The Nobody People

by Proehl, Bob

  The living room is decorated with beach kitsch. A miniature ship’s wheel. A stuffed gull. There are pictures of Kevin Bishop when he was younger. With faculty and students at what looks like a softball game. With Fahima and Sarah at a bar, wearing a paper party hat. Avi picks one up. It’s a faded sepia shot of two men in dark suits and fedoras in front of a massive scaffold in the desert that is topped with a huge metal globe. The wire-rimmed glasses identify the man on the left as Bishop, in his midtwenties. The other man Avi doesn’t recognize. He’s shorter with dark hair and the square jaw of a silent film star. Written in the lower corner it says, KEVIN, RAYMOND & THE GADGET. ON THE HILL. JULY 1945.

  Avi sets down the picture and looks around. He can hear music from down one of the halls. Something soft and folky. He draws the gun and follows it. He tries to be as quiet as he can, but his prosthetic clunks on the hardwood like a peg leg on a ship’s deck. He stops in front of a closed door, the source of the music. Avi focuses his attention on placing the song. A bit of lyric floats toward him. James Taylor’s buttery voice, assuring the listeners they’ve got a friend. The soundtrack is wrong, Avi thinks. It should be something ominous and terrible. Black metal. A wavering minor chord. The disconnect between song and situation makes whatever’s behind the door more threatening, a cuddly thing with insides of razors and teeth. He rests his hand on the doorknob and turns it slowly.

  The room looks like a dorm room at an expensive private school but divided by a sheet of heavy glass. A keypad lock and an intercom are set into the glass. The room is bathed in green light. One large window looks out onto the ocean. Owen Curry reclines on the bed, scratching words in a notebook, uninterested in the scenery. Avi approaches the glass. He taps it with the barrel of the gun, a sound like teeth dropping into a metal bowl. Owen looks up.

  Avi presses the button on the intercom. “Nice to see you again, Owen.”

  Owen glances over. “I remember you. You’re the reporter. You came and saw me when I was in that cage.”

  “Looks like you’re still in a cage,” Avi says.

  “I’m healing,” Owen says. “Getting ready for big things. Even bigger.”

  “Can you get out?”

  Owen shakes his head. “Lock’s right there.”

  “Then it’s a cage.” A hateful look passes over the boy’s face. It’s replaced by that same smug grin. “You killed my wife,” Avi says.

  “Could have. I killed lots of people.” He swings his legs over the edge of the bed and points at the keypad. “Seven seven three four. Come on in. I’ll send you to see your wife. It might take you a while to find her.” He pats his belly. “It’s crowded in here. But you’ll have plenty of time. You’ll have forever.”

  Avi pauses. She’s alive, he thinks. Kay is somewhere inside this monster. If I let him take me, I can get her out. I can save her.

  Owen grins sickly. There’s no limbo inside him. Powder Basin is dead. The girl and the pastor from Salem Baptist are dead. The people in the mall food court. Kay’s dead.

  Owen Curry killed her.

  Avi types in seven seven three four.

  The hum stops. The green light goes out.

  Owen’s grin widens, showing teeth. “Shit,” he says. “That’s not the door code. That’s the code that shuts off the inhibitor. Sorry about that.”

  The glass disappears in a perfect circle. Owen lunges for the opening, eyes wild, arms extended like he’s going to grab Avi and shove him into whatever void is at Owen’s center. Avi levels the gun in his left hand, steadying himself with his cane. His right arm goes numb up to the shoulder and his balance slips, but he recovers and fires three shots. The recoil knocks him onto the floor. The first two hit Owen in the chest, and the third hits the center of his forehead, snapping his head back. Wet chunks spatter across the bed and the window. Owen’s body drops back, hitting the bed and slumping to the floor. The echo of the shots rings in Avi’s ears. Pools of blood spread on the plush carpet under the body.

  It’s the body of a boy, not a monster.

  I thought I’d feel something, Avi thinks. I thought I’d feel fixed.

  He notices calmly that his right arm is gone, cleanly bitten away at the shoulder. The bottom six inches of the shaft of his cane sits on the floor. There’s no blood. Avi feels the smooth surface of the wound with the back of his hand. It’s tender to the touch, like the socket of a pulled tooth.

  He hears the door open and shut back down the hall. “I brought you some books from my parents’ house,” calls a voice Avi can’t immediately place. “I’m meeting Senator Lowery, then going to New York. I’ll be back in a day or so. It’s important you don’t go out. You’ve done an amazing thing, but you need to rest.”

  Patrick Davenport stands in the doorway, holding a small stack of paperbacks. Mysteries and sci-fi novels, the kind Kay used to read. Avi levels the gun and fires the last bullet. It tears through Patrick’s shirt and sinks harmlessly into the flesh of his chest. Patrick drops the books and watches as Avi continues to pull the trigger, the hammer clicking into empty chambers.

  “What have you done, Avi?” says Patrick. He’s smiling, but there’s no warmth in it. He doesn’t look like the man Avi knows but someone else, someone crueler. He steps toward Avi slowly. “Don’t you know what he was? What he was capable of? He was going to win the war to come. That little town full of bigots? Your wife? Those were a warm-up. A snack.” Avi can’t tell if Patrick’s wincing or grinning, but his teeth are bared. “You killed him like it was nothing.”

  “You made him do it,” Avi says.

  Patrick stops, calmed. He puts his hand on Avi’s cheek almost tenderly. It feels wrong. Something twitches and writhes under the surface of the skin. “How did you know?”

  “They found a piece of you in Darren Helms’s brain,” says Avi.

  “Ah,” Patrick says.

  “Why did you—”

  “Shut up,” Patrick says, squeezing Avi’s cheeks until his eyes tear up. “You know I can’t control Damps like you.” One of Patrick’s fingers stretches along Avi’s face, behind his earlobe, into the edge of his hairline. “It’s frustrating. When I put a piece of myself in someone with no Resonance, a useless Damp like you, it does the strangest thing. It goes to the same spot it would in one of us. But instead of nestling in and letting me speak to them, it roves around, knocking things over. Looking for the magic bit of them that just isn’t there. We’re talking about the midbrain here, so the things it’s destroying are memories. Isn’t that funny?”

  It slides into Avi’s ear, thick and viscous like a glob of spit. It blossoms inside his head, splitting into a dozen, a hundred tendrils. By the time Avi understands that they’re tearing his memories to shreds, it’s too late. He tries to hold on to one thought, a single moment. Standing with Kay in Central Park, Emmeline spinning at the center of a flock of geese. But the moment breaks. He sees the image, but it doesn’t mean anything to him. Who is that woman, that girl? Pieces slide away, and there’s only him, lying on the floor of a strange room. A man he doesn’t know towers over him. The man kicks him in the shoulder where his arm should be, and he screams in pain.

  “Now I have to change my shirt,” the man says. With his finger, he plays with a hole in the shoulder of his dress shirt. He leans down, his face close to Avi’s. There’s something in his breath, a smell like something is dying inside him. Avi struggles not to throw up. There are things moving in his head like a school of terrible fish.

  “You haven’t stopped me. You haven’t saved anyone,” says the man. “Everyone, even you, is going to forget you ever were.”

  The man walks out. Avi listens to him going down another hallway. He can hear the man humming to himself. He listens as a door opens, closes. A car starts, pulls away.

  He brings himself up to sitting. There’s something he knows. Not a memory but a structure. A container you put thi
ngs in. A way to start. Whowhatwhenwherewhy. He begins with the most basic.

  “Who?” he mutters to himself. No answer comes. The structure falls apart. He starts to sob because he knows something has been lost and because there is no way back. You can’t get anywhere from nowhere.

  He’s sitting on something. He shifts his weight and digs it out with his remaining hand. It’s a gun. It smells of spark and burn. He turns it over, admires it. He’s aware of a weight in his pocket. He sets the gun down and reaches in, pulling out the bullets and looking at them as if they’re birdseed, nickels, something benign. He loads them into the gun, holding it between his knees to compensate for his missing arm. It’s an action his body knows, inscribed farther down in the nerves rather than in the wreckage of his brain.

  He feels a hand on his head, running through his hair. He looks up at a young woman standing next to him. She is pretty, in her early twenties, maybe, with dark skin and bright blue eyes. Her hair is like fireworks. She is crying. He doesn’t know her or recognize her. She puts her hand on his face. Someone just did this, a minute ago, he thinks. But that was bad and this is nice. The thought skitters away from him, and he focuses on the young woman. Along the inside of her forearm, there’s an oblong scar that looks like a galaxy written onto her skin. He reaches up and touches it with two of his fingers. He knows it from somewhere.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asks.

  “No, Daddy,” she says. “You didn’t hurt me.”

  “I don’t know you,” he says. He looks at the gun. “Everything’s gone. Can you fix me?”

  “I can’t,” she says. “There are things that happen, and they always happen. There are things I can’t fix.”

  He nods. “You should go,” he says. “I have something I need to do. I don’t think you should see it.”

  “I’ll stay here with you, Daddy,” she says. She kisses him on the forehead, above his eyebrow. Her hand presses against his face, then pulls away. She gives him a little nod.

  He places the barrel of the gun under his chin and fires.

  Fahima waits for Alyssa to get up before she starts fajr, finding things to keep herself busy as the sun climbs in the window. By the time Alyssa’s out of bed, she’s lost the best light, the kind that stabs from the horizon rather than above it. In dawn light, Fahima can imagine a god waking somewhere in Brooklyn and lighting the sun like a first morning cigarette. Alyssa watches from the counter, holding her coffee mug in both hands, taking in the view. They’re both anxious about the apartment, both worried they’ll have to flee the country. When things happen, there will be a window between when it becomes necessary to leave and when it’s no longer possible. Every time they watch the news or go on the Internet, they add factors to this calculation. A young blond woman from the Kindred Network, one of Jefferson Hargrave’s more palatable heirs, has been making the rounds on legitimate media, suggesting federal property seizure of Resonant-owned buildings and businesses. On NightTalk, Lakshmi Rameswaram, who Fahima considered an ally as much for her status as a fellow brown person as for actual demonstrated sympathies, listens, intrigued, as the porcelain-faced bigot outlines her proposal. The Overton window is shifting faster than Fahima imagined it might.

  A humans first group that claims Jefferson Hargrave as its patron saint marches on North Avenue in Chicago and is turned back by Chicago police. Some of the cops share cigarettes and bottled water with the Resonants who live there. Others look longingly at the protesters, wishing they could disobey orders and join in. New York City cops are in front of Bishop every day. It’s unclear whether they’re protecting the students or keeping them in. A freshman congressman from Wyoming introduces an internment bill in the House that passes by two votes. Lowery says it will die in the Senate, barely. There are rumors. People gone missing. Militia groups with money building makeshift prison camps in the middle of nowhere. Patrick insists that he hasn’t found anything, but he’s not exactly Miss Marple.

  Is it time to run? Is running possible?

  They shower together, making the mundane intimate and important. Fahima lets her hand dwell on Alyssa’s hip. She kisses her shoulder as Alyssa reaches for the conditioner. Excuses to touch. Alyssa talks about an operation scheduled that day, one she’s told Fahima about already. Fahima listens like it’s the first time.

  “What about you?” Alyssa asks. “What’s on your schedule?” She asks as if Fahima might tell her, although she must know that Fahima has been stonewalling for weeks.

  “Death rays,” Fahima says. “Death rays all day.”

  Fahima packs up the notes she brought home last night and sits on the arm of the couch. She told Kimani nine, and it’s a quarter past. Alyssa is ready to leave, but neither of them has gone yet. One secret of long-term cohabitation is the thrill of having the apartment to yourself, even for a few minutes. Alyssa and Fahima are locked in a standoff, but Alyssa relents. She grabs her bag and has her hand on the doorknob when Fahima calls her back.

  “Lys?”

  “What’s up?”

  “You know I don’t care that you’re not like me?” Fahima asks. “You know I couldn’t love you any more if you could read minds or lift boulders or whatever?”

  “Of course,” says Alyssa. “And you know I’d love you even if you couldn’t—”

  “I know,” Fahima says. Except it won’t be like that, she thinks. Alyssa waits for her to say something else or to explain what’s going on. Fahima nods and says, “Have a great day.”

  “You, too,” Alyssa says.

  Fahima calls Kimani, and the door appears immediately to take her to her lab.

  “Can you make the door any bigger?” Fahima says as she drags a large box across the lab floor. Kimani obliges, and the door expands until it takes up most of the wall. Fahima planned this device in bite-size chunks, pieces she could carry. She knew she’d be doing this part herself.

  “You’re cleaning all this up,” says Kimani, pushing an armchair against a wall to make more space. “You’re not leaving any of this in here.”

  “You are standing in the way of progress,” Fahima says, grunting and nudging her aside. Slowly, the device takes shape, inscrutable to anyone but Fahima. Aesthetics have always been an afterthought. iPhones and sleek laptops, machines other people think of as beautiful, leave her cold. Give Fahima a steam engine with pistons jutting and boilers frothing. Give her the clicks and spinning wheels of a Turing Colossus, grinding the Nazi Enigma code into bits. Beauty is in function. The rest is a shell.

  They break for lunch, pork belly banh mi from Num Pang in Union Square. Kimani’s favorite. Any food in the world at her fingertips and Kimani chooses sandwiches from down the block. Between bites, she asks Fahima again what the device is, but Fahima shakes her off. The last piece she assembles is the one with an obvious purpose. It’s a seat the rest of the machinery centers on. Anyone would assume that the apparatus feeds energy into it, an electric chair. They’d have it backward. The energy will come from the chair, from its occupant. Everything else is there to handle the energy when it comes.

  Fahima goes into the Hive to find Patrick and Sarah. She puts out a call, pushing their names into the malleable substance of the place. Sarah answers first, followed by Patrick. They both look annoyed.

  “This is a bad time,” Patrick says. “I’m meeting with Senator Lowery before the Senate vote.”

  “How bad?” Fahima asks.

  “He thinks it’ll come down to one vote, maybe two,” says Patrick. “The majority leader is supposed to call it to the floor within the hour.”

  “It’s time,” Fahima says.

  Patrick considers this. “Give me twenty minutes,” he says, then fades out.

  “You have some little plan?” Sarah asks.

  “I have one big plan,” Fahima says.

  “And the two of you are in cahoots?”

  “I do
n’t know anything,” says Kimani.

  “I’m telling you all now,” Fahima says. “This next step we take together.”

  They leave the Hive, and Sarah enters through the door, Cortex along with her. Behind her, Fahima sees what she’ll always think of as Bishop’s library, although she supposes it’s Sarah’s now. One of the perks of the headmaster’s job.

  “How’s Alyssa?” Sarah asks.

  “She’s good,” Fahima says. “She’s doing a big surgery today. Very excited.”

  “Good,” says Sarah.

  “Tell us what’s going on,” Kimani says.

  “I wanted to wait for Patrick,” Fahima says.

  “Why do I think Patrick already knows?” Sarah asks.

  “He knows some,” says Fahima. “I haven’t gotten into the technical parts.”

  “Keep it like that,” Kimani says.

  “So how are you fixing it?” Sarah asks. Cortex looks up at Fahima expectantly.

  “We can’t win,” Fahima explains. “For all our abilities, for everything we can do. There are too many of them and not enough of us. More than that, there’s the clear line. Us and them. What we need is to blur that line. We need to make them into us. Turn our enemies into allies.” She looks at them to see if they get it, but they don’t. “I got the idea from drugs,” she adds.

  “That fills me with confidence,” says Sarah.

  “Rez,” Fahima says. “It gives users abilities for a little while. Nothing major, nothing world-breaking. And no Hive access. It pushes something latent in them to become actual. And if it can happen in a little way—”

  “It can happen big,” Kimani says. She opens the door for Patrick to come through.

  “What did I miss?” he says.

  “Blurring the line between us and them,” says Sarah.

  “I was also thinking about something you said,” Fahima tells Kimani. “That Bishop built the Hive to keep our numbers regulated. Like a bottleneck. The Hive lets a fraction of the energy we use through into the real world. If there were more coming through, there’d be more of us.”