The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  “Yeah, but I’m driving,” Fahima says. She steps past Kimani to fix the drinks. She does this exactingly, with the care Kimani lacked. Care that Fahima learned from Bishop. Kimani’s a beer drinker. To her a decent martini tastes the same as an excellent one. Fahima knows you can taste the attention to detail when it’s done right. Anything worth doing and all that. As she swishes dry vermouth in the base of the glasses, she watches Kimani move around the room, the sound of Prince in her head. She knows this space the way Fahima knew the house she grew up in, which stairs creaked and what it sounded like as it eased itself to sleep. Kimani knows this space because it’s part of her.

  “Kimani,” Fahima says. “Where are we?”

  “Here at the end of all things,” Kimani says dreamily.

  “Kimani,” Fahima repeats. “Where are we?”

  “In the Hive,” she says. “All of this. The Hive.”

  “But in our actual bodies,” Fahima says.

  Kimani nods. “A piece of physical space, embedded in transspatial Hivespace. That’s what Kevin used to say. He helped me build the room. Expand it out. I was in a tiny, dark space when he found me.” Fahima hands her the drink, and Kimani sips it. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s better than mine.”

  “When you see the world,” says Fahima. “The real world. Is it—”

  “Like looking at a map,” Kimani says. “I put the door where it needs to be and open it.”

  “All of everything,” says Fahima. “Like a map.”

  “Hivespace is everywhere at once,” Kimani says. “Wherever I want to be, I’m already there.”

  Fahima thinks about something Emmeline Hirsch said to her. Sometimes I’m already there. But Emmeline was talking about time.

  “You remember Emmeline?” Fahima asks. Kimani looks at Fahima like she’s an idiot.

  “Emmy’s in here all the time. Good kid.”

  “Is it like that for her, too?” Fahima asks. “Like a map she’s looking down on?”

  Kimani shakes her head. “From what she can tell me, it’s more like a cube,” she says. “I’m at a point in Hivespace, which is everywhere, right? But Emmeline is everywhere in Hivespace. Which is maybe everywhen? She’s me squared.”

  “That’s some scary shit,” Fahima says.

  “Fucking right,” Kimani says. She perches on the arm of the couch behind Sarah’s head.

  “Was it true what Patrick said?”

  “What are we all trying to do but tip the tables toward the good?” Kimani says, an edge of anger in her voice. “That’s all he did was tip the table a little.”

  “Is that all he did?” Fahima asks.

  Kimani takes a gulp of her drink and coughs. When she recovers, she says, “Too many of us would be a bad thing. The energy we add to the system could burn it out. That’s what he used to say.”

  “The system,” Fahima repeats. “The system is the world, the actual world. The Hive keeps the numbers down. Limits the number of Resonants.” Even Patrick hadn’t suspected that. Things in her head shift. The device she was designing comes apart, and its pieces reassemble themselves differently. Better. The final piece is obvious, but Fahima turns her attention away from it. She’ll have to consider it soon, but not now.

  “He built it strong. Good,” Kimani says. “I see those flowers, and I worry. But it won’t break unless somebody breaks it.”

  “Maybe someone should,” says Fahima.

  “You take a listen to your own advice,” Kimani says. “Allow the possibility that we followed him because he was right.”

  “No one’s right about everything,” Fahima says. She plucks an olive from her drink, places it between her front teeth, and neatly slices it in half, just as Bishop used to do.

  Sunlight pours in the high, narrow eastern windows of Hall H, and Carrie Norris lies awake. Miquel’s body wraps around hers like kudzu through chain link. One of her earbuds is still in. The other dangles over the edge of the bed like a rock climber detached from a cliff face. The battery on her iPod has been dead for months, but she still finds it a comfort to put the earbuds in before she goes to sleep.

  She’s not the only one up. She can hear the shift in breathing. She’s attuned to it. After four months in the camp at Topaz Lake, somewhere in western Nevada, Carrie inhabits Hall H like a body teeming with other bodies. The slow sleep breaths of the room and the measured, snotty lung rattles of kids sharing the same December cold is dominant, layered over the buzz of inhibitors that glow a constant green. Another rhythm rises out of it: the hasty inhale-exhale pattern of others like Carrie, who wake into a panic, rediscovering where they are. The horror of their circumstances greets them fresh each morning, grips something in their chests, and squeezes.

  There are 643 Resonants in the facility at Topaz Lake. The number shifts in either direction, but it hovers in the mid-600s. Many were already in some form of custody. Small-town jails, immigration detention centers. People whose disappearance could be effected with a lost piece of paperwork. Those people keep coming, with stories of getting picked up by local police for minor violations and ending up here. Then there are those who were grabbed off the streets, out of their homes. That seems to have stopped. Or at least paused.

  Thirty-one people live in the cots and bunks of Hall H, a tarpaper shack the length and width of a school bus. Miquel is the odd extra: unmarried. Warden Pitt denied their request to cohabitate, but none of Hall H’s residents complain about Miquel. He’s loved more than Carrie. Not just here but throughout the camp. He tells Carrie it’s because he works in the schoolhouse with the dozen kids among Topaz’s population. People are indebted to those who tend to children, but it’s not just that. People love that Miquel listens and that he remembers. Carrie’s access to the camp’s black markets provides Miquel endless chances to show up with little favors for people. I remember you said you like marmalade, he says to Edith Fowler in Hall F, a widow who used to be able to read minds like newspaper headlines but now can only smile sweetly and say Bless you in a way that carries weight, a blessing that will be passed up the chain. The camp’s affection rarely passes to Carrie, the procurer of these gifts. She’s liked to the extent that she makes Miquel happy. It’s enough.

  “Hey, baby,” he whispers through a fog of half sleep. Others in the bunks murmur. The hall wakes like a large hibernating mammal, slow and lumbering. Feet slap the floor, and Miquel pulls her close as the front door lets in a bitter blast of high desert winter air. No one told Carrie the desert got this cold. No one tells you the truth about anything. Miquel takes a lock of her hair and curls it around two of his fingers.

  “You sure?” he asks.

  Carrie nods, scratches an itch behind her ear. “It grows back,” she says. Miquel hmmmphs and extracts himself from her, pushing his body up and over hers to land on the floor like a gymnast. At the apex of this maneuver, he plants a kiss on her cheek.

  “I’ll go get the things,” he says, and takes off into the cold without a jacket. A Hall H mother has to stop him and remind him. No sense of self-preservation. No understanding of the borders between himself and the world. Remember, you love these things about him, she thinks. The thought undoes itself like a magician’s trick knot, appearing solid only to resolve into nothing.

  Carrie heads to the women’s bathroom. The women of Hall H outnumber the men and are for the most part mothers. All the halls are coed, but the distribution seems designed to discourage procreation, if not fucking altogether. Hall B houses the camp’s young single women, but the only men there are ancient to the point of sexual irrelevance. Hall H has a couple of young bucks but insulates them with women grieving for their children who are on the outside. Considering this as a plan assumes that their jailors think of them as human, with desires and motivations. There’s little evidence to support that.

  The ablutions of the mothers strike Carrie as theatrica
l. Black market requests for brand-name mascara and blush are frequent. The markup on these products subsidizes the costs of smuggled antidepressants and antibiotics. In the mirror next to Carrie, a woman in her thirties applies concealer to a fading black eye. Carrie can’t remember her name, only that she “dates” Mister Benavidez, one of the guards. In the fall, her arms and legs bloomed with bruises. Territory markings. The shiner was a bold announcement of Mister Benavidez’s claim on her and his ability to hit her with impunity. There are no consequences for the guards here, although it took them a few months to realize it. The woman offers the jar to Carrie.

  “It’s dehydration that does it,” she says. “I’m grateful not to freeze, but the heaters suck the moisture right out of you.” Carrie waves off the concealer, although she’s aware of the dark circles under her own eyes. Because they are mothers, the women in Hall H treat Carrie like a daughter, with gentle corrections and cluckings. They size her up with loving disappointment Carrie recognizes too well. Carrie does the minimum preparation for the day, the maintenance a body needs not to become decrepit or offensive, and leaves the mothers to their self-care.

  Bundled in an army surplus parka, Carrie meets Miquel outside. The inhibitors are weaker out here. Sometimes she feels the tingle of her ability returning, a song she almost remembers. Miquel opens his jacket like someone selling counterfeit watches in Washington Square Park. A cord dangles out of the inside pocket. He waggles his eyebrows at her lasciviously.

  “You have time?” she asks.

  “The kids’ll be gluing cotton balls to cardboard all morning. Each shepherd needs a sheep.” He nods to one of the guards, who leans on an elaborate rifle, a gun out of a video game. Carrie digs her fingernails into a spot high up on her scalp.

  The disposition of the laundry in its off hours depends on who’s guarding it. Most nights and early mornings, it’s a rendezvous spot for guards and female prisoners, consenting or not. One night, sneaking out of Hall H for a smoke, Carrie watched Mister Herschel drag a girl in there, a blonde in her late teens who works with Carrie in the commissary. Mister O’Keefe held the door open, then winked at Carrie as he shut it. “Don’t worry, Plain Jane,” he said. “We only want the pretty ones.” It should have been Carrie’s moment to rise up. Instead, she stubbed out her cigarette and retreated to her bunk. She shoved her earbuds in as if they could shut the world out and held on to Miquel as tightly as she could.

  The guard outside this morning, Mister Bailey, is sweet on both of them. He’s older and avuncular and regularly ribs Miquel about marrying that girl. Miquel smiles warmly at him. “I really appreciate this, Mister Bailey.”

  “I’d appreciate if you’d call me John,” says Mister Bailey. All the guards are Mister except for Warden Pitt. A lot of them are ex-military and ex–law enforcement, along with some hobbyists, gun nuts, and weekend warriors. They’re paid by someone, but no one’s working at Topaz Lake purely for the paycheck. The individual guards’ attitudes range from genocidal to paternal, and they go by Mister as an indicator of status, if not specific rank. Carrie and Miquel have discussed this. Never call them by their first names, never delude yourself that they’re your friends. John might tip his cap at you in the morning, but it could be Mister Bailey’s gun butt smacking you in the temple by afternoon.

  “Mister Huerta mentioned you smoke a pipe,” Miquel says.

  Mister Bailey nods sheepishly. “Everyone’s entitled to one vice.”

  Miquel deftly slips him a pouch of high-end pipe tobacco, which Mister Bailey pockets without looking at it. He opens the door for them. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll make sure you’re alone.”

  “No peeking at the keyhole,” Miquel says, throwing him a wink. Carrie gives a razor-thin smile as they close the door.

  “We could actually just have sex,” Miquel says. Carrie takes in the room. First laundry shift starts at eight. Thirty women will file in, stoking boilers and washing the clothes of Topaz Lake’s 643 residents. In the winter, the cinder block walls of the building sweat. Droplets of water reverberate off the tiles.

  “You take me to the nicest places,” she says.

  “We don’t have to do this,” says Miquel. “It’s only two of the kids. I checked you last night, and you don’t have any.”

  “I’ve been itching since you told me.” They don’t mention the word because it sends her into paroxysms. Carrie examined Miquel’s scalp for nits as he slept, then woke up in the middle of the night scratching at her own frantically enough to draw blood. This is the prophylactic measure she’s chosen. Miquel finds an outlet and plugs in the borrowed hair clippers, flipping the switch to make them buzz like an engine revving in the small tile-covered room. The clippers are shiny, metallic, weaponized. These are military-grade, not the kind you’d pick up in a Rite Aid. Most of the guards at Topaz rock the high-and-tight, a quarter inch of bristle protecting their pates from the wind. Whoever runs Topaz recruited the straightest of the straight. Softies like Mister Bailey slide in under the radar, along with sympathizers like Mister Guzman on the western fence. Miquel could coax Windex tears out of a robot’s eye, but most of these boys are John Wayne wannabes who look at their captives like cattle and keep kind thoughts at bay with discipline and routine.

  “You sure?” Miquel asks one more time. The clippers hover at the nape of Carrie’s neck. She can feel the chittering of their metal teeth.

  “Fucking do it,” she says.

  * * *

  —

  Hayden’s out back of the commissary, smoke rising from their cigarette, steam squeaking out through the lid of the hot lunch cart. Wednesdays, Hayden and Carrie run lunches out to the work crews. Today, they’re headed to southeast quad, where Bryce and a half dozen others try to crack the frozen soil to dig graves for three prisoners who made a break for it last week. Carrie didn’t recognize their names, although she’d know them on sight. Official word is they fell. Misadventure is the most common cause of death here. Gravity’s high around Topaz, Mister Benavidez likes to say. The bodies have been in storage waiting for a thaw, but Mister Howerton, who oversees the outdoor work crews, thinks grave digging’s hilarious. Especially in the cold, when the effort’s futile. He’ll be out there with a parka and a hip flask, chuckling to himself as he watches prisoners struggle to bury their own.

  “Are you waiting for me to tell you how butch you look?” Hayden asks. Suddenly self-conscious, they adjust their ill-fitted platinum wig. After a few days under inhibitor lights, Hayden started to physically revert to their deadgender, all the beautiful changes they’d written on their body coming undone. Their hair was the last thing to go, long blond tresses shriveling like unwatered vines. Hayden petitioned Warden Pitt for hormone therapy, but the warden had as much sympathy for Hayden’s gender identity as he did for their Resonance. Bigotries travel in packs that way. Hayden does their best with makeup and procured wigs but bears the pain of losing their ability more heavily than anyone at Topaz. They’ve lost access to theirself. Carrie’s only cut off from a parlor trick.

  “Fuck you,” Carrie says, rubbing her freshly shorn head. She hadn’t appreciated the insulating power of her hair. With her scalp exposed, the cold digs right into her brain. Hayden hands her a cigarette and lights it for her. She blows a column of smoke at Hayden.

  “Or punk. Is that better?” Hayden asks. “You look very punk.”

  “I will settle for ‘you look like you are not covered in bugs,’ ” Carrie says.

  “Children are disgusting,” Hayden says. “It’s unfair to the rest of us to be locked up in here with children.”

  “It’s better than snatching the parents and leaving the kids out there on their own,” Carrie says, although she’s unsure. She used to get pissed off with people who held freedom as a sacred abstract, but now it’s something she can hold in her hand. Or, more to the point, can’t. It’s easier here to weigh freedom against oth
er things. Is it better to be a free orphan or a loved but imprisoned child?

  “I’ve got something for you,” Carrie says. She hands Hayden a mesh bag she found in the laundry, the kind her mother used to wash pantyhose in. Hayden cocks an eyebrow at her, loosens the drawstring, and peers inside.

  “Tell me you didn’t just give me a bag of your hair, single white female.” Carrie tries to grab it back, but Hayden yanks it away. “All creepy crawly with bugs, I bet,” Hayden says. “Merry Christmas to me.”

  “I thought there might be someone who could—”

  “Glue it to my fucking head?”

  Carrie looks at the ground. Miquel tried to talk her out of it, but she felt like she needed to do something for Hayden to close the gap of loss between them. “I don’t know,” she says as they start toward the southeast quad. “People make wigs. Someone might know how to use it to make you one.”

  Hayden throws their arms around Carrie, pulling her so close that she can feel the hitch in their breath as they stand together for a second.

  “You’re sweet,” Hayden says. “Also a fucking idiot.” They let Carrie go, and they are once again composed, although Carrie can see red rimming their eyes.

  “So are you not coming to the pageant tonight?” she asks. “It’s a good alibi.”

  “I’ve got my alibi lined up,” Hayden says. They’ve been spending time with Guzman, one of the less terrible guards, who works the eastern fence. He’s promised Hayden he can get them Rez, that he’s working on it. Topaz gives it out to any Resonant whose ability has a physical manifestation that causes pain or death when shut down. Taken in small, constant doses, Rez sustains physical manifestations of ability without allowing the user back into the Hive. Without it, Bryce and Jonathan would be dead. Hayden argued to Warden Pitt that without their ability, they would revert to their deadgender, to no avail. Guzman is trying to help. Hayden’s not fucking him but swears he’s in love and he’ll come through.