The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  Ji Yeon looks at her like she’s an utter idiot.

  “All of it.”

  She hands off the forms to one of the other kids, who runs them off to wherever they need to go.

  “I mean, the National Guard was an unexpected bonus,” says Ji Yeon, “but everything else. Look, you’re like forty, right?”

  “I’m thirty-two,” Fahima says.

  Ji Yeon waves this away as if the numbers are equivalent. “Who’s your Rosa Parks?”

  “What?”

  “You grew up with the Rosa Parks who was a tired old lady who wanted to sit down, right? Only that wasn’t her. Rosa Parks was a trained activist. She made a calculated decision that day.”

  “And that’s you?”

  Ji Yeon shrugs as someone hands her another clipboard.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to run things,” Fahima says.

  “Yes, you do,” says Ji Yeon. “You’re dying to. Go on, try.”

  Fahima is struck silent for a minute. She’s used to dealing with teenagers she has structural authority over.

  “There are better ways to put Bishop to use,” Fahima says. “I know you’re struggling to keep the pantry full. If you put him in front of the camera—”

  “Then the whole thing is about him,” Ji Yeon says. “Everything we’ve done gets folded into his message.”

  “It’s not a bad message,” says Fahima.

  “Love thy neighbor and forgive thine enemies?” Ji Yeon says. “My parents brought me up Baptist. I got enough of that bullshit to last me a lifetime.”

  “There’s more to him than that.”

  “I know the whole thing,” says Ji Yeon. “They came to our house and did the sales pitch. He’s like the original, right? The first Resonant? Doesn’t mean shit to me. All it means is he had half a century or whatever to make a change and he only got us this far.”

  “How far do you think we should go?” Fahima asks.

  “Stars, kid,” Ji Yeon says. “We should be in the stars.”

  * * *

  —

  After their third day, Fahima walks the streets. Her arms hang off her shoulders like dead weight. The streets are empty, and the streetlights are out. The Guard cut the electricity a week ago. Fahima told Ji Yeon she could build converters so some of the energy users could power the enclave’s whole grid, but Ji Yeon said it wasn’t a priority. They had clusters of generators at the makeshift hospital and at a couple houses that served as hostels and charging stations. The moon is full and gives great light when the clouds aren’t blocking it. Fahima walks the perimeter, along the edge of the barricade. A young man weaves two-by-fours into the structure. The beams are as pliant as cooked pasta in his hands. They corkscrew into holes in the barricade. Through the gaps, Fahima sees the National Guard’s klieg lights, the movements of soldiers, the dark metal skin of tanks.

  After dark, committees move into living rooms to discuss media strategy, rations, governance. Every front door is open. Fahima can walk in, join any assembly. Each meeting begins by selecting a facilitator. They have no stable heads. No leaders. Alyssa is on the medical committee, which regularly interfaces with the supply acquisition committee. People are pouring in, outpacing supplies, not to mention space. The facilities committee talks about the need to take another block, as if saying it will push the Guard out of Hill Park, giving them the school and the green. Fahima has drawn up plans for solar generators and sewage purification units. The necessary parts go on a list below more immediate needs. Toilet paper and antibiotics. Tampons and soap.

  Yesterday Alyssa asked Fahima flat out what the endgame was here. Fahima didn’t have an answer to give her. There’s a value to being here for the sake of being here. It’s intuitive, something she can’t put a name to, and the fact that Alyssa doesn’t feel it highlights the space between them, the differential in how much skin each has in the game. Alyssa wants to know what they’re fighting for. Fahima is coming to understand that fighting is a continued condition of her existence. There may not be an endgame, only another battle and another after that.

  Walking down Essex, Fahima hears a familiar voice from one of the powwows and follows it in. Patrick sits cross-legged at the end of a coffee table. Teenagers group around him, dressed in black. She’s seen most of them before, but the only one she recognizes by name is Ji Yeon, directly to his right, looking like a lieutenant to Patrick’s general. Patrick glances up from the map of Revere spread out on the table.

  “Have a seat,” he says. “We’re discussing tactics.”

  On the map, they’ve labeled crisis points in the wall. One of the boys, a flier, plots out locations of troop amassments. Ji Yeon has a list of resources, including weapons and those in the camp who are effectively weapons. It’s a short list.

  “What’s your assessment?” Patrick asks her.

  “We can continue to hold them off, but we can’t attack.”

  Patrick nods. “What are our options from here?”

  Ji Yeon pauses to think. “A full offensive is useless,” she says. “Some of us could make covert runs across the barricade. Low-level sabotage. Targeted assassinations.”

  Patrick shakes his head. “First soldier turns up dead, they’ll roll tanks over the whole camp. I like the idea of supply missions, though.”

  “We need more fighters,” says Ji Yeon.

  “Only if we want a fight,” Patrick says. “It’s better to have people and not need them than to need them and not have them. Can we ask public relations to send word through the Hive? A recruitment drive focused on people with offensive capability?” He looks at Fahima. “There are some students we could call in.” Despite herself, Fahima nods.

  The conversation peters out from there. Fahima can’t tell if they’re playing war games or seriously preparing to fight. Once he’s had a last side conversation with Ji Yeon, Patrick and Fahima walk out together.

  “What do you think of special ops?” he asks. “They call themselves the Black Rose Faction after the flowers in the Hive.”

  “That sounds very Nazi Germany,” says Fahima.

  “You have to give it to the Nazis on aesthetics,” Patrick says. “They’re the blueprint for a century of evil names and uniforms.”

  “Your kids don’t have uniforms yet?”

  He chuckles. “They’re not my kids. They organized themselves before I got here. Bishop called me in as an adviser. It’s all a little above my pay grade. I’m a gym teacher, not a general.”

  “You seemed like you were holding your own,” says Fahima.

  “I’ll slow them down,” Patrick says. “Maybe keep them from getting killed. For a while.”

  “At some point do we let it happen?” she asks. “If the kids want to fight?”

  Patrick shakes his head. “Bishop worked his whole life to keep them safe. I’d like to at least stave off a war until he’s gone.”

  “He told you?”

  “He gave me a sense,” Patrick says.

  “We’re talking in terms of days,” Fahima says. “I worry about what comes afterward. If we rise up, what does that make us?”

  “Dead, most likely,” says Patrick.

  “Even if we win,” Fahima says. “Do we put them in camps? Deport them? Don’t we end up becoming what we fought?”

  “Nothing says we have to,” Patrick says. They’re coming up on the intersection where Bishop and Isidra made the sculpture. Patrick’s brow furrows, and he rubs at his temples.

  “You okay?” Fahima asks.

  “I’ve been getting headaches,” he says.

  “You look like shit,” says Fahima. “Been on the road too long.”

  So have I, she thinks, but it’s not entirely true. She has Alyssa here with her. Even if they’re not sleeping in their own bed, there’s a strength in carrying her home with her, a touchston
e, a turtle’s shell.

  Patrick looks at the sculpture, an abstracted tuning fork in ivory.

  “That’s an odd thing,” he says.

  “You should touch it,” says Fahima. “It’s like having an orgasm and a great idea at the same time.”

  “That doesn’t sound nearly as appealing as you think it does,” he says. He recoils from it almost fussily.

  Fahima shrugs. “Your loss.” She raps her knuckles on the sculpture, and it rings quietly like a struck gong. She lays her palm against it. Her mind floods with ideas that pass too quickly to register. A parade of impossible inventions. Medical scanner, universal translator, Dyson sphere. Along with the ideas there’s a feeling. The sense of being warm and protected, threaded through with the knowledge that it’s soon to be taken away.

  * * *

  —

  Fahima, Alyssa, and Bishop are housed on the near side of Cambridge Street with the Rhees, who have two kids away at college. Alyssa and Fahima share one room, and Bishop is in the other. Alyssa left a note saying she’d be at the triage unit till late. The Rhees are already asleep. Fahima hears the buzz saw of Tae Min Rhee’s snoring as soon as she closes the front door. She goes to the basement to check on Bishop. His room belongs to the Rhees’ daughter, who moved out at seventeen. The decor is an effort to abandon girlishness. Riot grrrl posters on pale pink walls, Sharpie drawings of flying V guitars, princess dolls bursting from behind the closet door. Bishop is propped up in a canopy bed under sheets the color of cotton candy. He’s reading Tripmaster Monkey, plucked off a shelf where it sat with The Second Sex, Rubyfruit Jungle, and a full set of Pippi Longstocking books.

  “How are you?” Fahima asks.

  Bishop takes off his glasses and sets them on the nightstand. “I am in an incredible amount of pain,” he says. “It feels earned. It’s mine and no one else’s.”

  Fahima ducks under the canopy and sits at the foot of the bed. “Patrick’s here. I saw him a while ago.”

  Bishop nods. “We talked this morning.”

  “He has very different ideas about what’s going on here,” says Fahima.

  “Good,” Bishop says. “Maybe we’ve all had enough of my ideas for a while. It’s nice feeling obsolete. No longer needed.”

  She pats his knee under the thick down comforter. “You’re needed.”

  “Do you see what they’ve done here?” Bishop asks. “What these kids have built?”

  “A hill to die on?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “There’d be a power in that, too. You shouldn’t underestimate the metaphorical weight of dead children.”

  “Is that our strategy now?”

  “I don’t know what our strategy is,” Bishop says. “Or if we have one. There’re so few of us. If there’s a war, we lose. We have no strength to bargain, so we lose the peace as well. Maybe what’s best is to gather on a hill and fight for the sake of fighting.”

  Fahima laughs because she’s been thinking the same thing. “You sound like a Greek myth.”

  “You sound old before your time,” Bishop says. “Get some rest, Fahima. The rain’s coming tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  The sun never shows, and rain batters the windows. Alyssa snuck into bed in the middle of the night, and Fahima lets her sleep. If they hurry, they can carve out the last stretch of ditch before the camp floods. Fahima checks the case of needles. Three left. Enough to get them through today. Tonight she’ll insist that Bishop let them take him to a hospital. Or a hospice. Tomorrow these kids will continue on their own.

  She knocks on his door, but no one answers. He must have woken up and taken something for the pain. Alyssa brought a grab bag of purloined narcotics. Oxycodone and Percocet. Vicodin and codeine. If Bishop dipped in, there’s no chance of waking him. She tries the door, which turns out to be unlocked, and lets herself in.

  She knows he’s gone as soon as she enters the room. It’s the way the air sits. Bishop’s eyes stare blankly at the stucco ceiling. Fahima kneels down next to the bed, numb. She puts her hand on Bishop’s cold forehead. She reaches back into her memory to find the dua for closing the eyes of the dead, words she learned from her mother before the concept of death held any meaning. Meaning came later, saturating the words and giving them weight, substance that outlasted the end of Fahima’s faith. The ritual of words is a home, too, a place of returning.

  “O Allah, forgive Kevin Bishop,” she says. “And elevate his station among those who are guided, and be a successor to whom he has left behind, and forgive us and him, O Lord of the Worlds. Enlarge for him his grave and shed light upon him in it.”

  She slides her hand down, forcing his eyelids shut. They pull upward against her fingers as if there’s more he wants to see.

  Fahima assumes that the standoff is over when they open the barricade to let Kevin Bishop’s body out. Magnetics and dendrics and lithics peel back each element they built into the wall, unweaving it. Isidra Gonzalez raises her hand and extracts threads of silvery liquid from the barricade. They float around her like streamers. The curtain draws back to reveal an audience of Guardsmen and news vans.

  Patrick carries the body out. Fahima lifted it out of the deathbed herself. It’s as light as balsa wood. Patrick’s arms coil around it like a winding sheet, a cocoon of flesh from which Bishop might be reborn. In the ambulance, at the urging of paramedics, his arms unwind and give the body over.

  “I’ll go with him,” Patrick says. Fahima has already converted the body to an object in her mind. Patrick sees Bishop in the skin and bones.

  “You should stay,” says Fahima. She looks around at the Guardsmen. They’re unsure whether to move in, flood through the gap. “They’ll need you.”

  “Make sure they don’t,” Patrick says. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  The ambulance eases between tactical vehicles and transports, bearing the body away. Fahima looks back across the hundred yards between her and the barricade. She expects hands forcing her down, the bite of zip cuffs on her wrists, but the moment holds. Slowly, alone, she crosses the mud and tire tracks until she’s within the border the enclave has set for itself. Behind her, the barricade knits back together like the edges of a healing wound. A crowd is gathered. Fahima sees Ji Yeon and Hassan and Lynette. They’re looking at her for answers. It’s hard, even when you’re young and rebellious, not to want a leader. It’s hard to ward off the urge to be led.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” Fahima says, “then I’m going back to work.”

  Ji Yeon looks at her, then turns away. “You heard her,” she shouts. It’s not an order, but they take it as a directive, eager to be set back into motion.

  On her way back, Fahima passes the statue. It’s mottled with cavities like a rotting tooth, as if it’s receding back to wherever Bishop pulled it from. When Fahima touches it, she feels nothing.

  * * *

  —

  The Guard comes through the next morning, before dawn.

  When the barricade goes down at the corner of Cambridge and Dedham, it’s under the blade of a bulldozer rather than the tread of tanks. The press has been alerted. In the footage, the collapse looks like the sun rising minutes too early. The bulldozers plow through, flanked by sunlight. The tanks are out of the frame.

  The Rhees’ house is near the incursion. Shouting wakes Fahima but not Alyssa. Alyssa sleeps like the dead. It’s her ability. Fahima dresses quickly in a tee shirt and sweats, wrapping her hijab clumsily into a knot under her chin. She bursts out the front door into a torrent of people rushing down Dedham, toward the break.

  Behind the bulldozers come troops decked out for combat. They split into two groups. Half move down Cambridge, the other half down Dedham. Most carry rifles, but the frontline troops carry weapons that look like leaf blowers. It takes a moment for Fahima to recognize the bastardized versions of
her design. She doesn’t understand until she watches a Guardsman train the bulky thing on one of the camp’s fliers and fire. She hears the familiar hum of the inhibitor, and he drops toward the sidewalk, flailing his arms and legs.

  Standing in someone’s front yard, Fahima turns her back to the bulldozers and soldiers. She waves her hands in the air. “Get back,” she screams at the Resonants who rush forward to stop the incursion. She sees a boy trying to patch the barricade, pulling branches across from one ripped edge to the other like stitches. A Guardsman hits him with the inhibitor. The boy stares at his hands, confused. He flicks them at the wall ineffectually, as if he’s trying to do a magic trick. A bullet pierces his chest, and he drops to the ground.

  The shot turns shouts into screams. People scatter down side streets. Ji Yeon leads a group down Dedham toward the soldiers. Hassan creates a wave of dirt and debris in front of them. They want so badly to look like the small band of rebels who defeat a massive army, but they’re children. Fahima’s head fills with a deafening noise, the sound of a thousand trumpets blaring inside her skull. Everyone hears it. Soldiers grip their ears, failing to understand that the sound is being fed directly into their brains. Ji Yeon’s fighters, prepared for this but not immune, launch themselves at a knot of soldiers. They fight to disarm and disable, not to kill. Ji Yeon throws spears of light at the Guardsmen, aiming for pain points, shoulders, and legs. Guns are tossed away from their owners, brains already addled with the imaginary blare of trumpets are shut down, their owners crumpling like puppets with cut strings. Even when they kill us, we don’t become them, Fahima thinks. Even now, we are not the worst we could be.

  One of the soldiers looks around for the source of the sound. He spots Lynette Helms perched calmly on the eaves of a ranch house, not a hint of pain on her face. He levels his rifle and shoots her in the head. She slumps and spills onto the lawn. Dazed, relieved, units move in on Ji Yeon’s group from all angles.

  Fahima takes a deep breath. She braces herself against the ivory sculpture with one hand and drops into the Hive. Her body wavers, the beginning of a faint, even as her Hivebody manifests in midair, falling toward the ground, its opalescent surface honeycombed with black.