by Proehl, Bob
“Kimani!” she screams. “We need you right now!”
She comes up, returning to her body too late to stop it from toppling. When she picks herself up off the asphalt, she sees the door in the middle of Dedham, standing on its own. The door opens inward. The sight of Kimani’s room in the middle of the open air, war raging around the door frame, makes Fahima feel nauseous.
“Come on!” Kimani shouts. Her face is pained. Fahima’s never seen her make a door that isn’t on a wall. Fahima rushes inside.
“There!” Fahima says, pointing at Ji Yeon and her fighters, who are engaged with soldiers in the intersection. “Go there.”
Kimani slams the door shut and opens it again in the middle of the throng. Bullets strike the asphalt around them, shatter windows in the houses nearby. Fahima grabs the nearest person, who happens to be Ji Yeon. The girl struggles, protests, tries to get back into the fray. Fahima tosses her back into the room. She spots Isidra, not one of the fighters but nearby, holding a round shield of flowing silver stuff. Fahima pulls her in as well. She reaches out a third time, grabbing Hassan by the wrist. He looks at her, encircled in a cloud of dust, eyes tearful and panicked. Before she can get him through the door, his body is riddled with bullets. Fahima pulls at dead weight. She drops his hand and pushes the door shut.
“Let me go!” screams Ji Yeon, lying in a heap on the floor. “You can’t keep me in here while they’re dying.”
“I just saved your ass,” Fahima says.
“Fuck you!” says Ji Yeon. “We have to fight them. They’re going to keep killing us unless we fight them.” She grabs the silver sculpture off an end table and throws it hard. It hits the wall and shatters into a thousand tiny droplets of silver, like ball bearings. They pool together, a half dozen puddles of mercury. Isidra gapes at the ruin of her work.
“There aren’t enough of us to fight them,” Fahima says. “You were going to die, and it wouldn’t mean anything. It wouldn’t change anything.”
“You don’t know that,” says Ji Yeon.
Isidra sits on the floor, dazed but uninjured. Kimani is out of breath. “We’ll go house to house,” she says. “We’ll get everyone out we can.”
“Get Alyssa,” Fahima says. “She’s in the basement of 224 Cambridge Street.”
“Your Damp girlfriend’s on her own,” says Ji Yeon. She pulls herself up. “Start at the triage unit on Furness,” she orders Kimani, “then hostels on Essex and Mount—”
“We start with Alyssa,” Fahima tells her, voice tight. She turns to Kimani. “I’m the one who called you, and I say we get Alyssa first.”
Fahima looks at Ji Yeon, daring her to argue. Kimani opens the door into the basement room of the Rhees’ house, where Alyssa sleeps through the start of a war.
The service is an afterthought, a public screening of grief. They hold it at a megachurch in Cobble Hill. Former students, a contingent from the Commune, Resonants who never attended the Bishop Academy, who’d stayed out in the cold. They pack into the church. The service is Resonants only. Sarah thought this was exclusionary, but Patrick pointed out that it was practical. All those seats and there isn’t enough room. Shen works the door, Hivescanning mourners on their way in. Police block off Smith Street as a sea of allies and enemies stand in front of the church with candles and placards, tiki torches, and American flags. Since Revere, Fahima has developed a radar sense for violence. It’s not pinging as she and Alyssa wind their way through the crowd. They’ll let us put him in the ground, she thinks. They’ll at least give us that, if nothing more.
They stop at the doors. Shen gives Alyssa a pained expression, and Fahima nods. She kisses Alyssa on the cheek. “This is where I leave you,” she says. Alyssa looks shocked. Fahima told her this was coming, but she must not have believed it. There’s a case to be made for her inclusion: Bishop owed his last days to Alyssa as much as to anyone. Fahima hadn’t bothered to make the argument.
This is for us, she thinks. And I love you, but you’re not one of us.
Seeing Fahima’s resolve, Alyssa turns to go. “I’ll see you at home,” she says. She looks so hurt, Fahima nearly calls her back, but the motion of the crowd urges Fahima inside. There are more moments like this to come, Fahima thinks. From here out, there will be fewer places we can go together. It won’t be that different from before, when Fahima kept herself secret from Alyssa. But to get past that, to stay together through it, Fahima had to promise that things would never go back to that way.
Sarah and Patrick saved Fahima a seat. Craning her neck to the back of the nave, she sees Kimani, door perched in the wall above the balcony. She looks down on them the way you hope God would, a sad smile on her face, a beer in her hand.
Fahima doesn’t know the woman who performs the service but falls immediately in love with her. Everyone in the church does. Janine Coupland gives off a warmth that registers deeper than the skin. Sarah found her from a story Avi had written for Harper’s about her murder trial and acquittal, one of Kay Washington’s biggest legal victories since Bishop brought her on board. Janine Coupland’s a healer. Most of the healers Fahima has encountered have a cold practicality about their ability. Abby Burgess, the school nurse at Bishop, can weave sundered skin back together but has all the bedside manner of a dead trout. Janine Coupland exudes healing. Fahima’s lucky to be in the front row, soaking up more of it than the rest of the congregants, even if it’s less than she needs.
Janine Coupland begins with apologies. She’s not a preacher or even much of a public speaker. There’s not much to the words she says beyond platitudes. It’s her presence that does the work, leaving an impression on all that they’ve shared something important, a moment that changed them. It’s a failing on Fahima’s part that she’s too smart, too critical to be part of it. Alyssa once remarked on Fahima’s inability to turn her brain off long enough to watch a movie. “You don’t have to be so smart all the time,” she said, grinning playfully.
“Thing is, I do,” Fahima said. It’s difficult to explain how tightly you cling to your intellect when it’s all you are.
“Is there anyone who’d like to say a few words about Kevin Bishop?” asks Janine Coupland. Sarah, Patrick, and Fahima exchange looks. One of them should speak. A former student, older than any of them, comes to the dais and waxes on about her time at Bishop, saying plenty about the school and very little about the man. The next couple of speakers run the same course, talking about what Kevin Bishop built without addressing who he was. Fahima wonders what she could add.
The thing she knows most clearly about Bishop is how little she knew him. He kept his past a secret. He said it was important that it stay that way. “We can’t focus on who we’ve been or where we’ve come from,” he said. “We need to think of where we are and where we’re going.” Bishop’s past was tangled up with the beginnings of Resonance, the Hive, and the way their community had taken shape, but he drew a veil over that part of their story. Days when she was feeling charitable, Fahima thought it was about Bishop’s idea that mystery and unknowability had intrinsic value, the seeds of faith. Fahima grew up around people who valued faith for its own sake. Faith could keep you good. It could hold you together and hold you up when a more empirical mind might fall apart. She was evidence of that. The years in the mental institution were the price she paid for her lack of belief. She suspected that there were parts of Bishop’s story that would poison the well they all drew from. His secrecy may have been spiritual and benign, or it may have been adopted to protect himself from judgment.
By the time Fahima decides there’s nothing she can say about someone as complex as Kevin Bishop, the service is over, the congregants dismissed.
“That was nice,” says Sarah. Cortex huffs in agreement. Even Patrick nods. He’s hardly spoken since Bishop died. Fahima tries to think of moments when he and Bishop seemed close. Maybe they’d been in touch while Patrick was away, hunti
ng. Maybe Bishop was there for him on the road. She likes to imagine Patrick and Bishop as a buddy movie. One’s on the hunt for a cold-blooded killer. The other is a disembodied voice in his head. She stifles a laugh that feels sacrilegious for being not just in church but at a funeral.
On the way out, Senator Lowery finds Fahima and falls into step behind her.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says quietly.
“You could have gotten in,” says Fahima. “Maybe thrown on a clever disguise? Groucho mustache and glasses?”
“Are you who I talk to now?” he asks. “I need to know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“With Kevin gone, someone needs to be the public face,” he says. “Is it you?”
There’s real worry in him, a sense that things have become unstable. It’s worse for him because he thought things were stable to begin with. At the awful dinner Lowery hosted, Jefferson Hargrave suggested Resonants would be better off if they hid what they were. Lowery has done just that, and it’s working for him. He belongs out here on the street with the allies and well-wishers.
Fahima stops and turns to him. She clasps his hand in both of hers and shakes it. “Thank you for your thoughts and prayers,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll be in touch.”
“Come on,” Sarah says, pulling her away. “Kimani’s picking us up.”
“You go on ahead,” says Fahima. “I’ve got some things back at the lab I need to finish.”
“Not today,” Sarah says.
“It’s for him,” says Fahima.
“He’s not going to take a point off for late work anymore,” Sarah says. Fahima smiles, kisses Sarah on the cheek, and heads to the F train.
* * *
—
Fahima changes into jeans and a work shirt. She hangs her black dress and nice hijab off the corner of her whiteboard, covering the notes she’s least comfortable with. Emmeline. A pulse. In the center of the board, she’s drawn a timeline that starts with the Trinity test and extends through today, into the future. A registration act by the end of the year. Internment camps soon afterward, if not concurrent with legislation. From there, two paths. One leads to submission. The other leads to war.
Fahima thinks about ways to change the course of a stream. Drop a rock in its path or pour in a ton more water so the stream overflows its banks. From there it could go anywhere. It could reconfigure itself as something new.
She doesn’t notice the pop when the door reappears. She doesn’t even notice the door is there until it opens and organ music floods out. It’s Prince’s opening monologue from “Let’s Go Crazy,” his sexy preacher bit.
“Fahima, we’re not taking no for an answer! Get in here and drink with us,” Patrick yells. “Quick, before Kimani starts singing!”
Fahima glances at her timelines. She’s already decided on a course of action. She decided when she drew up plans for the device instead of letting the idea slip away, forgotten like a dream. You’ll have to answer for this, she thinks. Whether the results are good or bad, you don’t do something like this with impunity. She turns away from the whiteboard and goes through the door. Kimani’s room hasn’t been cleaned or tidied since Revere. The sculpture Ji Yeon smashed is on the floor, a swarm of ball bearings beneath a shallow dent in the wall. She tries to catch Kimani’s eye, but Kimani is fixing a drink, whispering lyrics to herself as she does.
“I don’t know how you drink these things,” Sarah says. She scratches under Cortex’s chin with one hand and holds up a half-finished martini in the other. “It tastes like pine needles steeped in paint thinner.”
“It’s an acquired taste,” Fahima says, accepting a drink.
“When you die,” Patrick says, “we’ll drink white wine spritzers in your memory.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Sarah says, sounding genuinely hurt. “I’ve never had a white wine spritzer in my life.”
“How far along are you all?” asks Fahima.
“One round and this much,” Sarah says, indicating the empty top inch of her glass. “These things have a lot of booze in them.”
“Patrick was telling us about his travels,” Kimani says.
“The great white hunter,” Sarah says.
“I wasn’t telling them anything,” he says. “They were badgering me. We’ve been through all this. It’s not something I want to talk about.”
“So don’t talk about it,” says Fahima.
“He’s been gone for years,” Sarah says.
“I’m coming back next term,” Patrick says.
“You caught all the bad guys?” Fahima asks.
“It’s time to come back,” he says. “The job is too big for one person. It’s not just Owen Curry. There are groups. Cells. I couldn’t tell if they were connected or reporting to someone higher up. But I kept finding these little knots of Resonants waiting to blow shit up. It was like Whac-A-Mole. Every time I smacked one down, another popped up.”
“Would you say you were stretched too thin?” Sarah asks, stifling a laugh.
“Sarah,” says Patrick.
“Would you say you overextended yourself?”
“You’re drunk,” Patrick says.
“Yes,” Sarah says.
“I had a strange conversation on the way out,” Fahima says. “Have you met Senator Lowery?”
“Our wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Patrick says. Cortex growls, low and lupine.
“He asked me which of us is the new face of Resonants,” she says.
“What does that even mean?” Kimani asks.
“It sounds like a Cosmo article,” says Patrick.
“He wanted to know who becomes Bishop now,” Fahima says. “It’s not as ridiculous a question as it sounds.”
“Then you do it,” Patrick says.
“Let’s put the queer Muslim lady out front,” says Fahima. “That’ll chill people right the fuck out.”
“Sarah’s the pretty one,” Kimani says. “Everybody loves a pretty white lady.”
“I don’t—” says Sarah, flushing bright red. “I can’t—the academy.”
Patrick nods. “Sarah was born to run that school,” he says. “Maybe no one should take Bishop’s place.”
“I was about to say it should be you,” Fahima says.
“He did the things he had to,” Patrick says. “It doesn’t mean they should continue. Let it die with him.”
“What are you talking about?” Fahima asks.
Patrick smirks his most Patrick of smirks. “The scientific mind of Fahima Deeb,” he says. “Did it ever bother you that in seventy-five years, Owen Curry is the first of us to go really and truly off the rails? Didn’t that strike you as statistically aberrant?”
“We all know what Kevin did,” Kimani says. “I was there. I helped. The people he took off the board were—”
“I’m not talking about that,” Patrick says. “I don’t have a problem with that. You think I’m out there converting people back to the fucking flock? I’m continuing his work. That’s not what I’m talking about. We all followed him. Not just those of us who knew him. Every fucking Resonant on the planet listened to what he told us and kept ourselves secret. He said sleep and dream, and we closed our eyes. Did that never strike any of you as odd?”
“Maybe we listened because he was right,” Fahima says. Doubt creeps in. What Patrick is talking about is obedience across a wide spectrum. Why didn’t she see it before? It was glaring at her out of the data.
“What do all of us have in common?” Patrick asks. “What binds us all together?”
“The Hive,” says Fahima.
“And who built the Hive?”
The question hangs in the air, unanswered. After a second, Fahima carries the argument forward. “He talked about it like a lens,” she says. “It’s not just a plac
e or a conduit energy passes through. It bends the energy as it passes. Light through a lens.”
“He built it to keep us complacent,” Patrick says. “I don’t even fault him for it. It’s a fucking brilliant idea. But he built the Hive in such a way as to keep us docile. So what happens now that he’s gone?”
“Black flowers,” Fahima says.
“This is some bullshit,” Kimani says. “This isn’t what we’re here for.” She starts fixing another drink.
“They showed up when he got sick,” Fahima says. “When his control started slipping.”
“That’s enough,” Kimani says, slamming the shaker down on the table. “That man is in the ground five minutes and you’re going to start this shit? That is enough. The things he did, he did for us. They weren’t all good, and he’d’ve been the first to tell you. Where we go from here, that is up to us. But you will not sit here in judgment on him. Not today.”
“You’re right,” Patrick says. His hand stretches across the room and finds Kimani’s shoulder. “Not today.”
Sarah, relieved the conflict has been diffused, nods in agreement. Kimani bites her lower lip and goes back to making drinks. Patrick and Fahima exchange a look that says they’re not done, not by a length.
* * *
—
Sarah passes out on the couch, and Cortex curls up next to her. Patrick drinks himself into a state of tenderness and kisses Sarah on the temple before hugging Fahima and Kimani and having Kimani drop him off at Bishop’s house on Oceanside Way. Patrick’s been clearing out some of Bishop’s things. He says it’s helping him deal with the loss. She wants to go with him, but the point is for him to be alone.
“One more?” asks Kimani, eyes already swimming. The needle on the record player scratches against the label, giving the room a soft pulse.