one registers it. The van door slams shut. One of the agents comes around the back and gets into the driver’s seat. He pauses as he climbs in, seeing Avi watching him. He moves like he’s about to come barreling across the street and throw Avi in the back of the van. Then he closes the door and pulls the van into traffic. Avi starts after the van, but it runs a red and turns down Western, off North Avenue, and back to the real world.
* * *
—
Avi’s enough of a known quantity that people answer his questions. They know he’s a baseliner, a Damp. Either they’ve Hivescanned him with no luck or they just know. Maybe there’s a way to tell from how he talks, the way he stares as if each one of them is a god writ small. He’s known in the neighborhood and known not to be a threat.
It only takes a mention of white vans to set people talking.
The disappearances have been happening for weeks, although many people he talks to won’t call them disappearances. Some explain them away. “You build a community and it feels like it’ll last forever, and it doesn’t,” one of the older folks told him. “People leave.” But Avi’s watched the girl who goes in and out of the apartment across from the coffee shop. He can’t bring himself to talk to her, but he can see the shock on her face, even two days later. She’s been left behind. With a breakup, part of you sees it coming or can do the postmortem and recognize signs. There’s none of that in the girl’s face. Miquel Gray didn’t leave; he was taken. It follows that the other people who’ve disappeared were taken as well. Several stories involve white vans.
When nothing else comes together, Avi calls Louis. They haven’t talked since Avi passed on the Hargrave story. Afterward, Avi understood it as an olive branch, one Louis needed to poke him in the eye with before making peace. He feels like a line is open between them. The risk is that he’s wrong and Louis tells him, once and for all, to fuck off.
“What do you need, Avi?” Louis says when he picks up. His tone is flat, his office voice. It means there are limits on what can be said. People are listening. Avi presses on anyway.
“White vans on North Avenue,” he says.
“A baby blue Dodge Dart on South Division,” says Louis. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“There’ve been disappearances,” Avi says. “Going on for weeks. Witnesses keep seeing white vans at the scene.”
“Any of these reported?”
“These people don’t go to the police.”
Louis pauses. “White vans mean nothing to me,” he says. “Lake Shore Drive, half the traffic is white vans.”
“I saw a kid get taken,” Avi says. “The guys that took him looked like old-school Homeland.”
“Not everybody in a blue suit works for me.”
“Your guys aren’t cherry-picking Resonant kids off North Avenue?” Avi asks.
There’s the pause again. It’s not a complete tell: Louis clears his throat when he’s lying. A pause means he isn’t sure. A sign of doubt, a crack. “I’d know if we were,” he says, trying to sound confident. Doubt creeps back in. “This kid have a name?”
“Miquel Gray,” says Avi. “Address is 413 North Avenue. Upstairs apartment.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” says Louis. “But from what you’re talking, if someone was going to authorize this, it’d be me.”
“And you didn’t,” Avi says. He phrases it as if it’s something he already knows rather than a question.
“I’ve never been that guy,” says Louis. “Even over there, when there were plenty of those guys, that wasn’t me.”
* * *
—
Setting an empty glass on the coffee table, Avi looks balefully at the stairs, considering whether the comforts of his bed outweigh the discomfort of the trek up. He hasn’t gotten over how much easier it is to be single, how much less adult you have to be. The sink is full of dishes, the living room is strewn with laundry, and there’s no one to call him out on it.
He’s resolved to go up when the doorbell rings. He hoists himself off the couch and considers going up to the attic to get the pistol in his desk drawer. By the time he got up there and back, whoever’s at the door would have broken in or gone away. He peers through the peephole. Louis’s face is distended by the fish-eye lens.
Avi ushers him into the living room and pours him a whiskey without asking. “I’m not here,” Louis says. “You understand that?” By the smell of him, he’s already drunk. He takes a seat on the couch and stares into his glass. Avi stands over him.
“Two months ago, I was tasked with a viability study,” Louis says. “Coordinating with police to create local-level internment camps. Chicago was top on the list of test sites because Chicago PD got away with something like this before. You know about Homan Square?”
“Interrogation site,” Avi says, pulling the story up in his head. “It got busted by Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian.”
“Look for a U.S. story that follows up with anything that isn’t in the Guardian piece,” says Louis. “They ran a black site prison for a decade, and all they got hit with was an article in the foreign press.”
“It got closed down,” says Avi.
Louis looks at Avi like he’s said you can’t get a girl pregnant if you do it standing up.
“The determination I passed along to my bosses was that it could be done but obviously it shouldn’t be done,” he says. “You’re talking preemptive arrest and detainment of citizens. At some point, you stop and say, This is America and there are things we don’t do.”
Avi has seen the things America does. He gives Louis back the same look, eyebrow cocked at his naiveté. “Someone’s doing it.”
“Not in the system,” Louis says. “But some of our guys are involved. Entirely off the books. Big funding from someone on the West Coast. I had to get the right guys the right kind of drunk to hear about it. Some of the younger guys think we’re already at war.”
“What do you think?”
“This is America,” says Louis. “There are things we don’t do.”
“Where’s the site?” Avi asks.
“I don’t know,” Louis says. “One of my guys was about to tell me, but his friend clammed him up. My understanding is this has gone on for months. Our guys, local cops. Working with fringe militia. Hargrave’s disciples. I couldn’t get a sense of the scope. Maybe it’s a dozen assholes reliving the glory days of Homa
n Square in their off hours. Some tech billionaire bankrolling them for kicks. But Avi, my guys are not unique. Any office, the guys are more or less the same. If they’re doing it in Chicago, they’ll do it everywhere.”
He finishes his whiskey and gets up to leave. His hand is on the door handle when he stops. “Your kid,” he says, turning around. “Go get Emmeline and get her on a plane. In Europe they’re not thinking like this. Get your kid out of this country.”
The cops are as useless as Carrie expected but kinder. Chicago PD set up a Resonant liaison working out of the station house on California Avenue: Officer Kowalski, a portly Polish man with a walrus mustache. “My nephew’s one of youse,” he explains to Carrie as he fills out the missing persons report. “Speed. He tried to keep it hidden. Track star his freshman year. One race he took off in a blur, and that was the ball game. School stripped him of every medal. It’s not fair what they do to youse for doing your best.”
The officer’s enlightened views aside, there are no follow-up calls from the police. No one comes to their apartment to look for clues or dust for prints or whatever they do in a situation like this. Cops don’t come to North Avenue, not for anything good. Not to help. The residents of North Avenue have an unspoken policy of not calling the cops. There was an incident a year before. Some polo shirt–sporting U of C undergrad swore he’d been mugged by a gang of Resonants on North. It made the news, and Chicago’s sizable angry white population descended on the neighborhood. The cops obliged by rolling through, banging on doors and soliciting alibis. It was a week before they figured out the kid hadn’t been anywhere near North Avenue. He had paid his friends to rough him up so he could look the victim. Crowds and cops ebbed, but there were never any apologies given. Only the promotion of Officer Kowalski in the California Street station, with his Resonant nephew and accompanying sympathies.